Learning how to interpret Totem Poles
As we took a bus to the nearby Saxman Native Village, we started noticing the Totem Poles lined up on some corners in town. The Ketchikan area has the highest concentration of Totem Poles, about 80 of them, and we would soon get to see a few of them and learn their stories. Totem Poles are not objects of worship as we thought: they serve different purposes in the native culture, like sharing what clan you belong to, a story, honor a dead, shame someone who has not paid a debt... As we entered the 
Totem Pole Park, we were told the story of some of these poles and how each of them can only be topped by a living thing, like a person or an animal. We were surprised to see that one had Abraham Lincoln on it, with very short legs. Why? Because the carving was done back in the days, based on a picture of Lincoln from knees up and the artist copied exactly what he was given. Another pole was a shame pole for Mr. Skagway who never paid his debt to the village; since the pole of shame gets burned only once the debt is paid and that one never was, it will be there forever. We had a lot of fun listening to these stories and connecting the bright wooden carved animals, spirits and humans to the story they reflected. An extraordinary sight in Ketchikan: the sun
As we headed back to town, our guide pointed to our attention that we were particularly lucky that day as there was sunshine. It rains about 260 days of the year here and that does not count drizzle days: they call it “liquid sunshine” in a very optimistic way. Since we were that lucky, we went for a walking tour in town, getting down the boardwalk and observing the salmon jump upstream in Salmon Creek. It was quite hypnotizing to see all these fish jump up the small rapids. There was againlots of Pink Salmon and the water was boiling with fish. That's when the boys and girl decided to split: Chad and Stan would go and cast the line to play some catch and release 
with the Salmon (tough game as you can see in the picture) while Caroline decided to explore the hills of Ketchikan to get a good view of the surrounding islands. Before going our separate ways, we all went for a short "cultural" stop at Dolly's house, the still standing house of pleasure in town managed by Dolly, until 1953 when prostitution became illegal in Alaska. Apparently, this is a big and important piece of the Gold Rush "culture" here where odds are good for women (given the number of men), but apparently the goods are odd! We all had a great time in Ketchikan, exploring town or fishing on the dock and were quite tired after this full day of activities. We had our last look from the upper deck as the ship left, hoping that we would have another chance to come back here and enjoy more of the Alaskan wilderness and delicious fish.
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