SHERATON GRAND SEATTLE to NORWEGIAN ENCORE

'Twas a simple day yesterday.  Only went to Din Tai Fung for an early dinner.  Have written about this Taiwanese restaurant many times here.  First one started in Taipei  in 1958, and the 181 restaurants worldwide today are still mostly fast food pick-up places.  However, the one that opened in New York City this summer sits 450.  The Seattle chain I went to is huge.  Showed up around 3:30PM and had to wait 15 minutes to get in.  It specializes in Shanghai Soup Dumplings, or Xiao Long Bao.

Very large restaurant.

Beef and pork noodles, plus pork/shrimp dumplings.

Shanghai Soup Dumplings.

With Johnny Walker Black and ginger/vinegar sauce.

Saw two great NCAA football games yesterday:

• Oregon edged Ohio State.
• LSU never led until the end, and beat Mississippi in overtime.  I every two years particularly identify with this match because my Chemical Engineering Department is adjacent to Death Valley.  If you too watched the game, you would have noticed that there were 102,000 in attendance.  Only students/faculty and those who got seats through inheritance get tickets.  In my days, men wore sport coats and women, gowns.

We soon leave the Sheraton Grand to board the Norwegian Encore, a cruise ship with a max capacity of 4000 passengers that will take us from Seattle to Miami.  We stay on this ship and then will reach our final destination, Southampton, England.  Well, not final final, for we then fly to Amsterdam to join a Viking Christmas River Cruise to Budapest.  After a two-day stop in Zurich, be back home on Honolulu on December 7.

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