Around the world in 104 days!

Post-voyage reflection: sorry guys, this is unedited...

2011-05-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

“I feel like this is the real world and we are going back to sleep” –Jason on re-entry

“if you wake up to the voice telling you the date and time, shake yourself, you are having a nightmare.” –Captain Jeremy Kingston

I have to figure out, “What is this thing that is America?” to travel is to return to the place you came from and see it anew.

“Every time you return to the ship after the first time it is like coming home.” - Rosalyn

Dean Dan told us to pick a word that represents this ship to us. The word that whenever I hear it I will think of the ship: UNION!

“The world is a book and those who don’t travel only ready the first page” – commencement speaker

I’m surprised how easy it is to slide back into my routine.
I miss everyone but I don’t feel lonely, I feel connected

Back on land for a few weeks now, I thought I was having a fairly easy re-entry, but it seems to be getting harder with time. I’ve had trouble making sense of it all. Turns out time to think is not all you need in order to process. I was thinking about the people in Ghana and India but especially Ghana – and what it is about them that is so different yet so familiar. What I think it is: they are totally unplugged. These families don’t gather around a TV set after dinner. They don’t communicate with people in the next room via texting or even write papers for school on the computer. They are fully present with each other and the world around them every moment of the day. They are not an escapist culture – they don’t retreat behind headphones or zone out to movies for hours on end while mindlessly shoving food into their mouths without giving a second though to where their next handful might come from. And beyond that – or maybe because of it – they are a grateful people. They dance not because they are carefree or bored, but because they have life inside them and they want to show it. They are spiritual, if not religious, and they are connected. Ghana may be a difficult place to live – it may be disadvantaged economically or whatever, but they have one or two things that we don’t, and I envy them with all of my heart because of it. They taught me that you can’t have it all. Not only because it disrupts the balance that nature put in place but also because whenever you have more than you need, you sacrifice contentment for gratification and you face inevitable anxiety. Only those with something to lose fear loss. If you are privileged, you miss out on an experience that your body was made for – fighting for itself. You can never have the experience of starting off with nothing and building your own fortune. It is easier to measure how far you’ve gone in life if you start at the starting line. How much of a blessing really is a “head start” if it is true that you must sacrifice something else for it? Then maybe that explains the extreme unhappiness and discontentment in this country. Ironically, we think more is the answer – more money, more time, more distraction, more pills. I think the answer is “less.” Uncomplicate your life and see how you feel. Start with noticing how much you have in comparison to how much you need. I learned in one of my psych classes that they have finally proven that money doesn’t buy happiness. Beyond a certain level of income (this is where minimum wage comes from by the way) money is not even an indication of happiness. If you have enough to live off of, you are no worse off emotionally than a billionaire. In fact, it seems to me that the less you have the happier you are to have it. One cookie in the hand is worth two on someone else’s table? Here are some other ideas: There is something to be said for an honest day’s physical labor if it’s your own house you are building, or your own bed. There is a theory that food tastes better if you cook it yourself – I believe a house feels more like a home if you build it yourself. Ghanaian’s lives might be shorter than ours, but they are slower. It balances out…

When I am asked the annoying question, “what was your favorite country?” I respond by saying, “I had the most fun in South Africa, if I could return to one it would be Vietnam, but I liked Ghana the best.” It is the country that was most enlightening and most different from what I was expecting. It was the most different place we went – it might also have been the scariest. Dean Dan told us during his last speech that we have an obligation now to interrupt people when they are talking. We should interject with things like “when I was in Ghana that was not my experience…” The Dark Continent? I don’t think so.

I made a wonderful discovery: The world is a small place.
A long life is not about increasing the number of days, but slowing each one down.

ambassadors ball

it was a masquerade...

me and xuan

arriving to SD!

we saw mexico first...

THE UNITED STATES!

my fav of the bunch from that morning

wavin to parents

my last view of the ship....

Hawaii: “Give me liberty or give me dock time!”

2011-04-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

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Back in the good old US of A! It was very strange waking up and looking out the window as I do every morning and seeing land. That in itself would have been exciting enough after 11 days at sea but to know that it was The United States, the place we left 4 months ago, home, the closing of the circle, was a lot to process. We watched it come closer and closer and finally around lunch time people starting turning on cell phones. It took me a while to figure out how to use mine again, and I kept losing it because I would forget I had it.

Pre-port for Hawaii was as silly as we thought it would be. “Um – the exchange rate here is 1-to-1, and the water is safe to drink, and people speak English. Oh - and look out for uneven pavement.” We did learn a bit about the Hawaiian culture. Some of the Hilo students told us not to bring any rocks or sand back to the ship; it will bring a curse upon us. They were dead serious. They said they wouldn’t want to sail on if someone tried it. Like in Taiwan, we arrived before we arrived. We stopped earlier in the day in Honolulu for fuel. It was BY FAR the strangest part of the whole trip. I have seen us pull up to almost every country but it was my own that felt the most surreal. First of all it was gorgeous. I could look down into the crystal clear water and see a giant sea turtle. Ilana saw a whale. We pulled up along side and there were people in cafes that were waving to us. I bet they had no idea who we were or where we were coming from. I bet they didn’t know that we were coming home after 4 months of international travel and they were the first Americans we were seeing. “We made it” was all I could think. 4 months, an 11 day crossing – and here we are. I really can’t explain how bizarre it felt. We weren’t allowed off in Honolulu but we stayed there all day. I could use my phone and we could look off the ship to see the mountains and the trees and the harbor. We went through immigration and Marty told us later, “Did you notice that the only immigration officers that brought guns on board were the US ones?” The security in the States was the strictest, even more so than India where we had to go through airport security every time we re-boarded the ship.

Ilana and I got off the ship together in the rain. It wasn't raining heavily so we started walking towards the beach. Eventually it let up and we ran into these two guys who were sitting outside of their truck by the water drinking beer. They stopped us and asked if we would like some. It was our first taste of island hospitality. They were mildly interested in where we had come from, but not as interested as I thought they would be. The SAS staff had starting warning us that we are going to want to talk about this trip more than people are going to want to hear about it, and this was our first exposure to that. "We came on a ship" is a much less useful conversation starter than I expected. Both men were unemployed and just hanging out on the island. They tried to make us eat raw oysters (so raw that they were still alive) but we kindly refused. We headed down the road for another mile and found a small beach. When the rain stopped we could walk around in the bay and lay on the hot black sand. For lunch that day I had a caesar wrap -unimpressive I know, but still – American food! We walked home instead of hitchhiking (which is legal here) and I went to dinner at a real American diner. There were 8 of us and it was like we were on crack. We ordered the strangest combinations of food. Pancakes and eggs and pasta, I had mac and cheese and chocolate milk and part of a waffle. I pretty sure we confused our waitress.

The next day was beautiful for a number of reasons. First, I finally got the bagel and cream cheese I had been craving for months and then went to another beach where they had huge lava rocks for climbing on. We explored the tide pools and found a tie-dye crab and a bunch of odd muscles and a ton of fish. The four girls, me, Sara, Ilana, and Alison traversed way far out on the rocks away from the beach dwellers. It was a slippery climb but we made it. We sat out on the edge of the rocks and fought the urge to jump off of them into the water. We were mostly silent, there wasn't much to say to each other anymore, we were comfortable just sitting there and knowing that we were all feeling the same things. I was wearing a lei that a woman on the street had given to me as a welcome to Hawaii. It was beautiful, made out of huge fresh pink and white flowers. I took it off and we all held a corner and said a silent prayer of thanks to the sea for bringing us here safely. Then I flung the lei out into the water and we watched the current carry it away.

“Next stop home.” I kept saying in my head.

Boarding the ship for the last time!

that says, "next port of call - San Diego"

dinner on the ship before taking off

last view of hawaii

Taiwan: The Unexpected Port

2011-04-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

Hey guys! As some of you know, I am actually back on land by this point. Our voyage ended the morning of the 24th. Its taken a while to say goodbye to people and take friends to the airport but things are beginning to calm down. Blog posts will end soon, but these last three or so will come in quick succession...anyway, on to Taiwan...

one of the famous "night markets." I ate a corndog off the street

"Life is an adventure. The universe brings me everything I need in the perfect time and in the perfect way."

“This Earth is not something we inherited from our parents, it is something we are borrowing from our children.” - Awakening the Dreamer (look it up!)

Emily and I

So it turns out that there are some politics that prevent us from sailing directly from China to Taiwan. So we had to make a stop someplace else first. Guess where it was? Japan! The island we were at is Japanese owned, but it is the furthest one from the mainland. The place looked great and people were parasailing and rowing up to our boats all morning. We ended up staying there a few more hours than necessary because we drove over some poor guy’s fishing net and got it stuck in our propeller so divers had to go fish it out. Later that week we were circled by a Japanese coast guard helicopter, when we asked the captain about it, he said he was unaware.

It rained almost our whole first day in Taiwan but like the good sports we are we put on raincoats and sloshed our way to the train station to catch a train to Taipei. No one was super into it. Taiwan was feeling like our third version of China, plus we were exhausted. The highlight of the day was going up Taipei 101 to see the view. Taipei 101 in the second tallest building in the world right now, although it is probably about to be eclipsed. It was very foggy but we went up to the 90th something floor (in less than 40 seconds). We decided to take a nap up there before heading back down :)

a view from the top! look how small the cars are for reference

a few from the bottom

After lunch our second day Jason and I went out with Ana and her mom to the Peace Garden and a Confucius Temple and then to an excellent dumpling restaurant. Then for desert we walked around the corner to a placed called Chocoholic that is a chocolate restaurant and I had a nutella crepe on a green-tea tortilla. We lastly headed back to Taipei 101 to see the view at night and Jason and I made it up for free. It was less foggy so the view was incredible.

the 101 at night

was this invented for me??

The next and final morning I had my final SAS trip to the Taroko Gorge which is about 2.5 hours away by train. It was a trip of about 40 people, but only 7 of us were students. We had the entire field office and media team, half the medical staff, LLCs and Life Long Learners. It was one of the better SAS trips I’ve done and I think it was because of the lack of students. I knew it was going to be a great day when we all did the electric slide on the train platform in front of a number of confused Taiwanese people. We ate lunch at a hotel and I had the strangest meal of the whole trip: pasta, corn, carrots, pigs in a blanket and matzo balls. Our guide, who was a professor that was a volunteer for the tour organization, took us to many of the famous stops along the gorge, including the base of a 3000-meter cliff. Guess what? Turns out Toroko Gorge is another of the wonders of the world, just like Halong Bay which we tried so hard to make it to. The Universe provides...

my favorite photo of the bunch, this is the ship's photographer Brittney...can you see me in her lens?

from left to right: krista from the field office, Alyssa an LLC and Faith, MY LLC

I like this one too - we were all in awe

the couple holding hands is Betty and Boyd, the oldest people on the ship, they are almost 90

Me and bff Doctor Laura!

The ride back was long but we made it back for dinner (1.5 hours after on ship time, we were the last people out in port). I stayed out on the deck to watch our last international port disappear.

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We are now experiencing our 11 day Pacific crossing. An odd thing about this leg of the journey is the way it appears on the map on my cabin wall. I have spent so much time looking at that map, drawing a mental line across it and always using it to have a picture of where we are. In a few days, we will be sailing off the map. We will literally disappear off one side of it and re-appear on the other. On the map it looks like we are far from the states when we are actually pretty close and getting closer all the time. We experienced our very own Groundhog day when we crossed over the International Date Line. At midnight on April 12th we set our clocks back so that we woke up and it was still April 12th. Marty played “I Got You Babe” over the sound system to wish us a happy groundhog day. It took me all morning to figure out the reference.

We went slightly off course on our way to Hawaii; we had to move out of the waters we were on because there was missile-testing happening. Oh, the things that don’t make it onto the website or into the Voyage blog.

Last night we saw a light on the horizon. It was the first sign of human existence that we have seen in 10 days (although we did see birds when we got near the midway islands). We thought it was a ship but we later learned that it was a lighthouse. It is not to mark land, but rather a reef that is a danger to crossing ships. Hawaii two days out!!

China: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles…and a canoe.

2011-04-04T18:39:00.000-07:00

People have been saying that China is the port that surprised them the most. I’m not sure that any port really surprised me in that I was picturing something completely different from what I encountered. I would say however that if there was a port harbor that I envisioned incorrectly, it was Shanghai. From our ship we had one of the best views in the city.

The two days we spent at sea in between Vietnam and Hong Kong were some of the worst so far. It was like being back on the Caribbean. There was a storm over Japan that we caught more than the edge of. The ship started to rock that first morning and didn’t stop until we hit the harbor two days later. The movement was so much that they closed the elevators, canceled events and made an announcement telling us to “secure our cabins and proceed with caution.” I was terribly seasick but still one of the lucky ones. Ilana was so bad that she had to get a shot of anti-convulsive medication. I mostly stayed in my room at the bottom/back and watched TV and tried to sleep. I skipped most of my classes and did no work or journaling. I cannot satisfyingly explain how insane the ship’s motion was. Nothing was safe. The magnets couldn’t hold things to the walls, our drawers wouldn’t stay shut, and neither would the classroom doors. Things were flying off of shelves and Sara’s bed came up off its tracks and she fell out. The sound was also very intense. Not only was the engine noise super loud but the waves were crashing against the ship and the ship would hit the sea so hard that the whole thing would shake and it sounded like a symbol crashing. Each time a particularly large wave would hit and everything would screech and shake all we could do was laugh at how absurd it was. I wished for one big storm. I got it – and it wasn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it would be.

We were advised to get up early and watch the ship pull in to Hong Kong and it was totally worth it. Hong Kong is a bunch of small islands and we navigated them slowly and saw the skyline emerge. It was a little foggy but with everyone out there at the front of the ship it was one of the more fun port mornings. That day I bought a plane ticket to Beijing and then had Japanese food and went to the top of something called “the peak” to see the whole city, which was still unfortunately largely obscured by cloud. Hong Kong is known for its fantastic laser and light show that goes on 364 nights a year. From our ship, you could see the whole city and I rushed back to it to get a good view. As luck would have it, once a year the whole world celebrates something called “Earth Hour” where for one hour you are supposed to use no electricity. My one night in Hong Kong was Earth Hour day, which fell right at the time of the light show. Go figure. It was still a beautiful sight before the city lights started to go out at 8:30.

The next morning I was up at 6 for Tai Chi at Sunrise, an SAS trip that I signed up for for one of my psych classes. Only about 7 people showed up and we walked down to the pier and learned stretching and a tai chi sequence from a man that looked like Mr. Miyagi. It was very relaxing and I’m glad I kicked myself out of bed for it. One of the most interesting parts, for me at least, was noticing the other people on the pier’s reactions to us 7 Americans. There were a number of other people that may have been tourists or Westerners abroad that joined in with us. One guy got really into it and after some stretching lay down on the ground presumably in meditation. This made security really uncomfortable and it was a riot to watch him try and figure out what to do. Many of the Asians stopped to watch us and most took photos. They had no shame about doing this and it was odd to be on the other side of that situation. Actually, all week we were stopped by Chinese for photos. They wanted to be in the photos with us. I remembered this phenomenon from Israel where it also surprised me. According to a professor, it is a status thing for them to have a photo of themselves with a Westerner. It is like how we want photos with celebrities. It was fun but slightly awkward to be a celebrity for a week. After Tai Chi we went for tea Dim Sum that I ate and enjoyed and then I rushed to the airport. I was traveling alone, but it is impossible to be alone when you are on a Semester at Sea voyage. There were SASers all over the airport and a huge group of them on my plane; I got to sit next to a friend. Upon arrival I exchanged currency and got my hostel’s name translated and headed to the taxi line where I ran into another SAS friend. Her name is Anna and she was headed to the same hostel that I was so we rode together and shared a room. It was a good thing that I found her because the other girls I was supposed to be meeting at the hostel never came.

sunrise in beijing!

China is the first place we have come to that is experiencing a season other than summer. It was cold enough for a coat and the trees were bare. It looked a lot like New England actually and the temperature was invigorating. On the way there Anna and I talked about the transition into countries that look more like home. We were thrown into poverty and then slowly worked our way back into the first world, making our transition home much easier than if we had gone around the other way and ended after Ghana and Brazil. We agreed that even though we have two more stops, China feels like our last port and that it will be smooth sailing from now on (hopefully literally). The International Youth Hostel where we stayed was a fascinating place. It was on the bottom floor of a hotel, you would go into the elevator and push “-1” and be taken down away from the gold trim and fake plants and into a college dorm.

the hostel

hostel bar

The walls of the hallways were covered in painted messages from former guests. There were sayings of inspiration, art, and the classic “Joe was here summer ’08.” The hostel rooms were bare bones to the extreme, just four beds and a locker. We shared our room with a Ugandan family that didn’t like us and that we didn’t like. One of the women was 8 months pregnant and she and another woman and a man stayed in the other beds and had loud conversations when Anna and I were clearly sleeping. Also in the hostel/hotel there as small “dining hall” that had the best spring rolls I have ever tasted and a beautiful bar that looked a lot like the Lyon’s Den. There was a piano and also an Asian harp and a pool table and a ton of book and movies on shelves. There were also a ton of fish, in tanks, bowls, and in flower pots. Anna and I went there each night and talked to the other guests. We met some Danish teachers who were traveling with their high school students in China for 10 days. Denmark seems like a great place. The hotel had a tour operator that we used to buy tickets to the Beijing Opera, the Great Wall, and an overnight train to Shanghai. That first morning there we asked the front desk how to get to the Forbidden City. “You go light, then reft,” she told us and we laughed about it for a good long while on the way. We got a little lost on the way and finally found ourselves in a giant open space. I started to cross it as quickly as possible because we needed to get to the Forbidden City to meet our professor who was acting as tour guide when Anna suddenly stopped and said, “I think we are in Tiananmen Square. Indeed we were. I got chills looking around and realizing where I was and what had happened here 21 years ago. We did make it to the city where we ran into 200 or so other Semester at Sea students and faculty including three friends that we ended up bringing back to the hostel with us. It was great to the in the Palace but after the first three archways leading to courtyards, it gets a little repetitive. It was odd to see how many Chinese tourists there were. Beijing was the first place we have gone that has had tourists from its own country. The same was true in Shanghai.

anna and I

The Opera we saw was definitely a tourist version of the Beijing Opera, it was in a hotel and only 90 minutes long. It was very impressive and a lot of fun nonetheless. We got to see the performers putting on their make-up outside the theatre and the songs were translated into English (hysterically poorly) on screens over the stage.

putting on male-up

We were up early our last morning for our 3-hour trip to JinShanLing, the section of the Great Wall we decided to explore. We saw the sunrise on the way and then I fell asleep. When I woke up a few hours later my first glance out the window won me a spectacular view of the Great Wall off in the distance, winding its way along the tops of the mountains like the crooked backbone of some giant creature. We took a cable car to the top where we spent four hours hiking over the crumbling stones and stopping to take photos in the towers. We had picked this part of the wall because it is one of the oldest and farthest so we assumed it would be the least crowded. For the first hour or so we were alone but on our way back to explore the other side, we ran into a SAS trip of 60 people, including Jason.

Being on the wall was one of my favorite parts of this whole experience. It is so majestic and so impressive that I didn’t know what to do with myself. A lot of it has been restored but it still feels as old as I know it is. I remembered as we were hiking (and it really is a hike) along it that as people died building it, their bodies were put into the wall. A fact that became even more eerie a day later when we were hit with some terrible news.

A very large number of students signed up with a tour company called The China Guide, which takes people onto the wall to spend the night. One of the dozens of groups that were on the wall last Tuesday night went for a walk after dark and two students fell down a treacherous stairway. It was not their fault, it could have happened to anyone anywhere, even in ones own house. One girl, a close friend of my roommate’s cut her leg and ended up with 30 stitches and crutches. Another girl was not so lucky. She hit her head and we later found out was bleeding into her brain. She had knocked out several teeth and was unconscious all the way to the hospital. She is still alive and able to move her limbs and breathe on her own but according to our doctor this is a true miracle. Her survival is due to a number of smart pre-med students who acted with perfect grace and timing and got her down the wall. One of the heroes, an RA from my floor, ripped a 70lb door off the nearest tower (woah) to use as a stretcher to carry the injured student 45 minutes down a completely unlit and horrifyingly treacherous part of the wall. It took 30 students to get there, 8 to hold the door straight while picking their way up and down the many staircases and a dozen more to shine flashlights and find the easiest paths. A few students and a tour guide who acted as a translator brought the girls to two hospitals, the first could do nothing, not even for the girl with a cut on her leg and the second was 2 hours away. They learned first hand the mess that is the health care system in China. The Beijing ER was so understaffed that the students had to lift the girl on to a gurney themselves and take her to her CT scan and lift her on to that as well. They reported that the doctors were in jeans and sandals and refused to even touch the student until the group proved that they could pay. The SASers were on the phone with Charlottesville trying to work out how to pay, which eventually did get worked out. My roommate was there for this whole thing and stayed in the hospital until 8am. I have left out the details of her report of all of this to me because I am hoping to forget them. For all involved that night will remain a nightmare for decades to come.

our overnight train

Anna and I took an overnight train that night to Shanghai. I had heard horror stories about the trains in India so I was nervous. But my luck in China held and the trip was fast and easy. Our compartment even had a 4 TVs, one for each bunk, so we watched Ice Age in Mandarin. I slept 7 out of the 10 hours and then we took the subway to meet the ship, which had traveled at sea from Hong Kong to Shanghai. As we passed through security we heard everyone’s favorite phrase, “The ship has been cleared!” We boarded and no shower has ever felt so good.

If Shanghai were an animal it would the hare from the tortoise and the hair fable. Instead of saying, “moving at the speed of light,” the phrase should become, “moving at the speed of Shanghai.” Shanghai has the 3rd tallest building in the world and is in the process of building the 2nd. Its 15 daily trains from Beijing are not enough, they are currently building a high-speed rail that is going to put the airlines out of business. It is toppling over itself trying to climb financial and technological ladders but it feels young and fresh. Everything in it is beautiful, every building has a ton of personality but they all fit together. It looked a little like Manhattan but much cleaner. Perhaps the best parts of the whole city are the signs for tourists. They are written in both Mandarin and English but the English is pretty poor in the best kind of way. I started taking pictures of the signs all over the country and the funniest ones said things like, “Tourist! Please be self-restraint. Be a good tourist in order for a well-mannered imagination.” Or, “A healthy environment is on all of us, please omnivorously divide your rubbish.” For one beauty salon they offered what I assume was waxing but it was translated as “lose hair.”

It took me 11 countries to figure out how to get street vendors to leave you alone. You can’t be polite or rude and you can’t just walk away. What you need to do is speak to them in German. Learn one sentence, the translation is irrelevant, and then you can add in any inflection to convey that you are sad you can’t stop or just appear much more badass. They get really confused because they are expecting English and that gives you enough time to get away.

In Shanghai that first night I went to see an acrobatics show called ERA. Since I’ve seen Cirque in Vegas I wasn’t expecting to be blown away even though I’d heard that it was the number one show in China. I was totally taken by surprise, if not as beautiful as love, it was certainly just as impressive. I had to hold my breath all the way through because the stunts were so intense. On the way there the guide told us that all the acrobats are our age and most of them don’t come from Shanghai. The one child policy only applies to city people and rural farm workers are allowed to have multiple children. Since most families want a boy, they will keep having children until they get one and they sometimes send one or two of their daughters to the acrobatics school, which provides the children with food and an education while the parents get small compensation. The training sounded horrible. The guide said, “One time I went there and I saw a little girl trying to put herself into a box. She was crying and also a little bit bleeding. But when I came back 2 years later she could do it without any pain.” We could choose to see the show as child slavery, or as art. Even though they are worked very hard, they are getting care and attention that they wouldn’t otherwise be getting, and they do get two holidays during the year.

The one child policy creates a lot of stress for young people these days. Since China has become so much more advanced people are living much longer than they used to. That means that children not only have to care for their parents, but their grandparents as well. Since they are only children, the burden falls solely on them. I was talking to one woman about the stresses in her life and I learned from her that in China people prefer to deal with stress by working harder rather than taking time off. They believe that if they work hard and get ahead then they won’t have stress in the future. I thought of that as the equivalent of a student choosing to deal with the stress of writing a long paper by sitting down and powering through it rather than avoiding it and doing yoga and creating more of a time crunch. It is treating the cause rather than the symptoms.

I lucked into a free trip one of my days in Shanghai and got to go a bunch of gardens in a beautiful place called Suzhou. When you see paintings of gardens in China, it is usually this place. Perhaps even better than the gardens was a place called Tiger Hill that we stopped at before we headed home. The only way I can describe this place is by comparing it to Candy Land. There were literally places called “Hall of Crisp Clean Autumn Air” and “Sugar Plum Palace.” There were hundreds of thousands of tulips of all colors and colorful parasols hanging from trees and people in odd clothing everywhere. At the top of the hill (which used to be an island in the Pacific before the ocean receded) there was a tall and leaning old structure that is only open to Chinese and only once a year. If I didn’t have photos to prove it I would say that I made the whole place up in a hallucinogenic trance – but there really were giant flower balls lining the paths and a woman in a costume playing a mandolin from her balcony.

Add caption

Our last day I went to Eue (sp?) garden and ate at a gourmet Pizza Hut where I sampled wine, btw – if you ask for white wine in Asia they bring you whisky or some other hard alcohol. P.s. if they tell you it is “spicy,” beware. The shopping was good so I made my first totally indulgent purchase, a traditional Chinese robe-dress that looks great on me but that I don’t foresee and occasion to wear. We decided to walk back to the ship instead of taking a cab and cut on ship time as close as I ever have. 23 minutes to spare.

dumpling drink

I’m a world traveler now. I figured out the secret of speaking German, I alone navigated a country that I could not speak the language of and I’ve been on planes, trains, automobiles, boats, canoes, motorcycles, rickshaws, bicycles and I’ve crossed every ocean and sea between Florida and Taiwan and became a shellback in the process. We arrived in Taiwan tonight; we are here for 3 days and then an 11-day pacific crossing to Hawaii where it is just a short hop back home.

hong kong harbour

Vietnam: A Well Kept Secret

2011-04-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

the saigon river

Vietnam surprised us all. Jason said, “I was picturing a giant battlefield that was never cleaned up.” Whenever we hear about this country in the States it is almost always in the context of the war or some South-East Asian disease statistic. It is actually a very green and very beautiful place. The people are very welcoming and friendly and the landscape is largely high grass rice fields, white sand beaches, waterfalls, smooth orange sand dunes, and river communities. It is home to one of the natural wonders on the world – the one voted most beautiful. It is now added to my list of unexpected vacation destinations and I think that in a few years when the secret gets out, people will flock there from the states.

Dean Dan would have a hard time arguing that we were irrelevant in Vietnam. Upon arrival, there were 20 Vietnamese women holding a giant banner that said “Welcome Semester at Sea.” They had set up shop right in front of the ship. A lot of these ports that SAS visits twice a year know us and know what to expect from us. They know that when 800 Americans arrive for a week, they are going to make bank. One guy in Singapore said that his schedule corresponds with us. In Chennai, there was hand made signs in the windows of shops that said things like “special discounts for MV Explorer.”
(Haha yeah right – what that really means is “we jack up the price for tourists but we lower it back to almost its real value for you guys.”)

Every morning The Voice wakes us up gently at 9:15 by saying, “Good morning voyagers – today is Sunday, March whatever, today is a B schedule day etc…” Our morning of arrival Dean Al, who studied theatre, came on over the speaker and yelled “GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM!!!”

I went on a city orientation that first day in Nam. We saw a Buddhist temple and Reintegration Hall (where they house the tank that ended the war) and our guide kept saying “whore” instead of “hall” and it was all we could do not to laugh out loud. We saw the red phone and the bomb shelter and a giant statue of Ho Chi Minh. We ate lunch at a very beautiful restaurant and I finally got to try a Singapore Sling, which wasn’t very sweet. Before heading back to the ship I went to an ATM to take out money. The exchange rate here is the wildest it has been. 1 US dollar = 20,850 dong. I took out the equivalent of $50 dollars and got to hold in my hand 1,000,000 dong. My hand was shaking. A dollar goes a long way here, but nothing was more exciting to me than the DVDs. I’d heard they were cheap, but I was still shocked. For 65 USD, I got the ENTIRE series of LOST, the ENTIRE series of FRIENDS, the ENTIRE series of the Big Bang Theory, 150 Disney movies, Eat Pray Love, The Kids are Alright, and Black Swan. And the craziest part – I was totally ripped off! I couldn’t care less. The seller and I parted ways, both feeling like we’d gotten the better end of the deal.

The Vietnamese are the nicest people I’ve met. Maybe not the friendliest like in Ghana, but the nicest. The cab driver who took me and Jason a hour and half away to see the Mekong Delta and then waited for us for 3 hours before taking us an hour and half back, shared his terrible coconut snack with us and only tried one time to get more money than we’d agreed upon. When we refused, instead of getting angry and following us around like in India, the driver smiled and thanked us warmly and just let us go. It was such a foreign concept that I almost felt like I was cheating him by just giving a normal tip.

Being on the Delta was strange, it is very “old Vietnam.” It looked a lot like the Amazon. People live in little villages on the islands in a very quaint way. At one point our guide was showing us a beehive and grabbed my hand and shoved into in a honeycomb covered in bees. I was petrified, but when I pulled my hand away, it was covered in fresh honey that was the sweetest I have tasted. We were served fresh fruit, including this beautiful pink, green, and white seedy fruit called Dragon Fruit, and got to make our own honey tea and to cap it all off, we sampled Snake Wine. I don’t know how they make it and I hope never to. The man dipped our glass into a glass vat of brownish liquid that was filled top to bottom with coiled snakes, a king cobra’s skeletal head poking out the top. You could see his fangs. As we held our glasses Jason said, “I remember the doctors saying something about snake wine, but I don’t remember what it was. Oh well, cheers!” I got to hold a cobra too, which I’m glad I did but have no desire to ever do again. It weighed about 60 lbs and was clearly stronger than me. We rose motorcycles on the way back to our boat, which was fantastic. Everyone, literally everyone rides motorcycles here. There is hardly any other form of transportation. I wondered what happens when it rains, and I got to find out. During the storm that hit our third day, I witnessed whole families under three or four headed ponchos. It looked like those Chinese dragon puppets.

!!!!!!!!

our snake wine

During my research, I learned that up in North Vietnam there is a place called Halong Bay. It is one of the 7 natural wonders of the world and as I mentioned was voted the most beautiful. The guidebook said it has won multiple awards for its “universal aesthetic appeal.” It is a series of thousands of limestone monoliths that jut out from the bay and there are caves and lakes and greenery all around. When I heard about “beautiful Vietnam,” I was hearing about the North: Hanoi, Sepa, Halong Bay. Three of us tried to go last minute. We even made it to the airport for the 12:30am flight and were told that there were seats available. It didn’t end up working out, technical difficulties with the plane and the whole airport was really sketchy. It just didn’t feel right. From what I’ve heard it is just as well, there was a storm brewing and the government stopped letting people out on the bay, although that might have been after we would have left, I didn’t look in to it too closely. My other goal was to go see the sand dunes, which are also supposed to be gorgeous, but they too were far away and my being sick and also exhausted made it all too easy to just stick around Saigon.

One of my SAS trips was to the Chu Chi Tunnels, which is the underground system the Vietnamese built during the “American War of Aggression.” There are three levels to the tunnels, the first level is only 4-6 feet deep, but we went down into the second, which is 8-10. The tunnels didn’t have the same affect on me that the War Museum had later that week, but it was still terrifying. It was pretty odd to hear about this war from the other side, and it was downright creepy to see all of the traps that are still in place that were used against the American soldiers. We watched an informational video before going down into the tunnels where the Vietnamese voice explained in English how so-and-so won a “greatest American killer hero award.” The ground all around the tunnel system is booby-trapped; the kind of stuff out of cartoons really, with a deadly spin. They have the revolving trap door covered in leaves, but at the bottom there are two foot-long rusted spikes. We traveled in a single file line through the maze of tunnels, which was all fine and good on the first level, but as we went deeper it got much darker and so the people in front of me kept stopping to feel out a stone slide or because there was a family of bats in their way. When we were stopped I was starting to freak out. The tunnels were so low that the largest of us had to crawl and so narrow that the spiders on the walls were too close for comfort. At times there was no lighting and so I used my camera flash to find the way. I kept screaming at the people ahead of me to not stop and please go faster. Our guide had limited English and had not told us how long the tunnels were, and I just wanted out. There was tunnel on all sides and people at my front and back and it was hot and humid and hard to breathe. After a while I saw a man crouched in a tunnel that branched off of ours. I asked him, “Is it much farther?” “Yes!” he replied instantly with a smile. I felt my heart pounding through my chest and I started getting dizzy. I tried to go back but the way was clogged. Fortunately, it turned out that we were only about 40 feet from the end, and that that man had spoken such little English that he would have responded “yes” to any question. It was late in the day and the sky was covered in dark clouds and the place was very creepy. It poured rain our whole way back and I saw the most impressive lightening of my life. The streets flooded which did not affect our tour bus but did affect the thousands of people on bikes and motorbikes. It was so high it covered more than half of their wheels. I saw people using brooms to sweep water out of their stores and public busses and trucks so crowded that people were literally on top of each other.

On our way to the tunnels we stopped to see a Cao Dai Temple, which is one of only a few in the world. The religion is a hybrid one, it was designed to be the “prefect” religion and draws on existing beliefs from both Eastern and Western faiths as well as the ideas of philosophers. I don’t know what I was expected but the temple blew my mind, it didn’t look like any temple I have ever seen. In was part temple, part playground, and part planetarium. The predominant colors were pink, turquoise and gold. Everyone inside of it wore nothing but pure white. There were nine levels, and also two spiral staircases leading up to a second story where we observed a ceremony that occurs 3-4 times a day. There were many controlled flames and eyes in the windows and on the main feature of the predominant alter. On the blue ceiling there were white cloud dragons and hundreds of 3D silver stars. Most temples and churches that I have visited have had a cold and serious feeling on the inside; you almost don’t want to move around for fear of moving wrong. This place was totally different; it was extremely welcoming and full of light and warmth.

On our last day I went to the War Remnants Museum. It was definitely a wise choice to go, but it was very difficult. The museum did not protect the visitor the way they do in the States. Many things were not behind glass. You could actually touch the shells of missiles and a piece of pipe that a family had used for shelter before they were exploded inside of it. They even had a case of actual human fetuses on display in the middle of the Agent Orange room. The photographs were the hardest part, harder than simply being an American inside this place. Not only were there photos of the war itself, but there were dozens of photos taken of deformed children born even just in 2008 who are still suffering the effects of Agent Orange. I later had breakfast with a member of the UVA medical team who is sailing with us from India to China to visit hospitals, and he told me that the photos were very manipulative. He said that chemicals could not possibly have caused many of the deformities that were pictured and just occur naturally everywhere in the world. He said that the harmful chemical that the signs say the Americans deliberately unleashed on the Vietnamese was actually an unintentional contamination, and actually affected the American soldiers more than anybody else. He said he thought it was interesting how there was no mention of either the Chinese or the Russians and also nothing about what the Vietnamese did to each other. They did not mention the North/South feud; they presented themselves as united victims of an unwarranted American attack. Its hard to wrap you head around what actually happened because learning about it in either Vietnam or the States in going to have a biased perspective.

In the market there are signs on many of the stores that say “fixed price.” I noticed that all of those sings are in English, I bet its not fixed for locals. People were just a pushy with their stuff here as they were in India or Ghana, one woman actually grabbed me and pulled me to her shop and physically held on to me, quite tightly, so I could not leave as she showed me shoes. I think shopping culture is different here. In the West we can go window-shopping and look at things we have no intention of buying. In these poorer places, people only buy what they need and know what they want before they enter a store and so when I showed interest in a pair of sequined shoes, the women assumed I was out to buy shoes and if I didn’t get them from her, I would have to find them somewhere else. All I actually wanted was to see how they were made. That is maybe why it offends them so much when we refuse—they think its personal.

***

A description of Vietnamese Water Puppetry:
A pool about 2 feet deep of dark water. The pool extends out into the audience and also back behind a bamboo curtain. Metal puppets enter and exit though the curtain as music plays and voices are heard over a speaker. The puppets are on sticks being manipulated by the people sitting in the waist deep water behind the curtain. They can do flips and move in any direction and also leap out of the water and attach (by magnets I assume) to the set pieces. There is also pyrotechnics, the dragon puppet really breathes fire and the snake puppets spit water at each other and at the audience.

the puppet theatre

the puppets!

Recipe for really good tea: fresh honey, a pinch of sesame seeds, half of a small lemon or lime, hot water.

The phrase for bathroom in Vietnamese is “the happy room” because you go in unhappy but when you come out, you are happy!

we took some deaf children to the zoo one day, this girl is demonstrating the asian "thumbs up"

It’s interesting how all of these Global South countries all kind of look the same. The types of trees are different (although I think I have seen palm trees in every place we have been) the colors are a little different and what is sold at the roadsides stands is slightly different. But all places have the outdoor roadside shops, they all have the dilapidated buildings, the animals in the road, the shoeless people, the packed vehicles. If all I saw were a snapshot of a street scene without the faces of people in it, I would have a hard time identifying which country I took it in.

Singapore - The Lion City

2011-03-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

I broke one of the laws in Singapore and got away with it, 10 points to whomever can guess which!

Yesterday was Singapore Day. At pre-port they told us that Singapore would be different from any of the ports we’d been too and in many ways is more sophisticated than the United States. Their healthcare, education, public transportation, and food are some of the best in the world. But what really makes Singapore so impressive is not that they’ve managed to rise to such a developed level, but where they have managed to do it. They are at least a decade ahead of their closest neighbor countries. There is a lot that makes Singapore an undesirable place to be, the strictness of the rules, the harshness of the punishments, and human right’s violations, but it is the most impressive city I heave ever seen. It is impeccably clean and beautiful to look at. The transportation is top notch and the food service is indescribable – it was all anyone could talk about. There are tons of gardens and trees everything is marked (in like 4 different languages). In some places, you can just push a button and a taxi will come a minute or two later. In every other port we have arrived in, students have gone on wild goose chases trying to find internet, stamps, ATMs, drugstores and the like. In Singapore, the terminal included all of those things. I wish we could have stayed a week, but alas, it is too expensive to even park our ship overnight. I had a very full day. We started at the botanical gardens, which was the highlight for me. We walked around Swan Lake and visited a Japanese garden and the world famous orchid garden (60,000 orchids), and saw multiple waterfalls and the Singapore Heritage tree. Then we stopped at Arab Street for hummus and hookah and walked to the golden domed mosque. Next we visited Chinatown, where I could have spent an entire other day, and finished the day with a quick stop at the Esplanade to see the Double Helix Bridge, the hotel with the garden and trees on the roof and the Performing Arts Center. I didn’t get to try a Singapore Sling - my only regret…

Also at pre-port Dean Dan was seated in the front row and in the middle of Dean Marty’s talk about logistics and safety, he got up and took the microphone. He said, “I don’t know why ISE hasn’t included this in the list of things we need to tell you, but it’s extremely important. If you hear a tsunami warning siren, don’t go to the ship.” Everyone broke out laughing because it seemed like such an obvious thing, but it’s a good thing he thought to mention it because we don’t know what the sirens sound like, and we are told time and time again to return to the ship if there is an emergency. It was his tone of voice that made it so funny, and it is odd how its never been mentioned on passed voyages, but it extremely relevant now.

We are not going to Japan anymore. Right after the earthquake and tsunami, we were told that since we were still a few weeks away it was not going to affect us. Once the nuclear plants started going, we knew it wouldn’t be long before they retracted that statement. We are going to Taiwan instead. Surprise - Taiwanese passport stamp!!

Part 12: Neptune Day!!!

2011-03-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

captain jeremy as king neptune!

It was a little quicker than I imagined it would be, but it was the funniest day of the voyage. Usually The Voice wakes us up at 9:15 every morning with the morning announcements, but on Neptune day we were woken at 8 by the crew parading up and down the hallways banging on pots and pans. We were herded up to the 7^th deck for opening ceremonies where we were told that we would be transformed from mere pollywogs into the much more respectable shellbacks (A shellback has crossed the equator on a ship – a pollywog is a landlubber). King Neptune was there, who was our very own Captain Jeremy, painted neon green and wearing a Speedo and a wig. I feel inclined to mention that our captain is an EXTREMELY proper British guy with a clean accent and who we have never seen wearing anything other than his white uniform. Our deans were also all dressed up and the LLCs were as well. They organized us into lines and when we reached the front, we were made to stand in the shallow part of the pool and shut our eyes and mouths as the crew poured green slimy fake fish guts over our heads. We then jumped into the water to wash it off and climbed out to kiss the very real dead fish and then the ring of King Neptune. I forgot to do this last bit and as I tried to walk by the King, he pushed me back into the pool. We then had the option of getting into line to have our heads shaved which is the most famous part of the tradition. I opted out, but around 50 or 60 people didn’t, a third of which were girls. My roommate was one of them. A week later, she has fuzz a few centimeters long. To celebrate our new status, there was a BBQ, which I didn’t attend because Ilana was having a birthday celebration in the specialty-dining room. I don’t know what I was expecting specialty dining would be, but it surpassed my expectations. Every day on the ship is very casual, but for specialty dining we have to get dressed up and it is like going to a very fancy restaurant. We got a menu that offered us 2 or three options for each of the five courses complete with champagne and sorbet as a palate cleanser.

brave soul!

dean of students!

kissing the fish!

my roomie pre shaving!

Part Eleven: Arriving to Asia: "Just try to blend INdia"

2011-03-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

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(¸.•´ (¸.•´ .•´ ¸¸.•¨¯`•.

Holy Cow we are in Asia! Our 4th continent! I cannot believe we made it this far. As someone put it, “After this, we are heading back instead of away.” I never thought my stomach would allow me to make it all the way – but I will be grateful forever that I stuck it out.

My very first encounter with India was not the sight of it as we watched the sun rise. It was the smell, which made it all the way down into the cabins a solid hour before we pulled up. It smelled terrible, but to me it was the smell of life—all human and animal smells. That first day I discovered the auto-rickshaw—by far my most favorite form of transportation yet. These are tiny little yellow glorified golf carts. One girl, who liked them even more than I did and is making a rickshaw documentary, described then as one third motorcycle, one third golf cart, and one third lawnmower. They are made to carry three people, which really means up to five. The drivers of these things are just as strange as the things themselves. India is probably one of the only places in the world where you not only have to negotiate your fare before getting in, but also your destination. You will most likely get where you want to go in the end, but you will probably stop at your driver’s brother’s store and a market or two on the way. The drivers get free stuff from certain shops they have arrangements with in exchange for bringing tourists, so we were often taken for rides, literally. One of the highlights of my trip was getting to drive a rickshaw. We had a really excellent driver one day who took us to a beach path and let us sit up front one at a time and learn to drive. That was also one of the scariest moments of my voyage so far. Jason and I had already had our turns at the wheel and Ilana was next. We got out to let her out and left our bags on our seats. After she was settled up front the driver took off. We didn’t have our passports, our ship IDs, or any money. Not only that, but the driver had Ilana, who is the not physically strongest person I know. We watched the rickshaw disappear and as the realization sunk in that this could possibly be the beginning of a nightmare, we started to laugh. “Just keep laughing” I told Jason as we walked the road in the direction they had headed, “That way it is still a joke.” What felt like 10 minutes later but was probably more like 5, they came back into sight, Ilana at the wheel and the driver laughing.

I was fighting off a nagging feeling that I had made the wrong choice by deciding that I didn’t need to see the Taj Mahal and the Ganges River until my overnight in rural Kanchipuram. Chennai, despite being only the 4th or 5th largest city in the country is nevertheless 13 times more densely populated than New York City. 13 times! The picture of India that I had in my head was of streets so crowded with cars, people and cows that you can’t hardly even move on foot. Chennai was like that at times, but it didn’t match the image I had in my head. From the descriptions of Varanasi I got from friends, that is where the image comes from. My 2 days in Kanchipuram was something else entirely. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I had signed up to do an overnight entitled “Child Labor in Rural India” instead of a trip to the big city. After going, I remembered. The Taj will always be there, but it is only through Semester at Sea that I can go visit a Bridge School and spend the day with child laborers and then visit a village so remote that donkeys is their main form of transportation. I had an India experience that very few people who visit ever have and I left with a new image of India in my head, instead of a reinforced one.

Upon arrival to RIDE (Rural Institute for Developmental Education) we dropped off our things and went to a Bridge School which a school for children who are being transitioned out of the labor industry. They warned us before we entered, “These are not normal children, they are aggressive and violent.” Not only were they totally normal children, but they were some of the greatest I’ve ever met. As soon as I walked through the gate a beautiful little girl came running up to me and threw flower petals over my head. “Welcome to India!’ she said, and handed me a flower she had picked to put in my hair. We had brought jump ropes and soccer balls but once the novelty of those wore off, we made up our own games. For two hours we played with them without a single conflict and then we put on shows for each other. Something I’ve noticed about the kids in these Global South countries is their ability to entertain themselves with virtually nothing. They are so much easier to interact with than the kids in the States, even despite the language barrier. A kid brought up on television and video games (or even board games) is not going to be able to a jump rope in nearly as many ways as these kids did. They really valued it and the creative uses they found for it were amazing.

That night I attained upwards of 50 big bites, which have been keeping me up nights, but it was worth it. For our meals at the volunteer center we got to eat with our hands and I tried and was able to swallow a surprising amount of the food. Nothing as exciting as ostrich, but still—I ate more than Naan. Before we headed back to the ship the second day we did two things. One was visit a silk-weaving shop where we got to watch the workers use the looms, and the other was visit that remote village I mentioned. There were things and people in that village that had I been a less sensitive person, I would have LOVED to photograph. Many of the things I saw there I do not have documentation of because I could not bring myself to take out my camera, or worse, point it a person or their home and make them feel ashamed. It is hard to say what I mean on this subject, I’ll try just one example: I passed a woman who was the oldest and skinniest and most leathery person I have ever seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off her permanently rounded spine or her toothless smile. I saw her with my photo-taking eyes against the backdrop of her meager flower-making shop, which was really just a woven mat on the ground on the side of the “road” and I saw an opportunity for National Geographic style photo, the kind shot that is all eyes—raw emotion. As much as I was pleading with myself to stop and shoot, all I could permit myself to do was give her the warmest smile I could and try to form a memory of the image of her. I had to stop myself from taking pictures of the naked albeit perfectly decorated children because I didn’t want their impression of the first white people they were seeing to be from in front of a camera. That village we saw one was one thought-provoking places I have been, but not in an epiphany kind of way. I don’t know how to talk about it yet, and don’t expect to know how to soon, so hopefully the few photos I do have of this town without electricity or running water will do some of the talking.

Fun fact: at the movie theaters in India, you don’t eat popcorn as you enjoy your action/romantic musical comedies, you eat real corn. Cooked. In a cup. With some spices on top. With a fork. There is also a flavor of ice cream here called , “Computer Juice.”


this is me and Jason ZORBING - it is where you pretend you are a hamster and they put you in a giant inflatable ball and then throw you into a pool! I has a video!

On one of my free days I spent 2.5 hours in a rickshaw with Jason and one of the ship’s psychologists going to Mamallapurum, which contains a rare World Heritage Site called Shore Temple. We picked up Anne, the psychologist, in Timmetz Square as we headed out hoping to split costs, but none of us knew just how far we were going. By the end of the day I was so sore from the ride that I went to bed before 9. The city itself was small but filled with extremely old relics including one called “Vishnu’s Butter Ball.” Which is a huge boulder perched precariously on a rock slope. We stopped for lunch at a hotel and had some local beer and I ate some more new and spicy food. Anne turned out to be a master barterer and so we only paid about 1000 rupees for the 10-hour day, just over 20 US dollars.

bats!

dont tell the ship's doctors that i held a goat - major rule breaking on my part

the butter ball!

On another free day I got Henna and watched a performance of Bhrata Natyam, which I found to be the most captivating form of dance I have ever seen live. Non-Western Theatre students, be jealous, it was everything J Mad preached and more. Bhrata Natyam actually comes from Chennai, our port city, and there is a school for it. On the way home Laura gave me the word that I was searching for to sum up and/or describe India, but I’ll get to that later.

My greatest day was our second to last day where I went on a service visit to a disabled children’s home. By certain standards, it was a very nice facility. By US standards it would be shut down instantly. I did observe that the children are outside a lot during the day and are well fed and have a place to sleep if they live there and the staff seemed qualified and friendly. The atmosphere was overwhelming at first. Immediately upon stepping into the building we could see children lying in hallways where they have been left temporarily because they are unwilling or unable to move themselves. You could hear terrible screaming coming from the physical therapy room and there were spider webs everywhere. The first part of the day we took a tour, which I had to leave because I couldn’t stomach being paraded into rooms too small for both us and the children and watching as they were given treatments which were clearly painful. After the tour we did our best to help clean and paint, had a lunch served to us on palm leaves, and then had time to interact with the kids. I spent the afternoon in the deaf classroom, where the kids were extremely charismatic. They have developed a sign language of their own, unique to these students aged 3 to 7 or 8. There was one girl in particular who was able to communicate so well despite her disability that she could have been a performer. Her face was so expressive that it was like watching a talented mime or a silent cartoon. We got to take those students and a few others back to the ship with us for some ice cream. From what I’d gathered about their lives and the looks on their faces was that they had never seen a real ship, or been in an elevator, or had ice cream. I can only imagine how overwhelming it must have been for them, and I tied myself into mental knots trying to wrap my head around what they were thinking, and what they would remember this day to be. My favorite part of the day was back at the center during lunchtime. I went into the lunchroom where the children eat with their hands on the floor and observed a girl, no older than 6 or so, eating her meal while simultaneously hand feeding three other girls less functioning than herself. She did it with such skill that I was sure she does this three times a day every day. The boarding students greatly outnumber the caregivers and so I assume that able-bodied children like this girl have learned to help out. “Look how they take care of each other.” said another student as we watched from a corner.

on the ship!

When we were back in Ghana and our voyage was just beginning I made a prediction. I predicted that we were going to reach a point in our travels where things would seem to be falling apart. Our living situation is such close quarters and the natures of our experience so intense that we were bound to, to put it mildly, get irritable. I predicted that it was going to be in India when this would happen because this is the halfway point and we are now all comfortable enough with each other to let our darker sides come out. We are all exhausted in the kind of way sleep doesn’t really fix and so emotionally over-stimulated that our patience is worn thin. It did happen, for my group of friends at least, but as soon as I remember that we were always on a train headed to this feeling, I felt better. Breakdowns are inevitable once or twice a semester anyway, and now that we’ve had one, we can recover more fully.

It happened on our last day when our driver was not cooperating with us and the sites we wanted to get to we either too far, or not open, or not of interest to half of us. We were already hot and frustrated when we were dropped off at our first sight, which was a temple. We left our shoes with the driver and ran across the scalding hot street. I was instantly annoyed with the temple because it didn’t look like what I was expecting it to or thought it should look like. It was not tall and elegant and there were venders all throughout the entrance. I saw a baby no more than a year old asleep on a tiny blanket laid out on the side of the path. She was alone and in danger of being stepped on. Once we got deeper into the temple it became clear that it was actually quite large. People were walking about everywhere but their movements did not seem to be random. I watched them but could not figure out what paths they were following. Every once in a while the person next to you would drop to their knees in front of a pillar you didn’t even know was an alter or would touch the ground at your feet and you would look down to see that the stone you were standing on was a actually a carving. I kept feeling like I was in the way and someplace I did not belong. I didn’t want to be a tourist and sightsee anymore, I wanted to know a prayer I could offer so that I was not disrespectful. There were a number of places where people were lining up to go deeper into the center of the temple and Jason got in line. I got really angry when he wouldn’t understand what Ilana and I were saying about it not being a place for us to go see. “You go there to pray” Ilana said, “If you get to the front of the line and just look, it would be like observing a Shabbat service but not standing when the Arc is opened because it doesn’t apply to you. We shouldn’t interfere.” Jason didn’t seem to think it was a problem at all to go into the prayer rooms and I was getting more and more upset. Religion in India isn’t separate from life in India. I kept hearing the phrase “mixing of the sacred and the secular” in my head. These people were all moving around this temple quickly because it was just part of their morning routine. Eat – Pray – Work. It was Alec who finally made me realize why I felt like we were doing something wrong. “No one is moving counterclockwise,” he said. I watched and saw that he was right. I had felt so out of place because we had been moving around inside the temple in the wrong direction, literally obstructing people’s way. I could see the scene in my head like a movie. The camera panning up and out of the roofless temple, showing the four of us facing West, while everyone else was moving East. We left immediately. That day we also visited Saint Thomas Basilica, another Heritage Site and one of only three places on Earth that is known to contain the remains of an apostle.

By the end of the day we were so frustrated with our driver who was determined to take us shopping instead of sightseeing that we got out on the side of the road. We were trying to get him to leave us alone when a woman walked over who was not Indian. She knew immediately what was going on and we started talking to her and learned that she was from the States but had lived in India for 5 years now. She sympathized with our situation and called her family’s driver to come pick us up and take us where we wanted to go. It was so refreshing to have someone in India actually understand what you are saying and not try to bleed you for money. The day ended on a high note when 6 of us hilariously squeezed into the front seat of the shuttle to make it back to the ship before the line got long.

The word for India that Laura gave me was “transformative.” I liked that because it can have both positive and negative connotations. Every day in India brought new sights that are impossible to ignore or forget, either because they were so beautiful, so strange, or so upsetting. During our week there I saw an angry mob beating a man with sticks. I saw so many street children all hours of the day and night who’d use any device necessary to get money or food. I saw cows and donkeys so close to our rickshaws that I could have reached out and touched them. I also saw people who have such resilience and creativity that I now understand why people fall in love with India. It is such a physically beautiful and enduring place, yet it is strangely cruel. Complex would be a good word too, but just because a place or culture is complex doesn’t mean that it reaches you. India grabs you and wraps you up in itself and then spits you back out when you and it realize that you are not strong enough to do anything but visit.

A friend of a friend brought toast off the ship to feed to stray dogs. She lay a piece of toast down by the head of sleeping dog who lifted its head, sniffed the toast, and then went back to sleep. She was puzzled, why would this starving stray refuse toast? “They don’t like foreign food” a passerby informed her.

I fell in love with the word In-dee-ahh. A word that means something so similar to what Ghana means, but prettier—less utilitarian. A place where there are no rules of the road, where you want to cry but can’t because you know you are somewhere good. It’s a place that wore out my brain trying to keep track of the rules: don’t use your left hand, step into a house with your right foot, no shoes inside, to touching anyone of the opposite sex, no bare chests of knees, don’t eat the fruit, don’t say “mmh hmm,” it means “no” here. I visited monuments in India that were so old that it didn’t make sense; they might as well have been as old as the earth. I noticed that right along side the stickers of Vishnu and Shiva were images of Jesus. Indians embrace all deities. They don’t proselytize. Live and let live for the most part. I learned that even Gandhi had a darker side—just like India does. The caste system. “Its inhumane” Mark Anthony told me when I told him I felt uncomfortable touring the disabled children’s home, “to observe them like this.” It was strange to observe India period. Visiting the sights is not like it was in any other country on our trip, and totally different from Europe. These are not old relics. They are not museum temples. People still use them everyday, like we use Starbucks or Dunkin Doughnuts. As we observe this place as art, they pray here as a part of their routine. Religion is more alive in India than anywhere else. It is more than a way of life. It IS life.

Part 10: Drama: And Not the Cool Theatre Kind…

2011-03-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

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(¸.•´ (¸.•´ .•´ ¸¸.•¨¯`•.

That being said, for you theatre people, this is a picture of two students, Jason and Medea. eating lunch with them was awkward to say the least :) :) :)

The night before our one-day stop in Mauritius, I cried until 3 in the morning. Despite this ship being like home, and despite having finally found a family, and despite finally feeling both physically and emotionally secure, this trip is the hardest thing I have ever done. From where the ship is on the map right now, I am literally the farthest from home that I will ever be, or could ever be short of getting in a spaceship. If the laws of the universe were suddenly to fail and I were to fall through the Earth to the exact other side, I would land somewhere in California. The strange thing is, it looks exactly the same here. Same ocean, same trees, same sky and moon. Even though there are over 900 people on this ship with me, and when I speak about this experience I use the pronoun “we,’ this is a solitary voyage. Everyone is making this journey for themselves, and despite the packs we travel in, by themselves. I went on this trip for a whole host of reasons, but in the top three was to meet amazing people that I will have in my life until I die. Everyone I spoke to who has done this before talks about the relationships that form, and how close they are, and how important they become when you are back in the US and no one else understands the change in you. I’ve had to work much harder than I expected to find people who can keep up with me intellectually and who share my sense of humor. The ones I have found I can count on one hand.

After observing the social circles on the ship, I came up with a categorical system to drop people into. The people who don’t fit any one category are the ones I know I will probably like.

Here is the system: there are the cabin people. These are the ones who don’t seem to need sun or care that there might be dolphins outside. They are either sleeping all day, over-dedicated to their work, or attached by the fingers to their email. Then there are the deck 5 people, which can also be seen as a subcategory. These people hang out on deck 5 because that is where the smokers deck is. They go back and forth between the deck 5 dining hall, and the smokers deck, and they are the ones I see around the ship sometimes and think to myself, “Who are you? Have you really been here the whole time?” Another group, and I count myself as one of these, is the deck 6 people. These are the ones who eat in the deck 6 dining hall because it means you can eat outside. It is for the people who like to do their work and socialize at the same time, either in the piano bar or the garden lounge. At night, they play games or music in those locations. The last group is the deck 7 group. Deck 7 is the pool deck and it has the grill and the lounge chairs. It also has the weight lifting equipment. The people who hang out on deck 7 are the ones who maybe squeeze in some reading while they lay out and tan, but more often they treat everyday as a Saturday in the summer. Deck 7 people have a hard time keeping their clothes on and complain loudly and often about the lack on alcohol on board. 90% of the people who get dock time for coming back to the ship drunk or late, are deck 7 people. Professors are never seen up there. These categories are stricter than you might think, if you are somewhere you don’t belong, you know it. One day I wanted to lay out by the pool so I went early and took a lounge chair on deck 7. All morning I got weird looks and was asked to move my chair over to make room for people’s friends so many times that after 2 hours I was squished into a corner. No one spoke to me. The system has caught on and is quite useful in describing people. “Who is your roommate?” you might ask Ilana. “Meredith” she might reply, “she is a hard-core deck 7er.”

When leaving port, deck 7 becomes open to everyone, even faculty. We all like to watch the port cities disappear. Usually most people stay and watch for half an hour or so, while others stay 45 minutes. Last night I stayed the whole time, about 2 hours for a place as small as Mauritius. I watched Mauritius turn from buildings into a cluster of lights, then a single light that went out 10 minutes later as we got too far away to see anything at all. It was very surreal.


This is my "Extended Family." Its an organization on the ship that most people sign up for. Mine is unusually small, on my right is Father Dustin, and on my left are my brother and sister.

Mauritius was a good day, but it will seem like a blip as soon as anything else happens. “India-lite” is how it was described to us. It was home to the dodo bird before it became extinct and has rainbow sand beaches, which we unfortunately did not have time for. It looks like what would happen if you took a lot of Indian people and mixed them in with a bunch of African people and then put them in Costa Rica. It was a beautiful place, but it did have a familiar landscape. It was very much like being back the in the Bahamas. The people there speak French but we were able to get by on our English. We treated our 8 hours there as our first weekend since leaving the US. There are no real weekends on this program. You are either at sea which means you are in class, or you are in port, which means running around trying to squeeze a month’s worth of activity into a single week. In port there may be some sleeping, but there is no resting. You sleep just enough to be able to maintain a functioning level of energy. Mauritius however is not a place with a culture we felt we needed to absorb so we took a cab across the island to the beach described to us as “the prettiest beach in the Indian ocean.” It took 3 taxis to get there, one of which was a water taxi, but it was worth it. The water is warm and almost hot in shallow parts. We spent most of our time sitting in wave-less waist-deep crystal-clear water drinking the local beer and chatting with some locals who arrived on a wooden pirate-ship looking boat. We met another American, one of two in the area. We had heard a rumor that there was a SAS student some years ago that was kicked off the boat in Mauritius and never went home, and we thought that maybe it was this girl, but turns out it wasn’t. The taxi ride home was terrifying but we made it alive and more importantly, on time. The line to get on the ship was very long and there was more drama in that line than I have seen in any of the others combined. It was a circus. At least half the students were drunk (btw the Mauritian government wont let us stay overnight anymore because we party too hard). Some were so drunk they couldn’t stand up alone. Everyone, including me, had sunburns so intense that they couldn’t be touched. The girl behind me was crying, a boy ahead of me fell and made his head bleed, the women searching our bags fainted from the heat and the clinic was overflowing with dehydrated and intoxicated students. Worst of all was Dylan. No one really knows what happened to him. I was back on the ship before he arrived, but I got the story. He was on a SAS trip that had spent their last hour on the beach where he must have had too much to drink too quickly. On the bus ride back to the ship he passed out and it was all they could do to keep him breathing. They tried pouring water down his throat but he didn’t even gag on it. The people who were in line when he arrived said that he looked dead. He was gray and unable to even sit upright in a wheelchair. They rushed him to the hospital within seconds of his second fall out of the chair and we had to leave him there with the embassy taking care of him. He was ok in the end. According to our medical staff he came as close to death as a person can while still being alive. The reasons for this were explained to us last night in a community meeting. The other students involved made the right decision to not try and hide him. He was on a SAS bus, with a dean who knew what to do and an LLC who know who to call. Our ship doctor was in the right place at the right time and made the right judgment call to drive him to the hospital and those things combined saved his life. Dean Dan told us that most fatalities occur right after near-miss accidents, and he informed to that we have just had out near-miss accident and urged us to be careful.

The week’s drama did not end there. I woke up the middle of the night a few days later to find the ship zooming along at top speed. All four engines are never on at the same time, so I knew something was up. My first thought was pirates, and I got really excited. At 8am the next morning we were stopped out a at sea, in a harbor of a tiny military island so top secret that it did not turn up on our GoogleEarth satellite tracker. The captain came over the intercom and told us that we had had a medical emergency in the middle of the night and had needed to rush for the nearest land. He informed us that the island we had arrived at, called Diego Garcia, was so politically sensitive that we could not take pictures of it. The army men who live there were not hesitating to take pictures of us, the only faces other than their own that they have seen in a long time. Our stop there was so unusual for them that they used us to run a safety drill. They surrounded our ship in a tight circle and men came onboard with guns. As Alec said, “Well, we may not have been chased by pirates like you’d wanted, but we ARE in lockdown in a top secret US military base.” We watched from the side decks as three people disembarked. One was a crew member (who we later found out had a detached retina), one was a student who just walked off, and the other was another student who was carried off on a stretcher covered in blankets. The student who walked off had a blood disease that needed to be checked out and she was just getting off because we were stopping for the other student, a friend of mine from Cambodia, who had developed a dangerous infection. This girl, named Mimosa, survived a horrific incident during her childhood and subsequently is covered head to toe in healed burns. She does not have functional hands and was not expected to live at all, let alone walk or talk, both of which she can do. Her infection was spreading rapidly because of her condition and Ilana overheard the captain and the doctor talking about how the hospital in Singapore that she was airlifted to told them that they had made the right call by heading straight for land. Another near-miss.

Being on the Indian Ocean is like being back on the Amazon. This morning at breakfast Sara was looking out the window and said, “The Ocean is so calm it could be in a calm ocean commercial.” We saw dolphins yesterday, a huge pod of them, and more flying fish.

Part Nine: Cape Town: "Its A Frican' Experience"

2011-03-04T21:44:00.000-08:00

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Ohm……..y gosh is that a whale?

The Cape Town story comes in three parts for your convenience. Part two is a diary, part three is a reflection, but lets start at the beginning. Cape Town part one is the day we refer to as, "Fuel Burning Day."

making circles!

The night before we were due to arrive in South Africa they told us that there were strong winds and that we might be delayed a bit getting into port because the entrance is tight. 40 hours later, we arrived. The winds were so strong the initial morning of arrival that they wouldn’t let us near land. They also wouldn’t let us up to the front of the ship to watch the sunrise. As we stood on deck 6, I was getting blown forward and backward and couldn’t hold my camera steady. The waves were so large that they used special tablecloths at breakfast to keep the plates from sliding off the tables. Our disembarkation time was 10am after the initial delay. 10 came and went. Noon came and went. Dinner came and went and they finally announced that we would probably be getting in between 11pm and midnight. Then it was between midnight and 1am. I went to bed and woke up at 3, we were still rolling around at sea. I got out of bed at 7:30, still rolling. Our spiritual leader decided to hold a prayer session on deck five to raise spirits. Literally seconds after the ritual was complete, the boat whipped around (as much as a cruise ship can whip) and headed top speed back towards the continent. 45 minutes later, we were in port. After the announcement that we were getting let in, Aysha and I ran to the front of the boat. The outside decks were still closed off so we asked very nicely if we could go into the fac/staff lounge to see off the front of the ship. The view was amazing. You could see the entire port, with its mountains topped in clouds and as we watched, we could see dozens of seals leaping out of the water ahead of us like they were showing us the way. We also saw tons of jellyfish, both white and red, and to cap it all off, a whale, just a hundred feet away, blowing water out of its blowhole! As the pilot pulled up to the ship to guide us in everyone went to the starboard side to wave and yell and it looked exactly like what I have imagined our return to San Diego to look like. People were that excited.

the big waves knocked sara off her chair

our GPS :)

Our extra 26 or so hours at sea were actually great. I’m learning in my stress management class how to let go of things I can’t control, and this was great practice. Granted, I was one of the lucky ones, I didn’t have a safari I was missing, or a friend or family member I was supposed to be meeting, or a plane to Johannesburg to catch, so my stress level was relatively low. I spent the day on the decks, getting sunburned and eating too much. Even though the waves were the biggest they have ever been, I didn’t feel sick at all for most of the day. They were very good to us. We got sherbert at lunch and they played Hollywood movies in the Union instead of educational ones and they kept us updated every hour, even when there was no new information. Many students handled it really well, others did not. One person started a petition. Ilana said, “Do you really think its in their control? Do you think the captain was like, ‘the students are annoying me. How can I piss of them off the most?’” For the first time I could see the port city from my cabin window. It looks a lot like Santa Monica actually. There is a ferris wheel and a giant mall and behind it all are the mountains. Table Mountain most prominent and interesting. It’s the most Western-looking place we’ve seen. From the 7th and 8ths decks you can see beyond the city, where there are 1000s of people living in shantytowns. It’s bizarre.

The stadium where the world cup was held is walking distance up the road. WAKA WAKA! U2 is performing there tonight. Dean Dan told us the other day that he’d written Bono a letter asking if he would like to come onboard the ship. It began, “Dear Bono, I am writing to you from the middle of the Atlantic ocean where I have been living for the past month with 700 college students.” He said, if that wouldn’t get his attention, he didn’t know what would.

waka waka stadium!

The Voice told us to try not to use our credit cards. She used hers once in Brazil and got a call a few days later asking her if she did indeed purchase a topless cruise for 50 people. She said she was so confused and unconvinced she’d heard them right that she made them spell ‘topless.’

FUN FACTS:

The leading cause of death for women in South Africa is murder. 70% of the women who are killed, are killed by their husbands. 1 in 3 women here admit to having been raped but even more astonishing, 1 in 4 men admit to having raped a woman. Considering how unlikely people are to actually admit that, those numbers are unbelievable. It’s such a beautiful city, but it has a lot of depth and darkness.
***

Cape Town Part Two: Aka the part of the trip I wont decide to remember as a 26-hour long free whale watching excursion...

As soon as the ship docked Jason and I booked it off and headed straight for the aquarium. Walking through the waterfront was like being at home. There is a mall across the dock from our ship that is the biggest I have ever seen. There are multiple grocery stores inside and also a post office and a Hallal Subway restaurant. The aquarium is apparently the 3rd “best” in the world, after the one in Cali of course and the one in Dubai. We saw them feeding their giant sea turtle, and a bunch of huge sharks and beach penguins. There were great signs all around the shark exhibit that said things like: "Rethinking the Shark – Last year 673 people were killed by defective toasters, 4 people by sharks." After the aquarium we went to dinner on the waterfront where I had my first taste of South African wine and then we headed to the stadium to hear the U2 concert. We found a grassy knoll at the back where we could hear every word. We stayed for our 5 or so favorite songs and sang our hearts out with the other 100 people who’d found this sweet spot.

the woman whose house we were building

On Saturday I had my Habitat for Humanity trip, which involved leaving the Cape Town bubble. We drove into one the infamous districts and I felt like I was back in Ghana. I’d heard that parts of South Africa are in worse shape than Ghana and this is true. A mere 20 minutes away from the beautiful city there are thousands of people living in huts that are just cloth tied to sticks. The dirt streets were so narrow our bus had a hard time getting down them. A girl behind me on the bus said to her friend, “I thought that I wanted to live here in Cape Town, but I don’t think I could do it anymore knowing that this is here.” Just like in Ghana there were kids everywhere. They watched us as we worked and a few students went down to a little shop with them and bought 3 soccer balls that we all played with. The building was hard work in that it was mostly heavy lifting but the “professional” builders we were working with didn’t seem to appreciate us. In fact, I had the sense that we were getting in the way. Unfortunately, I came to the realization that Habitat is more for the volunteers than the ones in need. The jobs could be done quicker and better without our slow and imprecise contributions. The woman whose house we were working on was there all day with her children. She gave us snacks and ginger beer and let us take pictures of her newborn. None of the children were wearing shoes despite the construction site. I found that odd as we were not allowed near it without a hard hat on.

That night I bought two very cheap theatre tickets to go see Taming of the Shrew. I was supposed to go through SAS but that was canceled because we were trapped at sea. The venue was similar to the Theatricum but the style of theatre was not. The show was messed with in the kind of way Jen Madden would not appreciate but it was very entertaining. The most interesting part of it all was the audience. They were all very young. The majority of people were in their 30s and below and there were a fair number of kids under 10. The show was definitely not family friendly but it didn’t seem to matter. The theatre audiences I see attending Shakespeare in the States are usually retired couples, that was not the case here, it was rather refreshing.

The cab driver who took us there and back did his very best to cheat us out of money. He stopped for gas but refused to pause the meter and then didn’t want to use the meter at all on the way back, saying it would be the same price as going even though it was no longer rush hour. I talked loudly to Jason about how sick and tired I was of being taken advantage of in these other countries. Its true, from Brazil on and especially in Africa people see our white faces or hear our accents and assume that they can wildly overcharge us or get mad when we don’t want to buy from them. “You have money to be here!” they say, “I need to feed my kids!” Over time, saying no gets harder and harder, but then you reach a point when you get angry or indignant. I have no desire to underpay or barter below what something is worth but I’m not given a chance. I want to give them what they deserve, or in the case of the cab driver, what they should earn for their services, but just because I am from America even the nicest people want to bleed you. It almost hurt my feelings. We had a good conversation with this man but the message I got from his indirect route, gas stop, and meter was that talking to us was just a device to get a good tip. I guess my complaining hit home for the driver because when we reached the dock he lowered the price. I had been all prepared to open my mouth as I handed over the money and say something designed to make him at least feel guilty for charging us 30R extra, but he surprised me. My faith in humanity was restored.

The next morning I decided to wake up at 5:30 to see if I could hop on a day safari. I’d decided the day before that it was either that or cage diving and elephants trump sharks in my book. I did manage to get onto a SAS trip and it was one of the better life decisions I have ever made. I’d only slept for 4 hours or so but I was literally pinching myself to stay awake on our 2.5 bus ride to the reserve. We drove past the most amazing landscapes I have ever seen, and I mean that honestly. It took my breath away; I literally lost my breath. I have never seen such beauty anywhere in the world. No sunset seen at sea or valley of flowers or waterfall hike could ever match it. Sadly my photos don’t do it justice.

Upon arrival we were given glasses of wine even though it was only 8am and then served the best meal of my life. It was mostly usual breakfast food but included things I haven’t seen since leaving the States like crystallized brown sugar and pineapple and actual tomato ketchup for the chicken nuggets (I don’t know why those were included). The lodge was like a 1000 star hotel and from the window next to my breakfast table I could see two wild elephants grazing on the hillside. Our game drive began after our meal and lasted about 3 hours. We saw 4 out of the “Big 5” wild game and got so close to the zebras and elephants that we could have touched them if we’d liked. Interestingly, it was the rhinos and not the lions that were the scariest part. Rhinos kill more people suddenly than any other animal in the reserve. They gave us more wine on the trip and then more again when we returned for lunch which I could not enjoy because I was still full from breakfast and finally we headed back to the ship.

a school

The next day was our last full day and I had a trip planned to take a bike tour of a township. The bikes were a challenge. Mine was too big for me and many people got flat tired or had bikes with no brakes but we all made it. We visited an AIDS testing center and learned some disturbing statistics. 5,000 people die each day from AIDS, and many of them were never diagnosed. People don’t want to get tested because it is like getting a death sentence and they are then stigmatized. Many people still don’t know how HIV is transmitted and think it can be cured by honey, or prayer, or worst of all – sex with virgins. Its such a problem in South Africa that it is just a part of their lives now. Like we worry about catching a cold, they worry about catching HIV. Women are forced into prostitution because they have no money or husbands and it means being able to feed their children even if it cuts their lives in half. In some places around where we were, the average life expectancy is 30 years. Our bike tour took us to both the richest and poorest places of the township. It was shocking – literally, and I mean literally, next door to a shack the size of a porta-potty, was a brick house with a satellite dish. The poor build their houses where there is space, which is often in between the brick houses, and they live side by side. They can see each other from their windows. We played soccer with some school kids and gave them the soccer balls and visited a computer lab where none of the children seemed to know how to use the computers. We saw women preparing lunches for the school children and although the food smelled good, it looked like mud and was delivered to them in tin buckets. We got some lessons in the local language, Xhosa, which is the awesome clicking one, and then had some bread and tea in a woman’s home/restaurant before heading out.

that sign says "Presbyterian church of africa"

the children's lunch

On that last night I went out for a night of theatre in District Six with a great group of people. The theatre was a converted Church left over from the Apartheid days and we got some history from the “emcee.” Apparently when this district became integrated they had to re-do all of the roads to make it a physically new place so that no one group of people felt like they had a prior claim to it. The show was pretty standard community theatre but the dancing was top notch. After the show Ana and Laura and I rode the Ferris wheel, which made us all ill and then went for desert. The wind was blowing so hard it blew Laura’s glass of milk away. We ate something that was called “Death by Chocolate” that might was well have been crack. Laura sold me one of her phone cards and I called Wheaton, which felt chocolate for the soul. :-)

That afternoon I overpaid for Internet that didn’t last and was in a bad mood as I was walking around the mall with Alec and I said to him, “Tell me something good.” “South Africa” he instantly replied.

upward bound table mountain

I again got up with the sun that last morning to go climb The Mountain. Table Mountain was the backdrop to the whole week. You can see it from everywhere, the town, the townships, my cabin window. It is over 3,000 feet tall and is a constant presence. We began our climb at 7:45 and were the only ones on the trail. The trail by the way has no flat parts. It is a series of boulders that function as steps all the way up. It was foggy and cool and eerie to be out there just the three of us. The climbing was so rigorous that we stopped every 10 minutes and did actually meet some other climbers. One was a man who was on his way down. I was feeling like I couldn’t take much more and that surely we must be almost there. “You see that peak over there,” he said “that’s the 1/3 way mark.” He then told us to put our cameras away. “If a mugger hears your accent, you become an easy target.” We plowed on and got increasingly loopy. The altitude, the exhaustion of the past 5 days, and the part of the hike that was behind us made us feel intoxicated. Climbing was pretty scary at times when the wind picked up. More people die every year from this climb than do on almost any other mountain, including Kilimanjaro. The cliff is so steep that the wind just blows people off. We did make it to the top, which was in a cloud, and we were again the only souls to be seen. We each went and sat on the edge of the cliff on our own and I put on some music and watched the clouds clear, revealing the Indian Ocean side of the country. That half hour was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I was so proud of myself, and feeling so healthy and so broken down by physical and emotional exhaustion that I could just let the sight of the mountain and valley and ocean fill me up. The sun came out as I sat there.

robben island - mandela

The rest of the day we just messed around
spending the last of our Rand and that is when I ate an ostrich burger. It was good! What has become of me?! Pulling away from port was just as dramatic as pulling in. We could see the city lit up and even the mountain was visible. We listened to Waka Waka and Tiny Dancer as we pulled away and as soon as the lights were out of view, I law down on the deck and looked at the sky.
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Can we talk about the sky for a minute? There is no place on land when you can see stars like you can out here. We are at the bottom of the world and there are no lights for hundreds of miles in any direction. The sky is black and the sea is black and the stars are so clear it is like a smack in the face. They are so plentiful and bright that it is like a different sky entirely. It is like being in a planetarium. What is most special about it is not the clarity, but the sheer volume. From places on land you can see great stars, but you can only see the ones that are above you. Out here there are no trees or mountains or buildings to block the horizon so you can see stars in front of you and in every other direction. The other night from the port side we could see the Southern Cross, the Milky Way, and a lightening storm in the distance that flashed orange lightening every 15 seconds. What I will long for the most when I am home will be the sky.

The first time I lay out to look at the stars I noticed that they seemed to be moving. I pointed it out to Sara and she freaked out. The stars, and the planets in particular, were making little consistent circles in the sky. We were just about convinced that we’d made a very important scientific discovery when Sarah said, “wait…isn’t the ship moving?” I died laughing, but we are not as crazy as we sound. Because we are moving with the ship our frame of reference is odd and it looks like everything around us is moving and creates the illusion that the sky is rocking. The best part is two weeks later Jason was looking at the sky one night and exclaimed, “the stars are moving!” it took a long while to convince him that we was wrong.

Part Three: South Africa from the other side

South Africa was the first port that we were in where we didn’t stick out like a chicken in a row of ducks. Usually in port my eyes are trained to see the white people in the crowds because they are almost always us. In SA however, almost everyone was white and I found myself looking at other student-age people and wondering if I was supposed to know them. Dean Dan likes to talk about Ghana as a port in which we were “irrelevant” meaning that life went on as normal for the people around us despite the influx of Americans. I couldn’t disagree more, Ghana was positively waiting for us, everyone knew who we were. SA didn’t notice us. I walked through the security gate one afternoon and a group of people stopped me to ask my what the ship was. Telling people what we are doing is one of my favorite things. It was even more fun in South Africa because the people who live in Cape Town are very westernized and understand it in the same way that we do. In places like Ghana and Brazil, it seemed to be too strange a concept for them, as studying abroad period is a foreign concept, as is, for some, going to University at all. It is interesting to note that only 9% of South Africa is white. They are all just concentrated here, in the richest part of the country.

South Africa is one of the places I could really see myself going back to. There were a ton of things that I didn’t get to do in our 6 – make that 5 – days there. Cage diving obviously, lots of students did it, and one group saw 17 great whites, some of which came right up to the cage. I did hear however that almost everyone on those trips wound up vomiting from sea-sickness by the end of the day. The seas are rough here and the boat is just a dingy. I think I made the right choice with the safari. I also wanted to go see Robben Island, the prison island that Mandela served his sentence on. You actually get to see his cell and most interestingly, your tour is led by an ex-political prisoner. At first that seemed too weird to me, but apparently they have volunteered for the job. Lastly, I’m bummed I didn’t get to go to the Jewish museum. There is a huge population of Jews in South Africa, most from Lithuania. Ilana went and told me that the best part of the visit was learning about how it was the S. African Jews who were spearheading the anti-Apartheid movement. They refused to vote, because blacks were not allowed to. They hired them for jobs that other whites would not and it was the Jewish congresswoman who was the sole anti-Apartheid vote.

the fog at the top of the mountain

sara being simba atop "pride rock"

Part Eight: Ghana: "I Can See Africa From My Bedroom"

2011-02-20T07:42:00.000-08:00

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arriving to Africa at 6am

It is hard to talk about this port, so bear with me. The pictures really tell the story. But here is a shot at words:

Driving out of the docks for the first time was one of my favorite parts of the trip. As we pulled out of the port I saw a landscape that was both familiar and astonishing. I was riveted and glued to my window just taking in the sights as they passed in the blink of an eye. One moment, a woman with an infant strapped to her back carrying 40 lbs of water on her head, the next, a goat sleeping next to a burning tree. There were train tracks covered in grass that people use as roads and countless naked children who would chase the bus, trying to sell us everything from water to q-tips. I could do nothing but silently say the word for it all over and over in my head: Ghana, Ghana, Ghana. Our hotel was a resort but by US standards it was a cheap hostel. The bed had no blanket, the shower was a faucet and a bucket and only one appliance (either the light, the fan, or the fridge –which was full of old fish-) could be on at a time. We ate dinner under the most amazing sunset I have ever seen. The sky was blood red. After dinner we went to the University and asked and answered questions and then got to listen to their choir and dance with them to drumming. I had a moment of pure joy when I was dancing in a circle of Africans. None of my usual self-consciousness was present and I felt like I was at home somehow. It was the beat of the music that really got me. It felt like it was in sync with my heartbeat and the people all were pulsing to it. I found myself chanting with them even though I did not know the words. I ended the night at a bar where we had gone to see the Superbowl. There was a huge screen set up and we got there just in time to hearing the opening song.

Shortly after arriving another girl and I needed to use the restroom, which turned out to be a trek into the trees and was actually an enclosed cement slab with a drain in the middle and hose to wash the ground with. It was too much to take so we decided to go in the woods. Just as we pulled our skirts down a car drove up 10 feet away. We tried to run away but these three men caught up with us. One of them grabbed my hand in greeting and didn’t let go for a solid 45 minutes as we talked. The other girl had gone and I was feeling uncomfortable even though the man seemed genuinely nice. I convinced him to come back to the bar with me so I could ask him questions about Ghana for my classes. After about an hour he told me that he’d fallen in love with me and that it was always been his dream to marry a white woman. He asked me if I would marry him and thinking he was mostly kidding, I laughed. He was very sober and told me that marriage in not a joke. I told him that where I come from I am too young to be married which was strange to him as most women my age here have children. I did take a moment to consider his offer before I ruled it out. He was one of the friendliest people I have met and actually seemed quite smart. Not to mention, it has always been a dream of mine to marry an African man. I tried to let him down as easily as I could but he was insistent. He took my email and phone number and kept telling me he loved me. His friend, who was sitting near us, took that moment to show my what he had in his pocket. It was handcuffs. I decided it was time to leave. That man, Papa was the name he gave me, taught me a lot. He told me Africans look up to “white men” because they are fast and sharp. I told him that, the people I know at least, look up to Africans because they seem to have such knowledge of joy and how to live. He was genuinely surprised and thrilled to hear that. We talked about Barack Obama and mosquitoes and the differences between life here and life in the United States. Even though he made me uncomfortable in the end, I was glad to have met him. Our conversation that night will remain a highlight of my trip.

The next day we went back to the University for more drumming and dancing and hung out with some students. All of them wanted our names, emails, and phone numbers and wanted to give us theirs. They took us to a fish market where I felt very odd. I wanted to take pictures of everything but didn’t want to take my camera out. Not only did it feel weird to be holding something the cost of which could cover them for a year, but because I didn’t want to be a tourist. I didn’t want to be that person who came to Africa to collect photos like charms for a charm bracelet. I wanted to be here to honor them by being as engaged as possible. They live so in the moment, day to day, that it is hard to not be fully present. One woman got mad at me when I wouldn’t buy her fish, and I had to tell another women ‘no’ when she asked if her baby could have my water. That encounter still haunts me. A smile in any person’s direction was enough to start a conversation, though the people in this market mostly spoke Twi. I again found myself dancing to a rhythm that I suddenly have with a group of women cheering me on, laughing and clapping. I thanked them with my one Twi word “med-ahh-say.” After lunch we got to meet an important political figure and I was chosen to thank him on behalf of the students. The ride back was long, the buses have no air-conditioning and I was squished up front next to a large lady. We talked the whole way back. She is a counselor at a school in Winneba and I asked her everything I could think of about Ghana. I learned a great deal from her too. I learned that in Ghanaian culture the men give birth, not the women. There was no arguing with her about that. The men name the children, although sometimes they name them after the mother. Adultery is abundant, and suicide rates are high. I thought about what we learned in class, that in Africa there is one psychologist for every 3000 people, even in the populous places. The communities are small, and all day from sun-up to bedtime is spent working. I saw people sleeping on the ground or in chairs outside their shops by the road. All of the shops sell the same things; I don’t know how anyone makes money. The shops have the funniest names too. Things like “Jesus is Lord Barber Shop” and “God is Real Grocery Store.”

I felt a lot like I was in a fish tank this week. We really stand out. The big tour busses don’t help, although they do protect us from being pulled out of windows, which we encountered on the local busses. People literally stop what they are doing as we pass and stare at us and often smile and wave. Some people however, glare at us, and I feel like I am being judged down to the depths of my soul. When they are not trying to sell you things, Ghanaian people are the nicest people I have ever encountered. After being in Brazil, where you are literally chased by people trying to sell things to “rich Americans” Ghanaians were a breath of fresh air. After being off the ship for 5 minutes, Ilana and I were approached by a man from his roadside stand. “Hello sisters!” he said. “We don’t have any money.” We replied automatically. “Who said anything about money?” He said, “Welcome to Ghana!” He proceeded to insist that I take one of his key chains for free, saying we would meet again and I could pay him then. I argued my best because I knew I wouldn’t be back but I did end up going home with the keychain. People on the street stop you to ask your name and usually want to give you their email addresses. They do the thing where they say, “You are from the US? I have a cousin in Milwaukee, do you know her?” They can also be very manipulative. They know who we are and expect money from us, either in exchange for merchandise or otherwise. Some of them ask your name, and then a day later call out to you and show you the shell they have painted with your name on it and tell you can have it for a small price. Our inter-port student told us not to buy anything at full price. Usually try to get it 75% lower. I had a hard time with that. I don’t know what things are worth and I really don’t want to underpay. It’s hard to do conversions in your head so I usually end up overpaying but at the end of the day, they do need the money.

me and the chief elders

an african child took this one

Our second day in port I went to visit a village and participated in a naming ceremony where they gave me an African name. It is Yaa Mansa. It was a lot like a baptism and I got a certificate to keep. There was a little girl no more than 2 walking around collecting the cups we were drinking water out of. I had lost mine so I gave her my world keychain from my backpack instead. I saw her some hours later. She was still holding it. Being in that village was another major highlight. We met the chief and visited a school. There was already a group from SAS that had been there overnight and they were teaching classes. The kids were incredible. The village is made up of clay huts and there is no running water. There are maybe 200 children running around on the schoolyard, some can afford uniforms, others cannot. They were so curious about us and not at all shy. They would come up and touch us and climb on us and ask us for food and water and the clothes off our back. One girl asked my friend for her bra. I gave them my Captain Crunch, which was maybe a mistake because they fought like crazy over it. Seeing the SAS students interact with them was amazing. They were dancing with them, holding them, giving them cameras to play with, drawing them maps of the United States on the chalkboards, playing handclapping games etc. It was nearly impossible to leave them. They were so eager to play with us and they chased our bus out of their village waving and jumping. We drove 10 minutes to a resort for lunch where they had a spread that looked like a wedding reception. It was a difficult transition, all I could think about was taking the food back to the village and how happy the kids would be to have it.

basketball hoop

elmina slave castle

The following day I had off so I went with a group of people to see the castles and slave dungeons, which I’d heard, were not to miss. We took a local bus there, which was an experience in and of itself. We were solicited the whole way and even when we closed the windows they opened them from the outside to try and sell us stuff, including transportation. The bus driver then tried to charge us extra for the air conditioning, which wasn’t even on. The dungeons were horrifying. They take you down a rocky path in the darkness to the cells and turn off the lights and teach you about the slave trade and the lives of the captives. It wasn’t like being in the castles in Europe. These are authentic to the point where you can feel the suffering. One of the girls I was with broke down and ran out to throw up. We walked through the Door of No Return, which now leads to a fishing beach, and then got to return though it. The most interesting thing I learned is that Africans don’t blame the whites any more than they blame themselves. It was Africans who were rounding up each other and selling them to the buyers, so they have to heal from it just as much as we do. It was especially difficult for me to see the images of the ships the slaves were transported on. They were so crowded and viewed next to our luxury ship my mind was boggled. It was especially eerie because the trip that we had just made from Brazil was literally the reverse “Atlantic crossing.” To unwind we sat on the rocks by the beach and looked at the castle from the outside.

this is also Ghana

what is on the other side of the door of no return now

For our last day I had signed up for a Drumming and Dace Workshop. We saw some amazing performances by dancers, drummers, acrobats and contortionists and then after lunch we got to learn songs and dances. The drumming came naturally to me; the dancing was harder but fun. All the people from the street stopped to watch us in the courtyard and after school hours a group of kids joined us. The children are definitely my favorite part of Ghana.

My overall experience is hard to describe. Before coming here I thought about Africa a lot and I have always wanted to visit. I went up to the front of the 8^th deck the morning we arrived to see the sunrise over the continent as we pulled into port. As soon as the Gold Coast came into view I was overwhelmingly happy. I was worried that my experience would be something less than my expectations. It wasn’t, it was so much more, but at the end of some of the greatest days of my life, I felt a sadness that I could not shake. I had a long deep talk with Jason about it and he said something very interesting. He said that our job here is just to Feel. We are not expected to come up with answers to the problems we encounter like world poverty and we are not responsible to learn every aspect of the cultures we try to participate in. He said that years down the line our life choices will reflect what we saw on this trip and how it made us feel, and he and I wondered together if that is enough.

the storm that we left right before it arrived

jason and i after castles

Part Six: A Philosophy Minute

2011-02-11T12:46:00.000-08:00

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Some Random Thoughts…

By the way, I know 6 comes before 7, so don't worry.

Anyway, every day we have a "Geology Minute" where we spend the first part of class talking about where in the world we are and what that means in relation to everything else. Ill spare you the science and leave you with the few thoughts I've collected from being at sea for the past week. Enjoy my "philosophy minute":

Yesterday I sitting out in the sun and said to Alec, “I really wish I had my sunglasses, I should go get them. They’re just so far away!” Alec said, “You know what’s really far away? Land.” We then got to talking about how the closest land to us, is actually beneath us. We are literally thousands of miles from any continent, which isn’t freaking me out as much as it could be.

My list of places I want to visit keeps getting longer instead of shorter. The other day I was walking down the stairs and I thought to myself, “I want to see Croatia.” The ship goes there and many other amazing places on its other trips and I was trying to figure out how I could come back for another go round.

I realized the other day that within 6 months time I have traveled to both the highest and lowest places on Earth. When I was in Israel we went to the Dead Sea, which is the farthest from the sun a person can be. Even though I haven’t climbed any tall mountains our trip down the Amazon was literally right along the equator, the part of the Earth that sticks out the farthest towards the sun. Pretty weird.

crossing 0/0 the prime meridian

Last night we broke up into small groups to discuss our Brazil experience. It was wild hearing about some of the situations other people found themselves in. It was inspirational, it made me want to take more risks and spend more nights away from the ship. One boy found himself barefoot and shirtless walking through the pitch-black amazon at night for hours to deliver food with a guide who had only been employed for a week. His group slept in hammocks up a tree and monkeys stole from them. We discussed how the way children live here would probably be considered illegal in the US. The kids are often pulled out of school (the schools are a 2.5 hour boat trip away by the way) to work 8 hours a day at home. They carry heavy buckets of water and work with knives and go hunting. Here, not only is that not considered child labor, but it is necessary for survival. The families need every set of hands they can get. One group of SASers visited a village that had never had foreign visitors before. Ever. Those Americans were the first that had ever gone there. How crazy is that? Many of the places we visited, including the village I want to after dolphins, just recently got electricity. It’s not all good. The leisure time the men have from not needing to fish every day because they have refrigerators is spent drinking. Technology is bringing problems even as it solves them.

don't we look alike? this is ana, my friend from venezuela

One of the most surprising things about Brazil was how dirty it was, and the norm seemed to be to drop trash on the street instead of into trashcans. I watched at the end of the day how the street cleaners would sweep the piles of trash into the gutter, which presumably leads to the river. As we pulled away from the dock, we could see an enormous amount of trash floating in the water. During our discussion we talked about how “green living” is a luxury of the privileged. Taking care of the environment is low on the list of problems in South America. It doesn’t matter that they live on one of the most ecologically important places on Earth, to them other things must take precedence. They do not see the link between clean water and health, maybe if they did that would motivate them to think about drinking from a bottle instead of from the river that is also their toilet.

Every night that I can I go to sign language class on the smokers deck after dinner. Terril, the interpreter, holds very informal classes there every night we are at sea. A group of us stand around with her and Cherie, the deaf student, and try to learn words and sentences in sign language while simultaneously try to avoid being dive bombed by the huge beetles that live there. They fly into our clothes and our hair and make loud buzzing sounds when they are stuck. Yesterday was Cherie’s birthday and I proudly “sang” to her in ASL.

cherie and tarril

Funny story, everyday there are three sets of announcements that happen. One in the morning, one at lunch, and one at dinner that remind us to take our malaria pills, get our forms in, tell us what is going on that day etc…we call the giver of these announcements “the voice.” Today, the voice was replaced by the captain who was giving instructions to the crew who were running an evacuation drill. The captain has a fabulously classic British accent. He said, “Will all crew please simulate the evacuation of passengers to their muster stations. Please report in when all of your passengers are mustered.” The whole ship starting laughing. I’m still laughing.

Now that it is calm, I’m finally appreciating the beauty of the ocean. At dinner last night, we saw schools of flying fish. Huge schools of several hundred foot-long silver fish jumping around on the top of the water in unison. That water too, at certain times of the day from certain angles, looks silver. It’s like a giant pot of sloshing liquid metal. After the Amazon our water de-salinizer/purifier thing broke, and we had two days of water that tasted like chlorinated salt liquid. It was so bad I couldn’t even brush my teeth. Its back to normal now but my water bottle still smells.

I learned that with the invention of doors, spousal and child abuse was born. Before then, no one was surreptitiously violent because everyone else in the community would know about it and intervene. With the invention of doors came the invention of privacy. I’m not sure if it’s categorically true, but it’s interesting to think about.

The Voice called a huge group of people down to the medical clinic the other day because it turns out that one of the monkeys they played with in Brazil (and got bitten and scratched by) had rabies. I was talking to Sarah about the ship and how there must be a jail somewhere. Sarah said, “There IS a jail, there is also a morgue.”

I’m finding that I like best the things that upset me. I feel like I want to see the worst parts of the places we are going. I want to go to the red light districts, I want to tour the favelas, I want to get lost and get into trouble and be scared. I want to have stories to tell, I want my life to change every day. I feel completely comfortable with controversy. I like it when classes or movies make me angry, any and everything else just feels like a waste of time.

I spend a lot of time looking at the water and thinking. I do my homework next to this floor to ceiling window and watch the horizon rise and fall. I found myself thinking about what it must have been like to be sailing out with no destination in mind, just looking for new land, not even knowing if it exists. And I think about what it would be like to be in steerage for weeks on end on a ship with no stabilizers and how I’m here because of those voyages. I think about how excited I get when we see land or reach a port and how magnified that would be if it were the statue of liberty on the horizon.

A professor the other day called what we are doing on this trip “poverty tourism.” This particular professor has traveled to over 100 countries and taken groups of students all around the world. He gave us some advice, but made it seem as though he wasn’t. He said, “Although I appreciate the doctor’s warning on foods to avoid, I hope that when you get off the boat in San Diego you have more to say than ‘I didn’t get sick.’”

Part Seven: Friendly Competition: B-A-L, T-I-C Baltic, Baltic, Baltic Sea!!!

2011-02-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

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The ship, which seemed like an enormous and impossible maze the first few days, has condensed down to a familiar city. We simulate reality. We simulate “going out to eat,” “shopping,” “going to the movies.” Most recently we simulated “physical competition.”

Today was the “Sea Olympics,” a half-day event that we spent “many minutes” preparing for, to quote our opening ceremonies speaker, our much beloved Dr. Bill. The events were things like basketball and volleyball also relays of many kinds, synchronized swimming, crab soccer, tug-o-war, and half a dozen others. We were split up by “seas,” which is the equivalent of the name of a dorm. Mine is called the Baltic Sea, and our next-door neighbors are the Caribbean and the Aegean. We ended up in third place overall, which we were very pleased with as there were 10 groups competing. The faculty and staff group was called the “Lunacy” which I thought was pretty funny. In years past they have been called the “Dead Sea.” My voice is gone from screaming chants all day but I couldn’t be happier. We had a barbeque up on the pool deck to celebrate. The winners (the Red Sea) get to disembark in San Diego first. We will disembark third.

our banner

opening ceremonies

syncro

we won

We just passed the 3-week mark and the closest land to us right now is Liberia. See you after Africa!

Part Five: Brazil: As Close to the Sun as We Will Ever Get

2011-02-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

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Last night at pre-port we got the you-know-what scared out of us. Brazil is apparently a terrifying place. The doctors told us about parasites like tapeworms and all other sorts of stuff that enters through your skin or that you get from drinking water. On top of that, the expert slipped up and said, “when you get help up at knife point – I mean IF you get held up!” Ill spare you the statistics. I woke up this morning to find myself yet again in a strange and unfamiliar place. Its summer here and hot and humid. The sky is gray and it looks like rain. Large groups of people are headed off to the airport for their trip to Rio.

Brazil is the only place in the world where the poor live above the rich. They live in Faveleas, which are communities built willy nilly into the hill sides. They have spectacular views, but going into them is literally like entering a war zone. I saw a few favelas this week. From a distance, they are gorgeous. They look like brightly colored doll houses stacked up above the river. Upon closer inspection, it is clear that they are the slums. The entrance to the community is heavily guarded and tours through them have been known to be held for ransom. Many houses are on stilts and look unstable; some houses are missing walls.

favela

Our first day in the city I took a 5-hour walking tour with a guy and girl from the ship that I didn’t know. We went to the street market and found a little park and saw some weird stuff like a guy cooking a fish the size of a pillowcase on a grill on the street. Apparently the group that went out on the jungle tour saw even weirder stuff. They ate bug larvae and swung from vines and also ate fried piranha on a stick. The heat turns 8 hours of energy into 4 hours pretty fast so I took a nap on the deck in the afternoon.

Dominica spoiled us. No one here speaks English. If you are lucky, you can go into a hotel and try your best to remember your Spanish. It’s such a helpless feeling to be standing there with someone and not be able to talk to them. I ordered a hot dog from a street vender and tried to communicate that I wanted it plain. It took a crazy long time and at the end of the exchange I got really weird looks from the vendor and I knew she was talking to her friend about me because they kept staring, but I had no idea what they were saying. Portuguese is close enough to Spanish to be annoyingly just out of reach, but at the same time, it won’t really get you anywhere.

lots of trash

I know of four separate people who were robbed in broad daylight our first day. Three of them had their cameras cut off their wrists and didn’t even notice. One girl just plain old had it pulled out of her hand. At night in the bars people were pulling hands out their pockets every 15 minutes and I kept getting the feeling as I was walking around downtown that I was being followed a little too closely. I kept stepping over to the side of road and letting people pass me. Its not just the men, the women go for pockets and bags just as often.

I went out in a riverboat on the Rio Negro (or the “Negro River” and I horrifyingly heard someone call it yesterday) at night to find alligators. They are actually camions, there are no alligators in the Amazon, but they look just like them. We took a motorboat way out into the darkness. There was no moon and the stars were spectacular. From there we got into these little river boats that left us inches above the black water. We were so close to it that a fish actually flopped into the bottom of our boat. It was pretty big too, bigger than my water bottle. Our guide caught a camion with his bare hands and brought it to the center of the boat for us all to see. We each got to hold it, it was pretty calm and then they showed us their double eyelids, teeth, and how they fall asleep if turned upside down. It was a baby and we named it Steven. At first it was very cool but by the end of the night I was feeling so sorry for the animal that I didn’t want to be around it as it was passed around anymore. I kept thinking about what we had just learned in psych, that animals feel stress, and ours was just a baby.

me and an "alligator"

The next day was dolphin day. It was a three hour boat ride to place, which none of us knew, so it felt like it took a year to get there. When we did get there, we were so sketched out by the facility that I didn’t want to take my shoes off let alone get in the water. All it was was a floating dock with a shack on it and a bunch of shirtless Brazilians with buckets of dead fish. The water was crawling with bugs, including spiders, and all I could think about were the snakes that I know are in there too. Not to mention the water is black and when your legs go into it, you can’t see them. I’m proud to say that I did get in, which was the right choice because the experience was great. The dolphins are truly wild, they are attracted by the bloody fish that the guides dangle in the water. Unlike the dolphins from Nassau, these guys are hideous. They are pink and gray with fat heads and sharp noses and tiny, tiny eyes. We could feel them brushing by our legs and when they were jumping up to get the fish we could stroke them. They did a lot of thrashing around and were actually pretty scary. While we were in the water, the guides who spoke English thought it would be a good idea to tell us horror stories of the people who have had fish and worms enter their skin or swim inside them from this river. “Not to worry,” they told us, “it only happens about once a year.”

After our time in the water we got back in the boats and went to this nearby island community that just three weeks ago got electricity. It was “fixed up” by the Brazilian version of Extreme Makeover Home Edition and all of the houses were all freshly painted in bright colors. The population of the community: 40 persons. They had food prepared for us, some of the best fish I have ever eaten, and then we got a tour of the town. There was this adorable little girl that followed us around and some of us played with her while the others learned how to get rubber off of a rubber tree.

rio negro

The day after dolphin day I got lost going to the Opera House, which was worth seeing. It looks like it was taken out of France and plopped down in Manaus. The design on the inside was inspired by the Eiffel Tower. Our tour corresponded with a rehearsal so we got to see a bit of the show in progress. We had to put on these cloth booties over our shoes to walk on the floor of the display rooms. After the Opera, I took two dance classes: Brazilian Dance Fusion and African Tribal Dance. Both were great but the latter was the best. The woman who took us to the studio is going to be sailing with us to Ghana. She is excellent. She told us all about how dance is a necessary part of life and how every morning she wakes up happy just because she is alive. She has been to Haiti every three months since the earthquake to do dance with the children to help them cope. She studied dance as a survival mechanism and all throughout our classes she kept reminding us that it was supposed to be therapeutic. I wish I had more of the classes on tape. Parts of it are recorded, but not the best parts. My dance partner for Samba was a really attractive Brazilian man, but unfortunately I don’t think I have documentation of that. After dance I went out on a boat that a couple of SASers had rented for the night. It was essentially a house party on the boat but dancing was much more difficult because the boat was moving and slanted. Props to the girls in heels.

opera house

I’m not sure what I think of Brazil. I can definitely appreciate it for what it is, but I’m not sure I would want to come back. Its feels a little unsafe and its hotter and dirtier than any place I have ever seen. It has its own kind of beauty and I met a bunch of very nice people, but I didn’t really connect with it. Maybe it was the language barrier but I don’t think so. I enjoyed the time I spent out of the city the most, and by that I mean my time on the river. The dolphin experience was one of the wildest things I have ever done, getting in that water felt like enough thrill to last the whole trip and just breathing the air and knowing that it is coming from the trees of the rainforest, the lungs of the Earth, is wild in itself.

Part four: The Amazon: "Show me on the doll where the bug landed on you…"

2011-01-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

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Bugs! Bats! Hey – is that a slipper?

Right now we are cruising down the Amazon. The water is brown and murky but we can see the rainforest all around us. Last night I saw the most amazing moonrise of my life, it was so bright that I was easily able to photograph it. For the first time bugs are showing up on the ship. We found one on the top deck last night that was the size of my hand. The air is hot and muggy and I can't get over that I am in the Amazon. The current crime rates in Brazil are all anyone else is talking about. We were told to stay in groups of 4 or 5 and always have a male with us. We were told to keep our money in multiple places and carry a wallet with $50 to give up if needed. The boat's movement had ceased temporarily while we are on the river. Thank goodness. 2 days to Brazil!

Today was one of the best days of my life. I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I was awake. We are cruising down the Amazon at about 15 miles an hour and we are close enough to one side of the forest to be able to see birds and when it opens up we can see little villages. All of the children from the villages run out to the edge of land and wave at us. Some people jumped into canoes and they rode our wake. The clouds are unlike anything I have ever seen. Its not just one kind of cloud, there are 5 or 6 different kinds all mixed together. I haven’t been able to take my eyes away from them. Some of the clouds are rain clouds and as we pass under them it will rain pretty heavily for a few minutes even though the sun is out all around us. The heat is stifling so the water feels good. People come out of the ship to slosh around on the wet decks. The sun is very strong and it dries the decks in a matter of minutes. The bugs are out of this world. They are EVERYWHERE, inside the ship, every few feet on deck, and we’re not talking little fruit flies. I totally take back all of those times in school when we were learning about all the poisonous things in the Amazon that I didn’t think twice about because they were far away in the jungle and I was safe in my little California suburb. We get to Brazil tomorrow and the people who have signed up to sleep in hammocks along the river are rethinking that choice. Alec from middle school and I lay out in the sun and the rain and discussed how surreal this all feels. It is like we went to bed one night, and woke up in he jungle. Actually – it is literally like that. It’s totally wild to wake up and have to look outs your window to see where you are, and it is drastically different every day. One day, flat, flat, flat blue seas, the next, an exotic country, the next, a different exotic country.

Last night I went to Shabbat dinner. There were a good number of people there and they gave us wine and challah. We also had an open mic night which was extremely well attended, and by that I mean packed all the way to the back of our theatre. My roommate sang, as did a few more of my friends but what was most impressive was a rendition of “Summer Nights” about Semester at Sea called “SAS Nights.” Other highlights were “My Heart will go on” and a show stopping “Bad Romance” in full costume.

The night life on the ship cracks me up. We are allowed to drink, they provide the alcohol, but most people go in to the dining hall late at night with games and sit around the tables and play Mafia and Clue and Uno. It is like walking into free time in a kindergarten classroom full of 20-year olds. Most people go to bed around midnight and get up around 7 or 8.

ship dance


talent show!

welcome to the jungle

This is Semester at Sea’s first trip down the Amazon. We are making history. That means that the captain, the crew, and everyone else on board are all seeing this for the first time. Apparently we barley cleared the entrance. We made it in with just a meter of space from the bottom. The river must be deep, out boat goes down into it 30 feet.

Part Three: Dominica, the REAL virgin island

2011-01-26T12:51:00.000-08:00

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School bus crushed by tree

The night before we reached our first port the doctors put on a skit for us. One of them wrapped the other one up in a patented new product called the “full body condom.” They then gave us a list of “don’ts” that rhymed and were pretty funny. It went something like:

DON’T get BIT
DON’T get HIT
DON’T get LIT
DON’T do IT
DON’T eat SHIT

Meaning, avoid dogs and mosquitoes, cars, drugs, sex, and fresh fruit that we didn’t peal ourselves.

During my photo class last night the women told us to be culturally sensitive while taking photos. In some countries, they think that when Americans take photos of their children, it is because they are going to kidnap and sell them in the US.

Dominica is a strange and beautiful place. It looks very similar to other places I have been: Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, even Nassau. The major difference is the utter and complete lack of tourism. With maybe one or two exceptions, there are no gift shops, or chains, or hotels, or anything. Our tour guide pointed out a Texaco gas station with pride as one way that Dominicans are “modern.” It is the greenest place I have ever seen. they have 356 rivers and are the location of a number of scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean, including my favorite one – the one with Calipso. Dominica is very rich ecologically. Interestingly though, there isn’t a single species of poisonous plant or animal on the whole island. They have boa constrictors, but not so much as a sprig of poison ivy. The whole country is the size of a large University and it shuts down on Sundays for a day of rest. No restaurants or shops were open. As we drove around we could see families resting on the beaches. It reminded me of Shabbat in Israel. Our guide told us that 95% of the country smokes pot and they do not consider stress to be a part of their island lives. Also, drinking while driving is not illegal. Our driver was drinking beer and we navigated the canyon roads. Interestingly, Dominica is known for its longevity. A large percentage of its population is over 100 years old. They attribute it to eating locally grown food that has not been touched by pesticides or preservatives. After my waterfall hike, river tubing, and snorkeling in Champagne Reef, a girl and I walked around the town near our port. We found a school bus that had been crushed by the trunk of a tree and just left there to decompose. We met a man with only one hand who had lived in the US for a number of years because his “white wife” brought him there. He discovered years later that she also had another husband and so his marriage was illegal and they sent him back to Dominica. What makes Dominica – pronounced Domi-nikka by the way – so beautiful besides all the green are the clouds that cling to the mountains and the colorful houses on the mountainside. None of my photographs really capture the vibrant colors. Sunsets there were out of this world.

the MV Explorer

Part Two: Initial Shipboard life: Hold on to your chairs!

2011-01-22T12:32:00.001-08:00

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I am totally off the grid for a while. No Internet, no phone. I know my parents are close by but I have no way of reaching them to tell them that we push off at 8 tonight. As it gets darker, I feel weirder. It was fun walking around the ship and setting up my room with my newest roomie Meghan (my 3rd Meg roommate in three years.) People are all still getting to know each other; most people didn’t know anyone. It’s a little lonely because there are groups of people who stick together and even though we are all in one place everyone is doing their own thing.

We're off!!!!!!!

I am currently wearing my seabands, drinking ginger ale, wearing a patch and I’ve just taking Dramamine. The ship is really rocky. People key hitting the walls. There is no sun out, we are in a tiny little storm – light rain fall, rough waters and everything is gray. People are throwing up left and right and EVERYONE feels ill. Walking around feels like walking around in a plane during turbulence, you’re light on your feet one second, and then the ground is pushing up at you the next. The chairs are sliding around the decks.

First day of classes today. Last night we got a huge game of Scattegories going which was really fun. I had a difficult night sea-sickness wise, but we saw birds for the first time in days which means that we close to land. We docked in Puetro Rico for a few hours to refuel. As soon as the boat got into the harbor and stopped moving, I got “landsick.” I do hope this goes away completely, and soon. We keep seeing rainstorms off in the distance and sometimes we go through them and it pours rain for 20 minutes and flood the decks and then we get out of it. Yesterday we saw something pretty remarkable. It was a huge double rainbow very close to us and because there was no land to get in the way, it’s reflection on the water formed a complete rainbow circle. I’m convinced that if we’d taken a left, we would have sailed through it and entered an alternate universe. It was at the peak of sunset too and so everyone came running out. I hear they let people out of classes if a whale or a school of dolphins are in sight. I have met a bunch of California kids, and also a ton from Mass. We’ve only been out at sea for three days but it feels like a month. The semester is going to zip by but at the same time I know that the experience will age me much more than 3.5 months.

THINGS IVE LEARNED:

The great wall would stretch from Manhattan to Texas
Maps are liars and they give us biases toward other countries who are “below” and appear smaller in size comparatively
We have a deaf student on board with an interpreter
The key to success here is getting up early
Boats stay afloat because they are full of air and therefore are lighter than the water.

One of my professors is so excellent I can’t stand it! He looks like he grew up in Topanga and spent at least half the class teaching us a Tai Chi routine he came up with himself designed for college students with limited physical space.

I’ve finally gotten over my seasickness enough to feel hunger and get work done. It was crazy yesterday. The waves were so big that people as well as furniture were falling over. People kept running out of class to throw up. I wonder how big the waves have to get before they cancel classes. It is such a strange experience to be sitting in class and needing to hold on the table to keep from falling off your chair. The professors can't easily move from the board to the computer, and one professor actually fell over while teaching. Not getting distracted is virtually impossible. Staff members were standing at the back of rooms with airplane vomit bags in their hands to give out. I went to see the doctor the other day because I was hallucinating. She told me that I have been overdosing on seasickness meds. Oops.

Its weird seeing waves that don’t have anything to crash on to. They just kind of slosh around and resemble the insides of my stomach. White tips mean rough seas. We were told that rough seas at this point is unusual, normally its smooth sailing until the atlantic. Lucky us!

There is a girl in one of my classes from China. (There are a bunch of international students here – Ive met people from all over Asia including India and Singapore, as well as from Brail, Venezuela, Canada, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan). Her English is so limited that she carries around a translator. It occurred to me the other day how interesting it is that when we are in port, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Even though her native language is Mandarin and mine is English, we will both be at a loss to communicate with people from the countries we visit. Her culture may be different from mine, but both of them are different from the ones we will be living in. We are all outsiders here.

The idea of “in the same boat” has really sunk in. What I like most about it is the way it gets rid of the distinction between “work day” and “after hours.” Instead of writing down phone numbers for group projects, we write down cabin numbers. Every day we are eating breakfast with the professors whose classes we are about to attend and the same is true of lunch and dinner. Even if it is 8 o clock at night I can walk up to the ship's doctor in the piano bar and ask her a medical question. We are all away from our families, we are all feeling the effects of the sea and we are all grateful for the same things. My definition of community is changing. Its not about whose job is what or when they are supposed to it. Students, faculty and staff are all a family here. Office hours are 24/7. If a friend has something to say to you, they knock on your door. There is no texting, all communication is face-to-face.

It is also completely acceptable to sit down at a table with someone you don’t know at dinner and have a conversation. Each meal is like Emerson when its crowded and you awkwardly have to share tables. Minus the awkwardness. Empty space is a rare commodity.

Part One: Embarkation; Paradise, thy name is Nassau

2011-01-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

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Part One: Embarkation

Here at the airport. We are waiting to see if Dad and Carol have seats on the plane. My stomach is hurting – its all nerves. “This is the hardest part,” I keep telling myself, “Everything will be better when the sun comes up.” Its official, the flight we were on yesterday morning has been canceled. By the grace of Zeus I found out there was going to be bad weather in Georgia and that flights were being canceled left and right so we re-booked ourselves through Florida. Great plan, except everyone else tried the same thing and Delta overbooked themselves. It was really hard to say goodbye to my mom and the boys, especially Rupert, though something tells me he’ll make it through to April okay. “This is the hardest part.” I just have to keep breathing for a few more days. Once we get to Nassau and I meet some nice people things will get better. Once I see the boat things will get better. Once we are underway and the hard part is truly over, things will get much better. Rachel says that I’ll look back on this part and it will have blended into the whole amazing experience. If history is any indication, a week from today will feel like a month. A month from now will feel like a year. Before I left I sat on my bed and looked around my room. It looked smaller—which was weird because I had just removed the 3 suitcases.

I keep looking around the airport for college age-looking people. I’m sure there will be a ton in FL, but I can’t shake the feeling that I am also sitting within 100 feet of another SASer right now. Possibly even my roommate, who knows.

Here at the gate in Florida! The straw in my reusable water bottle set a few security men into a tithy. They tested it at least 8 times, and then decided when they didn’t find anything that they needed to pat me down. We had to check our carry on bags because they were too heavy so now its just me and my backpack (and several of my parents). I expected the sun to rise before the plan landed, but the sky did not begin to lighten until half an hour after. It was eerie and really freaked me out. I keep going through bouts of nerves bordering on nausea. The fact that I haven’t slept yet probably contributes to that. We met Carol’s sister Joy in the airport because she was there dropping off her husband. We had breakfast in Chili’s, which was a new experience for me. I’m sitting at the final gate now and DEFINITELY can pick out at least one or two other SASers. The huge over-stuffed baggage is what gives it away. I’m working up the desire to go over and meet them, cause the more people I know getting on that ship, the easier it will be to do. It won’t feel so much like I am sailing away from everything that I know.

Paradise, thy name is Nassau. You know when you see those photos of the Caribbean and it looks unreal. Well – its even more gorgeous in person. No photos can really capture the color of the water. I didn’t believe those shades of turquoise and teal really existed in nature, but they do. When we finally arrived yesterday we headed straight for the beach and fell asleep by the water. We woke up to the lifeguards laughing at us. I got to meet a bunch of SASers, most of whom are actually from California or Massachusetts. Remember when I said I didn’t know a soul on this trip? That was a lie. One boy looked particularly familiar. When I found out he was also from LA I asked him where he went to high school “I didn’t go to high school,” he said. It came out that he went to Wildwood elementary and middle school and as soon as he told me his name is realized we were in the same advisory in D2. How weird is that? Everyone I’ve met so far has been extremely nice and my nerves are almost entirely gone. We went down to the docs at night to see the ship, which is pretty big but is dwarfed by the Carnival cruise ships that surround it; its about 1/3 or ¼ of the size. Today we went to Blue Lagoon to take advantage of our free dolphin encounter. We got to play in the water with dolphins and see sea lions and hang out on this semi-private beach. We managed to buy cheep shampoo and some hangers and the hotel is positively crawling with semester at sea students – all of whose names I have learned and since forgotten. Except one girl - her name is Jenny and she is from California.

Getting on the ship at 8am. My next post will be when we are underway!

2010-12-14T10:41:00.001-08:00

I just got confirmation on a number of the field programs I applied to do! Most of what I'll be up to, community service projects, day trips and the like, I won't decide upon until a few days before they happen. However, here are a few of the things I am headed toward:

WONDERS OF WAITI-KUBULI: EMERALD POOL & RIVER TUBING
Dominica’s rugged mountainous landscape has produced an abundance of natural wonders, such as rivers, waterfalls, lakes and valleys; the island is criss-crossed with 365 rivers. On this trip, enjoy tubing on the Layou River, which is the largest river in Waiti-kubuli (the original Carib name for Dominica). Travel about 40-minutes by bus to the launch site for the safety briefing after which you will be provided with your life vest, modified inner tube, and paddle before getting into the river. After a lesson on the river bank, guides will position you into a large tube. With everyone in the water, your guides will set you loose to begin your journey, gently spinning and swirling in the current, taking in the changing scenery at the same time. Stop briefly to enjoy a popular Dominican pastime: river bathing. Enjoy a swim in the crystal clean waters for a few minutes before continuing down the scenic river to your exit point. At the end of the journey, refreshments will be served including punch and fresh fruit before returning to the ship.

THE CARIB INDIANS: TOUNA AUTE
This FDP will take you to the residential cultural Carib Indian Community, called Touna Aute, which is situated in the northeast of Dominica. The name Touna means water in the Carib language; enjoy a scenic drive through the island rainforest, stopping en route to visit the Emerald Pool, which is located in the Morne Trois Pitons National Park. A 15minute walk through rainforest brings you to the 50-foot cascading waterfall and impressive view. Upon arrival at Touna Aute, the community leader, a former Carib Chief, will welcome you at the traditional community Karbet and provide a short historical overview of the community and the Carib people. Afterwards, he will invite you to visit homes of local residents. This experience is the only one of its kind in Dominica, in which you may be given opportunities to participate in various domestic activities including basket weaving, bamboo weaving of traditional fish traps, and sugar cane juice squeezing using traditional techniques. Witness and learn the making of cassava bread, a centuries-old staple of the Carib diet. Natural medicine is still practiced here, and locals will share secrets of herbs used for healing. While walking through the village you can also enjoy fruit picking in season. Participants may opt to come prepared to enjoy the water. Local snacks and drinks will be served at the end of this excursion before returning to the ship.

NIGHT TIME JUNGLE EXPLORATION & ALLIGATOR SPOTTING
Take a riverboat cruise under a starry Amazon sky into the dense jungle backwaters. At the jetty in the Lake January Ecological Park, transfer to motorized canoes. Glide silently into the flooded forest and its countless overgrown tributaries. Armed with only a flashlight, your guide will attempt to locate jacares(alligators). Attracted by the light, their eyes shine like rubies. Watch as the guide attempts to catch one of the smaller reptiles with his bare hands and lift it out of the water for you to see. Unharmed, the caiman will then be returned to the water. The thrill of catching an alligator, plus the mystical surroundings of the forest at night makes this quite a unique and exciting experience.

SWIMMING WITH DOLPHINS
This full-day expedition travels up the Rio Negro,visitinglocal villages before reaching the Dolphin Sanctuary. Depart by speed boat to the island of Chameleon on the right bank of Rio Negro. Once ashore, visit the village of Paricatuca and explore the ruins of the fort, which housed the rubber extraction workers more than100 years ago. Reboard the boat and continueup the Rio Negroand arrive at Ponta do Lago Araras Tatu. Explore the surrounding jungle before enjoying a local barbecue with fish fresh from the river and various Amazonian fruits. Proceed to the local Dolphin Sanctuary. Learn about the dolphin’s revered place in indigenous Amazonian lore and legend. Enjoy some close contact swimming in the river with these large and friendly mammals before returning to Manaus.

BRAZILIAN DANCE FUSION
Brazilians are known the world over for their love of music and dance. Hear the sounds, feel the beat and absorb the energy while learning the steps of some of Brazil’s famous dances!
Transfer to the Ritmo Quente Dance Academy and begin your Brazilian dance experience. For two hours, Brazilian teachers will go over the steps and take you through a series of Brazilian dance styles like Samba, Forro, Zuke and Lambada.This workshop allows you to understand the different Brazilian rhythms, meet other Brazilian dancers and immerse yourself in this most energetic and creative culture through dance.

AMAZON TRIBAL DANCE
While Rio’s Carnival and the Sambasteal the international spotlight, Brazil hosts many festivals throughout the year. The Amazon is home to the second largest popular festival in Brazil, the Parintins Festival. Every June,the jungle explodes with a musical contest between the two schools of Garantidoand Caprichoso. The driving rhythmthat propels this festival is Boi Bumba,a pulsating sound with drumming, tribal roots and lots of swing! Travel to the RitmoQuente Dance Academy and learn the influence of the Boi Bumbadance in Amazon Culture. During the two-hour workshop,dance and vibrate with the energy of the natives—join the party!

WELCOME TO GHANA: OVERNIGHT VISIT TO WINNEBA
With a population of just over 40,000, the coastal town of Winneba is known for its fishing, its welcoming atmosphere and, most recently, its University of Education. Since partnering with Charlottesville, Virginia as a sister cityin 2009, delegates from both locations have joined forces to explore each city’s culture and hospitality. Join your Winneba hosts, who may include city officials, residents and students, as they welcome the ship’s arrival in Takoradi. Introduce them to the ship and enjoy lunch together onboard before departing for an overnight stay in Winneba. (The drive to Winneba is approximately 2.5 hours.) Prepare for the city of Winneba to welcome you. Upon your arrival, you will be greeted by traditional drumming and dance from members of the two warrior groups from this region, known as asafo: Asafo #1 -Tuafo, and Asafo #2 –Dentsefo. Following this ceremonial welcome, proceed to your hotel and check in. Spend the evening exploring the town and beach areas, meeting local citizens and enjoying a local dinner (included). After breakfast the following morning, visit a local market to witness its cultural and political dynamics. While there, meet the market queen, who presides over the market and settles local disputes. Proceed next to meet the “Chief Fisherman” and discern how disputes within this important local industry are resolved in a different fashion in a culture different from your own. Visit the University of Education and meet with faculty, staff members and students for a Q&A session. Compare similarities and differences between your university experience and that in Ghana. Other potential activities may include various cultural and musical performances. The order of these visits will vary depending on local schedules, and lunch will be arranged for you in the afternoon. You will spend enough time at each location to explore the surrounding area and get a good feel for the town of Winneba and its citizens.

VILLAGE EXPERIENCE
Depart for a drive to one of several local villages that will host Semester at Sea participants. Pay a courtesy call to the paramount chief and elders of the village amidst traditional drumming and dancing by the villagers, and also participate in a naming ceremony in which you will be given traditional African names. Later, interact with the villagers and school children.

DRUMMING AND DANCE WORKSHOP
Participants will partake in an African drumming and dance workshop under the direction of the renowned Afrique Dance Ensemble.Established in 1993, this group has been actively involved in the promotion of African and Ghanaian cultural heritage through traditional music and dance.Led by young and vibrant directors, this ensemble has performed widely in Ghana as well as in other African countries. Its rich repertoire includes Ghanaian folk/traditional music and dance as well as Senegalese, Malian and Guinean traditional dance pieces fused with more contemporary movements. The workshop will culminate in a performance by the Ensemble.
Through participation in this workshop, students will be able to observe firsthand how music is “culture,” “object” and “tool,” and to document and report on their experiences. Above all, students will have the opportunity to acquire a deeper sensitivity to, and genuine appreciation for, the amazing variety of musical sounds and music-related values and behavior that they experience during their stay in Ghana, and will be better equipped to distinguish, appreciate, compare and discuss musical sounds from many different parts of the world.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW—A NIGHT OF THEATRE IN CAPE TOWN
Enjoy a new production of Shakespeare's wonderful comedy of love and intrigue under the skies of the Southern Cross. Mynardville's outdoor theatre in the old gardens of Cape Town has a long and proud history dating back to the 1930's with annual performances of Shakespeare's plays. Director Roy Seargent, of Artscape Drama, directs a cast of South Africa's finest actors in a uniquely African setting. Meet the director and members of the cast while you enjoy a picnic on the lawns of the garden before the performance.

WOZA CAPE TOWN!—A NIGHT OF THEATRE IN DISTRICT SIX
Woza Cape Town! looks at Cape Town through the thoughts, views and experiences of three young South Africans from different cultural backgrounds. Their anxieties, pleasures, hopes and pains are conveyed through verse penned by some of this country‘s most respected poets. Full of South African songs, dances and poems, Woza! provides insights into the joys and challenges facing young Capetonians. Located in the heart of the historic District Six, the production is creatively staged in Chapel Street‘s refurbished church hall, one of Cape Town‘s oldest and most historic buildings. Now called the Theatre in the District, this building has had a long-standing tradition of serving its community and promoting the arts. Once at the theatre, enjoy an evening meal of Cape cuisine drawing on the multiplicity of its cultural tastes and influences. After dinner, meet the cast of Woza! and learn the Gumboot Dance. Next, Brian Notcutt, who created the show, will give a brief introduction, explaining the history of District Six and putting the show in context. Then, sit back and enjoy Woza Cape Town!, an exhilarating celebration of life in Cape Town today.

WELCOME RECEPTION
This reception is a SAS favorite and provides an excellent opportunity to meet Indian students, experience a traditional dance performance and enjoy Indian snacks. You will travel by motorcoach to the reception area where you will be given a traditional welcome with sari-clad ladies offering flower-buds, applying kum-kum (red dot or sandalwood paste on the forehead) and sprinkling rose water. Enjoy mingling with the invited guests from local colleges in the outdoor atmosphere of a local fair. Along with sampling the tempting snacks, you may learn how to tie a sari, have a design painted on your hand with henna paste and observe a Bharata Natyam dance demonstration. Bharata Natyam is the subtle and sophisticated dance-art of Tamil Nadu. It is a dynamic and very precise style of dance. The dancer presents a story at several levels of meaning using a variety of complex body postures and movements, hand and arm gestures and facial expressions. A dancer needs substantial knowledge and appreciation of the thematic and philosophical content of Indian myth and legend as well as a thorough grounding in technical skill. The meaning of a portion of the dance will be interpreted for you and some of the movements, gestures, and facial expressions will be explained. You will also have the opportunity to buy Indian clothing and costume jewelry.

CHILD LABOR IN RURAL INDIA: OVERNIGHT VILLAGE STAY
Despite Indian laws prohibiting child labor, thousands of children, ages 4-14 years, have been sold into bondage in the sari-making industry. Some of these children have had to work in these factories for 12-14 hours per day with no breaks and only a cupful of rice for lunch. They have earned an average of only $2 per month. This overnight field program provides the opportunity to visit a successful micro-credit lending program for women and a bridge school for children who have been child laborers in the silk weaving industry. The Rural Institute for Development Education (RIDE) began as a bridge school to help children leave the silk-weaving industry. They quickly learned that the best way to help children was to help their mothers increase their income. This visit will include an overnight stay in the village where you will see the women at work weaving silk and bamboo mats, a meeting with the self-help group leaders to ask questions, a tour of one of the bridge schools to meet the children, and a visit to Kancheepuram to view its beautiful temples and tour the silk-weaving factory and shop that supports child-free labor. Please note: Bring a sleeping bag and enough bottled water for two days. Visit www.rideindia.org for further information.

2010-12-11T07:10:00.001-08:00

Hello friends and family!

As many of you know,
I am sailing around the world for the Spring semester 2011!
I leave January 12 and return to the US on April 24th. Along the way I will stop in:

* Nassau, Bahamas
* Roseau, Dominica
* Manaus, Brazil
* Takoradi, Ghana
* Cape Town, South Africa
* Port Louis, Mauritius
* Chennai, India
* Singapore
* Ho Chi Minh, City, Viet Nam
* Hong Kong/Shanghai, China
* Kobe/Yokohama, Japan
* Hilo, Hawaii
* San Diego, CA USA

I have set up this blog because there is limited communication aboard the ship. If you'd like to hear about my adventures or just want to check in and make sure I am still alive, read my posts!