For the very last time, here I am writing my blog late at night before getting into our next port. Hawaii’s up tomorrow—first Oahu for two days and then the Big Island for two more. It’s pretty hard to believe we’ll be back in the U.S. again after more than three months. Honestly, it’s a little depressing, but I am extremely excited about using my phone again at least! The last couple of hours everyone has been running around the ship getting people’s numbers because even though we’re like family with so many others on the ship now, we haven’t even exchanged numbers.
Just getting ready to be back in our home country has been a little bit strange. Today in pre-port Dean Nick asked, “if you have an emergency, what number do you call?” We all looked around for a few seconds before realizing that all you have to do is dial 911. Putting my wallet “back together” was odd for me, too. I had to return so many items that I had taken out of it for the duration of the trip: my license, my health insurance card, US bills other than one’s, and American change that I stuffed in an envelop in my drawer way back in August. There were also a number of items that I was finally able to remove from my wallet now that we’re back in the good old US of A: a copy of my passport, a list of exchange rates, a detailed sheet of emergency contact information, a picture of the ship (which I carried to show non-English-speaking cab drivers), and some anti-diarrheal pills which we were instructed to have on us at all times.
As much as I’ve been thinking about it lately, I’m not going to reflect on the entire voyage quite yet, because we still have this last port to go. Just know that it has been, and is definitely about to be, a pretty emotional time on the ship. This may be in part because the cabin fever we all have after nine days at sea (it’s a longgg way from Japan to Hawaii), but I don’t think there will be a single SASer that isn’t going to miss the MV Explorer come three weeks from now.
Anyway, let me tell you a bit about my time in Japan! Day one in Yokohama we show up to the most intense immigration we’ve seen yet. Though it was annoying to have to go through one-by-one to speak with a Japanese immigration officer who took our picture and got our fingerprints, we finally felt like we were in a modern nation that wouldn’t let just anyone waltz into their country.
As soon as my German SASer friend, Stefanie, and I made it through immigration Yuka was there to meet us! (For any of you who don’t know, Yuka is a Japanese woman who lived with my family for a year when she was an exchange student at my school back in 2001-2002. She’s a sweetheart and we’ve stayed in touch with her over the years.) Yuka had taken off of work so she could show us all of the Tokyo area.
The three of us saw this enormous bronze Budda statue in Kamakura; we went to the very old traditional section of Tokyo, called Ikebukuro, which had enormous temples and a lot of very traditional Japanese food; and then we did all of the modern parts of the city, like Harajuku, which were super lively and had amazing shopping. Unfortunately Japan seemed so expensive after India, Vietnam, and China that I couldn’t buy much, but I did make one purchase of extremely cool and colorful Vans sneakers. As far as I can tell Tokyo is the best place in the world to buy sweet sneakers.
When in Tokyo we stayed at Yuka’s parents house, because it is bigger than Yuka’s apartment which is right in the middle of the city. Even though the Murakami’s live in the “suburbs” it’s only a thirty minute train ride to the heart of Tokyo and there’s a train stop just a ten minute walk away. I loved the public transport in Japan; you really can get anywhere you want without a car. This probably explains the amazement of Yuka’s two friends when I said, “the only I.D. I have on me is my driver’s license.” The two quickly asked me if I drive much and were equally amazed when I said, “yes, pretty much everywhere.” The one young woman told me that she doesn’t have a license and the other said she has her driver’s license, but she’s never actually driven.
Staying at Yuka’s house was a great time though. We had delicious home cooked meals and got a bit of much needed down time. (Just now, fifteen long days after leaving China, I’m almost recovered from a nasty cold I picked up in Beijing.) It was also such a fun time exploring Yuka’s room which is filled of reminders of her stay with us—things like framed photos, Beanie Babies from Dad, a good-bye poster signed by her grade, the old 2002 MFS yearbook, and a photo album made by Mom with many pictures of Yuka with us VC’s, our extended family, and our best friends.
Like a vast majority of Japanese people, no one in Yuka’s family speaks much English. Even still, we had a wonderful time communicating visually and with some translation from Yuka. This ‘round-the-world trip has made me appreciate the amount of often funny communication that can take place without knowing any of the other party’s spoken language. On this trip I have also discovered that Asian television is equally, if not more, entertaining than American television even though we cannot understand a single word that is being said.
Unlike in the rest of Asia, in Japan it isn’t so novel to be a white person. We were certainly noticed, but for the first time since October we weren’t stared at. The Japanese seemed to like us fine, but we were no longer celebrities, which was both nice and unfortunate. There didn’t appear to be any lasting animosity from the Second World War, though I never made it down to Hiroshima or Nagasaki so it could be different elsewhere in the country. Still, on our second day in Japan I had the abrupt realization that Yuka, Stefanie, and I were a Japanese person, a German, and an American hanging out with each other less than seventy years after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. went to war against both Germany and Japan. It seems so extremely trite to say, but I really had a sudden overwhelming sense of pride and optimism for humanity because the three of us could be together as great friends.
After a sad goodbye with Yuka, Stefanie and I hopped on a night bus to travel to the city of Kobe to meet our ship. We had a fun couple of hours of night bus-partying with other SASers headed to Kobe, and I arrived at the ship just in time to go on the earthquakes field trip for my class. Though I wasn’t thrilled to be spending one of my five days in Japan learning about earthquakes, we saw some pretty interesting stuff. For those of you in my generation, you probably don’t know about the enormous earthquake that hit Kobe in January of 1995. It was definitely the largest earthquake to hit a major city in modern times killing about five thousand people. We saw a piece of preserved ground on the fault line where you can see how the earth literally moved up and over several feet. We also went to a museum about the ‘quake and visited a section of the port area which is preserved as it was after that momentous day. The photos and video footage from the earthquake and its aftermath were absolutely stunning—the visuals of the destruction gave me a better idea of just how many fatalities five thousand really is. All of the information made me think deeply about my 1920’s apartment in very tectonically active Southern California. I just might have to move back to the East Coast where I’ll be safe from both natural disasters and excessive vanity (…just kidding, I love you Cali kids).
On my very last day in a Japan I went up to Kyoto to see one of the most traditional, beautiful cities in the country. We spent the day wondering around the peaceful city discovering many old temples and palaces that were once home to important shoguns and samari. Kyoto is a must-see place for any visitors to Japan—again, it was one of places that I cannot put words to why exactly I loved it, but I had a fantastic leisurely day. It was an amazing end to my international travels. Watching the sunset from the seventh deck and listening to a band play at the waterfront, we pulled out of our last foreign harbor nine days ago and we haven’t seen land since.
Just three hours from now I should see “home,” or a piece of home that is over six thousand miles away from where I grew up, but it’s the United States all the same. As some of you may have already noticed, we will be in Hawaii on the 68th anniversary of “the day that will live in infamy.” Unfortunately I’m not getting to Pearl Harbor because I have so much else to do, I’ve already been there, and I know it’ll be inanely crowded, but it should be interesting to see how the local environment changes to remember that day.
I’ll write back eventually, but my next blog probably won’t be written until I’m curled up on my family room couch in South Jersey, next to my fat Yellow Labrador and my three younger siblings who are watching a holiday marathon of Scrubs.
Can’t wait to see and talk with you all!
Much love,
svc
Friday, December 4, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The Most Populated Nation on Earth!
I knew that China was going to be an epic experience at my very fist glimpse of the country. My first encounter with the most populated nation on earth was at sunrise as I was sitting eating breakfast on the sixth deck. As soon as the MV Explorer entered Victoria Harbor my eyes were fixed on the scenic sky-scrapper covered landscape of Hong Kong. I’ve never seen so many tall buildings all together; they were literally the only thing I could see on either side of the river. It was absolutely stunning—cooler than any city I’ve ever seen. If you all remember the scene from The Dark Knight where Batman jumps into the building to kidnap the Chinese guy—that’s Hong Kong’s tallest building. Though a single photo won’t do Hong Kong’s dramatic skyline justice, it’s worth a look to get some idea of how amazing the city is.
I don’t mean to keep harping on the enormity of the city of Hong Kong, but I am still amazed by its sheer size. It’s like they are farming people in these giant residential communities. There would be a complex of literally ten forty story buildings together and not far away there’d be a whole other complex. I struggled to find any buildings that were less than ten stories high. Even with the great number of buildings, another startling fact was how many people they fit into each building. My tour guide said that oftentimes four people would live in 250 sq. ft.
Sadly I had only one day in this amazing city because there’s so much else I needed to see in China in only one week. Though I had to spend part of my only day in Hong Kong at a chemical waste treatment plant for a class, I made the most of the rest of my time there. I wandered the very Western, very wealthy city window shopping classy stores, trying interesting Chinese food, and revisiting some familiar foods such as Haagen Dazs. Once it got dark I watched the daily light show that is the synchronization of many of the colorful lights of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. The music was corny, but regardless it was cool to see. The rest of my evening in Hong Kong was spent doing as the locals do—watching horseracing at Happy Valley Racecourse in the center of the city of Hong Kong. Though I have no idea how to fill out one of the forms to gamble, I had a great time drinking beer with friends, observing the excitement of those nicely dressed residents of Hong Kong who knew what was going on and seemingly had a lot of money riding on these races.
After one day in Hong Kong, I flew up to Beijing with twenty-seven fellow Semester at Sea students. We spent four days in the city staying in the international student dorms at Tsinghua University, which I was told is the MIT of China. Interestingly, Tsinghua University was built by the United States in 1911 as a sort of sign of good will. Today the huge campus is home to thirty thousand of China’s elite students, who we were told by the international kids never really get a chance to unwind and go party. We got to know a few of the Chinese students, but I must admit that we hung out mostly with the international kids because they showed us how to find Beijing’s nightlife. One night we even made it to a club named Vick’s where the Ying Yang Twins were putting on a show. Being rowdy American university students, a bunch of us even made our way to the Ying Yang Twin’s private lounge. Not only were we in China, but we were hanging out with celebrities. It was pretty cool.
Soon I’ll get to all of the amazing sites I saw in China—places that were absolutely incredible to visit—but first I want to write a little more on seemingly insignificant experiences that I think really made my time in China as epic as it was. One such incident happened when we were out at a bar with the international students. I went to get a beer with a Swiss student, Laurent, and there was nowhere to sit so we decided to sit down at the end of a table that some Chinese people were sitting at. We quietly watched them, observing the way they had turned the innocent game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” into a drinking game. Within minutes they had the two of us participating in the ridiculous sport. I don’t speak more than three words of Mandarin and Laurent has a quite limited Mandarin vocabulary as well, but we managed with gesture communication and that was perhaps the funniest and most fun thirty minutes I had in China. I can’t really describe why, but it was incredible. I’m glad to have a few pictures with the Chinese people to remember the moment, and of course, I threw up the classic Asian peace signs in all of the pics.
Actually, I threw up peace signs in most of the pictures I took in China because pretty much all the Asians do that—it’s not really a stereotype. I ended up taking a lot of pictures with these peace sign-throwing Asians for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me. Asian tourists like taking pictures with white people, but for some reason they would single me out of our group of twenty-eight. At first I thought it was just a coincidence that they were coming up to me, but soon both my friends and I realized that they would literally look through the group and come up to me specifically a majority of the time. I still don’t know whether it was because I look particularly American, because I was wearing goofy beanies, or because I smile a lot and maybe look more friendly than others, but there’s something about me that they liked even more than the blonde hair of several of the girls in my group.
Okay, now for the epic sites of the historic city of Beijing. On our arrival to the Beijing airport we stepped out of the terminal into five inches of fresh snow, which was quite a change after hot, humid Hong Kong. We thought this might put a damper on our days of sightseeing outside venues, but I think it may have enhanced it. Our first stop was at the Beijing Zoo, which was amazing not because of the animals that I’ve seen so many times before, but because of the beautiful layout of the zoo that was even more picturesque in snow. It was exactly the type of place you’d go to take Senior Page pictures, so we snapped a few of ourselves untidily dressed for warmth.
The following day we visited the Summer Palace, which was the second home to the emperor and his family. Here we saw a half kilometer long extravagantly decorated hallway and a huge boat that was made entirely of marble (well, the boat didn’t move, but it floated). That day we also saw the Temple of Heaven, which is a very pretty set of gardens and temple-like buildings scattered around a large property. The best part of this trip was seeing about fifty people dancing in no particular formation in one of the gardens. We couldn’t figure out what was happening—it seemed like they all were on drugs dancing by themselves so focused on their own little world. We took videos of them and observed for a while, but we never concluded what was happening.
On the third day we made the trip to the center of Beijing to Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square was pretty much an extremely large open square, which as we were told, “is meant for public celebrations and gatherings.” That was the extent of our tour of the Square—there was absolutely no mention of the massacre that took place there to give Tiananmen Square its fame. I’m sure the absence of attention on the uprising which occurred in 1989 was not because our guide forgot to mention it. This was one of a few times where we felt the presence of communism in China. We then traveled just beyond the Square to Forbidden City, the complex that was home to several dynasties of Chinese emperors and their families. This extremely well preserved set of hundreds of buildings is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Though we rushed through the complex because of the frigid weather, it was a really interesting visit.
We saved the best for last in Beijing—on the morning before we flew out to Shanghai we went to see the Olympic venues, the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, and then we climbed a segment of the Great Wall. The Wall was colder than anywhere we had been previously been, but the hike up the mountainous terrain warmed us up pretty quickly. The steepness of some parts of the wall in combination with the snow and ice made certain sections of the hike quite intimidating, but we managed to reach the top. After a number of photo opportunities we were ready to head back to the warmth of the bus, but we had that same feeling we’ve had so many times on this around-the-world trip: “I can’t believe we’re on the Great Wall of China right now.”
On Semester at Sea we have a number of commonplace phrases and inside jokes that apply because of the type of wild adventures which naturally occur when traveling in the crazy countries we visit. I think they help explain our philosophies here on the MV Explorer so I’ll share two of them with you. One of our phrases is “TIA,” which stands for “This is Asia” or in the past, “This is Africa.” We use this saying whenever things seem quite unlike what we expect as normal in the U.S.—little things like restaurants that don’t have salt, don’t offer napkins, don’t think that any heating is necessary when it’s negative ten degrees Celsius outside, or whose toilets are more or less nonexistent so you just have to pee in a hole. These things shouldn’t faze us anymore, but if anyone decides to complain we throw a “TIA” at him or her. Another “stop complaining” gesture we use when we hear an unfounded complaint is a signal where we put our arms over our head to form a circle. This gesture stands for “we’re going around the world,” which essentially means “suck it up, what we’re doing is so amazing, you have nothing to complain about.”
Shanghai, another insanely cool megacity, was the last stop on our week long tour of China. We were supposed to only have one day in Shanghai, but due to inclement weather our ship stayed in port for an extra day so that was really exciting. Of course there were ship rumors that we were staying an extra day because President Obama, who was in Shanghai at the same time as us, was going to come talk to us. So many silly ship rumors… of course he didn’t, but we were extremely happy to have the day nonetheless. I meandered all over the city with three friends; we spent time in ritzy shopping areas and then strolled down more local boulevards just taking in China. I really don’t have a single good reason, but it was one of the best days of my entire voyage. The three that I was traveling with, Luke, Amanda, and Ikar, are really fun people to be around and we just went with it, drifting into and out of activities as we pleased. For some reason unknown to me, it was the perfect day.
China was the first country we’ve visited where it was difficult to find people who speak English. This made little tasks such as getting a cab to the correct destination or ordering safe food quite difficult. I witnessed a few friends trying the strategy of repeating themselves multiple times, louder each time to communicate, but we had to get a bit more creative than that when trying to carryout these seemingly simple tasks. After hailing a cab we would draw pictures or point to the nearest large hotel, which was the one place we knew we could find someone who spoke both English and Mandarin. At local restaurants we would have to point at pictures on the menu or sometimes go around to other people’s tables and point at their food. We narrowly escaped eating dog once after we ordered by pointing to a dish. An English-speaking man at a nearby table informed us of what exactly we had just asked for, and then he got a good laugh when he saw our facial expressions.
There are so many more interesting bits that I want to share with you all from China, but I’m four hours away from Japan now and I need to get a bit of shuteye before tackling another country. I guess when I get back home you’ll all just have to chat with me about my adventures to get the rest of the stories! (…Hm, ask about how everyone was shocked that we knew how to use chopsticks, or how we had our temperature taken everywhere we went, or how there was more or less a riot at one of the clubs I was at. They’re all good stories for the future!)
I’ll see most of you in less than a month now! I miss you!
svc
I don’t mean to keep harping on the enormity of the city of Hong Kong, but I am still amazed by its sheer size. It’s like they are farming people in these giant residential communities. There would be a complex of literally ten forty story buildings together and not far away there’d be a whole other complex. I struggled to find any buildings that were less than ten stories high. Even with the great number of buildings, another startling fact was how many people they fit into each building. My tour guide said that oftentimes four people would live in 250 sq. ft.
Sadly I had only one day in this amazing city because there’s so much else I needed to see in China in only one week. Though I had to spend part of my only day in Hong Kong at a chemical waste treatment plant for a class, I made the most of the rest of my time there. I wandered the very Western, very wealthy city window shopping classy stores, trying interesting Chinese food, and revisiting some familiar foods such as Haagen Dazs. Once it got dark I watched the daily light show that is the synchronization of many of the colorful lights of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. The music was corny, but regardless it was cool to see. The rest of my evening in Hong Kong was spent doing as the locals do—watching horseracing at Happy Valley Racecourse in the center of the city of Hong Kong. Though I have no idea how to fill out one of the forms to gamble, I had a great time drinking beer with friends, observing the excitement of those nicely dressed residents of Hong Kong who knew what was going on and seemingly had a lot of money riding on these races.
After one day in Hong Kong, I flew up to Beijing with twenty-seven fellow Semester at Sea students. We spent four days in the city staying in the international student dorms at Tsinghua University, which I was told is the MIT of China. Interestingly, Tsinghua University was built by the United States in 1911 as a sort of sign of good will. Today the huge campus is home to thirty thousand of China’s elite students, who we were told by the international kids never really get a chance to unwind and go party. We got to know a few of the Chinese students, but I must admit that we hung out mostly with the international kids because they showed us how to find Beijing’s nightlife. One night we even made it to a club named Vick’s where the Ying Yang Twins were putting on a show. Being rowdy American university students, a bunch of us even made our way to the Ying Yang Twin’s private lounge. Not only were we in China, but we were hanging out with celebrities. It was pretty cool.
Soon I’ll get to all of the amazing sites I saw in China—places that were absolutely incredible to visit—but first I want to write a little more on seemingly insignificant experiences that I think really made my time in China as epic as it was. One such incident happened when we were out at a bar with the international students. I went to get a beer with a Swiss student, Laurent, and there was nowhere to sit so we decided to sit down at the end of a table that some Chinese people were sitting at. We quietly watched them, observing the way they had turned the innocent game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” into a drinking game. Within minutes they had the two of us participating in the ridiculous sport. I don’t speak more than three words of Mandarin and Laurent has a quite limited Mandarin vocabulary as well, but we managed with gesture communication and that was perhaps the funniest and most fun thirty minutes I had in China. I can’t really describe why, but it was incredible. I’m glad to have a few pictures with the Chinese people to remember the moment, and of course, I threw up the classic Asian peace signs in all of the pics.
Actually, I threw up peace signs in most of the pictures I took in China because pretty much all the Asians do that—it’s not really a stereotype. I ended up taking a lot of pictures with these peace sign-throwing Asians for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me. Asian tourists like taking pictures with white people, but for some reason they would single me out of our group of twenty-eight. At first I thought it was just a coincidence that they were coming up to me, but soon both my friends and I realized that they would literally look through the group and come up to me specifically a majority of the time. I still don’t know whether it was because I look particularly American, because I was wearing goofy beanies, or because I smile a lot and maybe look more friendly than others, but there’s something about me that they liked even more than the blonde hair of several of the girls in my group.
Okay, now for the epic sites of the historic city of Beijing. On our arrival to the Beijing airport we stepped out of the terminal into five inches of fresh snow, which was quite a change after hot, humid Hong Kong. We thought this might put a damper on our days of sightseeing outside venues, but I think it may have enhanced it. Our first stop was at the Beijing Zoo, which was amazing not because of the animals that I’ve seen so many times before, but because of the beautiful layout of the zoo that was even more picturesque in snow. It was exactly the type of place you’d go to take Senior Page pictures, so we snapped a few of ourselves untidily dressed for warmth.
The following day we visited the Summer Palace, which was the second home to the emperor and his family. Here we saw a half kilometer long extravagantly decorated hallway and a huge boat that was made entirely of marble (well, the boat didn’t move, but it floated). That day we also saw the Temple of Heaven, which is a very pretty set of gardens and temple-like buildings scattered around a large property. The best part of this trip was seeing about fifty people dancing in no particular formation in one of the gardens. We couldn’t figure out what was happening—it seemed like they all were on drugs dancing by themselves so focused on their own little world. We took videos of them and observed for a while, but we never concluded what was happening.
On the third day we made the trip to the center of Beijing to Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square was pretty much an extremely large open square, which as we were told, “is meant for public celebrations and gatherings.” That was the extent of our tour of the Square—there was absolutely no mention of the massacre that took place there to give Tiananmen Square its fame. I’m sure the absence of attention on the uprising which occurred in 1989 was not because our guide forgot to mention it. This was one of a few times where we felt the presence of communism in China. We then traveled just beyond the Square to Forbidden City, the complex that was home to several dynasties of Chinese emperors and their families. This extremely well preserved set of hundreds of buildings is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Though we rushed through the complex because of the frigid weather, it was a really interesting visit.
We saved the best for last in Beijing—on the morning before we flew out to Shanghai we went to see the Olympic venues, the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, and then we climbed a segment of the Great Wall. The Wall was colder than anywhere we had been previously been, but the hike up the mountainous terrain warmed us up pretty quickly. The steepness of some parts of the wall in combination with the snow and ice made certain sections of the hike quite intimidating, but we managed to reach the top. After a number of photo opportunities we were ready to head back to the warmth of the bus, but we had that same feeling we’ve had so many times on this around-the-world trip: “I can’t believe we’re on the Great Wall of China right now.”
On Semester at Sea we have a number of commonplace phrases and inside jokes that apply because of the type of wild adventures which naturally occur when traveling in the crazy countries we visit. I think they help explain our philosophies here on the MV Explorer so I’ll share two of them with you. One of our phrases is “TIA,” which stands for “This is Asia” or in the past, “This is Africa.” We use this saying whenever things seem quite unlike what we expect as normal in the U.S.—little things like restaurants that don’t have salt, don’t offer napkins, don’t think that any heating is necessary when it’s negative ten degrees Celsius outside, or whose toilets are more or less nonexistent so you just have to pee in a hole. These things shouldn’t faze us anymore, but if anyone decides to complain we throw a “TIA” at him or her. Another “stop complaining” gesture we use when we hear an unfounded complaint is a signal where we put our arms over our head to form a circle. This gesture stands for “we’re going around the world,” which essentially means “suck it up, what we’re doing is so amazing, you have nothing to complain about.”
Shanghai, another insanely cool megacity, was the last stop on our week long tour of China. We were supposed to only have one day in Shanghai, but due to inclement weather our ship stayed in port for an extra day so that was really exciting. Of course there were ship rumors that we were staying an extra day because President Obama, who was in Shanghai at the same time as us, was going to come talk to us. So many silly ship rumors… of course he didn’t, but we were extremely happy to have the day nonetheless. I meandered all over the city with three friends; we spent time in ritzy shopping areas and then strolled down more local boulevards just taking in China. I really don’t have a single good reason, but it was one of the best days of my entire voyage. The three that I was traveling with, Luke, Amanda, and Ikar, are really fun people to be around and we just went with it, drifting into and out of activities as we pleased. For some reason unknown to me, it was the perfect day.
China was the first country we’ve visited where it was difficult to find people who speak English. This made little tasks such as getting a cab to the correct destination or ordering safe food quite difficult. I witnessed a few friends trying the strategy of repeating themselves multiple times, louder each time to communicate, but we had to get a bit more creative than that when trying to carryout these seemingly simple tasks. After hailing a cab we would draw pictures or point to the nearest large hotel, which was the one place we knew we could find someone who spoke both English and Mandarin. At local restaurants we would have to point at pictures on the menu or sometimes go around to other people’s tables and point at their food. We narrowly escaped eating dog once after we ordered by pointing to a dish. An English-speaking man at a nearby table informed us of what exactly we had just asked for, and then he got a good laugh when he saw our facial expressions.
There are so many more interesting bits that I want to share with you all from China, but I’m four hours away from Japan now and I need to get a bit of shuteye before tackling another country. I guess when I get back home you’ll all just have to chat with me about my adventures to get the rest of the stories! (…Hm, ask about how everyone was shocked that we knew how to use chopsticks, or how we had our temperature taken everywhere we went, or how there was more or less a riot at one of the clubs I was at. They’re all good stories for the future!)
I’ll see most of you in less than a month now! I miss you!
svc
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Vietnam
Hey friends and family!
I just got my temperature taken—36.5ºC which is perfect—so I’m allowed to enter Hong Kong tomorrow morning when we arrive at 8:00! I’m not sure what the temperature cut off is, but I imagine that at least a few of my unfortunate fellow shipmates are going to be quarantined and not allowed into China because there has been a cold going around the ship.
Though I’m preparing for Hong Kong tomorrow, I’m still recovering from Vietnam since we returned to the ship only three days ago. Vietnam is an extremely amazing place—probably my second favorite port so far after South Africa. It is definitely a country worth visiting. If Mauritius is the perfect vacation destination to lie on the beach and sip cocktails, Vietnam is the vacation spot to adventure and have great new experiences. The plane ticket around the world might cost an arm and a leg, but if you need a vacation to be active and encounter the unfamiliar while living, eating, and shopping like royalty for next to nothing, then Vietnam is your next stop.
So that’s Vietnam in a nutshell, but I’ll tell you a bit more about both my experiences and those of my friends.
The day after Tropical Storm Mirinae hit central Vietnam causing flooding that killed over a hundred, our ship traveled up the Saigon River to port in Ho Chi Minh City, which is still unofficially called Saigon. Saigon is a very lively city that retains a lot of its colonial French architecture, but also has a good number of contemporary tall buildings. It truly seemed like a modern city, definitely not a city that I’d expect to find in what we consider a “developing” nation. The prevalence of poverty is far less than what we've been seeing, and though still dirty by our standards the streets are quite clean. I even felt safe enough to chance drinking some iced tea which I'm sure was made with water from the local water supply.
Like always, the arrival of our ship full of mostly white Americans did not go unnoticed. In some bars there were signs that said “Welcome Semester at Sea” and several intelligent salesmen set up make-shift stores directly next to our ship. The Vietnamese people in the main parts of the cities are relatively used to seeing white Western tourists, but they still took no shame in staring at us as we did just about anything. Still, none of the Vietnamese are used to seeing black tourists. My friend Sam is a 6’4’’ black guy from Sudan (aka. he’s really dark) so the Vietnamese were all extremely fascinated with him. At first it was kind of funny; they would touch his skin and almost try to rub off his color or something, and every one of them with a camera phone would quickly snap a photo. Eventually though, I felt badly for Sam; I’m sure it got old being on display. And when I really thought about it, I sort of felt badly for the Vietnamese people—they are so ignorant to the diversity of the rest of the world, not that it is really by any fault of their own.
The main trip that I took while in Vietnam was a journey south of Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta region. The Mekong Delta region is the largest distributary in Southeast Asia as well as the second leading rice exporter in the world. This area is a maze of small rivers and canals that force the local community to focus their lives around the water entirely. The main mode of transportation is boat, markets are literally groups of boats that gather in a common water space, and any stores or communities that are not physically on the water are located directly next to a river.
On my trip we just experienced this whole lifestyle. The first night we stayed in a house on one of the hundreds of little islands in the delta. The house was literally built above the water—through our floorboards you could see the mangroves and water below. We slept in mosquito nets and saw leeches, we hiked around and gave candy to the local kids, and we helped make spring rolls for dinner and listened to a couple sing us Vietnamese folk songs. It was a quite unique, quite Vietnamese experience. The next day in the Delta region, we went from roughing it to first class living and spent the night in a very fancy hotel in Can Tho, the country’s fifth largest city. We saw two beautiful Cambodian Buddhist temples and spent a lot of our time eating absolutely amazing Vietnamese food [of which I have a newly found appreciation. I strongly suggest you find the Vietnamese restaurant nearest to you and give it a try].
While living it up in Can Tho, a few friends and I decided to get massages by blind Vietnamese people, which was quite an experience itself. For the three dollars it cost me it was worth the experience, but I’d take a traditional “American” massage over the all but soothing poking and pounding of a Vietnamese masseuse any day. My male friend that joined us girls for the morning massage was unfortunate enough to learn that the Vietnamese assume that all male foreigners want more than just a massage. Feeling quite violated, he used both words and hand signals to inform them he wanted “REAL massage.”
During my time in Vietnam I did my best to learn a few words in the local language; my favorite phrase to use was what sounds to us exactly like “come on you.” In Vietnamese it means “thank you very much” so it was one that I got to say often. Not only did we think it was entertaining to be constantly saying “come on you,” but for some reason the Vietnamese people absolutely loved it when we attempted to speak their language. They didn’t laugh at us, or I don’t think they did anyway, but I think they just thought it was cool we were trying—maybe they’re not used to us Westerners giving even a poor attempt to hide our ignorance—I’m not entirely sure. Regardless, we all had a good laugh every time I brought out one of the ten words in my Vietnamese vocabulary.
As for the many observations I thought I might have on Vietnam as a communist nation, there seemed to be very few obvious differences between it and democratic nations. Basically the Vietnamese have to be slightly careful of what they say on politics and alike, and they can’t gamble. Of course, this was all I saw as an outsider observing the daily life of the Vietnamese people. When I spoke with a young, educated Vietnamese man about the Communist Party he seemed to have mixed feelings. He was very proud of his country, as all Vietnamese people seem to be, but he felt as if his nation was stuck in a communist trap without any method for reform. I don’t believe that communism is an effective political or economic system, but it was still very interesting to hear about the concept from a wholly different source. Even though I grew up in a post-Cold War era, my generation was taught by those who experienced the Cold War and for that reason I’ve always been slightly skeptical of the objectivity of my teachers.
Most of my time in Vietnam I felt as if the nation seemed untouched by the Vietnam War or as they call it, the American War, that meant and still means so much to many Americans. Throughout their history the Vietnamese have had to fight off the imposing powers of the Chinese, the Khmers, the French, the Japanese, and the Americans so perhaps it was just another war in Vietnam’s long struggle for autonomy.
Still, I was very interested in this recent history so I made a trip out to the nearby Cu Chi Tunnels. In case you don’t know, the Cu Chi Tunnels are secret underground tunnels that spread throughout Vietnam and were an integral part of Viet Kong’s success in the American War. For a very long time the Americans were completely unaware of the underground network; soldiers would describe how the enemies would come out of nowhere and just as quickly disappear. In addition to crawling through some of these tiny tunnels we saw many disturbing booby-traps used by the North Vietnamese in the war and saw many huge craters, still present throughout the area, that were formed by B-52 bombs. Though it's depressing to reflect on past wars and losses in such a bustling, progressing place, I thought it was important and a day well spent.
Again, it’s very late the night before we arrive in our next port and I’m up blogging. I don’t know why I always do this to myself—lose sleep before I even get to the country. Luckily, the places we visit are exciting enough to wake me up and keep me up even when I am severely lacking in rest. Four hours from now I’ll be out on the sixth deck eating breakfast as we roll up to beautiful skyline of “the pearl of Asia.” I’m sure I’ll manage to get through the day.
I realized the other day that Hong Kong is the last of the three “city-states” in the world that I have yet to get to (the other two being the Vatican City and Monaco which I visited on my Europe excursion last summer). I’m starting to feel like a real world traveler now, but this feeling just makes me continually contemplate how I’m going to get to those many places I still have yet to see. …So if anyone is looking to vacation in South America this year, let me know!
Check back for my China blog in seven to ten days!
svc
I just got my temperature taken—36.5ºC which is perfect—so I’m allowed to enter Hong Kong tomorrow morning when we arrive at 8:00! I’m not sure what the temperature cut off is, but I imagine that at least a few of my unfortunate fellow shipmates are going to be quarantined and not allowed into China because there has been a cold going around the ship.
Though I’m preparing for Hong Kong tomorrow, I’m still recovering from Vietnam since we returned to the ship only three days ago. Vietnam is an extremely amazing place—probably my second favorite port so far after South Africa. It is definitely a country worth visiting. If Mauritius is the perfect vacation destination to lie on the beach and sip cocktails, Vietnam is the vacation spot to adventure and have great new experiences. The plane ticket around the world might cost an arm and a leg, but if you need a vacation to be active and encounter the unfamiliar while living, eating, and shopping like royalty for next to nothing, then Vietnam is your next stop.
So that’s Vietnam in a nutshell, but I’ll tell you a bit more about both my experiences and those of my friends.
The day after Tropical Storm Mirinae hit central Vietnam causing flooding that killed over a hundred, our ship traveled up the Saigon River to port in Ho Chi Minh City, which is still unofficially called Saigon. Saigon is a very lively city that retains a lot of its colonial French architecture, but also has a good number of contemporary tall buildings. It truly seemed like a modern city, definitely not a city that I’d expect to find in what we consider a “developing” nation. The prevalence of poverty is far less than what we've been seeing, and though still dirty by our standards the streets are quite clean. I even felt safe enough to chance drinking some iced tea which I'm sure was made with water from the local water supply.
Like always, the arrival of our ship full of mostly white Americans did not go unnoticed. In some bars there were signs that said “Welcome Semester at Sea” and several intelligent salesmen set up make-shift stores directly next to our ship. The Vietnamese people in the main parts of the cities are relatively used to seeing white Western tourists, but they still took no shame in staring at us as we did just about anything. Still, none of the Vietnamese are used to seeing black tourists. My friend Sam is a 6’4’’ black guy from Sudan (aka. he’s really dark) so the Vietnamese were all extremely fascinated with him. At first it was kind of funny; they would touch his skin and almost try to rub off his color or something, and every one of them with a camera phone would quickly snap a photo. Eventually though, I felt badly for Sam; I’m sure it got old being on display. And when I really thought about it, I sort of felt badly for the Vietnamese people—they are so ignorant to the diversity of the rest of the world, not that it is really by any fault of their own.
The main trip that I took while in Vietnam was a journey south of Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta region. The Mekong Delta region is the largest distributary in Southeast Asia as well as the second leading rice exporter in the world. This area is a maze of small rivers and canals that force the local community to focus their lives around the water entirely. The main mode of transportation is boat, markets are literally groups of boats that gather in a common water space, and any stores or communities that are not physically on the water are located directly next to a river.
On my trip we just experienced this whole lifestyle. The first night we stayed in a house on one of the hundreds of little islands in the delta. The house was literally built above the water—through our floorboards you could see the mangroves and water below. We slept in mosquito nets and saw leeches, we hiked around and gave candy to the local kids, and we helped make spring rolls for dinner and listened to a couple sing us Vietnamese folk songs. It was a quite unique, quite Vietnamese experience. The next day in the Delta region, we went from roughing it to first class living and spent the night in a very fancy hotel in Can Tho, the country’s fifth largest city. We saw two beautiful Cambodian Buddhist temples and spent a lot of our time eating absolutely amazing Vietnamese food [of which I have a newly found appreciation. I strongly suggest you find the Vietnamese restaurant nearest to you and give it a try].
While living it up in Can Tho, a few friends and I decided to get massages by blind Vietnamese people, which was quite an experience itself. For the three dollars it cost me it was worth the experience, but I’d take a traditional “American” massage over the all but soothing poking and pounding of a Vietnamese masseuse any day. My male friend that joined us girls for the morning massage was unfortunate enough to learn that the Vietnamese assume that all male foreigners want more than just a massage. Feeling quite violated, he used both words and hand signals to inform them he wanted “REAL massage.”
During my time in Vietnam I did my best to learn a few words in the local language; my favorite phrase to use was what sounds to us exactly like “come on you.” In Vietnamese it means “thank you very much” so it was one that I got to say often. Not only did we think it was entertaining to be constantly saying “come on you,” but for some reason the Vietnamese people absolutely loved it when we attempted to speak their language. They didn’t laugh at us, or I don’t think they did anyway, but I think they just thought it was cool we were trying—maybe they’re not used to us Westerners giving even a poor attempt to hide our ignorance—I’m not entirely sure. Regardless, we all had a good laugh every time I brought out one of the ten words in my Vietnamese vocabulary.
As for the many observations I thought I might have on Vietnam as a communist nation, there seemed to be very few obvious differences between it and democratic nations. Basically the Vietnamese have to be slightly careful of what they say on politics and alike, and they can’t gamble. Of course, this was all I saw as an outsider observing the daily life of the Vietnamese people. When I spoke with a young, educated Vietnamese man about the Communist Party he seemed to have mixed feelings. He was very proud of his country, as all Vietnamese people seem to be, but he felt as if his nation was stuck in a communist trap without any method for reform. I don’t believe that communism is an effective political or economic system, but it was still very interesting to hear about the concept from a wholly different source. Even though I grew up in a post-Cold War era, my generation was taught by those who experienced the Cold War and for that reason I’ve always been slightly skeptical of the objectivity of my teachers.
Most of my time in Vietnam I felt as if the nation seemed untouched by the Vietnam War or as they call it, the American War, that meant and still means so much to many Americans. Throughout their history the Vietnamese have had to fight off the imposing powers of the Chinese, the Khmers, the French, the Japanese, and the Americans so perhaps it was just another war in Vietnam’s long struggle for autonomy.
Still, I was very interested in this recent history so I made a trip out to the nearby Cu Chi Tunnels. In case you don’t know, the Cu Chi Tunnels are secret underground tunnels that spread throughout Vietnam and were an integral part of Viet Kong’s success in the American War. For a very long time the Americans were completely unaware of the underground network; soldiers would describe how the enemies would come out of nowhere and just as quickly disappear. In addition to crawling through some of these tiny tunnels we saw many disturbing booby-traps used by the North Vietnamese in the war and saw many huge craters, still present throughout the area, that were formed by B-52 bombs. Though it's depressing to reflect on past wars and losses in such a bustling, progressing place, I thought it was important and a day well spent.
Again, it’s very late the night before we arrive in our next port and I’m up blogging. I don’t know why I always do this to myself—lose sleep before I even get to the country. Luckily, the places we visit are exciting enough to wake me up and keep me up even when I am severely lacking in rest. Four hours from now I’ll be out on the sixth deck eating breakfast as we roll up to beautiful skyline of “the pearl of Asia.” I’m sure I’ll manage to get through the day.
I realized the other day that Hong Kong is the last of the three “city-states” in the world that I have yet to get to (the other two being the Vatican City and Monaco which I visited on my Europe excursion last summer). I’m starting to feel like a real world traveler now, but this feeling just makes me continually contemplate how I’m going to get to those many places I still have yet to see. …So if anyone is looking to vacation in South America this year, let me know!
Check back for my China blog in seven to ten days!
svc
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Indian Experience
Hello from just outside of Singapore! Unfortunately we’re only refueling here with the very impressive city skyline in the distance. We can’t even get off of the ship for the day—I guess we’re on a tight schedule trying to make our way through the Strait of Malacca and over to Vietnam. Next time though, I’ve decided that I have to make another around-the-world trip at some point in my life to get to the places we’re missing. Maybe Latin America, then South America, through the Mediterranean and Red Sea, hit a little more of Africa on the way to Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of Oceania. Wishful thinking, I know.
It’s been a few days since India now so I’ve had some time to really think about everything that I saw—it definitely took some reflection because it was the most ‘intense’ experience yet. Between the unbelievable amount of pollution, the severe discrepancies in wealth, and the extreme culture shock I have so much to write to you all about, but I’ll try to keep it relatively concise.
First of all, I would like to say that India was absolutely amazing. I was quite worried about what I would experience prior to arrival in Chennai because our ship psychologist and deans were all forewarning us about what we were going to see and telling us of ways to relieve our stress if we were overwhelmed by the country. They must have forgotten about all of the poverty we have already encountered in places like Morocco, Ghana, and South Africa because India was not as intimidating as I was expecting. I must say though, out of everywhere we’ve been, India’s list of endemic diseases was by far the most extensive. I’m not one who is normally OCD about sanitizing my hands every fifteen minutes, but India and its cholera, polio, meningitis, typhoid, dengue fever, malaria, measles, etc. definitely worried me and had me thinking about every surface that I touched and food that I ate. By some miracle I made it out of there without any health repercussions [other than the loss of a week or two off of my life due to the huge amount of particulate matter that I inhaled].
The vast presence of pollution was truly shocking. Though in total the United States pollutes more than India, the United States seems like an untouched paradise next to ash and trash ridden India. Every night I would blow my nose after returning from my travels—not to be overly graphic, but my snot really did consist of tiny black particles. When looking in the mirror I could literally see this same black dust all over my face. Another major environmental problem that India faces is its wastewater and sewage treatment, or lack thereof. You may think this would be hard to notice just touring around, but there was a very distinct stench that came about as soon as we got within two hundred yards of the river that runs through Chennai. Lastly, there’s the overwhelming presence of trash. There really aren’t garbage cans anywhere on the streets because the streets are the trash cans.
My sleeper train ride down to the southern-most point of India really epitomizes the Indian attitude towards waste disposal. Before I say more, let me tell you that the sleeper train was a whole experience in itself. We were packed into train cars like the crew of a nuclear submarine. The bunks went three high and were immediately next to one another. Even with this and the several cockroaches my friends and I spotted it was an awesome experience. We chatted with some Indians about everything from the caste system to arranged marriages and the history of Hinduism. We saw the beautiful countryside of India and ate crazy Indian food off of banana leaves and with our hands (as is customary in India). I slept within arms distance of four very cool professors that were taking the trip with four of us students. So very cool, very India-like experience, but out of all of it the most surprising aspect was what happened to the waste produced on the train.
My first trip to the bathroom on the train was the first time I encountered an “Indian-style” toilet, which is a toilet where you just sort of squat to use the restroom. If that wasn’t alarming enough, I realized that the waste literally dropped out of the train car and onto the tracks. I could see the light reflecting off of the tracks up into this bathroom through the “Indian-style” toilet—very, very strange. It wasn’t for a while, until we were about to get off of the train after the fourteen hour ride, that I realized what was happening to our trash. Someone had always offered to take my trash for me so I didn’t think anything of it. I thought they brought it to waste bins at the end of the train, but when staring out the window looking at the extensive banana plantations I suddenly realized where that kind woman was taking my empty chips bag and water bottle. She had taken them to the train car door and just thrown it out the side as everyone did—as was expected, because there weren’t even any waste bins on the train. There is a wholly different mentality on waste in India, one that is going to have to change as India’s dense population continues to grow.
Anyway, the sleeper train I rode with the eight others took us from Chennai down to Nagercoil, which is at the very bottom of the nation near Sri Lanka. We were told that the trip was a sort of town visit, so we were quite surprised when we found out that Nagercoil is a “town” of four hundred thousand people. I guess by Indian standards that’s hardly a large enough population for a “city.” On this trip we were guests at a wonderful Indian couple’s large home. Latha and Kumar are very wealthy Indians who spent fifteen years in the United States when Kumar was working as a software engineer. They returned to India to take over the family businesses which include a rubber plantation, a spinning mill, a hotel, a school, and a university. They employ over a thousand people in Nagercoil and clearly are an exception to the majority of Indians who live on two dollars a day. With fifty inch Samsung flat screens around the house and servants who literally run to pick up your empty soda can, Latha and Kumar acknowledged that they had made the decision to be very wealthy Indians rather than middle class Americans.
Kumar and Latha were amazing hosts. We ate enormous, delicious Indian meals everyday and they took us to see everything to be seen in the area. We made trips to a very old palace and a number of temples, including one gigantic stunning temple, named Suchindram Temple, that had been built in 700 AD. I didn’t know that people could build such structures then—it was over one hundred feet high and the entire outside was made of these intricate statues that told stories. We got to go inside the temple at night when everyone was worshiping. No shoes were allowed to be worn in the temple and the guys had to take off their shirts—not exactly the “no shoes, no shirt, no service” policy we’re used to in the States. Inside of the temple we got to light candles and offer flowers and butter to the statues of Hindu gods like Ganesha (my favorite, the elephant and god of luck). It was an extremely cool, surreal experience.
Kumar and Latha also took us down to the very bottom coast of India, a place called Kanyakumari. At Kanyakumari, the “three seas” meet—the Arabic Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal become one. Though it’s purely a geological phenomenon and not really different seas meeting, you can see waves that clearly hit the rocks on the coast from the three different directions. Kanyakumari is of religious significance to Hindus as well so there is an enormous thirteen story statue of one of the gods right off of the shore.
One of the best parts about being with Kumar and Latha was that we didn’t really do touristy things. The places we went to were busy, but with Indians and not foreigners. I saw two other white people at the huge temple, but other than that we were the only Caucasians around during our travels in Nagercoil. We were so unique that more than a few Indians took pictures of us as we were just walking around. Occasionally we were even asked to pose. (Later in the trip I was cleaning as part of a service project and was asked by an Indian to pose with the duster for his picture. I’m not sure if he thought it was funny that white people cleaned, but I didn’t care so I put on a nice smile.)
Without elegantly integrating the following stories into my blog, I want to share what I thought were two funny little experiences in India. First, I was on a bus putting on sunblock on my face when I offered some to my friend; a woman who we had been talking with asked us if we were just putting lotion on our faces. Though she was a relatively well off, educated woman, she didn’t know what sunblock was. Secondly, I was out eating with some of my friends when we asked a man who worked at the restaurant to take a picture of us. He held up the camera with the lens pointing at his eye, thinking it was a viewfinder and not realizing that there was a screen on the other side on which the digital image is displayed. Particularly in India, there were so many of these seemingly very minor experiences that really took me aback and changed my assumptions of what is widespread knowledge and practice.
After returning to Chennai, I spent my last day in India on a service visit to an institution that houses adults with physical and mental disabilities, rehabilitates those with orthopedic problems, and schools children with a wide range of disabilities. At this establishment we first helped by cleaning a filthy room in which about twenty of the physically disabled women live. Prior to that experience I didn’t know that so much dust could collect in such a heavily lived in room. After cleaning we were able to go around to see and hang out with many of the people there, which was really the reward for our help.
It was pretty shocking to encounter individuals who have been affected by polio—definitely not an experience that I imagined I would have in my lifetime. I know this sounds corny, but I think it was the first time I could fully appreciate modern medicine. Without what we Westerners assume as commonplace medicine I would of had childhood nightmares of disease instead of nightmares about robbers. It was pretty unbelievable to see how a virus can cripple a human body. The doctor walked us from patient to patient telling us of each person’s disease and treatment (clearly, Indians don’t share our sentiments on medical confidentiality).
One woman we saw was exactly my age, twenty, and had suffered from polio when she was a young child. The doctor told us that last year her family had finally saved up enough money to pay for a remedial surgery, and after it she was able to walk for the first time in her life. The woman understood what the doctor had told us in English and had a huge smile on her face. The single moment when that woman smiled with such great satisfaction, and looked at me searching for excitement in my expression, struck me more than any other experience I’ve had on this trip.
After seeing patients we got to go play with the school children in the institution. The classroom I visited had the most precious little Indian children with hearing disabilities. The children were taught some sign language and with hearing aides most of them could hear and speak some. Still, none of them spoke English so we had to find other means of communication. In an attempt to bridge the language gap a friend and I decided to play “Miss Mary Mac” and “ring-around-the-rosy” with the kids. All was well until the kids started really getting into the falling part of ring-around-the-rosy and hearing aids begun flying everywhere. Though I nervously looked to the teachers when this happened, neither they nor the children were fazed; the kids simply put their hearing aids back in and were ready to go for another round.
Despite the great amount of poverty and disease pervasive throughout India, there seems to be hope for the world’s second largest nation. India has had high and relatively consistent economic growth over the past decade or two. The people I spoke with said they’ve seen clear improvements in the average quality of life. The doctor who gave us the tour of the rehabilitation center, said that his young patients are now mainly children with cerebral palsy as polio has been eradicated in the southern part of India. Without overlooking the suffering I did my best to remain hopeful thinking of improvements India has made and of those soon to come. Still, I hope through its development and industrialization India will not lose any of its rich culture, because I think India is by far one of the most unique places on earth.
Well now we’re moving on from the world’s largest democracy to one of the few surviving communist countries—the first communist country I will ever visit! I am extremely excited for tomorrow morning’s arrival in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Formerly known as Saigon, the city was renamed “Ho Chi Minh City” for the communist revolutionary whom our inter-port student told us the Vietnamese worship like a god. I am curious to see if there will be many noticeable differences in a country run under a political system so different from the type we to which we are accustomed.
After exploring Vietnam we are going to have only two days aboard the ship before reaching Hong Kong, but I’ll do my best to blog all about communism and rice paddies before my arrival in China.
I’m sorry, I know I said that I’d try to keep this brief, but I had so many amazing and astonishing experiences in India that I really wanted to share. Your time spent reading my mini-novels is appreciated!
I miss you all, but I am not quite ready to come home and see you yet. Three more countries and sadly only six more weeks!
svc
It’s been a few days since India now so I’ve had some time to really think about everything that I saw—it definitely took some reflection because it was the most ‘intense’ experience yet. Between the unbelievable amount of pollution, the severe discrepancies in wealth, and the extreme culture shock I have so much to write to you all about, but I’ll try to keep it relatively concise.
First of all, I would like to say that India was absolutely amazing. I was quite worried about what I would experience prior to arrival in Chennai because our ship psychologist and deans were all forewarning us about what we were going to see and telling us of ways to relieve our stress if we were overwhelmed by the country. They must have forgotten about all of the poverty we have already encountered in places like Morocco, Ghana, and South Africa because India was not as intimidating as I was expecting. I must say though, out of everywhere we’ve been, India’s list of endemic diseases was by far the most extensive. I’m not one who is normally OCD about sanitizing my hands every fifteen minutes, but India and its cholera, polio, meningitis, typhoid, dengue fever, malaria, measles, etc. definitely worried me and had me thinking about every surface that I touched and food that I ate. By some miracle I made it out of there without any health repercussions [other than the loss of a week or two off of my life due to the huge amount of particulate matter that I inhaled].
The vast presence of pollution was truly shocking. Though in total the United States pollutes more than India, the United States seems like an untouched paradise next to ash and trash ridden India. Every night I would blow my nose after returning from my travels—not to be overly graphic, but my snot really did consist of tiny black particles. When looking in the mirror I could literally see this same black dust all over my face. Another major environmental problem that India faces is its wastewater and sewage treatment, or lack thereof. You may think this would be hard to notice just touring around, but there was a very distinct stench that came about as soon as we got within two hundred yards of the river that runs through Chennai. Lastly, there’s the overwhelming presence of trash. There really aren’t garbage cans anywhere on the streets because the streets are the trash cans.
My sleeper train ride down to the southern-most point of India really epitomizes the Indian attitude towards waste disposal. Before I say more, let me tell you that the sleeper train was a whole experience in itself. We were packed into train cars like the crew of a nuclear submarine. The bunks went three high and were immediately next to one another. Even with this and the several cockroaches my friends and I spotted it was an awesome experience. We chatted with some Indians about everything from the caste system to arranged marriages and the history of Hinduism. We saw the beautiful countryside of India and ate crazy Indian food off of banana leaves and with our hands (as is customary in India). I slept within arms distance of four very cool professors that were taking the trip with four of us students. So very cool, very India-like experience, but out of all of it the most surprising aspect was what happened to the waste produced on the train.
My first trip to the bathroom on the train was the first time I encountered an “Indian-style” toilet, which is a toilet where you just sort of squat to use the restroom. If that wasn’t alarming enough, I realized that the waste literally dropped out of the train car and onto the tracks. I could see the light reflecting off of the tracks up into this bathroom through the “Indian-style” toilet—very, very strange. It wasn’t for a while, until we were about to get off of the train after the fourteen hour ride, that I realized what was happening to our trash. Someone had always offered to take my trash for me so I didn’t think anything of it. I thought they brought it to waste bins at the end of the train, but when staring out the window looking at the extensive banana plantations I suddenly realized where that kind woman was taking my empty chips bag and water bottle. She had taken them to the train car door and just thrown it out the side as everyone did—as was expected, because there weren’t even any waste bins on the train. There is a wholly different mentality on waste in India, one that is going to have to change as India’s dense population continues to grow.
Anyway, the sleeper train I rode with the eight others took us from Chennai down to Nagercoil, which is at the very bottom of the nation near Sri Lanka. We were told that the trip was a sort of town visit, so we were quite surprised when we found out that Nagercoil is a “town” of four hundred thousand people. I guess by Indian standards that’s hardly a large enough population for a “city.” On this trip we were guests at a wonderful Indian couple’s large home. Latha and Kumar are very wealthy Indians who spent fifteen years in the United States when Kumar was working as a software engineer. They returned to India to take over the family businesses which include a rubber plantation, a spinning mill, a hotel, a school, and a university. They employ over a thousand people in Nagercoil and clearly are an exception to the majority of Indians who live on two dollars a day. With fifty inch Samsung flat screens around the house and servants who literally run to pick up your empty soda can, Latha and Kumar acknowledged that they had made the decision to be very wealthy Indians rather than middle class Americans.
Kumar and Latha were amazing hosts. We ate enormous, delicious Indian meals everyday and they took us to see everything to be seen in the area. We made trips to a very old palace and a number of temples, including one gigantic stunning temple, named Suchindram Temple, that had been built in 700 AD. I didn’t know that people could build such structures then—it was over one hundred feet high and the entire outside was made of these intricate statues that told stories. We got to go inside the temple at night when everyone was worshiping. No shoes were allowed to be worn in the temple and the guys had to take off their shirts—not exactly the “no shoes, no shirt, no service” policy we’re used to in the States. Inside of the temple we got to light candles and offer flowers and butter to the statues of Hindu gods like Ganesha (my favorite, the elephant and god of luck). It was an extremely cool, surreal experience.
Kumar and Latha also took us down to the very bottom coast of India, a place called Kanyakumari. At Kanyakumari, the “three seas” meet—the Arabic Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal become one. Though it’s purely a geological phenomenon and not really different seas meeting, you can see waves that clearly hit the rocks on the coast from the three different directions. Kanyakumari is of religious significance to Hindus as well so there is an enormous thirteen story statue of one of the gods right off of the shore.
One of the best parts about being with Kumar and Latha was that we didn’t really do touristy things. The places we went to were busy, but with Indians and not foreigners. I saw two other white people at the huge temple, but other than that we were the only Caucasians around during our travels in Nagercoil. We were so unique that more than a few Indians took pictures of us as we were just walking around. Occasionally we were even asked to pose. (Later in the trip I was cleaning as part of a service project and was asked by an Indian to pose with the duster for his picture. I’m not sure if he thought it was funny that white people cleaned, but I didn’t care so I put on a nice smile.)
Without elegantly integrating the following stories into my blog, I want to share what I thought were two funny little experiences in India. First, I was on a bus putting on sunblock on my face when I offered some to my friend; a woman who we had been talking with asked us if we were just putting lotion on our faces. Though she was a relatively well off, educated woman, she didn’t know what sunblock was. Secondly, I was out eating with some of my friends when we asked a man who worked at the restaurant to take a picture of us. He held up the camera with the lens pointing at his eye, thinking it was a viewfinder and not realizing that there was a screen on the other side on which the digital image is displayed. Particularly in India, there were so many of these seemingly very minor experiences that really took me aback and changed my assumptions of what is widespread knowledge and practice.
After returning to Chennai, I spent my last day in India on a service visit to an institution that houses adults with physical and mental disabilities, rehabilitates those with orthopedic problems, and schools children with a wide range of disabilities. At this establishment we first helped by cleaning a filthy room in which about twenty of the physically disabled women live. Prior to that experience I didn’t know that so much dust could collect in such a heavily lived in room. After cleaning we were able to go around to see and hang out with many of the people there, which was really the reward for our help.
It was pretty shocking to encounter individuals who have been affected by polio—definitely not an experience that I imagined I would have in my lifetime. I know this sounds corny, but I think it was the first time I could fully appreciate modern medicine. Without what we Westerners assume as commonplace medicine I would of had childhood nightmares of disease instead of nightmares about robbers. It was pretty unbelievable to see how a virus can cripple a human body. The doctor walked us from patient to patient telling us of each person’s disease and treatment (clearly, Indians don’t share our sentiments on medical confidentiality).
One woman we saw was exactly my age, twenty, and had suffered from polio when she was a young child. The doctor told us that last year her family had finally saved up enough money to pay for a remedial surgery, and after it she was able to walk for the first time in her life. The woman understood what the doctor had told us in English and had a huge smile on her face. The single moment when that woman smiled with such great satisfaction, and looked at me searching for excitement in my expression, struck me more than any other experience I’ve had on this trip.
After seeing patients we got to go play with the school children in the institution. The classroom I visited had the most precious little Indian children with hearing disabilities. The children were taught some sign language and with hearing aides most of them could hear and speak some. Still, none of them spoke English so we had to find other means of communication. In an attempt to bridge the language gap a friend and I decided to play “Miss Mary Mac” and “ring-around-the-rosy” with the kids. All was well until the kids started really getting into the falling part of ring-around-the-rosy and hearing aids begun flying everywhere. Though I nervously looked to the teachers when this happened, neither they nor the children were fazed; the kids simply put their hearing aids back in and were ready to go for another round.
Despite the great amount of poverty and disease pervasive throughout India, there seems to be hope for the world’s second largest nation. India has had high and relatively consistent economic growth over the past decade or two. The people I spoke with said they’ve seen clear improvements in the average quality of life. The doctor who gave us the tour of the rehabilitation center, said that his young patients are now mainly children with cerebral palsy as polio has been eradicated in the southern part of India. Without overlooking the suffering I did my best to remain hopeful thinking of improvements India has made and of those soon to come. Still, I hope through its development and industrialization India will not lose any of its rich culture, because I think India is by far one of the most unique places on earth.
Well now we’re moving on from the world’s largest democracy to one of the few surviving communist countries—the first communist country I will ever visit! I am extremely excited for tomorrow morning’s arrival in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Formerly known as Saigon, the city was renamed “Ho Chi Minh City” for the communist revolutionary whom our inter-port student told us the Vietnamese worship like a god. I am curious to see if there will be many noticeable differences in a country run under a political system so different from the type we to which we are accustomed.
After exploring Vietnam we are going to have only two days aboard the ship before reaching Hong Kong, but I’ll do my best to blog all about communism and rice paddies before my arrival in China.
I’m sorry, I know I said that I’d try to keep this brief, but I had so many amazing and astonishing experiences in India that I really wanted to share. Your time spent reading my mini-novels is appreciated!
I miss you all, but I am not quite ready to come home and see you yet. Three more countries and sadly only six more weeks!
svc
Friday, October 23, 2009
"Spring Break" in Mauritius
Hello all!
The MV Explorer has just returned to the Northern Hemisphere and is nearly to India, almost literally half way around the world at this point. In celebration we did not have a day of very unusual traditions for this equatorial crossing, but instead we had a day of “Sea Olympics.” For this event the ship population was split into nine different seas. Most seas had relatively boring names such as the “Mediterranean Sea,” the “Andaman Sea,” and so on, but the Life Long Learners (retired travelers) got creative; they called themselves the “Nearly Dead Sea.” My sea name was not very exciting—we were the Yellow Sea although for some reason our team color that we had to wear was red (yes, very confusing). There were about twenty different very strange competitions that each Sea had to partake in. I participated in Pictionary and crab soccer; in both events my excellent teammates and I took first place. I sacrificed quite a bit for those wins, too--my hands have blisters all over them from crab soccer--but unfortunately the Yellow Sea still came in second overall. Even without the big win, I had a great day of ship-community bonding.
Four days ago we boarded the ship after a quite fun three day getaway in the tropical island of Mauritius. For those of you who don’t know, Mauritius is a small island nation located a few hundred miles east of Madagascar. As it turns out, Mauritius is the farthest point of land you can get from Southern California, so for all of you reading from Los Angeles, I’m just about as far from you as I will ever be.
This great distance from the U.S. also meant we were the only American tourists on the island, but we were definitely not overlooked. A German tourist I was talking with said to me, “everyone on the island knows you [Americans] are here.” I guess it’s pretty hard to not notice the sudden influx of five hundred rowdy American college kids running around an island that’s not more than twenty-five miles wide.
So a bit about Mauritius: It is quite a cool little place. Mauritius is a non-active volcanic island surrounded completely by coral reefs. Because the island is so isolated there are many endemic species of flora and fauna that are unique to the island. The only that you will all be familiar with is the dodo bird. Mauritius was the only place in the world the dodo was found, but in the 17th century the hungry Dutch settlers and their dogs hunted it to extinction.
Two thirds of the Mauritian population is of Indian decent (they were brought in as agricultural workers in the 1700’s) so there is a large Hindu influence. Though The Netherlands, Great Britain, and France all had a hand in the settlement of the island, the French had the largest role which is clear today as the main language of the Mauritians is French. Luckily for me, most of the people know English, too.
A group of friends and I rented an awesome villa near the coast so we could get away from ship life for a bit and have a different [and much larger] space to hang out. Though Mauritius is a very special and unique place, what mattered most to us SAS students was that it has gorgeous beaches. We definitely did a lot of beach afternoons with pina coladas, but I managed to wake up in the mornings to go do some pretty cool things as well. One day my villa-mates and I took a boat out to an uninhabited neighboring island, “Isle de Gabriel,” where we had a barbeque, and yes, we did more hanging out on the beach with beverages.
Still, I did change things up significantly one day when I went SCUBA diving on the coral reefs surrounding the island. I don’t know if you non-divers can appreciate this, but the health of the coral reefs was shockingly wonderful. I’ve only ever been diving in North America—the Florida Keys, the Caribbean, the Sea of Cortez, and around Hawaii—but I just assumed all of the worlds’ reefs were in a similar very poor state. With my first dive in the Indian Ocean I found out this is not at all true. While about twenty to thirty percent of corals where I’m used to diving are dead or bleached, I would guess that one or maybe two percent of the corals I saw on my dive in Mauritius were dead. It was awesome to see such a pristine reef. I also saw my first squid on the dive! There were fifteen or twenty swimming together—it is rather unusual to see so many squid at one time.
Not only was the dive itself amazing, but our dive master, Bhurtun, who took us out was super cool, too. After the dive I was with my two buddies and we asked him where we could find a place to get a beer and sit on the beach. Bhurtun offered to give us a ride there and along the way said he needed to make a quick stop. At the stop we just waited in the car only to see him come back with a six pack of beer and a bunch of snacks for us. He then drove us to a beautiful beach and refused to take the tip we tried to give him for showing us such a great day. Sitting at that perfect beach with beer in hand, we couldn’t stop talking about how cool Bhurtun was and how absolutely amazing of a day we just had.
So yes, Mauritius was a success. It was a great break from school work and the depressing side of many of our visits in ports. I realized after writing my last blog about how great South Africa was, that I often neglect to write about the many troubles of the countries I have visited. I left out the lasting effect of the bigoted apartheid government, the twenty percent prevalence of HIV/AIDS, and the illiteracy rate of nearly fifty percent from my blog on South Africa. I suppose I did this mainly because I did have such an amazing time, and I would much prefer to tell you happy stories than to discourage you. And still, I don’t mean to depress you now, but after thinking it over I realized that seeing these many problems is a very important part of my experiences and I would be doing these people a disservice by not recognizing the many challenges they face. A friend of mine who went to help build a house with Habitat for Humanity in South Africa said that the people were so happy to know that we are aware they are in great poverty—they want to know that they are not being forgotten.
On that note, I expect India to be the most humbling experience yet. With six hundred million people living on less than two dollars a day, India has more challenges to face than any country we have visited thus far. Our professors have already warned us that India will not be comfortable—that India will “offend all of the senses” and dumbfound us even though we have been prepared for the kind of immense poverty we will encounter. I am both nervous and excited for our arrival in Chennai tomorrow morning.
The sun is going to rise in just three hours now, so it’s definitely time for sleep before experiencing both the physical and emotional demand of India. As always, I’ll write back in a week or two.
svc
The MV Explorer has just returned to the Northern Hemisphere and is nearly to India, almost literally half way around the world at this point. In celebration we did not have a day of very unusual traditions for this equatorial crossing, but instead we had a day of “Sea Olympics.” For this event the ship population was split into nine different seas. Most seas had relatively boring names such as the “Mediterranean Sea,” the “Andaman Sea,” and so on, but the Life Long Learners (retired travelers) got creative; they called themselves the “Nearly Dead Sea.” My sea name was not very exciting—we were the Yellow Sea although for some reason our team color that we had to wear was red (yes, very confusing). There were about twenty different very strange competitions that each Sea had to partake in. I participated in Pictionary and crab soccer; in both events my excellent teammates and I took first place. I sacrificed quite a bit for those wins, too--my hands have blisters all over them from crab soccer--but unfortunately the Yellow Sea still came in second overall. Even without the big win, I had a great day of ship-community bonding.
Four days ago we boarded the ship after a quite fun three day getaway in the tropical island of Mauritius. For those of you who don’t know, Mauritius is a small island nation located a few hundred miles east of Madagascar. As it turns out, Mauritius is the farthest point of land you can get from Southern California, so for all of you reading from Los Angeles, I’m just about as far from you as I will ever be.
This great distance from the U.S. also meant we were the only American tourists on the island, but we were definitely not overlooked. A German tourist I was talking with said to me, “everyone on the island knows you [Americans] are here.” I guess it’s pretty hard to not notice the sudden influx of five hundred rowdy American college kids running around an island that’s not more than twenty-five miles wide.
So a bit about Mauritius: It is quite a cool little place. Mauritius is a non-active volcanic island surrounded completely by coral reefs. Because the island is so isolated there are many endemic species of flora and fauna that are unique to the island. The only that you will all be familiar with is the dodo bird. Mauritius was the only place in the world the dodo was found, but in the 17th century the hungry Dutch settlers and their dogs hunted it to extinction.
Two thirds of the Mauritian population is of Indian decent (they were brought in as agricultural workers in the 1700’s) so there is a large Hindu influence. Though The Netherlands, Great Britain, and France all had a hand in the settlement of the island, the French had the largest role which is clear today as the main language of the Mauritians is French. Luckily for me, most of the people know English, too.
A group of friends and I rented an awesome villa near the coast so we could get away from ship life for a bit and have a different [and much larger] space to hang out. Though Mauritius is a very special and unique place, what mattered most to us SAS students was that it has gorgeous beaches. We definitely did a lot of beach afternoons with pina coladas, but I managed to wake up in the mornings to go do some pretty cool things as well. One day my villa-mates and I took a boat out to an uninhabited neighboring island, “Isle de Gabriel,” where we had a barbeque, and yes, we did more hanging out on the beach with beverages.
Still, I did change things up significantly one day when I went SCUBA diving on the coral reefs surrounding the island. I don’t know if you non-divers can appreciate this, but the health of the coral reefs was shockingly wonderful. I’ve only ever been diving in North America—the Florida Keys, the Caribbean, the Sea of Cortez, and around Hawaii—but I just assumed all of the worlds’ reefs were in a similar very poor state. With my first dive in the Indian Ocean I found out this is not at all true. While about twenty to thirty percent of corals where I’m used to diving are dead or bleached, I would guess that one or maybe two percent of the corals I saw on my dive in Mauritius were dead. It was awesome to see such a pristine reef. I also saw my first squid on the dive! There were fifteen or twenty swimming together—it is rather unusual to see so many squid at one time.
Not only was the dive itself amazing, but our dive master, Bhurtun, who took us out was super cool, too. After the dive I was with my two buddies and we asked him where we could find a place to get a beer and sit on the beach. Bhurtun offered to give us a ride there and along the way said he needed to make a quick stop. At the stop we just waited in the car only to see him come back with a six pack of beer and a bunch of snacks for us. He then drove us to a beautiful beach and refused to take the tip we tried to give him for showing us such a great day. Sitting at that perfect beach with beer in hand, we couldn’t stop talking about how cool Bhurtun was and how absolutely amazing of a day we just had.
So yes, Mauritius was a success. It was a great break from school work and the depressing side of many of our visits in ports. I realized after writing my last blog about how great South Africa was, that I often neglect to write about the many troubles of the countries I have visited. I left out the lasting effect of the bigoted apartheid government, the twenty percent prevalence of HIV/AIDS, and the illiteracy rate of nearly fifty percent from my blog on South Africa. I suppose I did this mainly because I did have such an amazing time, and I would much prefer to tell you happy stories than to discourage you. And still, I don’t mean to depress you now, but after thinking it over I realized that seeing these many problems is a very important part of my experiences and I would be doing these people a disservice by not recognizing the many challenges they face. A friend of mine who went to help build a house with Habitat for Humanity in South Africa said that the people were so happy to know that we are aware they are in great poverty—they want to know that they are not being forgotten.
On that note, I expect India to be the most humbling experience yet. With six hundred million people living on less than two dollars a day, India has more challenges to face than any country we have visited thus far. Our professors have already warned us that India will not be comfortable—that India will “offend all of the senses” and dumbfound us even though we have been prepared for the kind of immense poverty we will encounter. I am both nervous and excited for our arrival in Chennai tomorrow morning.
The sun is going to rise in just three hours now, so it’s definitely time for sleep before experiencing both the physical and emotional demand of India. As always, I’ll write back in a week or two.
svc
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
South Africa!
Hello from the Indian Ocean!
It’s my first time over here in the Indian Ocean. So far so good—as we were rounding the cape of South Africa and entering the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, I was on the back deck watching the sunset when I saw “the green flash” for the first time. (Just in case you don’t know, the green flash refers to the ray of green light that can be seen by ocean-goers for a half a second as the sun falls completely below the horizon.) If that wasn’t exciting enough, just minutes afterwards I saw a pod of eight to ten humpback whales cruising alongside our ship. It was a very cool welcome to the Indian Ocean. Since then though, the Indian Ocean hasn’t felt much different the Atlantic or the Pacific. Still, the places we’re going to visit in this ocean are going to be nothing like what I’m used to when I’m nested safely between the Atlantic and Pacific back in the US. The next few countries we’re hitting are Mauritius, India, and then over to Vietnam—it should be epic. I’ve been busy with school work for the first time thus far on the voyage (midterms…), but we’re just a day and a half away from the spring break-style vacation island nation of Mauritius now so I thought it was time to share my reflections on the AMAZING country of South Africa.
As much as great of a time as I had in Canada, Spain, Morocco, and Ghana none of them were quite as phenomenal as South Africa. I can’t put my finger on exactly why I loved South Africa so much, but I think it definitely had to do something with the fact that there is a very distinct culture, history, and geography of South Africa, yet it isn’t too unfamiliar. I found myself continually comparing Cape Town to Los Angeles. The sun, the winds, the temperature, the development extending from the coastline all the way up to the bases of the picturesque mountains that surround the city, the ritzy hotels, amazing restaurants, and swanky shops all made Cape Town feel very comfortable and familiar to me. It was this comfort in combination with the crazy safari animals, the Afrikaans speaking people, the bunny-chow dinners (no, they’re not made with rabbit), and probably most of all the friendly and amusing local people that made my South African experience so amazing. I’ll tell you about my favorite South Africans, or SAffers as they call themselves, later.
The first thing we saw when arriving in Cape Town was the stunning Table Mountain that is the backdrop of the city. I wish that I could post pictures because Table Mountain is something that you cannot really be described in words, but unfortunately here on the boat our communication with the outside world is limited to text. [Note from Mom/Martha: I posted a web photo of Table Mountain since Sarah was not able to send one.] When possible I will definitely add images to this blog so you can not only hear about, but also see bits of my adventures.
After a day of discovering Cape Town I flew to Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape, with a group of SAS students looking to find some of Africa’s largest and most impressive wild animals. I went on safari at Kariega Game Reserve which is a large private reserve that is home to all of the “Big Five” (elephants, rhinos, buffalo, leopard, and lions) as well as many other cool safari animals. Although the animals are confined by the electric fences that surround the large reserve, they are all wild animals and are treated as such—the lions are left to kill whatever prey they can take down.
Each day, oftentimes in the early morning and late evening when the animals are most active, my group of eight went out with our ranger, Terry, in our roofless off-roading jeep to search for the many types of animals. Many of the animals were surprisingly difficult to find. I guess it was hard because the reserve was so big, but we didn’t even find elephants (seemingly the easiest animals to find because of their size) until the second day on safari. After three days though we did see everything—from ostriches, to giraffes, to hippos, lions, wildebeest, monkeys, elephants, zebras, rhinos, buffalo, tortoises, many different types of antelope and bird species—everything except for leopards. Leopards are quite hard to find because they live by themselves, hide in trees and tall grasses, and are most active during night. Terry told us leopards are seen by a ranger only once every three weeks or so in Kariega.
There were three other groups of Semester at Sea students at Kariega; each group searched around for animals independently in our separate jeeps. Every night when we all met up for our amazing exotic dinners of kudu, ostrich, and other game there was a sort of competition between the vehicles as to who had seen the best animals, or seen the animals doing the coolest things. For example, seeing two male lions roaring gained your jeep a lot of brownie points.
On the last evening as we were heading in after dark my jeep decided we were going to ‘see a leopard.’ Everyone got super into the idea so we discussed the details of how we saw it: “when we were driving back from seeing the hippos it was walking across the path, it saw us, and then jetted for the bushes. It was hard to see, but it was quite a bit smaller than the lions.” We didn’t even know what a leopard really looked like so we had to get the details from Ranger Terry. He also got really into the idea of a leopard sighting. Terry said asked us, “are you guys really going to do this? Because if you stick with it, I’ll call it in on the radio. But if I do then it really happened, because I could get in a lot of trouble for falsely reporting a sighting.” So my group decided we’d stick with the lie. At dinner we told everyone our elaborate story and, needless to say, they were all very jealous. Terry got a lot of props from the other rangers, too, but they seemed to quiz us about the leopard, almost as if they didn’t believe Terry. It wasn’t until we were back on the ship where Terry couldn’t get into any trouble that we finally broke and admitted to the other groups it was a big fabrication. We had a number of good laughs about it.
The most interesting piece of knowledge that I learned on safari—knowledge that I feel I should spread to you all—was that of the correct terminology for groups of different species. I’ll tell you some of the best: “raft” of hippos, “troop” of monkeys, “pride” of lions, “crèche” of rhinos, “dazzle” of zebras, “journey” of giraffes, and my favorite: “implausibility” of wildebeest. I also had “peck” of hyenas on my list until Terry saw what I was writing and corrected me saying that the collective term for hyenas was very easy—they’re simply in a “pack.”
This was not the only time I had trouble comprehending the South African vernacular. When hanging out with my favorite two locals, Dean and Dan, I was always very focused when they were speaking, attempting to figure out which words were slang and which words I knew very well but I just thought were slang because of the way SAffers pronounced them. At one point there was an entire sentence I didn’t understand. I let it go as I sometimes did when I thought the statement didn’t require a response from me. Still, later I admitted there was a moment “when it sounded like [they] were speaking a foreign language.” Dan and Dean laughed and admitted that I wasn’t crazy. They were actually speaking a different language—they were speaking Afrikaans (the other main language of South Africa). As you can tell, despite the fact that South Africans speak English, communication was not always fluid. Still, I really think this added to the fun and excitement.
One of the many, many reasons I loved South Africa was, once again, because of the lasting influence of the British Empire. It is so nice being in countries where the main language of the people is English. It’s not even the convenience of being able to find my way around or knowing exactly what I’m eating for dinner, it’s the experience of meeting the locals. Talking with and hanging out with the SAffers may have been the best part of my entire stay in South Africa. Just comparing things that we have versus what they have or what we say versus what they say is so much fun. They had a ton of slang words, most of which were completely foreign to me because they were Afrikaans words, but I picked up a few that I like. My favorite is more of a SAffer phrase than a SAffer word; instead of saying “that sucks,” SAffers say “that’s not ideal.” They’re classy like that. They also thought speaking with us was really fun/funny; at one point Dean said to me, “I feel like I’m in the movies when I talk with you.” There was a genuine interest in the lifestyle of the other party that made the conversations between the South Africans and us Americans last for hours. I spent the entirety of my last day in South Africa just hanging out by the spectacular Kalk Bay with a Semester at Sea friend and our new SAffer friends just watching the seals, drinking beer, eating fish and chips, and chatting. I wish so much that I could just do that for weeks.
I loved South Africa so much I’ve spent the last few days ignoring my Global Studies midterm and scheming as to how I can get an internship in Cape Town or go to the 2010 World Cup to get back there. If anyone has any ideas, let me know!
There is so much more I could tell you all about South Africa because it really was that amazing. Unfortunately, I need to be off to get on that studying because my midterm is in eight hours. When I’m home though, just ask, and I’ll go on for hours with many more stories.
Go Phils! Beat LA!
It’s my first time over here in the Indian Ocean. So far so good—as we were rounding the cape of South Africa and entering the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, I was on the back deck watching the sunset when I saw “the green flash” for the first time. (Just in case you don’t know, the green flash refers to the ray of green light that can be seen by ocean-goers for a half a second as the sun falls completely below the horizon.) If that wasn’t exciting enough, just minutes afterwards I saw a pod of eight to ten humpback whales cruising alongside our ship. It was a very cool welcome to the Indian Ocean. Since then though, the Indian Ocean hasn’t felt much different the Atlantic or the Pacific. Still, the places we’re going to visit in this ocean are going to be nothing like what I’m used to when I’m nested safely between the Atlantic and Pacific back in the US. The next few countries we’re hitting are Mauritius, India, and then over to Vietnam—it should be epic. I’ve been busy with school work for the first time thus far on the voyage (midterms…), but we’re just a day and a half away from the spring break-style vacation island nation of Mauritius now so I thought it was time to share my reflections on the AMAZING country of South Africa.
As much as great of a time as I had in Canada, Spain, Morocco, and Ghana none of them were quite as phenomenal as South Africa. I can’t put my finger on exactly why I loved South Africa so much, but I think it definitely had to do something with the fact that there is a very distinct culture, history, and geography of South Africa, yet it isn’t too unfamiliar. I found myself continually comparing Cape Town to Los Angeles. The sun, the winds, the temperature, the development extending from the coastline all the way up to the bases of the picturesque mountains that surround the city, the ritzy hotels, amazing restaurants, and swanky shops all made Cape Town feel very comfortable and familiar to me. It was this comfort in combination with the crazy safari animals, the Afrikaans speaking people, the bunny-chow dinners (no, they’re not made with rabbit), and probably most of all the friendly and amusing local people that made my South African experience so amazing. I’ll tell you about my favorite South Africans, or SAffers as they call themselves, later.
The first thing we saw when arriving in Cape Town was the stunning Table Mountain that is the backdrop of the city. I wish that I could post pictures because Table Mountain is something that you cannot really be described in words, but unfortunately here on the boat our communication with the outside world is limited to text. [Note from Mom/Martha: I posted a web photo of Table Mountain since Sarah was not able to send one.] When possible I will definitely add images to this blog so you can not only hear about, but also see bits of my adventures.
After a day of discovering Cape Town I flew to Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape, with a group of SAS students looking to find some of Africa’s largest and most impressive wild animals. I went on safari at Kariega Game Reserve which is a large private reserve that is home to all of the “Big Five” (elephants, rhinos, buffalo, leopard, and lions) as well as many other cool safari animals. Although the animals are confined by the electric fences that surround the large reserve, they are all wild animals and are treated as such—the lions are left to kill whatever prey they can take down.
Each day, oftentimes in the early morning and late evening when the animals are most active, my group of eight went out with our ranger, Terry, in our roofless off-roading jeep to search for the many types of animals. Many of the animals were surprisingly difficult to find. I guess it was hard because the reserve was so big, but we didn’t even find elephants (seemingly the easiest animals to find because of their size) until the second day on safari. After three days though we did see everything—from ostriches, to giraffes, to hippos, lions, wildebeest, monkeys, elephants, zebras, rhinos, buffalo, tortoises, many different types of antelope and bird species—everything except for leopards. Leopards are quite hard to find because they live by themselves, hide in trees and tall grasses, and are most active during night. Terry told us leopards are seen by a ranger only once every three weeks or so in Kariega.
There were three other groups of Semester at Sea students at Kariega; each group searched around for animals independently in our separate jeeps. Every night when we all met up for our amazing exotic dinners of kudu, ostrich, and other game there was a sort of competition between the vehicles as to who had seen the best animals, or seen the animals doing the coolest things. For example, seeing two male lions roaring gained your jeep a lot of brownie points.
On the last evening as we were heading in after dark my jeep decided we were going to ‘see a leopard.’ Everyone got super into the idea so we discussed the details of how we saw it: “when we were driving back from seeing the hippos it was walking across the path, it saw us, and then jetted for the bushes. It was hard to see, but it was quite a bit smaller than the lions.” We didn’t even know what a leopard really looked like so we had to get the details from Ranger Terry. He also got really into the idea of a leopard sighting. Terry said asked us, “are you guys really going to do this? Because if you stick with it, I’ll call it in on the radio. But if I do then it really happened, because I could get in a lot of trouble for falsely reporting a sighting.” So my group decided we’d stick with the lie. At dinner we told everyone our elaborate story and, needless to say, they were all very jealous. Terry got a lot of props from the other rangers, too, but they seemed to quiz us about the leopard, almost as if they didn’t believe Terry. It wasn’t until we were back on the ship where Terry couldn’t get into any trouble that we finally broke and admitted to the other groups it was a big fabrication. We had a number of good laughs about it.
The most interesting piece of knowledge that I learned on safari—knowledge that I feel I should spread to you all—was that of the correct terminology for groups of different species. I’ll tell you some of the best: “raft” of hippos, “troop” of monkeys, “pride” of lions, “crèche” of rhinos, “dazzle” of zebras, “journey” of giraffes, and my favorite: “implausibility” of wildebeest. I also had “peck” of hyenas on my list until Terry saw what I was writing and corrected me saying that the collective term for hyenas was very easy—they’re simply in a “pack.”
This was not the only time I had trouble comprehending the South African vernacular. When hanging out with my favorite two locals, Dean and Dan, I was always very focused when they were speaking, attempting to figure out which words were slang and which words I knew very well but I just thought were slang because of the way SAffers pronounced them. At one point there was an entire sentence I didn’t understand. I let it go as I sometimes did when I thought the statement didn’t require a response from me. Still, later I admitted there was a moment “when it sounded like [they] were speaking a foreign language.” Dan and Dean laughed and admitted that I wasn’t crazy. They were actually speaking a different language—they were speaking Afrikaans (the other main language of South Africa). As you can tell, despite the fact that South Africans speak English, communication was not always fluid. Still, I really think this added to the fun and excitement.
One of the many, many reasons I loved South Africa was, once again, because of the lasting influence of the British Empire. It is so nice being in countries where the main language of the people is English. It’s not even the convenience of being able to find my way around or knowing exactly what I’m eating for dinner, it’s the experience of meeting the locals. Talking with and hanging out with the SAffers may have been the best part of my entire stay in South Africa. Just comparing things that we have versus what they have or what we say versus what they say is so much fun. They had a ton of slang words, most of which were completely foreign to me because they were Afrikaans words, but I picked up a few that I like. My favorite is more of a SAffer phrase than a SAffer word; instead of saying “that sucks,” SAffers say “that’s not ideal.” They’re classy like that. They also thought speaking with us was really fun/funny; at one point Dean said to me, “I feel like I’m in the movies when I talk with you.” There was a genuine interest in the lifestyle of the other party that made the conversations between the South Africans and us Americans last for hours. I spent the entirety of my last day in South Africa just hanging out by the spectacular Kalk Bay with a Semester at Sea friend and our new SAffer friends just watching the seals, drinking beer, eating fish and chips, and chatting. I wish so much that I could just do that for weeks.
I loved South Africa so much I’ve spent the last few days ignoring my Global Studies midterm and scheming as to how I can get an internship in Cape Town or go to the 2010 World Cup to get back there. If anyone has any ideas, let me know!
There is so much more I could tell you all about South Africa because it really was that amazing. Unfortunately, I need to be off to get on that studying because my midterm is in eight hours. When I’m home though, just ask, and I’ll go on for hours with many more stories.
Go Phils! Beat LA!
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Ghana, Togo & Benin
Hello all!
I’ve been back on the ship for a few days after my first experience in sub-Saharan Africa! We visited Ghana, Togo, and Benin (three little countries next to each other on the coast at about seven degrees north of the equator). Because these countries are so underdeveloped none of them have a real tourism industry but we managed to find our way around and figured out things to do so it was an amazing time.
Really the best part of being in Ghana, Togo, and Benin was getting to know the locals. They were by far the friendliest group people I have ever encountered in my life. The locals were constantly coming up to us just to chat. At first we were always very skeptical [as we had been taught to be in Morocco] but we later realized that 95% of the people who approached us really just wanted to talk with some foreigners and get to know us. Though we got many funny questions about being white (not kidding) and a number of marriage proposals, it was so fun hearing about life in Ghana. One thing that struck me was that despite their great poverty most of the people I met seemed genuinely happy. They were fully aware of how much more we have than they do but they are very accepting of this and they have a lot of faith in God so they were content, if not pleased, with their lives.
We, being the mostly white group of Semester at Sea students, were definitely a novelty to the Ghanaians. I realized after only a few hours that we are much more used to seeing people of other races than they are. I could count the number of non-SAS white people that I saw during my four day stay on two hands. Wherever we traveled we got starred at, not in a bad way really, they were just very curious. Still, people gave us friendly waves as we drove by and occasionally kids would break out in dance putting on a show for us. I was later told that we were the largest group of Americans to ever arrive in Ghana at once—as I said, it’s not really a travel destination but I loved it.
Still, there were a few sites to see in addition to just discovering the natural beauty and local culture of Ghana, Togo, and Benin. In Benin I took a tour of a village named Ganvie that is built literally in the middle of a lake. In old wooden boats powered by outboard engines with no covers we made the eight kilometer journey to the middle of the lake where there’s a population of several thousand people living in houses built on wooden stilts. The stilts were no more than small trees cut down and stuck in the mud under houses made of wood and palm leaves. The people really do live there all of the time though—they said they have to take the children to a nearby island so they can learn to walk on solid land. The village was founded three hundred years ago because a rival tribe was trying to kill/rape/pillage a weaker tribe. This weaker tribe decided the safest place for them to hide was in plain sight in the middle of the lake and clearly they were right because the same tribe remains there today. Ganvie was probably my favorite place I visited in Ghana, Togo, and Benin. It was like something straight out of National Geographic.
On my last day I saw what I think are the two biggest tourist attractions in Ghana—and there was no one there but us SAS students. In the morning I visited my first rainforest! Kakum National Park has walkways 120 feet up in the canopy so we were able to observe the rainforest from quite high up. It was really fun but unfortunately I didn’t see any elephants, leopards, monkeys, or anything cool like that. Later that day we went to Elmina Castle, the oldest and largest set of slave dungeons in sub-Saharan Africa. It was quite a humbling experience after such a cheery morning parading around in a beautiful rainforest. Walking through the small, grungy cells in which literally millions of African captives died or passed through on their journey to slavery in the Americas made one really take in the history. Because such a huge portion of American slaves came from Elmina Castle I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the black SAS students in our group have ancestors that passed through “the gate of no return.” My mind then drifted to whether I have any ancestors that had enslaved these Africans—after all, it was the Dutch who ran the operations out of Elmina Castle for most of its history. It was a depressing but powerful experience. I’m glad I was able to see it.
Looking back I’m surprised I wasn’t more depressed by the conditions the local people were living in. It was definitely a third world country. Almost every house I saw was a one room cottage made of concrete blocks or wood and palm leaves. None of these residences had electricity or running water; they all used little oil lamps at night and brought freshwater to their homes by carrying it in buckets on their heads. (Not to be insensitive, but it seems that all Ghanians have this amazing skill in that they can carry just about anything of any weight on their heads. It’s not something they just show on the Discovery Channel.) I guess it wasn’t extremely disheartening to see these people in such a poor state because they did seem so content. The people of Ghana, Togo, and Benin need help though—Benin has an illiteracy rate of 65% and Ghana, perhaps the most advanced country in sub-Saharan African other than South Africa, has an illiteracy rate of about 50%.
Another aspect of culture in these countries that really struck me was the lasting effect of colonialism on African nations. This was most obvious in the languages they speak. In Ghana everyone speaks English with a few native words thrown in here and there, and then as soon as you cross the border to Togo and Benin everyone speaks French. [Who knew it was so easy to communicate with Africans?!] Though I don’t speak French I keep some intelligent foreigners around to help me out. On the ship I’ve made friends with a number of Spanish speaking guys: Agustin and Daniel from Columbia, another Agustin from Argentina, Pedro from Mexico, and Ikar from Spain. I hang out with them and seriously feel like I'm in Vicky Christina Barcelona--they're all going off in Spanish and every few minutes one of them will say "speak English for Sarah" or "say it again in English." It’s proved useful being with these guys in all of the ports thus far though; not only do they speak fluent Spanish and English but they also speak fluent French and dabble in Italian and German. Still, being around them makes me increasingly aware of how egocentric Americans are. We are the only culture in which it is completely normal and acceptable for educated people to know only one language. Unfortunately, I’m no exception to this stereotype but spending so much time with the “Latin Lovers,” as they were dubbed for their performance in the SAS talent show, my Spanish is starting to come back to me a bit.
As for food in Ghana—it was amazing. It was the last place I expected to find delicious food particularly because we had been warned so many times about getting Hepatitis A, typhoid, and so many other ailments from eating the local food, but it was the first port we have visited in which I enjoyed everything I ate. They had a lot of standard foods such as rice, potatoes and chicken but they had great stew-like sauces that they would cover them with. I also had delicious goat, crepes with mushrooms inside, avocado salad, fresh fish, and my favorite, fried plantains. Luckily, I didn’t get sick from eating any of these foods either! …Ghana did make me ill later though. Someone brought a stomach bug on board the ship and it spread like wildfire in the days following our departure. I finally understand why they have people standing outside the dining halls and outside of the union whose only job is to make sure everybody sanitizes their hands on passing.
Now that we’re back on the ship everyone’s been busy with classes. We all have papers and tests now for the first time so it’s actually starting to feel like school. We did cross the equator a few days ago though so we got off of class to celebrate “Neptune Day.” As rumored many people did shave their heads, including 15 girls. I admire their bravery but I think some of them might be starting to regret their decisions. I’d say at least 60 to 100 guys shaved their heads as well. We definitely have enough skinheads for all of the stand-ins needed to make American History X.
We reach South Africa in just three days now. I’ll be safari-ing and just checking out Cape Town which I hear is amazing. Will write back on the way to Mauritius!
svc
I’ve been back on the ship for a few days after my first experience in sub-Saharan Africa! We visited Ghana, Togo, and Benin (three little countries next to each other on the coast at about seven degrees north of the equator). Because these countries are so underdeveloped none of them have a real tourism industry but we managed to find our way around and figured out things to do so it was an amazing time.
Really the best part of being in Ghana, Togo, and Benin was getting to know the locals. They were by far the friendliest group people I have ever encountered in my life. The locals were constantly coming up to us just to chat. At first we were always very skeptical [as we had been taught to be in Morocco] but we later realized that 95% of the people who approached us really just wanted to talk with some foreigners and get to know us. Though we got many funny questions about being white (not kidding) and a number of marriage proposals, it was so fun hearing about life in Ghana. One thing that struck me was that despite their great poverty most of the people I met seemed genuinely happy. They were fully aware of how much more we have than they do but they are very accepting of this and they have a lot of faith in God so they were content, if not pleased, with their lives.
We, being the mostly white group of Semester at Sea students, were definitely a novelty to the Ghanaians. I realized after only a few hours that we are much more used to seeing people of other races than they are. I could count the number of non-SAS white people that I saw during my four day stay on two hands. Wherever we traveled we got starred at, not in a bad way really, they were just very curious. Still, people gave us friendly waves as we drove by and occasionally kids would break out in dance putting on a show for us. I was later told that we were the largest group of Americans to ever arrive in Ghana at once—as I said, it’s not really a travel destination but I loved it.
Still, there were a few sites to see in addition to just discovering the natural beauty and local culture of Ghana, Togo, and Benin. In Benin I took a tour of a village named Ganvie that is built literally in the middle of a lake. In old wooden boats powered by outboard engines with no covers we made the eight kilometer journey to the middle of the lake where there’s a population of several thousand people living in houses built on wooden stilts. The stilts were no more than small trees cut down and stuck in the mud under houses made of wood and palm leaves. The people really do live there all of the time though—they said they have to take the children to a nearby island so they can learn to walk on solid land. The village was founded three hundred years ago because a rival tribe was trying to kill/rape/pillage a weaker tribe. This weaker tribe decided the safest place for them to hide was in plain sight in the middle of the lake and clearly they were right because the same tribe remains there today. Ganvie was probably my favorite place I visited in Ghana, Togo, and Benin. It was like something straight out of National Geographic.
On my last day I saw what I think are the two biggest tourist attractions in Ghana—and there was no one there but us SAS students. In the morning I visited my first rainforest! Kakum National Park has walkways 120 feet up in the canopy so we were able to observe the rainforest from quite high up. It was really fun but unfortunately I didn’t see any elephants, leopards, monkeys, or anything cool like that. Later that day we went to Elmina Castle, the oldest and largest set of slave dungeons in sub-Saharan Africa. It was quite a humbling experience after such a cheery morning parading around in a beautiful rainforest. Walking through the small, grungy cells in which literally millions of African captives died or passed through on their journey to slavery in the Americas made one really take in the history. Because such a huge portion of American slaves came from Elmina Castle I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the black SAS students in our group have ancestors that passed through “the gate of no return.” My mind then drifted to whether I have any ancestors that had enslaved these Africans—after all, it was the Dutch who ran the operations out of Elmina Castle for most of its history. It was a depressing but powerful experience. I’m glad I was able to see it.
Looking back I’m surprised I wasn’t more depressed by the conditions the local people were living in. It was definitely a third world country. Almost every house I saw was a one room cottage made of concrete blocks or wood and palm leaves. None of these residences had electricity or running water; they all used little oil lamps at night and brought freshwater to their homes by carrying it in buckets on their heads. (Not to be insensitive, but it seems that all Ghanians have this amazing skill in that they can carry just about anything of any weight on their heads. It’s not something they just show on the Discovery Channel.) I guess it wasn’t extremely disheartening to see these people in such a poor state because they did seem so content. The people of Ghana, Togo, and Benin need help though—Benin has an illiteracy rate of 65% and Ghana, perhaps the most advanced country in sub-Saharan African other than South Africa, has an illiteracy rate of about 50%.
Another aspect of culture in these countries that really struck me was the lasting effect of colonialism on African nations. This was most obvious in the languages they speak. In Ghana everyone speaks English with a few native words thrown in here and there, and then as soon as you cross the border to Togo and Benin everyone speaks French. [Who knew it was so easy to communicate with Africans?!] Though I don’t speak French I keep some intelligent foreigners around to help me out. On the ship I’ve made friends with a number of Spanish speaking guys: Agustin and Daniel from Columbia, another Agustin from Argentina, Pedro from Mexico, and Ikar from Spain. I hang out with them and seriously feel like I'm in Vicky Christina Barcelona--they're all going off in Spanish and every few minutes one of them will say "speak English for Sarah" or "say it again in English." It’s proved useful being with these guys in all of the ports thus far though; not only do they speak fluent Spanish and English but they also speak fluent French and dabble in Italian and German. Still, being around them makes me increasingly aware of how egocentric Americans are. We are the only culture in which it is completely normal and acceptable for educated people to know only one language. Unfortunately, I’m no exception to this stereotype but spending so much time with the “Latin Lovers,” as they were dubbed for their performance in the SAS talent show, my Spanish is starting to come back to me a bit.
As for food in Ghana—it was amazing. It was the last place I expected to find delicious food particularly because we had been warned so many times about getting Hepatitis A, typhoid, and so many other ailments from eating the local food, but it was the first port we have visited in which I enjoyed everything I ate. They had a lot of standard foods such as rice, potatoes and chicken but they had great stew-like sauces that they would cover them with. I also had delicious goat, crepes with mushrooms inside, avocado salad, fresh fish, and my favorite, fried plantains. Luckily, I didn’t get sick from eating any of these foods either! …Ghana did make me ill later though. Someone brought a stomach bug on board the ship and it spread like wildfire in the days following our departure. I finally understand why they have people standing outside the dining halls and outside of the union whose only job is to make sure everybody sanitizes their hands on passing.
Now that we’re back on the ship everyone’s been busy with classes. We all have papers and tests now for the first time so it’s actually starting to feel like school. We did cross the equator a few days ago though so we got off of class to celebrate “Neptune Day.” As rumored many people did shave their heads, including 15 girls. I admire their bravery but I think some of them might be starting to regret their decisions. I’d say at least 60 to 100 guys shaved their heads as well. We definitely have enough skinheads for all of the stand-ins needed to make American History X.
We reach South Africa in just three days now. I’ll be safari-ing and just checking out Cape Town which I hear is amazing. Will write back on the way to Mauritius!
svc
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Ship Life
Hey everyone!
I have a bit of downtime on our long trek from Morocco to Ghana so I thought I’d fill you in on a few more details about life at sea. Though I have so many interesting experiences within the countries we visit, living on the MV Explorer is an experience in itself and is definitely worth talking about.
It’s been pretty hot out recently so most of us on the ship have been spending a lot of time up on the seventh deck sunbathing and swimming. Today I spent a good part of the afternoon in the pool getting beat up by some of the professors’ young boys. All that the five, six, and eight year old boys wanted to do was chicken-fight in the pool. Though Luke, the six year-old I had on my shoulders for over an hour, and I were quite the chicken-fighting team, I was constantly struggling to not inhale the salt water. Strength was not an issue but the other two boys had young men supporting them who had a few inches of height on me. Luke and I held our own but had a bit of trouble when we got cornered into the deeper end. I would end up underwater without air until the rolling of the ship forced the water to the other side of the pool at which moment I could snatch a breath of much needed oxygen. Even though I was having trouble getting air, my eyes were burning, and my neck was aching it was a good time.
While we’re on the outside decks by the pool or at dinner we’ll often see a group of people rush towards the railing—somehow watching dolphins never gets old. It is pretty cool though, it’s a reminder that we really are in the middle of an ocean that other creatures really do inhabit. Though it seems strange that we would just forget we’re on a ship, when you go about with your daily life of classes, friends, etc. the fact that we’re in the ocean drifts to the back of your mind.
Another time we are suddenly reminded that we’re on a ship is when we have “muster drills” to prepare in case of a fire or other emergency that could occur on the MV Explorer. “Please report to your muster stations” calls everyone onboard the ship into action. I wish could somehow portray a British accent via text but unfortunately there is no good way to represent Captain Jeremy’s perfectly calm English voice in a blog. Just know that it’s the type of voice you would want to hear if someone had to tell you there was a serious fire on the ship—you’d almost think everything was going to be completely fine. With that said, muster drills are no joke. When alerted everybody has to quickly get to their cabin; dress in warm clothes, close-toed shoes, and a ball cap; put their life jacket on; and report to their designated muster stations (aka. our area that’s close to the lifeboats so we could abandon if necessary). At first we didn’t think it was such a big deal, but it’s the only time you’ll see the crew really serious. The first drill one student had flip-flops on so the crew chastised him and then hid him in the back of the crowd so Captain Jeremy wouldn’t see bare feet on his walk through. It started to feel a bit like Titanic the first time they told us “women and children in the front.”
As for clubs on the ship, I’m involved in the dive club, “Green Group,” and the group informally known as “I want to get a good job this summer” club. The dive club is just as it sounds—we’re planning trips while we’re in Mauritius and Hawaii. Thus far I’m the most experienced diver I’ve met certification wise. When people ask if I’m PADI and I tell them “yes, I’m a Rescue Diver” they’re always very impressed so that’s always a nice little ego boost.
As for Green Group, you can probably figure out what we do. Our goal is simply to raise awareness about environmental issues. We’re writing e-mails to our Senators to show our support for the climate bill that just passed the House and trying to encourage others to do so as well. I’m also going to be giving a seminar on “How Saving the Environment Can Peacefully Prevent Terrorism.” My presentation will be based on a chapter on ‘petro-dictatorships’ from Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded. I strongly suggest anyone who is at all interested to read Friedman’s book and particularly that chapter (Chapter 4) because it was truly eye-opening for me. Dad, I know of all people you probably think I’m crazy but just read that one chapter—I honestly think you will find it interesting. It may sound like I’m becoming a “fanatical liberal,” but for the record I don’t consider myself a liberal, just someone who is very concerned for the environment.
The other group I’m involved with—the “I want a good job this summer” club—is basically just a networking/tips on finding good internships and jobs group that meets every once in a while. Though it seems dorky I’ve already met some great contacts. As it turns out two people that I knew quite well already, one of my professors and a Life-Long-Learner friend from geography class, could really help me find a job in finance and/or environmental consulting. I was pretty excited to get to talk with these guys about their specific fields and they’ve already given me some great ideas and tips on how I might find the perfect summer internship.
A little more about life on the MV Explorer—there are several professors who really stand out and influence everyone, even those who are not their students. One man like that is our music professor on the ship who is the epitome of the absent minded professor. He can pick up any instrument and get lost in it—it’s so cool to watch him. During our cultural pre-port for Ghana he got up on stage and started doing some really cool drums, bells, etc that he learned when he was in a band with a bunch of Ghanaians. He then put some Ghanaian music on and started to show us some traditional Ghanaian dancing (this guy is very white, too). Soon the inter-port lecturer, who’s a professor from Ghana, got up and started dancing with him and not long after many students followed. It was awesome. Not to mention that Dean Bob had just rapped our entire lecture on Ghana’s culture because he was worried we were going to get too bored otherwise. The professors here are exceptionally outgoing, fun people—I guess you’d have to be to want to live with five hundred college kids on a ship traveling the world for a whole semester.
I hadn’t thought about it until recently but living on a ship for four months creates an immense sense of community. We do absolutely everything together. From breakfast, lunch, dinner, and “snack time” to class, meetings, and downtime, the same seven hundred of us are on the ship 24/7 oftentimes for seven days at a time. Seven hundred people may seem like a lot but when you spend literally your entire day every day for the majority of four months with your classmates, professors, and professor’s families you get to know the people really well. Two days ago there was a talent show and I realized how many little ‘inside jokes’ we had that the entire shipboard community was in on. It’s only been three weeks but I can already tell that when we get off the ship in San Diego it is going to be so hard to say goodbye to the extremely closely-knit society. I know this sounds really cheesy but I don’t think you can truly understand it unless you’ve been in the rare situation where your classmates and professors are the only people you actively have contact with for several months.
As we head for Ghana we’re approaching the equator quite rapidly. We are reminded of this every time we step out on the back deck into the extremely muggy heat. Though we stop in Ghana first, in a week from now we’ll be celebrating the actual day we make our equatorial crossing with “Neptune Day” festivities. I’m not sure exactly what this involves but I hear all of the guys, and even some of the girls, shave their heads. I heard something about kissing fish and then putting their guts on your head, too. The rumors make it sound like a cult ritual but luckily shaving one’s head is not required for females so I’m excited to see what other interesting rituals happen when the MV Explorer enters the Southern Hemisphere.
Will write back soon to fill you in on both Neptune Day and Ghana!
svc
I have a bit of downtime on our long trek from Morocco to Ghana so I thought I’d fill you in on a few more details about life at sea. Though I have so many interesting experiences within the countries we visit, living on the MV Explorer is an experience in itself and is definitely worth talking about.
It’s been pretty hot out recently so most of us on the ship have been spending a lot of time up on the seventh deck sunbathing and swimming. Today I spent a good part of the afternoon in the pool getting beat up by some of the professors’ young boys. All that the five, six, and eight year old boys wanted to do was chicken-fight in the pool. Though Luke, the six year-old I had on my shoulders for over an hour, and I were quite the chicken-fighting team, I was constantly struggling to not inhale the salt water. Strength was not an issue but the other two boys had young men supporting them who had a few inches of height on me. Luke and I held our own but had a bit of trouble when we got cornered into the deeper end. I would end up underwater without air until the rolling of the ship forced the water to the other side of the pool at which moment I could snatch a breath of much needed oxygen. Even though I was having trouble getting air, my eyes were burning, and my neck was aching it was a good time.
While we’re on the outside decks by the pool or at dinner we’ll often see a group of people rush towards the railing—somehow watching dolphins never gets old. It is pretty cool though, it’s a reminder that we really are in the middle of an ocean that other creatures really do inhabit. Though it seems strange that we would just forget we’re on a ship, when you go about with your daily life of classes, friends, etc. the fact that we’re in the ocean drifts to the back of your mind.
Another time we are suddenly reminded that we’re on a ship is when we have “muster drills” to prepare in case of a fire or other emergency that could occur on the MV Explorer. “Please report to your muster stations” calls everyone onboard the ship into action. I wish could somehow portray a British accent via text but unfortunately there is no good way to represent Captain Jeremy’s perfectly calm English voice in a blog. Just know that it’s the type of voice you would want to hear if someone had to tell you there was a serious fire on the ship—you’d almost think everything was going to be completely fine. With that said, muster drills are no joke. When alerted everybody has to quickly get to their cabin; dress in warm clothes, close-toed shoes, and a ball cap; put their life jacket on; and report to their designated muster stations (aka. our area that’s close to the lifeboats so we could abandon if necessary). At first we didn’t think it was such a big deal, but it’s the only time you’ll see the crew really serious. The first drill one student had flip-flops on so the crew chastised him and then hid him in the back of the crowd so Captain Jeremy wouldn’t see bare feet on his walk through. It started to feel a bit like Titanic the first time they told us “women and children in the front.”
As for clubs on the ship, I’m involved in the dive club, “Green Group,” and the group informally known as “I want to get a good job this summer” club. The dive club is just as it sounds—we’re planning trips while we’re in Mauritius and Hawaii. Thus far I’m the most experienced diver I’ve met certification wise. When people ask if I’m PADI and I tell them “yes, I’m a Rescue Diver” they’re always very impressed so that’s always a nice little ego boost.
As for Green Group, you can probably figure out what we do. Our goal is simply to raise awareness about environmental issues. We’re writing e-mails to our Senators to show our support for the climate bill that just passed the House and trying to encourage others to do so as well. I’m also going to be giving a seminar on “How Saving the Environment Can Peacefully Prevent Terrorism.” My presentation will be based on a chapter on ‘petro-dictatorships’ from Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded. I strongly suggest anyone who is at all interested to read Friedman’s book and particularly that chapter (Chapter 4) because it was truly eye-opening for me. Dad, I know of all people you probably think I’m crazy but just read that one chapter—I honestly think you will find it interesting. It may sound like I’m becoming a “fanatical liberal,” but for the record I don’t consider myself a liberal, just someone who is very concerned for the environment.
The other group I’m involved with—the “I want a good job this summer” club—is basically just a networking/tips on finding good internships and jobs group that meets every once in a while. Though it seems dorky I’ve already met some great contacts. As it turns out two people that I knew quite well already, one of my professors and a Life-Long-Learner friend from geography class, could really help me find a job in finance and/or environmental consulting. I was pretty excited to get to talk with these guys about their specific fields and they’ve already given me some great ideas and tips on how I might find the perfect summer internship.
A little more about life on the MV Explorer—there are several professors who really stand out and influence everyone, even those who are not their students. One man like that is our music professor on the ship who is the epitome of the absent minded professor. He can pick up any instrument and get lost in it—it’s so cool to watch him. During our cultural pre-port for Ghana he got up on stage and started doing some really cool drums, bells, etc that he learned when he was in a band with a bunch of Ghanaians. He then put some Ghanaian music on and started to show us some traditional Ghanaian dancing (this guy is very white, too). Soon the inter-port lecturer, who’s a professor from Ghana, got up and started dancing with him and not long after many students followed. It was awesome. Not to mention that Dean Bob had just rapped our entire lecture on Ghana’s culture because he was worried we were going to get too bored otherwise. The professors here are exceptionally outgoing, fun people—I guess you’d have to be to want to live with five hundred college kids on a ship traveling the world for a whole semester.
I hadn’t thought about it until recently but living on a ship for four months creates an immense sense of community. We do absolutely everything together. From breakfast, lunch, dinner, and “snack time” to class, meetings, and downtime, the same seven hundred of us are on the ship 24/7 oftentimes for seven days at a time. Seven hundred people may seem like a lot but when you spend literally your entire day every day for the majority of four months with your classmates, professors, and professor’s families you get to know the people really well. Two days ago there was a talent show and I realized how many little ‘inside jokes’ we had that the entire shipboard community was in on. It’s only been three weeks but I can already tell that when we get off the ship in San Diego it is going to be so hard to say goodbye to the extremely closely-knit society. I know this sounds really cheesy but I don’t think you can truly understand it unless you’ve been in the rare situation where your classmates and professors are the only people you actively have contact with for several months.
As we head for Ghana we’re approaching the equator quite rapidly. We are reminded of this every time we step out on the back deck into the extremely muggy heat. Though we stop in Ghana first, in a week from now we’ll be celebrating the actual day we make our equatorial crossing with “Neptune Day” festivities. I’m not sure exactly what this involves but I hear all of the guys, and even some of the girls, shave their heads. I heard something about kissing fish and then putting their guts on your head, too. The rumors make it sound like a cult ritual but luckily shaving one’s head is not required for females so I’m excited to see what other interesting rituals happen when the MV Explorer enters the Southern Hemisphere.
Will write back soon to fill you in on both Neptune Day and Ghana!
svc
Friday, September 18, 2009
Moroc
Moroc is by far the most different place I’ve ever been in. (Yes, the real name of the country is “Moroc.” Someone along the way decided that its name needed to be lengthened for the English language so somehow “Moroc” became “Morocco.”) I realized just days before we arrived in Casablanca that I really knew nothing about Morocco—not its language, its climate, its history, its politics, anything. I had no idea what to expect until our pre-port lecture which gave me only a bit of an idea of what I was about to see in the North African nation.
On arrival to Casablanca all that was in sight were shipyards and mountains of phosphorus exposed to the open air (in case you don’t know, phosphorus particulate matter is not something you want regularly inhaled by the population of your country’s largest city, but there it was regardless). To add to the negative image already painted by Morocco’s largest port, Semester at Sea said they hired a shuttle bus so that we didn’t have to risk the walk through Casablanca’s shady shipyards.
Though intimidating at first, Morocco turned out to be an amazing experience. I went on a trip arranged by Semester at Sea to Marrakech, Morocco’s most visited city, and into the Sahara Desert for a “camel trek” and overnight stay in a nomad tent. It was awesome, just at little unnerving at times and, for lack of a better word, crazy.
The first day in Morocco we went to the “souks” of Marrakech. These are little shops lined up close together in the old part of the city where locals sell crafts and foods, often to tourists like us. I was traveling with three friends of mine and in that moment I’m pretty sure they kept me from being ripped off and/or kidnapped. It was so overwhelming at first—there were people shouting at me in both French and English telling me to “just look,” motorcycles and donkey-drawn wagons whizzing by me in the tiny alleyways, and in every direction there were Moroccans, of whom we were told to always be extremely skeptical. [In the pre-port lecture they said always have your purse on the side away from the street so people in cars couldn’t snatch it as they drive by and they said to never hold plastic bags only by the handles because the plastic could be ripped right out of your fingers.]
We had been told that the locals would really try to rip us off in the souks and that they would barter down to a third of the price they originally suggested, but I still had no idea of the value of anything they were selling. Was a Moroccan teapot really worth 300 dirham as the guy had repeatedly told me was a “very good deal” in his broken English? Clearly no, but being from the US I was not used to negotiating the price of goods I buy. In this hectic situation on the first day, I decided not to buy anything and I am very glad I didn’t. After observing some more experienced barterers and with a little bit of practice I later got a much nicer Moroccan teapot for only 150 dirham (originally suggested to me at a price of 700 dirham). By the last day I was a pro barterer and was getting good deals on souvenirs left and right. Once I had the know-how bartering became quite a fun little game.
On the second day we made the eight hour drive out of Marrakech to the edge of the Sahara Desert. Sleeping with scorpions far away from civilization and any modern medical technology was more comforting than the unnerving drive out there. On the drive we had to pass through the High Atlas Mountains, which are not little Pocono-size hills, on roads that were built quite a long time ago seemingly without any regulatory agency checking up on their safety. There were a few moments when we’d be zooming around a narrow turn, another truck would suddenly appear, and everyone on the bus would gasp as our driver jolted the bus towards the rocky face beside us. After one close-call the tour guide had stopped talking and then two minutes later, without addressing our near death experience, he resumed discussing Islam in Morocco. I regularly found myself contemplating, “okay, if we fell off this edge and I held on reallyyy tight, what are the chances I would survive?” Most of the time I reasoned it wouldn’t even be worth trying to hold on. I’m really not kidding about how intense this drive was though, one of the Life Long Learners even started to cry because she was so afraid. Still, once we arrived safely we gave credit to our driver because he did a pretty good job considering the circumstances.
When we finally reached the Sahara I couldn’t help but notice its resemblance to the Mojave Desert of California. I had been expecting huge white sand dunes but I guess you have to go a lot farther for that—we saw a sign that said “52 days to Timbuktu.” I think that meant by camel, though I’m not entirely sure. I wondered how many people really make the 52 day drive/ride to literally the middle of West Africa/the Sahara Desert. Still, the less-intense desert was a great time. Camel riding was awesome but really a lot like being on a very calm, patient horse. Once we got to our campsite we enjoyed traditional Moroccan cuisine and had time to relax, watch the sunset, go looking for scorpions with blacklights (for some reason they glow neon blue under blacklights), and lay on the rocky sand looking at the stars for over an hour. That may have been my favorite part—there were more stars than I’ve ever seen, so many that I couldn’t even make out any constellations. I had never really spotted the Milky Way before but it was unmistakable out in the Sahara. And I saw five shooting stars in such a short time. It was just so cool. My friends and I couldn’t help but say “I can’t believe we’re in the Sahara Desert right now.” I think we’ll be uttering similar sentiments many times in the next three months.
After getting back to Casablanca I had a field trip with my Sustainable Development class to the local Coca Cola factory. It was pretty much your standard factory, but it was really cool to have an opportunity to go with a class to see what we’re talking about first hand, and to get to talk to some seemingly important business executives. After trying some of Coke’s Moroccan products I toured around the souks of Casablanca with a pack of strong Semester at Sea guys as my body guards. I was later very glad I had brought those guys along. My “extended family” on the ship (one of the nurses and her fifteen year old daughter) had been navigating the same souks when they were confronted by a local waving a kitchen knife around. Luckily they were wearing their money belt (as we all do, really cool, I know), because the man just ran off with their camera bag and not their passports, credit cards, and cash too. Needless to say they were shaken up but crime is a reality you have to face when traveling in such poor countries, and they were very glad to be back on the ship safe and with their passports.
Now we’re back into classes which isn’t too bad. Though being in the countries having such new experiences is always amazing, it’s still nice every time we have to come back to the ship which really feels like a home to us now. And as good as the Moroccan cuisine was we were definitely ready for some standard “American” food. [I have to admit, on the last day in Morocco a friend and I snuck away to grab some of the local Pizza Hut.] In addition to enjoying the American food here on the ship I am now enjoying my downtime taking afternoon naps; sunbathing on the seventh deck; playing cards, scrabble, and mafia with friends; and watching the Disney movie channel which is usually the only one of our five channels that has anything entertaining on it.
In just three days we’ll be in Ghana! I’m not sure what to expect but I know that Ghana is straight up West Africa so it should be interesting. Wish me luck!
svc
On arrival to Casablanca all that was in sight were shipyards and mountains of phosphorus exposed to the open air (in case you don’t know, phosphorus particulate matter is not something you want regularly inhaled by the population of your country’s largest city, but there it was regardless). To add to the negative image already painted by Morocco’s largest port, Semester at Sea said they hired a shuttle bus so that we didn’t have to risk the walk through Casablanca’s shady shipyards.
Though intimidating at first, Morocco turned out to be an amazing experience. I went on a trip arranged by Semester at Sea to Marrakech, Morocco’s most visited city, and into the Sahara Desert for a “camel trek” and overnight stay in a nomad tent. It was awesome, just at little unnerving at times and, for lack of a better word, crazy.
The first day in Morocco we went to the “souks” of Marrakech. These are little shops lined up close together in the old part of the city where locals sell crafts and foods, often to tourists like us. I was traveling with three friends of mine and in that moment I’m pretty sure they kept me from being ripped off and/or kidnapped. It was so overwhelming at first—there were people shouting at me in both French and English telling me to “just look,” motorcycles and donkey-drawn wagons whizzing by me in the tiny alleyways, and in every direction there were Moroccans, of whom we were told to always be extremely skeptical. [In the pre-port lecture they said always have your purse on the side away from the street so people in cars couldn’t snatch it as they drive by and they said to never hold plastic bags only by the handles because the plastic could be ripped right out of your fingers.]
We had been told that the locals would really try to rip us off in the souks and that they would barter down to a third of the price they originally suggested, but I still had no idea of the value of anything they were selling. Was a Moroccan teapot really worth 300 dirham as the guy had repeatedly told me was a “very good deal” in his broken English? Clearly no, but being from the US I was not used to negotiating the price of goods I buy. In this hectic situation on the first day, I decided not to buy anything and I am very glad I didn’t. After observing some more experienced barterers and with a little bit of practice I later got a much nicer Moroccan teapot for only 150 dirham (originally suggested to me at a price of 700 dirham). By the last day I was a pro barterer and was getting good deals on souvenirs left and right. Once I had the know-how bartering became quite a fun little game.
On the second day we made the eight hour drive out of Marrakech to the edge of the Sahara Desert. Sleeping with scorpions far away from civilization and any modern medical technology was more comforting than the unnerving drive out there. On the drive we had to pass through the High Atlas Mountains, which are not little Pocono-size hills, on roads that were built quite a long time ago seemingly without any regulatory agency checking up on their safety. There were a few moments when we’d be zooming around a narrow turn, another truck would suddenly appear, and everyone on the bus would gasp as our driver jolted the bus towards the rocky face beside us. After one close-call the tour guide had stopped talking and then two minutes later, without addressing our near death experience, he resumed discussing Islam in Morocco. I regularly found myself contemplating, “okay, if we fell off this edge and I held on reallyyy tight, what are the chances I would survive?” Most of the time I reasoned it wouldn’t even be worth trying to hold on. I’m really not kidding about how intense this drive was though, one of the Life Long Learners even started to cry because she was so afraid. Still, once we arrived safely we gave credit to our driver because he did a pretty good job considering the circumstances.
When we finally reached the Sahara I couldn’t help but notice its resemblance to the Mojave Desert of California. I had been expecting huge white sand dunes but I guess you have to go a lot farther for that—we saw a sign that said “52 days to Timbuktu.” I think that meant by camel, though I’m not entirely sure. I wondered how many people really make the 52 day drive/ride to literally the middle of West Africa/the Sahara Desert. Still, the less-intense desert was a great time. Camel riding was awesome but really a lot like being on a very calm, patient horse. Once we got to our campsite we enjoyed traditional Moroccan cuisine and had time to relax, watch the sunset, go looking for scorpions with blacklights (for some reason they glow neon blue under blacklights), and lay on the rocky sand looking at the stars for over an hour. That may have been my favorite part—there were more stars than I’ve ever seen, so many that I couldn’t even make out any constellations. I had never really spotted the Milky Way before but it was unmistakable out in the Sahara. And I saw five shooting stars in such a short time. It was just so cool. My friends and I couldn’t help but say “I can’t believe we’re in the Sahara Desert right now.” I think we’ll be uttering similar sentiments many times in the next three months.
After getting back to Casablanca I had a field trip with my Sustainable Development class to the local Coca Cola factory. It was pretty much your standard factory, but it was really cool to have an opportunity to go with a class to see what we’re talking about first hand, and to get to talk to some seemingly important business executives. After trying some of Coke’s Moroccan products I toured around the souks of Casablanca with a pack of strong Semester at Sea guys as my body guards. I was later very glad I had brought those guys along. My “extended family” on the ship (one of the nurses and her fifteen year old daughter) had been navigating the same souks when they were confronted by a local waving a kitchen knife around. Luckily they were wearing their money belt (as we all do, really cool, I know), because the man just ran off with their camera bag and not their passports, credit cards, and cash too. Needless to say they were shaken up but crime is a reality you have to face when traveling in such poor countries, and they were very glad to be back on the ship safe and with their passports.
Now we’re back into classes which isn’t too bad. Though being in the countries having such new experiences is always amazing, it’s still nice every time we have to come back to the ship which really feels like a home to us now. And as good as the Moroccan cuisine was we were definitely ready for some standard “American” food. [I have to admit, on the last day in Morocco a friend and I snuck away to grab some of the local Pizza Hut.] In addition to enjoying the American food here on the ship I am now enjoying my downtime taking afternoon naps; sunbathing on the seventh deck; playing cards, scrabble, and mafia with friends; and watching the Disney movie channel which is usually the only one of our five channels that has anything entertaining on it.
In just three days we’ll be in Ghana! I’m not sure what to expect but I know that Ghana is straight up West Africa so it should be interesting. Wish me luck!
svc
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Espana
Hello all!
I am back aboard the MV Explorer after four days in our first port of Spain! Though it’s disappointing to have to leave already it’s about time I catch up on my sleep. Spaniard’s definitely know how to party… no one in southern Spain sleeps until 6:00 am and when you have to wake up to catch a bus at 9:00 this makes for a long day. The Spanish guest lecturer we had onboard our ship suggests that perhaps this is the reason for his country’s relative economic inefficiency but this makes Spain such a lively place. It seemed to me that the lives of Spaniards are much more focused on being social than are our lives. I’ll tell you a little about that later.
Our ship docked in the little city of Cadiz in southwest Spain. To me, the coolest thing about Cadiz is its history. Cadiz is the oldest city in western Europe—it was founded 3,000 years ago by the Venetians. Since then it has been ruled by the Romans as well as several Islamic, Jewish, and Christian empires. It’s said that Cadiz was founded by Hercules himself; images of the Greek god can be found in artwork throughout the city. Cadiz accumulated immense wealth in the 16th century because, for a time, it was the main port for trade between Spain and the New World. Because the city is on a peninsula surrounded by high sea walls created hundreds of years ago to protect the prosperous city from invaders, Cadiz is also the only city in Spain that never fell to Napoleon. Sorry to bore you all with the history lesson but I just thought it was amazing that Cadiz has been around for so long and has been through so much yet it still remains a lively, functioning city. Another piece of the history that was shocking to me was the fact that people still live in these houses and buildings that are 300 to 700 years old. I mean, people probably died of the bubonic plague in those houses.
Some friends and I also went to Seville which is an absolutely gorgeous city inland about an hour from Cadiz. There we saw the third largest cathedral in the world, the oldest palace in the world that is still in use by a royal family, and the final resting place of Christopher Columbus (I’ve never seen a more elegant crypt). Not just in Seville, but in all of the cities we visited I was amazed by the beauty of the churches but even more than that I was amazed at the lack of religion in a place where people had once spent such vast amounts of money to erect and adorn these beautiful churches. We visited a huge old cathedral—one that even had the bodies of two five hundred year old saints displayed in it—on a Sunday morning! Apparently there was only one mass a week there and it was held in the afternoon. For a country in which 80% of its citizens consider themselves Catholics, Spain seemed to lack religious presence everywhere other than in its grand old churches which have truly become religious relicts.
Though the Spaniards lacked religious tradition, there was so much culture elsewhere. One of my favorite experiences was when some friends and I visited Ronda, a city high in the mountains of southern Spain. It was another beautiful old city with tiny roads that only Volkswagen Beetle size cars could drive through. There were many grand, several hundred year old houses crowded together on this mountaintop because it was where many of the wealthiest families in Spain, and even France and England, had their summer homes as it was known to have the cleanest air in Europe. Back in the day the best way to try to live long lives and be healthy was to have (1) proper nutrition and (2) fresh air so this is why they headed all the way to Ronda. And I digress again. Anyway, we just so happened to be in Ronda during the week they celebrate their fellow Rondian who created the sport of bullfighting several hundred years ago. To celebrate, of course, they have bull fighting events. Our tour guide said the worst ticket would cost at least eighty euros. I guess people pay that for an Eagles ticket, but it wasn’t the price that amazed me—it was how much of an event the bullfight was. We didn’t get to go inside the arena itself but we saw all of the Rondians, young and old, dressed in their best for the event. Young women rode to the arena in carriages pulled by lavishly decorated horses. The young women themselves looked so elegant. They wore long beautiful dresses and lace veils that our tour guide said were often two hundred years old—passed from mother to daughter—and could cost up to one hundred thousand euros for the very best ones. I was so surprised and fascinated by all of this because I had never previously thought of a Western country having such rich, distinct traditions.
One of my favorite aspects of Spanish culture is how important their meals are. It’s not just about great food, it’s so much about spending time with family [and in our case, friends]. One night some friends and I went out to a nice restaurant on the river in Seville for my roommate’s birthday. We got there around 8:00 and stayed until 11:30. No one bothered us to leave, in fact, after three and a half hours we finally had to ask for the check.
Drinking and partying also seemed to be important to Spainards, as I have previously mentioned. In order to be good travelers and really immerse ourselves in the culture my friends and I tried to do as the Spaniards do and went to some bars. I had “cerveza” down, but communicating our wants for other drinks with my broken Spanish required a bit more creativity. In trying to order my friend her whiskey sour we ended up with a shot of whiskey, a glass of ice, and a bottle of lemon Fanta. Still, it did the trick and we had a few good laughs with the bar tender.
And now, as if it wasn’t difficult enough trying to communicate in Spain where I actually knew a bit of the local language, we’re off to Morocco—a country whose official language was unknown to me until our pre-port lecture this afternoon. [F.y.i. They speak Arabic. Who knew.] It’s sad that now we have one less stop to see but I am so excited for what still is to come—cultures that will be even more different from our own. When we wake up tomorrow we will be in our first African country! And it should be something else--we’ve been told that us women need to cover up and that none of us should eat in public because it’s disrespectful to the 99% of Moroccans who are Muslims and are fasting for Ramadan. I’m going to need to brush up on my Islamic customs!
Well I need to get that rest before I embark on new adventures! I’ll be sure to write back soon to tell you all about Morocco!
Se amo!
svc
I am back aboard the MV Explorer after four days in our first port of Spain! Though it’s disappointing to have to leave already it’s about time I catch up on my sleep. Spaniard’s definitely know how to party… no one in southern Spain sleeps until 6:00 am and when you have to wake up to catch a bus at 9:00 this makes for a long day. The Spanish guest lecturer we had onboard our ship suggests that perhaps this is the reason for his country’s relative economic inefficiency but this makes Spain such a lively place. It seemed to me that the lives of Spaniards are much more focused on being social than are our lives. I’ll tell you a little about that later.
Our ship docked in the little city of Cadiz in southwest Spain. To me, the coolest thing about Cadiz is its history. Cadiz is the oldest city in western Europe—it was founded 3,000 years ago by the Venetians. Since then it has been ruled by the Romans as well as several Islamic, Jewish, and Christian empires. It’s said that Cadiz was founded by Hercules himself; images of the Greek god can be found in artwork throughout the city. Cadiz accumulated immense wealth in the 16th century because, for a time, it was the main port for trade between Spain and the New World. Because the city is on a peninsula surrounded by high sea walls created hundreds of years ago to protect the prosperous city from invaders, Cadiz is also the only city in Spain that never fell to Napoleon. Sorry to bore you all with the history lesson but I just thought it was amazing that Cadiz has been around for so long and has been through so much yet it still remains a lively, functioning city. Another piece of the history that was shocking to me was the fact that people still live in these houses and buildings that are 300 to 700 years old. I mean, people probably died of the bubonic plague in those houses.
Some friends and I also went to Seville which is an absolutely gorgeous city inland about an hour from Cadiz. There we saw the third largest cathedral in the world, the oldest palace in the world that is still in use by a royal family, and the final resting place of Christopher Columbus (I’ve never seen a more elegant crypt). Not just in Seville, but in all of the cities we visited I was amazed by the beauty of the churches but even more than that I was amazed at the lack of religion in a place where people had once spent such vast amounts of money to erect and adorn these beautiful churches. We visited a huge old cathedral—one that even had the bodies of two five hundred year old saints displayed in it—on a Sunday morning! Apparently there was only one mass a week there and it was held in the afternoon. For a country in which 80% of its citizens consider themselves Catholics, Spain seemed to lack religious presence everywhere other than in its grand old churches which have truly become religious relicts.
Though the Spaniards lacked religious tradition, there was so much culture elsewhere. One of my favorite experiences was when some friends and I visited Ronda, a city high in the mountains of southern Spain. It was another beautiful old city with tiny roads that only Volkswagen Beetle size cars could drive through. There were many grand, several hundred year old houses crowded together on this mountaintop because it was where many of the wealthiest families in Spain, and even France and England, had their summer homes as it was known to have the cleanest air in Europe. Back in the day the best way to try to live long lives and be healthy was to have (1) proper nutrition and (2) fresh air so this is why they headed all the way to Ronda. And I digress again. Anyway, we just so happened to be in Ronda during the week they celebrate their fellow Rondian who created the sport of bullfighting several hundred years ago. To celebrate, of course, they have bull fighting events. Our tour guide said the worst ticket would cost at least eighty euros. I guess people pay that for an Eagles ticket, but it wasn’t the price that amazed me—it was how much of an event the bullfight was. We didn’t get to go inside the arena itself but we saw all of the Rondians, young and old, dressed in their best for the event. Young women rode to the arena in carriages pulled by lavishly decorated horses. The young women themselves looked so elegant. They wore long beautiful dresses and lace veils that our tour guide said were often two hundred years old—passed from mother to daughter—and could cost up to one hundred thousand euros for the very best ones. I was so surprised and fascinated by all of this because I had never previously thought of a Western country having such rich, distinct traditions.
One of my favorite aspects of Spanish culture is how important their meals are. It’s not just about great food, it’s so much about spending time with family [and in our case, friends]. One night some friends and I went out to a nice restaurant on the river in Seville for my roommate’s birthday. We got there around 8:00 and stayed until 11:30. No one bothered us to leave, in fact, after three and a half hours we finally had to ask for the check.
Drinking and partying also seemed to be important to Spainards, as I have previously mentioned. In order to be good travelers and really immerse ourselves in the culture my friends and I tried to do as the Spaniards do and went to some bars. I had “cerveza” down, but communicating our wants for other drinks with my broken Spanish required a bit more creativity. In trying to order my friend her whiskey sour we ended up with a shot of whiskey, a glass of ice, and a bottle of lemon Fanta. Still, it did the trick and we had a few good laughs with the bar tender.
And now, as if it wasn’t difficult enough trying to communicate in Spain where I actually knew a bit of the local language, we’re off to Morocco—a country whose official language was unknown to me until our pre-port lecture this afternoon. [F.y.i. They speak Arabic. Who knew.] It’s sad that now we have one less stop to see but I am so excited for what still is to come—cultures that will be even more different from our own. When we wake up tomorrow we will be in our first African country! And it should be something else--we’ve been told that us women need to cover up and that none of us should eat in public because it’s disrespectful to the 99% of Moroccans who are Muslims and are fasting for Ramadan. I’m going to need to brush up on my Islamic customs!
Well I need to get that rest before I embark on new adventures! I’ll be sure to write back soon to tell you all about Morocco!
Se amo!
svc
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
At Sea!
Hello from the middle of the Atlantic!
I’m currently writing from the MV Explorer as we travel east towards Cadiz, Spain. We’ve traveled about a thousand nautical miles since Nova Scotia and have another 1,700 or so to go before we reach our next destination.
The closest point of land is a mere 455 nautical miles away—we are absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Yesterday I saw the first sign of life other than us as a cargo ship passed in the distance. Let me tell you, it was a huge deal. We were in the middle of class when someone spotted it and everyone immediately got up and ran to the windows and starred at it as if we were five year old kids who’d never seen a ship before.
With that said, it’s an awesome experience to live aboard a ship. [We are often corrected for calling the ship a “boat” because this offends the captain and crew—they command a grand ship not just a little boat.] We’re lucky enough to be on a huge 25,000 ton ship that was built only eight years ago specifically for the Semester at Sea program. It has seven decks complete with two luxurious dining halls, a library, a computer lab, ten classrooms, a basketball court, a gym, a spa, a pool, a bar, a “campus” store, and other great facilities.
Though all the common areas in the ship are extremely nice I can’t say our cabins are as high class. My roommate and I joke that our room is a closet they converted to living quarters. We’re on the inside without a window so when you wake up it’s impossible to know whether it is 5:00 in the morning or noon. Still, it’s really not awful—we have our own bathroom and everything we really need. I guess that’s just the price you pay for living aboard a traveling vessel.
Even though we have everything you’d need at a normal college campus it’s impossible to forget that we live aboard a ship. The most shocking part of the experience for me thus far is how much the ship sways back and forth. The seas are relatively calm and the MV Explorer is pretty large but there’s never a time when you can’t feel the movement. I can’t really describe feeling but you feel as if you’re going to tip over in your chair yet your glass of water doesn’t slide from the table. It can be quite entertaining to watch groups of people walking down the hallway as they simultaneously move from side to side and sometimes collide with walls.
Our ship is home to almost 900 people. There are about 550 students from all over the US, around 40 professors, another 15 or so staff, the families of the faculty and staff, 30 or 40 “life-long-learners” [who are mostly retired people interested in learning and helping us to learn so they pay to join our voyage], and about 200 crew members. It’s great getting to interact with the professors’ young children and the friendly and wise life-long-learners who sit in on our classes and eat with us. The crew are also great. They are truly from all over the world: the UK, China, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many many more places. [Our Captain is British--I always imagine that our ship would be on fire or sinking and we'd still hear his calm, clear British accent over the loud speaker. Before I met him I thought that all of the announcements were recordings.] Every day our beds are made, our rooms cleaned, our food served to us, and our plates are cleared by the friendly and seeming very happy crew. Life is good.
Really everyone I've encountered thus far has been awesome. All of the students are extremely friendly, outgoing people. The first night I flew into Canada I ran into other SAS students at the airport (it was pretty clear which kids were students as there aren’t many people that regularly fly into in the little city of Halifax). Immediately we were all talking and a few Dartmouth kids let me crash with them in their hotel so I didn’t have to look around for a place to stay at midnight. The next morning I was outside of the hotel waiting for a cab when a family from Geneseo, NY spotted me with my two huge duffel bags on wheels and offered to give me a ride to the ship since they were taking their daughter there as well. This open kindness amongst people is so common onboard. The life-long-learners really want to get to know students, as I said before crew are always cheery, the professors and their families are extremely glad to be here (it’s actually harder for a professor to get accepted to the program than it is for students), and obviously all of the students are stoked on traveling around the world with five hundred kids their age. As we sit out on the back dock watching the sunset and chatting we can’t help but occasionally throw in “I can’t believe we’re here right now.” It really is the coolest trip—we’re all so excited to be here even though for the time being “here” is precisely in the middle of nowhere.
There’s so much to tell you all about this extremely new experience for me but so much I need to get to (yes, somehow they keep us busy even though we’re isolated to a single environment in the middle of the open ocean). I’ll be sure to write again soon when I get a chance and when I have some more new and exciting things to tell you all about.
Thanks for following!
svc
I’m currently writing from the MV Explorer as we travel east towards Cadiz, Spain. We’ve traveled about a thousand nautical miles since Nova Scotia and have another 1,700 or so to go before we reach our next destination.
The closest point of land is a mere 455 nautical miles away—we are absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Yesterday I saw the first sign of life other than us as a cargo ship passed in the distance. Let me tell you, it was a huge deal. We were in the middle of class when someone spotted it and everyone immediately got up and ran to the windows and starred at it as if we were five year old kids who’d never seen a ship before.
With that said, it’s an awesome experience to live aboard a ship. [We are often corrected for calling the ship a “boat” because this offends the captain and crew—they command a grand ship not just a little boat.] We’re lucky enough to be on a huge 25,000 ton ship that was built only eight years ago specifically for the Semester at Sea program. It has seven decks complete with two luxurious dining halls, a library, a computer lab, ten classrooms, a basketball court, a gym, a spa, a pool, a bar, a “campus” store, and other great facilities.
Though all the common areas in the ship are extremely nice I can’t say our cabins are as high class. My roommate and I joke that our room is a closet they converted to living quarters. We’re on the inside without a window so when you wake up it’s impossible to know whether it is 5:00 in the morning or noon. Still, it’s really not awful—we have our own bathroom and everything we really need. I guess that’s just the price you pay for living aboard a traveling vessel.
Even though we have everything you’d need at a normal college campus it’s impossible to forget that we live aboard a ship. The most shocking part of the experience for me thus far is how much the ship sways back and forth. The seas are relatively calm and the MV Explorer is pretty large but there’s never a time when you can’t feel the movement. I can’t really describe feeling but you feel as if you’re going to tip over in your chair yet your glass of water doesn’t slide from the table. It can be quite entertaining to watch groups of people walking down the hallway as they simultaneously move from side to side and sometimes collide with walls.
Our ship is home to almost 900 people. There are about 550 students from all over the US, around 40 professors, another 15 or so staff, the families of the faculty and staff, 30 or 40 “life-long-learners” [who are mostly retired people interested in learning and helping us to learn so they pay to join our voyage], and about 200 crew members. It’s great getting to interact with the professors’ young children and the friendly and wise life-long-learners who sit in on our classes and eat with us. The crew are also great. They are truly from all over the world: the UK, China, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many many more places. [Our Captain is British--I always imagine that our ship would be on fire or sinking and we'd still hear his calm, clear British accent over the loud speaker. Before I met him I thought that all of the announcements were recordings.] Every day our beds are made, our rooms cleaned, our food served to us, and our plates are cleared by the friendly and seeming very happy crew. Life is good.
Really everyone I've encountered thus far has been awesome. All of the students are extremely friendly, outgoing people. The first night I flew into Canada I ran into other SAS students at the airport (it was pretty clear which kids were students as there aren’t many people that regularly fly into in the little city of Halifax). Immediately we were all talking and a few Dartmouth kids let me crash with them in their hotel so I didn’t have to look around for a place to stay at midnight. The next morning I was outside of the hotel waiting for a cab when a family from Geneseo, NY spotted me with my two huge duffel bags on wheels and offered to give me a ride to the ship since they were taking their daughter there as well. This open kindness amongst people is so common onboard. The life-long-learners really want to get to know students, as I said before crew are always cheery, the professors and their families are extremely glad to be here (it’s actually harder for a professor to get accepted to the program than it is for students), and obviously all of the students are stoked on traveling around the world with five hundred kids their age. As we sit out on the back dock watching the sunset and chatting we can’t help but occasionally throw in “I can’t believe we’re here right now.” It really is the coolest trip—we’re all so excited to be here even though for the time being “here” is precisely in the middle of nowhere.
There’s so much to tell you all about this extremely new experience for me but so much I need to get to (yes, somehow they keep us busy even though we’re isolated to a single environment in the middle of the open ocean). I’ll be sure to write again soon when I get a chance and when I have some more new and exciting things to tell you all about.
Thanks for following!
svc
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Pre-Voyage
Hey friends and family!
I set up this blog to keep you all updated on what I’m up to this Fall as I circumnavigate the globe on my Semester at Sea voyage!
For those of you who don’t know much about what I’m doing, this Fall I am studying abroad in a rather unique way. The University of Virginia has a program called “Semester at Sea” on which you travel around the world (literally) on a large ship with 700 other students and faculty. Yes, we take real classes and actually do school work but we also have the time we’re docked in each port city to ourselves to explore the different countries.
I’m not really the blogging-type but it’s going to be difficult [and expensive] for me to contact any of you individually while abroad so I figured a blog would be the best and easiest way to update all of you at once. I’m sure I’ll be really busy but I’m going to try to keep this blog as up-to-date as possible. Also, if you need to contact me or just want to say hello the best way would be via e-mail (sarahvancleve@gmail.com).
My Fall 2009 voyage is planned as follows:
- Depart Halifax, Canada on August 28th
- Cadiz, Spain
- Casablanca, Morocco + Camel Riding in the Sahara!
- Accra, Ghana + Togo and Benin
- Cape Town, South Africa + Safari near Johannesburg!
- Port Louis, Mauritius
- Chennai, India
- Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam + the Mekong Delta
- Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, China
- Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kobe, Japan
- Oahu and the Big Island, Hawaii
- Arrive in San Diego on December 14th
- Then back to the East Coast for less than two weeks before snowboard season begins in Mammoth, CA!
Obviously there’s not much to tell you all at this point. Everything is packed and ready to go. I fly up to Halifax this evening, board the ship tomorrow, and then start the trek across the Atlantic. Of course last minute anxiety is kicking in--have I packed everything I need? what if my roommate is awful? is everyone on the ship going to get seasick when that hurricane traveling up the east coast hits us?--but I know that I have the most important things (passport, visas, credit cards, and the best immunity to exotic diseases that the developed world can supply) so I'm confident that everything will work out and I'm extremely excited to start this once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Well, I'm sure I'll have more exciting news once I've actually been “at sea” and in other countries but I hope you all get a chance every once in a while to check out what I’m doing this Fall.
Check back soon!
svc
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