A Year Later.

Well it's been months and months. I've finished up at CNU, moved back home to Northern Virginia, and now... I'm not totally sure. Semester at Sea was the most life changing thing I've ever done (and quite possibly will ever do. What's it mean if you've peaked at 20? Ouch) and I really do miss it nearly every day. I have some regrets like not spending a little more time researching where I'd go and what I'd do in each port, never finishing the 3rd blog for Japan (whoops!), and maybe even spending a little less time going out with friends and partying. Honestly though, I can't imagine it any other way; I met most those locals at bars and impromptu spots I'd never have planned to be. I saw the heart of those countries in the faces of the drag queens in Cadiz, in the wandering hungry kids in Guatemala, in our bartender Chuck Norris in South Africa. It's corny but I'm so thankful for every single person I met along the way - the best and the worst - because they paved the road wherein I circumnavigated the world and somehow found myself.

This blog was my means of writing down every detail as it occurred to me at the time (hence some of the frustration and foul language and more risque exploits) but it was all a part of my journey. And thank God for this blog because this completely amazing and impossible to explain time of my life is preserved should some of those faces begin to fade.

For anyone who found this blog because they're interested in Semester at Sea and want to know what they're getting into: it is the singularly most terrifying, unfathomably beautiful, insane, and life-changing opportunity. And a hundred thousand other adjectives. You won't understand or ever prepare for it before or during but if you can make it across the globe you'll find yourself returned an entirely different person. A world traveler capable of truly anything, and a person to be reckoned with.

If that sounds like something you can handle, or even if it doesn't, take the plunge. You won't regret it. https://www.ise.virginia.edu/asp/onlineapp.asp

I am...

HOME TOMORROW.

 

I heard they blast "born in the U.S.A." at 7am. Can't wait.

Guatemala!

Quote for the day from the dean’s memo:
Whatever you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. BOLDNESS has genius, power and magic in it. -- Anonymous

Guatemala was looking to be pretty exciting. Angie and her coworker Amie were gonna come meet up with me in Guatemala via a flight from DC to El Salvador and then onto Guatemala City (only 4 hours total from D.C.!) ISE told SAS that the state department had issued a mandatory curfew of 11:30 pm, and the whole country was kind of famous for crime that ranged from pick pocketing and armed robbery, all the way to child kidnappings. Honestly though, none of us knew what to expect – SAS scared the shit out of us in numerous countries; in India they made us wary of every possible terrorist attack. Guatemala was around the same safety level of South Africa, and though I never had any problems in South Africa, I knew lots and lots of people who’d been robbed. However, I’d never had any problems at all these past four months, so I figured it’d all work out. I was so excited in fact (and on a messed up sleep schedule from finals) that I didn’t end up sleeping until 5am, so after two hours of sleep I got up and showered and finished packing for Guatemala.

We docked far earlier than originally expected – around 8 instead of the originally scheduled 11am (thanks captain Jeremy!) But by the time the gates of Puerto Quetzal had opened and the shuttles to said gates had started running, it was 11 anyways. I’d gotten the heads up the night before that Angie and Amie weren’t going to be able to meet me at the port itself but that we’d find each other at the hostel she’d been looking at. I was thankful to get out of the port since we were in the same kind of situation as Laem Chabang in Thailand; the port was a good 1.5/2 hours away from Antigua or Guatemala City and there was no real city around the port itself. Plus SAS was geeking out about curfews and safety and had made all these rules about when we’d be allowed on the ship (only until 11:30) and off again (10am) but there were also some rule about sometimes you wouldn’t be able to get off until 3pm… I don’t know. I appreciate the concern for our safety, but in a country where a hostel costs something like an average of $4 per bed, there was absolutely no need for me to be anywhere around the boat.

Anyways, Allie and I took the little cramped shuttle that sat around for 45 minutes in mass confusion before leaving to take us to the port taxi area. This turned out to be another SAS sponsored lie though, because no actual taxis were there, and in their stead were massive tourist shuttles sponsoring tours to Antigua for the original asking price of 30 dollars a person, though pre-port said that a taxi ought to cost 10-20 dollars a car to be split between however many people we could cram in. We heard a rumor about real taxis parked outside of the port area but we had absolutely no idea where we were going and I wanted to get to Antigua already since I told Angie and Amie I’d meet up with them around noon and we were already running late. So Allie and I walked back towards the port center and hopped in a way too crowded van. Allie sat on the pullout chair and I sat on the floor while all the car parts I don’t really understand – pipes? Engine? Burnt through the Van’s floor and scalded my ass. Amongst about a billion backpacking bags and with a burning butt, for 15 dollars a person, I figured this was a worrisome start to my last time in any port.

The ride there we were seated next to a bunch of bros and hos who’d rented a house on the edge of Antigua and were planning to get, like totally wasted the whole time. For $1,000 dollars for two nights and two days, I thought they were retarded. The house was nice but nothing spectacular. One story and on the edge of town they were going to pay each for a normal hotel in cab fares alone. Not to mention there was no way they were going to see that much of Guatemala from inside their little pocket of fratboy hell. Also, considering the average income of a Guatemalan is around $3,000 a year, I felt like that money should have been better distributed throughout all sectors of the economy to lots of different families. Whatever; do you I guess. We saw them off and headed to the center of town to the hostel. Neither Amie or Ang were at the hostel when we’d arrived 45 minutes later than originally planned so I asked the hostel receptionist of a good authentic restaurant nearby, and we left a note telling them to meet us there whenever they got back. Both Allie and I were starving at this point since we’d had the normal crappy breakfast at 7 and hadn’t eaten anything since. So we went to the Café de la Calle Fontane (anyways that’s what I think it might be called – I forgot to pick up a card.) I’d asked our taxi driver what his favorite Guatemalan food was and he said chilerianos, or bell peppers stuffed with minced meet, rice, and vegetables, covered in an egg, and then fried. We figured that sounded pretty awesome, so we both ordered those, and Allie got a tumbler of the expensive Guatemalan rum she’d heard good things from, while I ordered a side of plantains with honey and cream and a Gallo beer. The chilerianos were amazing, very spicy but very delicious. There was a light green dish of chile sauce that I later came to think of as a ubiquitous part of Antigua, as it was on every table. The gallo beer tasted like a Guatemalan natty light, but I do have to admit, when your mouth is on fire, it starts to taste significantly better.

We’d found my friend Sarah throughout all of this and had her sit with us for a bit while she ordered wine (except we found in a lot of Guatemalan restaurants you have to buy wine by the bottle more often than not) so she was drinking a bottle by herself and eating some garlic bread. The restaurant itself was really gorgeous and airy – there was an open pavilion with tables around it and a second floor with more tables overlooking the center of the restaurant. The walls were yellow with pottery and poetry all over. We’d been seated beside the window so I was keeping lookout for Angie, when BAM! She arrived. We hugged and Sarah met back up with the rest of the smokers while Angie and I caught up a bit. This was also my first time meeting Amie so we all chatted a bit before wandering off in search of a hotel. The first place we were originally going to meet up at only had rooms on the first floor which Angie had read on trip advisor were really noisy at night, so we looked around Antigua for another place. We ended up reserving a room at a really cute place with three beds, a fan, t.v., and an enormous shower. I’ll just add photos once I’m back because I wouldn’t do it justice to describe it – it’s not as though it was gorgeous and extravagant. It was homey and sweet. Lots of plants and ceramics, hammocks and wood tables. Exactly the kind of place I wanted to stay, and all for around 20 dollars.

We went across the street and down a block to the artisans market – on the way we passed a grocery store where I pulled out some money (overseen by a couple armed guards) and passed an SAS student who said he’d bought a baby turtle nearby. We found the pet store where we figured he’d bought it and took lots of pictures of all the crazy animals. I’m pretty sure I’ve snapped photos of adorable puppies in nearly every country by now, but I still love them. We walked along the lines of stalls in the outside of the market and talked to a bunch of the vendors. Angie bought an awesome Technicolor Virgin Mary shawl thing with fluorescent roses and tasseled edges, Allie bought an embarrassing and yet kind of cool backpack that says “Guatemala” with the crazy textile patterns that are seen on nearly everything there. Oh! And a small interjection; in Antigua, you can actually see locals wearing “authentic” kind of clothes. In Antigua that means a lot of women in the same textiles of brightly colored, thick fabric, that they fashion into short sleeve shirts and long skirts to their ankles. It’s pretty cool. I bought a few bracelets and a couple necklaces. I haggled a little bit but I was really enjoying the vendors themselves – after a series of non-haggling countries and considering the last place I’d really bargained for everything was Vietnam where the vendors lacked any finesse and had no concept of polite banter and back-and-forth, I was excited to be back in my element.

We wandered around a little more and found our way inside a sheltered section of the market; there were still stalls but they were built into the sides of walls and were clearly sectioned off from one another. I wandered around some and found a crazy white blanket with hand-embroidered different scenes with fluorescent yarn. With scenes of little brown children playing around a see saw (this is a big thing for me. I can’t stand when art from a country with people who are obviously not white are depicted as such. It’s weird. And it perpetuates an even weirder standard of beauty that paler skin is better looking, which is just wrong. In India and Africa there were bleaching creams all over the place and all the models had skin the color of butter. That’s so fucked-up and wrong! Here we are in these countries full of absolutely gorgeous people with skin ranging from light toffee to a color so black it almost looks like dark blue. I’ve seen so many people with skin that looks so warm and beautiful that it makes me so sad that my souvenirs from those people look like me and nothing like them.) Moving on, there were also scenes of a quetzal flying over the three local volcanoes nearby Antigua. The quetzal is the Guatemalan national bird and a big deal. It’s a crazy-looking green thing with a long curly tail that they name everything after. Even their money are called Quetzales.

I haggled for a long time with the guy who started at 700 Q which was crazy. I liked it a lot but not 60 dollars. Eventually I got him down to 250 Q, or twenty dollars, which I figured was good enough. I hope when I get home my Aunt Bah could help me make it a part of a quilt since I’m worried the stitches in the back might become unraveled if I don’t put it against some more fabric. Plus I just think it would make a good quilt, haha. So during all of this haggling it’d become really hot. All the foot traffic combined with a hot day in Central America, and Angie said she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to step outside. Angie hadn’t eaten anything at the restaurant and I was worried about her getting lightheaded, so as soon as I’d finished up with the vendor I found Allie and went outside. We found Angie really sick. She’d been throwing up in the trashcan on the edge of the indoor market and was pale and greenish. She said she just needed to lay down back at the hotel so she walked back there and hung out for a little bit while Amie and I tried to workout a cab back to the port for Allie since she had a field program trip to the Pacaya and had to be back there since she’d already paid 90 dollars for it. We searched for a really long time but it seemed the lowest price we could find was $50 USD for the ride back. This is the kind of problem we’ve encountered in numerous countries.

When a whole town knows 700 rich white kids are coming (and don’t underestimate the fact that EVERYONE knows you’re coming and apart of a circumnavigating trip – I’ve had locals tell me our itinerary) things get crazy. We’re talking really crazy. They can charge us outrageous prices for whatever and since so many of these kids from the ship haven’t traveled much and are INSANELY loaded with their parent’s money, they’ll pay it. Thus setting the asking price for some things exponentially higher than they would be for me as a normal traveler unassociated with a program like SAS. Usually things work out despite this –except in the case of Allie with these freaking cabs back to the port. I’d heard one girl paid $116 dollars to get back that night so there was no way anyone was going lower than 50 bucks. Eventually though I found another girl who wanted to go back to the ship and said she’d split the money with Allie so they’d only have to pay 25 dollars. It was already about 8pm and they didn’t want to get dock time or anything for being late past the curfew so they decided to just go. A note on how sketchy this whole place was though: they paid their money to a travel agency before they left in a cab the company called with a driver that spoke essentially no English. The agency guys then chatted Amie and I up, told us to go salsa dancing that night, asked if I had a boyfriend, and when I said yes, he asked if we could have a one night stand. He then proceeded to give Amie a bag of macadamia nuts still in their shells. I was really confused.

So we left and Amie and I went back to the hotel to check on Angie. She was a serious mess and only getting worse – she was throwing up blood and she thought she’d need to go to an emergency room. Angie’s usually really good with pain so I figured if she wanted to go to a hospital that’s exactly where she needed to be, we got the name of a good private hospital and took a tuk tuk there. (note to travelers: tuk tuks are fine on the relatively paved roads of India and Thailand – however on the old-timey cobblestone streets of Guatemala they make for an even more harrowing ride…) We checked her into the hospital of Santiago de Apostal and they hooked her up to an IV. No one there really spoke English and so things were really confusing for a while there – though I should note it seems in extreme situations, like that of my being falling-down drunk at DC United games and sitting with Bolivian fans, as well as when my best friend is in the emergency room in Antigua, I miraculously know Spanish.

It seemed that both a billion things were happening and yet nothing at all was going on that night. They gave her medicine to protect her stomach before anti-biotics, but the anti-biotics never came. They tried to give her a sedative (maybe?) but they couldn’t explain what it was and Angie didn’t want mystery medicine. This is actually really interesting in retrospect since I took a class on patient rights and biomedical ethics around the world this semester. Remember when I wrote in an earlier blog about how American patients want to know every possible outcome, what exactly is going in their bodies, and when exactly they’ll be better, latin patients are fine with paternalistic approaches. But since all my FDPs for that class are long over and I am now technically a senior with a whole new series of courses waiting for me back home, I’ll be moving on now. There was no way I would be sleeping much in that hospital room (though they did let me stay thankfully since we kept saying I was her sister, while Amie got some sleep back at the hotel) and I wasn’t about to leave Angie there alone, so for the second and a half day I’d be getting 2ish hours of sleep. The next afternoon they finally called the actual doctor back who finally gave her the full diagnosis of two parasites, a throat infection, and a bladder infection. Like I said, she was a mess.

She really wanted to go home at this point, and I felt like she would be in better hands with a doctor who not only had her medical history and knew how to treat all these problems but also spoke fluent English. I was worried if she got worse there wouldn’t be anything else the hospital there could do considering all they essentially did in a day with her was hook her up to three IVs. We went back to the hotel and she left to take an emergency flight home on the flight that was leaving in exactly two hours. Amie decided to stay and signed up for a trip to Pacaya (the active volcano that’s something like 40 minutes from the center of Antigua) that was picking her up around 2 – we went for lunch at a little theater café down the street in the meantime. I ordered a sandwich that was essentially a baguette with garlic butter, pesto, actual basil leaves, and a thick slice of mozzarella, and fries with the Guatemalan version of orangeade. I mixed that green chile sauce with ketchup on the fries (spicy and delicious!)

Amie headed back to the hostel and I wandered around the city. I had planned to meet Allie from 4:30 to 5:30 in the central square of town, which meant I had essentially three hours to kill. I wandered all around town, bought a tortoise for Dad, and a pastry to give to Allie when I saw her since she’s obsessed (the bakery was actually called “Hansel y Gretel” which I found delightful and had a nice conversation in broken Spanish/English with the shop owner about which were her favorites. I prayed in the main church beside the plaza, I visited an art gallery and got to look around the day before everything would be unveiled, I escaped a guy who nearly crashed his motorcycle while trying to talk to me, who then parked his bike down the street I was walking along.

I waited in the plaza for Allie to show up, gave her pastry to a dirty kid who was looking for food in the trash can, but when it was 5:30 and she hadn’t shown up I decided to get to the black cat hostel where I told Allie to meet me if she was running late. Originally we’d planned to head to the earth lodge, a hotel of treehouses overlooking an avocado farm, where Amie would try to meet up with us later. I asked the information guy how to get there and he gave me a map with elaborate directions to go down certain roads. I figured I’d just take the most direct route because I was already running late and lots of streets in Antigua aren’t marked. So while walking along I began to realize I was essentially in the ghetto. Nothing was going on and it was kind of creepy. Remind you I stick out a lot right now. I’m in a bright multicolored dress and a yellow cardigan, with a huge backpacker’s bag on my back, and big purse on my arm, clutching a map. An old guy comes up to me and touches my shoulder and says something like, “Aqui estas muy silencio; aqui estas muy peligrosso. Something else in Spanish I don’t know.” Considering I have never taken a Spanish class and what I do know is pretty severely limited, I’m a little surprised I got the gist of what he was saying, which went along something like: “Here is really quiet. It’s really dangerous.” He was shooing me to leave but my hotel was on the end of the street so I headed there, which was really fucking stupid in retrospect, but I figured I was already in the ghetto, and to retrace my steps would mean I would still have to walk in the ghetto for 5 more minutes so I might as well be headed in the right direction…

I was at the edge of the street when two guys started yelling things at me. I kept walking. (Another side note, I got a lot more attention here than any other port by a lot. A lot of catcalls and whistling and guys staring. Sometimes it came in handy, like when I got really good prices from shopkeepers, and sometimes it didn’t, like when those two guys cornered me and edged me against the wall, talking about how pretty I was. I flipped out and started yelling and essentially sprinted to the black cat hotel that I could see from there. The guy there locked up the gate outside the hotel (lots of hotels in Antigua had big wrought-iron gates) while I sprawled out on the couch hyperventilating. We talked for a bit and he told me about how they’d increased security exponentially that month – probably because they knew we were coming and would need a lot more security. I know it’s usually not that great though; our diplomatic briefing guys told us there is only one police officer for every 1,400 citizens… So the guy calls the earth lodge people where their shuttle is and he’s told they’re picking people up from the other black cat hotel. This was the Black Cat Inn, which was totally different from the Black Cat Hotel/Hostel. What. The. Fuck.

It’s raining now. And so I walk back the safe route as outlined originally by the information guy to the center square and towards the right hotel. Remember I’m essentially running on four hours of sleep for the past three days, and am now walking in the rain after being harassed and narrowly escaping something that could have possibly been a lot, a lot worse, alone in a city I don’t know and that doesn’t speak English, my best friend was diagnosed with Lupus and went home on an emergency flight, and my cellphone doesn’t work. So when I see my friend Amy in the center square I of course burst into tears and dissolve into a puddle of mess. She was hanging out with her boyfriend (kind of?) and I had to get to the other black cat to see if Allie was there waiting since the Earth Lodge people were picking everyone up in 10 minutes, so I leave Amy and run there only to find the shuttle had already left and the asshole who ran the desk couldn’t tell me who was on the shuttle or the number of the place. I go to an internet café for a few minutes to see if anyone wrote where they were since at this point I was really over being alone in Antigua, dropped my bags off at the hotel we’d booked that first night, and talked to the guy working there.

I have to note that this man was the sweetest guy ever. I’ve been thinking a lot about how in Judaism there’s a concept of how the world is sustained by 36 people, no one knows exactly who these people are, and they don’t know they themselves are what is keeping the world in balance. I feel like in these past 4 months I’ve met a couple of those people – these selfless and absolutely amazing, beautiful people who keep the world right. This guy might have been one of those lamed vav tzadikim. He let me keep my bags there all the time even though he knew I wasn’t going to stay there again, asked me if I was okay, how my friend was doing, and constantly asked if there was anything he could do, anyone he could call, or translate. I left my bags there and said I’d be back at 8pm when Amie was supposed to be coming back from the volcano hike. I went to the center square to see if anyone I knew was there since I really didn’t want to be alone anymore.

Once there I met up with Amy, Stephanie, Scott, and Jordan. It was a huge relief to be around people I knew again… We all went to dinner where I was still a little too upset to eat but Amy bought me a beer and we talked for a while. Around 8 I met back up with Amie who had an awesome time at the volcano. I have to admit, I was a little jealous, since it looked so, so, cool. However, everyone I’d met who’d been up there had big gashes on them from the volcanic rocks and Amie’s shoe even caught on fire. We all met up and dropped our bags off at the hotel they were all staying at. Since they had 4 beds they said we could just crash with them, which was really generous. We went out for drinks at El Mono Loco since Amie was meeting up with Liz (Cassie’s roommate) there. It was like Senior Frogs all freaking over again. It was literally all SAS kids it seemed.

A redeeming quality of the crazy monkey’s though, was their 8 Q ($1.25) shots of rum and rum and cokes. We drank a couple of those each and talked to some people outside. One pretentious obnoxious Brit was just giving everyone shit – he made fun of the fact that I was wearing an I heart DC shirt (my sleep shirt, but considering we had our last laundry day three days before we even reached Guatemala, I was wearing it out anyways) and from around DC. I asked him where in the UK he was from and when I didn’t know where it was he said, “Well of course you wouldn’t.” He was awful. However, we did meet some hilarious police officers who wanted to chat us up outside. Seriously, I have become increasingly aware of the fact that cops love me. As you can imagine, this is an incredibly handy facet of my personality – we posed with them and I got to wear their hat. Anyways, we met up with a cute Brazilian guy who’d been staying at that first hotel and was much too old but really very cute, that Amie had her eye on. We also found Liz as she was leaving dinner and was headed back with a big group of girls to their hotel. She said she’d be back for drinks once she saw her friends off, but she never made it back. Later I found out it was because they’d all been robbed and groped at knifepoint.

Everyone else wanted to go home but Amie and I and considering I was running on no sleep and only lunch for the day I probably should have gone in too, but I was already out and I felt like I hadn’t seen nearly enough of Guatemala yet, so Amie and I went back out to see some different clubs. Also – I was really wary because it was around 11 already and clubs in Antigua close down by midnight and there was that curfew of 11:30. We went to Reilley’s, a really crowded Irish pub where we ordered rum and cokes and hung out with a gay Jew from DC (that shirt came in handy after all) and his Israeli traveling companion. We chatted and drank some and then headed across the street to club casaba. It was alright there and the dj seemed pretty good but there was seriously only like 5 or 6 people there and all of them middle aged Guatemalans. We stayed until midnight when everything was shut down and then headed back to the hotel.

The next day we slept in until around 10 which meant we didn’t have much time to see the rest of Antigua our last day in port. Scott arranged for a chill taxi driver they’d met to take us back to the ship around 1 – it was a two hour drive and over 200 students on SAS trips were going to be coming back all during 5-6pm, so we all figured we’d ought to be there sooner rather than later. We had breakfast overlooking the central square (fresh fruit with crepes and unsweetened yoghurt for me with sweetened iced cappuccino, fried eggs with bean paste and plantains with Mayan hot chocolate for Scott and Steph, and a plate of pineapple for Amie.) It was really, really good. We then headed out to a local emporium style place that sold all kinds of Guatemalan stuff. It was all sticker priced but the prices were fair and they had all kinds of stuff under one roof. I had $25 dollars left to spend so I bought a mask for my mom, some hot sauce for Million and my dad, a statue of the virgin mary for myself (they had a gooooorgeous old one priced for 60 dollars with dark skin and fingers so intricately carved you could see her fingernails, along with gold foiled robes and a huge intricate crown. Instead I bought a more solid big wood 6 dollar one…) and some other little things for friends back home.

We were running out of time so I hurried up and spent the very last of my money and walked to the square where we were all going to meet up and get in the van together. We met up with Carlos, our driver, and all piled into the van. No longer than 5 minutes into the trip someone asked if we could smoke and Carlos said, “Hell yeah. You can even drink. In fact, we can stop by a cheap liquor store on the way there – I know how you SAS kids are.” So Joe was getting drunk in the back off a bottle of rum, and Scott, Jordan, Steph, and Carlos, were all drinking really good rum. Amy and I drank a beer each but it was more because it was just hot out; I wasn’t really about to get drunk right before getting on the ship. I was way too tired. We get only a few miles out of town when the police pulled us over. Carlos told us to all put the beer and liquor between our feet because the police were all really corrupt in Guatemala. We were all legal to drink, and it wasn’t as though our driver had been drinking, but the police held people up and did weird random searches just to try to get money from everyone. They searched the sides of the van and the back and demanded to see if we had all the right equipment to change a tire and all kinds of strange things before letting us go on.

I wasn’t really all that worried about it, but it was kind of just the cherry on the weirdness of my Guatemala cake. Honestly, after so many easy trips and having spent so much time on my own in these countries it seemed as though everything was not necessarily going wrong, but just getting weird. It was a very strange trip. Despite my mini-meltdown and some of the tougher parts of my time in Guatemala, I really liked it there. There was a lot of Spanish culture, architecture, and influences in their food, language, music, and art, and yet it was significantly less expensive and with outstandingly beautiful scenery all around. It was a lot more dangerous too, but I guess that’s the price you pay – I guess it was an adventure to say the least.

Adios.

Finals are long done, Guatemala was great, and now I have exactly five days to do nothing but get tanner, watch movies, and come to terms with the fact that this insane and amazing semester is done.

See you in four days.

Today.

Today has been a crazy day. I tried studying for all my finals tomorrow but things have been too hectic. I'm stressed since I have one at 8am, one at 10:45, and one at 1pm, but I can't seem to make myself go over it too thoroughly. Instead I played spoons and talked to friends. Angie flew out today and today marks exactly 10 days left in the whole voyage.

Important Udates In My Life.

- Aiden arrived two days ago via emergency C-section! His picture is printed out and above my bed - I can't wait to meet him. Love you Vi.

 

- I have way too many finals all at the same time and am beginning to loose track of them all. I have twice in one day messed up the times for when things were due despite having done them on time and am terrified of the consequences.

 

- I never sleep at normal times anymore; I went to bed at 4am yesterday and woke up at 8:30, went to class and had breakfast and then slept from 10am to 3pm.

 

- I have never been more frustrated with this stupid ship and miss home greatly.

 

- Today I heard 40 tourists are murdered a day in the capital of Guatemala City a week - ISE has also notified us that the State department has issued a curfew for all American tourists in both rural and urban Guatemala of 11:30pm.

 

- I dream of nothing but home now.

 

 

 

 

Hawaii.

Hawaii:

 

Aloha everyone. As I write we are in the throes of finals and I am not managing my time well. I am not, as I ought to be, studying for any of the four finals I’ll be taking day after tomorrow, I’m not in mandatory global studies, and I’m definitely not writing my eight page paper for biomedical ethics on the Bouvia case and the right to die. Instead, I am in my room listening to Mickey Avalon and Amy’s Famous Beer Pong mix on my ipod and writing this blog entry.

 

So I know it’s to be expected around finals week, but I am definitely ready to come home now. It’s not that I couldn’t travel to another 12 countries – I definitely could – but the ties bringing me back home are strained as is and communication between the ship and back home is getting harder and harder. Violet’s C-section’s been moved up weeks early so I’m going to miss it after all, despite getting an early flight back home the day we disembark in Florida. It’s not that big a deal I guess but I thought I’d worked it out so that I wasn’t going to miss everything; since she’s moving away just weeks before my birthday in June, it feels like she’s slipping away from me even faster now. It’s been really hard this semester to be so far from family that I’m normally really close to…

 

Also I can’t get internet in my room anymore and it feels like every email I’m writing no one is reading it all the way through or is missing the point of my email completely. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t my only form of communication. So when I’m trying to work shit out back home like internships and I can’t manage things myself and am left at the mercy of everyone else – complete with time differences, incompatibility between different versions of word and pdfs, and sas’ super shitty email server – I could scream it’s so frustrating. For the love of God, and my own sanity, if I send you an email please read all of it and respond appropriately.

 

Now that I sound sufficiently anal and neurotic, onto Hawaii. We docked unusually early in Hawaii (6am early) and since we had face-to-face immigration stuff like we’d had in China, we all had to be up then. The night before was a little hectic and weird; I’d been hanging out with Allison, Allie, Grant, and Mike, and didn’t get back to my cabin until 3-ish, so when I set my alarm for 5:30 to shower and go up to 7^th deck for inspection I was over it. The Hawaiian immigration guys were unordinary sweet and even though it was way too early it was nice to hear only English (!!!!!) and be back in the US (kind of.) I looked like crap and my hair was standing up in all directions and the big Hawaiian guy inspecting my passport laughed at me when I came up to his desk and handed my passport over to him – I told him I’d slept two and a half hours and he said, “I went out last night too and got up at four. Welcome to Hawaii.”

 

I figured that was a pretty good sign. We finally debarked the ship and got outside the port terminal by 9:15, where we waited around for around an hour for the shuttles to pick us up and take us to the skydiving place. A bunch of kids had tried to get in on the earlier 10am time so we were a huge group and when the first little van came we shoved 21 people (plus the big thug-looking driver) inside. It was a long ride out of the city to the sky-diving place but it was fun since everyone was so pumped to go skydiving and we listened to the radio for the first time in three months and heard new American music. We finally get there and things start going really quickly. We all sign the papers that promise not to hold Skydive Hawaii responsible – no joke, these were the scariest-worded papers of my life. They, at one point, listed all the possible ways we could die; oh, and not just by parachute malfunction – they also refused all responsibility for the safety of the takeoff of the plane. Insane. Despite all this they were turning us all out really quickly. As each person was suited up they weren’t even briefed on safety until they were riding up in the plane before the jump. With something like 40 of us all there for the 10am time, something like 5 or 10 of us were suited up and jumped before they stopped everyone and said they wanted to wait before sending another group of us to jump.

 

There were unusually strong winds from the West, which was weird at this time of year, but they wanted to be really careful because we were on the coast so when they jumped if they were blown just a little bit off course they would end up in the ocean. A bunch of the instructors were willing to jump but it was all up to the discretion of the “tandem master” who decided when and if everyone jumped, and after one instructor wiped out on her way down, they weren’t about to let all of us go up until the winds had died down. This instructor wasn’t able to slow down on her incoming and slammed into the ground on her butt/lower back – they thought she might have a problem with her spine and called an ambulance for her, and when the EMT’s asked her where it hurt she pointed to her bellybutton and said “all the way through, into my spine.” It was a creepy, auspicious start to the day.

 

While we all sat around I called my dad and some friends while I got steadily more nervous. I walked over to the other company next to the one I’d booked with and saw Sarah, Grant, Mike and Lee – as I walked over there Brian and Allison were getting off their plane – they’d gone up and the door was open, they were all ready to jump, but at the last minute they’d been called back down because of wind. Haha.

 

So they all messed around and tried to learn to ride unicycle (I don’t know.) and I walked back to my company. As soon as I got back they said they were going to have to reschedule us all because the winds weren’t dying down at all. At this point it was like 2:30 and we’d wasted all of our morning and afternoon waiting around here doing nothing when we only had like a day and a half in Hawaii at all. I was pissed but we rescheduled for 6am the next day. I told the girls I came with and Allie that I’d find them later in Waikiki since our cell phones all worked (!) and that I’d see them later at dinner since I didn’t want to hang out all the rest of the day on the beach. I went to the smokers kids at the other company and waited with them to all reschedule. Their company said it would be 3 hours until a van would come pick them up and take them back to Honolulu – ridiculous!!!!! A taxi was going to cost like $140 dollars and the only public bus was still a 20 minute drive away. I wanted to go already, so I went back to my company and asked if he’d drive me back to Honolulu then and if my friends could come with; apparently there was “bad blood” between the two companies and he would get in serious trouble if he did that even though he’d have to take me back anyways.

 

I was starting to get really frustrated with the whole thing by then and was about to cry when the young guy came over and told Grant he’d take us all back if we were quiet about the whole thing (there were about 50 people still waiting for that van that was going to take 3 hours at the other company) – we snuck into the van and headed back to Honolulu. The guy who agreed to drive us was probably the sweetest man ever. He was a pysch major at the university of hawai’i and was just doing this as a weekend job to help bay off loans. He drove us back to Honolulu to grab our stuff off the boat and then even offered to drive us to Waikiki for free. Like I said, sweetest man, ever. He said he knew if we’d been stuck back at the skydiving place it would’ve ruined the way we thought about Hawaii and he couldn’t let that happen.

 

So he dropped us off on the main strip in Waikiki and we wandered down towards the beach, we stopped into an ABC – okay, footnote: in Hawaii ABC stores aren’t liquor stores, they’re kind of like 7-11s that sell EVERYTHING. Seriously everything. From one 7-11 I bought a white sundress, a coke with lime, some sushi, a postcard, a sticker of the islands, an I love Hawaii shirt, and a pair of flip flops. They’re really typically Hawaiian and I shall always think of them as a big part of how I experienced Hawaii… So anyways, we walk towards the beach and stop in a random dress store to look at some cute summery stuff when we ran into Steph! Everyone else was across the street so we bummed around for a bit and kept walking towards the beach together.

 

Sarah bought a bottle of tequila and beer while we waited outside looking sketchy… So being underage for the first time in three months really sucked. It wasn’t even as though I’m some douchey-alchoholic who needed a drink – however, to know that I didn’t even have the option – that every country except my own trusted me to make my own decisions. Whatever. Thaaaat being said, it’s not as though I don’t do what I want anyways. Speaking of which – I called the girls: Allie, Laura, Michelle, Emily, and Vanessa, and left the smokers to their own sketchy devices while I met up with the girls again at the resort quest hotel right on the beach. We all had mixed drinks of 151, pineapple juice, and Malibu and danced around the hotel room.

 

We ate a delicious dinner at Cheeseburger in Paradise and met Erin and Alex’s boyfriends which was very cute but made me a little jealous and bitter of their being adorable couples. It just made me miss home and all the people in my life I’ve been apart from for over three months… I know I’m so close to coming back home but for now it’s just been a little difficult missing them so much. Anyways, we walked to the international market since it stayed open until 11. What a cool place! It was filled with little stalls in the middle of a paved area between two rows of shops with all kinds of stuff being sold. Lots of jewelry, wind chimes, clothes, and normal cheesy souvenirs. I bought a few stuff for ang, and my dad and mom and a necklace with Hawaiian sand and a pearlized turtle in a block of black Lucite. It’s a little weird but cool. 

 

We met up with the same Japan crew member I had so much fun with – I’ll call her/him Pepsi for the sake of anonymity. So Pepsi says to meet up with them and a couple other crew members at a tiny club in the middle of nowhere. Once we get there I went to hand my ID over and the huge Samoan bouncer guy puts two huge X’s on my hands (so weird) and holds my ID up to my face. Then he says he’s going to keep my ID with him at the front until I leave and if anyone sees me drinking anything not from a waterbottle or if they want to come over and sniff my waterbottle and it’s not water they were going to keep my ID and then give it to the police. Crazy, huh? Stuff like that doesn’t even happen in Virginia. I asked him if he was the bouncer for the rest of the night and he said, “Maybe, why?” so I said, “Because how am I supposed to know if I can trust you with my ID or if the next bouncer decides I don’t look like my photo and doesn’t want to give it back?” (Honestly, it was a sketchy little club and I was paying a 10 dollar cover charge to get in and I was pissed about the whole thing.) Then the bouncer says, “well that’s just a risk you’re going to have to take.” Isn’t that awful!? I would have left but we asked around and no joke – it seems in all of Honolulu there are only two clubs that allow people between 18-20 to get in. I have two months before I turn 21 and in all of my three and a half months of traveling nothing like this had ever happened. In fact in all the places I’ve ever been to even back in the states no one ever gave me such a hard time.

 

Ugh. So Pepsi and two random other crew members are there and we’re dancing in this shitty dead club where I am the only one who has to pay for anything it seems, no cover for 21+ and drinks are only like 2 or 3 dollars when I had to pay 4 for a bottle of water. I’m bitter and angry but enjoying myself none the less.

 

-         OOOOOOOOOOOOKAY side note. Allie never wears real shoes (or underclothing staples like socks and underwear it seems) so as a result she has developed some particularly gruesome looking blisters on her feet. They’ve healed some but now they’re like skin shrapnel from once-deadly minefield-like boils. DISGUSTING. And, because Allie particularly delights in making me vomit all over the room, she liked the one on her big toe the other day. Then yesterday she picked a piece of it off and jumped on my bed while I was writing a paper with it. She then proceeded to “accidentally” drop it somewhere in my bed and I started dry heaving and hyperventilating so badly I had to run to the bathroom to use both the inhalers. She of course found this hilarious. Just one more peek into the fun-filled life of cabin 4151 aboard the Explorer!

 

So. We dance all at the club (called PlayBar for future reference) and we have fun and one of Pepsi’s friends, a crew member from Guyana is being sketchy and just generally creepy and at one point says “How old are you? You look like you are 15.” I’m obviously a little bit offended by this and say that I’m very nearly 21, to which he replies, “Well whatever you’re doing to stay young you keep doin’ it girl, you look good.” Terrifyingly creepy. If you think I’m 15 you need to not talk to me in a bar.

 

We dance to ridiculous music (the DJ was TERRIBLE) and we wander around a bit. We get the brilliant idea that what we really needed to do right then was to skinny dip in the ocean at the public beach in Waikiki… We wander over there and there’s like 10 of us now and we all run into the water in various states of undress. I, because I am brilliant and am a master planner, take assorted articles of clothing off but for some reason decide to go into the ocean with my dunks on. My shoes are soaked and have sand inside them but the ocean was relatively warm and I was in Hawaii. Life was good.

 

We all stagger out of the ocean to see that there’s a group of probably 30 or so SAS kids on the beach in the dark watching us the whole time – later I found out my friend Caroline saw us but thankfully it was dark enough no one was identified, haha. Michelle and I try to get into a bar, which was obviously a no-go since it seems all of Hawaii believed me to be a 15 year old out way past curfew… We even were confronted by a group of frightening Australian lesbians who told us we looked younger than one of their 17 year old daughters (this was all drunkenly screamed at us). Michelle tried to steal their takeout pizza. Things got ugly. We unsurprisingly decided to leave there and head back to the hotel… It was three am and my phone had died so I went to sleep. I had a 5am alarm set to wake up to pack before going skydiving.

 

So the alarm goes off and I immediately realize the foolishness of my thinking I was going to jump out of a plane that morning. I was a little hungover and it was essentially my second all-nighter in a row – I was in absolutely no condition to go skydiving, I’d begun to pysch myself out considering the ambulance and the winds of yesterday, and I didn’t really want to throw down $200 dollars to do it so I told Allie I thought I was going to pass. Laura decided to skip it as well, but because Allie is a baller who isn’t afraid of anything she went solo. I felt pretty jealous when I saw her pictures and video of her soaring through the air above the gorgeous coast. Oahu is seriously beautiful and she undoubtedly had the best view ever.

 

Instead though I slept in until 9, which is unusual for any country, and packed leisurely. We all got out of the hotel around 10 and since the girls were hellbent on some “American” food we found a food court with taco bell and a subway. It was really nice to eat some familiar food but I wasn’t 1/1000 as excited as they all were. I think I’ve been relatively lucky this semester not to really miss any food since the only restaurants my mom and I ever go to are Sushi, Thai, Chinese, or Indian. It’s not as though I eat a lot of McDonalds and Italian food while I’m home, so for me lots of the food we’ve been eating has been familiar fare. That sounds kind of pretentious but whatever.

 

Sooooo then all the girls wanted to lay out on the beach and since I don’t possess the patience to do that and get frustrated doing nothing besides roasting all morning I took the public bus number 19 back to Aloha Tower in Honolulu where the ship was socked. It was a long ride but it was cool to talk to some locals. I met a guy who tinted car windows who was cool but looked like he’d just been released from prison. Oh! And the bus drivers all wear little uniforms of Hawaiian shirts with “the bus” printed all over them with palm trees and surfers and stuff. So cool.

 

I called Allie and met her around the outdoor mall outside the port – I was killing time so I walked into a private art gallery where I had a long talk with the owner who showed me a lot of local artist’s work. There was a woman who came on vacation from Detroit and never left and now made her living painting Hawaii’s native flowers with dew drops so 3d I would’ve thought I could see my own reflection in them. There was the “Hawaiian Mona Lisa” with a young Hawaiian girl with thick wavy hair and a hibiscus behind one ear, whose eyes followed me all around the room. There was a series of paintings by a Japanese-Hawaiian man who crushed seashells and mixed them with his paint to create designs of cranes soaring through mountains and Japanese style waves along what was obviously the Hawaiian coast. The gallery owner said his family were kimono designers and it showed all over the traditional Japanese cranes in flight and the long twisted trees the artist used, but the landscape was obviously all taking place in Hawaii. So cool to see all these influences in the way immigrant cultures mix their own familiar practices with native stuff – I bet I’ll see America completely differently once I’m back home ‘cause of it. He told me to read “The Alchemist” after I explained to him what I was doing on SAS and how I could tell him it was changing me. Mental note to check that out once I’m back home.

 

I bought a crazy printed Indian-style wrap-around skirt like the black one I got at fabindia! From a crazy hippie beside the gallery. This one is red and blue and yellow and green and the whole thing is reversible. It’s incredibly cool. I got starbucks and sat in the pavilion and used the internet for an hour-ish uploading Japan pictures and talking to friends before walking towards the grocery store Allie went to print out all her “Thank You” photos. On the way though I saw a Marshall’s where I wanted to try on some dresses for the Ambassador’s ball; I found two, one is a frilly short black dress with a see-through over layer of fabric with a thin tie at the top and the other is a club-wear zebra print dress. I think I’m going to wear the black one with my platinum blonde wig from Vietnam and the big gold earrings from India with my black patent heels. Hopefully I don’t look like a crazy person.

 

Oh! And I also bought a pair of new dunks since I decided to leave the old ones at the hotel before we left. They had been through an awful lot (dune 4x4ing in Namibia and entrails in Thailand’s meat markets just to name a couple places) and between all that and the two inches of seawater and sand still residing in them I figured it was time to let them go. I bought them in Chicago a while ago and they deserved a Hawaiian burial. However, in the Marshall’s in Honolulu I found a pair of hot and light pink and pearlized white dunks in my size for 20 dollars! Maybe it’s Japan, but I’m beginning to really believe in the idea that if you stay zen and just get used to letting things go it’ll work out in the end. Like my dunks!

 

We walked back towards the ship but we only had an hour and a half before on-ship time so we stopped in for a last meal in Hawaii. The restaurant we went to was right near the ship and when we sat down we realized we were seated right behind the academic dean Reg Garret, his lover, and his grandkid! I actually can’t stand the man and find him incredibly obnoxious, but how weird is that! Both Allie and I bought kaluah pork quesadillas with sweet chili sauce. I talked to my mom for a little bit and then paid the incredibly cute bartender. It was amazing and a perfect end to my time in Hawaii… 

 

 

 

The Art of Zen: Japan pt. 2

Japan pt. 2:

 

We wandered around Osaka castle for a bit but we didn’t have the time to go inside so we just admired the cherry blossoms and took lots of pictures and ate the Japanese version of a sno-cone. We hopped back into the van and headed closer to Kobe. We stopped at a sushi restaurant first though that had a conveyer belt that went around with all different kinds of awesome sushi. Each plate was a dollar, or 100 Japanese yen, and we each bought like 7 plates, while the girls bought like 10 or 15 each. We had inari, the sweetened gingery tofu skin with rice inside. I munched on little rolls filled with tuna and cucumber. Unagi, or grilled eel. Mystery white fish sashimi, the best tuna of my life, and lots of green tea. The girls loved that we were with them because for every plate they got they could slide the empty tray into a hole in the table that counted how many dishes we’d used all together. For every 5 dishes they got to play a game that was near the table. Eventually they both won pins.

 

We headed back to the ship and said our goodbyes and then I grabbed my backpack and changed and met back up with Kierstin to take the port metro to the regular kobe city subway. I rode the subway for one stop (after serious confusion. The metros in Japan are EXTREMELY comprehensive, and there are about a thousand exits for every stop. Most of the stops on each line are numbered but it’s still really confusing since each station is like a connector and there are so many entrances and exits and connections to other lines. It took me like 20 minutes to get to that Shin-Kobe station stop.) Then I took the shinkansen bullet train to Nagoya. I’m still in awe of how much money everything costs in Japan. That ticket was so expensive, but riding the bullet train was admittedly, very, very cool. I like trains in general and it goes ridiculously fast. I want to say 130 KMH, but I may have just made that up.

 

After an hour and a half ride and three stops later I made it to the station exit with like an hour extra time. I started walking towards the exits when I saw a sign for the Marriott Associa – so convenient. So I went to the 5^th floor taxi entrance and looked around but there weren’t any chairs or reception so I figured I’d find where the check in desk and lobby was to find the smoker kids. I went to the 15^th fl. Where the lobby was and saw all of them – all 6 of them passed out all over the couches/seats and arms of settees. Once there they were tired of Nagoya though so we took another hour long train to Tokyo.

 

Once in Tokyo we got really really lost. We took the metro to an area someone had heard had good nightlife and three or four hours later we were still wandering around with all our huge backpacks trying to find a hotel or hostel. I heard some Japanese students using English and we latched onto them like white on rice (haha.) It seemed everywhere we went was super swanky or booked. They told us they knew of an area they’d never stayed in but they knew would be cheap. Once we were there though – after one of the students whispered to me “many people are coming here for the… make love.” we realized once more we’d ended up in the red light district. For every price for the night there was also a half price for one to three hours. I swear I’ve been in the redlight district of every single country on this itinerary. Even then though we had a horrible time finding a hotel. It was 7 of us total and everywhere we went either wouldn’t give us a room big enough for all of us, was way out of our price range, or had signs up that said they wouldn’t let rooms out to people who didn’t speak Japanese.

 

One place was  particularly obnoxious about it, the lady at the desk had a nametag that said “Bridgette” and in perfect, unaccented English told me I couldn’t stay with the hotel unless I spoke Japanese but that she was awfully sorry for the inconvenience. Most of these places even had little robotic light-up boards where you pushed the room you wanted and then just handed money to a little old lady behind a counter. Little human interaction required so as to expedient your hooker time I guess. Steph and Sarah found a banging hotel with a karaoke machine, huge flat screen and all kinds of other awesome shenanigans for $40 each for two people. Naturally we all tried to sneak up there.

 

Once we got to their floor though we saw cameras so we ducked behind a wall – we were found out though and thus proceeded a shitfit of epic proportions. The lady who was working went NUTS. There was like a 30 minute battle between her and Sarah, and when we tried to get more rooms she just kept telling us to leave. As Steph so wittily noted later though – it was as though they wanted us to all stay together; who does karaoke between just two people? Oh, and the reason we were so easily found out was because in Tokyo it seemed like every hotel demanded we turn our keys in after we left so that when we came back in we couldn’t just walk up to the room and wait for the person with the key to meet us up there. I feel like that would never fly in America – this trip has made me realize just how much Americans value individuality and freedom way more than any other we’ve visited.

 

Anyways, at this point pretty much everyone was unraveling pretty quickly. So we wandered some more and found Hotel Dan Dan down the street. For $53 each we all fit the rest of us in two rooms, and though they weren’t as nice as Steph and Sarah’s place, it was still pretty good. Nice t.v., vinyl red couch, ambient music, crazy black “wrinkle chapeau” brand condoms, and even vibrating bed. Juice and I stayed in one room together and slept pretty well – we even got a 3pm checkout time. We were still wired despite it being like 2am once we were all settled. Allie, Juice, Amy, and I went out again and searched for a cheap bar or club – we would ride the elevator to the top of some sketchy office-building looking place and just wander down the empty halls opening each individual tiny bar’s door looking for something fun. We ended up at an empty thai bar where for a $20 pitcher of shitty draught beer (Japan is crazy expensive!) we also got a bunch of karaoke songs included for free. We used the three or four Thai phrases we still remembered to charm her into helping us select such classics as “baby got back” and “ride wit me.” We crawled into bed around 4 but promised to all meet up again around 10am.

 

The next morning (by 10) we woke up and got McDonalds for breakfast. I don’t feel even a little bit guilty as it really was the first time I’d eaten any American food in three months and I was due for some familiarity. We wandered around looking for an internet café that might be open, and once again NO ONE spoke English. However we did accidentally walk into the arcade that “Lost in Translation” was filmed in, which was pretty cool. Those arcades could give me a seizure – they’re ridiculous loud and always busy with a billion Japanese people all playing slots or video games and all kinds of weird annoying stuff that is full of lights and is highly addictive. We got out of there though and after like an hour or two we finally found ourselves at Café B@gus, otherwise known as nerd heaven. Everything was sleek and black and comforting. For 3 dollars you got an hour of internet in leather chairs with unlimited free drinks and ice cream and other sorts of little snacks. It was heaven. Oh! And that reminds me; the vending machines in Japan are insane. You can get a hot cup of coffee, but you can also get a heated hamburger and fresh fruit and cold green tea and all kinds of crazy stuff. They must restock those things like every 5 hours.

 

We went back to the hotel and modeled our Dan Dan robes and the light-up whirlpool bubbly bathtub and packed our stuff to change locations. While we were at B@gus we decided we booked two rooms at a hotel in Roppangi (sp) a district famous for it’s accessibility to clubs and stuff made easy for foreigners. So we each took an exorborantly expensive taxi ride to the hotel and checked in. At first they wanted us to turn in our keys when we left but I started freaking out and saying I was worried they wouldn’t recognize Allie and I’s faces and I’d feel better if I just held on to it and they just let us go with them. We went out again to see the biggest intersection in the world in Shabuya and walked around for forever. Held puppies, wandered into a terrifying sex shop, ate Italian food, stopped in a tattoo parlor to get an estimate for Amy’s lotus and Japanese waves, and scoped out a condom emporium. We wandered for hours and then took the metro to an art exhibition opening party at a private gallery. It was called “Nude” or “naked” or something – I have to check the flyers I snagged, but they were all of blown-up giant portraits/photographs of naked women from the ‘60’s to the present, all from the same photographer. It was actually really, really, interesting. We had some deep discussions on the nature of art versus pornography and what is obscene. But then, like true college students we grabbed some liquor and headed back to the hotel to drink on our own since it was 1/100^th of the price. One back at the hotel everyone snuck up there and we drank in the room until we were all ready to go out.

 

We dubbed that night the “tu tu night” since Stephanie and Sarah bought tu tu’s to wear out to the club; this isn’t as weird as it might sound, in Japan kids dress very bold. It was another night of weird, fun-filled antics. The first club we went to was fun but only moderately crowded – I danced with some Turkish guy who got way too drunk and creepy and tried to make out with me and when I pushed him away he wouldn’t stop. No one was noticing because everyone was dancing and I eventually had to bite his tongue to get him to go away. So awful and it nearly ruined my night. We went to a couple other clubs and were hassled by strange East African hustlers who were standing outside of each club trying to promote it. Most of them had hidden cover charges and insanely expensive drinks (in Japan it’s not unusual to spend 7-10 dollars on a beer and 10-15 on a mixed drink. Not including the $20 cover charge to get into the club.

 

This meant though that we ended up at so, so, many clubs and after a while it all seemed like a blur. I remember Brian was wearing a green shirt and I had that green shirt/dress from Bangkok and he kept screaming “Green machine!” I danced all night and had so much fun. Lost the room key until it was found again. Thrashed to Avril Lavigne. Tried to speak French. Eventually though Brian and I took a taxi back to the hotel and crashed – the next morning, before our 10am wake-up call, we all had breakfast and decided we were ready to stop spending money and meet up with the ship in Yokohama. Amy stayed behind since she had an appointment to get her tattoo in Shabuya so we went with her there and continued on the metro to Yokohama. It is kind of amazing to think you could go from one major city to another on a metro, but Japan is nutty like that.

 

We got to yokohama and dropped our stuff off at the ship and had lunch before I met up with Allie to go to the Baseball game she and I’d bought tickets for in sale 2. We all walked to the stadium and she bought a jersey and I a tee-shirt. I asked a bunch of locals who their favorite player was and everyone said to get number 25 – Murata. Funny enough, he was injured and didn’t play once the whole game we saw. Haha. Anyways, we got there early and had our hands stamped and went to the 7-11 across the park and bought sushi and chips and beer. I even had my first sips of sake sitting amongst some tulips on a children’s playground. I couldn’t stand it though – it tastes a lot like wine, which I hate. Allie said they have a lot of different sweetened and flavored ones like sugared orange, but I never tried those. We went back to the game and tried to do some of the local cheers; for every player who comes up to bat there is a very specific and corresponding cheer and clap to shout him on, none of which I really got a hang of.

 

It was lots of fun but we’d been there since 4 and it was 9 so a bunch of the smoker kids and I left to look around Yokohama. We eventually ran into the crew from the ship docked across from us and they told us that they were working on a ship with 12 floors and only a maximum of 800 people, both crew and passengers, which is crazy to think of since our ship is only 7 decks and has a capacity of over 1,000 people. They did say though that the passengers on their ships were all Japanese millionaires who spent 5,000 USD a day to be on there for a minimum of three months. They actually were following nearly the same itinerary as our original one but from the opposite direction to the Bahamas. They wanted to meet Allie W. and I in some park later to head to some club together, which we said okay to but weren’t all that about – we went to a jazz club and a bar on our own before finding a weird traditional looking Japanese bar where I wanted to stop by to go to the bathroom, when we found Mike and Grant – Grant, stigmata Grant, and Mike who got realllllly beat up falling over the fence in Spain. They were both trying to chat up some older Japanese women and Allie and I sat with them and filled up empty mugs under the table with beer we’d just bought at 7-11 to save money. We’re classy like that.

 

We wandered around Yokohama and met lots of fun people – I swear I meet a million times more people while in port than actually on the ship. We even found the crew from that other ship – or rather they found us, and they weren’t too happy we ditched them. Allie avoided this awkward moment by taking a nap in the middle of a paved pavilion while I tried to get everyone back to the ship and away from some bitter philipino men. We met up with a crew member who shall remain nameless since this blog is monitored by SAS and the last thing I want to do is get anyone in trouble, but we had a blast with him/her – sweetest person ever! However, the way back to the ship was incredibly confusing since the port was uneven and two stories of planked wood in all kinds of crazy directions and designs and they’d closed down the two entrances we’d ever used and left one 80 year old Japanese man to explain to us we had to go back to the gate entrance on the first floor and find a sneaky way in once we showed our ids. MERCI BEACOUP SAS.

 

The night continues from there but only with more antics not fit for the blog until I’m back home and this stops showing up on updates.

 

One more part to go on Japan, and we'll be in Hawaii day after tomorrow!

Sleepshnizzle Kicking in To Kanye.

Tonight at "Explorer's Got Talent" show Jonathan Katz gave a funny comedic bit about how when he got home things were going to be really different - he'd throw down his bags saying "Dad, look, you can search if you really want to but you should know by now there's no alcohol! I swear!" and that at noon he'd hear "the voice" of his dad: "Ding din, Good afternoon, these are your noon-day announcements... Distance made good from the kitchen is 10 ft. with another 20 before you reach the couch." This may not seem that funny to those back home but this was HILARIOUS to us. I certainly hope my mom becomes the voice.. you know without the beard, or baby, or wife. Actually not at all.

 

Anyways, these are some of my more favorite recent Dean's Memos; thought you might like to see our school newspaper:

 

 

Today’s Quote:

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily difference we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee - - Marian Wright Edelman

                                

Next class day is A19

 

Laundry

Today: Deck 3 port

Tomorrow: Deck 2

 

Happy Birthday!

Gabrielle Flick

Molly Roof

Dean’s Memo

Spring 2009

Tuesday  - April 14^th    

 

Today

1400-2000:  Lost and Found:  There will be a table in Timid Square.  Please collect your missing items.

1730: Faculty/Staff, Life-long Learners Fiesta Social:  In the faculty/staff lounge.

1730: Movie: Planet Earth will be shown in the Union, presented by SPEW.

2000: Career Night:  Meet in the Union for an introduction.   Faculty and staff facilitators will then lead breakaway workshops in different specialties to give advice on classes that may be helpful, potential internship opportunities, what to do after finishing your undergraduate degree and how to get your foot in the door of your dream job. 

 

Tomorrow

2000:  Explorers Seminar

“The Dark Side of Matter”:   Inspired by the imminent release of the history/science fiction movie “Angels and Demons”, partially staged at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, the talk will discuss the real aspects of subatomic physics research, and especially the details of the new machine, the Large Hadrons Collier, due to start operation at CERN this year.  Sergio Confetti will present the topic in the Union.

2000:  Explorers Seminar

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Giving Hope to the World

 The South African TRC has been emulated by many other countries, including communities in the US.  Lavinia

 Crawford-Browne will speak on how the commission functioned, what it achieved and its impact elsewhere.        

 Classroom 4.                                    

2100:   The Persians by Aeschylus:  Attention Ship's Company! A play of war, death, despair, and woe presented by the Poseidon Players in  the Union.   Come see your shipmates face the fall of a great empire and the loss of their sons and husbands.  A second performance will take place on Friday, April 17^th.

 

 

Announcements

“Beyond the Horizon…”

The Spring 2009 Shipboard Drive has begun!

All Donation Forms should be put in the drop box at the Student Life Desk by April 18^th at 5:00pm.  There will be incentives for 100% ship participation and the Sea with the most participation.   Shipboard Drive Donations help to support:  new equipment and technology; student financial assistance; service visits, reunions, events, parent and alumni involvement; SAS Visibility and Outreach to Diverse Students, Staff & Faculty; and much more!     We hope you will consider a generous donation to the Shipboard Drive now and in the years to come. We thank you for your continued support and hope you will remember that future voyagers are counting on you to help give them that once in a lifetime experience that we have enjoyed and will never forget!!

 

Volunteers for the “Open Ship” in Hawaii:  We need some help in Hawaii.  On April 19th (our first day in Hawaii) we will be hosting about 40 visitors as part of an "open ship".  We would appreciate your help from 3pm-4pm welcoming guests and giving tours.  This is a great way to meet other students, share your experiences, and help us promote Semester At Sea.  Please email Luke Jones at assistantdean@semesteratsea.net if you are interested in helping.

 

From the Crow’s Nest  -   

 

Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.  Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is the source of these lines.  This couplet describes the thirst of the crew after the ship has become becalmed in the tropical Pacific, a misfortune attributed to bad luck brought on by the killing of an albatross.  Only 3% of the water on Earth is fresh, the rest is in the seas and oceans.  Of this 3%, most is in the form of ice.  Antarctica holds 90% of this ice.  At the South Pole, the ice sheet is nearly 2 miles thick.  (At the North Pole, the ice sheet thickness is a mere 15 feet.)  If all of the ice in Antarctica melted, sea level would rise 200 feet.  Only 0.036% of all the water on our planet occurs as surface fresh water, such as lakes, ponds, reservoirs, and rivers.  Groundwater accounts for 0.36% of the total water on Earth. A very small amount, 0.001%, is found as water vapor in the atmosphere, some of it forming clouds.   Obviously, fresh water is a limited and precious resource, despite the 320 cubic miles of water on this “third rock from the Sun”.  And where did all this water come from?  Most recent speculation suggests that, during the formation of the Earth, hot water vapor aggregated with tiny grains of rock.  These grains coalesced on a gigantic scale to form the planet, a wet Earth.  As the Earth’s crust solidified, huge quantities of water were expelled in volcanic eruptions and fell back to the ground as rain, forming the oceans. 

 

Movies start at 1400

Channel 2:     King of Texas (95 min)

Channel 3:     Spice World (PG, 93 min)

Channel 5:     Commanding Heights Pt 1

Channel 6:     Trials of Life 9:  Friends & Rivals

                                    Play 1400-2100

                        Holo Mai Pele: The Epic Hula Myth

                                    Start at 2030

 

 

Bridge Noon Report

At noon today the Explorer’s position was…

 

Latitude: 31° 40 mins N

Longitude: 171° 53 mins E

Distance made good:  1658 nautical miles

Distance to go to next port: 1752 nautical miles

Average speed: 14.5 knots

Sea temp: 18°C (64.4° F)

Air temp: 19° (66.2° F)

Wind:  South East/14 knots

Sunset today: 1853

Sunrise tomorrow: 0544

 

The one before it was pretty good too. Notice though the lack of diversity on the T.v. loop. I love my Spice World but I need something new every other day, please.      
 
  
Today’s Quote:
We go… we have a long way…no hurry...… just one step after the next.  Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV, it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it.  They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
 
 - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
                                           
Tomorrow – no classes
Next class day is A19
 
Laundry
Today: Deck 3 starboard
Tomorrow: Deck 3 port
 
Happy Birthday!
Nicholas Constant
Rebekah Ehrich
Dean’s Memo
Spring 2009
Monday  - April 13th
 
Today
2000:  Students of Service Charity Auction:   Live auction in the Union.    Come, see the action and bid on some very special items.    The Charity Auction kicks off the Spring 09 Shipboard Drive to raise funds for toys and donations made to the projects SAS students visit, student scholarships, games and other equipment used by students on board, Fairy Godmother fund, etc.   This is your opportunity to give back, be generous!
 
2100:  “The Office”:  One hour screening immediately after the auction in the Union.
 
Tomorrow
0800: Ship Photo:  This is for everyone.  Deck 7 aft.  Bring your smile and be ready to cheer!
 
0800 and onwards: Photo Day:  For all colleges and universities represented on board.   Wear your school colors or clothing with your school name to show your spirit and meet on Deck 6.   Check the time for your school on the schedule posted in Tymitz Square. 
 
1400-2000:  Lost and Found:  There will be a table in Tymitz Square.  Please collect your missing items.
 
1730: Faculty/Staff, Life-long Learners Fiesta Social:  In the faculty/staff lounge.
 
1730: Movie:  An episode of Planet Earth will be shown in the Union.
 
2000: Career Night:  Meet in the Union for an introduction.   Faculty and staff facilitators will then lead breakaway workshops in different specialties to give advice on classes that may be helpful, potential internship opportunities, what to do after finishing your undergraduate degree and how to get your foot in the door of your dream job.  
 
Announcements
Post-Port Reflections:  Drop written reflections on your experiences in the Public Folder under “Post–Port Reflections”.   Please share your special moments.
 
Thailand in the news:  Given our recent visit to Thailand we encourage you to read up on the latest violence there which has impacted both Bangkok and Pattaya and resulted in a state of emergency.  Recent clashes between yellow shirts and red shirts have killed two people and injured more than 113.  These violent demonstrations are a continuation of the tension between supporters of the current prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, and former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.  You can read more on the free news sites provided by Semester At Sea.
 
Note:   There will be no alcohol service on Deck 7 tonight.
  
 
From the Crow’s Nest  -    
We are crossing a vast stretch of the Pacific Ocean.  It’s about 3,861 miles from Yokohama to Honolulu along a great circle route (compare that to 2,475 miles from New York to Los Angeles).  Despite this great distance, we will traverse a rather small span of the Pacific. The Pacific Ocean extends in a north-south direction some 9,600 miles, and at its widest point, along the 5º N latitude line, it stretches 12,300 miles.  The Pacific is by far the world’s largest ocean.  It covers more than half the surface area of the Earth, clearly making it larger than all the land masses combined.  It contains 51.6 % of all sea water, compared to 23.6 % in the Atlantic Ocean and 21.2 % in the Indian Ocean.  Its average depth is almost 4,000 meters (about 2.4 miles), making it some 300 meters deeper than the other great oceans.  At its deepest point, the Mariana Trench, off to the south of our course, its depth exceeds 11,000 meters (almost 7 miles).  Human migrations across the Pacific began about 3,000 years ago.  People from Taiwan and the Malay Archipelago traveled east to populate the Polynesian islands, such as Tahiti, and went gradually on to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island.  Easter Island is only 2,200 miles from Chile, placing it far closer to South America than to Asia.
 
Movies start at 1400
Channel 2:     King of Texas (95 min)
Channel 3:     Spice World (PG, 93 min)
Channel 5:     Pride & Prejudice (PG, 127 min)
Channel 6:     Trials of Life 9:  Friends & Rivals
 
Bridge Noon Report
At noon today the Explorer’s position was…
 
Latitude: 32° 46 mins N
Longitude: 165° 10 mins E
Distance made good:  1308 nautical miles
Distance to go to next port: 2100 nautical miles
Average speed: 13.6 knots
Sea temp: 16°C (60.8° F)
Air temp: 18° (64.4° F)
Wind:  South East/27 knots
Sunset today: 1921
Sunrise tomorrow: 0611