Flying Everywhere.

Rough waters today. Incredibly nauseas. Crap flying all over the boat. Right next to Madagascar - Mauritius tomorrow.

Carte Postal.

Also, if you'd like a postcard just email me your address - jabyerly@semesteratsea.net

Animail Time!

Another friendly mail update! If you send something to me in the next two days I'll get it in Thailand!!

Be careful though, any later then that and it'll be lost forever.

 

MV-Explorer - Spring 2009 Voyage
ATTN: Jennifer Byerly

OIA GLOBAL LOGISTICS (THAILAND) Ltd
1168 / 20 - 4th Floor
Lumpini Tower Rama 4 Road
Thungmahamek, Sathorn
Bangkok 10120, THAILAND

Also, a Side Note:

I'm going skydiving in Hawaii.

Today in World Religons...

My professor was talking about Islam. She asked us what percentage of people we thought would make it to heaven and how that compared or contrasted with what percentage we imagined Muslims thought would make it to heaven. When one girl said she believed only around 40% would make it the professor asked the class why she might think that way. One girl said, "because if everyone was allowed in it wouldn't be special" (interesting, huh? And it plays right into what I wanna write my senior thesis on.) Another girl says, "Because you have to think about the people who break God and Man's law - heaven shouldn't exist for both a child rapist and a child. That just couldn't happen."

So then my professor says, "You know class... That makes me think of when I was having a little talk with Archbishop Desmond Tu Tu over margaritas. I asked him about the truth and reconciliation committee and how it dealt with justice. I said, 'You know, I just don't see it. To have a parent listen to their friends and childrens murderers - to hear everything they did, and then just forgive them... I just don't see where justice is served there...' and the archbishop responded, "Joyce, there are two kinds of justice. There is retributory justice; the kind where you torture your torturers and you can wipe your hands clean. You can remove yourself and let whatever happens afterwards fall into place. And then there is restorative justice - the kind where you let all your hatred and anger go, where you give yourself to the thread that helps to stitch back a frayed fabric that makes up a country and a community.' And now I can see what the Archbishop was saying. Maybe heaven is like that. You have to forgive and let go and trust the justice to God because he creates the community of heaven member by member for a reason."

 

How incredibly cool was everything about that?

 

I may not always understand people's motives or even personalities - especially on this ship, but thank you so, so much Oma, Opa, Mom, and Grandma Violet for making this really happen; for the first time in a long time I'm beginning to feel like I am in the right place at the right time.

Quite Possibly the Longest Bog. Ever. SOUTH AFRICA.

B7: 9 hours ahead of you all. Around the South Eastern edge of Africa en route to Mauritius –maybe.

 

As I type this on the very back of the boat, deck 7, someone is practicing bongos –no doubt something they picked up in a port…And there are probably 100 people laying out while the pool sloshes and crashes all over the place and floods the deck per every wave we hit –whereby some girl squeals and giggles. This is rockier waters than we’re used to, as rounding the horn of Africa typically has crazy waves. There are stewards pushing the water with giant squeegee looking things whilst singing. Today the local favorite seems to be that “Oooh baby I love your way”song.

 

DAY ONE: The first thing I saw once we docked in Cape Town was white people. Lots and lots of white people. We were docked at the V&A waterfront port (Jetty 2) and it was a very expensive, very touristy place. We walked around the mall (Amy, Caroline, and I) that was right there and enjoyed all the creature comforts we’d been missing from home. Things like air conditioning (while it may still be cold back home remember that we’d spent the last two weeks around Summer in Africa.) So anyways we’re in the mall, trying to find the craft market people told us was worth checking out, when we reach a place called the red shed market inside the mall. We wander around a little bit and I find the coolest, creepiest beaded doll ever and decide I must have it. We’re talking really very creepy. So creepy in fact, that when I brought it back to the room 4 days later to show Allie, she told me she never wanted to see it again. It was made by some women in a local township (townships are huge sprawling ghettos found in S. Africa and Namibia [and probably other places in Africa, but I haven’t been to those] where people live in ramshackle tiny houses made of scrap wood and metal. With 20% employment rates in these places community arts programs like the one that made my doll make all the difference in how they live.)

 

So I started chatting with the woman who sold me the doll –Elgin, from Turkey. She left her home 17 years ago because of the Kurdish violence and wanted to start somewhere new. She was completely bonkers too. When I was paying her I told her we’d been in South Africa only an hour or two and when I started paying her, quickly counting out the coins of Rand she goes, “How you know what money what?!”And I told her I’d picked it up quickly since Namibia uses some rand too, and she says, “This bitch! She’s so smart!”No joke. I was called a bitch within my first hour of arriving in Cape Town by a 40 something crazy Turkish lady standing next to a life-sized wire and bead sculpture of a warthog. My life is very strange lately.

 

She tells us to go eat a delightful restaurant upstairs called “the ocean basket”where they serve all the dishes in the pan they cooked them in. We all ordered fish an chips and a half a liter local draught beer (this is quickly becoming a meal-time tradition) and got a huge serving of two fresh pieces of fish lightly fried, a serving of fries, and a generous glass of Castle beer. Castle is good but more astringent than I like. If ever you’re in S. Africa I’d just stick with the local Namibian Windhoek –though I did meet some Americans who told be Stella was good too. Anyways though; it was an amazing meal and only 4 dollars for everything!

 

So then Caroline meets up with some other friends and Amy and I decide to try and find the craft market –we get there and I bought some baller earrings and a rattle for Aiden, bracelets for Erin and Grace, and a bracelet for Vi. We then took off to long street; one young interport lecturer named Dale who boarded in Morocco and was getting off in her home of Cape Town, told us long street was full of funky cafes and markets and it was a must see. Amy and I got a little lost going there though because neither of us really believes in maps and would much rather keep asking people so we can meet the locals anyways. One local was Peter, who was a taxi driver who loved to talk and talk and talk. I honestly don’t even know what it is we talked about, except that is took up like 30 minutes of my first day there and he was incredibly suave.

 

When we were leaving he goes, “Wait, ladies…I don’t have your names!”So we introduced ourselves and he says, “Why is it that Americans always seem to have the most beautiful names? And Amy! Amy is an incredibly powerful name to South Africa.”He told us the story of Amy Beihl, the American Fulbright scholar who helped to write South Africa’s new constitution at just 26. That she loved everyone, black and white, and that when she was brutally murdered while trying to pick up some black friends from a dangerous political rally in a nearby township, everyone was shocked. Four men were convicted in the stoning and stabbing of Amy out of the 300 who were rallied in the township that night –the men were a part of the pan-African movement whose goal was to have all of Africa in the hands of Black Africans and to run all white people out of the continent. Amy’s murder was, in a sense, premeditated in that the men were under orders to murder any white people who came to the township that night.

 

Amy’s story was incredibly moving, and depressing, but much more so when I did a service visit to her foundation in Cape Town two days later.

 

But anyways, back to that day, we said goodbye to Peter and started heading off towards what we thought was Long sty. We passed a big pretentious looking, all white with multiple security locks and gates at the entrance, private art gallery and when we just so happened to pause in front of the doors, they buzzed us in! We were looking pretty haggard I imagine, since there hasn’t been a laundry day in over two weeks and we’d been up since 6am for our diplomatic debriefing and breakfast. For whatever reason though, the gallery saw us fit to wander around and admire the incredibly cool paintings and prints we could never afford –the most striking of which was by a South African woman who did a series of what she called “African Mandala”prints. I don’t know if you can look them up back home but they were really cool. She’d taken clippings and digital art of politicians and flowers native to S. Africa and multiplied them into big symmetrical patterns like Buddhist mandalas (I hope I’ve spelt that right.)

 

After that we needed to get back to the ship because Amy had an FDP scheduled and I was exhausted. Being incredibly sick is just not conducive to exploring a big city. So I came back to the ship, grabbed some cheese and bread and rhombus tee and sketched for a little bit before falling asleep early. So the first day in Cape town was good and relaxing.

 

DAY TWO: Caroline, Cassie, Monica, and Rachel and I all got up and visited a township on the other side of table mountain called Iziko Lo Lwazi in Hout Bay. Our driver was a cool young Xhosa from Cape Town named Michael who was friends with a guy named Charlie that the girls had met their first day in S. Africa. I thought the whole thing sounded just a little bit sketch considering just how many people told us Cape Town was dangerous, and the townships in general.

 

Just to go off on that a little more –the first time I started to get nervous about Cape Town was when our diplomat was warning us of S. Africa’s critical safety rating by the US government –the highest rating a country can get. They  also dropped the bomb that people ALWAYS get robbed in Cape Town, often at gun or knifepoint, and that last voyage a girl had been raped there. Considering the HIV rate in S. Africa is just as bad as Namibia (roughly 1/5 people) if you do get raped you need to get to a hospital asap so that they can administer retroviral stuff that is 97% effective if you take it in the first four hours. Obviously every girl in the Union was near tears at this point, and very confused as to why this was only being brought us now…They also said whole buses of legitimate tours to relatively safe townships had been held up at gunpoint and robbed one by one. I wasn’t incredibly keen on taking an independent township tour with only 5 girls through a friend of a taxi driver.

 

I’d underestimated both Charlie and Michael though because I never felt anything but safe. When we first got to the township Michael got out and walked half of it with us. We stopped by the township church (made out of old steel shipping containers, cool, huh?) and met a community of women trying to financially empower themselves through traditional crafts life basketweaving, as well as new media like photography. An Irish photographer came there 5 years ago and taught a few women how to take photographs of the township they lived in, and then how to print them on silkscreened canvases. I met the woman who took a couple of the photographs and bought three little bocks of them.

 

We toured their community center where they’d built a sewing school to make local church robes, a computer lab they’d set up for children, They made a soup kitchen where if you had the money you could pay a small fee for a community dinner, or if you didn’t you could eat anyways. There was a house built atop the church where they’d made a safe haven for abused men/women/children, and a tutoring center for adults who wanted to improve their English. Noma, our guide who lived in the township, told us that the majority of people living in townships weren’t from South Africa, but poorer regions of Africa looking for a marginally better life. She said that the only reason the townships were divided was because they all spoke different languages –the Zimbabweans threw block parties and the West African French speakers would show up but they wouldn’t have much to say to each other, which is why English was to important to learn. It meant not only getting a job in South Africa, but also a means to understanding your next door neighbor.

 

The township was very cool, but also very strange. I’d seen third-world living conditions before. Shantytowns exist all over the world, and it wasn’t even so much the vastness of them –Khayelitsha alone has over a million people living in it, but rather the paradox of Khayelitsha existing only a few miles from wealthy playboy paradises like Camps Bay and the Waterfront. This weirdness is all over the place in South Africa, and even in the tourists who come here. One girl I know from the ship visited two townships here and then went to the mall and bought Burberry sunglasses. We talked about it yesterday in my biomedical ethics class and Professor Harmon called it a cyst. There’re like these dense little pockets of extreme affluence, where people can completely ignore how most South Africans live. And they’re all over the place.

 

After the township we all wandered back to long street and ate dinner at a place called Mamma Africa’s. We didn’t have a reservation so we had to sit at the bar, but it was no big deal at all because it curved (it was carved and painted like a giant snake!) and we could all see each other. Plus we had the coolest bartender ever, who was very sweet and kept giving us springboks. Springboks are little shots of the local version of kaluah mixed with mint liqueur. Delicious, and the smoothest shot I’ve ever had. I also tried kudu there, a kind of antelope thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Kudu) that made one of the best steaks of my life. Deeeelicious.

 

We had a fun few hours on Long street, bought some postcards and a tee shirt, had a couple drinks and then went out for hookah down the street. I didn’t smoke because I wasn’t feeling well, but I was enjoying their wine menu –which included the delectable “Nitida”: featuring the “mouthwatering characteristics of asparagus and tinned peas.”There was a not-so-great bellydancer who was dressed like a middle-Eastern Amy Winehouse (ew) so we decided to get out of there asap since the place was so shitty –there was only one flavor: mixed fruit, and they wouldn’t give us new coals.

 

So that was pretty much it for the second night. I wanted to get back fairly early since I had a service visit FDP to the Amy Beihl foundation the next morning starting at 9.

 

DAY THREE: My third day in south Africa was probably my weirdest. I’d known the story of Amy Beihl’s murder but what I knew of it virtually stopped at her death. I didn’t realize that her parents famously started this foundation, or that when Archbishop Desmond Tutu started a reparations committee giving those who felt they were wrongly imprisoned at the end of apartheid, that two of Amy’s murders requested that their cases be reopened. They had testified to stabbing and stoning her. They admitted their guilt. Yet when Desmond TuTu agreed to let them go, having served only four years of a seventeen year sentence, Amy’s parents agreed to their freedom. They said it’s what Amy would have wanted, that her murders were a product of political brainwashing and broken families from impoverished townships, that they didn’t actually kill her. And here’s where the story gets truly bizarre. Two of these men started working for the Amy Biehl foundation –they keep in close contact with Linda Biehl and even call her “mother.”Those two men were at the Amy Biehl foundation when I visited, and one of them helped give my tour of what the foundation does for the townships.

 

Easy L. testified to repeatedly stabbing Amy. Easy L. put his hand on my shoulder when I was getting out of the bus. Easy L. said that he was told “one settler, one bullet.”That the pan-African movement would fix Africa’s ills and that ALL white people were the enemy.

 

While I think it’s a fairly admirable thing Easy now if the sports programs director for the Amy Biehl foundation, I think he got off incredibly easy. He told us he now has a six year old daughter. I realize that the Christian ethics built into the American psyche lead us to have a very different view of death than other cultures. I get that. I realize that in certain parts of the world, death is seen as an incredibly natural process, and that it may not be the incredibly sacred, invaluable gift that I consider it. In my opinion, when you snuff out a life you’ve spat in the face of God. If you killed someone you’ve killed that person but you’ve also killed their children, their grandkids, every destiny and hope they’ve cultivated themselves for. When you repeatedly stab Amy Beihl, the Fulbright scholar who at twenty-six dedicated her life for the betterment of people across the world –for whom she helped write a constitution, when you stop short a life so heartbreakingly full of promise you had better remember her every day of the rest of your life. You had better live to make your own life an example to others, but you also ought to live and accomplish enough for two people: yourself and the person you killed.

 

The creepiest thing about it was that he didn’t seem to even show much remorse at all, and even weirder, it seemed as though everyone on the bus was quick to forget exactly what he did. One girl sitting in front of my on the bus said: “You know, it’s so awesome that out of such brutality, God could do so much good.”Like God changed Easy’s heart to this saint of a man –that teaching a few kids from just a small section of the world’s ghettos how to play field hockey counteracted his actions. I was horrified to see SAS students hugging Easy and laughing at his jokes. When we passed the cross marker where Amy was dragged from her car, beaten with stones, and then stabbed and left to bleed out beside a gas station outside a township, Easy stayed in the front seat of the airconditioned charter bus and took questions. I found the whole thing disgusting.

 

I hope no one thinks though, that I disagree with the Amy Biehl Foundation itself. I think it’s one of the most admirable things I’ve ever heard to let go of so much pain and make it your life’s mission to continue with the kind of work your daughter would have supported, despite her death. I think the Beihl Foundation (and most of it’s workers) do a really noble thing by trying to give kids with literally nothing, a means to express themselves through art and music. I’d like to think that maybe that’s enough to save some kids, but I can’t imagine that fingerpainting is going to erase years of hatred towards a perceived enemy.

 

 I later talked to the tour leader, professor Dee Bird about everything from that day. Dee is a white South African who’s been living in the states for a few years now –when she asked me how I felt about that day everything just flooded out. I found myself getting angry, I told her about how horrified I was by Easy, by his political rhetoric that he still talked about –how he called himself a freedom fighter then and a freedom fighter now. That it felt as though he felt a little sorry for having killed someone in so public a way, that the ideals that motivated Amy’s death were still obviously there. Dee said she felt the same way –that she thought it strange too how quickly the other kids on the boat were to accept his work with the foundation as suitable penance for the crime he committed. She said that she was glad she wasn’t the only one, and that as a white south African it would be expected of her to have those opinions.

 

South Africa has real and true living heroes. The kind I think America lost a long time ago. People like Desmond Tu Tu and Nelson Mandela are credits to the world –to face such hardship and adversity and then find a way to not only make yourself better, but to uplift an entire Nation from mess with little resources, is a truly amazing thing. South Africa has so much hope, and when we learned about how Mandela refused to retaliate against those who’d done so much wrong against him I was so amazed by the wisdom and patience and supreme faith he must have to believe that things will work out as they should and that he was a better man than those who did wrong by him and black South Africa.

 

And yet, he may be an example to South Africa, but he is by no means the average man. The racism I saw in South Africa was worse here than I’ve ever seen in any country, on both sides. Worse than Appalachian Virginia, worse than castes in India, worse than how Spaniards view Africans. Even Elgin, the Turkish woman who came here after apartheid had ended whispered to us to be wary of “the blacks...”That they would kill you for the necklace you wore; that they “are hungry.”Neither side trusts one another –whites feel maligned by a government trying to give opportunity to generations of blacks for whom the previous government spend 2 dollars worth on education compared to the 30 dollars white children received. White South Africans are emigrating at an alarming rate because they can’t find jobs and the crime is so bad. Black South Africans are still segregated. They lash out with horrible violence against the whites who they feel continue to represent a system and way of life that doesn’t care about them at all. And I’d have to agree; those cysts exist to make rich, white, south Africa comfortable. It’s hard to see those townships through the tinted shades of one’s designer sunglasses.

 

After that I was exhausted. I got back around 6 and that night a bunch of us went out to eat with a friend of Caroline’s from back home. He’s from Fairfax city too, so it was really weird; small world, huh? They were nice but we were all tired and not all that interested in going out club/bar hopping, so we headed in early. We also didn’t do all that much because we knew we’d have a big day ahead of us the next morning since the girls had arranged for an all-day tour of the highlights of Cape Town with Charlie, their original driver who they assured me was totally legit and very cool. I had a couple of doubts, mostly because we’d had such HORRIBLE experiences with cab drivers in Namibia and I was wary of them, but I knew Charlie was a good friend of Michael’s and Michael really pulled through that day at the township and made it such an awesome experience.

 

DAY FOUR: At 7 the next day we all work up and went outside to meet up with Charlie. He was the sweetest man I think I’ve ever met in my whole life. He gave us an amazing rate (don’t worry, we tipped like a rockafeller) and was just incredibly nice. We kept saying he was like our dads he was just so nice and attentive. At one point during breakfast in Simonstown he told us he was sorry to leave us for a moment while we drank our hot chocolate, but that he’d be back in just a minute, that he had something he had to get across the street. Once we’d finished our hot chocolate he’d returned with a bunch of cough drops and sinus stuff from the pharmacy across the street since Monica and I couldn’t stop coughing. Early on in the day I asked Charlie if he’d heard of Bojo Mojo, an African dance group we’d listened to back to back in Michael’s car –he said he hadn’t but before we could say anything more he’d called Michael and urgently demanded they meet up and let him borrow the c.d. so we could listen to it some more.

 

Like I said, sweetest man alive. So we went to Simonstown first, had a cup of delicious hot chocolate all around, saw the statue of Just Nuissance, a famous dog of Simonstown who would go and collect the sailors who’d gotten too drunk at the pubs to get home by themselves. We saw the penguins all around and got really close. Charlie got a little too close to one of them and it leaned over and started hissing at him, then he goes “Oooh, this one seems a bit aggressive!”Charlie is charming like that.

 

On the way to the cape of good hope our car was rushed by baboons. They were everywhere on a little road along the side of a mountain and they just weren’t all that interested in the multitude of cars, vans, and bikers all waiting for them. Charlie got out a tazer and whenever they got too close to the car he’d let it go off –just the sound of it scared them away, which made me wonder how many times they’d been tazed before. One of the smaller baboons was even missing a hand. How sad.

 

Once at the Cape of Good hope we just wandered around –it’s the most south western part of Africa and it’s where the Indian and the Atlantic oceans meet. It was pretty cool but really touristy.

 

Then we went to an ostrich farm on the way to the winelands (Oma you must go here in Cape town, I really think you’d love it. Just driving up there is GORGEOUS and the wine is spectacular and very cheap.) Where I chased a couple baby ostriches before heading out to another vineyard where we pet cheetahs! We had a really tasty lunch and pretended to be incredibly fancy though I’m sure we stood out like the loud, constantly laughing, chewing with our mouths open, fidgeting, Americans we are. Lunch was all kinds of South African specialties like bobotie (a minced meat dish with potatoes and cheese; we’ve had it both spicy and sweet) cheesy cauliflower, yellow rice with raisons, and malva cake with custard.

 

The vineyards were absolutely gorgeous, they were just spectacular. I don’t even like wine, but the place smelt wonderful and there were gardens and fountains and sculptures in each vineyard we went to. As lovely as all this was though, it was just another of those incredibly rich, predominantly white, cysts Prof. Harmon spoke about. On the way to one of these vineyards there was just a line of girls walking up and down the highway –in a country where aids is truly an epidemic, turning tricks has got to be a near death-sentence. And yet, just a mile or two away there were old white people, Europeans on holiday with money burning holes in their pockets, delicately sipping exclusive wines in all-white outfits.

 

We then went to a lion sactuary. There’s a big problem in South Africa of people and farms raising lions and other huge game and making a small profit from people petting them and visiting them in zoo-like places whereby they’ll sell the lions once they’re big enough to fake safaris just so people can shoot and stuff them. It’s kind of disgusting. Anyways, we went to a sanctuary where I can only imagine they steal them from these farms, as most of the time the plaques said they couldn’t disclose where the lions came from. They even had a really adorable white baby lion that I got a video of.

 

There was a little zoo type place outside of that with goats, pigs, ducks, and tortoises, that we played with a bit before heading off again back home.

 

We were exhausted once we got back to the waterfront so we popped into the pick and pay grocery store for some snacks for the 4 days between S. Africa and Mauritius and then the 4 more before then and India. Once we got back to the ship (I snuck on garlic bread, hahahaha) I went to the smoke deck to see what Amy was doing and if anything was happening that night for Brian’s birthday. They all went out to a fancy shmancy dinner (later I learnt said dinner included don perrignon and fresh oysters –wtf) while I went out for a few drinks with Caroline, we met up with my friend Michelle (a buddy of Allie’s) at the bar and we had a few shots while waiting for them to finish with dinner.

 

I had something called “Antifreeze”that tasted like a frozen, minty banana. Very strange. In South Africa I’ve found about half the time the shots are normal, and the other half they bring out two or three little one ounce shots. It’s kind of cute, and nowhere has alcohol been more expensive than in the US, so it’s always a good deal.

 

This blog is already entirely too long and I’m sure my drinking escapades are only amusing for so long so I’ll give you the highlights:

 

-12:00 We started out at Zula’s at midnight –a fun two story club on long street with a big, live, local band. Had lots of springboks with Allie, Allison, Ben, Brian, Grant, Lee, Amy, Scott, Sarah, Rachel, Michelle, and some other friends of friends. Met some cute French men. Had a shot of tequila with Michelle. Bought a mystery shot for Brian’s birthday –had a shot of something apple-ish with Michelle from a test tube. Met a cute Brit. Had a rum and coke. Had a beer and another shot of tequila with Michelle. Danced.

 

-1:30 Grant had arranged for a cab to pick us up from Zula’s to go to Camp’s Bay –the very exclusive, expensive, beach town, about 20 minutes away from Long St. Piled 10 people into a cab (how did this happen?) Bruises on my lap from when Michelle’s bony bottom made my legs go numb since there weren’t nearly enough seats. Made it to the club as they were closing. Stole Allison’s beer and everyone headed to a different bar called Dizzy’s down the street.

 

-2:10 Had three shots of tequila with Michelle and a beer. Decided we wanted to all hang out on the beach so Michelle and I bought some beers and smuggled them out in our shirts by holding our stomachs and pretending we were pregnant (why pregnant kids go to bars, I’ll never know.) Climbed some rocks. Drank beer and whisky Scott bought off the bartender. Built a bonfire. Ran into the ocean a couple times thinking it’d be the Indian and thus really warm. Instead we were still facing the Atlantic and it was painfully cold. Grant’s iphone was stolen by a homeless man named Willy who said he owned the beach. Ben fell off a rock and bruised his hip.

 

-6:30 Made it back to the ship, showered off my clothes.

 

-9:00 Got a call from Cassie, Monica, Rachael, and Caroline, asking if I still wanted to wander around cape town and try to find the weekend market beside the stadium where the 2010 soccer fifa championships were to be held. Washed my face and noticed I’d lost my nose ring sometime last night.

 

Bought a book, ate a wrap, listened to some terrible live music at the amphitheater, came back just before 5 thinking I’d made it with enough time before the 6pm on-board time when we were to leave Cape Town to go to Port Louis, Mauritius. When I woke up the next morning we still hadn’t left because we had more trouble refueling. Furious, I went to classes and studied for the global studies exam I took today. Now they say if weather permits, we should be arriving to Mauritius on-time. Considering how often SAS messes up times I think we’ll be lucky to arrive there at all. L

 

xoxo,

Jennifer

Bojo Mojo.

I just took the first Global Studies exam and I'm pretty sure I've failed it. One question was whether Xhosa was a Bantu or Khoisan click language (for future reference it's Bantu - and thus a national language of South Africa.)

I'll write up a blog posting on South Africa as soon as I can, in the meantime though let me just throw out a couple tantalizing updates:

 

1. Lost my nose ring somewhere in Camps Bay in Cape Town.

2. There is sand ALL over my room.

3. Dalfie was fired.

4. I have cuts all over my right foot.

5. I spent three times what I've been budgeting for each country in South Africa.

6. I ate kudu (google image that ish.)

7. I am still sick and now on steroids.

8. I did a load of laundry in my trashcan with shampoo yesterday (this is what my life has come to...)

9. Had our itinerary not been changed I would have been in the exact place, at the exact time, the bomb went off in Cairo the other day.

10. Am toying with the idea of a Mekong Delta river boating tour in Vietnam.

Email.

Also, in case I haven't made it clear, my new email, the one I'm actually checking because it's free on the ship, is JABYERLY@semesteratsea.net

 

Message me!

My Love, Namibia - AKA That Country Angelina Jolie Bought her Brownest Baby From.

Neither A or B day –6pm, Monday, February 16, 2009.

The ship is sounding it’s little horn thing and we about to head towards South Africa, where we’ll be docking day after tomorrow. I just got back on the ship about an hour ago. So much has happened in Namibia, I’m not even really sure to begin…I guess chronologically would be best so hopefully I don’t skip over anything.

We got to Namibia Valentine’s day morning. I’d been feeling a little sick the night before, mostly just coughing, but I just curled up with a book and went to bed a little early hoping it’d pass by the time we had our logistical preport the next morning at 8. Well I woke up a little early to have breakfast with Monica, Rachel, Caroline (Caroline is in my Classical Islam class and her two best friends from Pitt. Are very cool. We all decided to do Namibia together since none of us had any big plans, just a few things we knew we wanted to do if we could) and Cassie. We went to the preport (didn’t start until 9:30 though. Oh SAS I love how unorganized you are…) Where an American Diplomat who specialized in security briefings from the Capital of Windhoek (pronounced VIND-hook; this country was colonized by the Germans after all, and is still spoken by much of the population) came and gave us a briefing about Namibia and how to stay safe. Mostly it was the usual stuff; be careful of crimes of opportunity: check out the atms and the people around them carefully before putting your card in, don’t flash money or credit cards, keep your purse close to you, watch your drinks, ect. Then he told us about how last time he came to Walvis Bay (vahl-fish bay; where we were docked) he spent the night in a bed and breakfast on the first floor.

Around 2 or 3 am he heard a light scratching on his window, so he went and checked it out, pulling back the curtains of his room and there stood a mid-twenties guy with what looked like a knife raised above him. So the diplomat started yelling for the guy to back away from the window when the guy slammed the supposed knife into the window, shattering it, and lodging into the diplomat’s forearm. The diplomat picked up a wicker chair and started beating the guy with it while yelling and screaming, but nobody came. Eventually the guy sprung back out of the shattered window and ran away, and the diplomat was left alone in his hotel room, glass and wicker everywhere, and what turned out to be not a knife, but a screwdriver, lodged in his arm. He told us there was a lot of crime here in Namibia and that the security threat here was considered high (4/5 rating I think) by the US GOV. , but that our next port, Cape Town, had a safety rating of critical (5/5), and to be wary.

The rest of the preport mostly had to do with the economic disparity of Namibia and the aids crisis here –on average, one in five of every person I met here in Namibia had HIV –and of the horrible effects of German colonization: something like 50% of Namibians were killed by Germans at one point during their struggle for occupancy. Overall though it sounded like a country with a lot of friendly people with a lot of national pride. Everyone kept saying Namibia was a young country –both because the country had only gained its independence since 1990 and also because something like 50% of the nation is under the age of 16. It’s a weird thing.

After the preport they announced it’d also be a few hours before they’d cleared all our passports for immigration as Namibia had brought only one official and one stamp for everybody on the ship –thanks once more SAS! But that they’d also arranged for a childrens choir to greet us with traditional song and dance on the port. So we all swarmed to check that out and it was very, very cool.

So the first day we all headed out immediately to Swakopmund, a cute little German town about 25 minutes away (only a 200 Namibian dollars, or $2 taxi fare too!) where there was a lot more going on. I loved it –we got an adorable cab driver who took us right into the edge of town along the coast. Swacop is a beachy little place where other Africans go for vacations I guess. We got dropped off a big pier where people were fishing, and walked along the beach for a bit. We ate at an awesome restaurant called “The Tug”that was right over the water. I had a huge beer off the local tap and the lamb curry –it was sooooo tasty, and could I just interject that I had no idea what I was missing when it came to international beer. Summer in Africa would have been significantly more difficult thing to bear had there been no refreshing beverage that was large (half a litre), cheap (for a dollar), safe to drink (beer is generally regarded to be safer than water in most places we’re visiting), and so cold it would numb my teeth. Thank God I like drinking beer now because I would have missed out on some seriously delicious, no astringency, foamy, fruity, light, beer. I will become a total beer snob once I get back to the US –never again will I be able to drink some shitty Coors or Natty light. Okay maybe that’s a lie, but I’ll complain significantly more..

So delicious lunch in check we walked along the beach a little more; then a guy came up to us asking if we’d like our portraits drawn. He said he was a struggling art student and that for two dollars he’d draw each of us. So we were all like, yeah, sounds awesome! Somehow I’ll find a way to post these photos soon. You can judge the (not-so) likeness of my mongoloid version self as soon as I can post-up (there’s a rumor on the ship that all of Mauritius is shore to shore wireless!!) So Rachel’s post-Neptune day baldheaded loveliness, as well as Monica’s fab. Egyptian-ness, annnnnd my face, are forever etched. The guy who did this also tried to chit chat with me while he was drawing, “So you look like the baby. You are very little and white. How old are you?”I told him to guess and he says, “I do not want to say too young…12? 15?”Seriously. Not cute.

During lunch sometime we also heard about a great hostel from some of the smoker kids Amy was with called Dunes Backpackers right near the ocean, so we wandered over there and got rooms for 100 NAD, or $10, there were four beds in one room, and one bed in another with Amy and the rest of the smokers. I said I’d take the room with them since I knew them fairly well and had gone out with all of them in Spain and knew some of them from various classes. We booked an atv/quadbiking tour for the next day on the sand dunes in the Namib desert through a company called outback orange (www.outback-orange.com) and then went out around town. We went to a fair trade store where I bought one of the billions of carved makalani nuts (I think I’ll hang it on my car), a carved soapstone tortoise for my dad, a sticker for my waterbottle (one in every port so far, yesss!) and a porcupine needle for my hair. We had the most delicious soft serve with chocolate flake stick, checked out a crazy grocery store (tried pine nut soda –very strange!), and had late night French fries and more beer before going out to a couple bars and clubs, lots of drama ensued from there, but I’ll spare you the gory details.

Needless to say, I got no sleep at all, and when we woke up at 7:30 to shower and have breakfast before the quadbiking people picked us up we were all exhausted –I’d also started to get a really disgusting bronchial sounding cough and feeling kind of terrible. Cassie’d lost her voice though, so I made out a little better I guess. We left our shiznizzle at the office (p.s. the manager was at the same club as us that night. Creeper), paid our $40 (for three hours, what a deal!) and hopped into the van to head out to the desert. After something like 50 seconds of safety instructions on how to use the quadbikes (faaaar more complicated than one might initially think) we were off. Me in the very front initially. They go so fast! It’s bizarre too, for the most part they felt like they gripped on to every grain of sand and the faster you went the more you just flew over the dunes, while other times the atvs felt like they were going to tip over at any second (this turned out to be a legitimate fear as I later found out one kid from sas had to go to the hospital because the atv flipped over on him. No wonder we were specifically told not to rest any type of motor vehicles while on the voyage, including ATVs), and if you didn’t go fast enough they’d get stuck in the sand, often on ridiculously steep dunes. The driver ahead of us said that dunes in general are 45 degrees on one side, and have 90 degree angles on the other so if you try to go over the wrong dune you could go air born off the other side. These really obnoxious guys were with us too who were so disgusting and rude –all typical frat boy misogamy and general rudeness. We were supposed to stay in a general straight line, but they kept cutting us off and not listening to the instructor; weaving in and out around the dunes and ignoring the safety signals our instructor gave even when there were sinkholes and snakes and stuff.

It was just incredible though; I couldn’t imagine seeing the dunes any other way though. They were just so vast and gorgeous –I don’t think I’d ever really be able to describe them properly…Were we walking through them I probably would have wanted to kill myself considering how hot it gets out there with the heat and sun reflecting off of the dunes and minimal breezes. At one point towards the end we edged up one huge dune and on the other side you could see a vast expanse of bright ocean. Like a big painted swath of blue across the desert, it struck me how strange it was that it was like the beach beside the ocean just stretched out forever, never really turning to anything all that fertile. Which isn’t to say the Namib Desert wasn’t an ecosystem of its own. Things live and thrive in that desert that I never even knew about, including the people.

We took it a lot slower that day, mostly because it was a lot hotter and Cassie and I were feeling a lot sicker. We tried to go to a brewery and the local aquarium without much luck and eventually came back to the ship for an early dinner (after more soft serve, of course.) I passed out around 5pm and didn’t wake up until 7am the next day. I still feel awful, but I can go a few minutes without hacking and am somewhat able to breathe now –everyone on this freaking ship is sick too; things spread ridiculously fast here, it’s a little crazy. Kids need to learn to wash their hands and stop breathing on one another, okay?

So this morning after my 7am wake-up we decided to all head to the bank to pull out some more money but one of the girls we were travelling with had her card frozen. Even though most everyone called their bank ahead of time to let them know they’d be travelling out of the country, and to where, many of the people on the voyage seem to be having problems with frozen accounts and just general problems pulling out money…

Then we headed out to dune 7, the largest dune in Walvis Bay, I really wanted to climb to the top, but like an idiot I’d worn flip flops today and the sand was just waaaay too hot and nearly burnt my feet through the soles. We also got a crazy-ass taxi driver who demanded we all pay double once we were halfway there; we decided in the end to just pay him what he wanted since it was stupid to quibble over dollars when we were in the middle of the desert and it was noon. We hung around and took some photos –OH! That reminds me, Cassie and I were messing around with the settings on my camera yesterday night and somehow managed to delete every single one of the photos and videos I’d taken. Oh well; I was only a little upset about it since I had some really awesome photos of atving and group shots of us all. But I figure I saw those things, I did those things, and even with my incredibly horrible memory, I can’t imagine forgetting much of this. Buuut I don’t particularly wanna risk it, so I’ll be stealing some of the ones Monica took; she has a much nicer camera than me anyways.

After dune 7 we went to a restaurant by the boat called The Dock beside the lagoon. We ordered pizzas all around and they were so good. It’s not what you think either, pizza seems to be a favorite of Namibians, it’s all over the place…It was getting kind of late too and Cassie needed a Namibian flag and I wanted to use the last of my Namibian dollars since you can use S. African Rand and Namibian dollars interchangeably here, but in S. Africa they won’t accept NAD and you have to pay a fee to have NAD changed to Rand. So I bought lots of snacks including chutney puffs, lollipops, cough drops, lemon-lime shaving cream, wine gummies (Cassie bought those for me; they have all different kinds of wine flavors!) and mentos (apple, strawberry yoghurt, and cherry yoghurt flavored.)

So now I am watching Pirates of the Caribbean and I am thinking I need to be a little less white in my future life. It seems I am forever burning, despite the multiple applications of sunscreen each day. I am always burnt and it is incredibly annoying. I’m over it. TANNING = NOT WORTH IT.

I have to study today and tomorrow so expect multiple blog updates.

Just realized I'll be missing Holi by 2 days in India. Whhhhhyyyyy?!

 

Also, I just heard an announcement while studying that we've officially passed the equator now, then we felt a huge shudder through the ship because they've reversed all our plumbing. COOL HUH?

Where is the love?

If you mail me in the next three days I'll get it in Mauritius. Postcards to outside the US are only 90 cents!

Where the eff is my friendship bracelet and mix, Nicole?!

 

MV-Explorer - Spring 2009 Voyages

ATTN: JENNIFER BYERLY

IRELAND BLYTH LIMITED
Shipping Operations Department
No 6 Dr Ferriere Street
Port Louis, MAURITIUS

A Day Hell.

Today in global studies my fake dad presented. He was pretty funny in an old man goofy kind of way. Then Schoenner, the regular globals tudies professor reminded us that the reason the ocean's been so calm lately is because the equator always has very calm seas and relatively no wind - in olden times they used to call it the doldrums (anyone else read Phantom Tollbooth when they were little?!) and they used to have to tie up the lifeboats and row the whole ship until they got far enough away from the equator. Crazy, huh? So also, I am exhausted, and in ten minutes I have to go to my last class of the day... Sometimes this schedule just kills me I get so tired. In biomedical ethics today the professor asked us all to come 30 minutes early to the next A day class so this is what my class schedule will be looking like day after tomorrow:

 

7am: wake up, wash my face and teeth and grab breakfast before class.

7:30-9:15: go to class where I'll take 1/3 of my midterm for biomedical ethics and then watch the rest of Wit, whereby we'll recieve our 2/3 midterm, a 8-10 page paper on ethics as they pertain to the movie.

9:20-10:35: Global studies

10:45-12: Go take a quiz in Classical Islam (he told us about this today and hasn't said what'll be on the quiz.)

12-1:30: Lunch

1:30-2:45: Test in World Religions on African religions and Christianity.

 

 

Hollerrrrrr.

 

02/09/09 (Neither an A or a B day! And no Global Studies!)

P.S. I am retarded and was just pointed out by Allie that it’s diram not dinar in Morocco. My b. She also pointed out to me we only have tomorrow and then one more days of class before we get to Namibia, then 2 more classes before Mauritius, then two more before India, two more before Thailand, one before Viet Nam, one before China, one before Japan, and 4 before Hawaii, and then 2 classes before finals and the next day we get to Guatamala - from there to Florida neither Allie nor I have any classes at all. I love having only classes on A days!

Today on loop throughout the monitors are:

Channel 2:    Trials of Life 1: Arriving

Channel 3:    Out of Africa (PG, 161 min)

Channel 5:    The Wisdom of Faith: Islam  Play 1400-2030

                   Monty Python &the Holy Grail (PG) Start 2030

Channel 6:    Blood Diamond (R, 143 min)       

 

And we still have over 2,500 miles to go to Namibia, though we did stop yesterday in Senegal to fuel up, but no one was allowed off the ship. But aside from that I’ll be okay because I can watch t.v. and I LOVE “Out of Africa”!!! And Meryl Streep who is so incredibly brilliant and such a badass - never before did I want scars on my back from a lion attack…But on to more important matters:

Neptune day: Today we were actually woken up at eight instead of the six am I’d been told we’d have to be up by a (very) loud procession of mostly the stewards dressed in crazy red and white outfits with tridents and bells and tinfoil crowns, all banging shit and making loud ALALALALALA noises up and down the halls –Allie and I poked our heads out and looked down the hall and BAM –John the voyage photographer was there with a camera in our faces to capture our disgusting messy bed head and make-up free faces all confused and irritated. Enjoy that one, friends and family, when the next inevitable slideshow shows up on SAS’website. So we go up for breakfast and have some of the delicious cream cheese warm pastries, oatmeal with brown sugar and milk, pineapple juice, and potatoes (I swear to god, if they serve potatoes with one more meal –which they undoubtably will tonight –I will kill. Anyways so after a delightfully tasty breakfast we all go up to the rear of 7^th deck beside the pools and they’ve prepared a “concoction”of milky green stuff they said was fish guts? Whereby any pollywogs up to the challenge get the nasty green goo dumped on them, jump into the pool, climb out and kiss a giant tuna, and then kiss King Neptune’s ring and bow to the queen. Then you have the option to shave your head. Allie didn’t go through with it after all, however there were a good four or five girls that did, which was pretty cool…Cassie and Allie did do everything but the head shaving, and it was all very funny –then there was a kind of impromptu dance party to some terrible music, I got froyo with blueberries, mangos, and raspberries; so tasty on a hot day cruising alongside Western Africa. We all laid out for seriously all day, just going up on the observation deck and reading, playing music, and talking. At one point in the day Allie turned to me and goes, “So this is Monday, on a school day, on campus.”It boggles the mind sometimes that this is actually happening to me –though it was a little disgusting to peer over one deck and below see a girl tanning topless on her stomach who’d pulled her bikini bottom up her asscrack to better tan her butt. Seriously, there are kids on the boat still…Which brings us to the announcement that just came over the speaker in my room “This is just a reminder, kids, to please where clothes in the ship.”Haha –the whole ship was out tanning or taking photos or just reading beside the pool, and I must say I am slightly less day-glo looking.

So it really wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it’d be, though the dean’s memo for today mentioned that “Crossing the Line, or Neptune Day, is an initiation rite celebrated in many navies. It commemorates a sailor's first crossing of the equator. The rite was intended originally as a test of new shipmates by seasoned sailors. The tradition dates back to the 16^th century, and in the old days, the ship heaved to (that is, it set its sails so as to remain stationary) and the pollywogs were hoisted on the mainyard and dunked into the ocean 40 feet below; afterwards, shaving and other forms of blood letting took place. We will actually cross the equator tomorrow in the late afternoon. “

Which is kind of crazy, especially since all day today I’ve been saying the day could only be better if they’d let us actually swim in the ocean. Haha.

Also to update I did get my laundry back yesterday, thank God. So today I got freshly washed jeans which have never felt so wonderful. It’s definitely the little things on the ship that constantly delight me –basalmic vinegrette salad dressing, getting new email, crossing the tropic of cancer, putting lotion on my legs after I shave and getting to slide into a freshly made bed (that I had no part in the making of.) You know.

I just got back from meeting my new extended family. There’s a thing you can sign up for on the ship where they pair up a bunch of students with an older life long learner, staff person, a faculty member, or even a family of any of those combinations. Allie’s family is a big one with a grandma and grandpa who’re life long learners and their daughter in law(dance teacher), son (some kind of computer professor), and grandson (he is a brat who has a leash. No one likes him much but Allie has to pretend to because she’s his “sister”now. They’re actually really cool and very sweet –they have Allie and her nine sibling’s photos on their door and bring back all their adopted kids gifts from ports, they’re even having a cookie party on their big porch in their 7^th deck suite. I’ve heard some horror stories too of Michelle’s family where there’s 12 kids to one old life long learner, which just sounds awful. I’ve also heard about seven kids to one poor IT guy who’s only 23, hahaha. There’ve been lots of kids who weren’t even placed, Cassie’s roommate Liz has started putting up flyers with “ARE YOU AN ORPHAN?”on them for students who’re trying to start their own little family because they’re lonely and neglected I guess. So anyways, my family isn’t so bad. My dad is Professor Levine, who Cassie has for “Sacred Sites”class since I guess he specializes in art history, his wife Nancy is a professional photographer and seems very sweet, she even offered to help us plan any trips since this is her third voyage and she has lots of internet. As for my “siblings,”I have 8, I only talked to half of them on one side of the table, but they seem alright. One girl seemed very nervous and kind of awkward, one was pretty cool, one girl talked in a baby voice the whole dinner, and one guy was really catty sounding. All over the place I guess, but my first impressions are wrong all the time. They said they wanted us to all meet in their 7^th deck suite sometime and we’d have ice cream cake and chat (how cute, huh?)

Dinner was pretty impressive today too, I guess because it’s Neptune day, but there was bbq and hot dogs, and burgers, and all kinds of good stuff, but especially ice cream, ice cream is really rare on the voyage, mostly because it melts easily I guess. It’s Summer in Africa though and it’s ridiculously hot –like face peelingly hot, so ice cream is glorious. And it’s only getting worse from here to China, haha.

That’s about it I guess…I finally finished my immigration stuff last night. It for real took like two or three hours since they’re so particular about filling things out just right and there aren’t any extra and America is retarded and for whatever reason teaches it’s children to write the date as month/date/year, unlike the rest of the world it seems. I’m pretty sure I have my passport number memorized by now too. Well, miss you friends and family but I have lots to do. Maybe I’ll go listen to the lecture given by Archbishop Desmond Tu Tu’s assistant, maybe I’ll watch a movie outside on the observation deck, maybe I’ll go play cards with some kids before my 9:30 work out slot, maybe I’ll even do some homework…. Or maybe not.

Morocco, My Love.

02/07/09

I’ve finished up classes for the day (all four of which I attended in pajamas –first time ever!) and am now watching What A Girl Wants while I type this out; I guess I’m on a Amanda Bynes kick again since I watched my pirated copy of She’s The Man last night –I love her an wish to have all her movies one day. So far I still need Sydney White and whatever other movies she’s done, haha. Anyways, on to Morocco; after we left Spain we stopped around dinnertime to fuel up off the coast of Gibraltar which was a fairly cool process actually. They tie up a smaller boat to the ship and attach a bunch of pipes and stuff and supposedly fuel is getting pumped into the boat –however, it wasn’t until the very, very, end of our pre-port at 10pm that night that The Voice made the announcement that nothing was going on whilst the baby boat was tied up next to ours for a few hours. In fact, the waters were so rough we never even attached to the baby boat and it wouldn’t be until the next morning that we’d get any fuel, which would push back the whole arrival time for morocco –we wouldn’t get in until a 8pm instead of 8am like we were supposed to –but it gets worse! Immigration didn’t want to board our ship that late so we’d have to wait until the next morning, thereby losing a whole day and a half of the measly 3 original days I had with Angie and my Mom who were meeting me there. Oh! And to make matters stranger, for whatever reason none of us could call or text one another for whatever reason. So finally, finally, finally, I pick up my passport from the 7^th deck the next morning –thank god my sea was called first –and I’m rushing to get off the ship, out the port, and to the train station that they told us in our pre-port meeting was only 5 blocks away. Lies! As soon as I get on the dock of Casablanca it’s sketch as shit; there’s mud and poo and trash all over the place, and men yelling all kinds of stuff at me. One guy kept yelling it wasn’t safe for me to wander around the port alone (I was trying to get out thank you) and that I was in danger because I was too cute. So this guy is yelling at me in French and I’m not sure what’s going on, and I figure it’s like in many other countries where the taxi drivers harass female travelers like it’s their full time job so I’m ignoring him and telling him in my broken French I’m fine and I know what I’m doing, which was a horrible lie considering I’d been walking for like 15 minutes and was lost around the huge disgusting labrynth that was the port of Casablanca and I’m flipping out because at this point it’s like 8:40 and I’m rushing to get to the train station for the 8:50 to Marrakech and I’m walking and walking and getting nowhere. So then this one taxi driver just won’t leave me alone, and I keep ignoring him until he says, “are you going to the train station?”So I tell him about trying to make the 8:50 and he says I’m going to the wrong train station –I have no dinar, only dollars, so I’m freaking out, and I keep telling everyone I have no money at all, and it’s bedlam, and then I rush to a bunch of other SAS kids climbing into a taxi and find out they’re going to Marrakech too so I head off with them; they’d already agreed to pay 20 bucks which was completely ridiculous but I threw in 7 bucks anyways. The ride took about 15/20 minutes too, so by the time I got to the train station I’d just missed my train.

I went to the atm in the train station and took out money (p.s. be wary future travelers to Morocco; they don’t separate their amounts with commas so be sure you mean to pull out 100 bucks instead of 10 since the exchange rate is like 8.7 MAD to ea. $) and met up with a bunch of girls going to Morocco, including Cassie’s roommate Liz. We were all trying to make the 8:50 train, and everyone missed it, so there was just a million SAS students all milling around this tiny ghetto train station aimlessly –and Casa isn’t much of a walk-about kind of city, so Liz and the four girls she was travelling with (everyone travels in huge, loud, incredibly American groups it seems…) so we all went for café au lait and mint tea and delicious croissants with chocolate melted inside. Then we all get on the train and we find we’re in a compartment with a bunch of other SAS kids and one poor Moroccan man who at first looked completely disinterested and then once we started playing BS he started laughing at my extreme frustration. It was an okay three and a half hour train ride really, if uneventful. Once off the train I hung around for a bit and said goodbye to Liz and friends and then went out to find a taxi to the main medina’s Bab Ailen gate where the guest Riad was supposed to be a few blocks away from. P.s. When I wrote my directions down I accidentally wrote down “Bob Ailen”so in typical French accent fashion I pronounced it “Bub Ailan”which was very confusing to everyone involved. On the way there though I made pretty good friends with my cabdriver, who even lowered his original asking price he liked me so much (though I should mention that I brought along my fake wedding ring which was helpful to illustrate that my fake husband was waiting for me at the Riad - in the rest of Marrakech this didn’t make much of a difference but here my taxi driver was a lot more protective and nice and significantly less creepy once I told him I was newly married.) We talked about the ship and the rest of the students, about my new young husband, and my classical Islam class –it was kind of a miracle too I think considering how all over the place my French is. I really ought to work on that more before Mauritius. So I get there and the driver pulls into the medina a little more (though this isn’t technically allowed) until the walls get too close to his car and he couldn’t drive anymore. Then he grabs a little boy (maybe like 10 years old?) and yells something to him and tells me he’ll be showing me where the riad is and that I should pay him a very small amount once I get there. I’m kind of skeptical of this kid because he keeps telling me all this stuff about how I’m beautiful and how everyone is staring at me because I am so white and blah blah blah –but remember that all of this is in French and it takes me a good 4-5 minutes to completely piece together sentences and figure out what they’re saying. Anyways I kind of dislike this kid already because it’s just a little creepy when this 10 year old suave hustler kid is buttering you up for a better tip in a straight ghetto of animal poo and mud and all kinds of people shuffling around and or staring at you. No bueno. We finally get to the Riad, which in reality was very close, but all very sketch because I had no idea where I was going and this nutty kid wouldn’t stop blabbering to me using words I really didn’t know. Once there I give him 20 dinar (like $2.30) and he keeps telling me I need to give him more, that his friend has been following us from behind to make sure we aren’t jumped and I need to pay him the same, I tell him that the 20 was 10 for him and 10 for a friend and he says that it’s not enough, so I give him 10 dinar more and this kid goes in to kiss me! Not like a cute aw haw moment on the cheek but like legitimate dirty shit’s real 10 year old pimp move. Luckily I stepped back in time for the guy who was watching over the Riad to open the door, laugh, and let me in. Awkward.

So my cell phone doesn’t work at all –the guy who’s hanging around the Riad says my mom left around 11 and it was something like 2pm then, he offers me mint tea and is extremely nice and helpful despite the language barrier. I loved him. I’d only been waiting about 20 minutes with no clue as to when Angie and my Mom would show up when they did; it was so great seeing them walk through the door and Angie all cool and world-traveler like. They figured I’d be on the 10:50 since they’d taken the same train to get to Marrakech and knew the schedules. We hung out some, had some chicken kebab and fresh-squeezed orange juice and mint tea, and then headed out again to the main centre of the medina. It was a little overwhelming seeing so many tourists again –though few SASers were around at that point, I saw a couple kids I knew but really not all that many... I tried to get Ang to haggle more and the sellers were fairly aggressive, though not as bad as Turkey, they were far more likely to just yell things at tourists walking by. Such gems as “FISH AND CHIPS”(that one just made no sense to me…I guess they thought we were just wondering Brits,) or “SPICE GIRLS!!”or they would tell us what they would pay for us in camels –weird. My personal favorite though is “Beautiful eyes, beautiful prize!”which the guy at the center of the medina selling galebayas (sp) tried to convince me to buy a baby’s pink pantset for 50 dollars. He was going on and on about how the baby’s clothes had just as much detail work as the larger adult sized ones. In the end I think we got it for around 80 diram or 9 bucks. It’s very cute and is for Angie’s littlest sister who’s to be born fairly soon I guess.

Oh and just to interject, I seriously considered buying a mezuzah at some strange jew shop in the middle of the medina for the house next year, haha.

I also ended up buying some pretty baller stuff; a pair of crazy-looking bracelettes with evil eyes and rhinestones and matching rings that’re attached for Erin and Grace, a weird knit hat for Jake and for Ben with traditional colors of Africa (you know, black, red, green, yellow,) and a bedspread with silky lime green and blue (this man loooved me. It was kind of ridiculous. At one point he grabbed the bedspread and held it up to me and him and said, “You are the perfect size for me! Once we are married we shall sleep under many such fine bedspreads! This whole shop shall be yours!”) a pale green handmade ceramic and metal worked pigeon ashtray for the house next year –it’s so cool, I swear. Also I got a wooden box with cutouts that look like the tile work in mosques, and two folksy looking paintings with the hands of Fatima on them –the artist wasn’t incredibly happy with all our back and forth haggling and when I bought them he wrote a bunch of stuff on the back; any friends out there who could translate Arabic for “I kind of hate you, you dumb tourist?”Oh! And another gorgeous brass and multi-colored glass plated lamp for the growing collection after Egypt.

I really liked Morocco, it felt like a mix between Egypt and India where I kind of actually understood what people were saying! Should I ever end up taking Arabic back at school it’d be perfect for me! The people there weren’t incredibly overtly friendly and it wasn’t an easy country by any means but it was so interesting and the people I met there were just really cool. I want to go bad for sure if I ever get the chance… When I was leaving on the train it was just one other SAS kid (so freaking many of us ended up in Marrakech it was ridiculous…) and 4 other Moroccans –they were really interesting guys, one was some famous historian everyone seemed to know, a guy who was working in France on some kind of business between them and morocco, a bunch of other men who spoke zero English and what seemed far more Arabic than French, and one relatively young guy who spoke okay English, he said he’d been in Texas for a year or two –he kept saying weird American expressions like, “Yeah! Sure as shit!”and was now in Switzerland doing something I didn’t really understand. Anyways though, we started talking about how I was a religion major; they thought it was a completely wild idea that I wasn’t religiously affiliated at all and yet was studying all religions. I kept telling them I was trying to make an educated decision and they would laugh and say something like “Only in America!”We spent a lot of time talking about Islam and eventually they asked what religion I would pick if I had to pick one and I told them Judaism –the younger guy said, “Only people say that if they come from a family of Jewish people.”Which I thought was kind of interesting, and then the quiet, sweet old guy working in France turned to me and pulled out his wallet and showed me a little old coin with a gold hand-made looking star of david in the center, he started talking really fast and the younger guy had to translate for me, “He said it is a coin from Morocco –from the 11^th century.”I started freaking out and turning it over and over and babbling about how it ought to be in a bank or in a museum, and the historian guy who I’d thought was sleeping says, “Such coins are all over morocco –some in banks and museums…Some in pockets. He keeps it for his happiness.”How cute is that? He pulled out a binder from his briefcase and showed me all these photos and notes laminated and scribbled all over with different coins from all different eras –he even showed me one he said was from some BC time where the gold had been tested to be at 99.9999% pure and the only way to date it was through the wear and the teeny tiny percentage of carbon in the coin. He said they rolled out the gold’s impurities like they would a pizza’s dough and that the gold came from the south of Niger, he showed me all these maps and charts…It was so cool.

Then I got off the train, grabbed two bags of paprika chips and two bottles of juice and headed towards the dock while it rained and I had all this stuff in my bags, I had the hardest time ever finding a taxi and once I did –my taxi driver was so confused and such a jerk and kept criticizing my French. He took me to the wrong part of the dock and then once he finally did figure it out he wanted more money for his time. What a hassle –I made it onto the dock with like 40 minutes to spare though, thank God.

So now I’m just chillin’. Watching Blood Diamond at 2am with the roomie. In four hours all the stewards will frolic throughout the halls banging on pots and pans all dressed in blue and silver (youtube semester at sea Neptune day, ish is crazy.) . Tomorrow is Neptune day and I could pee my pants I’m so excited. This is the email they sent all of us:

SUBPOENA to all POLLYWOGS,

You are hereby requested to appear before the ROYAL COURT OF THE REALM OF NEPTUNE, in the DISTRICT OF EQUATORIUS, because it has been brought to the attention of HIS HIGHNESS, NEPTUNE REX through his trusty SHELLBACKS, that the good ship M/V EXPLORER is about to cross the equator and enter those waters accompanied by passengers who have not acknowledged the sovereignty of the RULER OF THE DEEP.

THEREFORE be it known to all Slimy Pollywogs that The Royal, King NEPTUNE REX, Supreme Ruler of all citizens of the deep, will, with his Secretary and Royal Court, meet in full session on board the offending ship M.V. EXPLORER on the 9^th day of February, A.D. 2009 at 0900 on Deck 7 aft, to hear your defense.

 

Regards,

-King Neptune and His Royal Court

 

In addition: All pollywogs with hair longer than 8 inches who wish to donate their hair to a worthwhile charity, should do so BEFORE undergoing the initiation ceremony, as only clean hair is able to be donated.

 

If there are any pollywogs who have brought hair clippers on board, your services are hereby solicited by King Neptune and his Royal Barber. You may help by bringing your clippers to DECK 7 aft, tomorrow morning. 

 

 

YESSSSSSSS!

xoxo,

Jennifer