CADIZ!

B3 (Mon, Jan.26^th)

Right now the little t.v. in our cabin says we are travelling at 14.4 knots, our course is 79 degrees and we are so close to Spain it’s crazy. We will dock in Cadiz around eight am day after tomorrow. I have nothing really planned. Lots of kids are springing for flights to Barcelona and Madrid but I think I’ll save my money since I’ve already been there and haven’t seen any of the south of Spain. As of now my only plan is to show up at that small party hostel in Cadiz and hope they have room available; I figure I’ll just bum around a day or two enjoying all the cathedrals, delicious local beers and wines, clubs, and fresh seafood (I’m sure I will be a little over seafood by the end of this voyage considering every port we go to is hailed as the freshest for seafood, though it will be cool to have it for relatively cheap all over.) Lately we’ve been picking up radio from Ibiza, I have no idea though if it’s satellite or regular but it’s nuts. It’s called maxima fm and they just play the raunchiest, weirdest, oldest, techno. Think that hamster dance song mixed with “Toxic” and some soulful woman talking over all that about how she’s gonna treat her man on their 10 year anniversary. Weeeeirrrd.

Just to interject – my roommate just reminded me that we only have 40 odd days of classes (more time in port than in class, actually) and because we both have all our classes on A days we technically only have 20 odd days of class. HAHA to everyone else slumming it back in the US on a regular schedule.

Anyways though, I finally was assigned my vicarious voyagers group the other day. I’m working in a team with the only other student aboard from CNU – Laura and I were assigned a 4^th grade class from Charlottesville to send and share everything about the trip with. I wrote the following email to them:

Hello 4th grade class and Mr./Ms. Gallagher,

I'm writing to you from my cabin (room 4151) aboard the MV Explorer. There's a cool little television that comes in every room that shows us how fast we're going, what time it is, and even a map that shows us exactly where we are in the world and how much further we still have to go (it's a lot like the ones that are shown on airplanes.) Right now my television says that our speed is 14.9 knots (we've been moving a little slower than our usual average of 20 knots lately), our latitude is 32 degrees 32.95 north and our longitude is 033 degrees 14.8 west, and our course is 80 degrees. We're also just a little more than halfway there to Cadiz from Nassau - we should arrive in port in just a few more days!

Even though it's Saturday and back home you all are enjoying your weekend, us students are still going to classes; we have A and B days where we alternate our classes and end up going to school every day while on the boat no matter what day of the week it is - it's crazy, but worth it since we get to travel around the world and don't have classes while docked in countries. Even though it's Saturday (and later for us than back at home in Virginia; we are five hours ahead of you as of today) I wanted to write you all right away! I just received your class and email address about an hour ago and I just wanted to let you know that Laura and I are really excited that we get to share such a cool experience with you guys!

Laura and I both are juniors at Christopher Newport University (we're the only two on the ship that both go to school there!) about two and a half hours away from you all in Newport News, Virginia. I'm originally from northern Virginia, pretty close to Washington D.C., but most of my time is spent at school at CNU and I really like it there. It's our sixth day on the ship and I have classes from 8am until 2 in the afternoon tomorrow so I'll keep this letter short, but I wanted to introduce myself a little before Laura and I send a real letter to you guys together. If you have any questions or want to know anything more about the voyage, the ship, or Laura and I, please email either of us back; we'd love to hear from you all.

-Jennifer Byerly

P.S. It would be awesome if somehow you could all introduce yourselves and/or tell us about your class - I have so much to tell you about living on the ship and the voyage; I'm sure you have lots to tell about your class!

P.P.S. Has it snowed back home yet?

I’m pretty excited to be doing this with them. Each student is supposed to write us a letter and we’re supposed to write each student an individual letter as well, as well as include newspaper covers, menus, postcards, and other small things we find from ports to represent the countries we visit. Then we put it all together in a package that’ll go out to them three times during the voyage. It should be pretty cool I think.

Oh! And our trips from pre-sale and sale one were delivered to our door yesterday. I got everything I wanted! In Chennai I’m signed up for the Rotarian Homestay: 1100 Friday, 06 Mar. to 11 Sunday, 08 Mar. “This homestay, hosted by a Rotarian chapter in Chennai, has been rated very highly by past SAS participants. It is your chance to spend two nights in an Indian home and to exchange views on various topics or aspects of Indian/US culture. During the time with your host family, you will travel by coach to the Hotel Taj Connemara. Each pair of participants (two males or two females{) will be met at the hotel by their host family and accompanied back to the ship after their homestay. Be prepared with a modest gift for your host family. The price of this practicum includes a donation to the madras rotary club’s scholarship fund.”

In Kobe Japan I’m doing another homestay (this one was really popular, I’m the only one I know who actually got it.”Your homestay will begin in the kobe Port Terminal To meet your host family. The Hippo Family Club is a volunteer group in the field of Internat. Exchange has arranged these homestays. A homestay provides and excellent opportunity to spend time with a Japanese family in their home and to gain first-hand knowledge of contemporary Japanese culture. Plan on spending most of the second day with your host family, as they will typically want to see or do something with you. If you need to return to the ship at a specific time please inform your host family right away. Please take a small thank you gift for your hosts (such as a box of sweets of something from your home city or university). Packing lightly is advised as you’ll be travelling by train.”

And then in South Africa I’m doing a service visit at the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust: “Amy Biehl was a young American Fulbright Scholar who was stoned to death in South Africa in 1993 where she had gone to help in the struggle against apartheid. She was very interested in working with disenfranchised voters in the country and had worked there previously, studying mult-party elections in various African states. Her parents, Peter (now deceased) and Linda, and their family have established the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust to continue their daughter’s work and have been highly supportive of groups concerned with the lasting effects of apartheid. In these townships you will see the impact of apartheid and continuing racial discrimination on poverty today. As you meet these individuals, remember that there are social forces at work that have caused these terrible conditions to occur.

This highly interactive trip is a fav. With SAS participants, many revisit the foundation during their remaining time in Cape Town b/c it is such a rewarding experience. On this trip, spend the day touring the various facilities and programs in the townships run by the Amy Biehl Foundation including the Amy Biehl Music Program which teaches 6^th and 7^th graders music theory and practice; the youth reading role models program, where 7^th graders read to 1^st graders; the Buthisizwe Training Centre, a facility which provides instruction on block making, sewing, and aluminum window-frame making. The foundation provides children and youth with the opportunity for constructive and safe activity after school and makes the game of golf accessible to all South Africans regardless of race or economic circumstance. Lunch is included at a township restaurant featuring traditional Xhosa foods.”

Stuff I will write about when I have more time:

-crazy-ass gym sign ups

-pre-port things on Spain with this guy Sir David, knighted by the king of Spain.

-pub night (bullshit.)

-game club and kemps (Quims and Cash)

-potatoes for dinner every night

-biomedical ethics class professor and insane amount of hw for that and classical Islam

- no laundry until after morocco L Gross.

http://www.ise.virginia.edu/video/S09/vid_1.html

Cadiz:

We arrived in Spain a good hour or two before we were expecting to – in fact Allie and I’d set our alarms for around 6:30 (we were supposed to get here around 8) and we hit the snooze button only to be woken up like 10 minutes later to the lighthouse of Cadiz shining right into our room, a little obnoxious, but it was a pretty awesome way to wake up. So we went up on deck and had breakfast outside while the sun came up – we were geeking out so badly just to see land after so long at sea… Cassie, Amy, and I had booked a hostel since we figured the port would be far enough away that instead of taking multiple cabs back and forth to the boat even though you can enter any time and stay overnight for free. You also can get meals on board during regular dining hours fo’ free, which helps save money since the euro is kicking the dollar’s ass right now and Spain is one of the most expensive countries on our itinerary. So the first day was mostly spent getting incredibly lost and frustrated with awful not-to-scale maps, siesta that seems to last FOREVER and closes down the ENTIRE city, cheap weird labeled vodka, and crazy kids at the hostel. Oh and once we got there we realized the city is actually something like a 2 minute walk from the port. Awesome.

So we went to the hostel and got back our money for two of the three nights (not enough notice to cancel the first one) and tried to put our stuff in lockers. It was nuts – we got there at 1pm and people were still staggering out of bed, sheets hadn’t been changed and the British owner was in and out. We came back at 3 (and had to leave our backpacks there locker-less for those 2 hours) while we went out for tapas (I had a delicious sandwich thing with Iberian cured ham and queso manchego while Amy had a sandwich with tuna and tomato.) We checked out the coast – pretty cool, but for some reason there were just cats eeeeeverywhere - and wandered down small winding cobblestoned alleys. By the time we got back to the hostel at 4:30 no one was there. We finally just got a locker (with some cheek from weird British owner; I kept insisting on getting a locker before we went out again even though everyone else who was staying there seemed to have no problem just leaving their luggage out everywhere, [honestly though; hostels can be sketchy. When I was in Madrid I met people who had their stuff stolen WHILE in the lockers, and I just didn’t want to have something like that happen when we have so little clothes and time to begin with.] So the owner gets all huffy and is like, “What the fuck to you all have in those bags anyways? The crown jewels?!” Later we decided he was kind of an asshole and wasn’t getting any of the vodka we were going to share with him – besides, we’re American motherfunker. We don’t have pretentious crown jewels.) So then the owner disappears. Like magic. Completely gone. We stay for an hour and NO ONE who works there is around. I’m telling you, siesta is really serious in the south of Spain. It goes from 3-6 it seems and it’s like a ghost town.

Anyways. So that day was crazy, I’m pretty sure we walked all of Cadiz and didn’t really accomplish anything at all – also, it seems there are a million cathedrals in every plaza around every block, and yet there are never services and the doors are forever shut. Cadiz in general seems to be a city of closed stuff; I realize it’s a smaller city, is further south than I’ve ever been in Spain, and it is off-season for them, but it’s a little crazy since it feels like us 700 Americans are actually running the city. P.s. I used to always hear you could spot American women in foreign countries by ponytails but I’m really beginning to think it’s by north face jackets, ugg boots or moccasins, and leggings. Seriously girls. They aren’t pants.

But anyways, we had an all-right day, albeit one filled with confusion and craziness, oh and at one point I reached up to push my hair back and there was a bee in my hair! And not even like a bumblebee, but a killer wasp type of thing that never dies and just keeps stinging you over and over until you pass out, foaming at the mouth. I nearly died. So to skip back to the hostel, we all came back fairly early since we were so tired from walking all day. Oh! And at one point back at the hostel we were up on the roof and they were definitely growing weed up there – did I mention we were also staying less than a block from the police station?! So we’re inside the hostel snacking on bread and cheese and sliced cured ham and we start talking to everyone else staying in the hostel…

It was really really terrible not knowing Spanish this time around P.S. Cadiz is not like Barcelona and Madrid and it is very rare there to find someone who speaks great English and the other kids at the hostel just put us all to shame; one girl sounded like she was from Iceland or one of the Stans or something and was switching in and out of Spanish, French, and German with another guy who worked at our hostel. I promise to take a Spanish lesson or two sometime once I’m back home. So we move downstairs with our disgusting cheap vodka and peach juice when we meet some guys from Chile doing the exact same thing but with orange soda and Smirnoff. So we talk with them a little from all subjects – Paolo Neruda, D.C., and Semester at Sea, and they start getting pretty funny. I stopped drinking but Amy and them kept at it – suffice to say a few hours later one of them was serenading Amy to such top-40 classics as that Mr. Bright Side and Wonderwall songs – in broken English from both Amy and the Chileans.

The next two days were more wondering around and just general sightseeing. Cassie and I really needed to find a cathedral to visit for homework in some classes but absolutely nothing was open (surprise!) despite having walked to the other side of Cadiz to see some cultural center that was also closed. We also kept hearing about a clothing store called Yellow Rat Bastard that everyone from the ship was going to that had really cheap and cute clothes discounted from prices around 50 Euros. We kept asking girls our own age where the store was in our incredibly broken Spanish but no one seemed to know what we were talking about – we ran all over the city trying to find it with no luck. Annoying!

Mostly though the highlights of Thursday were going to Medusa and Café Pontiere. We’d read about them briefly in the travel guide in the library and figured they’d be cool stops to check out so Amy, Cassie, some crazy girl who I thinks’ name is Emily, and I all headed out around 12 (nothing starts in Spain until really, really late) but everything was still closed when we got there; so we wandered around for an hour or two in search of a sandanter bank (no atm charge fees for bank of America users) and got very very lost, as we like to do. Tensions were high and our trusty off-scale map was hanging on by a thread, but finally we got back to Calle Beato de Deigo – or whatever that street with all the bars on it is called, and head to Medusa’s for a drink. Medusa’s was described in the book as a vibrant club atmosphere; red and lime green walls with lightboxed interesting photos on the walls that was all about the student/alternative crowd, whatever that means. So we go in and it’s still completely dead. It was something like 1 or 2 by now and nothing was happening, granted it was a Thursday night and later someone did tell us it was the end of finals for Spanish students, but still. We know Spain is serious with the clubs and bars.

We have a couple drinks there but then we moved on to the café club and bar because we’d heard there were drag shows there on Thursdays. Eventually we met up with some more SAS kids there and a very lovable gay art teacher who was more than willing to translate everything that night into English for us named Frank and had a lot of fun. If only I could have taken photos of this drag queen for you guys, she was amazing. And terrifying. Something like 6.5 feet tall and at the very least 300/350 lbs in all her glitter and sequined majesty , she sang this song about how she thought she was fat and every time she’d pause of turn the microphone we were supposed to scream “Yo te quiro mattheqa!” I’ve probably spelt that horribly wrong, but Frank said it was supposed to mean something like “I see you thinner.” It was really fun, but then Amy wanted to go to bed while Cass and I wanted to stay up. The boat was only like 2 blocks from the clubs, but around 11 or 12 they shut down the entrance closest to the boat and you have to walk like 3 miles in the opposite direction just to get through the gates and then walk all the way back to the ship – it sucked. And! I left my jacket with Frank like an idiot, thinking we’d be 10/15 minutes at the most. So after dropping Amy off we meet up with two guys named Grant and Lee (Southerners, I’m surprised you are all to find out given their names) who we convince to go back to the club with us. So we get there and everything it barred up and shut down – I start slamming on the door asking for my jacket because there was no way I was letting my new northface go out like that… And miraculously one of the club owners was still cleaning up, and even more miraculous, someone had turned my jacket in to the bar. So since everything on that end of Cadiz was shut down at this point and everyone migrated to the discotechas about 15 minutes walk on the other side of the bridge, Grant, Cassie, Lee and I all hung out by the boat and took a couple shots and talked in a plaza for a few more hours it was really, really fun and they were good company. Somehow though I ended up with a stigmata looking burn on my right hand that has been all kinds of painful and problematic.

The next night was just as fun, Amy and I went out for tapas and beer with some kids she met from Pitt. And later we all went to a couple bars with more SAS kids; I’ll post some funny pictures from then on here whenever I get the chance…

So when we came back from going out with the Pitt kids walked back into the dorm and saw Allie again – who knows what we talked about but it was good seeing her again and hearing some of her hilarious stories from her time in Seville.

The next day I woke up at 11/12 and talked more with Allie, she said she broke her camera somehow in Seville and needed to go find a repair show before we had to be back on the boat at 5. So we wandered over to the plaza de flores and had a breakfast of some delicious pastries and cappuccino and cafe de leche beside the weekend market. It was a really delicious and cute way to begin the day, until I so gracefully spilt my hot coffee allll down my leg and lap – the owner gave me a new coffee for free and tried to help me clean it up, but the stain faded to a yellowish brown color that looked suspiciously like urine but since we only had a few hours left and I didn’t want to waste any time left in Spain by going back to the boat to change, I sucked it up and spent my last day in Cadiz as the crazy America who peed her pants.

We checked out the Friday food market and it was so cool. A lot like the French markets they have in Paris where the food is all arranged in such interesting ways and it seemed like the whole city – so dead before was completely alive for the first time since we’d gotten there. Lots of fresh fish and squid, sea urchins and mussels, tangerines and ginger roots, clams and snails, even old men selling fresh asparagus from the backs of their vespas. It was so pretty and active. We wandered down some old streets and found a fabric store where Allie bought some ribbon to tie her more expansive camera around her neck and I found a ridiculous pin I thought Angie might appreciate. Then we stopped at a supermercado and bought snacks for the ship (Allie: limon diet fanta, chocolate pims cookies [later she said they were the best cookies of her life – we didn’t wait more than a few hours before opening some of said snacks…] chocolate surprise eggs, and tex-mex Doritos . Jennifer: a pack of fruit juice boxes, ham flavored chips [I have no idea…], fluffy chitos [kind of like airy cheetos], mango conditioner and lotion.) Allie and I considered buying a bottle of wine (a decent bottle from the rioja region can cost only like 3 euro a bottle in grocery stores and we aren’t talking franzia, friends) and a 40 (40 cents a bottle) and just stopping by one of the many delicious pastry shops, and grabbing our laptops and sitting in one of the free public Wi-Fi courtyards just saying goodbye to Spain the way God and any healthy 20 year old intended.

Then on the way back to the boat from the plaza de Flores we ran into Yellow Rat Bastard! The store I’d spent so much time trying to find without any luck! Allie found a pair of cool corduroy brown hippie pants and a greet track jacket and I bought a cute pink long-sleeved shirt with the yellow rat mascot on it for 10 euro. Apparently in NYC the same things would have cost something like 50 euro each! Then Allie and I grabbed more pastries (which Allie subsequently snuck onto the ship… in her pants. Putting her pastry count at 8 for the day) and returned to the ship with an hour to spare. We usually arrive and depart from ports at 8am and pm respectively, but we must be on the boats, cards swiped and passports turned back in by 6, no excuses or leeway even if you’re there at the dock waiting to get on the boat because of long lines. For every 15 minutes you’re late past 6 you get 3 hours of dock time. So if I’d been even 30 minutes late because my train from Seville was delayed or I was robbed or anything, I’d have to sit on the dock of Morocco for 6 hours while everyone went out. So it’s far better to be early than late.

All in all I had lots of fun in Spain, and I’m really glad it was our first port, and thus a fairly easy introduction to world travel for the kids who’d never been out the US before. It reminded me how much I loved Spain but also how much I miss friends from back home - going out every night for the first time since 9 days at sea was fun but I’m ready for Morocco and to see Angie and my mom. Right now I feel seasick again (awesome, I missed this so much) and we’re stuck outside Gibraltar waiting out a storm before we can dock for fuel before Morocco.

Now to actually do some much-neglected homework and laundry a la sink.

Until next time – hopefully I’ll get to upload pictures from Morocco.