The 17th - Floating in the Nowhere of the Pacific.

Despite it being a B day and I don't have any classes I think today has been one of the most frustrating days of my whole time on the ship. Thankfully the global studies exam is over and I escaped with another solid C (I don't care even a little bit at this point.) But there's miscommunication between so many people back home and I and I'm gearing up for finals, which always makes me a huge mess. I'm behind on all my internship applications and missed the deadlines for a couple of them because I've been trying to focus on my work on the ship. The worst though is that I've lost the new USB my mom just got me. The USB with all my internship information. The USB with all my pictures of China. I was waiting until a B day when I didn't have too much to do to upload them onto my hardrive and now I have no idea where it is - the other thing is that if it's not in my room somewhere (and I turned my whole room apart and tidied up trying to find it...)it might be gone forever. There're a lot of problems with people stealing USBs since everyone has so many pictures to keep.This wouldn't be such a big deal if I hadn't had lost ALL my Namibia pictures.

 

It's not that big a deal I guess but on top of everything it just really upset me.

 

Also, I have another Classical Islam quiz tomorrow for Professor Jawed a.k.a. THE WORST PROFESSOR EVER. I don't know why he bugs me as much as he does but I stress myself out so bad over the work he assigns our class. I got a perfect grade on quiz 1/3 and an F on quiz 2/3 - considering tomorrow is quiz 3/3 and the only other grade we get is our final which is worth 50% of our whole grade. That's not allowed in any other school I've ever heard of. He doesn't understand how email works and refuses to do anykind of review session or study guide. He so graciously gave us all a "guide" for the final that consisted of 18 essay topics ranging from "What is the difference between Sunni and Shi'a? Elaborate." to "Compare and contrast different Hadiths and how different Muslims approach them." Okay, for one, if it weren't for my other Islam classes, I wouldn't know what a hadith even was - we've never talked about them. At all! Plus, he expects us to spend at least an hour on each of these 18 essays, of which he'll pick one at random to add to our multiple choice final. What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. On top of that, when a friend of mine asked if the final was cumulative or not he just said, "It is both cumulative and not. It would be prudent of you to review all past material but that doesn't mean it will be on the test."

 

I could scream.

 

Also, all these bitches have decided they have to start going to the gym to get back into shape for their homecoming - which means the precious few times I've been able to get a time slot on the elliptical is no longer. I can work out in the room or I can continue to eat nothing but the only menu available of potatoes and pasta and begin an early career of jabba the hotness. AGHHHHHH.

 

If we don't get to Hawaii soon I may just loose what's left of my sanity, though I probably ought to use my tropical fun-time as a study session for finals since they're all on the same day. Baller planning SAS!

 

Expect hysterical calls at inappropriate hours soon since I'm loosing my mind and I've heard rumors that we'll get phone service a day off the coast!

 

The Art of Zen: Japan pt. 1

Japan pt. one: 1.5 day of 5.

 

The first day in Japan I got off the ship before everyone else because I was one of the lucky few to get a homestay. Originally I hadn’t planned to do much of anything in Japan but Allie told me about the Japanese Homestay offered in Sale 2 and I figured it sounded cool enough; little did I know what a coveted item that ticket was until later. Whenever I told people I was doing a homestay they would positively lash out. Honestly, it seemed as though every other person I knew signed up for it and were bumped – which is weird because a bunch of kids ended up doing their homestay solo.

 

A night or two before we docked in Kobe I talked to Steph and a bunch of the other dirty dozen smoker kids and found out they were all planning to go to Nagoya with Amy. Amy’d been telling me since the beginning of the trip she’d wanted to get to Nagoya to see the city her Grandmother came from and that she wanted me there and I figured it’d be cool to travel with all of them since I hadn’t seen them in-port since South Africa really. Steph googled a bunch of big hotels and came up with the Marriott Associa – we agreed to meet there anywhere from 8-9pm the second night after my homestay. I was trying to stay optimistic about it all working out but I was a little worried since they aren’t really all that known for planning, but more about that later.

 

So back to the homestay – we all sat in the port terminal waiting for our families for a good hour or so until everybody arrived and then we found our families according to the signs they were holding with our names on them. My fam. consisted of Mom, mystery dad who works all the time, Rie (pronounced Ree-ah), Yukki, and Haruna (under occupation mom had written “baby” which I found absolutely hilarious.) The sign they had made for me was really adorable, with a little anime character of what they thought I might look like, mushrooms, and cats. My other SAS homestay partner was Kiersten. Kiersten looked like what they must have thought all Americans looked like – gorgeous, blonde, and blue-eyed. She’s so, so, so, funny and we got along really well. We all did a bunch of weird ice breakers with the rest of the hippo family club homestay people – one of the games was essentially rock paper scissors, but if you lost you had to hold on to the person who won; then you’d play another person and if they one the both of you would attach to the back of the new winner. So we made these crazy snake chains all over the port terminal – half in English/frantic hand motions, and half in Japanese.

 

We also played such classics like London bridge and introduced ourselves. Mom spoke okay English I guess – maybe - but the kids knew no English at all it seemed. It was a struggle to be sure since I feel like it was miscommunication all around and mom was really busy with the eight year old twins and an infant. So that first day we finally get out of the crazy hippo family club bedlam that was meeting our families and being awkwardly friendly, and we headed to the family minivan. We drove to downtown Kobe and had lunch with another family and their two SAS kids – Phil and Tyler I think. Phil’s in my shipboard family so I kind of knew him before but we’d never really talked. Lunch was pretty funny – I ate Hamburg, which was not at all a hamburger like I was lead to believe (thankfully since I’m not a huge burger fan.) It was a beef patty mixed with some kind of starch like mashed potatoes, grilled and sautéed in a soy ginger sauce with pickled radishes on top. There was also white rice and miso that was super good. However, between all of us we made all kinds of faux pas. Firstly Phil and I poured our soy sauce directly on our rice bowls to which the whole table gasped, the kids tried to mimic us, and both moms looked like they might cry. We said goodbye to the other fam. and wandered to Chinatown, which I found absolutely hilarious since we’d just come from China. We tried some weird hashbrown-like stuff that was more like really sweet mash potatoes fried on the outside with tiny bits of famous kobe beef on the inside.

 

Just to interject here – kobe beef is serious. Serious enough that I will never be able to afford it. Serious enough to charge high hundreds for a small steak. Serious enough that these cows live on waterbeds and you can go to college to learn how to properly massage them. It’s insane. And for good reason because the tiny bits I had that were nothing were outstanding.

 

We then stopped by a water thing where an old Chinese man rubbed his calloused hands against the two bars coming out of the basin and it made the whole thing vibrate and splash water upwards with a weird rhythm. It was cool but none of us – except mom – could do it right. We stopped by a shop for $4 gelato (Japan is INSANE it’s so expensive. Everything here is nuts.) where I got the Sakura – or cherry blossom flavor. It was Spring, and thus cherry blossom season here in Japan, and people went absolutely apeshit over it. Yukki and Rie would chase little petals down as they came off of trees, you could buy sakura flavored all kinds of stuff, and they were featured in every artwork I think I saw the whole time in Japan. It’s strange I guess, living outside of D.C. where the cheryblossoms are such a big deal, to trace them back to where ours originally came from and see how special they are in the motherland as well. More so even.

 

On the way from Kobe to Osaka where our family lived (like an hour and 15 min. drive) we stopped at a desert place where they served us the afternoon specialty everyone seemed to be getting. A big glass bowl filled with green milky pudding like stuff, candied red beans, glutinous rice balls, and shredded ice all over it. It was so, so, so, sweet and really good. The girls brought us tea – it seems in Osaka and Kobe at least that you always have the option of two free teas, either green (often powdery and mixed in hot water with a tiny metal spatula/knife thing and bland tasting) or the brownish yellow rice tea (tastes strongly like roasted rice black tea. I bought lots of this in Japan but never found another white person who liked it.) Outside of the teahouse/dessert stop there was a little garden aside the restaurant with a koi pond full of ENORMOUS fish, a series of little pagodas and spirit houses on top of rocks, and a tanuki in the corner, and he’s the best part, with a little tanuki wife! Oh Osaka, how delightful you are. Another faux-pas to note here though: I suggested putting sugar in the green tea and she looked like she might flip the table over on me she was so offended.

 

We worked it out though, since once we all arrived home mom showed us around the house some. As soon as we stepped inside they gave us each “inside shoes” to wear around the house as we were to leave our regular shoes beside the door (they were incredibly strict about this one; later I heard Phil went two feet inside the house to grab his forgotten cell phone and his mom started screaming at him.) They even have bathroom shoes, big plastic blue galoshes that one wears whenever walking around in a bathroom. So then we got to move all the traditional sliding doors and mats and extremely low  foldable dinner tables that were extremely uncomfortable for me to sit in for more than 30 minutes at. They laid us out bedrolls and set up a bunch of heaters – including a Burberry footwarmer, hahaha. Another funny thing about that house were the toilets. Toilets are really interesting all over Japan. Heated seats and bedei action come standard, but some had light and fountain shows, sinks on top of them, and even t.v.s on the back of the door at eyelevel when you’re sitting down. It was very weird. No one should want to watch t.v. and take a nap on my toilet.

 

Mom told us she was throwing us a big hippo family club party and that lots of people were coming so we helped out a bit. I helped Rie chop up octopus tentacle with a huge cleaver for the takoyaki (sp) or fried octopus balls. They diced up spring onion and added fish crackers, pancake batter, octopus, and dried whole shrimps. It was really good, and even more so when dipped in a crazy sweet soy-sauce like stuff that came next to it. The best part was that they were fried in a griddle-type thing with curves cut out so that to cook one side and then rotate it to the other all the kids would take long toothpicks and as quick as lightning would flip them over and over so none were burnt.

 

So we’re all there and the boys have made it their mission to get wasted. Which is awkward and embarrassing. They went into the grocery store and bought a huge bottle of wine and a bunch of tall beers, and when their home stay mom saw it she laughed and said “Oooh, American size!” which was kind of hilarious, I must admit. They never got more than tipsy, thankfully, but they were definitely trying. Even so much so that they were talking about shotgunning beers outside. That’s awful. We’re invited into a family home for a family party with kids running around everywhere, and you want to get falling-down drunk? The thing that kills me is I would say they were just stupid kids, but they weren’t. Phil spoke fluent Mandarin and is an international business major who makes straight A’s, and Tyler goes to an Ivy league school and is studying PR. So strange…

 

Speaking of Phil’s fluency with Chinese, it was so cool – for every language we might know between all of us they knew it, English, Japanese, and often a language or two more. My homestay mom spoke Chinese with Phil, while Naru, another woman from the hippo family club, spoke French with me (even though she’s an English teacher in a Japanese high school) and other guy spoke Spanish. On the way back to the ship later I noticed they were playing HFC language immersion c.d.s the whole time.

 

So dinner that night was great – and included sushi from the local grocery store (which was really, really, surprisingly good!) Takoyaki, steamed rice triangles covered in seaweed, spareribs, and a stew our mom made with chicken, eggs, veggies, and strange alien looking triangles of mystery grey matter. When I asked our mom later what it was she said it was some root/vegetable they pound into mush and then shape into triangles with black specks inside. She said it tasted like potatoes but it was gelatinous looking and I was way to freaked out to try it. There was lots of beer – and Japanese women were drinking along with us, which was fairly unusual for most our travels – mostly Asahi beer which tastes like butt. Though later in the trip I did try Asahi clear which tasted like moderately more washed butt, and a beer called “straight” which tasted, as Allie W. so tastefully noted, “like cat piss.”

 

We never saw much of our homestay dad – he’s a gas pipe architect/designer who left at 7am and came home at 9:30. We saw him that night right before we went to bed, they wanted to stay up but we were way too tired and both Kierstin and I crashed (though we couldn’t for the lives of us figure out those heaters and felt like we were in the lowest circle of hell midway through the night.)

 

We woke up the next morning to a breakfast of strawberries that they ate with a squeeze tube of sweetened condensed milk mixed with sugar           - I bought a tube before getting back on the boat later I liked it so much on fruit. There was also miso soup and lots of steamed rice with a rotten looking “sour and salty old plum” (surprisingly good) and miso paste that was delicious. There was also sticky soy threads that were really unappetizing and banana bread that I think was made with us in mind. Oh, and leftovers of that stew from the night before that was good cold with rice.

 

We didn’t have a lot of time since I had to be back on the boat by 4 to get my shit together before the bullet train to Nagoya. The night before I had a short-lived moment of panic when I thought to myself, “what the hell am I doing traveling across Japan by myself hoping to randomly meet up with people I know rarely have their shit together? Isn’t this what SAS tells us exactly not to do?” But then I came to my senses and figured I wanted adventure this semester and I needed to stop worrying – I’d figure it out if they weren’t there and stay in a hostel and see Nagoya, Tokyo, and Yokohama on my own. I’d done it before in a lot less safe countries.

 

So the last morning with our homestay family we all have breakfast and then it’s a fun-filled hour or so of trying on our homestay mom’s kimono. Let me preface this story with I am inherently ill-suited to wear a kimono. And my mom had zero qualms with telling me so multiple times. In Japan, the beauty ideal is long and lean; two things I am a lot unlike. Buildings, clothing, gardens, all of it, are designed with lines in mind. Long lines are gorgeous there, and despite putting a band of cloth around my waist to get rid of it and a tight underwear thin kimono that pressed my breasts down, I still wasn’t full of lines. So much to the disappointment of my homestay mom, with a little frown on her face she put about a billion layers of belts and ties and what felt like 40 lbs of fabric all over me and eventually whispered, “Nooo. No right. Not beautiful in Japan.” She put my hair up in a funny clip thing that made me think of a lunch line and I took a bunch of pictures. Haha.

 

Then we went to Osaka castle where there was some kind of local festival. There was all kinds of crazy stuff going on, including a goldfish game that Rie and Yukki played where you have a bowl and a small fan made of rice paper and for three dollars you can very, very, gently scoop each goldfish into the bowl. For three dollars. And you don’t keep the goldfish. I didn’t get it at all but it seemed very Japanese to me – it was like paying for learning how to be patient. Actually, it seemed all of Japan itself was a test of my patience. In every way possible.

Ni Hao!

China:   The first day in China I went out with Allie, Michelle, Laura, and a couple of their friends I didn’t know all that well. The port in Hong Kong was in an amazing location, right beside the city and easily accessible. When we docked on port side Allie and I had an awesome view of the other side of the city with all of Hong Kong lit up in the background, while everyone else on the other side of the ship were stuck looking into the other end of a mall. Weirdly, we docked right up against a huge mall. Like a shopping mall. China really loves malls. There are malls attached to every metro station, malls connected to banks and office buildings, outside promenade style walking malls, and huge ant farm looking malls with what seems like millions of Asians all milling around them. Oh! And as soon as we got off the boat we walked about five feet from some incredibly cute very buff New Zealand rugby team members since Hong Kong was hosting some big Rugby 7 tournament thing while we were there. I’m not really sure of the details but I know it was a big deal and that tickets had been sold out for forever…

 

Anyways, we get off the ship and I’m one of the only ones who has Hong Kong money (thanks Mom and Bank of America!) since a bunch of people assumed People’s Republic of China (PRC) money would work there. Which is another weird thing – Hong Kong is absolutely nothing like PRC. It has a distinct government, money, and language. Therefore, after much discussion, Mom and I’ve decided to count it separately as a country apart from the rest of PRC (for those who are keeping count that means I’m at 27 countries. Hollerrrrr.) It really is nothing like the rest of China. It’s very cosmopolitan and English accessible and built up; unlike what I saw of PRC.

 

The interport lecturer for Hong Kong was a university student whose name I’ve completely forgotten but was very small and adorable. He told us some of the must-see stuff to check out during cultural preport, and one of the things I’d written down and circled multiple times was Stanley Market. He made it sound as though it was a market like we’d been used to – a huge chaotic sea of vendors selling all kinds of goods at reasonable prices. A must see. However, when we arrived there (after a $15 cab fare with 5 people squeezed into the tiny taxi for a 30-40 minute ride! It was on the other side of Hong Kong!) it was nothing like I’d expected. It was super touristy and full of insanely expensive stuff all geared at tourists. We’d also been lead to believe that we couldn’t really bargain so everything seemed frustratingly expensive and insane. – Though I should mention that in retrospect each of the countries builds on the last and much like how I felt about prices in Viet Nam after Thailand and then China after Vietnam, I was crazy to think China was so expensive after Japan bitch slapped my wallet. I guess that’s how it always is though, it’s all comparative to what you know.

 

So I bought just a couple little things – a shirt and some hanging decorations for the house next year and a year of the ox thing of Aiden. We walked up and down the alleyways with legitimate stores lining each side and then hugged the edge of the water and people watched. We decided to grab some lunch from a cheap local looking place hidden inside Stanley Market but there wasn’t really room for all of us, so they corral us into a creepy attic looking upper lever place where we all order some much missed greasy Chinese food. I had beef and udon noodles and split some dumplings with Allie. Tasty. We watched the rugby games on the t.v. and soon the attic became PACKED with locals searching for the scoreboard and some Chinese snacks. After lunch we all wandered some more and then took a cab back to the port area since I wanted to stay relatively near to the area since my mom was meeting me around 7/7:30ish in the hotel. (Also, another side note about the taxis here… It wasn’t until here that I was able to use a seatbelt again for the first time the entire voyage since I didn’t take any taxis in Spain. Usually this is how it works out: we pile about a million people inside one small taxi and ignore our cab driver’s complaints. I pull out my seatbelt to buckle as many of us in as possible, but realize that though there is a belt, there is no buckle. Of course not. So our driver usually makes some of us lay across the rest in case the police see us, and we speed off into the unsafe distance. It’s kind of charming, and now that we won’t be experiencing anymore of that I know I’ll miss it…)

 

We wandered back along the Kowloon side of Hong Kong (we had to take the star ferry from the Hong Kong island side to the Kowloon side to get to Stanley Market) – we saw the IFC office building where someone told us part of the Dark Knight was filmed, and went to the mall attached (of course.) to get some iced coffee and a usb for Michelle. We asked the information lady at the mall where we should go for some good foot reflexology – which we promptly ignored when we got distracted by a costume store where we tried on wigs, masks, boas, and tiaras. We finally found a foot reflexology place that was $25 USD for 15 minutes of shoulder massage, foot soak, and an hour of foot massage. It was really nice and even though it was about 5x what we would have paid in Thailand, it was perfect. It was also interesting because in China foot reflexology is a serious medical thing. For certain parts of the foot there are corresponding parts of the body that go along with it – for instance, a pregnant lady came in after us and they needed to know how far along she was because since she was already 8 months along they wouldn’t go near her ankles because that’s where sex organs corresponded to and they didn’t want to send her into early labor.

 

After that I had to leave asap since it was already past 5. So I took the star ferry back to the Tsing Tsang Tsui station to get my bags and passport from the boat and then take the ferry back to the main station on the kowloon side and took a taxi to the Conrad to meet my mom. I checked in only a few minutes before her and quickly passed out on the bed until she knocked. It was so good to see her, but also really, really, weird. It’s been such a journey for us to get to each place, and even though it’s been a lot more sped up with only two days between ports for Asia – the idea that my mom could leave NOVA the same time I left Vietnam and get to the same place as me in about the same time, from the other end of the world, is a weird thought. As I type this we are on day 2/9 en route from Yokohama to Hawaii and while it sucks we have a full 9 days on the ship (and 8 straight days of classes) I can’t imagine it taking any less time. More about this leg of the trip later though.

 

So after Mom came we talked lots and had a swanky dinner at the hotel that I wasn’t very happy with initially but I must admit was very delicious. It’s hard to explain it but after seeing – no, not even seeing, living – in such culture shock, poverty, and independence, it makes me supremely uncomfortable to be around rich white people all the time. To drop even 15 or 20 dollars on a meal, much less 30 or 40, seems so foreign to me now. I’m sure things will change quickly once I’m home – already it’s different after Japan, but it’s still weird. Even the ship, which I’ve come to think of as my real home oddly enough, with its teeny tiny cabins and beds that are essentially cots, seem a luxurious pleasure after traveling through tuk tusk and hostels. I don’t want it to sound like I’m complaining because I’m not at all – what I’m trying to say though is that this ghetto, hectic, dirty, chaotic, and weird way of living has been my life for the past 3 months. And I really like it. It’s really solidified how I want to move on after college and the kind of careers and life I want to pursue if I can.

 

In the meantime though it just made me feel really weird and nervous to have my mom remind me of the familiar America and way of life waiting for me back home in just three weeks. But back to time with the momma; we went to bed early and woke up the next morning to check out the antiques market. We saw lots of weird stuff like a monkey skull with embossed metal all over it and skull earrings and all kinds of weirdness. There were also lots of little carved wooden men and women that looked like ancestor carvings that were in Thai spirit houses – I’ll have to ask my religion professor about the ones we saw in China, but they looked almost like the ones Roman temples had where people would order carvings of themselves to place in front of statues of gods and goddesses to worship them all the time. Kind of an interesting idea, but I have no clue what the ones in China were about. There were lots of Mao iconography too – even a statue of Mao sitting in a big overstuffed purple chair smoking a cigarette. Both Mom and I really liked that one but it was insanely expensive and there was no way we’d have been able to lug it back to the hotel. I tried on an enormous metal necklace with different Chinese horoscopes. I also  found a really cool demon brass door knocker that looks like something out of the Labyrinth (I’m putting my foot down on this one too, no matter how creepy you all might find it back home, I’m definitely putting it in the house.) We stopped in at a local dim sum restaurant and ordered way too much food after like 30 minutes of trying to figure out how to order. We had sweet honeyed pork belly, steamed buns, shrimp dumplings, barbequed pork on white rice, and lots of Chinese tea.

 

We went to Temple St. market where I went crazy with the shopping. I got a big gold painting of monks walking, a purple jade Buddha for Nicole, and lots of other little things for people back home. I also ordered a beer and got a huge 40 oz. looking thing with a straw (so classy.) It was a really fun night and full of all kinds of crazy stuff – even an electronic dancing Amish man.

 

We then got on the 20 hour sleeper train from Hong Kong to the PRC’s Shanghai, which was very strange. Both mom and I had top bunks in the compartment – without ladders. These things were like 10 ft. off the ground and we had to leap up onto a metal step the size of an ipod and then launch ourselves onto the beds. Once there we didn’t do all that much since the couple under us were a pair of Chinese people in their 60s or 70s. We didn’t want to really bug them and there wasn’t anything to do on the ship so we just talked and I watched bedknobs and broomsticks and the secret life of bees (so, so, so, good.)  

 

Once in Shanghai we realized nobody spoke English. We managed to somehow get a taxi after lots of confusion, and checked into our new super swanky hotel. We ate a lunch of fantastic stuff like sushi and chocolate ice cream and other tasty treats. There was lots of napping and watching of awful Asian MTV where skinny Asian men dressed kind of like women – including eyeliner and blush – fought over a girl and cried because their relationship was over. I think. Honestly I have no idea what was happening there.

 

We saw lots of bird’s nest restaurants all over (I guess the birds secrete some weird saliva that hardens into a nest that the Chinese then snatch and like to make soups out of.) I wasn’t about to try any of it, but it did look kind of cool. I never saw any scorpion either despite both Allie and I having made it our mission to try since Thailand. We went to a huge “pedestrian mall” which was actually just a cute walkway with all kinds of strange shops and malls on either side.

 

I went into the Nike Shanghai shop and checked out some of their awesome selection. They had some cute stuff but everything was outrageously expensive – I mean more than in the US for the same things sometimes. They did have a lot of really cool and helpful NikeID center where you could do everything on line in person and see about a billion different varieties of each style nike. We also went to a bunch of huge grocery store like places where I bought random things like peanut and coconut jellies and glutinous rice cakes (surprisingly delicious.) I also got some things called “Tuckahoe” cakes, which I initially was very excited about because Tuckahoe park in Arlington was my childhood haunt and it was the only other time I’d ever heard of it. Since then I’d eaten probably 5 or 6 of them not knowing what they were. I just wikipedia’d it and am horrified with myself.

 

“What it is: Wolfiporia extensa (Peck) Ginns (formerly known as Poria cocos F.A. Wolf) is a fungus in the Polyporaceae family. It is a wood-decay fungus but has a terrestrial growth habit. It is notable in the development of a large, long-lasting underground sclerotium that resembles a small coconut. This sclerotium (called "Tuckahoe", or Indian Bread) was used by native Americans as a source of food in times of scarcity. It is also used in Chinese medicine.”

 

My heart, spleen, and kidney channels will never be the same…

 

We ate at a Japanese restaurant where mom had udon and I had a green tea and black honey milkshake that was quite possibly the most delicious milkshake of my life, and croquettes and grilled unagi (eel.) We drank some tea and then kept walking. We found about a billion jewelry stores and inside one discovered some really awesome orange-y gold drop earrings with hollow stars at the end with bright orange stones in the center. There was also a lot of really gorgeous intricately carved jade pieces but they were so, so, expensive.

 

Anyways. Then we went back to the hotel for a good night’s rest before heading out the next morning to the 580 Market. It was less like a market and more like a warehouse full of random stalls with all pirated stuff. Tons of pirated stuff. They had some signs up that listed things you couldn’t have fakes of, like North Faces, but besides those it was a free for all. Pirated movies, fake hermes and tiffany’s, fake armani underwear, fake gucci sunglasses. It was nuts. I bought an insane black bape hoodie with gold all over it, lots of little gifts for fam. back home, and mom got fake uggs. There were all kinds of weird things there.

 

We had another lunch of udon (even though we were in China and I’d be in Japan in just two days, haha.) where I had some cold udon and dumplings and another green tea shake that looked a little shady but thankfully didn’t make me sick, and mom had hot udon. After that though we had to go since we had an on-ship time of 6 and I wanted Mom to tour the ship before we departed. I’d like to think she was thoroughly impressed, though she did note that my side of the room was in all kinds of disarray (sorry Allie!)

 

Overall China was exactly what I needed. Really low-key and a chance to see my mom again. It wasn’t full of crazy adventures, but I’ve had lots of those in the past three months…

 

Next up: JAPAN: Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Yokohama!

Same Same.

Vietnam:

 

Firstly, I know I haven’t been responding to everyone’s emails in a timely manner lately: I still love you, I just can’t manage my two free days on the ship well… Hopefully in China I’ll have a reliable internet connection and will probably have nights free since my mom’ll be meeting me there and I don’t think we’ll be going non-stop sightseeing and bar hopping together like the last few sleepless countries. This whirlwind tour of Asia is exhausting. I seriously get maybe two or three hours of sleep a night for five days at a time amidst +100 degree heat and humidity you could swim in. Not that I’m complaining or anything, I’m just looking for a bit of respite in China.

 

Anyways – about Viet Nam. I feel like Viet Nam was a really different feel than the rest of the countries we’d been to so I’m going to do my write-ups a little differently:

 

The best of Viet Nam:

- Finding a tailor the first day to have a dress made for the ambassador’s ball.

- Eating delicious Pho.

- Cheap, cheap, cheap, pirated dvds.

- 25 dong (like a dollar and fifty cents) for three draught beers and a shot at Eden’s.

- Finding people who were as a general rule, very sweet, and not at all resentful and angry towards Americans.

- Tutti Fruitti frozen yoghurt that came in flavors like taro, mango, kiwi, tart, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. With toppings like oreos, fruity pebbles, grapes, rambutan, jelly, and dragonfruit, it was probably the most delicious thing I ate in all of Viet Nam.

- The most beautiful religious ceremony I’ve ever seen.

- The best manicure of my life. For two dollars.

 

The worst of Viet Nam:

- The tailored dress doesn’t fit well at all, despite three separate fittings.

- Everything was a lot more expensive here than the last few countries.

HORRIBLE, SHADY, TERRIBLE TAXI DRIVERS. Far worse here than anywhere else; worse I’ve ever been in any country I’ve ever visited.

- Incredibly aggressive vendors lacking any kind of charm or humor like other countries I’ve haggled in.

- Really good pho, but in general, the least exciting or overall delicious food of any country.

-absolutely insane traffic unlike anything I’ve ever known. Zero traffic lights or direction either, so that to cross a busy street everyone is just expected to walk one purposeful step at a time and expect the oncoming throngs of traffic to swerve around you. DANGER.

- The hottest port we’ve ever been in with some of the worst pollution. So much so that my cough came back with a ferocity.

 

We spent five days in Ho Chi Minh, or Sai Gon, but really it felt like a lot less. Not as much happened, I wasn’t completely immersed and captivated with the port city like I had been for the last few ports… Days melted together and even though I’d wake up at 8am to try to see as much of the city as possible before the midday heat really kicked in and made me want to kill myself, it felt like I was only half-alive and dragging my feet the whole time. Allie, Cassie, Amy, and I went to Ben Thanh (I’m probably spelling that wrong) market in the middle of town, bought wigs, had gold wires replaced for the earrings I bought in India, bought presents for people back home, and got very claustrophobic and angry. Of all the markets I’ve ever been in this was by far the hottest and most crowded. Not even with tourists, but it seemed a hole in the wall the size of an average half bathroom had 4 or 5 people working in it. I’m sure I’m being a little hard on Viet Nam but it was definitely my least favorite port – maybe it was just because I happened to hit a wall in my trip because we’ve just seen and done so much. Maybe it was because I just let a few bad experiences sour my overall feel for the city. Or maybe it was just because I’d been holding it to a higher expectation since the two ports before Vietnam (India and Thailand) have been my favorites so far.

 

We wandered around a lot and I got some gifts from one of the numerous wood handicrafts shops that are all around the city, was fitted for my dress (pale yellow 50’s style cotton day dress. I wanted something conservative that I could wear in ports and over and over and could dress up to wear to the ambassador’s ball), and then we walked to the war remnants museum. On the way there we passed a woman selling really tiny puppies in a metal cage. It was at least 95 degrees with humidity and they didn’t have any water – when I asked the woman selling them how much they were (that tiny calculator I brought with me has been by far the most valuable thing I could have packed) and she said 1700 dong. Or one dollar. If we hadn’t already been yelled at and told not to bring animals on the ship – I heard a particularly gruesome rumor that they drowned a smuggled pocket monkey in a sink – I would have definitely bought all of those poor adorable puppies.

 

The war remnants museum was crazy. I’m glad we saw it but it was definitely hard to stomach at times… Babies and fetuses deformed by agent orange preserved in glass cases, photographs of hacked apart bodies and strips of flesh pulled apart, the well a family hid in and then were massacred beside… It was like visiting the holocaust museum but instead of being a Jew, I was a Nazi. I was sickened and guilty for all the really really terrible and awful war crimes they documented Americans doing. It was so surreal seeing all this paraphernalia for a war I have no real concept of. It was never taught in any part of my public school education and all I ever knew of it came from movies which would have never gotten away with showing the horrifying images I saw in that museum.

 

We found an adorable bakery called tout les jours that had sweet pastry dough wrapped around hotdogs with peppers and tomatoes and melted mozzarella melted around it – so, so good. Lots and lots of iced coffee. Vietnam has some serious coffee there, really concentrated and thick, but really good too. We found some really crappy fake north face jackets but much more north face backpacks which I didn’t really want since I have my fabulous big black backpack. However, I did buy a lime green fake chanel purse for 6 dollars at the night market. I heard fakes are a billion times better in China though so I’m really holding out until then.

 

So about these terrible taxi drivers… The first time was when we left from the night market after literally two beers to a popular club and the guy who drove us started his meter at the initial 13 dong. Then he blasted a popular techno song that we all sang along to, but I watched him click the meter ticker next to his steering wheel continuously until two blocks later we some how owed 120,000 dong. I told him to pull over and he suddenly didn’t speak any English  - so I motioned that I’d open the door while we were moving and was talking and kept saying “This is wrong, you clicked the meter, blah blah.” I gave him 40,000 dong, way more than he even deserved and he threw it back in my face and started shouting. Threw it straight at my face, screaming. What the fuck.

We tried to walk away and he kept shouting at me since I’d been sitting in the front and was the one to give him money. So then we added a dollar and kept walking. Then later that night we were coming back from Apocalypse Now; a big club and got a really shady cab driver who’d rigged his meter to speed up super fast; we ended up owing like 4 or 5 dollars for a 5 minute cab ride – unheard of for a regular meter. Then when we left we started walking in the port towards the ship when Allie realized she’d left her camera in the cab. A bunch of the motorbike drivers told us he was a known crook and that he’d be back at the club waiting for more students wanting to come back and that they’d drive her for a dollar each way. So she goes speeding off like some fast and furious shit – without a helmet. And I’m geeking out because she’d been talking about wanting to go on motorbike taxis before and I told her I was very worried about it. You know how nervous I am about all kinds of driving in general, much less in Vietnam, without helmets or seatbelts, when traffic is so congested and crazy. I wait outside the port terminal for her and one of the bike drivers comes over and chats me up until Allie comes back. He was sweet but a little creepy and kept saying, “both you and your friend shall cry yourselves to sleep tonight over this camera, yes?”

 

The last day we woke up early and took the free shuttle bus from the port into town (I still can’t get a straight answer as to who exactly provided this, but from what I understand maybe the Vietnamese government insisted that SAS provide us with free shuttles that run every 30 minutes from the port into downtown. Thanks guys for that!) We had arranged the day before for a cheap travel company to take us to the cao dai temple three hours away and let us check the whole thing out independently before on ship time of 6pm. We had an INSANE driver who within the first 30 minutes into our trip was pulled over by the police and given a $30 USD equivalent ticket – which he then wanted us to pay. We said there was no way we’d be paying anymore than the fifteen dollars each we’d already paid for the day, so he sullenly went to argue over his ticket for another 30 minutes while we were pulled over in a congested roundabout in the middle of town with the keys still in the ignition. It was very weird.

 

Once we’d finally made it to the temple though it was all worth it. It kind of sucked because we didn’t have an interpreter to explain to us what everything meant so it was pretty confusing, but still very cool. We took off our shoes outside and wandered around the brightly colored huge rectangular temple. There were poles with huge dragons wrapped around them, triangled symbols with eyes everywhere, and a pale blue ceiling outfitted with thousands of little gold stars. Towards the alter of the temple there were statues of Buddha, Jesus, and lots of other figures I didn’t immediately recognize. The Cao Dai are incredibly interesting, and I won’t go into too much of it here because I don’t honestly understand lots of it, and I’m worried I might give you some bad information, but definitely google it. It’s a faith with the kind of synchronicity and interesting history that makes Religion major’s hearts pitter patter. It was also probably the most beautiful service I’d ever seen. All the cao daists dress in white robes and dresses and sit together in lines, most of them very old people, behind men in brightly colored robes who look like they might be leading the service, but do nothing differently than the rest of the practitioners. They look like they’re meditating and then this collective light humming noise started, but it was so faint I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, until all of it rose into a legitimate song-like noise that grew louder and louder until everyone was singing, all kept in beat with what initially sounded like stringed instruments on some kind of jazz-scat weirdness accompanying an epileptic drum beat. Separately and initially it made no sense and nothing went together until they reached the singing part, when everything became this obvious ecstatic prayer. It was very cool.

 

            We grabbed some lunch and beer and hopped back into the van to head back to town then. At Monica’s suggestion though, our driver threw on some of his favorite music – scratched up techno that kept repeating something about sex on a beach as loudly as possible. This continued for 3 hours, which I slept through most of, but I woke up to Rocky looking like she was about to kill us all. Hahaha. We made it back on to the ship with lots of time though, and that was about it.

 

While lots more happened in this port, so much of it has melted together in a frustrated mess and my memory is notoriously bad considering how late I am writing this. Hopefully I’ll get the time to go back and add more to this post but I wanted to just get some things down in the meantime. Sorry guys!

Things I Miss:

 

Boys.

My car and driving at night.

Parties, both at college and back home. This also includes pong, kings, and other irresponsible drinking games.

Theme unit friends and knowing what was happening in their lives.

Nova friends and family – Joe, Angie, Jeanine, Grace, Erin, and Violet, it sucks not having you near.

Spur of the moment trips to the beach and mall.

Impromptu techno dance parties in Ben’s car.

Ice cream and Chipotle.

Being able to do laundry relatively cheaply whenever I want to.

Being able to go to the gym whenever I want to.

Hanging out with my mom and being able to call whenever I need to.

Not being sick. Always.

Wearing different jewelry, clean clothes I actually like, and perfume everyday.

Elephants.

Thailand blog: Oh my god this is going to take me forever.

 

The first day in Bangkok Allie and I got on the bus from Laem Chabang port, about two hours away by drive from Bangkok if there wasn’t too much traffic. I had packed the night before since I didn’t want to wake up ridiculously early just to sit around like we’ve been doing in the last few ports. As usual, SAS pulled into port around 8am and between their disorganization and slow immigration processes, we got on the bus around noon, a full two hours after we were supposed to have gotten on the buses to get to Bangkok. My passport was the next-to-last called too, so Allie and I were just stuck on the boat doing nothing while all of Bangkok waited for us.

 

Finally we made it to the bus and waited out the drive. We had a CRAZY driver/tour guy who told us all the on bus times were 2pm to go back to the ship from days 1-4 (Allie was going back the 4^th, and I the 5^th,) which made no sense because everything had the time listed as 8pm, or 2000, since the ship goes by military time. He also made it a point to stress to us exactly where we were getting off the bus – next to the shrines on one side of the enormous central world Bangkok mall thing. By now Allie and I were really hungry since we ate at 8am and it was now after 2.We grabbed some delicious noodles from a street vendor outside the mall and some bubble tea – Allie got green tea and I coconut. It was really interesting too because it was our first (but by no means the last, since we saw it at every meal it seemed) time seeing the ubiquitous little metal boxes filled with chili flakes (far spicier than they look, p.s.), sugar, and peanuts. Allie and I added all of this to our noodles before we really knew what they were, but it was so tasty! And really cheap too; under $1.50 for both of us with drinks and everything.

 

I was hellbent on getting to the weekend market since I’d only ever heard really interesting and awesome things about it and it was only going to be on that first Sunday there and until 6pm. We only had four hours but we nabbed a taxi driver and spent our first few hours in Thailand in the largest weekend market in the world. With something like 28 acres of stalls and thousands and thousands of vendors we must’ve only seen a teeny-tiny section of the whole place, but it felt like never ending. We saw all kinds of crazy stuff being sold – really everything you could ever possibly think of was being sold there... Because there’s no way I think I could ever really list absolutely everything I got there in order with the vendors I bought them from, I’ll add a little sampling: a photo painting of young monks standing on a grey dock with saffron parasols, milk tea from a stall that pulled and flung the milk through the air in an acrobatic show that made the cold orange tea so cool and frothy I couldn’t think of anything more delicious, a secret present for Erin to congratulate her getting her learners permit – ballin’!, fried quail eggs with soy sauce that I thought were nauseating but Allie loved, a big shell necklace, wooden spiked earrings that I’ve worn nearly everyday since, a handmade tortoise with some kind of tribal stitching that was explained to me and I have subsequently forgotten, and matching purses for Angie and I. OH! And a big ugly red pig/rat? bank that is huge and cumbersome to carry all around Bangkok and caused a lot of stares and trouble. But I liked it and it was only 50 baht and I would’ve given the old lady selling them a dollar 50 change just because she looked like she needed it way more than I did. Allie hated that bank I think. Anyways, it was a good time all around but very hectic.

 

We decided we’d try to take the skytrain to Sukhimvit where we’d heard of a good hostel, but like many of the skytrain and metro stops in Bangkok, the station is still a little bit of a walk from the places it’s supposed to be near. We asked about a billion people over and over and finally figured out where we were going. For anyone going to Bangkok, the skytrain is ridiculously easy to get around on. There’re only 2 lines with metro connections branching off of those, however that being said, taxis are about the same price if you split it between two people if you can get them to use the meter, so it didn’t always make since for us to take the skytrain. It was about 100 baht, or 3 dollars for an hour long taxi ride, and you can easily spend that each person if going always away on the the skytrain and then connecting to the metro…

 

Anyways though, we get off on the Nana exit and wander through the now dark station exit. The first thing you notice about Bangkok at night are the prostitutes. It didn’t seem to really make much of a different where we were because they were everywhere. They line up on each side of a street amongst the late-night food and goods vendors, some talking to the people passing by, some just looking really sad and quiet. Allie said she’d never seen a prostitute before so I don’t know if it was particularly strange to her, but it wasn’t as weird to me as I’d thought it’d be. Honestly it didn’t seem all that weird at all – what was weird though was my reaction to male tourists in Bangkok. In my medical ethics class one guy was talking about how after the first night in Bangkok whenever he saw another white male walking around Thailand his immediate response was “You are scum and I’m disgusted with you.” I have to admit I felt the same way. Anytime I saw an older male tourist with a young Thai girl I wanted to throw up. I don’t care if they held hands and their awkward language barrier and giggling looked kind-of genuinely like real flirtation.

 

I don’t know if I’ll ever really be able to process it into a coherent thought, but I guess it boils down to something like this: Thailand is really, really cool. That doesn’t really mean anything, but the whole city of Bangkok was so incredibly interesting, the people so raw and gorgeous, and despite all the gritty dirty aspects that I guess inevitably accompany any major city, I felt safer here than most other ports. The people were friendly and curious in a genuine way, they were sad and sweet in the best and worst of ways. I felt like despite the serious cultural differences, I connected with the spirit of the city, that maybe I understood Bangkok a little more than an average tourist… And this is exactly why the idea of multitudes of balding, sweaty, paunched, older white men flooding this city that I came to know and love, just for sex tourism upset me so much. Someone told me 60% of Thailand’s tourism is just based on sex. That’s a strange thought. A kingdom with such incredible people, history, language, religion, sites, sounds, and smells shouldn’t be simplified into the one-stop seedy fantasy of a person who is willing to objectify such a great city into their own morally derelict playground.

 

I don’t know. Obviously it’s a complicated issue and not one easily fixed or even addressed it seems. Thais love their King. A lot, a lot. Billboards, stickers, posters, and the like are everywhere, and it’s not some creepy Chairman Mao style propaganda either; they put this all up of their own accord and assumedly on their own meager paycheck. When we were leaving the weekend market they played the national anthem and instead of turning towards a flag, ALL of the market, police officers, children, and vendors all stopped talking and stood facing the giant portrait of the king and sang along. Traffic stopped and no one spoke out of turn. It was kind of amazing.

 

Anyways, back to the hostel. We got a little lost but eventually made our way to Sukhamvit Soi 1 guesthouse (Sukhamvit is a major street and every soi is a off branching street with a number instead of a name – sois are on every street.) The manager Dave showed us around the cool hostel and we packed up our backpacks and headed out once more. We went and got dinner at a little tented food market on the corner of Soi 1. We had noodles and beer, pet baby elephants wandering the city (no joke), and eventually went out to Patpong (the most popular red-light district in Bangkok) at Dave’s suggestion. Allie and I’d talked about going to the red-light district and seeing a pingpong show way before we’d ever docked in Thailand.

 

I won’t write about all of it here because honestly that’s a little weird, but I will say a little something. Okay family who are assuredly reading this, here it goes: I decided a while ago before I even got on the ship in the Bahamas that I wanted to see as much as possible. I wanted to see everything – the good and bad. Whether I or Thailand’s ministry of tourism wants to see or talk about it; this is a major part of the tourism of Thailand, and Bangkok in particular. For better or worse, whether I see it or ignore it, it continues to exist with or without any interference from me. I figure the best I can do – the most honest way to travel – is to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut until I’ve seen everything. Then I’ll process it and post some comments here – try to sort it all out in the context of my own familiar culture; so that’s what I’m working on. I’ll write up a separate little entry on the more sordid stuff I’ve seen in Bangkok and if you want to read it and see exactly how I felt about it, just email me and I’ll send it to you privately.

 

 

 

 

The second day in Bangkok Allie and I headed out to see the temple of the Emerald Buddha and the grand palace. GORGEOUS. The place is fantastically beautiful and I’ll let the pictures I’ll hopefully get to upload soon speak for themselves. Also, a note here: Thailand was painfully hot and there are quite a few photos of me looking exhausted and overheated and just generally haggard looking. I was. Don’t judge. Oh! And that reminds me, while I’m at mentioning things to not judge me about; I forgot my debit card on the ship. This means I had nothing but my credit card that I can’t use to get money out of via atm for 5 days in Thailand; 2 hours away from where the ship was. Allie lent me money the first day until I made it to a bank with my passport and convinced them to give me a cash advance and charge my credit card to the bank. What a pain.

 

Needless to say I was extremely tense and stressed out so Allie and I headed down soi 5 or 7 (I don’t really remember) after and got massages. For 7 dollars each we both got an hour-long traditional Thai massage. The place was slightly ghetto but that only adds to the experience. Amongst posters of baby kittens and bowls of fruit tacked to peeling wallpaper we had our first experiences with Thai massage. Traditional Thai massage (not to be confused with its creepy counterpart, happy ending Thai massage…) for those who don’t know, is intense. At one point whilst my masseuse was slamming her balled fists into my hipbones – I looked over to Allie across the room and she had her arms locked behind her and her forehead touching her toes in a painful-looking pretzel fashion. My masseuse then flipped me over, sat on the back of my thighs, and kneaded my butt. It was all very surreal and not totally pleasant. Feeling very much assaulted and taken-advantage of, we then moved next door and got manicures and pedicures. For another 7 dollars we spent two and a half hours laying down and getting our nails done and drinking coffee. It’s a hard life we poor college students lead.

 

We went back to the hostel and changed to go out to dinner. We went to a restaurant I’d read about called Cabbages and Condoms on a higher numbered soi (11 maybe?) off of Sukhimvit also. It was really nice. Lights streaming down from trees overlooking the open courtyard where we ate – lamps made out of condoms. Very romantic. The whole place is run by the largest NGO in Thailand that promotes safe sex and population control – portions of each meal go to aids awareness programs and instead of getting an after-dinner mint you get a condom. It was really cute and both Allie and I had some good food. Including mango and sticky rice which Allie is now obsessed with. We then went shopping along the way back to the hostel and bought flowers carved out of soap and a cute outfit for Aiden with Muay Thai fighters.

 

Allie wanted to go out but I was so exhausted from not sleeping well at the hostel the night before – the place has incredibly rickety beds that make really loud noises whenever anyone shifts the tiniest bit in bed, and a couple of the people there had spent a late night partying in the common room until 4 or 5 am. So I suggested we see a movie instead. In true college fashion we stopped by a 7-11 (yes, a 7-11, they were all over Bangkok!) and found exotic bitch beers like lychee Bacardi. So we bought a bunch of those, headed to Siam on the skytrain, and went to the Paragon Theater. We got there late, at like 11, and there were only two movies playing, one of them in English with Thai subtitles so that’s the one we saw. It was called The Outlander and it was the most ridiculous movie I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t know if it actually made it to the box office in the US (I have no idea what is happening back home anymore) but it was insane. Here’s the basic premise: soldier from the far far future in space lands in ancient Norway to fight a dragon/alien that destroys whole towns, as it did with his space colony – driven by revenge for his slain wife and son, we finds unpredictable love in the chief’s daughter Freya. I told you it was ridiculous. It was just right for the night though. Oh and it should be noted on the way back we found the sneakiest driver ever! His English wasn’t great so I wasn’t totally sure he knew where we were going and when we turned into a hospital I started getting worried we’d have to walk around and find another driver at like 3 am – but then he went out the other side of the hospital, cutting through the whole place, only to end up right on our street! The whole drive was 1/3 of what we’d usually paid because he was so sneaky! I was in awe for the rest of the night of this man.

 

 

 

 

So that was the second day. The third Allie and I changed hotels to one in Silom – a totally different section of town. We kept it fairly low-key for the beginning of the day, went for lunch (Thai curry, sweet noodles with pork and tofu, Thai tea, and mango and sticky rice.) Oh and another caveat – it took me two days to figure this out, but surprise surprise, in Thailand it’s not called Thai tea. There it’s called just iced tea. As you can imagine, this was very confusing for me. Anyways, we then went to a Muay Thai championship at Lumpinee boxing stadium. It was kind of hectic figuring out what ticket to buy since the box officers don’t really speak much English, instead little Thai women in silk jackets run up to all the white people and badger them into buying ringside tickets for 2,000 baht, or about 60 dollars. Neither Allie nor I even brought that much since we’d been told second-class tickets were only 800. The women kept telling us the prices had changed though and the cheapest ticket we could buy was 3^rd class which meant no picture taking (lies), that we’d have to stand the whole time from 6 to 11pm (lies), and that we couldn’t leave and come back in (lies again.) We bought the 3^rd class tickets anyways, which were really pretty close after all that, and had seats. We bought some beer and steamed pork buns and had a great time. That sport is so bloody and serious. I don’t think there are many rules if any, but it was so cool to see a real match of Thailand’s national sport.

 

Allie and I bet on who would win, either the red or blue corners, for steamed buns, and sat amongst the locals (who I’m sure paid significantly less since they went to a separate counter and had different colored tickets…) We even met two cute traveling Americans who’d just graduated and were spending 4 months all around Asia. We went to the night market next door with them for a bit before wandering around on our own some. We took a cab back to the hostel and decided to check out some of the dance clubs nearby Patpong. After the first night though we were all-kinds of over the hassling creepy parts of Patpong and when we discovered the clubs were a little empty and like everything else in Bangkok, had a cover charge, we moved on. It was St. Patrick’s day and we desperately wanted to find an Irish pub that’d be sure to celebrate, so we asked around, held a morbidly obese baby of a prostitute? (photos are coming, I swear) and wandered some more. We eventually found a street without any of the cat-calling and pestering pimps of Patpong, and were told there was a show happening across the street. We weren’t all that interested in what we figured the “show” would entail, but as we were about to leave they told us it was singing and dancing and that it’d be starting in 15 minutes and that 100 baht (or about 3 dollars) would be both cover charge and a free drink. We went across the street and had a 50 baht pint of draft Leo brand beer each – we remarked how cute all the waiters were in their tight shirts, and that’s when we realized… All the people at the tables outside were men. All our waiters were men. That’s right kids, we’d wandered into gay Patpong.

 

It gets better though. We finish our beers and go back to the show/club place and realize our 100 baht bought us red bull and vodka (Allie) and a rum and coke for me – in a drag show! Thai drag queens! How did this even happen? I have no idea but it was wonderful. At the ends of the sets the ladies are doing some kind of stand up or something, I’m not really sure because it’s all in Thai, when one of them notices me. She starts shrieking and asking me all these questions in broken English/speedy Thai. I’m so confused. And another queen says she says I’m gorgeous and something something something. I figure they’re talking about my breasts (long, involved story, the gist of which comes to the fact that I guess large breasts are rare amongst tiny Thai women and they loved to bring this up and try to make a grab for them. This is really awkward no matter what country you’re in.) No one will translate for me really and I’m so confused.

 

Some Italian guy who’s been living in Thailand comes over at the very end and gives me his card and a rose and is wearing all black and looking thoroughly Italian and a little – I don’t know, sketchy isn’t the right word. Out of his element and off his game maybe? He seemed nice but not even a little bit kind of like my type and too old. Allie and I go outside with the intention of getting a few more cheap beers and seeing if anything is heating up back at the clubs we’d seen earlier, but John, the Italian invites us to Spicy, an expensive club that stays open until 4am. Most clubs in Bangkok shut down around 1 and it was already 12 so Allie and I decide to go with him and some of his friends. His French buddy (whose English is about as good as my French = confusion), his Thai girlfriend Noi, her mother Linda, and a hilarious gay man named Visky from the club, and Allie and I all pile into his truck and head to Spicy.

 

In retrospect this might not have been the absolute best idea, but they all were really nice and I didn’t want to pay to get into Spicy. It was really fun but the best part of the night was meeting Visky, who was so much fun, a fabulous dancer, and made us laugh all night. We took a cab back to the hotel (and sang-along to some terrible Mick Jagger 90’s song much to the – I’m sure - delight of our poor cab driver.) We slept in a little bit until I woke up around 9:30 and asked the hotel to cash advance me a little more money for my last few days. Thailand is very cash based and credit cards don’t get you very far anywhere there.

 

We had a complimentary breakfast of grapefruit (much sweeter and actually actually appetizing in Thailand), bacon, and eggs with tea and coffee, and headed out to see if we could get on a longboat water taxi for relatively cheap. Bangkok is a little like Venice in that there are waterways that connect the different sections of the city and for 20 baht you can ride one way anywhere up and down the river. They wanted us to buy a day pass style touristy thing once there though for over 1,000 baht, which we weren’t about to do, so we convinced him we’d rather do the 20 baht per way version (we only knew this was an option because of the awesome hotel manager at our place – La Residence.) But once we were on the longboat I guess everyone assumed since we were white we’d paid for the day ticket because no one ever collected money from us. We rode for free all day but since we didn’t have a map of each stop we just got off at a random stop lots of people left for.

 

We walked around, drank from dragon fruit juice, took photos and talked to locals. I wore a shirt that day that I’d bought in the weekend market that says “I heart… Bangkok” except that Bangkok is written in Thai and uses the Thai name (which I can’t remember and probably wouldn’t be able to spell even if I did) – this was a HUGE hit with the locals. Guys would yell, “YOU LUH BAN-KOK? AH LUH YOUUUU.” Haha. So we wander around and come across another Wat (Thai Buddhist Temple) – it looks kind of small on the outside but I wanted to check it out. Since Allie was in shorts though, she waited outside while I said I’d just run in an out. It was a lot less here than the temple of the emerald Buddha too so I figured there wouldn’t be much to see, but once inside I realized the complex was pretty huge. It was the temple of the reclining Buddha! This was a major Wat of Bangkok and we’d just wandered in somehow! There’s an enormous gold Buddha laying down – later I found out in Religion class this actually symbolized the Buddha’s death, and that his elongated elf-like ears were supposed to be a symbol of beauty and good-luck. One good thing about this ship’s classes is that occasionally they really do have incredibly relevant information that explain lots of stuff locals don’t necessarily know the English or I the Thai to talk about.

 

We got back on the boat and got off at another random stop for a quick lunch – on the way out though we found a bunch of really cool painted and gold-foiled masks. When we asked the shop owner who it was we were looking at he said Hanuman – one of my favorite Hindu gods! So Allie and I bought one; it’s light since it’s made out of coconut wood and not too enormous – and we bargained him way down, from 750 baht to 200, and he threw in little Thai Buddhas – the skinny ascetic ones specific to Thailand. I ate some rice and Chinese veggies with crispy pork and Thai tea and we wandered some more. After a few minutes we found ourselves on Khao San rd. where all the backpackers stay. That was were I figured we’d stay if we couldn’t find rooms available on Sukhimvit. I thought Khao San rd. was really cool and very, very cheap, but it was all young tourists. There were no locals at all it seemed, just crunchy young white hippies. Allie had a last meal of fried rice and chicken, mango and sticky rice, and I had another Thai tea (my third for the day – I was determined to never sleep apparently.)  We walked down some random streets while it drizzled and cooled everything off. We walked into a dead-end street where there was a Muay Thai training school that we watched for a little bit, then walked to find a taxi back to the hotel to pick up our incredibly heavy backpacks that we’d left there for the day.

 

We drove through miles and miles of Chinatown – we were told it’s the biggest in the world outside of China, and finally made it back to the hotel, grabbed our bags, and walked to the skytrain to get back to Siam station, nearby where Allie was supposed to meet the bus and I had to transfer to get back to Nana station (p.s. I wish I had recorded how the skytrain announcer lady pronounced Nana on the train. It was like this long, drawn out, baby-voiced, soothing kind of “Naaaaaah-naaaaaaah….” I’ll miss it. I walked back to the hostel and put my stuff back in lockers – thankful not to have the responsibility of carrying my passport around everywhere. Should I have lost or had my passport stolen I would’ve sat on the boat the whole time my mom was supposed to meet me in China since my visa would be lost forever. I don’t even want to think about it.

 

So I went back to the food market stalls off of Soi 1 and had a last dinner of wide glass noodles, sweet pork, and some kind of dark green leafy veggies. And more thai tea. I’m an addict. I bought a newspaper and wandered back to little Arabia, where Allie and I ended up the first night in Bangkok for a bit. I bought a sticker of the kind with Thai flags to put on my waterbottle and a bigger one just because I thought it was so cool. There were African immigrants everywhere – though not being carted away in huge trucks by the immigration police like Allie and I saw the first time we were there… I bought some coconut water and ramen to bring back on the ship, and headed back to the hostel for a few beers and bad t.v. with the other people staying there. We watched Beverly Hills Ninja which was awwwful and listened to some guys talk about their happy ending massages and late-night escapades in Bangkok. Met another American (there weren’t a ton of us in Thailand it seemed, mostly Aussies and Canadians – I heard from a kid we met on Khao San rd. that it’s only $250 dollars to get to Thailand from Australia, which is kind of cool.

 

I was about to go to bed when I asked David about a flower market I wanted to see the next morning and he suggested I instead see the huge food market Khlong Toei ( later I found pronounced “KhhhLong – TOYEEEEEE” – that caused some confusion. Dave said it was crazy and kind of dirty but that I’d be seeing a part of the heart of Thailand that tourists never see – which was enough for me. It was 15 minutes until midnight, when the skytrain closed down, but I left to go anyways. I changed at Asok station and got on the metro, and walked the rest of the way. It was now about 12:30 at night at what seemed like the edge of the city and there weren’t any signs but I kept walking and occasionally asked someone if I was still headed in the right direction. I knew it once I was there.

 

It was crazy for sure – there were sections where young girls were cutting apart snails and flinging the shells into the street, frogs cut open and their guts pulled looking up with baleful eyes out so that blood would keep circulating and they wouldn’t go bad, but they were in no condition to hop away. There were what looked like pig masks, where the whole face of a pig had been skinned off paper-thin. Vegetables and spices everywhere, fishes of all kinds. It was also extremely crowded and when I started sliding around everywhere in my normal sneakers (thanks for the warning David. Not.) I didn’t realize it was because of the inches of blood and entrails on the ground because of all the people crowded around me. Young boys were running up and down little alleys between the stalls with huge barrels of pig and fish, blood all over them – no aprons. I swear to God I was the only white person to have ever stepped foot in that place judging by the stares I got there. I’m so glad I went.

 

My last morning in Bangkok was far more low-key. Since I didn’t get back until like 3am I slept in and left the hostel around 11. I stocked up on delicious coconut water and some ramen and headed towards the meeting point for the bus that would take us back to the ship. I got there about an hour early and just sat there but I never really saw any other SAS kids – it was about 15 minutes until we were scheduled to leave when an old Thai man came up to me and asked if I was a student on the ship university. I told him I was and he asked me why I wasn’t on the boat with everyone else – apparently the buses had been parked on the other side of the mall beside a hotel. They never announced this to anyone because – well let’s face it, SAS couldn’t get their shit together if their life depended on it. I ran to the bus in the last 15 minutes and made it just in time. Once inside I asked everyone if they’d had similar experiences and everyone said they’d only found out about the changed meeting point from either word of mouth from other students or from that one older man. The thing is, stuff like this happens all the time. Either SAS corrals everyone and is hyper protective of them in a big cloistering, sir conditioned charter bus kind of way, or they completely drop you in a big pile of crap and leave you to fiend for yourself. And I know you’re reading this SAS higher-ups; it’s all over the ship about the people whose blogs you’ve been monitoring, of how you all are updated when anything new with “semester at sea” is created, and how you’ve called in students giving SAS a bad name is stories of drinking escapades and the like.

 

Oh, it’s also been brought to my attention that there are lots of random students whose parents are reading my blog? One girl was telling a story to a group of my friends about how her mom had read about Tyler’s time with us in Mauritius and how crazy it got, even though I ‘d never met her kid. It’s weird to think more than just family and friends read this, so to all those anonymous people out there reading: say hello! Leave some constructive criticism? Anything you want to know about ship life? Gossip? I don’t want this to begin to sound just like diary entries over and over and it’s nice to know people are reading it.

 

Next up: Viet Nam.