100 Days In Between Sea and Sky

Searching for Mr. Atse

2010-09-12T23:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Elise,

Life has been pretty different these last three months, hasn't it?

We were reading a book you love - Olivia - and as we reached the last page of a very happy ending, you started crying. And not just any whiny cry - the quiet, sad kind that breaks your heart, where your bottom lip protrudes as your eyes brim with tears.

That's not like you to do that. So I asked you why were you crying. And you said it was because on the last page of the book, Olivia's mom had said goodnight and gone away, and Olivia was sleeping alone.

I didn't expect you to have a harder time coming home than any of us. But I think it was tough for you, and you showed it in your own little way. Some days you would want to know where the Union was, or if you could test microphones, or if we had ship yogurt in the fridge. Other days you asked your nanny if she's been to the Acropolis, or if we remember the Coliseum. Most days were more subtle - you'd simply ask the whereabouts of Emma and Diana and Caleb and Val and Tom and Johnburkoff and Allan and Margo and Tanya and Natalie and Rebecca and countless others friends, as if there might be a chance these people you love were just around the corner, just as they were every day this summer.

I thought I'd jot this down because I'm not sure you'll remember any of our amazing Summer of 2010, or have memories of these amazing people who meant so much to you. Then again, maybe you will - you do surprise me every day.

I think you loved being on the ship. I'm pretty sure because of the way you let everyone know you were going to the pool, the way you insisted on singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" every night the Union, the way you begged for cart rides, more than anything, the way you made a point to visit everybody in their office every day.

Your morning routine started with a conversation in Elly's office, followed by a visit to the campus store, the library, and the AV booth. After lunch, you would stop by Hotel Director John's office on your way to orange juice in Johnburkoff's office, pretzels in LaVahn's office, and Purell in Tom and Kim's office ("Can I have some soap"?). The visits were clearly the most important part of your day, and if you found an office door that was closed, you would make a point of returning several times until it found it open, with friends inside.

The way we dropped this trip on you, you had every reason to kick and scream and curse the parents that dragged you for two months away from everything you knew placed you in a tiny cabin en route to distant lands with endless walking in 100+ degree heat. But you didn't.

Maybe it was the gelato, maybe it was Ingrid at the pool bar, I don't know. But you seemed so happy, I'd like to think you played a tiny role in bringing everybody's spirits up on the ship.

Your great-grandfather would have been really proud. He was the biggest fan of my first voyage, constantly sending emails and commenting on my blog, and even serving as my mission control and travel agent for most of the trip . I remember getting my travel bug from him, as a little boy pouring through his albums in Sao Paulo, full of photos of him and Bisa in places like India, China, Russia, and other exotic locations in the never-ending list of countries they visited throughout a rich life. There was nowhere else for him to visit, so in many ways than one, I've been following in his footsteps ever since.

I think he would have made a good SASer. More than anyone I know, he embodied the idea that a person is a person through other persons. He relished his family and recharged his batteries through the interaction of his countless friends. It was a little sad not having him travel vicariously with us. He passed away not long after you were born, having never gotten a chance to meet you in person. I think you two would have gotten along.

So now we're back, and you seem to have adjusted to a whole new set of changes. Mommy and I are back at work, so you have a new brand new preschool to adjust to. We now live with Mimi and Baba, but we spend a lot of time in our old neighborhood, because you've ask to see all the people there you loved before we were on the ship. You seem to like your new room now, as hard as it was to fall asleep with no swaying, dolphins outside your window, or mommy and daddy's feet within arm's length of your crib.

And as you already know, the biggest change is yet to come. You must really have paid attention to the conversations around you - it was amazing that you figured out all by yourself that mommy was pregnant. I think the little peanut that *you* want to name Leo is lucky to have you as a big sister - we think you have that caring Nagy gene, so much so that mommy and I have to plan what we're going to do when you insist on trying to breastfeed the baby yourself. Because we know it's going to happen.

(And how many families can claim they have not one but two, ehem, "souveniers" of SAS?)

Sigh. I miss the ship sometimes. There were some great people aboard, who I hope will continue to be a part of our lives in some way or another. Once I let go of the ghosts of my first voyage, and let this voyage develop on its own terms, something special happened. I look back at how close we'd become by the time we all went out to dinner in Istanbul. It was always a neat feeling to see the ship after a long day, looking forward to sharing hilarious stories with our friends in the hallway outside of our cabin while you, Caleb, Margo, Cash, and Cal slept

Mommy and I laughed a lot.

But my favorite part of the summer, by far, was the uninterrupted family time we had for 11 weeks. It's easy to take these things for granted in the everyday rush, but as busy as things have been lately, life has just felt more balanced since.

I don't know when you'll be able to read and understand this (who knows, maybe you already can?), but I wanted thank you and your wonderful mommy for making this a amazing summer, amazing in ways I could never have imagined. Even if you don't remember the voyage, I hope it affected you in as many positive ways as it affected me.

I think our family will grow up with Semester at Sea.

I love you very much,
Daddy

Last Day Out at Sea

2010-08-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

It's a calm moonlit night not too far away from the Chesapeake Bay, and we're all mingling at the faculty lounge one last time, enjoying all the drinks and snacks we've collected throughout the voyage that we won't be able to take out of the ship in Norfolk. For the second voyage in a row, the last day has been one of my favorites, with our Convocation that puts a brings a really nice closure to it all. We're all dying to get home, but there's something about the shipboard community. The faculty and staff are simply top-notch, filled with great people from the bottom down. I think our little family will miss them very much.

I'm exhausted from Elise's extremely early wake-up times, so I don't think I'll be up waiting for sunrise like many on people on the ship are doing. If all goes we'll be arriving to our new home at the Nagy's house before midnight. Then I'll let it sink in and write my final thoughts next week.

Off to bed. We'll have one busy day tomorrow.

The Best Crew in the World.

2010-08-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

We’re two days away from being back in the US, having spent a week just watching the uninterrupted sea go by. It’s been somewhat of a lazy morning – we had our formal Ambassador’s Ball last night (themed “A Med Summer’s Night Dream”. Get it?), complete with a late night dance on the Pool deck. It was sweaty enough to remind me of some frat parties in college, but that’s not important right now. Everyone had a blast, and I was surprised at how many people woke up for breakfast this morning.

The reason I know how many people got up is because we have a 2-year-old aboard. And while many people would love the extra hour (of sleep) we get every feel days from sailing west, as Dave wisely pointed out, for those of us with kids, the extra hour simply means that we have an extra hour watching them. Their biological clocks don’t seem to adjust as quickly as ours… resulting in the earlier and earlier bedtimes (3pm, anyone?), and, of course, earlier and earlier wake up calls (4am, anyone?). I mean, she’s up for good. And wondering when breakfast will be served (answer: three hours later). At least she’s usually in a great mood at that time (“Momma! I’m awakey-jakey!”) the sunrises are magnificent at sea, which makes the early calls quite nice. But really, we’d pay big bucks to install a snooze button on her. I know I would.

With the earlier and earlier bedtime, she fell asleep at 3pm yesterday, and by the time dinner came around, she was comatose. But we had to wake her up – we were seated with Dean John and Nancy, as well as Tom, Rebecca, and little Parker, and couldn’t miss the amazing meal that the crews prepare that night. So somehow we managed to awaken her, and once she got up, she was in a surprisingly slap-happy mood, which made for a great meal with lots of hugs for everyone.

(That reminds me… ever tried putting pajamas on a comatose baby? Elise fell asleep with her clothes on, so we had to get her ready for bed, and the scene was straight of our “Weekend at Bernies”. It would have been easier to dress a cat. We couldn’t stop cracking up… and definitely documented the entire ordeal).

Back to the meal, boy, do the crew members do a great job getting the ship ready that night. They’ve been working on it for over a week, and fancy up the hallways quite a bit. What an amazing. amazing crew.

I think, like last time, that’s one of the things we’ll miss the most. The crew is simply amazing, working so hard for us, always with a smile on their face, and with Elise, they turn it up another notch. They are so exceptional with her. Many of them have families back home, usually in the Philippines, and don’t see them months at a time, for years on end. So the children really pick them up quite a bit, and they treat them like family. Elise knows so many of them by name – Perry, Ismael, Archie, Darwin, Ingrid, Rey, Joel, Allan, Clyde, Lea, Malaya, Mandy, etc, etc… - and they go out of their way to make sure she’s at home on the ship. I can just picture that we’ll be sitting at dinner when we get back home, and she’ll be asking us, “Where’s Perry? Where’s Cletus? Where’s Vic”? Makes me sad just thinking about it.

And for me, one of my absolute favorite part has been sailing with Allan “Sparky” Pesado for yet another voyage. He’s my AV crew counterpart, and we get along so extremely well, that I pray he’ll be back on the ship next time I sail, sometime in the next five years. He’s been on the ship over 16 years now (I don’t remember the exact number), and always makes the experience so much fun.

Some of my favorite memories from Fall 05 involved singing Simon and Garfunkel songs with Allan, since we share “The Boxer” as one of our all-time favorite songs, and we did it again this year, several times, with me on the melody, and Allan on the harmony and guitar. And he’s one of Elise’s favorites – when he retires, I will make sure our family files to the Phillipines just to visit him in the future farm he will someday build.

So we have two more days at sea… today is a day of reflection, and tomorrow is convocation, and then we’re home. We can’t wait to see everybody soon.

A Hill of Beans in this Crazy World

2010-08-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought that the most relaxing moment in the entire voyage would happen in Morocco, nine weeks after we left Ft. Lauderdale, after visiting havens of relaxation like Croatia and Santorini? We realized as Monika and I put Elise to bed and sat in the courtyard of our ryad in Marrakesh, enjoying couscous served from tajines with fresh orange juice in one of the most pleasant evenings of my life. Morocco proved to be the hidden gem of the voyage, and as Ishai put it, we were expecting Alexandria and found ourselves another Istanbul. It is the place where we knew the least about, but know enough look forward to coming back here again.

In retrospect, I really didn’t know much about Morocco at all, save some images of deserts, and the ubiquitous CSN&Y song about the Marrakesh Express. But unlike all of the other ports except for Spain, we had plenty of time to prepare for this trip, because we had six days at sea between Alexandria and Casablanca.

And what a six days it was. In that time, we watched Casablanca in the Union, and we had the Sea Olympics, which anyone who has sailed on Semester at Sea knows how seriously everyone on the ship takes the competition. The staff and faculty were part of the Diploma Sea (we were the Vitamin Sea on Fall 05), which made for some pretty great costumes and mascots. Not sure how this happened, but I was signed up for the pull-up, synchronized swimming, and lip-synching competition. Monika had been signed up for a bunch as well (like the dodge-ball tournament), but Elise’s sleep schedule didn’t seem to care too much for they Olympic spirit. Surprisingly, we didn’t finish last, and just like Fall 05, the winning sea celebrated as if it they had just won the World Cup. Which was pretty awesome.

Most importantly, we also had plenty of time to learn about Morocco in class (verdict: quickly modernizing nation with lots to work on, with the Western Sahara issue as the camel in the room). In that time, we decided to get out of Casablanca, as we were told the modern city wasn’t particularly pretty or interesting for a short visit. So we picked to take a train to Marrakesh over Fez (because of the distance), a beautiful (and extremely hot) city about a three-and-a-half hour train ride from Casa. We would go with the McAdams/Hagens, the Patersons, and the Kongs with all the kids and try mostly to stay in the same ryad.

We arrived in the most commercial port of the voyage, amongst pellets getting loaded directly aboard cargo ships. As soon as stepped off the ship, the shuttle drivers out of the port were “out to lunch”, so we found ourselves taking a 20-minute walk in the hot sun with the kids just to get to the taxis. After much negotiation, we split up the group, with us and the Kongs taking the train, while the rest took a van to Marrakesh. We preferred the train over a vehicle… Elise tends to do much better when she can walk around on the long trips.

What a train ride it was. We made it too late to get assigned first-class tickets, but bought one of the unlimited number of second-class tickets, packed in with the 400 or so students who had the same idea as us. It was a pretty packed train, with benches inside cabins full of strangers and little or no air-conditioning. Monika and I split up further, but luckily Elise fell asleep through the first portion of the trip, enough for us to reshuffle and find a more comfortable cabin by the time she woke up.

It was immediately apparent that Morocco was no Egypt (not that Egypt was bad… but just really hard with a 2-year-old tagging along). There wasn’t the chaos in the traffic, there were much fewer people out and about, and surprisingly easier to get around because everyone spoke French (so Monika was right at home).

Once we got in Marrakesh, we hired a taxi to take us to the ryad, who dropped us off at the main square and told us we’d have to take a foot taxi to carry our luggage at that point. Not knowing anything about Marrakesh, this seemed highly suspicious, as the man was taking us through little dark alleyways and tunnels of the medina, not really knowing where HE was going, until he knocked an unmarked wooden door that turned out to be where we would stay.

Ryad Cadi – what a lovely place it was. It was built by combining three medieval houses into one, and the tiny hallways twist, turn, go up and down through courtyards before you get anywhere, with a small plunge pool of uniform depth that was just big enough for me touch the bottom while safely holding Elise out of the water.

It made the entire trip worth it. I went back out to grab delicious Moroccan food, we put Elise to bed, and just sat there in the warm evening enjoying that true moment of calm that is so fleeting on a moving ship with hundreds of people.

We took it as easy as possible in Marrakesh. Most of our walks were near the ryad, and we where very close to the amazing Souks, where all the shopping action happens in Marrakesh. Note that Monika and I are not shoppers by any means, in fact, I would say that my least favorite activity in the world is shopping, but we wanted to get gifts for as many people back home as we could afford or carry back with us. The souks happened to be a great place for this – the experience was infinitely better than any shop in the voyage, such as the craziness of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, because there was almost no pushy store owners as there were everywhere else. It was pretty surprising. As a result, we found ourselves doing something we didn’t expect to do at all, especially after we were cornered on our honeymoon in Turkey - we went rug shopping, and actually enjoyed the experience quite a bit.

We were actually looking for artisan tiles to give as gifts, and the store owner sold carpets as well, and gave us a card if we were interested. We then wanted to see a few, and the first carpet he lays out was a slam dunk – exactly what I would call “Monika-ish”, and the first price he put out was already a fifth to a tenth of what they were asking for in Istanbul… so we bought four small ones. And Valerie and Jer bought two big ones. And Elise had a blast, because she would do forward rolls every time our friend Hassan would put down a new carpet. It’s quite interesting, actually, with him specifying the details of the mostly Berber artwork. One of the most interesting one was this Jewish-Berber pattern from the time not too long ago when there were a lot of Jews in Marrakesh (we visited the Jewish quarters there… Ruth Setton, the creative writing professor who is also a Moroccan-born Jew, said that there once was a very large and vibrant Jewish community, there are probably less than 5000 Jews left in the country today).

One note about shopping… by this point, we’re all sick and tired of negotiating. We know we can get everything down to a third or half of what is originally offered, but honestly, none of us have the patience for it anymore. We’re at the point we prefer buying a lot less for a premium, because the process, as enjoyable and part of the culture as it can be, can get a little exhausting when you are in the sun with a tired two-year-old. So we often pay whatever the price, or maybe just counter with 20% off, and leave walk away happy. I mean, sometimes it feels silly to spend so much time and effort to negotiate from $3 to $1.50. We’d do that with taxis all of the time, only to have such a good experience with our drivers that we would tip them quite a bit more anyway…

That sums up our days in Marrakesh – a lot of walking around the old medina, a lot of hanging around the ryad, and a lot of eating delicious food. We did, however, experience the scariest moment of the entire voyage just blocks away from where we were staying.

On the second night in the city, Elise was getting tired but hadn’t eaten yet. We unwisely decided to take her to get some food at the closest restaurant to our ryad, as nighttime was falling. We run out pretty quickly, and by the time the food arrives, Elise is done, do we decide to take the food back with us.

By this time, however, the locals had all come out, because much like Egypt, it is much cooler to live your day-by-day at night. There was about, say, ten times more people on the streets than there were only an hour before.

Monika is carrying Elise, and I have the food, with two large clay tajines in in my arms. As we’re headed back to our place, we notice that there is a major, major human bottleneck ahead of us, just a crowd of hundreds of people trying to get through this narrow spot where the alley converges. And amongst the sea of people moving in both directions, there are motorcycles, wheelchairs, and strollers in the crazyness, all trying get through the narrowest 30-foot stretch of the street.

As we are getting closer, and old man approaches me, taps his finger near his eye, and point to a few people behind me. He really saved the day – he was warning me that there were people looking at me, so keep an eye on my belongings. I was in the most vulnerable position possible, and I knew it – I was wearing cargo shorts, with my wallet, camera, and Monika’s wallet in my pockets, with my hands tied up by trying to hold up the food. It was just enough time for me to rearrange and grab the camera and Monika’s wallet in hand, but couldn’t reach for the wallet in my back pocket. By this point, we were swept by the crowd into the point of no return.
It was five minutes of pretty grueling pushing, with people coming in all directions. We were mostly ok, but Elise started getting a bit nervous after a while, and I kept touching my pockets as much as I could with the food because I was pretty certain someone was going to try to get the wallet behind me.

Sure enough, I felt the hand in my pocket. At first I thought it was a child tugging from in front of me, but I couldn’t see anyone in the melee, until I realized it was a man’s hand that was coming from behind me. There was a skinny man in his early twenties pushing his whole body against Monika and my own, forcibly reaching into my pockets as I tried to pull him away, and I told Monika that he was trying to pickpocket me, so help keep with the back pocket. So she grabbed my remaining wallet through my pants and just held on to hit, while trying to elbow the guy out of the way, and I kept wrestling to keep his hands away from the remaining two minutes or so we wee in the crowd.

A lot of pulling and shoving later, we were free of the bottleneck, just in time to duck away into our alley and into the safety of the ryad. We were pretty shaken up about it – I think if I had been single, I definitely would have expected this more and would have been more prepared with my wallet in safer place. Besides, it’s not the first time I’ve wrestled hands away from my pockets. But the fact that I had Elise with us, and that we placed her in an uncomfortable position like that bugged me a bit, and as we talked about it, we realized Elise was picking up on everything we were saying. She started repeating, very excitedly, with her hands out to the side, “THAT WAS CRAZY!”, and “DID YOU SEE THAT GUY?!” Finally, after she kept asking us, “What happened to that guy?!!!”, we started telling her that nothing happened, that we were just hugging and that he was a friend who we told goodbye before he went away. We think it worked, because she hasn’t asked about him in a several days.

That was the only potential incident of the whole voyage, and the rest of the time in Morocco was wonderful. We left Marrakesh the next day, and though we had first-class tickets this time around, there was no air-conditioning for 3.5 hours, which was quite brutal as it was over 110 degrees in Marrakesh the day we left. Check out the pictures… we’re burning up in there. Good times all-around.

When we got back to Casablanca, we found the ship caked in phosphate dust. Phosphate mining is one of the biggest industries in Morocco, and there was this loading center right next to our ship that spewed phosphate all over the place. It affected everything, even the cooking water on the ship, and it made it very hard for the crew members who had to work the gangway all day, so they were all wearing masks.

We took it relatively easy the last day in port, going out with Tom, Rebecca, and little Parker over to the Hassan II Mosque. I heard that it was a must-see in Casa, but I had no idea how big and spectacular it would be. The mosque, built in 1991, is enormous – you could fit a couple football fields inside. If it hadn’t been built in 1991, it would give the Taj Mahal a run for its money in terms of sheer awe. In a trip where we visited buildings like the Familia Sagrada, the Colisseum, the Acropolis, the Aya Sophia, and the Pyramids, I was surprised that the building that awed me the most was on I had never heard of before, on the last day of the trip. Elise had the time of her life running up and down the steps, and jumping on the carpets they were rolling out in preparation for Ramadan, which started the Thursday after we left. We spent the morning at the Mosque, drove by Rick’s Café (when in Casablanca…), bought a few last souvenirs and an extra suitcase to fit them all in before heading back to the ship to cool off in the pool.

And with that, our ports were over. We quietly sailed away from Casablanca, leaving our last foreign port on a really good note, and wondering when we’d come back. We’re done with the ports, but it’s far from over… we’re a couple days into our 10-day trek across the Atlantic Ocean on our way back home.

The pictures are up on Picasa again.

I’m on a Camel!

2010-08-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

I have to admit - I wasn’t showing it, but I was pretty nervous about this port. We knew in advance that with the long travel to and around Giza, the heat, and just the all-around craziness of even waking down the street, that Egypt would had the potential to be a really rough port on Elise (and therefore, us). Somehow, the stars aligned perfectly, and we left with the experience that I’ve wanted to have since I was a sixth-grader checking out pyramid books at the Hennepin County Library – yet another item checked off the bucket list.

After two days at sea, we headed south and docked in Alexandria, with full preparation that this port would be unlike any of the other ports we visited. And this was evident immediately outside the port gates in Alexandria, where we docked. Egypt is the closest thing I’ve seen to India since I was in India – a bit dryer, with fewer people, but with the same sensory overload for anyone who steps off the confines of the ship. It’s one of the great formative experiences for anyone of privilege such as ourselves, taking it all in, understanding that this is how much of the world goes about day-by-day.

Our plans were made around the one thing everyone is required to do when visiting Egypt – traveling to Giza to experience be in the shadow of the great pyramids. We decided to sign up for a Semester at Sea trip overnight trip to Cairo, because these trips are impeccably organized, and we didn’t really want to deal with having to negotiate every single taxi ride to unfamiliar places with a two-year-old in 110+ degree heat. In the past, I would have shied away from too many SAS trips because the can be a bit too easy on you (though they are a fantastic way to meet and bond with fellow shipmates), but with a two-year-old, it was exactly the right thing to do.
But the trip to Cairo didn’t leave until our second day in port. So we wanted at least to explore Alexandria the first day on the trip, but not having thought it through too thoroughly ahead of time, we didn’t sign up for any SAS city orientations, and were unsuccessful on jumping on one of the ones that left that morning.

So were 30 other students, so our amazing field office team of Wade, Carol, and Holly put together another city orientation bus with a guide for us, and since I was the only staff member who wanted it, I was made the trip leader - free trip! As soon as we left the port, the amazing dance that is Egyptian traffic began, with our bus finding itself in a lane in the wrong direction, gridlocked with an oncoming tram ahead of us, and another on the side, plus several more cars, all in an Escher-esque puzzle that took all drivers several quick conferences on the road to figure out how to untangle the mess. It was pretty great – I don’t think we traveled all that much, but because of our little street waltzes, it certainly was a 4+ trip when all was said and done.

Alexandria is a amazingly interesting city. Fairly conservative with a majority muslim population, I don’t think we saw any women that weren’t covered – the vast majority had the full burkas on. The beaches (quite numerous) were full of men and women, but all women were fully covered in the water, head to toe, and I can only begin to imagine how hot it is in that sun, while how heavy it could be swimming with all that cloth.

Most people also only get out at night, when the heat is manageable, so the streets that were only marginally crowded during the day are PACKED in the evening, with pedestrians taking over much of the streets in already busy traffic. Much like India, car horns abound, as a statement of affirmation to anyone who will (can) listen, and much more interestingly, I noticed that headlights are not meant for lighten the road for the driver, they are used to flash and alert pedestrians of the oncoming vehicle on an as-needed basis. There certainly is a rhythm to it… we get very nervous the first time we step into the craziness, and it certainly isn’t “safe”, but generally, everybody understands the beat and accidents are probably a lot less numerous than it should be. I thought we would have hit at least a dozen people by the time we got back on the ship.

(Which, by the way, our taxi driver on the last day told us he had done just a month before).
So we got the insulated city tour the first day – great to get the lay of the land with Elise, and having wonderful conversations with our city guide, who also had a two-year-old. We visited sites such as the Catacombs, the Montazah Palace and Gardens, the fort on the site of the old Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the stunning new Library of Alexandria (more on that later).
The following day we boarded the bus for what would be our three-hour car ride to Cairo and Giza. I was the bus leader with about 35 pretty great students on the bus, and we set off early morning through the desert. And really, the highway just goes right through the desert. The entire population of Egypt lives along the Nile, or on coastal cities, and the rest of the country is pretty deserted. My favorite part of the ride was learning about these pigeon houses built everywhere, because apparently pigeon is quite the delicacy out there. Yum. Elise was in pretty good spirits, therefore, so were we.

As soon as we get near Giza, the big pyramids come into view. You can see them from everywhere, and they are quite the sight – exactly how you’ve seen them in the million of pictures since childhood. We drove past them, through the extremely poor outskirts of the city to avoid the traffic, straight to the Step Pyramid, which is the oldest attempt at building a pyramid that we know of.

As our favorite tour guide Hedy explained, the everyday things could be built of perishable materials, but the tombs and stuff for the afterlife had to last forever. And boy, did it. In the intense, intense desert heat (summertime is not the high tourist season in Egypt for a reason), we ventured out into the tombs and into the pyramid for our first experience with hieroglyphs, which are everywhere and still in pretty great shape.

What we discovered is that Elise would really enjoy going to the pyramids, not because of their sense of awe and wonder, but because there sand everywhere. Egypt is a big sandbox to her (maybe that’s why we saw so many cats too). You can see it in all the pictures – we would step off the bus, and while everyone is looking at the sights, she’d go straight for the ground. Our biggest regret is we had purchased sand toys exactly with that scenario in mind, but forgot it aboard the ship. Oh, well, next time. We have to come back to see Luxor someday anyway.
We went back to the hotel (Mena House?), literally in the shadow of the great pyramids. One thing that you don’t realize from all the pictures is that the city encroach right up to the pyramid complex, with houses and hotels and highways fairly close to them, yet it is really hard to tell that that’s the case from all the pictures, given how everything is positioned.

We finished the day at the Cairo Archaeological Museum (which was really crowded… and it isn’t even the high season). The best part of the museum? The Tutankhamen exhibit, with all the artifacts we’re familiar with. There’s are so many items there, that makes me think that the traveling Tutankhamen exhibits don’t really have anything left to show. It’s more impressive when you think that Tut wasn’t the most lavish of the tombs – only the one that was found intact. Elise was running on empty at that point, so we skipped the mummy exhibit and headed to the hotel.

In typical SAS fashion, the hotel was perhaps 7 stars (is that possible? I have no idea. And low standards.), and much to Elise’s delight, full of grass for her to run all over the place. Monika took over as bus leaders to take the students to the cheesy sound and light laser show at the pyramids, where the Sphinx was the british narrator over an overly-dramatic musical score. I stayed back and let Elise enjoy her first bathtub in months before she fell hard asleep. It was a good day for all.

The next morning I was up at 4am (while the ladies stayed behind), to take the students to the pyramids for sunrise and camel riding. One of the advantages of being on Semester at Sea is that they can pull off things like this… they opened the pyramid complex just for us so we could see the sunrise behind the pyramids. The view was amazing and the temperature was perfect at that time, and we also had a lot of fun doing some camel riding, but I have to say I don’t think I’ll ever do that again, as the camels aren’t very well treated over there.

What else can I say about the pyramids that haven’t been said before? I think the most amazing part is that they were the worlds tallest structure for 3500 years, of a size and scale that required an ungodly effort to complete in 20 years. I think that perhaps there’s an emotional connection as the pyramids are something that people (myself, at least) have distinct memories learning about in their childhood, and to see them materialized in front of you, picking up the little details that can’t come up in any book, is something worth seeing.

We met up with Monika and Elise soon afterwards, spending over three hours around the pyramids and the sphinx (including the sunrise), then went to the biggest bazaar in Egypt, and finished with a cruise on the Nile. The cruise, unfortunately, matched a lot of Vegas with some of the cheesy aspects of it. It had over-the-top Egyptian decorations (think Luxor Casino without the budget), complete with a photographer half-dressed in pharaoh’s clothing. The food was good but the music was too loud, so we spent much of the time on the staircase since Elise is pretty sensitive (still) to loud noises. They had a bellydancer, and having been surrounded by burkas all trip long, it felt so wrong and dirty in the context. I asked our guide how bellydancing is perceived in the area, and her face led me to believe that we were in the region’s equivalent of a strip cruise. I would have loved just to sail the Nile, but I assume there is a real demand for this type of cruise when in Egypt. Oh, well.

Other than that, the cruise was lovely. It really was – there was a derv-ish dancer aboard who did some truly interesting moves, and Elise kind of bonded with him.

Afer a busy two days in Cairo, we were soon on our three hour drive back to Alexandria. Elise fell asleep the entire time, so we really couldn’t have scripted it better.

I have to say that as interesting as the pyramids were, I was pretty fascinated by the often ignored history of Egypt since the ancient times, and where Egypt is today. Egypt has gone through as many transitions through the ages as Turkey, and it is easy to forget that there were several thousand years of history (and fairly interesting history at that), that happened since the ancient times – with the Greeks, Romans, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else between dropping by. Its particularly interesting to see such a predominantly Muslim country when it was Christian not so long ago, and how the population embraces its distant past.

Most interesting to me was experiencing the country with Elise and Monika. I hope Monika writes an entry from her perspective – she was getting so many mixed messages. On one hand, men were really forward with her, particularly when they didn’t see I was with her, taking pictures of her, and on the other hand, she was in a society where she wasn’t supposed to interact with men who are not her husband. She said several times that it would be much easier for her to maneuver around if SHE was wearing a burka, so she didn’t have to worry about what to do (and she was dressed conservatively by our standards – covered shoulders with full-length skirts the whole time.

Also interesting was traveling with Elise. As has been true in every country, but especially in Greece and Turkey, people were extremely forward and loving with her. The main difference I felt this time was that more women came forth to her than before, and that there was a curiosity factor to the interaction that hadn’t existed in the other countries – perhaps because tourists don’t usually bring a two-year-old to travel to Egypt too often. When we visited the library at Alexandria, Elise wasn’t allowed in (had to be 6 or older), so Monika and took turns hanging out with her outside for almost three hours. She was mobbed by women and children coming up to her, picking her up, kissing her, taking pictures of her and with her. At first, Elise took it extremely and surprisingly well, smiling for the pictures, and not freaking out when full-burkaed women picked her up to hold and kiss her. After three hours, she finally got tired of it, and when a man came up from behind her and picked her up, she screamed, and that was the end of the touching for that day (the man did, however, as me permission if he could take a picture with my wife. I said yes.).

Speaking of the Library, that is easily the most impressive thing we saw in Alexandria. Located on the same site as the ancient Library of Alexandria, it is a masterpiece in design. The outside is pretty neat – a circle that submerges beneath a pool at sea level, but the inside is simply stunning, with several staggered, open, naturally-lit floors, each with their own unique function interspersed between the books. The library has books in Arabic, English, and French (and I saw others too, all on the same shelving), with half a million volumes, but it has enough space for eight million items (it is very empty right now). The guide told us it is the fourth largest library in the world, but should be the largest once it is all completed – larger than the Library of Congress. It would certainly look more impressive.

The last thing of note was that I didn’t want to come all the way to Egypt and just experience it from the insular bubble of the ships and tour buses. It is very difficult to just go out with Elise, so once she fell asleep, I went out to walk around the city of Alexandria with Emily, Kris, and Holly. This was sensory overload at its peak, as we went out in the cool hours of twilight when the masses came out. There was so many people all over the place, navigating effortlessly through the chaos, full of colors from the fabric of the bazaars. We had two guys follow us for 25 minutes before we told them we were just going to walk alone, and I was sure they just wanted to see us something, but after hearing stories from people on the ship that they were followed and helped by these individuals for hours who didn’t try to sell them anything, I realized I may never know if we blew off two individuals with purely noble purposes. It was a pretty neat experience all around.

Egypt is tough, and I think the most important port for the shipboard community to have visited. I hope people took in more than the pyramids, because just like India, I think that’s what will stick with me when I look back at this trip years from now. It is the kind of place where you find so many hidden wondrous gems in the unlikely of places, surrounded by a chaos and poverty that makes you realize how randomly lucky we are to be born where we are. I think about that all the time.

We’re bunkering right now on the shadow of the massive Rock of Gibraltar out our window, finishing six days at sea, sailing through the Barbary Coast (no pirates! But same view they had.) before docking in Morocco. We’ve had the Sea Olympics (always awesome), the Talent Show, and the Crew Talent Show (absolutely, positively the most amazing and awesome crew in the world). We’ll be in Casablanca in the morning, Marrakesh in the afternoon, and four days later, we will be at sea for ten days, reflecting on the experiences on our way home.

Gotta go take Elise to dinner. Back in a few.

Honeymoon Do-Over

2010-07-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

What a difference 80 degrees make. When we got married, we wanted to go somewhere far for our honeymoon, and we’d narrowed down our choices to New Zealand and Turkey. The deciding factor was the ticket prices – flying down under was over $2000 per ticket, but flying to Turkey was about $600 apiece. It was a no-brainer for us, so we packed our bags and were off to Istanbul.

On all the high praise we heard from our friends who had been to Turkey, and also the usual guidebooks, few had mentioned how cold it can get there… certainly a lot colder than San Francisco. It was sleeting cold, and as little as 6 degrees F. in Cappadoccia. Add the fact that Monika was five months pregnant at that time, it made for a delightful but certainly trying time—enough to get a great feel for the area, but leaving us longing to revisit when there were leaves on the trees on a warm day.

I’m not sure our return could have been much better. After really intense heat in Greece, we hit a couple rainy days in Istanbul, which was a relief. We even took the kids to the park in the warm rain, somewhere in the mid-80s. And since we’d had a pretty hectic time in Greece with the travel back and forth to Santorini, we wanted to take it as easy as on Elise as we possibly could, especially knowing that Egypt was about to be the toughest port on her.

Unlike last time, we also had the advantage of having lectures on the history and politics of Turkey that we didn’t get the first time around. Istanbul is as much in the crossroads of different cultures as anywhere in the world, having been ruled by the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, and now the Post-Ataturk government of secular rule, and that history seeps out in everywhere, one layer built on top of the other.

What a lovely time it was. I looked at the pictures of our honeymoon, just to refresh our memory of what the place looks like all dark and grey. And everything was so vibrant and full of life. We stepped off the ship, right next to the Istanbul Modern past the Galata bridge that we were already familiar with, and made our way to the Spice Market, off to a lunch at some hole-in-the wall place with tasty meats, and in hiding from the sudden rain, discovered the Basilica Cistern that somehow we missed the first time around… a heeby-jeeby underground structure where the city used to store all the water that came from the mountains.

By the time we walked back on the ship on the first day, we had revisited much of the steps of our honeymoon, culminating on what may turn out to be my favorite playground (for Elise) of the trip, right in the middle of the Gulhane Park next to the Topkapi Castle.

That night was also one of my favorite of the voyage, where most of the staff walked from the ship to a restaurant up in the Taksim district. Somehow we managed to seat 45+ people, eat a ton of delicious food, while everyone, including the kiddos, had a fantastic time. I think when I look back at this voyage, I’ll see that meal as the moment that the trip turn from fun to comfortable; when the ship became home. Those who have sailed on Semester at Sea before know of that moment, and it’s always a nice feeling when you get there.

We stayed in Istanbul the entire time, and despite having planned on making it to the Asian side of the city at some point, the closest we got to the other side was about 20ft of the continent on a impromptu Bosphorous cruise that we jumped on at some point. Monika and I have been there before, but if Elise doesn’t go back to Asia before she’s 18, I can imagine this scenario with her as a teenager where she will hold a grudge against us for having taken her 8000 miles never to step on the promised land. (Elise, if you’re reading this, please understand that it’s not that big a deal, I promise I’ll take you back someday.)

One thing we noticed: more than any other country, Turkey had an inordinate number of men and children come up and grabbed Elise, always touching her, and often picking her up and throwing her up in the air. It was pretty uncomfortable at first, but slowly it became clear that it was never malicious, that there seemed to be a expectation that you are supposed to come over and complement any child. They really value children (could it be that it was because Elise was a girl?) in a different way there, and we’re really happy that Elise was mostly ok with it.

(The relationship with children has a slightly different twist in Egypt – I’ll save that story for the Egypt blog).

When we left Croatia, Monika and I looked at each other and said it would be hard for any of the upcoming ports to beat it, and we thought we had our sure favorite. Three ports later, I’m not so sure. I personally felt like we completed what we missed in our first visit to Turkey – things I couldn’t possibly have predicted – and enjoyed way beyond the level of simply going to the tourist sites (Monika even went to a Turkish cooking class for a day). I left Istanbul the first time around loving it, but now it is also in my “list of favorite cities in the world”, which it hadn’t cracked the first time around. We had rested from Greece, and ready for the craziness that was about to come up in Egypt.

We’re leaving Egypt right now, another wonderful port, and easily the craziest place I have been since India, and we’re about to be at sea for 6 days before going to our last port in Casablanca. Sea Olympics are tomorrow, and this will be the first port we actually have a couple days at sea to reflect on what we’ve seen. And this was a good port for a little reflection time.

Good times for all. Pictures are up at http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade .

Dolma, Dolma, Dolma

2010-07-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

I’m aboard the ship right in Istanbul right now. Monika went to a Turkish cooking class with a bunch of the staff, and I stayed behind to take care of Elise. So after a fun morning at the park in the middle of the pouring rain, with lots of puddles to jump in, Elise went down for a nap. I’m just waiting for Mon to get back, and I’ll be heading out with Kevin, another staff member, as we try to get a haircut in a foreign land. Which is always an adventure.

It really has been a great several weeks now. After a long haul crossing the Atlantic, and testing the waters a bit in Spain, I think we’ve gotten into a really nice rhythm. Italy and Croatia were great with Monika’s parents, and Greece and now Turkey have also been fantastic, with some of my favorite days in these two ports. We had staff Karaoke night at sea followed by a full day in Istanbul that culminated in an enormous all-staff dinner in Taksim, and it couldn’t have been much better.

I can’t believe how much we’re getting done, and how great Elise is handling it all of it. With all the new places, new people, and shuffling around, it is a lot of stress and stimulation, but she’s doing amazingly well. She misses everyone at home a lot (she mentions everyone by name all the time), and she’ll miss everyone on the ship when we get home as well.

But I’ll do a quick summary of Greece. At some point before we arrived in Greece, we decided that five days would probably be too much to just stay in the port/Athens area, so the night before we dock, we decide to go to an island. Most of the students were going to Mykonos, and Monika really wanted to see Santorini given all the wonderful testimonial of all our friends who have been there – including Dave and Tanya, who spent their honeymoon there.

So in true Semester at Sea fashion, we make a last-second plan and purchase our tickets for a 2:15pm flight the day we dock. With the crises in Greece, there was going to be a air traffic controller strike the day after we arrived, and we wanted to make sure we had at least 2+ days to explore Athens. We figured that with the ship arriving around cleared by about 9:30am, we’d have our passports not long after that, could each lunch in Piraeus, then head to the airport in time to enjoy the famous sunset in Santorini. We booked our flights with our good friends Tom and Rebecca Jelke, who also have a little one (Parker).

We’ll, even though people were able to leave the ship, we didn’t get the passports back until about 2pm or so, which meant that we had to change our flights to 6pm or so at some cost. In the meantime, went out to explore Greece until it was time to leave for the airport. Which we discovered…

- We love the greek alphabet. It felt like an omnipresent calculus class (or a fraternity, if you’re so inclined. Which I’m not). I kept wanting to solve for all the missing variables. It was fun because by the end of the voyage, we were kind of able to pronounce some of the words, as long as we very carefully spelled out the greek letter aloud. We had no idea what it meant, but at least we knew how it sounded like.
- Greece is really hot this time of year. Really hot. It makes it really hard to go out with the little one, which meant we needed to keep her hydrated at all costs, use lots of sunscreen, go swimming as much as possible, and really try not to go out in the middle-of-the afternoon sun. My favorite moments of the port – the amazing sunset at Ia in Santorini, and the sunset at the Acropolis followed by an early evening at the Plaka district – were my favorite in part because it was so dang pleasant at that time of day. We’re getting in this pattern of going out early, eating and going to museums when it gets hot (and Elise falls asleep on the stroller), then enjoying the late afternoon and early evening hours again.
- The food is fantastic. Even the smallest, touristiest place has tasty greek food. Too bad I don’t remember the name of a single item. But Monika does. Hmmmm….. And we always order too much. There’s no way around it.
- I don’t know if we just got lucky, but the greek people seemed to have an exceptional care for children that I’ve never seen en masse before. Everyone has been absolutely wonderful to travel this whole time, making it very pleasant to bring Elise everywhere in Europe, but they took it to a new level in Greece. By the time we sat down to lunch on our first hour in port, we already had two people show us pictures of their kids and grandkids, and she was become fast-friends with our fast-talking waitress. If there was a line, we were sent to the front of it. Seats were always made available to us, motorcycles would stop accelerating and even stop traffic for us (and nobody else), and everywhere we got some free foods and items because of Elise. It was often quite touching and completely unexpected, and I really hope that we didn’t just hit an amazing streak, and that this is something the culture really values.
- The economic crisis is real over there. We benefit from not having as many tourists around, and lower rates to meet the lower demand, but everyone we talked to told us how slow business is right now (and thanked us for sailing in with so many students for five days).

So after the passport delay, an hour-long cab ride to the airport, another 2-hour flight delay because of air-conditioning problems, we were aboard our 40-minute hop to Santorini, where we witnessed the Santorini sunset from the air.

The island is very striking in appearance. Located on an enormous volcano, the caldera is open on two sides into the ocean, forming creating a huge three-quarter circle of gentle slopes on one side and 1000ft drops into the sea on the other. Inside the caldera, there is a growing lava island of the active volcano. The island used to be the home of the ancient Minoan Crete civilization, and there is a lot of evidence that the massive eruption around 14 BC (I believe) became the origin of the myth of Atlantis, because parts of the island disappeared, and the populations of Santorini and neighboring islands, including Crete, were destroyed.

Now the island, particularly the top of the cliff on the caldera, is covered in these distinct white buildings with blue roofs. I kept wanting to visit a hardware store just to take a picture of the paint aisle. I’m pretty sure all swatches are either “Santorini Blue” or “Santorini White”.

We arrived at night, took a short cab ride to the city of Thira, where our (cheapo) hotel was in the middle of everything and less than 100ft from the caldera. There’s enough time for us to get some delicious whatdoIcallits pita with Kebabs (greek tacos? Sufliakes? Mon, help!), then go to bed and get ready for a full day.

We discovered how much Elise loves beaches, so we made it the first priority the next day. We took a bus down to the public black-rock beaches on the southeast corner of the island, and parked there the first half of the day while Elise had the time of her life in the water. I don’t think it was possible to have a better water temperature… in the extreme heat we were in (made hotter by the dark pebbles), it was just cold enough to be extremely refreshing but not too cold. Fun times for all.

After lunch and nap on our way back to Thira, we jumped on another bus on our way to Ia (spelled Oia with what I though was a silent Theta in greek, but what do I know?) on the northern tip of the island. Which, to us, was the best part. Quaint, clean, with the best view, this is the place I would recommend staying to anyone visiting the island (though prices were sometimes six times more expensive than what we paid for our hotel). Elise fell asleep in time for us to have a glass of wine, and woke up to discover the playground out of heaven (Mt. Olympus?), on top of Ia, just ahead of a most amazing sunset. After playing for a few minutes, we grab a pizza, enjoy the most perfect of evenings, then take the bus (again) back to our hotel in Thira.

(OK, Mon’s back to watch Elise. I’m going to get a quick haircut. Be right back.)

(Alright, I’m back. That was hilarious. I guess they are used to dealing with a lot of hair here. I went with Kevin, we found a random barbershop near the ship, they spoke no English, and they give you the equivalent of a Turkish bath on your head. Lots of stubby fingers all over the place, lots of tools to snip hair you didn’t even know you had (they sure take care of that nose hair for you), and, best of all, they singe your ear hairs. Yup. I didn’t even know I had them until I felt a burning pain in my ear. The barber had pulled out a lighter, put them to my ear, and burned away all of my ear hair, on the lobes and everything. And he didn’t just put the flame and pull it away. He kept it there. It hurt a lot. And it smelled like burnt hair.

Then he took my head, dunked it in the sink in front of him, washed my face all over – stubby fingers in my eyes, ears, and nose, and then dried me off with a towel so vigorously I kind of felt I was being waterboarded. It was hilarious.)

(And my ears feel like a baby’s bottom right now. We have so many hilarious stories from Turkey – I can’t wait to type up that blog in two days).

(But I digess).

So after enjoying one more light day in Santorini, we made it back to Athens. The following (extremely hot) day, we explored Piraeus by going to the local playground with Cal and Cash, ordering WAY too much delicious food (I blame Dave), going to the local archaeological museum, and taking a nap, before waiting for things to cool down to visit the Acropolis near the end of the day.

The Acropolis is something. Way cooler than anything I could have imagined, and just a shame that much of it was destroyed by conflict. We picked a perfect time and day to do it – even though it was extremely hot, it was certainly cooling down at that point, the pollution had mostly blown away (giving us an amazing view of the city and sea from up top, and Elise was in a pretty great mood.

We were scrambling to make it but there before it closed, so we didn’t bother getting more cash. They didn’t take any credit cards, and we somehow managed to pay for the 24 Euro entry fee with the last remaining coins we had, and miraculously, we barely had enough. I can tell you the cashier loved us when we dropped all the coins in front of him.

For those of you who have never been to Athens, the walk up to the Parthenon is pretty precarious, with slippery, worn-down 2000-year-old marble, on some pretty steep ground. I can’t imagine what it is like when it rains – I can only imagine that these ancient marbled cities like Rome and Athens was a disaster when it rained. Can marble be any more slippery?

After enjoying the view, we tried to make it to the new, amazing Acropolis Museum, but it was too late. So we let Elise play in the grassy hill outside for a while, then walked over to the beautiful and quaint Plaka neighborhood, on the foot of the Acropolis, for another perfectly pleasant dinner with a view of the Parthenon.

We took it really easy on our last day in Greece and decided to go back and explore the Acropolis museum, which is stunningly brilliant. It is built on top of ruins (which you can see through the plexiglass floors), is laid out more like a modern art museum than a history museum, then had an offset third floor of the size and orientation of the Parthenon, to house every single sculpture that was ever part of the outside of the Parthenon.

The problem is that many (most) of the artwork is outside of Greece, and in fact, much of it has been housed outside of the country, primarily at the British Museum in London. The Greeks have been trying to get them back for years (claiming they were stolen), and one of the biggest arguments against returning the artwork has always been that they would be better cared for in England than in Greece.

But with the new museum, that argument is done for. It really is world class, and though it’ll be unlikely that the Brits will return anything, I think the Greeks have made a pretty good case that the statues belong in Athens, in the context of the Acropolis. It’s a must see for anyone visiting the city.

So that was pretty much our time in Greece. I think the pictures summarize it pretty well (http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade)

Now we’re almost done with Turkey (I’m now enjoying the most amazing view of nighttime Istanbul from the Staffulty Lounge, or 10 Forward, as we call it on this voyage) and we have crossed that point in the voyage where the ship is home; that you get the nice feeling when you see the lights of the ship when you’re out at night, and that you get really excited if you haven’t seen somebody for several days. We miss everything from home, and are looking forward to going back soon (two more countries), but doggone it, it’s nice to be here.

Off to bed, but a quick Elisey-ism before I go (I need to keep better track of these - there are a million of them).

The three of us were in our cabin two nights ago, and while Elise was having a boob, one of us (who shall remain anonymous to protect his identity ) passed gas, and quite audibly. So to distract from the fact, I say, "Elise, I think there's a frog in the room".

She looks up right at me and says, "A farting frog."

She would have gone back to the boob but Monika was too busy rolling on the floor laughing.

***

The next day, Elise was looking out the cabin window when SHE flatulates. She giggles for a second, looks at us, and says, "That was daddy's frog."

***

Back in a couple days.

What are you sinking about?

2010-07-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve seen the MV Explorer in 22 different ports since 2005, and the view from the ship in some of these places have been stunningly beautiful (Hong Kong and Cape Town are two of my favorites). But none of them have been as quaint and picturesque as our little home in Dubrovnik, Croatia, with it’s light-colored houses topped by red-tiled roofs surrounding the little bay we were in.

Dubrovinik has been the surprise revelation of the trip so far. In sharp contrast with everything in Italy, we found an extremely clean, friendly, calm city, as if tourists hadn’t discovered it yet. It probably helped that we arrived in the middle of the week, during a European economic crisis, but that first day in Dubrovnik was one of the most lovely, peaceful, carefree days I can ever remember. The city quickly shot up into one of my favorite places in the entire world).

And what a place it is. It is a really modern city, with one of the most amazingly well-preserved medieval centers, the Old Town, with its massive white walls surrounded by the Ocean. We met Tom and Karen after they ferried over from Italy the day before we arrived, and spent the rest of the day walking around the old town and the walls, enjoying the magnificent view of the emerald and green Adriatic, and eating seafood and delicious pizza while Tom tried to converse in Croatian with our waiters. It was what I imagine some parts of Italy and Europe looked when tourists and pollution take over.

(And, weirdly enough, they had set up a tennis country in the middle of old town for an exhibition match between John McEnroe and Goran Ivanisec, which while was supposed to be out of view of the unpaying public, things are small and quaint enough in there that it was pretty easy to catch a glimpse of the action from the side. But I digress).

So we packed a lot in there in a few days. On the second day, we went with several friends to a hotel on the west side of town to do some scuba and snorkeling off shore while the kids swam in the hotel swimming pool. It was quite nice, with Elise taking her first ocean swim, but it was highlighted because the Croatia Summit was this week, with many leaders of European countries in town, and in the hotel we were in. Security was incredible, and the Scuba instructor told us Berlusconi was with us. Dave swears the old man in the hot tub with him was the Italian Prime Minister, since security was really present in the pool at that time.

That afternoon Monika and I left Elise with the grandparents, and rented a kayak for the rest of the afternoon. That was hilarious and a lot of fun, especially when we didn’t sink, which we almost did, since we rented a cracked kayak unbeknownst to anyone. The story of those four will be its own entry, and I’ll let Monika describe it from her perspective (which was the dry, comfortable, front half of the boat).

The next day we rented a little boat with a 15-year-old skipper to check out some of the island and beaches around the area, with Dave and Tanya. We jumped in the ocean, stopped by caves along the shore, and Elise enjoyed the water at a sandy beach for the first time in her life. Given how much she enjoyed playing in the sand, then running off to the water to wash it off, then back to playing in the sand, I think we’ll be scheduling more time to take her to the beach from here on out. She really had a great time.

But what stuck with me the most was the car ride back from the boat to the ship. The driver was our skipper’s mom, and she told her a bit about life in Dubrovnik. Life over there is really, really good right now. Really good. She said that “people celebrate more than they work”. The money is coming in from tourism, and the city has been able to keep order.

But she told us how miserable the 1990’s were for her and everyone in the country. Its hard to believe that the quaint little town was part of one of the most brutal conflicts and ethnic cleansing in recent history, and what kills me is how recent it all happened. The area has had an amazing history of conflict under different rulers, but it was quite peaceful and relatively prosperous under the Tito. After his death, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Slobidan Milosovic, a Serb, organized takeover of the Yugoslav republics to all be under super-Serbian control (after a system of apartheid had begun in the area). With that in mind, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, and the international community refused to recognize Croatia for a long time.

Croatia had no army, and without international support, faced retaliation from the Serbian military, who bombed Dubrovnik (a city of little strategic value) to ruble. Our driver delivered her son the day after the bombing of the city, in the hospital with no electricity or water, and delivered her other son (our skipper) later in the war.

And the brutal genocide began, with Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, etc… all cleansing their lands of the “other” people, with a brutality that was described by one of the professors this way:

“Rape has always been used in war, but they turned rape into a violent artform. They would rape women in front of their husbands, kill their husbands, then leave the women to bear the child of different ethnicity in the process of ethnic cleansing”

This was just over a decade ago, and of the people we asked about were affected by it. I can’t get my head over it. That everyone was affected by something so brutal not so long ago, and somehow manage to move on, at least superficially, into one of the most friendly and peaceful places in the world.

(They are really friendly. These old women who were sewing along the city walls gave Elise a pair of shoes she knit. We tried to pay her, but she refused – I don’t think I’d ever quite seen that happen before).

I honestly find it very scary, to say the least. Not because they move on, but because it seems like that violence and conflict can actually erupt anywhere, and I’m sure these people would never have imagined the turn their lives were about to make in the early 90s. I’m one of the most optimistic people I know, sometimes unreasonably so, but this is something I think of a lot, especially since having Elise. What kind of world are we leaving her? And the more I think about it, the happier I am that we are raising her in a culture of global awareness and cultural education, because I think this will be one of the most important skills or requirements of her generation. This will be a topic for a later post.

(And about the Balkan War… we visited the war photo museum in Old Town on the last day, and all I could think about is that we have a moral obligation to stop violence around the world. Sounds simplistic, and it may be, and some may consider this being the world police, but doggone it, that genocide was preventable if the international community had stepped in sooner. It’s really sad).

To finish on a good note – the driver told us they had bought some land by the water after the bombing for almost nothing, and that now that the city is doing so well, that they are really well off. I hope that’s the case for everyone who managed to stay in the city through the worst of times.

So now we find ourselves away from one of the most amzing places in the world, and off to Greece (which we can already see out of our window). We look forward to sending more updates then!

(Croatia pictures are at http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade)

A Rome with a View

2010-07-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

So something really fun happened tonight. Elise was playing with our camera in the cabin, and figured out how to take pictures. So the grabs the camera, comes out of the room with it, and starts taking pictures of everyone she sees.

It’s a great little sequence of about 50 pictures or so. It starts out with tentative pictures, of walls and fingers grabbing the lens, but then quickly becomes this dynamic sequence from her little point of view… where she runs to people she’s really excited of seeing of seeing, and tells them she’s about to take a picture of them. It’s just pictures of happy people so happy to see her, and see her so excited, and crouching down to her level.

And, of course, she took many pictures of students she never met along the way. It was a great icebreaker (and right before she crashed an Insanity workout class and apparently tried to follow along with everyone. Wish I had pictures of that). I’ll post the sequence sometime after Croatia. I have a smile on my face just thinking about it.

Which, by the way, were doing a late-night docking as I type this. Immigration will happen in the morning, so we can’t leave the ship until tomorrow. Monika’s parents will again join us at this port, and everything seems to point to a wonderful four days here.
And why do I think that? Because we just had a fantastic seven days in Italy.
(Ah, Italy. Your architecture reminds me so much of Las Vegas.)

(Alright, just kidding.)

Remember when I said we did approximately 20% of what we normally do because Elise is around. Well, scratch that. Maybe it was because we worked out the kinks in Spain, maybe it was because we had a fantastically-located apartment in Rome, or maybe it was because we had the extra helping hands of Monika’s parents who met us in Rome and will meet us in Croatia. Or maybe it was just the gelatarias on every corner.

Whatever it was, we did everything we wanted in Rome. I checked all the major items on my list, and I got a great sense of everyday life over there. We even managed to walk from the Colisseum to the Vatican with Elise – one of our many walks – due to the perfect timing of her afternoon 2-hour naps.

We arrived in Civitavecchia after single day at sea, in which we went right between Corsica and Sardinia with an amazing full moon on the still water. We immediately venture in the intense summer heat with Dave, Tanya, and their kids, to the train station to purchase an express ticket to Rome. We were there in 40 minutes.

Much to Elise’s delight, Mimi and Baba were waiting for us at the train station. I really wish I had captured it on tape, because it was something out of a movie. She saw them from a distance, and as soon as she recognized them, she darted off into their arms. They are her favorite people in her entire little world.
And we were off to the apartment, which belongs to a Nagy family friend, and which was close to everything. We were immediately off to explore Rome, chasing Elise, eating gelato, and visiting playgrounds.

Which reminds me of a few things.

First, because the playground was amongst ancient ruins, as was everything else in Rome I mean, everything in Rome is old. There are ruins everywhere, and I’m assuming that everything is built on something that is over 2000 years old. It has to be a nightmare to build something new there, because I can only imagine the bureaucracy (beyond the typical Italian bureaucracy) to get permission to dig up in the city. I imagine that if you do get permission, and do dig, you’ll find something interesting. I imagine that has to be a problem with Athens and Istanbul and a bunch of other old world cities as well, which have a rich history, all where people have been living continuously in mass for centuries.

Second, I’ve come to the feeling that one of the measures of quality of life in a city is the number of playgrounds and park benches to be found. It really makes a big difference. Italy had great playgrounds (and an inordinate amount of park benches), but my favorite was in Naples. Beachside, really nice, and full of old Italian grandfathers bringing their kids to the park. Naples is a really “gritty” city by any measure, but walking around on that part of town really made me (us) fall in love with it.

Third, I had a wonderful conversation with one of the professors tonight about the environment, and where we are going. Things aren’t looking great right now, and he thinks it is too late to reverse the climate changes that we already started, and that things will change and that the third world will suffer most from it, but that he doesn’t think all is hopeless. Humans will have to adapt, and I can’t help but see Italy as a window into what countries like the US may look like many years from now. Things are crowded, and fairly polluted, but there is a great use of communal space. And since one of the biggest problems with dealing with global warming in a a world of increased standards of living, is that people are living in bigger houses. But the Europeans are using a lot fewer resources than we are, and part of the reason for that is that they live in smaller spaces, and make much better use of their communal spaces, going out for everyday entertainment (instead of making big living rooms with huge back yards). Imagine if WE had a pub on every corner.

And you know what? They’re happier because of it.

(This is what I love most about Semester at Sea – this sense of communal living. We have a small cabin, and we have to get out and be social to live – and luckily, we live amongst some amazingly interesting and well educated people to talk to.)
(I also love that I get to attend the lectures. We had a brilliant guest lecture in Global Studies about Croatia today. I may have to do a whole blog on it).

(But I digress).

This is all a long way of saying that we saw all the tourist attractions in Rome, and even hosted a party at the apartment where 22 shipmates (mostly parents and kids) came. And Tom and I made sure to take as many goofy pictures as we could. It may have annoyed our wives to the fullest, but doggone it was fun.

We even made it to Florence for two days, where Monika had lived a bit after college, before we went to Naples to meet the ship. Florence was pretty packed with tourists, and was extremely hot. Monika felt very nauseous the night we arrived there, and we later attributed it to sleep deprivation, dehydration, a possible heat stroke of some sort. Which makes her (according to her), a ninety-year-old woman.

One of my favorite things about Florence was seeing the statue of David. The museum opened at 8:15am, and because of the extremely long lines the day before, we decided we would make see it as soon as the museum opened.

So after a fantastic morning stroll seeing Florence wake up, we realize that everyone else had the same idea to show up early to the museum as well. Which means we waited 40 minutes to get it, but it was well worth it.

It’s a stunning statue – bigger than I imagined, and beautifully rendered. I always thought David was just passively posing, but going around it, you can see that he actually has a pretty angry “determined” face on him, like is about to cause some damage. And of course, Elise had to point out that “David has a small pepito”. That’s our daughter.

I can go on and on… but I need to go to bed. We posted pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade, and will have lots more in a few days.

And we can’t wait for a few more days with Mimi and Baba. They are the best inlaws. And I may need to send some Tom Nagy-isms instead of Elisey-isms on the next post.
(One more quick story before I go. I was swimming on the ship pool yesterday with Elise, and she was laughing her head off as I threw her as high as I could and caught her back in the water. In between the laughter, she manages to say, “I have poops!”, which turns out is the last thing you want to hear while throwing a little kid in a small swimming pool.

I managed to catch her before causing too much damage, but man, there was poop everywhere. Monika and I quickly do the “I’m carrying you with the least amount of contact as possible as you dangle in front of me” that every parent is familiar with, and had to wrap her in towels since the inside of the ship is SOOOOO much colder than the outside. By the time we got back to the cabin, there was poop everywhere. I don’t think we could have gotten more poop on the towels and close if we had tried to catch it directly.

And it wasn’t even the worst poop story of the moment… as Cash had, at that same time, woken up from his nap with a poopy diaper, only to decide to take it off and smear on his bed before his parents got back in the room.

Just look at the picasa pictures and you’ll see it’s all worth it).

My in-laws crack me up

2010-07-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

We're enjoying a couple of days in Rome at a friend's apartment, with Monika's parents. They crack me up. Here are some pictures just from my camera - they have a lot more.

You brought her, you Barcelon’er

2010-06-28T15:17:00.001-07:00

Welcome to Italy Day! We are currently sailing right between Corsica and Sardinia, with an AMAZING full moon that just arose behind the horizon. The water is so calm that it feels like we’re on a lake, and we’re moving so slowly that it feels like we’re not moving at all. It’s been this way since we entered the Mediterranean, and it’s expected to be this way all the way until the next Atlantic crossing. You know what that means… more seasickness! Woohoo! I mean, crap.

And it is really hot and humid already, at night, so I think we can expect some pretty sweaty weather in the next few days.

Our beta-testing country of Spain is out of the way, and we’re now full-fledged travelers with a two-year-old. We have discovered how to plan for only one or two big things a day, and everything else is bonus. I used to be able to absorb every single detail that tour guides would give me about a place, but now I’m content with getting, oh, say 20 percent of the information on the first go-around, because one eye is on Elise all the time. Which is just fine – it means we get to stroll around a lot of neighborhoods, meet all the local kids at the playgrounds (which have been plentiful so far), and enjoy the food at a lovely pace. It’s completely different from any travel I’ve ever done, and in many ways, it is richer. And I love it. I’m definitely looking forward to filling up the holes I missed on all these tours. I mean… when was that statue built again? Is that Church Romanesque or Gothic? Where’s the surreal roof with all the chimney? What’s a Spanish tortilla again? It goes on and on.

(Though we’re developing a pretty good system where we take turns listening to the tour guide and watching Elise, and just summarizing what the other one missed on the last go-around. We’d make great study partners).

We were lucky that, as in most ports, the ship docks right next to the action. So from the first day, we were able to get off the ship, walk to the famous Las Ramblas, and mostly enjoy the Old Town of Barcelona, walking down the narrow alleyways, looking for playgrounds, and enjoying the open spaces.

The day we arrived was a major holiday (St. Joan), so everything was closed and quiet, and Barcelona was hungover from the celebrations the night before. But after strolling with a couple of the other parents and kids, we found a nice little place to get some juices and beer and take a break from the sun.

It was a pretty nice break, though at one point, a drunk man came into the bar, and seeing that some of us had beers, demanded that he be served a beer as well. The bartender said no, that we were his family, and that he didn’t serve beer in the morning. That caused the drunk man to start screaming, threaten the bartender, and the result was an altercation between the two of them that almost got very ugly, as the bartender shoved him out of the bar, then grabbed and iron rod when he thought the drunk man was coming back to join us. The guy was escorted away by a friend of the bartender.

It was a lovely sight for all the children present. I’m not sure they noticed what was happening. We continued on with the stroll.

Most days went on that way. We would pick a place to go to, then try to time the longer distances with Elise’s naps, then stop to get food, or find a place for her to run around, when she was awake. It worked extremely well, especially when we visited Gaudi’s Casa Mila (with the chimneys on the roof) and Familia Sagrada (if you’re not familiar with Barcelona, Gaudi is a surrealist architect that created many of the defining structures of the city. They are certainly something to behold. Imagine if Cirque du Soleil built houses and churches).

Both those were very far from the ship, but we walked all the way to both and back, and it all worked out perfectly. We didn’t go into those, as the lines were too big to wait with Elise in the sun. But, because we had been building up everything we do to her, especially the night before (she prefers predictability), we had to explain why we weren’t going on the roof of Casa Mila after we made such a big deal about it. We told her the lines were too big. She seemed to get it right away, enthusiastic that the “lines were so BIIIG!”

Not much later, we understand why she is enthusiastic. She said, “I’m scared.” And we asked her why, and she said because the “Lions were too big” on the roof, so we couldn’t go there. So now she’s convinced there are lions on every tourist attraction that has a queue. Good times.
On the second day, we visited the monastery at Montserrat, about an hour away from Barcelona. It was our first SAS trip after we gave away our tickets to the city orientation (knowing Elise would not want to sit on a bus after 10 days at sea). If you don’t know what Montserrat is, take a look at our pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade . It’s pretty impressive, originally build in a serrated mountain centuries ago (but rebuilt several times over the years), and still going strong as one of the major tourist attractions in Catalonia.

We made it up with Elise, and started perfecting our tag-team over there. I mean, the hard part about taking a kid is that they get so excited, you know, but going up and down the three steps to the gift shop. And I love her watching her do that. But we’re succeeding in getting her to be excited to see the things WE want to see as well. We even managed to take her on a short hike up the mountain, in the hot sun. She really is a trooper.

We’ve hit Barcelona in the middle of World Cup fever, with the spaniards doing a good job making it to the second round after losing its first game. So we got to see the game out at a Tapas bar, with good people like Dave, Tanya, Tom, Rebecca, and Emily, and still took some time during the game to see more of the city in celebration. It was also pride week over there, and we saw what must have been the smallest pride parade in the world. I’m really curious what the homosexual culture is like over there.

Our last day in the city was Sunday, and there were a lot of celebrations going on… we managed to take in the Picasso Museum while Elise napped (which was surprisingly good – showed a lot of his student work, which you could see a definitive progression of his skill as an artist. So much energy). There was a lot of dancing on the streets, and at noon, we caught this human tower competition – seven stories up, with the tiniest of kids, maybe 4-6 climbing up to make up the top of the tower some 40 ft in the air. And the tower is trembling the entire time. It is truly dangerous stuff, though I must admit that if I were a kid growing up in Barcelona, I would most certainly have been one of the kids dying to participate in the tower every weekend.

It was one of my favorite parts of the weekend, though I found out later that we missed the last tower, which fell with the kids on top. I don’t know if anyone got hurt, but I think we left at the right time.

So that was Barcelona in a few paragraphs. We had a wonderful time, and it was a perfect place to hone in our on-location parenting skills. We had a quick all-Italy day on the ship (since we had 10 days to prepare for Spain, but only one for Italy, so it was non-stop Italy lectures today). The best part was that they asked us, being from California, to share earthquake safety tips to students, since Italy is seismically active.

Enter Monika Nagy, Italian Geologist, who shared the tips she learned from having survived the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Everybody left thinking that all Californians as versed in earthquake safety as she is. Did you know that you shoudn’t necessarily stand in the door frame during an earthquake? On some buildings, it may be the strongest part of the building, but on some buildings, it’s the weakest! Bet you didn’t know that.

So we arrive tomorrow in Civitavecchia, and will take a train to meet with Tom and Karen Nagy in Rome. We really look forward to it. Elise will see Mimi and Baba, and we will get few hours to ourselves over there… which hasn’t happened since we left.

Other than the "Lion is so BIIIG", here is a quick round of Elisey-isms:

When getting ready for a boob, Elise exclaimed, really loudly, "OH, JESUS! I GOT A BOOBIE!"

When asked if she wanted to sit on the potty, she said, "No, dadda. I'm too small. I'll fall in."

We're trying to break her of the habit of the binky, so we ask her to keep her binky and froggy in the cabin whenever we go out. So as we're getting ready to take her swimming, she starts singing, very happily, "We're taking the binky to the pool... I'm taking the binky to the pool.... we're taking the binky and froggy to the pool... we're taking the binky to the pool..." To which I say, "No, love, we're keeping the froggie here." She looks at me as if I'm crazy, and says, "It's just a song."

She really likes these bunny crackers, so one morning, she says, "I want some bunny crackers." We didn't have any, so Mon tells her so. She intently replies, "But I want some!" Mon calmly says, "They're all gone." She exclaims, "Let's get them at the store!" Mon responds, "The store doesn't have any."

She very calmly looks at us, pauses for a second, and says, "Oh. I guess they're all gone."

You can almost see here wheels spinning. We really have to explain everything to her.

Alright, off to bed, but pictures are up here: http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade

Don Ricardo

2010-06-23T11:45:00.000-07:00

The name Ricardo Andrade is one of the most common in Brazil – about the equivalent of Peter Smith in the U.S. And somehow, in the early days of gmail, I managed to snag the coveted “randrade@gmail.com” email address. The result, six or seven years later, is that I keep getting personal emails sent my way – not spam, but sincere emails from people who mistakenly think I’m Rodrigo Andrade, the parent of a truant high school student in New Mexico, randrade6849@gmail.com, or dozens of other possibilities.

Now, most of the time, a simple, “I’m sorry, you sent this in error” to me is enough to not get emails again, but there is a small, persistent, and vocal minority that do not believe that I’m not the person they are trying to reach, and in fact, argue with me to knock it off. With gmail, this becomes even more problematic because of the “chat” function, so I often find myself chatting with people, trying to convince them that I am not, in fact the person they think I am. And two of these threads have been going on for over two years.

The first is from a guy Marlison in Brazil who thinks I’m his college buddy Romario. Apparently, Romario always arrives on campus first, and the buddy wants to find out what the upcoming classes are like. And apparently, Romario must be quite the joker, because no matter how much I argue that I’m not Romario, even offering to do video chats and phone calls on my US cell phone number, Marlison thinks that I’m pulling his leg. So after a while, I usually just give in and make up information about the classes I’m supposedly taking. Here’s a transcription of a typical chat with this guy, translated from the portuguese:

marlisonhbsi: Hey Romario!
Heeeeyyy... do you know when class starts?
?
me: I'm not romario. I'm Ricardo
marlisonhbsi: There you go with your kidding
later later
Ok
me: No, really. I live in the United States. I'm Ricardo Andrade
marlisonhbsi: so, Romario Ricardo Andrade
and the classes?
me: Dude - you're talking to the wrong person. randrade@gmail.com : http://www.gostanford.com/sports/m-gym/mtt/andrade_rico00.html
marlisonhbsi: yes, romario ricardo
and the classes?
me: Do you want to do a video chat or skype to prove I'm not Romario?
Call me in the U.S. now . 650-793-3537
American cell
marlisonhbsi: I don't want to know if you are romario ou ricardo I want to know about the classes
?????//
me: what classes?
marlisonhbsi: the classes
Don't you study?
me: no
I work
a lot
marlisonhbsi: you think I don't know you?
me: Where do I know you from?
marlisonhbsi: is your car working better
?
me: it's much better
marlisonhbsi: thought it'd get worse
right now
yes, and the classes?
quit kidding around
since you're there
tell me.

The second one is even better, because apparently I’m a very important man in Southern Chile, who is holding off some sort of civil project because I refuse to sign the documents. I’m not kidding. A guy by the name of Christian has been emailing me for over two years, very politely asking me to please sign the documents, so they came move on with this project. He’s even gone as far as writing me a long philosophical letters addressed to the “Esteemed Don Ricardo” flattering me and my services in every way possible in hundreds of words, only to finish off saying that “as you can see, this is very important, and your cooperation in this matter is urgently needed.” One letter started, in spanish, as “Dear Esteemed Don Ricardo. I would like to share with you some of my reflections regarding the Garcia letter.”

He even comes on chat every once in a while. One time, he chatted that he was waiting his meeting with “me” in the auditorium, so he must have been surprised when he saw “me” come online at the time of this meeting. This was one of the many times that I argued with Christian that I’m not Don Ricardo, and the general response is always, “Ah, yes, very funny, Don Ricardo. But please, Don Ricardo. We need those documents.”

And I keep having to tell him that I don’t speak Spanish, but it doesn’t matter. He thinks I’m kidding.

So I’m picturing that Christian is an eager young intern that has been assigned to deal with the jokester of Don Ricardo, the town’s Marlon Brando in the later years. Because the only reason I think this has continued on for so long is that 1) Don Ricardo is the kind of guy who hides whoopee cushions during important meetings, so pretending he’s not Don Ricardo on emails is not beyond him, and 2) He’s a powerful and intimidating enough person that no one dares question him – kind of like no one questioned Brando when he made some cookey acting decisions in his later years.

From what I understand, the project has to do with preparing the city for its 100-year celebration of its founding, with a few public works. And based on the emails that came into my inbox for so long, I’m assuming that the celebration came and went without any festivities, and that somewhere, there is a fuming, real Don Ricardo wondering why no one asked him to sign any documents…

Anyway, that has nothing to do with SAS, but I was reminded of it because we’re heading to Barcelona tomorrow, and the word “Don” comes up quite a bit, especially since we have an actual Spanish Knight, Don David Gies, aboard the ship. We sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar yesterday, and could easily see Spain and Morocco at the same time (well, I have deep set eyes with terrible peripheral vision, so not technically at the same time. But I could if I had a mirror. You get the picture. I’m a hunter, not a gatherer).

At this point, the two countries are only seven or so miles apart, and the terrain is fairly dramatic. There are very large letters written on a Moroccan mountain that says, in Arabic, “God, Country, King.”, and what appears to be a fairly large fort of some kind, but I have no idea at this point. It’s pretty easy to see why the Strait (Straits? There’s only one) inspired the Gates of Hercules at one time. I was almost anticipating sailing through two large statues a-la Lord of the Rings at any time. We’ll be refueling at the Rock of Gibraltar

But it was pretty awesome. We were greeted by a bunch of dolphins out our window again, and ship traffic was pretty heavy as everyone is funneled into this area. They also have jumping swordfish out here too, which we saw out of our window. Which is nice.

The Spanish side had a lot of windmills (and we had a great lecture today on how Spain is a leader in developing renewable energy today). It has been really neat learning about Spanish history the last several days, particularly the fact that because of the Islamic invasion, Spain continued advancing as a civilization while the rest of Europe fell into the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome. I miss school.

That’s it. I’m off to take Elise to the pool, and tomorrow we’ll hit Barcelona, so there may be silence on our end for a few days.

P.S. We're sailing past Ibiza right now. You can see the clubs from here.

Azores and Dolphins

2010-06-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

My work day is done. Pretty busy night – lots of activities that required AV around the ship, but everything is turned off and locked right now. The ship’s route put us exactly through the islands of the Azores archipelago, so it was pretty cool to look outside and see the volcanic cones drift past our windows every once in a while. We should be hitting Gibraltar about 2pm tomorrow, and given how smoothly the seas have been so far, they are expected to be even smoother in the Mediterranean, and for the rest of the voyage.

And because we were near some islands, we encountered quite a few birds and dolphins the last few days. They are right out our window – I managed to get a little video of a school going by: http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade/AtlanticCrossing#5485364524783557554

I posted some new pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade/AtlanticCrossing

I’m off to the staffulty lounge to finish off the night, more tomorrow.

Halfway there.

2010-06-19T07:47:00.000-07:00

Alright! The schedule is starting to normalize, if only ever so slightly. From what we worked out, I basically work from 9am to lunch, then take breaks to play with Elise while Monika takes two classes in the afternoon. Then I get to work the nighttime hours, when there are usually a couple seminars and events such as the dance that will go on tomorrow.

Last time, I survived our 23-hour days (because of the constant time changes), by fitting naps in there… and it’s a little harder to fit in naps this time around. Elise, however, seems to be adjusting to the schedule just fine, when everything’s ok. (She had a little freak accident where her eye was poked yesterday, so she was up a lot of the night. She seems to be fine now.)

Once classes are set up and I respond to the professor requests, I’m mostly on call, so it gives me a good opportunity to sit, read, write, and watch the sea go by. We are smack-dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and though the ship could make it to Barcelona much quicker, we’re moving at a snail’s pace to accommodate the class schedule. Hard to believe we’ll have several more days before we see any land.

And somehow, hundreds of miles away from shore, we see birds flying alongside the ship quite often. My favorite things to do (which hasn’t happened on this trip yet), was to go to the outside front of deck 7, and look down to see the schools flying fish spooked by the ship, gliding away some 50ft or so for dear lives, only to see the seagulls and boobies that why along the ship dive at them as soon the fish hit the water again. It’s pretty impressive, if not somewhat funny to see the fish jump out. You can almost hear them screaming, “Get awaaaaaaayyyyyyy!”

So after a hectic start to get settled into a rhythm of classes, here’s hoping for a predictable second half of the crossing. Aside from the eye-poke, Elise seems to be doing just great, and when she gets excited about something, such as going to the pool, she makes sure to stop and let everyone know what her current plans are.

So I leave you with a quick list of Elisey-isms I’ve witnessed so far. I’m sure Monika has more to add:

- Elise was eating on Monika’s lap, and looks at something on her hand. She asks, “Mamma, what’s this?” while quickly sticking it in Monika’s mouth. Before Monika gets a chance to respond, Elise elaborates. “It came from my nose.”

- When the ship very slowly made its way away from Halifax, I told Elise, “Look, we’re moving!” To which she corrected, “NO DADDA! The water’s moving.”

She’s not wrong.

- Monika mentioned this in one of the comments, but the night that Elise lead the dining hall in siging “Twinkle twinkle” (then later screamed, “EVERYBODY, SING!”), she calmly states to our table that, “Daddy’s pepito is in his shorts”. To which no one responds, so she says it again, louder, “Daddy’s pepito is in his shorts!”, puts her arms up, then points right at me. Our good friend Tanya (Cash and Cal’s mom, and ship doctor), but just reacts by wisely smiling and nodding, so Elise helpfully tells her, “Only daddy has a pepito.”

(Other than blushing, the only thought a parent goes through at a moment like that is think what the other parents are thinking. And I was imagining something like, “What kind of parent calls it a ‘pepito’?”)

- Tanya, also pointed to her eyebrow and asked Elise what it was. Elise, excited, exclaimed, “That’s a mustache!” So I think we haven’t taught her body parts too well.

- Cash (2), and Cal (4), have their own room (and are like a little comedy troop – more on stories on putting them to bed later). So Tanya puts Cash down to sleep, then Monika and Elise of over to Tanya and Dave’s room across the hall to hang out.

Elise looks at Tanya and asks, “Where’s Cal?” Tanya says that he’s taking a nap.
A few minutes go by, and Elise, unbeknownst to the adults, had quietly scanned the entire room, and something didn’t make sense to her. She goes back to Tanya, and very pointedly asks, “Did you put him under the bed?”

- Every once in a while, when Elise sees a somewhat scantily-clad student, she goes up to them, cocks her head to the side, and asks, “Are you wearing a swimming suit?” The answer, so far, has always been no.

- Apparently, I always introduce myself the same way to students, by engaging in a conversation (usually initiated by Elise in some way), followed by me saying, “I’m Rico, by the way.” I know this because Elise says “I’m Rico, by the way” all the time now. To everybody. So now I’m totally self-conscious and try to vary the way I say it, like “Hello, my name is Rico,” at random spots in the conversation.

- And she really does repeat everything we say, and I mean everything. She was playing with Cash and Cal in the other cabin, and I called them on the phone from our cabin since I know she likes to talk on the phone. She picks up, and then, this is what she says, without a pause to breathe: “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Hold on. Ok, can you hear me now? How are you?!! It’s so good to talk to you?!!! I’m good!! Oh, can you hear me now? Hold on, let me put you on speakerphone. One sec. Ok, you’re on speaker. Is everything good?....”

This went on non-stop for several minutes. She even pretended to put a blue-tooth on at one point. Good times all around.

Alright, I’m feeling like I’m THAT parent, and these might not be that interesting. But I’m writing this as much for us as anyone else.

Gotta go set up for the next class, so more later…

P.S. For those of you who sailed in Fall 05, I’m really appreciating what Kevin Murphy did with his class. He really hit a grand slam out of the park.

Somewhere in the North Atlantic

2010-06-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

We’re off and sailing to Barcelona! We’re not terribly far away from where the Titanic sank many moons ago, so Mon and I already pretended that I was Leo and she was Kate and did the spread armed kiss on the front of the ship at sunset while Celine Deon played in the background. Alright, that’s not true. But that’s not to say it won’t be by the end of the voyage.

The students, all 739 of them, are onboard the ship, and they sure look a lot younger than I remember them five years ago (I can’t believe it was that long). There’s quite a bit of excitement in the air, with everyone giddy to be aboard, and we’re trying to settle into a routine as classes start tomorrow.

We’re getting a few more swells right now but nothing too bad. Luckily, Monika is no longer seasick, and the squeaky laughing dolphin outside our cabin at night now has a name – Billy Jean. Something must be really funny because that dude is pretty loud right now.

We also uploaded a bunch of pictures and videos to Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.com/randrade. A sample:

Enjoy the Picasa album, but we’ll upload more when the bandwidth gets better.

So this voyage is obviously completely different from the last one. Here’s a blurb from the blog last time, when they sent us a plan to rescued from a blockade in the Venezuelan jungle:

“Right away we knew things weren’t quite right. At every military stop along this solitary road that connects Brazil with northern Venezuela, they are telling us that the locals were staging a protest and have blocked the road in Las Claritas. We were hopeful that by the time we arrived in town, things would have calmed down and we would be on our way. That wouldn’t be so."

And this is what a blurb looks like now:

“We had a wonderful time in Halifax. After Elise fell asleep at the amazing Public Gardens, we went to a grocery store so we could stock up on diapers for the trip. Luckily, we found a playground only a block away from the ship, with a nice variety of options for Elise. There’s nothing like discovering a new sandbox to play with after a few days after a few days at sea.”

Alright, we actually did get to walk the city a bit, but I’m pretty sure that while there may not be any “they sent a rescue plane to save us from the jungle blockade” or "I'm riding a moped at night left side of the road in crazy Mauritian traffic and my headlight went out" stories this time around, we’ll certainly be experts in Mediterranean playgrounds by the end of the trip. Which is great, by the way – I really could hang out with Elise at a playground all day long.

I’m off to bed now. We’re keeping track of Elisey-isms, so I’ll post them tomorrow night sometime.

Kumbaya

2010-06-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

We just finished our little impromptu party in the hallway outside of our cabins while the kiddos slept, and it was probably the last time get to enjoy wine in the hallway before the students arrive. We hung out much longer than I expected, which is great, but since we’re going to bed I’ll only share one of the many stories from today.

There was a somewhat formal Captain’s Dinner with the Global Forum on Engagement that is aboard the ship with us (the one that brought Julian Bond and Sandra-Day O’Connor aboard with us). For those of us with kids, and others who didn’t feel like dressing up (a relatively significant group), we ate at the smaller of the two dining halls, in Deck 6.

So at some point during dinner, Elise starts singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” under her breath, like she often does. And each time she finished the song, she would sing it again, a little bit louder. And louder.

And louder.

Finally, Elise was belting “Twinkle Twinkle” so loudly that everyone in the dining hall stopped talking. For a minute, we all paused to listen do her best impression of Mariah Carey.

Until someone joined in. And then everybody joined in.

So for a few moments tonight, on a ship somewhere in the North Atlantic, a dining room-ful of people sang an impromptu version of “Twinkle Twinkle” led by a two-year-old girl. And all was well in the world.

We’ll wake up to a rainy Nova Scotia out our window in the moning. I’m off to bed.

P.S. It was sea sickness, not morning sickness.
P.P.S. Whew.

Fall 05 through 10

2010-06-12T20:25:00.000-07:00

It wouldn’t take too much to convince me that this voyage is simply a continuation of Fall 05. The whole five years in between were just an extra-long port in our itinerary. The same crew is still here, the AV job hasn’t been updated at all, and I keep waiting for Chris, Jason, Karen, Yas, John, Gail, and everyone else to show up to the Staffulty lounge on the Seventh deck for a few drinks before going to bed. Because they wouldn’t miss a beat and fit right into the group that’s here right now. There’s a really good bunch of people here. I just really love being on the ship.

The only difference, of course, is that we now have a two-year old amongst us, and boy, does that change everything. It is a lot of work, and luckily, Elise isn’t the only kid here. There are five kids about her age, with really fun parents, and 20 kids total, some of the nicest kids in the world. Really – you should see them around Elise. They take her everywhere, they play with her, and they make signs for our door with her name on it. So she’s having the time of her life, running around the endless hallways on the fourth deck, and playing in the waves of the kiddie pool as the ship sways from side-to-side.

But she is a lot of work, and I can’t wait to get into the rhythm of classes so we can figure out exactly how to give Monika some relief of caring for Elise. Because you need to keep an eye on her every single minute on the ship… the railings around the deck of the ship are a lot wider than I remember them to be. We’re doing our best… we think she’s gotten the message that she can’t get anywhere close to them. She stops 5-10 feet from the edges, just like she does at intersections. And we’ll still keep an eye on her.

They tells us that it gets a lot easier when the students arrive, because there will be hundreds willing of babysitters, so perhaps Monika and I will be able to leave the room for extended periods of time after Elise is asleep after all. Though, I have to say, this whole thing is a giant Snooze Cruise for her anyway, so whenever she’s in bed, she’s been out, so I think we may take longer and longer excursions together out of the cabin, like we did tonight, which has been my favorite part of the trip so far.

The cabin is feeling pretty cozy right now. There are two twin beds with a huge window not far from the water with a great view of the horizon. When the swells get bigger, metal creaking of the ship sounds exactly as if there a dolphin laughing outside our window, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s exactly the source of the noise. Elise is sleeping on a travel crib that somehow manages to fit at the foot of my bed. We’ve put up a bunch of decorations… Elise’s alphabet magnets, since the walls are metallic in here, as well as these pictures of portholes that Monika’s dad took of an actual porthole that he purchased and gave to us prior to the voyage.

Seriously, he purchased a porthole at some point, then before we sailed, the printed out pictures of the sea, and of some trees at the Stanford foothills, placed them behind the porthole, took of picture of that setup, then laminated and gave it to us, in case we go an inside cabin with now view. But we do have a great view, and the portholes went up anyway.

We are starting to see a few more swells, and Monika has been pretty seasick a few times, which is miserable. We’re really hoping it goes away soon, and if it doesn’t, I’ll ask her to take a pregnancy test.

The main fun fact of the day is that Sandra-Day O’Connor has been sailing with us to Halifax, and she gave an hour-long talk today that really gave us a good sense of her colorful character. Judge Judy has nothing on her. If she’s this fast-talking, quick-witted, and sharp-tongued at 85, I can’t imagine what she was like when she was on the Supreme Court. In fact, Supreme Court justices tend to have as strong a personality as she does, I can only imagine what the table was like when they had to debate a case in front of them..

Alright, Monika is already asleep, so I’m off to bed. I should have gone to bed sooner… long days coming ahead of us…

Going to See Mr. Atse

2010-06-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

Not to jinx it, but if the first day is any indication, Elise is going to be just fine. She was in a fantastic mood all day, and actively engaging in hilarious and spontaneous conversations with random strangers, especially the taxi driver from the airport to the hotel. My favorite exchange of the day was when we asked if what we're doing tomorrow, and she responded, "Going to see Mr. Atse!" At that moment, we realized that by pronouncing "Semester at Sea" to her as "See-mester at Sea", (because of Allan's song that we sing to her), we've accidentally been building up, for the last six months, this life-changing encounter with a certain Mr. Atse, and not an epic voyage visiting nine countries in three continents on a ship.

So we're not sure how to break it to her that Mr. Atse doesn't exist, and to apologize for misleading her this whole time. It's like breaking to your kids that Santa doesn't exist, only worse and at a younger age. I resigned that this will certainly trigger a period of rebellion over a decade ahead of schedule.

The other notable item of the day is that we could see the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster perfectly from the airplane today - all the ships where the platform used to be, a flame that could be seen from over 30,000 ft, and, of course, the oil that glistened completely differently than the water around it in the sunlight of this beautiful day. It makes me really sad knowing that the oil will continue to flowing until we get back, and who knows, maybe we'll sail through part of it? What. A. &#%^. Catastrophe.

(By the way, the first thing this reminds me of is my last voyage - Katrina was hitting the Louisiana coast as we were leaving on the Fall 2005 voyage, only I had NO idea how bad it was until after we got back.)

We're in Fort Lauderdale right now, and board the ship tomorrow. We're exhausted, having moved/finished grading/finished work/packing/finding a home for our cat/saying goodbye to everybody. The worst part, to me, was the moving, because that's more permanent than the 10 weeks we're gone. Such a wonderful place, with such wonderful neighbors, and it kills me that Elise won't remember a single thing about those years there, because those were really great years with really great people

Alright, so off to bed. I can only hope there will be an amazing passenger named Mr. Atse onboard that will live up to Elise's unrealistically high expectations...

The Return to the Blue MV Explorer

2010-05-30T00:50:00.000-07:00

This is kind of how I pictured it happening.

During my first voyage around the world in the Fall of 2005, I daydreamed life would play out something like this: Every couple of years, I would return to be the ship's AV coordinator. My first trip back would be another solo voyage, followed a few years later by a return with my significant other, culminating with a lifetime where my future kids would grow up with memories of traveling the world at different stages of their childhoods.

I didn't think it would take five years, and I certainly didn't think my first voyage back to Semester at Sea would include a wonderful wife and a hilarious chatterbox of a 2-year-old. But it did, and we're reboarding the MV Explorer for the Summer 2010 voyage, getting ready to cross the Atlantic twice for another 10 weeks at sea.

And it makes me so happy. My first voyage came at such a wonderful period in my life, and left such a mark on who I am today, that of course I would want to share it with the most important people of my life. There's just something about a shipboard community, disconnected from cell phones and other pressures of day-to-day life, that clears your head and cleans your soul.

I mean, this trip was surely meant to be: our Academic Dean, LeVahn Hoh, is a circus historian. I bet he balanced his kids too.

My biggest concern over doing another voyage has always been my job, and it is specially hard to take time off when work has never been better in the twelve years I've been with Transvideo Studios. The staff is such an amazing bunch who believe in what we do, and work so hard to build a company everyone wants to work for, and I hope to continue to provide all the support I can to continue in that direction while overseas.

But there's just so much to be excited about. I'm excited about the amazing itinerary, the sunsets at sea, the 360 degrees of uninterrupted horizon. I'm excited about meeting some wonderful new people, many surely to be friends for life. I'm excited about unplugging, and being in an academic environment. I'm excited to see Istanbul when it's not sleeting outside, and for Elise to bring her sand toys to the pyramids. I'm excited that she'll sleep like a baby every night, because that's what happens to everybody who's ever had the privilege to rock to sleep on a ship.

Of course there are a few unknowns. How Elise will handle being at sea for as many as 10 days at a time (and Monika, for that matter)? Will Elise understand what's going on? Will she make it her home? How will she handle not seeing Mimi and Baba until they come meet us in Italy?

I don't know. But I do think that will have a tremendous impact in shaping the wonderful little character that she already is, even if she won't remember a single thing about this voyage (which blows my mind, by the way). I know what living in close proximity with 800 people did to me the first time around, and I can only hope that she grows comfortable in large communities, learns to do so much with so little, and enjoys the uninterrupted family bonding time we'll be having for those weeks.

So if you want to see what we're up to, I'm dusting off the same old Cobosce blog I used for the first time around for this trip. I haven't written anything outside of work since the last voyage (I feel rusty just typing this little blurb out) but we look forward to immerse ourselves in writing and keep you updated as much as we can.

Here's the itinerary:

June 10 - Depart Ft. Lauderdale, FL for staff training in route to picking up the students in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
June 15 - Depart Halifax and cross the Atlantic
June 24-27 - Barcelona, Spain
June 29-July 05 - Meet Mimi and Baba in Civitavecchia and reboard the ship in Naples, Italy
July 08-11 - Meet Mimi and Baba in Dubrovnik, Croatia
July 14-18 - Piraeus (Athens), Greece
July 20-24 - Istanbul, Turkey (Elise calls it "Chicken", which is one of my favorite things ever).
July 27-31 - Alexandria, Egypt. We'll take a 3-hour bus ride to Cairo to see the pyramids
August 7-10 - Casablanca, Morocco
August 21 - Arrive Norfork, Virginia, USA!

One year later.

2006-12-07T11:56:00.000-08:00

I stopped living in the moment, if just for a minute, when the ship pulled away from Kobe and into the darkness of the Pacific Ocean. It was impossible not to. This was our last foreign port, the final of many countries that had lured us aboard in the first place. Why did I feel differently now than I did leaving South America? Was it something about Japan?

The experiences in Asia were so fresh, so vivid, that despite being able to recall every minute of the voyage, the first month on the ship seemed so distant, like a different voyage altogether. “What happened in Brazil?” I asked myself. “Were we really in Venezuela?”

“The Bahamas were part of this voyage, right?”

It was, in fact, an entirely different voyage. It was fun, spectacular, remarkable. But it wasn’t cozy. The ship wasn’t home yet. We had yet to feel chills when seeing the ship after a few days away – the kind you get in a great relationship, when you first see her at the end of a busy day. As the Archbishop would say, we lacked the self-assurance that comes from knowing that we belonged.

Ubuntu, he told us. That wonderful Xhosa word that neatly encapsulates the relationship between the individual and his community. A word that says that my humanity is affirmed because I belong to a greater whole.

It speaks of the essense of being human, he explained. It is to say, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” We say, “A person is a person through other persons. I am human because I belong. I participate. I share.”

I am, because you are.

That was his gift to us, this one word that sums up why my eyes retrace our route every time I walk past a globe, why I’ve been rereading my journal for the last 100 days, why my ears still perk up every time I hear one of our countries mentioned in the news. We belonged. We participated. We shared.

Today, exactly a year after stepping off the ship in San Diego, I know that this was the main lesson I learned during Semester at Sea. That this feeling is reproduced when we cultivate friendships, foster relationships, when we inextricably link our well-being to the well-being of those around us. In it, you find the happiness, passion, optimism and comfort that comes from knowing that you belong.

What developed aboard the M.V. Explorer should not be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. May every day be the start of the best 100 days of your life.

The Dispassionate Life is Not Worth Living

2005-12-14T10:20:00.000-08:00

“I lived on a ship for almost four months?” I often ask myself. “With 900 people?”

24,036 miles. 12 countries. 4 continents. 100 days (99 for everyone else). 21 take-offs. 20 landings. Countless new friends. I didn’t think the transition would be as glaring as it has been, I’m not going to lie to you. I wouldn’t call it difficult per se, but it isn’t as if I had never left. I’ve already gone back to work, trying to organize my office before plunging head first in this next chapter in life, but often daydreaming about the days I would sit in the Staffulty lounge for hours just watching the sea go by. It was one of my favorite things to do on the ship, enjoying the one view in this world that has remained unchanged in the history of mankind.

I’m starting to believe that the shipboard life affected me more than any of the countries we visited. Whereas we studied the countries and prepared ourselves psychologically for them, many of us dismissed shipboard life as a downside to getting to the ports. I think this is why the trip went from excellent to spectacular after the Sea Olympics, between Mauritius and India. That was a symbolic turning point in the development of this shipboard community, and more so than the ports, the experience was a purely emotional one.

Ever tried saying goodbye to 900 people? It is logistically impossible in a few days. It takes planning and preparation, and despite the fact that I was writing notes and saying goodbyes for three days straight prior to the end of the voyage, I think I only hit a couple hundred of them.

In a sense this trip has been far from over, and this is clear to me now. I rented a car in San Diego, spent a day or two saying goodbye to the staff in Laguna Beach, hung out with students in Coronado before heading out with Rita, Corey, and Roy to Los Angeles to attend the premiere of Do A-yay (Our Cause) at the 20th Century Fox Film Studios. We were invited by Cristina Moon on the US Campaign for Burma, a group that is very passionate about doing the best for Myanmar. I am eagerly trying to get them involved with SAS because they are a wealth of information on the country and I think a lot of good things can come with their help. (Though we completely disagree on what role sanctions play in this issue… we’ll sort that out later).

We spent the night at my sister’s house and in the morning headed up with the girls to the Bay Area. I hope I didn’t hurt my friends since I tackled them when I saw them for the first time. I was ecstatic to see everyone. They hosted a holiday party the night I returned, so there were a lot of people crashing at my place, and since my subletter still hasn’t moved out, we had to make other sleeping arrangements. So many of my friends were there, including several new SAS friends, that it was a little hard devoting just a few minutes to everyone when you would love to talk to everyone for hours at a time. Oh, well.

Since the girls had never been to San Francisco before, I took them to the best places in SF (SAN 100, San Francisco and Beyond), including a phenomenal sunset from the fort across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Oh, the sunsets. I’ve been made a lot of fun for putting so much emphasis on it. I don’t know why we’re still attracted to them. I guess it is because it was one of the few constants in our experience. The sun that my friends see in California is the same sun we saw in Mauritius. The sunset follows the same arc of a drama, complete with a development, climax, and a conclusion – you feel like you missed something if you don’t catch it from the beginning. And even though you know how it is going to end, the enjoyment comes from appreciating the differences from sunset to sunset, like watching a sports movie when you already know your team will win at the end.

I actually debated whether I should travel now or save my money to travel in the future, and the answer is clear to me now: get out while you can. There’s something to be said about traveling when your knees don’t ache, when your sight is good, when you don’t have other commitments to tend to. I traveled at a particularly good time, when all was spectacular in my life after a period of not knowing if there was a life after gymnastics. It was like entering a good relationship - where both parties are happy and confident in who they are, and not dealing with personal issues.

So it’ll still be a while before I understand the experience. I already notice I see some movies in a new light (the experience of watching Lost in Translation and Titanic are completely different to me now). This sounds cheesy, but I walked by some Indian students speaking Hindi at Stanford yesterday and I noticed them a lot more that I ever had before. My ears perk up every time I hear one of our countries mentioned in the news.

Will it always be that way? Maybe I’ll get used to the huge American portions again. Maybe I’ll be comfortable again with the convenience of my car in this age of global warming. Maybe I’ll turn into a pessimist, because sometimes that is what it takes to be a realist in this world. Maybe I'll be even more of an optimist, because it motivates us to do something about the world's problems.

I don’t know. Too soon to tell. I’m just so happy that I did the voyage, and did it with passion. As a matter of fact, when Desmond Tutu’s exhibit in South Africa asked us “If you had one piece of wisdom to give, what would it be?”, my answer was simple. Do it with passion. Pour yourself into what you do. Make it personal. Work hard. Play hard. I think I did that.

I leave you with the MP3 of Allan's song, "The Ship It Used to Be." The lyrics can be found here. Thanks to everyone who read my ramblings, and sorry for the stream-of-consciousness disconnectedness of it sometimes. A lot more people read this and wrote me than I ever expected (Clara - your inbox is full). I might do one more upload of all my pictures, by popular demand (now that I have fast, free internet), but otherwise, this is the last entry for this Cobosce. If you have any questions on SAS or are some random Fall 2005 alum who randomly bumped into this blog, or anything else, I can be reached at randrade@stanfordalumni.org.

I’d love to hear from you someday.
Rico

Coming to America

2005-12-07T07:42:00.000-08:00

I've been up all night again, my second night in a row, saying goodbye to peeps and engaging in very long conversation with professor Kevin Murphy about Global Studies and Semester at Sea. Because of that, I need to finish packing and won't write extensively right now; I'll extend my final blog entry to sometime next week when I get back to the Ranch.

It's been an eventful last day. I don't think anyone on the ship missed last night's sunset, where, after 100 days (99 days back home), I finally saw the mythical green flash at the tail end of the sunset that I heard so much of during the voyage. It really exists, though you have to stare at the sun the whole time to be able to see it.

We had a final convocation last night, which was a great way to bring closure to the voyage. I'll write a little more about it when I'm coherent.

We walked out early today to watch the last sunrise, with everyone on land as California appeared in the horizon. All of the backs are packed in the hallways of the second deck, which is surreal - the long hallways seem to be made of suitcases.

Because of a military ship, we're running some 45 minutes late, but we should be alongside shortly. I need to hurry up. More updates in a few days.

Clearing Out

2005-12-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: Jason Vanhee wrote his last guest blog entry on our final day at sea, and I just found it now, ten months after the fact. I think it is still worth uploading.

I arrived on the ship early, three days before almost all the staff, seven days before the students. When I got here the halls were empty, the walls barren, the rooms tidy and quiet. There's something of the same look to the ship again, now on the last night.

The students aren't roaming about tonight. They sit in public places talking and getting their journals signed, or huddle in their cabins with their good friends. The walls are vacant once more; the stewards are clearing everything off of them. It's a lot like trees in autumn; some are still green and leafy, some are losing their leaves, but most are bare, a few dry, skeletal vestiges left. Here and there a nametag has somehow escaped notice, or a white board wasn't packed, or a sticky note leaves a message that may never be answered.

And in our rooms the chaos that has grown up in the last months has vanished. All of our bags are packed, the largest carried away to completely fill the second deck hallways. What's left isn't much; a few changes of clothes, perhaps, a book, the breakables. The things that we'll need for the day or two until we get home. So the cabins, too, look much like they did, just a few signs of life in most of them.

Within twenty four hours the Explorer will look the way I found it, clean and empty, just a few people walking about where once there were hundreds. I wonder if anyone leaves a sign of their presence; a note hidden behind a life jacket, or a picture tucked up under the bed. Do the cabin stewards search carefully to eradicate any signs of the old voyage, or can something slip through? I like to think that somewhere on the ship there is such a sign, overlooked for months or years, waiting patiently for someone to find it. That the clearing out of the ship is somehow not the end of our presence here. That we will still sail onward.

Packing et al.

2005-12-06T05:14:00.001-08:00

I was going to write my Japan entry, but instead I’ve been packing all night, figuring out my receipts and forms for customs (I’m only taking back $392 worth of new stuff, almost none for myself… I spent a lot less money than I thought I did), writing goodbye notes and getting everyone’s contact information before we leave. I’m doing a blog break to procrastinate a little more before going to watch the sunrise. I just don’t want to pack.

Tonight they gave us a few suggestions upon returning. First, to say our goodbyes tomorrow because we won’t get much of a chance to do so on the 7th. Second, not to make any drastic decisions until we’re settled back in to make sure we’re not reacting to our change in environment. Third, they told us to go outside tomorrow to take in the ocean one last time, making sure to appreciate the 360 degree view without land, because it’ll probably be a while before anyone of us experiences the open ocean again. I made sure to get out on the deck tonight, to see the stars one last time, listed to the ship cut through the wave, see the wake of the ship disappear into the pitch black darkness of the Pacific. I also saw my first moonset of the voyage tonight, with a beautifully red moon, and I’m wondering why I didn’t do that more often. I’m going to try to see the moonset again tomorrow.

Quick summary of Japan since I won’t want to do it tomorrow:

We hit Japan at exactly the best time of the year, in that little window where all the leaves are as red as they possibly can be before falling off. The country was stunningly beautiful, slightly chilly, but you wouldn’t want it any other way. We arrived to much fanfare, with fireboats spewing water alongside the ship, and the city of Kobe hosting welcome ceremonies on the ship, complete with a marching band, samurai swords, and Taiko drums. I love Taiko. Oh, to have more time here.

We had bought bullet train passes, which saved us because it allowed us to enjoy every second of the country and sleep on the train on the way to your next destination. The first day Jason, Amy, and I headed down to Hiroshima, and it wasn’t long until we were completely lost in translation (except for Jason, who researches these things methodically before we go anywhere).

I thought I knew a lot about Japan. I’ve had Japanese coaches throughout my Stanford gymnastics career, watched Japanese superhero shows as a child in Brazil and have a few friends who were Japadaphiles. But I didn’t – and got lost over and over in the process.

The reason is simple: Japan doesn’t need the US. They are financially independent, and since they didn’t weren’t colonized by the west like most of the other Asian countries, there is little by way of English there. So our ATM cards don’t work, and few places accept the credit cards. And signs are all in Kanji, making sure that you will get lost once you’re there. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Our first mistake was putting money into a machine thinking we were paying for a streetcar. It wasn’t until we were yelled at in Japanese by the driver that we realized we had put our money into the change machine and hadn’t paid for the ride yet. Whoops.

Everyone had similar stories. My favorite was of these girls who thought they had gone into an empty dance club with techno music, started dancing, were chased out only to find out they had gone into a strip club. I would have paid to make that mistake.

Anyway, we head to ground zero of Hiroshima, the Memorial Peace Park, which is solemnly beautiful in the park, complete with the thousands of paper cranes that come in every year. The museum is incredibly informative (I heard they changed a few years ago when people protested that there wasn’t much information related to why the bomb was dropped in the first place). The bomb was devastating, though I wondered why there wasn’t a Tokyo firebombing museum (which was much worse) until the museum transformed itself into a peace museum calling for the disarmament of nuclear arms around the world.

(By the way, after studying this on and off the ship, I’m pretty convinced now that the primary reason for using the bomb had more to do with scaring the Russians in the post-war world… but that discussion is for another time).

After a few hours in Hiroshima (a bustling city nowadays), we eat some delicious Chinese food with a little sushi and get back on the bullet train to Kobe to hang out all night with the students. Jason hinted at what happened to him that night in the previous blog, and I’ll leave it at that. It was a bonding moment for all.

Chris and I left the next morning for Kyoto, the cultural center of Japan. As usual, he was looking for his National Geographic moment, with me happily tagging along, and Kyoto in the fall is a pretty good place to find one. There were so many Shinto, Buddhist, and other temples to choose from, and I was so surprised to see how much of the Japanese population is involved in this religious aspect of the society, most notably ancestral worship. There were men in business suit who would just bow near a statue, pay their respects, and be on their way.

After walking around and taking pictures all day, Chris and I head by taxi to the one place we were told we HAD to go, the Golden Temple. We thought we had enough time to make it there at sunset, but traffic is a little slow in Kyoto. After 40 minutes inside a taxi with self-opening doors and drivers in suits and white gloves, we missed the sunset by some ten minutes, which made Chris’s pictures a little flat. But the pondside temple covered in gold leaf is a must-see, especially when it is overwhelmed by the red trees surrounding it.

We headed back to Kobe after yet another bonding day for the both of us, and I got ready for another night out in town. The next morning I set out for Tokyo since I had gotten a hold of Yoshi Hatakeda, two-time Japanese Olympian and one of my former coaches at Stanford and we would be having dinner in Yokohama. I was planning on going by myself, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Jason taking the same train as myself, where he told me he had slept until the afternoon the previous day. We caught up in the happenings and were off on our three-hour train ride, taking us alongside the magnificent Mt. Fuji. We made some basic plans arriving in Tokyo, heading to the grounds of the Imperial Palace before going to the Tokyo Times Square. I had thought this was area the famous intersection showcased in Lost in Translation, which is the iconic representation of Japan in my mind, but it wasn’t. It was, though a very, very high-tech, trendy, busy shopping district. Something about Gwen Stefani shopping there?… I don’t know...

(By the way, I always loved Lost in Translation, but it catapulted into being one of my favorite movies after going to Japan. No only did I think Sophia Coppola nailed the details I noticed about Japan, but the feeling of the and pace of the movie matched a lot of my experience of my last day in Japan.)

Jason and I parted ways so I could meet my coach, and I try following Yoshi’s directions and get completely lost in Tokyo, which was the best thing that could have possibly happened. Because in between trying to figure out subway signs and where I was, I waltz out of the Shibura train station to find myself exactly at the famous intersection at sunset. The place is as cool as advertised, with screens that fill the entire sides of buildings. I had never been so happy to be lost, but then again, I wasn’t sad in the first place. I just thought there was a chance I’d miss dinner with Yoshi if I was to make it back to Kobe to save a little money on hotel rooms.

But a clue here, a sign there, and I figure out my way and made it to Yokohama an hour and a half late. Yoshi hadn’t changed much in these last three years – said I got very skinny since the last time he saw me – but his daughter Hitomi was 5 now and he had a new girl that I’d never met before. He was coaching a the University of Yokohama and helping the National Team some. It was great to see him, getting a ride in his 3-D GPS-equipped car, which seemed pretty common there. The meal was some spicy Japanese food that I don’t think I’ll ever again outside of Japan, but I’ll email Yoshi to get it again.

We have dinner as late as possible, and run out to make it to the Shintansen bullet train. Luckily, those trains seem to be accurate to the second, because that’s how much I had before I missed the last train last to Kobe. I got to sleep soundly before going on an all-night Karaoke session with the students, and we all know how much I love Karaoke. This was supposed to be the last night in port (we were given an extra night in Hawaii later), and the trip was supposed to culminate with a karaoke all-nighter in Japan, so I’m glad it did.

The next morning, I took a bullet train back to Hiroshima on my way to the island of Miyajima, which Yoshi said he wouldn’t allow me to leave Japan without visiting it (and my friend Matt Traverso had just sent me an email with the words “Miyajima is the bomb” in there somewhere). I decided to go by myself, because I had enjoyed a day by myself in just about every port end realized that it is pretty good to sit back and take time to yourself once in a while. This is something I don’t think I’ve ever really done before.

I’m out of server space, so I can’t upload pictures, but please Google “Miyajima”. It has the famous red gate shrine in the water, and I hit it perfectly at high tide. The temples strewn the island, some going in the water, and it was completely red from the trees. I rented a bicycle and hit my state of zen. It was absolutely the perfect way to end the trip.

I headed back at the end of the day, meeting up with friends to find out all of the great stories and all of the other things I had missed. Four days in Japan is a crime, but I enjoyed it to the fullest and it will probably be the easiest country for me to go back, Brazil excepted. We all left the port exhausted, with heavy heart, on our way to our long Pacific crossing. It was time to start reflecting on the last few months.

Back to packing. Tomorrow will be the my last entry on the Cobosce.

Kunmingling

2005-12-04T19:49:00.000-08:00

Apparently I’m out of server space on all the servers I have access to from here, so this will be another report without pictures or videos until I can figure out the problem.

The world is a smaller place after you travel on SAS. To us, it isn’t a big deal to travel anywhere in the world, finances notwithstanding. If our friends call each other and decided to meet in Turkey, everyone would go. Sometimes even on the same day.

This sentiment was the underlying motivation for Yas, Jason, and I to forgo a trip to Beijing to see the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and somewhat randomly choose to go to Kunming Beijing is easy, we thought; we’ll come back someday. After our bonding episode in South Africa, the three of us decided to travel together to Sizchuan, since we heard so many good things about it, and once we arrived in India, the travel agency told us that the tickets that we wanted were no longer available. It took just a couple of minutes us to ask for a map, decide that Kunming was “close enough”, and reserved the tickets. We were going.

The second morning in Hong Kong, the giddiness began. We had no idea what to expect, except what the few words that the Lonely Planet had to tell us. Jason had read everything about the city in the book, and Yas and I had not. Jason had effectively become our trip leader, complete with head counts and dock time. If you ever happen to be on a SAS trip, you would understand why this hilarious. Alas.

There wasn’t much listed in the book, something about a stone forest, surfing Buddhas, and unicorns. Unicorns became the theme of our trip, and we wouldn’t rest until we saw one.

After an eventful couple of hours at the huge Hong Kong terminal (on an artificial island off Lantau), eating dim sum and making videos about what we expected in Kunming, we were on our way to the Yunan province.

The culture shock started immediately. Whereas I could somewhat communicate in every place we had traveled to thus far, there was no sign of English upon arrival. Because of the Chinese characters, we spoke lonely-planetese, calling someone’s attention and pointing to the good book to ask what we wanted. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But the good book would ultimately save us many times in the next few days.

Jason and Yas passed through customs somewhat easily, and, being what must have been the very first Brazilian ever to set foot in Kunming, my process took much longer. I’m not convinced they knew where Brazil was, and given that the receptionist at our hotel asked me that very question, I think that possibility is very high.

But I got through, eventually, and we set out to find a cab that could take us to the hotel. After getting dupped into paying 50 Yuan to get to the hotel (the price was close to 15 Yuan), trying to explain to the appropriate people where Brazil was, and enjoying a quick drink and laughing our arses off, we headed out to a beautiful fall afternoon. You can’t beat the fall in China (well, you can in Japan, but that’s another entry).

Sunday afternoon in Kunming. A lazy Sunday afternoon in Kunming. A comfortably lazy sunny fall afternoon in Kumning, with red leaves dominating the trees. I can keep adding adjectives all day. This was one of the most pleasant afternoons I could remember, watching the bicycles go by, strolling the street markets, and enjoying this clean, surprisingly beautiful city. Somewhat industrial, with 4 million or so people, but you’d never know from that afternoon. We slowly and deliberately made our way to these 1300-year-old pagodas, one of the few “attractions” listed in the Lonely Planet, and found hundreds of old men playing Mah Joon (?), who seemed very excited if somewhat confused by our presence there. Yas found what she thought was a tea house – we’re still unsure. But a cute older woman was extremely excited to see us, letting out what sounded to us like yips, and Yas did the international symbol for “we want tea” (bringing an imaginary cup to your mouth while holding a plate on the other). Apparently, that means “bring me the largest, most delicious meal imaginable”, because that’s what we got. She didn’t even seem to want money for it, but we insisted (by putting the money out), and she eventually showed us a number. We still don’t know if we committed a faux pas or not.

We continued on our stroll, and would run into one thing after the other. We encounter a huge, empty Chinese pagoda, with just the three of us enjoying the premises during sunset. There were Buddhist chants coming from the corner stores, and music coming from rounded flutes that seem to be the local instrument of choice. The city is famous (in China) for its eternal spring, with blossoming flowers all over the place. We’d look up and see that people were flying kites from the tops of buildings; the kites flying so high they were the last objects catching sunlight that day. We decided to randomly enter any small alleys to see what they brought, and soon enough, we found ourselves searching for the source of some music… was it live?

Sure enough, the music was coming from a Karaoke bar, a gay Karaoke bar in China. It wasn’t long ago when homosexuals were deemed insane in China (I think it is still illegal), so this bar was a little surreal. Of course we went in. As much as we wanted to, there was no chance we would sing since English songs or words were nonexistent, but perhaps we could find someone for Jason, who happens to be gay? It wasn’t long before all eyes were on him; this exotic occidental man who strolled in. This would surely be his night.

At some point, I went to the bathroom (one of those typical Asian squat toilets that deserves its own entry someday), when I noticed our smiling waiter had followed me in there. He shows me a piece of paper with the words, “Ar your gay” written on it.

Oh oh. I don’t remember anything in the Lonely Planet about what to say if you get propositioned in the bathroom of a gay karaoke bar in China. I’m sure there were no Chinese characters I could point to to gently let him know that I wasn’t. I shook my head as clearly as I could, and attempted to tell him that my friend was. I think he got it. Well, actually, of course he must have, because nothing happened.

A while later, Jason come back from the bathroom with the same story, except that he said “yes,” and the waiter turned the paper around to the words “I lov your” written on it.

“I think it’s time to go,” Jason said. We took off.

We were about a block down when two of the guys from the karaoke bar come running and screaming after us. They look desperate, terrified, and we have no idea what’s going on. I thought they were mad at us for some reason.

After a couple of minutes, we realize that they want to see our pictures, and the reason was very obvious – they didn’t want to be recognized and possibly incriminated from a picture that we had taken. We showed them every picture we had, and once they saw that there was no one identifiable except for ourselves, they calmed out, gave us a friendly smile, and were on their way.

Other than clues like that, there was little evidence of the Communist government running the mainland – a soldier here, some populist art there, some Communist flags – otherwise, we saw plenty of capitalism, western companies, mosques, churches, and temples. I’m curious if this is different from not-that-long ago.

“What else could possibly happen?” we asked ourselves. By following our rule of going down little alleys, we heard techno music that lead us to lights in a park. We had come across a late night roller-skating rink. When was the last time you used the four-wheeled rollerskates, much less with a bunch of adolescents late at night in China? There was no rhyme or reason to the way they skated. Some people went clockwise, others went counterclockwise. Both Jason and Yas went down on collisions, and I myself caused someone to go down hard. I’m not that big, but I happen to be bigger than most people we encountered.

A few bruises later, we returned the skates to find another excited cute Chinese woman (one of many we would find), and followed her to see where she would take us. And, to my excitement, she took us straight to another karaoke place, this time with private rooms and songs in English. Of course we sang the night away. Could we have done anything else?

It was the perfect ending to the perfect day. We knew we had come to the right place.

The next morning we woke up early to get the shuttle from the hotel to the Shilin Rock Forest, another one of the “attractions” near Kunming. The shuttle, however, was full, and somehow we discovered that there are buses that go in that direction. We hop on the taxi, and our miscommunication in lonely-planetese took us straight to the train station, where we eventually found an attendant who spoke English… after many unsuccessful attempts at communicating in Chinese. She said the train wouldn’t arrive in Shilin until after 2pm, so she directed us to the nearby bus station.

As we walked through the crowds, we run into our third over-excited cute Chinese woman yelping “SHILIN SHILIN SHILIN SHILIN SHILIN”, and in following protocol, we followed her through parking lots and hotels and back alleys until she took us to a car with what we assumed was her nephew. We negotiated a private ride to Shilin at about the same price as the hotel shuttle – pretty good deal.

The two-hour+ drive through the Chinese countryside was beautiful, going through luscious canyons, hanging terraces, and houses covered in corn. I can’t quite explain it. There was also plenty of evidence of massive public works projects (seems like there are a lot of highways coming into the area… lots of questions about the environmental consequences of those works, but I digress).

Our driver was the most overtly-cautious driver I’ve met in a long time, and perhaps the nice car he was driving had something to do with it. If there was something on the road, he would honk. If there was something off the road, he would honk. If there was a chance that someone a mile away from the road would somehow go crazy and run onto the road and into our car, he would honk. Really, I swear he was honking at trees sometimes. And I don’t think it was ever necessary. Good times.

We arrive at the beautiful Shilin Rock Forest. The name couldn’t be more appropriate. Huge free-standing rock formations that you can walk between and climb at will. Just know we were very excited about spending the day there.

We ate some spicy South Chinese food before finding our driver having a party in our car (we think there were 13 people in there somehow…) and driving back. We even saw the obligatory motorcycle accident, but the guy looked like he would be alright.

We finished the night walking around Kunming, coming welcoming tea house where we finally saw how tea should be served. This was a work of art. As part of a tea tasting, this woman would brew and re-brew, washing the cups in tea before serving us the perfect cup of tea. And it was delicious – let’s just say some people will be getting tea as my gift from the trip.

That was perfect day #2.

We woke up early the next morning and had to make our way to the third “attraction” in Kunming, the mountain temple with the surfing Buddhas and the unicorn. The trip wouldn’t be complete without seeing them.

If you’re ever in China, please wake up early and walk around someday. One of the most peaceful moments this entire voyage was watching hundreds of people do Tai Chi or lining up their motorcycles and bicycles as badminton nets. Please don’t miss seeing that if you’re ever in China.

We were the first people in the misty mountain temple, greeting the monks as they woke up and offered to join them for breakfast. We declined… we wanted to see the unicorn and the surfing Buddhas, and they were nowhere in sight.

And, as Jason wrote, as we were standing in front of the incense pyre, a monk opened a golden door to the main part of the pagoda, and everything was revealed. The hundreds of surfing Buddhas, and the unicorn, as beautiful as our imagination would allow. Yas, Jason, and I looked at each other, and the trip was complete. We could go home now.

We staying in Kunming a few more hours, enjoying museums and the Not-So-Great Wall of China. As I read back at what I just wrote, I still don’t think I capture our giddiness, the same kind of giddiness I get when driving to the cabin in Tahoe, or making a Ranch video. It was a great time, one we still look fondly at. We spent the night in Hong Kong “street bar hopping”, thinking back on the last 48 hours, some of the best on the trip. If I had a chance to redo every country by going to a random city, I might take it. I finally understand why they call this the "Voyage of Discovery".

Sassy McSasserville

2005-12-02T17:13:00.000-08:00

Clara, I’m sitting next to your daughter Nicole who is one of my salsa instructors and my future wife. Really. I proposed to her and everything… I’ll let her tell you the story.

Boy, was I pooped last night. Who goes to Hawaii for a day? Has that ever happened before? In trying to maximize the time there, I ended up sleeping some 13 hours last night, well, more like 12 if you count the time change. Again.

It is Dead Day on SAS, with all of the students studying for finals on the back deck on this glorious day. I took some time to do my end of year evaluations and paperwork, but now I’ll try to sit back, enjoy the ocean while try I catch up to the huge email backlog I’ve accumulated over the months.

Quick recap of Hawaii:

Went to a nice dinner at a pub with some staff members. There are definitely things about American culture that jump out after being gone for so long.

1. As Mandee put it, “Gosh, it’s nice to see fat people again.”
2. You just expect things to look nice and clean in the US. If Hawaii were in Asia, we would have said, “Gosh, Phnom Pehn is modern and clean.” Since it is in the US, you don’t think there’s anything special about it.
3. Walking into traffic doesn’t work – they won’t swerve to avoid you.
4. We are overly security conscious.
5. The American flag is one of the most beautiful in the world. We display it more than most countries do.
6. Americans are loud and shameless. Asians are not.
7. For the first time on this voyage, it is hard to pick out SASers from a crowd

(Our name for a place full of SASers: Sassy McSasserville. It just rolls off the tongue).

I have a lot more, but I forgot most on my 12 hour beauty sleep. I’ll have to remember it later.

After a nice dinner and hanging out with staff and students all night in Waikiki, including waddling in the ocean, Chris, Jason and I set out for the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. There was a great movie presentation prior to taking a ferry to the memorial which answered a lot of the questions I never thought of asking prior to SAS, such as why would we have such a large military presence in Hawaii at the time anyway?

The memorial is over the sunken remnants of the USS Arizona in the water, and you can still see the oil blots coming out of the ship at an rate of about a quart a day. There’s something about the oil smell that gives the memorial an unique immediacy to the day of the attack.

Listed along the names of the dead are the “Attack survivors interred with their shipmates,” which means they are still burying people near the memorial, as recently as earlier this year.

As soon as I got back I met up with a bunch of student and headed to the North Shore for my first skydive since I became certified a while back. Since my USPA membership had expired, they wouldn’t let me jump solo (which would be really cheap), so I strapped on to a dive master and headed up.

I forgot how much I love to skydive. There’s nothing natural about it, yet it becomes so comfortable after you jump a couple of times. I also forgot how relaxing a tandem jump is, where in a normal jump you have to check your altimeter literally every second, you don’t have a worry in the world in a tandem jump. Just sit and enjoy the view.

My favorite part was waiting outside of the plane as it circled 180 degrees over the drop zone. Oh, to be able to do that every day. And the view of the island from above was magnificent, with waves as big and blue as advertised.

If there was a downside, it was that the jump was only from about 10,000 ft, with about a 30 second free-fall. All the jumps in Hollister are between 15,000 to 18,000 ft, with about a 90 second free-fall, which is so long as to almost be boring. Almost.

We went back to Waikiki to sit on the beach until sunset followed by a little night swimming. A suggestion for people in big groups in Hawaii – limos are cheaper than taxis. Keep that in mind.

I would have gone snorkeling, but we couldn’t take much off the ship because we didn’t go through customs and couldn’t take anything bigger than a camera with us. Oh, well. Hawaii is easy to come back to. As much as I loved it, I would have traded it for another day in any of the countries we went to. Except Mauritius.

The Pacific IS as Blue as my Dreams

2005-11-30T18:03:00.001-08:00

We’ve arrived in Hawaii, we’re waiting for the ship to clear. It is going to be faster than we expected. The day was glorious – I didn’t work much, the sea was smooth, the weather was perfect, we had a navy plane fly by the ship some three of four times, dipping its wing each time, and we even saw two whales as we approached the ship. Well, I didn’t, but most people did.

The funny thing was watching people activate their cell phones as we came into cell phone range. By the time we reached Honolulu, EVERYBODY had a cell phone outside, and even I talked to Becky from the Chaplin’s phone. I think the voyage will be psychologically over after this port.

Here’s a sample conversation, as suggested by Jason:

Yeah, I’m in Hawaii. What? No, I’m in Hawaii. The O.C.? They broke up? Really? Oh, I liked them all, but tell me… they really broke up?

Good times. A few housekeeping items. First, I wrote a guest blog entry on the most popular blog on SAS.

Second, I found out Amy has a bunch of pictures up from Brazil.

We’ll be off soon, we might have time for more.

Aloha means...just about everything, right?

2005-11-30T17:26:00.000-08:00

We're docked in Hawaii on a gorgeous, gorgeous day. We're waiting for the ship to clear, and as usual, we'll be uploading short ramblings before we can leave the ship. Jason wrote the first of the ramblings

We're in Hawaii, docked and just waiting for immigration to get onto the ship and start processing us. It's supposed to take about three hours, so we have some time to blog. First off, I'm going to talk about the language barrier. We're in the US now, but there is a native language here other than English. That language is Hawaiian, and while not a lot of people speak it, a goodly number speak Pidgin. This is a language that has some parts of English and some of Hawaiian, and is also a lot like nothing else.

Aloha is about the only word of actual Hawaiian I know, excluding a few fish and bird names. It means hello. It means goodbye. I think it means I Love You, and probably also, The Bathroom Is That Way, Idiot. It's one of those words that takes up a lot of pages in the dictionary. In Pidgin, I know just a few words, and I'm not sure how they're spelled in some case. Da is The, which is pretty obvious. Haoli is a little less clear, but I know that it means foreigner, non-Islander and also more importantly, white person. It's used almost always by native Hawaiians, be they ethnically so or not, and it's not a good word. Usually it's paired with stupid. I expect we'll hear it a lot, and a lot of people will have no idea what it means. All I know is that when I do hear it, I'm going to get the hell out of the way, because it's trouble when it comes from a big Samoan.

So other than those two other languages, it should be pretty clear. Except for Chris, because he's Canadian, and they speak a funny language up there too, eh? Do Canadians speak other languages, anyway? I mean, besides French, which doesn't count. And poutin.

Groundhog Day

2005-11-29T23:59:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Tuesday, November 29, 2005, for the second time! We just crossed the international date line, which looks just like the scrimmage line in a football game. A couple girls celebrated their 21st birthday twice, and we’re no longer 21 hours ahead of Cali, we’re two hours behind now. I already miss being in the future.

Sorry for the lack of original blogs – the Kunming and Japan blogs are in the works, as well as I’ll be guest blogging in the most popular SAS blog out there (Beth says she wrote about us in China and Japan… oh, to have cheap internet), but life got really busy lately with all sorts of end of year performances that keep an AV Coordinator busy. But I have a lot of good stories to upload, including how they’re getting us ready for the culture shock coming home.

We’ll arrive in Hawaii tomorrow, and after circling the globe, it is pretty clear that the U.S. is the hardest country to get into. Gosh, we make it complicated. Really. There’s a good chance it’ll take a few hours to get off the ship given all the paperwork and all the officials that need to come aboard. There’s no messing around here.

We’re waking up early to see the sunrise and the raising of the American flag for the first time this voyage (the ship always raises the flag of the country we’re arriving at). The choir sang America the Beautiful tonight, and as a very recent American citizen, it was a pretty sweet moment, I won’t lie to you.

This will be my fourth paradise island of the trip, along with the Bahamas, Fernando de Noronha, and Mauritius. I have some plans already, but I’ve never been to Hawaii, so if anyone has any good suggestions of what I should definitelydo, let me know.

On a side note, someone alerted me that the Cambodia entry made it on someone else’s blog.

On another side note, the lovely Yas wrote about Kunming, but I’m afraid to upload it because she misses some key stories. Everyone has a blog these days.

Screw it, here it is:

http://yasatsea.blogspot.com/2005/11/when-in-fresno-it-really-just-keeps.html

Tempus Fugit

2005-11-29T22:42:00.000-08:00

Another Jason guest blurb. Changing the hours so many times is surreal.

Dawn is an hour late. Or an hour early. Night falls while you're having your afternoon nap. There aren't enough hours to work and sleep and socialize, so you drop the second. And one magical time, you repeat a day entirely.

This is the Pacific crossing.

Tempus fugit is Latin; its literally meaning is time flies. But as a phenomenon, it is applied to all manner of time distortions. Your line at the supermarket will always be the slowest one? That's an example. A movie seen the first time seems longer than the second time? That's another. Those five awkward minutes you spend waiting for your date to be ready? Yet another. And the crossing eastward of the world's largest ocean is the biggest of them all.

Westward is easy. Every couple days you gain an hour, so that you get more sleep, or take a long lunch, or spend that extra time looting other peoples' I-tunes. A day vanishes entirely, which would be odd, especially if (as is almost surely the case on a large ship) it was someone's birthday. But it's not such a big deal. A cakewalk.

We, instead, are a ship that's sleep deprived, aching and tired, wondering what the hell hit us. It can't be those little time changes, can it? Oh, and we get that extra day, but do we spend those lost hours, now regained, in rest? No, it's just another day. Great for the one girl whose birthday it is, but sucks for the rest of us.

So time flies, and we get carried along with it. Sometime, probably around the 10th or 12th of December, we'll start to feel a little more normal again. But feeling normal means going back to the real world, and if that's the case, I'm ready for a bigger ocean. But could we just sail north and south next time, please?

A Truly Japanese Experience

2005-11-29T22:38:00.001-08:00

Jason had written this in Japan, I haven't gotten a chance to upload until now. Taking care of someone in a land you have zero understanding of the language is a great story that I am working hard to make sure hits the Cobosce before the end of the voyage.

I also realize that we might be giving the wrong impression of the trip, but I think there's enough other entries to show otherwise.

The first night in Japan provided me with an excellent opportunity for a truly local experience. You see, in Japan there's an entire group of people, sometimes called in English salarymen, who work their little hearts out and then, after they're done with work, go out and party. They drink shots, pound back beers, challenge each other to drinking games, and in general misbehave on a grand scale. They do this almost every night, because it's the only way they can vent. Late in the evening, it's considered socially okay for them to publicly urinate, vomit or just about anything else they need to do, so long as they're obviously drunk.

That was pretty much me. But without the good job or the public urination. And I didn't even get to karaoke.

Many thanks to Chris and Rico and Alex for making sure I got back to the ship in one piece. Smaller but still sincere thanks to the people who bought me drinks. I wish I could remember them all, but I can't.

I wonder if this would look good on a job application at the Japanese corporation?

The Life Emanuel

2005-11-29T16:20:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Tuesday, November 29 #1! Little known fact outside of the ship: one of the first things I did getting on the ship was join the Salsa team, and in honor of our big performance tonight, I wanted to write a quick word about Emanuel Pleitez, who just happens to also be our main salsa instructor.

Remember that name - he's one of those people I just know we'll be reading about someday. Emanuel grew up in a poor neighborhood in Southern California, got himself into Stanford, and now on SAS comes up with some ingenious methods of financing his trips that he couldn't go to otherwise. Whenever we arrive in port, Emanuel works for the taxi drivers in exchange for rides, spending hours fraternizing with them right off the ship and serving as their salesman. Language doesn't seem to be an issue - he came back from Myanmar with a surprisingly extensive Burmese vocabulary - and often has some of the best stories from his trips to places money can't take you.

Janet Eastman wrote a short blurb on Emanuel for the LA times. The guy impresses me tremendously, on and off the ship, so I mention his name here as a favor. I think you'll hear his name again. So if someday you pick up a newspaper and see the picture of a guy who looks like a football-playing John Tuturo, remember that you heard of him here first.

(I just noticed our one-headlight incident in Mauritus also got a mention.)

Hardy har har

2005-11-27T01:57:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I'm unable to upload anything to the executiveranch.net servers (dang holidays...), but I wanted to upload the pictures of the state I found my cabin in after a five-course dinner with the captain and chief officers tonight. Yup, my room is covered in toilet paper.

I'm glad they did it... I already have my revenge planned out an everything. I've been waiting for this opportunity for a long time. I'd tell you what I would do, but I've been told Chris's girlfriend Nicolle-with-two-"L"s (hi Nicolle!) reads this so it might come back to him. Even though he probably had nothing to do with it. Unless you're willing to keep him in the dark, Nicolle.

(BTW, if you think I'm just putting the TP to waste, you're very wrong. It will be rolled up and be used as the good lord intended us to.)

In other great news, we're arriving in Hawaii a day early, so we actually get to spend a night there. A repeat of the last night in Kobe? Umm... it can happen.

In yet another great news, Danny and Becky are coming down to tour the ship in San Diego when we arrive. I might be more excited about that than going to Noronha. Did I already mention that? Am I still wearing pants?

We forward the time one hour some four times before Hawaii. I have stopped thinking that I'm eighteen hours in the future from you guys and started seeing it as being five hours back plus a day, and getting closer. We'll get two November 29s, aka "Groundhog Day." It is pretty funny because since we have two consecutive Tuesdays, we need calendars that can accommodate the extra week day. They can either end up looking like a periodic table, or November 29 is split into two sections. People tend to prefer using the latter calendar.

Anyway.

I was pretty excited about being able to upload a (bad) MP3 of Allan's song tonight, as part of an charity audio CD with original music by SAS students titled "No Silence Can Be Heard". The whole project was organized by a student named Adam Deutsch and the music is really good.

Um.

I just realized these entries aren't nearly as fun without pictures or videos or music, eh? Perhaps I shouldn't upload this...

[Trying to hold back the fingers...]

[...nooooooo....]

Whoops. There it goes.

Stuck in a Cambodian Prison

2005-11-25T15:26:00.000-08:00

What would you do? One of the students in the trip you lead gets a little silly and while running after a monkey, knocks down a pillar in an ancient Siem Reap temple. It starts a chain reaction that destroys several hundred years of civilization in a matter of seconds.

Poor Beau. Stuck in a Cambodian jail. All other 57 students made it back to Vietnam. Did the one thing you don’t do in a Buddhist country: mess around in a Buddhist temple. Bad things are bound to happen.

Or so the ship thought. You see, Beau lost his passport in Phnom Penh. He wasn’t sure where it was in the afternoon. He might have lost it in the morning at the hotel. Or he might have been pickpocketed the night before. Whatever, he was really stuck in Cambodia. It is one of the worst things you can do on Semester at Sea, losing your passport. Because you need a visa to enter Vietnam, and you need an exit visa to leave Cambodia, and because it takes a few days to get a new emergency American passport, and because it was a Cambodian holiday, Beau didn’t make it to the ship. It wasn’t that big of a deal, just an expensive pain in the arse. He’s an adult who can take care of himself; he would meet us in Hong Kong once the paperwork was straightened out.

But the ship didn’t know this. So we agreed as a trip to tell the story that Beau was arrested in Cambodia. We would be vague with the details, “I didn’t see it, but I think was climbing the temple to take a picture,” or, “I saw him pretending to be Sarah Croft earlier and next thing I know you hear this crashing sound.” But he had knocked something, and didn’t come back to the ship.

Boy, was that fun. As trip leader, I must have had dozens of incredulous students come up to me to confirm the rumor they had heard about our trip, and of course I played along with it. Not all the students in the joke could keep a straight face – one student told me I convinced her to lie to her best friends on the ship, whoops – but enough students believed the story that, now that he’s back aboard, Beau is still asked about his prison experience. It was worth it.

Besides, our story made him look cool. Losing your passport is careless and a pain. A very nice girl lost her passport in Venezuela and was unable to leave the ship until Cape Town three weeks later, missing Brazil as she couldn’t get issued a visa in time.

Such was HCM24. Somehow I managed to trip-lead one of the most popular SAS trips, to Phnom Penh and Angkot Wat. The four trips to Cambodia were so popular that one of them had 100 students sign up beyond the maximum number of 60 per trip, growing to the point they added another trip leader - Tina Trap on our medical staff.

I had been selected to trip-lead a small, four-day camping safari in Kenya, but as you probably know, we never made it to East Africa and all my efforts would have to wait until Cambodia. A week before the trip, I started building excitement amongst our group by announcing over the closed-circuit TV system that HCM24 would be the “Best Trip Ever”. As a result, the entire ship was aware of HCM24 a week before arriving in port, and as mentioned in previous entries, several members that didn’t make the trip articulated their concern that we (I) was rubbing on their faces. That wasn’t my intention, so I stopped the campaign immediately and apologized.

But it served its intended purpose, and everyone involved felt pretty good about going on the trip. My leadership style has completely relaxed since my days as an RA at Stanford, which means that basically anything goes as long as we’re respectful to the people and places that we were going. That also meant that we wouldn’t be doing head counts or really checking for people until flights, so if people missed the bus, they’re adult enough to take care of themselves. We just didn’t want to wait around for people.

Our group arrives in Phnom Penh, and we have two hours to waltz around before heading over to a boat ride up the Mekong River. Phnom Penh (which sounds like a drum beat at the end of a bad joke, as in “I just flew into Cambodia today. Boy, my arms are tired.” phnom-penh) is under construction, and is probably well on its way to becoming a big metropolis in the next few decades. The city is also underwater, which is normal during the rainy season.

Over the centuries, the country has changed back and forth between Buddhism and Hinduism depending on the emperor of the day, and the temples and artwork are a striking mix of what appears to be Indian and Burmese architecture. With monkeys all over the place.

After our a fun meal trying to that involved somewhat randomly picking items in a Cambodian menu, we hit the Mekong for the sunset. The timing of the ride was perfect, because as we watched the sun do down along the temples and stilt houses along the river, we could see, quite literally, a wall of water approach us. It was so precise and linear that we could predict the arrival of the monsoon to the second… five…four…three…two…

We all, needless to say, got soaked, but we were soon back on the bus, bonding to “Tiny Dancer” on our way to an over-the-top yet delicious Cambodian buffet. One of the problems with many SAS organized trips is that they pamper you too much, and this was one of those trips. The hotels they put us in were ridiculous, and perhaps a few hundred dollars could be shaved off the trip if only we were treated to something a little more modest.

We visited the concentration camps and Killing Fields on day 2. I’m not ready to talk about that. I had consciously not done any research on Cambodia before coming, in order to view everything for the first time and not put up an emotional shield. I’m not sure that ultimately was a good thing. It does hit you hard. The pictures and the stories of torture and the mass graves and the teeth and bones on the ground and the walls of skulls hits you hard. Everyone you talk to mentions they lost a parent or a sibling or a son during the Khmer Rouge. Everyone. Yet they talk about it so matter of factly. You leave with a terrible feeling, knowing that 2.5 million people were killed.

Moreover, there’s an academic reason I’m not ready to talk about it. I found out coming back to the ship that there is a serious academic debate on the history of the Khmer Rouge, and that perhaps the total number of people dead was more towards the hundreds of thousands, not in the millions. Not that this diminishes the gravity of the situation. It’s just that I want to do this story justice. It is important to too many people to do otherwise.

The second half of the trip was very happy. We traveled to Siem Reap, home of the temples that inspired the Jungle Book (and were also the set of Tomb Raider). These are magnificent temples, and watching the sunrise at Angkor Wat was the highlight of the trip to Cambodia for most people. The temple is huge, discovered by the west in the mid 19th century, but built about 1000 years earlier that as a Hindu temple. You think to yourself how amazing it must have been to be the first westerners to encounter the temple going through the jungle. One of the temples has been kept exactly as it was found, and the trees growing in the temple walls are breathtaking. They are more of an attraction than the temple itself, and ironically, as they grow, they destroy the temple even further. I’m not sure how they are going to deal with the problem, say, 100 years from now, as trees die down and grown in the places. Is it just going to be a pile of rubble someday?

I was wondering which would I rather visit, Bagan in Myanmar or Siem Reap in Cambodia. I decided a few massive temples was slightly cooler than thousands of smaller ones. The problem is that Angkor Wat is setting itself up to be a Vegas-like resort town, and they are over 20 massive new hotels being built around the temples. I’m not sure that is the way to go – I hated the area around the hotels. The sense of adventure was completely lost in them, and we you can see that soon that area will look like a “Angkor Wat Hotel and Casino” in Vegas. Actually, why doesn’t Vegas have a Cambodian Temple sort of casino yet? Hmmm…

That was just a blip on a fabulous port. Hanging out with the students was a lot of fun (though I was glad that it would be my last SAS-run trip), the sites are impressive, and the Killing Fields stay with you long after you leave them. It is an amazing place.

I can’t wait to come back.

WeFightMS.com

2005-11-25T02:58:00.000-08:00

Happy Turkey Day, all. SAS doesn’t operate on a normal calendar, so the concept of weekdays or holidays have become completely alien to us, but we did somehow manage to fit in a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, complete with mashed potatoes and carved turkey, even though classes proceeded as they normally do.

So before I go to bed, I’ll place the first (but not last) mention of the MS150 bike ride that I participate every year with my great buddies Aden, Dunagan, Danny, and several other friends. This is an 180 mile bike ride from Houston to Austin that raises money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the experience is as amazing as anything that has happened on Semester at Sea. We definitely go all out every year and have raised some $17,000 in the last two years. Below you can see the annual videos we made for the last two rides. There are a lot of videos, so sit back and enjoy:

http://www.WeFightMS.com

Please don’t use last year’s donation link; if you’d like to donate this year, please use this link:

http://ms150.org/edon.cfm?id=180178

I’ll post a lot more about the ride towards the end of our trip. This is a really big big deal to the four of us and to the millions of people suffering of MS.

Check out our nine 2004 videos here.

I’ll also start posting the blogs from the arrival in Japan, starting with Amy’s first guest blog (below).

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Rico hearts Me!

2005-11-25T02:49:00.000-08:00

I do. I heart Amy. As IT Coordinator extraordinaire, she makes this blog possible. I heart her for that. She wrote this entry, the first of several guest blogs written as we approached Japan.

Amy is myscuba-diving buddy (on the right) and will be living in Santa Cruz later when she returns.

Here's the picture she took of me petting a huge morray eel.

Over the past 3 months we have become a close knit bunch and most of us have no shame in showing that love. Briana made a sign for Beth that said "I heart Beth," and the phrase stuck. This love was not felt all the way around however. Poor little Yas thought she was unloved because she'd tell Rico that she hearted him, but he'd just smile and not give his heart in return. While in Hong Kong we realized that it's not that Rico doesn't heart Yas, he doesn't heart ANYONE. Well, he might, but he won't admit it. We've been working on him, though, and finally got him to say "I heart y'all," and then...the miracle of all miracles happened. The other day after I gave Rico something that he really wanted, he showed his appreciation by saying "Amy, that's why we all heart you." That was the closest I'd heard him get to sharing all that love he has burning inside. Then I asked if HE hearts me, and indeed he does...I then became the first person that Rico outwardly hearts, when at last he told me "Amy, I heart you." It made me feel all warm and tingly inside.

Strike Up The Band

2005-11-25T01:27:00.000-08:00

Jason's second Pre-port Rambling as we pull into Kobe.

Kobe pulls out all the stops for us. Not only did they build a port just to have us here, but they sent out their fireboats to do a little routine. I just hope there wasn't a fire in port while they did it, though I did see some suspicious looking smoke. And now there's a full band playing American marching music of the John Phillips Sousa type. Later, I hear that two samurai are going to fight to the death on the pier for the priveledge of welcoming Dean John to Kobe once more.

Okay, only half of this is true. But this is still the most welcoming port we've been to, and we haven't even gotten ashore. I think part of it may be that they don't have to jack up their prices for us. In other countries, everyone likes us for our money. Here, we're kind of poor, so we know they like us for who we really are.

Wait, the samurai are coming out onto the pier...

Now where did I put that Parka?

2005-11-25T01:22:00.000-08:00

Jason's first Pre-Port Rambling as we pulled into Kobe

When we pulled into Cape Town, lo those many weeks ago, everyone was on deck wrapped in layers of clothes, blankets and towels. We all wished we might have a toque. It was cold. Or so we thought.

There's a cold wind blowing over the Inner Sea. Winter has started in Japan. It's cold. It's really fricking chilly. Okay, it's pre-dawn and all that, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't have a really good coat. I thought it would be a little cool here, not something which would make Chris's Canadian heart quiver as he realizes this is going to seem warm to him in a month when he's back in Calgary.

So there are students standing on the deck in t-shirts. Either they didn't get up in Cape Town, or they didn't go to Beijing, or they're just not very bright. They admit that if they went back inside to go and get their jackets, they wouldn't come back at all, but they still don't admit that it's cold enough to need the jacket. I don't get it. There's no f-ing way I'd be hanging out in the cold if it weren't the last port, and if we didn't need video.

Which I'm going to go and film now.

I think I'm turning Japanese

2005-11-23T18:43:00.000-08:00

I am buying myself a little more time in port before having to board the ship and leave. In the last twenty-four hours, I have gotten lost in Tokyo, had dinner with an old coach, stayed up all night doing Karaoke, and traveled to Miyajima in the southern part of the country to enjoy the fall colors by myself.

I couldnt have predicted a better way to finish our last day in a foreign country. Maybe I shouldnt board the ship.

Just maybe.

I take solace in this quote from Shawshank, in lieu of our two-week Pacific crossing (with a bathroom break in Hawaii):

I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope.

Sigh.

I miss my friends.

Time to go home.

Tokyo 2020

2005-11-22T23:04:00.000-08:00

Good lord almighty, this country freaking rules.

And I have an entire new appreciation for this ranch invite now.

I Said I Wanted to SEE a Game Show...

2005-11-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

I just confirmed my meeting with Yoshi by email, so I thought I'd mention that I fixed this link of crossing the street in Ho Chi Minh from the Vietnam entry.

Good lord, I love Japan.

Japadaphile

2005-11-21T10:38:00.000-08:00

I believe the question at the end of the trip will be: in a few years, would I rather spend a year traveling around the world, or would I rather spend a year in Japan? Good lord, I love this country. I honestly do not know the answer.

(There will be no apostrophes in this entry as I cannot figure out where it is on this Japanese keyboard. But I learned the hard way how to turn the Kanji on and off on my screen. Alas.)

The ship internet was down as we approached Japan, so I have a ton of entries that several of us wrote as we approached and waited for the ship to clear that need to be uploaded, including the summary of Cambodia. That will have to wait until the first leg of the Pacific crossing.

I am trying to see if I can make it up to Yokohama to meet up Yoshiaki "Yoshi" Hatakeda, one of my many former Japanese coaches at Stanford.

Sayonara!

Sushioke

2005-11-20T00:04:00.000-08:00

We're trying to figure out how many entries we can post before the ship is cleared... in twelve hours. This is Jason's second of the Pre Port Ramblings.

We get to Japan in about 8 hours. We'll leave the ship in maybe 12 hours. And then, just a few hours after that, we'll have Sushioke. All night long, perhaps with a little Kirin or Sapporo, we'll have some Sushioke.

Some might already have figured out what it is. It's not exactly hard. For a made up word, it works like a combination German word. In this case, Sushioke is of course the combination of Sushi and Karaoke. Who doesn't like raw fish combined with drunken yodling? I mean, at least if you're already a little drunk yourself. Otherwise it could be a bit stomach turning. The singing. Not the raw fish.

We made that term because we wanted to have them both at once. I don't know if it's really possible. We might have to eat and then sing. With drinking for both. But I think we should manage it somewhere. Because, damn it, we're in the last port, and we're going to need to combine a thing or two to fit it all in. Probably a thing or three. So long ago we figured out that this particular combination could work really well, and really easily, and now we have the chance.

What would be best would be one of the conveyor belt sushi restaurants. After you took your sushi plates, you could put your song requests back on the same belt, and the sushi chefs would pass them on to the MC. He'd call your name, you'd gulp down a last bite of deliciousness, take the mike, and sing your heart out. In a perfect world, there'd be a beer converyor belt, too, but I don't think that we'll be that lucky.

So we'll hit the street and drink some ten dollar beer. We'll spend a hundred on sushi and then rent a little room for big bucks and belt out hits from the seventies. And we'll return home a little drunk, a little full, still singing something by Barry Manilow, maybe. With visions of Sapporo dancing in our head, we'll sleep deep, and wake up with just a few days left, and wonder where it all goes.

But we'll always have Sushi. Oke, that is.

Do the Chinese have a word for it?

2005-11-19T23:34:00.000-08:00

Jason wrote another guest entry... consider him the co-Cobosce (Co-Bosce?). Expect a slew of blogs as we wait for the ship to clear in Japan tomorrow morning...

The auction mentioned below raised over $25,000, btw.

There was a charity auction on the ship last night. The thing about charity auctions is that people get a little carried away. Because it's for charity, they bid on things they have no real interest in. Sometimes just to give money, sometimes in a misguided attempt to raise the bidding price. Rico and I were the main auctioneers (along with the very game and willing Dean John), and through the glare of spotlights I saw a few poleaxed looks on faces as people realized their bids were actually being accepted.

One of my work studies did it. He bid on a chair, because he thought the price would go higher. Weirder things had sold for more. But after his bid, the second for the item, the room fell silent, and suddenly he was the proud owner of a ten dollar chair, for which he had paid thirty dollars.

A member of my adopt-a-family made an accidentally successful bid, too. She was bidding for a ski weekend in Aspen, which is spitting distance from where she lives right now. And after she named the reasonably high but still underpriced sum of 325 dollars, there was just shifting in the seats, and Rico and me calling for more bids with diminishing enthusiasm, and suddenly she had a vacation to a place she goes to anyway.

And there was me. One of the items was, oddly enough, staff and faculty only. Except there were just about 8 total staff in the room, and I think there were no faculty most of the night. So I ended up bidding 200 dollars on a weekend in a condo on the west Florida coast. I have no interest in going there, but I wanted it to sell, and no one at all was going to bid. It turned out I was completely correct, no one else was going to bid, and now I have a trip to a place I don't want to go to.

There has to be a word for that, right? For bidding when you don't want something, or don't expect something? Maybe it's a French word, because they're subtle like that; or a German word, because they enjoy tangled situations like that; or a Russian word, because they understand awkward misery pretty well. And if there's not a word for it, there should be, because it would make this story much easier to tell.

Crazy Game of Frogger.

2005-11-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the South China Sea, where the MV Explorer has encountered the roughest seas of the voyage! Everybody is sick! Woohoo! About 30 people showed up to Global Studies that they decided to break with the tradition and allow the class to be broadcast directly into the cabins. Kevin Murphy, the Global Studies lecturer, almost stopped mid lecture, but somehow managed to pull it through. I was really busy since so many professors decided to show movies instead of lecturing today. I don’t blame them. Even Sam, my new AV counterpart, who has lived six years on a ship, tells me was the first time he’s ever gotten sick.

The rocking is pretty violent and random, unlike previous swells, and that is why I think everyone is sick. It is impossible to sleep for any length of time before getting jolted awake. The windows on the seventh deck Staffulty lounge are getting nailed with spray. Several students and I spent some time last night timing our jumps with the slams to see how high we jump. Really, there was only one thing left to do in this kind of weather.

I needed a haircut.

Yup. Apparently the hair on the sides of my head an the back of my neck grow much faster than the hair on the top of my head (balding? Um… my grampa on my mom’s side died with a full head of hair… I’m safe! Whew!) that I beginning to show hints of Gallagher with a mullet. Chicks dig that, right?

I went to the beauty spa, home of the sauna and massage tables and exercise rooms and barber shop (rough life, eh?), and requested a touch up of the sides. Remember that scene in Jackass when Steve-O gets a tattoo while offroading on a Hummer? It was like getting a haircut from someone with severe Parkinson’s. The results?  Well, if you think Kim Jong Il of North Korea is sexy, than I’m the man for you. I might request a little touch-up when the water is a little calmer, but we’ll see.

The captain will try to steer behind some islands for protection against the weather, and I can see a huge city of Taiwan as I type this. Not sure which… I’ll got check the Map Channel later.

Alright, more catch-up to do. We new immediately that Vietnam was going to be a different experience when they taught us how to cross the streets in Ho Chi Minh, complete with simulated cars. The trick? Once you go for it and start crossing the street, you have to commit and go all the way through. Much like gymnastics, the most dangerous thing you can do is hesitate, because the drivers assume that you will be moving forward and will dodge you accordingly. Since there seem to be more motorcycles than people in Ho Chi Minh, this is a scary proposition the first time you actually try it, but it isn’t long before you trust the system and start walking into the busiest streets just to get a kick of watching the parting of the Red Sea.
After a windy, three-hour trip up the Saigon River, we arrive in Ho Chi Minh City, and immediately you notice how modern and western the city is. The staff members who have been here as recently as two years ago say that the city has undergone a tremendous shift. Gone are the bicycles and traditional clothing and in are shops and malls and fashionable wear. I saw little evidence of a Communist economy while there, unless the Communist Party is really into making sure all citizens get a fair share of Armani Exchange. There were western brands everywhere.

(By the way, I’m convinced KFC is the most popular brand in the world. Colonel Sanders died a famous man).

I had planned for a long time to meet with a man named Cuong, a native Vietnamese man who befriended some SAS staff members over a decade ago. When Pete returned to Vietnam as a resident dean of the Fall 2000 voyage with Anne, he had raised some $5000 to help Cuong buy a house. Cuong has been indebted ever since.

Anne gave me his contact information, and we agreed by email to meet at the Ho Chi Minh Museum upon my arrival. What I didn’t know at the time is that the city has some five Ho Chi Minh museums, and he waited next to the one located next to the ship, dedicated to HCM the man himself. I walked all the way to a museum dedicated to the city, waited some time and didn’t find him, so decided to tour the city by foot, on my own.

The city is wonderful, modern, easy to get around, and I got to do a lot, so I’ll save a few details.

First, I visited the War Remnants museum, dedicated to the victims of the Vietnam War (or, as called over there, the American War or the War of Vietnam Agression). The first thing I noticed is that I’ve never seen a movie has successfully captured the look of Vietnam during the war. There was an war photography exhibit, and most of the pictures involved a lot of mud, which we don’t see in most of the movies set in the war.

The museum puts a real face on the Vietnamese side. Most of what I know about the war comes from movies from the war, but, as noted by Kevin Murphy, they’re never about the war but about how the war changed the soldier. The Vietnamese side is faceless or never dealt with, and the museum immediately adds that perspective for you.

There are two moments in particular that make Americans feel very uncomfortable while there: the start of the exhibit, which starts with the American Declaration of Independence, and this text on Agent Orange. It hurts reading it, and in combination to the descriptions of torture techniques, the experience was powerful. War is hell.

I continued on my foot tour of the city, visiting a Catholic Church that had a Virgin Mary statue that the faithful believed was “crying” and so they clamored around it by the thousands. I’d never seen a miracle up close and personal before. Unless you count the Berman’s performance on the HBMR video. That was an amazing experience.

Things were so cheap in Southeast Asia... and everything is fake, though oftentimes the workmanship is so good there is nothing to tell you what you're buying isn't real. All the CD and DVD are pirated, all books are illegal copies, and there are fake brand name accessories all over the place. I bought a huge North Face backpack for $15 and a Rolex for $10. Not bad, eh?

After calling my mom for the first time since the voyage began (I'm a bad son), getting pinched by a prostitute, and hanging out with the staff and students until late, I was able to figure out where Cuong and I went wrong, and luckily, he volunteered to try again the next morning at 9am... just a few hours later.

I met up with Cuong, a diminutive man who believes he's 40s, though either he doesn't know exactly or he wasn't able to convey it to me in English. His wife was also present, and after a brief introduction I hopped on the motorcycle and we headed into the crazy Vietnamese motorcycle traffic. I'm not going to tell you I thought this was a smart idea - they tell us on the ship that 30 people die a day in Vietnam from motorcycle accidents, and I didn't have a helmet. But I couldn't miss out on this unique opportunity and Cuong's generosity, so we hopped on board. It was pretty fun to see him dodging the pedestrians and other obstacles, and since I'm about twice his size, I'm pretty sure he needed quite a bit of effort to get the cycle moving... objects in motion tend to stay in motion...

We drove and drove and drove until we got to an industrial part of the city, where Cuong lives. We arrive at his house, in a very poor area where there is a home-made fishing pond and chickens around. In other words, I was near malaria and avian bird flu at the same time, and with the motorcycle rides, the only unsafe thing I didn't do was have unprotected sex with a prostitute. That I remember, anyway.

Soon the neighborhood children are packing his door frame trying to get a glimpse of this strange creature that's come to make a visit. "They've never seen an American," Cuong tells me. As I've done in all the other places, I start making friends with a little juggling, and next thing you know, I'm playing tag and other games with them while Cuong's wife cooks us a delicious meal.

At lunch Cuong tells me all about himself and shows me his pictures, including some that I had seen before from Anne, He doesn't live in the house bought with the $5000 given to him - his wife lives there with his five-year-old son because there are better schools in that neighborhood. He lives near his work, and now work isn't much anymore. Nine months ago, he was working at a nearby factory making fishing nets, and he lost a finger in a work-related accident. He was fired and given a $60 severance package. Out of work, he had to improvise, so now he collects cans and after opening them with a device he built, he sells them as scrap metal. His wife makes about $70 a month at her job.

After the meal, he asks if he he can take me anywhere, and I tell him I always wanted to go to the Cuchi Tunnels. He said no problem, so we hopped on his motorcycle on our two hour trek of Vietnamese backcountry. This time I had a helmet.

The backcountry is exactly as we expect Vietnam to be in our minds: rural, green, with traditional clothing, ox carts, bicycles, conical straw hats, and rice field after rice field after rice field. I did wonder why they bothered marking the streets with traffic signs, because really, they didn't mean much. We never stopped dodging cars and buses and trucks driving into oncoming traffic, often sending us to the shoulder. There does seem to be a pattern after a while, so you really get used to it and feel safe. Until it starts raining. But I'll save that story in a second.

Two hours later, we arrive at the tunnel, which is an amazing experience in itself, showing me how little I knew about the Vietnam war. I had an impression in my mind that the tunnels were somewhat like the U-boats in World War II, that is, impressive but ultimately not important in the big picture of how the war progressed. I was wrong - the tunnels were an intergral part of the strategy of the guerilla warfare. They are an impressive feat of stealth engineering and improvisation, complete with hospitals and dining halls and booby traps. I walked through them and they are very small, I was sweating profusely by the time I reached 50 meters or so - it takes a lot of effort crawling through them, and the smaller average size of the Vietnamese soldier actually worked in their advantage because oftentimes American soldiers couldn't fit through some of the holes.

I spent two hours around the tunnels, and you leave with the feeling that the Vietnamese had a complete resolve to win the American War, regardless of the cost to their country. They were simply hard-wired to do so. Even today, you sense this undertone of pride that the little country beat out the big American invaders. It feels very weird to westeners, especially since the Vietnamese tend to be very hospitable to Americans nowadays. Cuong tells me he wishes people would just forget what happened. I wonder how easy that is to do.

I leave the tunnel, and a monsoon of epic proportion hits us. Of all the Vietnam movies I've seen, the only one that gets this right is Forrest Gump. Really, Forrest Gump! They rains come and go exactly as described in the movie, like someone turns them on an off in a matter of seconds. It can be sunny, and then you see a wall of cloud rolling in, and it's pouring rain in a matter of 30 seconds.

We're running out of light, so we need to make the two hour trek home. I ask Cuong if this is safe, but I'm not sure he understands my question. He puts on a plastic bag, and we're on our way.

I'm not proud of this, but this was definitely one of the craziest things I've ever done. I can't see a thing with the hard rain pelting my eyes. I'm not sure Cuong could see it either. The traffic continues moving as if this were a drought, and the road is often flooded. At one point, crossing about six inches of water, Cuong loses control of the motorcycle and we manage to fall off but stay on our feet (thank you, gymnastics!). Cuong loses a sandal in the process, which I find in the middle of traffic and have to run out and get it.

An hour later, the rain stopped, and we're relieved. We get back to the ship so I can get some dry shoes (I hate wet shoes), and I go out and treat Cuong to dinner and coffee. I'm not sure what it is with me and motorcycles in distant countries, but this was a pretty sweet day, one of the best. We say our goodbyes and I'm off to another night of fun in Saigon. If you're ever in Vietnam, give me a call, and I'll put you in touch with Cuong. He'll show you around.

The next day, we traveled to the Kingdom of Cambodia. That's next.

For the Best Trip Ever, bring new Rico (tm), now with Magic Happiness Action!

2005-11-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

Jason's eighth (?) guest blog. I might not need to write about Kunming after this.

Seven ports. Seven times I heard Rico boldly declare he had been on the Best Trip Ever! And while I'm not going to call him a big fat liar on his own blog, I never really thought everything could be as good as he claimed. Rico has a far too positive attitude for his own good, so that something that most people might just say “Meh” to, Rico would love. I was willing to believe he had some pretty good trips, but that was about it.

Then we came to China, and I saw him in action. Not that he did much. He just had an unfailingly positive, hopeful and wonder-struck attitude. He's ready for everything to be awesome, and ready for anything bad to turn out good. That's not my attitude; I'm ready to be disappointed, and I'm ready to have things that look good go bad. And yet, with Rico that just went away. A couple times I was pretty sure that we were screwed; Rico said to just give it one more chance, and lo and behold, a little Chinese woman would appear and everything would be fine. It helped, too, to have Yas along, who also has a good attitude, so that my vague negativity was pretty much overwhelmed.

Further, things just happen. Like you walk around a corner, see lights and hear music, and find yourself rollerskating five minutes later. Or you wander the airport and discover that it's possible to have hot, sour, aching and distended breasts like when you were a young girl, and this is a sublime and amazing thing. Or you mean to order tea, but the woman makes you a full, delicious meal; what it is, you have no idea, but you can't stop eating. Rico did nothing to make any of this happen, but it fits with all the other trips he talks about, all the strange and great things that seem to occur. He's a walking bundle of serendipity, that wondrous sensation of finding an unexpected and amazing thing.

So in other words, Kunming was great. Rico'll write all about it. Yas, too, will surely write about it. I might, but I rather doubt I'll do it with any completeness. It's more special than that. I feel odd even talking about it, though, this being SAS, I have to do so, because people ask. I want it to sink into the back of my brain like some story I heard as a child, a tale of wonder and magic that I can somewhat remember the details of, but that I can more importantly remember the feeling of. I want to hold onto that feeling, and I feel too much writing, too much analysis, will lose it, and make it less special.

We walked in a stone forest and saw an elephant dancing on a platform. We heard eerie music played on strange instruments echoing on the night streets. We were kings in an ancient palace. Kites flew higher in the sky than all the string in the world would allow. A monk opened a golden door to show us a unicorn. Every word is true. Every word is unbelievable.

It was the best trip ever.

It's a City... From the FUTURE!

2005-11-17T01:08:00.000-08:00

In 1989, my family visited Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida, as must be required by law of every Brazilian in their first visit to the United States. I was ten at the time, and some would call me slightly gullible. But can you blame me? While at Epcot Center, my dad took full advantage of my youth by convincing me that even the bathrooms of the futuristic park were of the latest technology, complete with self-flushing toilets and a robotic hand that would extend out from the urinal to shake off the last drops. “There’s no need to do it yourself,” he told me. “But be careful because if it malfunctions the hand doesn’t let go.”

Of course, the hyperactive, Calvin-esque child that I was thought this was the coolest thing I’d ever heard, and immediately proceeded to the bathroom, patiently waiting with my fly open for five or ten minutes after the deed for a robot to molest me. Disappointed that nothing happened, I walked back out to meet my laughing parents, probably wondering if I had enough evidence to get them arrested.

Fast forward to 2005. Why do I mention such humiliating moment of my youth?

Because we’re in Hong Kong, a city which seems like it was made in 2025. Everywhere you look, you feel like you’re decades ahead of anywhere else in the world. If someone had skated past me on a hoverboard, I wouldn’t have been surprised. If the urinals had a robotic arm that “took care of business”, I wouldn’t be shocked. It is certainly the trendiest city I’ve ever visited, with brand new buildings constantly being built on man-made islands reclaimed in the Victoria Harbour. The city is clean, safe, easy to get around, and reminds me a lot of a mixture of New York and San Francisco (an extra-large China town, complete with the Bay, if you will). Gone are the days when the harbor was filled with the romantic junks sailing into the sunset, once synonymous with the city.

The ships literally drops you off in a mall, and immediately you realize that the city is a shopper’s paradise. There is mall after mall after store after store after mall. This is quite jarring after the stretch from Chennai to Ho Chi Minh, especially since prices jump exponentially from the pennies we’ve gotten used to spending. I remember thinking in 1997, when Hong Kong was “returned” to China after British rule, that the claim that Hong Kong would operate in a separate political and economic system from the rest of the communist mainland wouldn’t last two long. Eight years later, the system seems to be working just fine, and if anything, mainland China is moving more and more towards a model of an open capitalist market.

(Speaking of the handover, we ran into Lord Patten, the last British governor of the island, who was promoting his new book. I “recognized” him because I noticed he was holding a book with a big picture of himself on the cover.)

Hong Kong is easy. I feel like I know the city very well after only some three days here (two of our days we spent in Kunming). You don’t realize how stressful it is to see constant poverty and suffering until you visit to a prosperous, rich place like Hong Kong. So we sail away at night from one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and from my favorite port so far in this journey (if that was possible after the rest of southeast Asia). This is my view as I type this. Just for kicks – these are my five favorite cities in the world in alphabetical order (I haven’t visited Paris and Sydney and many other towns in the world):

Cape Town
Hong Kong
New York
Rio de Janeiro
San Francisco

We’ll be in Kobe, Japan in three days, and I have no plan of action. I have to write about Vietnam, Cambodia, and Fresn… err… Kunming, and hopefully I can get it done before then. I might need the help of some guest bloggers.

When in Fresno...

2005-11-14T22:56:00.000-08:00

Imagine this scenario:

Imagine 700 Chinese students arrive on a ship in Los Angeles. 500 students immediately board a plane to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge. The rest stay in the trendy LA area. Three staff members randomly decide to go to Fresno.

Now imagine that going to Fresno turns out to be the most fortuitous decision you've made the entire voyage.

We're in cloud nine right now. We'll be back in Hong Kong - the coolest city on the planet - for another day and a half starting tomorrow.

Good times. Good times.

That's Our House. We live there.

2005-11-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

(Jason's note: I wrote this more than a month ago, but Rico's only now posting it because he wants to avoid posting a really inappropriate entry he says he'll post later. So here's the nice one instead.)

We live on a ship. This is pretty obvious. It's Semester at Sea, after all, not Semester in a Condo or Semester on the Streets. But it bears repeating. We live on a ship. I don't know how many of you have ever been on a cruise ship, but I'm reasonably sure none of you have lived on one longer than ten days.

It's not like living elsewhere. You can't go out. Or you can, but only as far as the seventh deck bar. Which is two minutes from your cabin. Which is two minutes from your work. Which is two minutes from the one and only restaurant on the ship. And so on. The place is small, and it's your whole life. You might have been on a big ship, and thought it was really quite large, but it's a lie.

The MV Explorer. 590 feet long, 84 feet broad; we have access to parts of Deck 2, most of Decks 3 through 7. This is it for us. All of us. For any single person, it's a couple shops, a few classrooms, a few public spaces and one cabin. A cabin that's probably smaller than the bedroom of whoever is reading this, unless you're in a dorm. In which case, get back to your homework.

The ship moves, too. I mean, of course, we're sailing around the world, but that's not it. It rocks. It sways. On occasion, it tips a goodly bit. Shit falls over. People lean as they walk, unusally in tandem. Doors, if not anchored, threaten to crush limbs. It's worse in the front of the ship, where I live (and Rico, too.) It's worse higher up. The Staffulty Lounge, which is that seventh floor bar I just mentioned, is about the worst, but then, it's private, and there's coffee.

Pretty much the entire ship is like that, one big compromise. Our rooms in the Pit, or to be more proper, 3 Forward, are small and lack amenities like windows, chairs and color. But the people there are the best on the ship. There's seasickness in the wings, but then, there's the endless swell of the sea. There's the smell of a thousand of us, hidden by strong cleaning agents, that fills the halls, but outside, there's the freshest air you've ever smelled, air that hasn't been bothered by people and their messes except briefly, as with us, in passing.

And for all the little problems, the lack of space, the minimal privacy, the repeition of sleep/work/home/bar being all the same places every day, for all of that, it's still home. The title of this piece is something I've heard people say, not once, but several times. Maybe we're drinking in a waterfront bar, and we look over to see the blue and white ship. Someone looks at someone else and says it. That's our house. We live there. And we smile, because we're the luckiest people on earth, to have such a home.

When we're in port, they turn on the lights at night. It's nothing much, just a string of bulbs from stem to stern. They're prettily ornamental, hundred watt bulbs strung in a single great line that must be seven hundred feet long. They're the first thing you see of the ship, once the sun is set. When the cab driver doesn't know the way, you spot those lights above the werehouses, and suddenly you can find the ship. They shine out into the night, into the strange, sultry darkness of foreign ports, and they call us home.

That's our house, we whisper, and point, and the cabbie smiles, if it's not too late, if he's not too tired from ferrying drunk students to the port. We live there, we say. He already knows, and so do we, but we all like to say it.

Rico Has A Posse

2005-11-12T11:30:00.000-08:00

Um, this is akward.

Jason wrote this as we wait for Yas to finish distributing passports. The ship has cleared!

Obviously you all know this. But on the ship, he really does. Okay, their combined ages barely equal his, but Nick and Jonah Barreto are definitely in Rico's corner.

Nick is sixteen, which means he's congenitally stupid for about the next three or five years. Further, he has mild ADD and OCD, and being a teenager, is convinced his family is out to get him. Other than that, he's pretty normal. He has the advantage of looking, when he grows his goatee, about twenty, which meant when he said he was a junior, most of the students thought he meant in college. He calls Rico Jesus, placing him second in his personal pantheon behind only Captain Jeremy. While I may make him sound like he's a bit of a spaz, he's actually smart, funny and pretty clever. For a shit, that is.

Jonah is twelve, but lies a lot and says he's thirteen. Why he does this is unclear. He likes his family a lot better than Nick, with the exception of Nick, that is. Being as they're brothers, they fight. This is okay, because it's funny to watch. Mostly there's a lot of Jonah getting his ass kicked because he's half Nick's size. The funnest thing about Jonah is he's just the right height to get in a headlock without it being inconvenient for the locker. It's not at all uncommon to see me or Rico wandering down the hall with Jonah under our arm, talking as if there was nothing strange about having Jonah attached to us violently. He also worships the ground Rico walks on.

The two of them, some say, look rather like Rico, because they're half Cuban, so that have that Latin thing. Although they don't have his tan, there is a sort of similarity. So Rico has not one but two Mini-Mes on the ship,and I think he really likes it. Oddly, he takes no advantage, and doesn't make them run errands for him or anything, which they would. But he's a good guy like that, which is probably why he has a posse.

Passport Paranoia

2005-11-12T11:15:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: We're still on the ship. Jason had time to write another guest entry.

The last time I travelled I took my passport with me everywhere. It sat in my security belt, and I didn't worry about it. When I was in a hotle I just put it down wherever and didn't feel the least bit concerned. Whatever happened, I would be fine.

This trip is a little different. From moment one, they told us that we should be terrified about losing our passports. I got on the ship, and they asked for it, and I didn't see it again for days. They're so afraid that we're going to lose it or get it stolen or possibly both that we're not allowed to have them unless we absolutely need them.

We don't carry them around in port, which is strange to me. My passport is my only ID, the only ID I ever breing when I travel, but now they tell us to just carry a photocopy. So far, that's been good, but what if some official looks at me funny? I think that's a bigger risk than carrying my passport. I'd rather have to use my photocopy for a few days than have to spend time in detention. But maybe that's just me.

But when I do have it now, I'm actually catching their paranoia. I feel a little worried. I think that maybe something is going to happen, that some clever pickpocket with get it, or that it'll just vanish someplace. But that's ridiculous. Like I'm going to just lose it somewhere. People do, but then, people also don't read books, and vote Republican, and other stupid things. Despite that comforting notion, the notion that I'm not a idiot, it has spread to me. I am partly convinced that it's a bad thing to have my passport. My rational mind knows that's moronic, but I can't help it. It's like a mob mind thing. And I want it to stop, but I can't.

Hopefully, I'll get over it. There will come a day when can I carry it safely but without concern again. Just not on this trip.

"The Ship it Used to Be"

2005-11-12T11:07:00.001-08:00

Postscript: The MP3 of this song can be downloaded here.

Alright, still have time to post. These are the lyrics to Allan's song. I'll post the MP3 when I have one. Sing it with a thick accent. Trust me, it is really catchy.

"THE SHIP IT USED TO BE"
Written and composed by Allan Pesado,
A/V Officer
Fall 2005

THE MV EXPLORER IT MEANS A LOT TO ME,
THE SHIP SAILS ONCE AGAIN, FALL SEMESTER BEGINS
FAR AWAY FROM HOME IS NOT AN EASY DREAM

IN A STORMY SEA IS A SCARY THING
THE MV EXPLORER THE SHIP IT USED TO BE

TOGETHER WITH YOU GUYS
ON SEMESTER AT SEA
SHE SAILS IN THE FALL
SEMESTER AND SPRING

THEN SUMMER HAS BEGUN
TO SAIL WITH YOU AGAIN
THE OFFICERS AND CREW
OH! FRIENDS DON'T YOU KNOW
WOULD LIKE TO SAY
HELLO OF COURSE TO ALL OF YOU
AND THANKING YOU SO MUCH
FOR ALL OF YOUR SUPPORT
TO SAIL WITH US AROUND THE WORLD.

THE MV EXPLORER IT MEANS A LOT TO ME
SO MANY THINGS TO LEARN
ON SEMESTER AT SEA

EXPLORING IN THE WORLD
AN EXCITING MOVE
ALL THE PORTS ARE GREAT
KENYA THE PLACE WE MISSED
MAURITIUS HAS TO COME
WAS NOT THE REAL PLAN
YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND

YOU OPEN UP YOUR EYES (IN YOUR LIFE)
NOW YOU REALIZE (WHAT YOU ARE)
SOME QUESTIONS IN YOUR MIND (WITH YOUR HEART)
NOW YOU UNDERSTAND

THEN CHRISTMAS TIME WILL COME
FALL SEMESTER HAS GONE
0N THE LAST DAY ON AT SEA
FAREWELL TO ALL YOU SAY,
TEARS FALLING IN YOUR EYES
WATCHING ALL YOUR FRIENDS
KISSING YOU AND SAID GOOD BYE.

EXPLORING IN THE WORLD AN EXCITING MOVE
ALL THE PORTS ARE GREAT KENYA THE PLACE WE MISSED
MAURITIUS HAS TO COME,WAS NOT THE REAL PLAN
YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND

YOU OPEN UP YOUR EYES (IN YOUR LIFE)
NOW YOU REALIZE (WHAT YOU ARE)
SOME QUESTIONS IN YOUR MIND ( WITH YOUR HEART)
NOW YOU UNDERSTAND

THEN CHRISTMAS TIME WILL COME
FALL SEMESTER HAS GONE
ON THE LAST DAY ON AT SEA
FAREWELL TO ALL YOU SAY,
TEARS FALLING IN YOUR EYES
WATCHING ALL YOUR FRIENDS
KISSING
YOU AND SAID GOOD BYE.

TEARS FALLING IN YOUR EYES
WATCHING ALL YOUR FRIENDS
KISSING YOU AND SAID GOOD BYE.

"Birthing"

2005-11-12T10:59:00.000-08:00

We're still in port, so I'm going to keep posting until we clear. Jason had time to read through my posted entries and is making fun of me for referring to the docking of the ship as "birthing". Actually, it's "berthing". I'm an idiot. That's the last time I try to use cool maritime lingo.

That's what happens when English is your second language. That would never happen in portuguese. I think.

PPT

2005-11-12T10:42:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: The ship hasn't cleared for Hong Kong yet, so Jason had time to write a guest blog before we head out. I have time to upload it. Get us off the ship!

The Pre Port Tipsy is an ancient custom of our people (Rico wants to make it clear that by this we mean Staff), dating back at least a couple of voyages. It's probably that tradition that we most hold to, which isn't saying much; every one of our traditions gave way within weeks to laziness, busyness or general apathy. PPT still lingers on, though, like the bad taste in your mouth after a night of heavy drinking. Rather like that, actually.

The concept is simple: none of us work in port, so we can afford to get a little drunk. Hangover? Whatev, just get up a little late, and anyway, it's not like we have to do anything. Plus, we can talk about plans and what's to come in port, and get to spend time with the people who will disappear for five days. Sounds great, what?

But there are problems. First off, the damn ship doesn't pay attention to the fact that it's pre port night. I've got to work on every one of those night for half the allotted bar time. There are events the Resident Directors have to go to, or supervise. There are meetings. Rico's got to set stuff up. Trying to get all of us into Staffulty to have a little drinky-drinky is harder than it would seem. If we can get five good minutes, it's a minor miracle. And I mean five minutes with ten or so of us. Instead, and not in a good fun way, we end up running in and out, having a drink here and there with someone. That sounds fun, but it's really not. It's a lot of work. And then you have to drink superfast to actually have your drink with whoever has appeared, or change partners mid conversation. Like speed dating without even the possibility of a payoff.

Secondly, we're getting tired. People go to bed early, or don't show up at all. Some of us even get sick. So the remnants wonder is we should try to track them down, or did they go to bed, and should we wait? Which muddles things even more, and makes it harder to get together.

Why wait? Because there's supposed to be a shot. We decided to start having a shot at every PPT, but that didn't go well. What sort of shot, we all wondered. When should we have it? Should we wait for Rico, or Chris, or whoever was missing? Should we try to get in a shot before someone went off to bed? Too many variables, too much work, we would just go ahead and have the same drinks each port, which wasn't the plan.

So do we still PPT at all? A little. There's still a vague spirit of drunkenness, a desire to get together and have a drink with our friends. There's often still a shot, for half a dozen of us, whoever's around at last call. Tokyo's the last real port, so it should happen there. And will we have the granddaddy of all PPTs before San Diego? That, my friends, is certain. Poor Hawaii, though, will probably lose out. It barely even seems worth it.

On the other hand, it is our last surviving tradition, as sick and weak and horribly gimpy as it is. So maybe even the middle of the Pacific will see us knocking back a B-52 at five minutes before eleven, six or eight of us lined up at the bar, raising a glass to a single day at one more sunny port of call. Maybe we don't all get up for sunrise, and we don't have parties, and you don't find more than a few of us at breakfast anymore. But this one thing seems worthwhile. Who doesn't like alittle tipsy in their life?

Hong Kong

2005-11-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

When did we sail into Manhattan?

We're off the ship in a shortly. See you if we make it back from... where was that again? Oh yeah, Kunming. Time to start reading about the city. As far as I know, it could be just like that British guy in "Love Actually" that decides to visit Wisconsin. I can only hope to meet the same kind of locals he did.

See you in a few.

Allantown

2005-11-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

There are two worlds on the ship, one in which passengers know very little about. There are about 200 crew members aboard the MV Explorer, and due to strict ship regulations, they are not allowed to fraternize much with the passengers beyond some small talk when they are doing the job. There are some awesome people on this ship's crew.

Which is why I’m very, very lucky to have a crew member assigned to be my counterpart on this trip. Mr. Allan Pesado, "Sparky", who is leaving the ship in Hong Kong to wife and kids in the Phillipines for three months. He’s been aboard the ship for 11 months, and has been living this life as a Radio or AV for 13 years.

Crew life is tough. I’ve learned all about the shipping industry in our hours and hours and hours and hours of conversation about the ship. He’s been through everything - he’s been through fire, collision, embankment, deaths, and was the radio operator calling “MAYDAY” during the infamous 50 foot wave damaged the ship earlier this year.

(That story, by the way, is one of the best stories I’ve ever heard. If I don’t find a site that fully documents this stories, I’ll have to create one myself).

Allan is a short, bald, with the body of Homer Simpson and a thick Phillipino accent. He’s also on the jolliest, funniest, hardest-working people I have ever met – he’s often working from 7:15am until well after midnight. And we get along extremely well. I can’t tell you the number of times during Global Studies we busted out in the AV booth into a quiet rendition of “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel, with me singing the melody and him singing the harmony. We assume no one can hear us, but we often hear from students later telling us, “We heard you singing in Global Studies today…” Whoops.

But he’s a great musician, though most people would never know it until the crew talent show, where he played guitar or piano or sang in just about every skit they did. As we were setting up the instruments for the show in the empty union, he picked up the guitar, started strumming “The Boxer”, and next thing you know I’m on the keyboard and we’re singing our brains out. I’m sure people heard us as they walked to the library. I hope they did. How often do you get to karaoke at work?

Then when sang his original composition “MV Explorer”, with lyrics like…

The MV Explorer
It means a lot to me
Going lots of places
With Semester at Sea

…where the word “Semester” is pronounced “SEA-mester” due to his thick Philipino accent, we’ll let’s just say someone must have been chopping onions in the union that day.

The crew members don’t get paid a lot, though it is good money relative to the countries they come from. The work is rewarding but tough – they work extremely long hours, often living in small cabins with three other individuals (as an 2nd officer, Allan gets his own cabin). They work long hours every day, are required to be on the ship at least nine months at a time (though they have to stay longer or cut their vacation short if the ship management company, V-Ships, asks them to do so). Allan deserves to go home and see his family. But he’ll be missed on the ship.

This is him and his replacement Sam (who I like already)

The Burma Identity

2005-11-10T20:00:00.000-08:00

Catch up time. I have lots of things to write about Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, and my crew counterpart Allan who is leaving us in Hong Kong, so let’s get to it.

Burma/Myanmar was clearly the great unknown of this voyage. What would happen when 700 students – the largest congregation of Americans in the country since 1962 – descend and take over a country that wasn’t quite ready for it?

There was a lot of buildup to this port. Information about our arrival changed every day, and the administration made a big deal about what to prepare for, and they made it clear that they had no idea what to expect. The only thing that seemed clear, thanks to reports of our risk management company (iJet), was that the small bomb that went off at our home base in Yangon a week prior to our arrival did not pose a serious threat to our shipboard community. But otherwise, no one really knew what was going once we arrived in port, or even arriving in port.

As described in previous entries, we hit the mouth of the Ayerwaddy River on our way to the port located some 45 minutes south of Yangon. Due to the shallowness (is that a word?) of the river, we had to enter the river at high tide, and limit the amount of water aboard the ship to minimize how much of the ship was submerged (this would lead to a severe rationing of water aboard the ship which I’ll come back to).

Everybody went outside to see the rural countryside go by, and many straw houses and pagodas later, we arrived to the cargo port in the middle of rice fields. A shuttle service had been set up from the ship to Yangon for the students, and once we got off, we knew this stop was different from most others. We didn’t have to deal the usual hordes of taxi drivers and peddlers outside of the ship that have been characteristic of most of the other ports.

On the way to Yangon, a few things jump out at you:

1. Men wear these long skirts in Myanmar. ALL men except for the military wear these skirts, the longyls. If you don’t think I purchased and bought one by the time I got back on the ship, you are just plain wrong. If you don’t think that most of the guys on the ship bought and wore one at some point, you are also very wrong. They’re pretty cool and comfortable – you won’t believe the freedom down there. Alright, too much detail.
2. The women and children wear a blotch of white paste on their cheeks. I had no idea this was coming, so it is no exaggeration that I was more surprised to see this for the first time than I was seeing dead bodies at the Ganges.
3. I took a picture of the first monk I saw. After my millionth monk, I didn’t think I had to take pictures of them any longer.
4. Burmese is the coolest looking language in the world. They write in circles (which I’ve been told developed from having to write on banana leaves). At one point, the letters started looking like little people to me, which makes for some funny stories if you “read” your interpretation out loud (“So this pregnant woman gets on her knees before losing her legs…”
5. What an amazing difference from India, which we had just seen two days earlier! There wasn’t nearly as many cars and people, and the countryside seemed so much cleaner. Was this in fact representative of Myanmar? The country has twenty times less people than India, but I’ve been told about the extreme poverty and the American diplomats warned us of the “veil” of Myanmar, where tourists are able to visit without having any idea of the political turmoil of the country. Was this part of that veil?
6. Things were unbelievably cheap in Myanmar. A dollar is worth a lot in that country. The local currency doesn’t have much teeth.
7. I thought, “I bet this is what Thailand looked like 40 years ago.”

I’d say that we surprised most of the people there. We got off the bus and no one came out to us. Of the people we did talk to, they were extremely gentle and seemed almost intimidated by us. After five days in India, we were shocked to see vendors not be pushy, accept “no”s, and not try to sell you much. It was amazing to see a transformation in five days, because the vendors and peddlers became much more aggressive by the last day in port. Why? Because it works, and every time you buy from a pushy person, it becomes an incentive for them to do it again. Though to be honest, it seemed most SAS people didn’t mind when you’re asking 25 cents for a shirt priced at 50 cents. And I’d say most people didn’t mind pumping some money into the informal economy.

Chris, Jason, and I decided to hang out the first day and improvise Yangon. We took a Lonely Planet, and started walking out and about, looking completely lost, when Mr. Toe approached us.

Mr. Toe. He’s like Red in the Shawshank Redemption. He’s the man that gets you things. Myanmar only gets 300,000 tourists a year (compare this to Thailand’s 12 million visitors), but Mr. Toe is one of the few tour guides around. He walked to us in the middle of an intersection, asked us what we wanted, and we wanted food. Authentic food. Cheap food. Good food, which wouldn’t make us sick later. He told us he would take us there. Since we hadn’t agreed to pay him anything, we took his advice, and sure enough, the restaurant fit all of the criteria. We needed to pay in Kyat (pronounced “chiat”) but the official government rate is 450 kyat per dollar. The black market rate is more like 1300 Kyat per dollar. Instead of going to a bank, Mr. Toe took us to the back of a t-shirt shop, asked us to cover our money, and we discreetly exchanged our money. I’m not sure why we had to be so discreet since EVERYBODY exchanges their money in the informal market, but we did as told.

The money lasted a while. Our dinner, with drinks, was around US$5. Chris got a haircut for 40 cents. At one point, Mr. Toe looked at Jason’s bag and noticed it was all ripped, so he took us to this alleyway where a shirtless tailor was working on a 100-year-old sewing machine. Seeing how fast the tailor fixed – actually, made stronger – Jason’s bag, we started looking for things we needed worked tailoring. Chris needed to fix his expensive Canon camera straps – the man whipped out some leather (that sounds bad) and fixed them. I had a missing zipper on the side pocket of my expensive REI short/pants (shants), and without having to take them off, I had a brand new zipper in no time. Total cost for all this: $2, paid in Kyat.

By this time, we had started to develop a funny bond with Mr. Toe, and the video of us singing “Killing Me Softly” in Burmese proves it.

(By the way, why does every country have it’s own version of “Killing Me Softly”? And why does the entire world enjoy Celine Deon? And why does the entire western world wear speedos? Why?)

Mr. Toe then took us the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest place in Burma and one of the holiest (if not THE holiest) place in Buddhism. (We liked calling it the “SchwearToGod Pagoda”). The pagoda is huge, some , covered in billions of dollars worth of gold that accumulated over the centuries. For such a beautiful place, there was one thing in particular that never seemed right by western standards – the flashing colored Vegas lights that they put behind the heads of the Buddhas. To us, it looks tacky, but it must mean a lot to them, because these lights were very common in Myanmar (I didn’t notice them that much in Cambodia).

We watched the sunset at the pagoda and got in a long conversation with a monk who somehow learned amazing English in his one year in the monastery and was much more progressive than we’d been told to expect. (Women, for example, were told not to look a monk in the eye, yet they kept coming up to the SAS students and engaging them in conversation. There are some really nice people in Myanmar). As someone who speaks English as my second language, I’m amazed at how well people can learn English around the world without being immersed in the language. This is particularly obvious of the little children on the street, who often speak English perfecty.

We had another cheap dinner with Mr. Toe, and gave him some money for being such a quality guide in the eight hours+ we were with him. If you’re ever in Yangon, ask for Mr. Toe. If you look lost at the intersection near the Trader’s hotel, he’ll find you. Tell him you know Chris, Jason, and Rico. He’ll take you around.

We took the last shuttle back to the ship to get some sleep and get ready to fly to Bagan the next day.

I hadn’t seen any evidence of the evil Myanmar that was on everybody’s mind. They asked us not to engage in political conversation with the locals as to not endanger them and have them questioned by the police later on. We were afraid to ask, for their safety. But I wanted to. I would have to wait until Bagan.

(I’m in the Union writing this as the choir is practicing “America is Beautiful” for the first time, to be sung prior to arriving in the U.S. I just got chills. The trip is coming to an end…)

I woke up the next morning, a little too late to be able to go to Yangon and back and still make it to my flight. So I decided to explore the nearby area on foot. I made my way out of the port, towards some oxen in a muddy rice field towards some straw huts I’d seen from the bus. As I got closer, an 18-year-old (whose name I unfortunately can’t remember) came to greet me, and I spent the next hour or so talking to him, asking a million questions, learning quite a bit about the poor people in Myanmar, getting angry at the government who makes things worse for them, and thought a lot about a time when my parents were going through serious financial difficulties and had no one to turn to. I hate to compare the experiences because the conditions are obviously very different, but I thought back about the feeling of helplessness, and the inability to understand why people are unwilling to help. This brought me right back to my experience in India, and in my mind, all the sudden all the beggars have a background story – such as, what got them to the point of having to come beg at a dirty station – and I began to understand, I think, the feeling of helplessness they must feel when a “rich” individual goes by. Why won’t these people help me? Can’t they see I hungry? Can’t they see I can’t help myself?

Why is it that even though we spend thousands of dollars on elaborate trips around some of the most exotic locations around the world, some of the most meaningful moments happen alongside a non-descript road within walking distance of the ship?

I said goodbye, and hitchhiked a ride back on a truck carrying teek (sp?) and was dropped off just feet away from the ship. I joined the group, went to the airport, and headed to Bagan, home of some 2500 ancient stupas and pagodas. There were no lights visible as we landed, so we knew we were in the middle of nowhere. I won’t spend too much time describing our plan of action because I’d be summed up like this:

Pagoda, pagoda, stupa, pagodas, Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, pagoda, Buddha, stupa, stupa, pagoda, stupa, Buddha, stupa, pagoda, Buddha, stupa, stupa, stupa,. And another Buddha. Please don’t underestimate how cool that is, especially by someone who’s never been to a Buddhist country. Some of the highlights:

1. Going to some really cool resorts on the river. I thought the hotels they put us in Varanasi and Delhi were overkill, but these seemed to fit the trip. They were really nice.
2. Climbing the temples and seeing the view from the top of them. There really are thousands of ancient temples all over the place in Bagan. They should shoot the next Indiana Jones here.
3. The city is still not tourist-friendly, which is great. There aren’t many people there, most streets are still unpaved, and it isn’t hard to find large empty temples to explore. I’m not sure long this will last – the country is spending a lot of money doing out-of-place constructions in the area, and rebuilding a lot of the ruins, with modern bricks. I’m not sure what their motivation is, but I think they should just leave the temples as found. See Bagan now before it is too late.
4. Best Idea Ever – renting bikes. We had some free time, and this girl Jamie and I decided to get the bikes and go exploring. It was my favorite part of the entire trip.
5. The city is dead at night. I left our resort to meet up with a friend at another resort, and asked at the reception if it was safe to walk around. “Be careful,” they said. “Many snakes.” I was thinking I’d have to worry about some government operative, but instead they gave me the nice tip that Cobras make a hissing sound when they attack. Vipers, on the other hand, are completely quiet. When I left the hotel, it was completely dark, but I could see the very faint silhouette of the temples as I made my way past them. And I saw many huge flying foxes along the way. Good times.
6. Stargazing on the shores of the Ayerwaddy River in Bagan is one of the coolest things ever.
7. The welcome reception was jaw-dropping. They lit one of the largest ancient temples entirely by candlelight as the locals came out holding torches and playing the drums. Just one of those moments you had to be there to understand, but that by itself made the trip all worth it.
8. Finally having the political conversations I wanted. The locals we talked to asked us not to let anyone know that they had talked politics with us, and there were a lot of revealing statements. They are scared of the government, and one guy in particular believes there will be a revolution in the next few years. “No one thought Nelson Mandela would be president of South Africa someday,” he said. So true. So true.

Upon return to Bagan, I still had two days in Yangon, which I made to good use of. As soon as we got back from Bagan, Sony and I decided to walk with the goal of getting lost. In the process, we saw all of the poverty and slums that we hadn’t seen in around the tourist trail. Poverty is poverty is poverty, no matter where in the world you are. The saddes sight was of these old men swimming in the sewer looking for possible objects of value that could have been dropped in there. A few hours later, we made our way back.

I met up with some students, booked a room in $3-a-night hotel, hung out with staff and students until very late, and I met up the next day with my adopted son, Ashish (long story – I have an adopted son and three adopted daughters on the ship), and we explored Yangon and ate and ate and ate all day long. Ashish is Hindu, and since India was fresh our minds at the time, we spent several hours talking about the subcontinent. Sounds boring, but for someone who knows little about this stuff, it was fascinating.

Remember when I said there was a severe rationing of water? We couldn’t take in new water in the river, and people didn’t reduce the amount of water while on the ship, so by the time we got back, they shut off the water except for a short time in the morning and evening, including flushing of the toilets. And since we spent another half day in port, some people were really stinky by the time we hit the sea, present company included.

Myanmar was wonderful. I think it is a much easier country to travel in than was believed before we arrived there – you can see they are trying to make an effort to up the tourism in the country, and I don’t doubt that it’ll be at the same level as the other southeast asian countries someday. But the government needs to change. Though embargo is not the answer.

Thank you, Mr. Toe.

Cambodinam

2005-11-09T22:34:00.000-08:00

I loved this port.

I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it.

Loved it loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved.

Loved it.

Seriously.

I loved it.

Good Morning Vietnam!

2005-11-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

We woke up arriving on the Saigon River, and we’re doing our awesome 3 hour trek into the Heart of Darkness (actually, that’ll be in the Mekong River in Cambodia), but should be arriving in Ho Chi Minh City in a couple of hours. The river is narrow and twisty and crowded and in the middle of what appears to be some pretty dense jungle – I’m amazed at how well this huge ship handles these tight turns. The ship has gotten in some serious collisions here before. Let’s hope for the best.

This is so, so cool right now. I’m working on my Myanmar report, but I’ll be honest with you, I might get easily distracted and not finish it. But I’ll get it done, for sure.

A little about what I’m doing in Vietnam. Once we arrive, I plan on visiting the War Museum and meet up with a local named Cuong, who had befriended a friend of Anne’s. We’ve been in touch by email and he said he’d be happy to show me around.

Also, I’m trip leading one of the Cambodia, into the Killing Fields in Phnom Phen and the temples of Angkor Wat. These have been the most popular sign-ups on this trip, with hundreds of students not getting a slot, so snagging the trip-leader spot was a pretty sweet deal. I actually chose not to do much research on the subject. So why am I going if I don’t know much about where we’re going?

When I started researching what I was going to do on this trip, Anne gave me three pieces of advice:

1. Don’t let money be a concern – if there is something you really want to do, figure out how to do it, because you never know when you’re going back there.
2. If you go on SAS trips, pick the ones with the fewer maximum number of people.
3. Whatever you do, go to Cambodia.

So that was it. I was sold. We never talked much about it after. I signed up, got the trip, became so excited I started a media campaign to get the rest of my group excited – I would post on the television screens slide shows essentially saying that the “Best Trip Ever” is coming. It worked a little too well, because I brought to a halt when one student told me people who didn't get a slot were starting to get really jealous.

So yes, I’m excited. I’ll get back to the Myanmar stuff since I like writing about things when they are fresh. I’ll keep y’all posted.

The Myanmar Dilemma

2005-11-04T13:18:00.000-08:00

Question asked by Chris at breakfast this morning:

“Do you remember that time we had lunch in Singapore?”

The answer, of course, was yesterday. We pulled over for a pit stop in Singapore for gas, a Slurpy, some twinkies and beef jerky, and a bathroom break. Well, we just stopped for refueling, but were right off the Singapore skyline and got our passport stamped even though we weren’t allowed off the ship. Which really sucks, by the way. What a tease.

Otherwise, god, I love this. One of the most surreal elements of SAS is the fact that as vast as the ocean appears to be from the seventh floor deck, the world feels as small as the big map posted in the hallway denoting where we have been. There’s a feeling of, “Hey, wanna go to New Zealand?”, and we can do that. I “just” happens.

Another reason I love being on the ship. Here’s an announcement taken verbatim from our Dean’s Memo.

“Pirates still do exist, although they probably do not look like the one we see in Hollywood movies. There are reports of pirating on the seas throughout the world, oftentimes when a ship is traveling close to land like in the Malacca Strait, which we are about to enter. Although the risk is low the ship does take precautions, like increasing our speed through the area of risk. Pirates are much more interested in cargo ships, not passenger ships.”

Any job that warns you about the danger of pirates can’t be all that bad. Can it?

I reread my final India entry, and reread my journal, and I still don’t think I’ve quite conveyed my experience there quite accurately. I had a long discussion with Janet Eastman, who is teaching journalism on board and writes for the LA Times, about our thoughts and experiences there, and neither of us have quite nailed it yet. India is a difficult country. My journal makes it seem that I jumped out of an airplane, with sensory overload, but yet I feel somewhat removed from that ten days later. But I thought about it a little further, and I’m not sure if simplifying the experience to an intellectual exercise is accurate. I also wanted to emphasize that I loved my five days there. I just wish I could have come up with a better understanding in those five days.

I have lots of pictures to upload, but as Internet is quite slow again, so I’ve only uploaded the Rinspirator picture:
http://www.executiveranch.net/sas/india/rinspirator.jpg

(Speaking of pictures, I guess the link I put up to Chris’s Mauritius pictures didn’t work, so just go directly to his main site and click on “Mauritius” (http://www.37thframe.ca/sas) and Myanmar because I hung out with him the first full day there.)

But India takes us to Myanmar. Semester at Sea had sent trips to Myanmar from other port stops, but this was the first time that the ship would “birth” (cool maritime lingo) in the country. But this would not be without controversy. Myanmar has one of the worst records of human rights violation by the government, second only perhaps to North Korea, and culminating with the house arrest of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who is still in custody to this day. Desmond Tutu called her his hero and said there is a poster of her up in his office.

The country has the worst possible diplomatic relationship with the United States and still be recognized as a country, and in defiance of the Myanmar government, the U.S. will refer to the country as Burma in its official documents.

(This leads us to our first dilemma – how do we refer to the country when we’re there? I decided that the US government should indeed call it Burma as a symbolic gesture against the government, but when talking to the locals, “Burma” is a vestige of British colonialism and only encompasses the Burmese people, which is only about two-thirds of the population. Myanmar means “Strong People” so the locals seemed to prefer that. Alas).

There is a US diplomatic staff in Myanmar, but, in a move filled with symbolism, there is no U.S. Ambassador there. We have been told that the embargo against the country is the foreign relations issue with the largest bipartisan support of any issue in the US Congress. My OMHML, Archbishop Tutu, is the world’s most ardent opponent of the Myanmar regime and a huge supporter of sanctions in the country.

A very serious dialogue started on the ship. Should we be going to Myanmar? The answer from the Institute of Shipboard Education’s side seemed pretty straightforward – this is an educational trip, and ISE will not put itself in the position to making a political statement by choosing not to go to a country. They’d been to Communist China before they opened their doors to the west, to Vietnam, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa, all in the name of education.

But that still wasn’t reason enough for me to exit the ship. Would our visit be perceived as some sort of endorsement of the government, and would our money end up in the hands of government to be used for more human-rights violations? Should we stay on the ship as some sort of protest? If I decide to not stay on the ship, would that be perceived as some sort of ignorance or indifference to these issues. Coming from India and South Africa, where there was a history of systematic injustices, these were questions that were laying quite heavily with a lot of people.

(By the way, I think this opportunity to compare so many countries in a short amount of time is the most important aspect of SAS, and have a lot to say about it, so I’m sure I’ll come back to this at the end of the voyage).

The answer, for many of us, came when the Kevin McGrath and his wife Olga, our Myanmar Interport Lecturers, boarded the ship in Chennai. He was an UN officials in Burma (and many other countries) for many years, and he built a very convincing case that the sanctions are not working at that they are the wrong approach to dealing with the country (actually, he made the case that sanctions are generally a bad way to deal with international issues, South Africa being a notable exception). Some of the main points, as I understood it:

1. In a country where the ruler believes in Karma, suffering is caused by some greater cosmic force - if my people suffer because of the economic sanctions, then it was meant to be. There’s little motivation to do anything about it. But the government can continue to splurge whatever is left on itself, which means Myanmar has the world’s most disproportionate ratio between military spending to social spending (something like 9 to 1). The ruler isn’t afraid to make insane rulings on the basis of astrology: in the early nineties, the government decided that the money needed to be based on the number 9, and the financial system lost its credibility and collapsed when certain bill denominations were deemed illegal overnight.

2. The sanctions only bring Myanmar closer to China, who fills in the void left by the sanctioning countries. It seemed like all of the major businesses, such as hotels, were owned by Chinese (and Thai) companies. This very close relationship with China is very much against the interest of the United States.

3. The government somewhat fills in the void of services that were missing before by becoming a middleman, taking in the profit, and making services too expensive for the little guy to afford.

4. Keeping Myanmar isolated keeps it away from our consciouness, since there is absolutely little motivation to learn about the human-rights violations in the country if we don’t foster some sort of business or tourist interest there. Sad but true.

5. The conditions in South Africa, under which sanctions worked, was very different from Myanmar. South Africa had a large white middle class, without a despot, which was heavily hurt by the sanctions. South Africa was also surrounded by countries that disapproved of the government, whereas Myanmar is surrounded by friends who can fill a lot of the holes created by the sanctions.

The conclusion: the country has declined tremendously in the last 10+ years, with severe poverty and on the brink of an AIDS epidemic, yet the government has not changed its human-rights record. So the sanctions aren’t working.

What can we do about it, then? Kevin and Olga have a lot of suggestions, and I hope I get a chance to talk to them about it before they leave us in Vietnam.

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything remotely academic! (Not that this counts, but, woohoo!) I just realized I vented all this on Myanmar without a word about what happened off the ship… I guess it’s been on my mind a lot. Or I just like venting. Hope you enjoyed it – I’ll post this entry, then start write about fun stuff.

The India 500

2005-11-02T17:03:00.000-08:00

Hello from the Strait of Malacca! We’re passing by Thailand, sailing past some of those famous Thai islands (Thaislands?). A number of people threatened to jump off the ship and swim ashore. Soon we’ll have Sumatra on one side and Malaysia on the other on our way to Singapore, where we will dock for refueling. We won’t be able to leave the ship. Well, legally anyway.

It’s been a while since India was in our consciousness, but the memories are still pretty fresh. The highlight of the Varanasi trip was boarding the boat that morning on the Holy River Ganges (our guide always referred to the river as such). Just as amazing as seeing the bodies, dead or alive, in the water, was seeing the vendors that came up to you on boats and tagged along to you remora-style. One of the peddlers was selling DVDs of Varanasi and actually had a working television set playing the DVD aboard the little boat.

We left the boat and toured Varanasi on foot, getting close and personal to the funeral pyres, dodging cows along the narrow alleyways, and visiting the Golden Temple, the holiest temple in Hinduism, with a steeple (?) made of solid gold and monkeys jumping all over the place. What was most interesting to me was the mosque next door, with its 30 foot fences and hundreds of military police guards. The mosque was put in the place of an important Hindu temple that was destroyed during the last of many Muslim invasions in India, and now there are many people who want to tear down the mosque and turn it back to a Hindu temple.

The security was simply a microcosm of the immense tension between the Muslims and Hindus in that part of the world. As I alluded to earlier, this is the greatest threat to world peace, more so that the Israeli-Palestinian or the US conflicts as there are two nuclear powers (India and Pakistan) with a history of three wars between themselves in the last fifty years, compounded by possible line of command issues as to who has actual control of that launch button. Few people know how close we were to nuclear war when tensions escalated in 1999 or so (and the more we study it, the more I’m impressed at how thoughtfully and firmly the Clinton administration dealt with the issue). And as the bombings in Delhi (where we were) proved to us last week, the tensions are very, very serious. There are billions of lives at stake here.

Anyway, we get back to the comfort of our hotel, where much to the chagrin of several of us, and to the pleasure of others, they serve us Americanized food. That drove me nuts. Part of the tour involved a tour to a carpet factory, and since I had already done my shopping the previous day, I ditched the group with two girls and we went in search of adventures through the streets of Varanasi.

We are careful not to get hit by the hundreds of honking motorcycles and bicycles and trucks and cars, and eventually make our way in the rain to a village on the very polluted shore of a tributary of the Ganges on the north side of the city. We see some kids playing and we’re curious enough to go down to visit with them, and by the time we get down there, we’re surrounded. The kids are fascinated by these laughing white people dressed in funny clothes, and next thing you know, we’re teaching these very enthusiastic kids how to count to ten in English and I’m doing flips, which means the adults come out as well. I should have taken some video of it, but I did remember to finally pull out the camera before we were out of sight. They were still waving at us when I did so.

One more thing I did in Varanasi – I learned how an ancient loom works while people were gift shopping. Pretty amazing piece of primitive technology. So if you don’t get a gift from India, you can blame it on my morbid fascination for spools of thread. Oh, if I were a cat… them looms are cat-toy heaven… all them hanging spools and stuff…

[Coughing a hairball]

Anyway.

Soon we were out of Varanasi and back in Delhi, which, thanks to those crazy British imperialists, looks a little more western as we know it, though it is the smoggiest city I’ve ever visited. We arrived around 4pm, and the sky was brown on a perfectly cloudless day, and the smog was so thick that we were getting sunset light several hours before sunset – perhaps the ugliest sunset of the voyage.

We went to the largest Hindu temple in Delhi, quite a piece of work. The chanting filled the marble rooms, and in the Krishna section, a very nice old man invited me to sit as he prayed, and regardless of any sort of metaphysical or spiritual significance you attach to prayer or meditation, which I don’t, you can’t deny that it is some pretty soothing and relaxing stuff. Good times.

We also went to a Sikh temple and had to cover our heads to get in. Interesting religion. Relative to the other religions we’ve looked at, I still don’t know much about it, but they seem to steal the pageantry of Islam and the philosophy of Hinduism and seem to be a fairly organized group in India. I took some of their literature to read up a little more on them.

We woke up at 4am after a late night of hanging out and enjoying the World Series (go ‘stros!… sniff…) took off to the crazy Delhi train station and headed for a two-hour trip to Agra.

There really is one reason to visit Agra: the Taj Mahal. We visited two beautiful forts in and around Agra, one of which had the worst and most aggressive peddlers I think we will ever see, and the other which housed the prison of the king that built the Taj, with the view of the Taj down the river, spending all day as we prepared for sunset at our main attraction.

As great as they were, I won’t spend any time describing these forts, because the Taj Mahal is absolutely, positively the most beautiful man-made object I’ve ever seen. (WARNING: CHEESY, FLOWERY, OVER-THE-TOP YET ABSTRACT AND VAGUE LANGUAGE ABOUT TO FOLLOW. I would hate reading myself right now. I’m not kidding. Really, shouldn’t you be working right now? Is that your boss behind you? Should I insert some text about spreadsheets and budgets here? Alright, here it goes…)

Someone should invent a headphone device that plays angelic music every time people set their eyes on the Taj Mahal. I can’t imagine someone building something more beautiful. My first sight of the Taj, from down the river at Fort Agra, was stunning. It is perfect – you can’t stop looking at it. All our pictures from Fort Agra involve views of the Taj, even though the Fort is something to behold itself. When we eventually arrived in the Taj Mahal premises, it was clear that the building had lived up and surpassed all of the hype over the years. In typical Islamic architecture, it is perfectly symmetrical with inlaid black Persian text and artwork on the marble. The flowers and grass and trees and gardens around it are perfectly upkept. There must have been ten thousand tourists there that day, but it never seemed crowded as the marble structure is enormous. People should be required to visit the Taj. The tomb took 22 years to build, and the king was going to build a mirror image of the Taj in black marble across the river but the plan wasn’t completed after he was imprisoned by his own son. Can you imagine what that would have looked like? I know I can’t.

Ok, no more coffee after noon. I promise.

By the way, getting in was an adventure since the place is under heavy security, and I had Kerberos’s Rinspirator™ with me that I promised Tom I would take pictures with around the world. The Rinspirator™ looks like a gun, so try explaining to Indian security what that little device is for. I succeeded – the Taj has been Rinspirated™.

We were there for almost four hours, so after walking around, most of us just picked a spot and watched the sun set on the Taj. Since you’re all sunseted out, I’ll spare the pictures, but I’ll add that I did what must have been the first back flip in Taj Mahal history. Unless you’re talking about the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which I hear is just as nice. I’m sure they do back flips over there.

We made our way back to Delhi, but not before we were delayed in the Agra train station at night. The two train stations were quite something, a home for many of India’s most impoverished and disabled beggars. We have been suggested not to give for various reasons, the main one being that if we give, we would do more good by giving to a charitable organization such as the Mother Teresa Foundation. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you. So you do what you can, and as we had well over an hour delay in the station, we would play with the kids, and no matter where you are in the world, a little juggling or a magic trick goes a long way. At one point, I started to chase the kids in a handstand, which elicited the same response as the when I chased the Pemon Indians in Venezuela, but if you saw the ground of the train station, you would agree with me when I say it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done. Well-worth it, but disgusting; though nothing a little bottle of Purell, a liter of bottled water, some grossed-out looks, and another bottle of Purell couldn’t take care of.

Back in Delhi, we cleaned up, went to a sheesha (sp?) bar with the students (When in Delhi…), and hung around until the start of the World Series before getting on a flight back to Chennai in the morning. Chennai would subsequently be hit by a .5 meters ( that’s about 18 inches of rain for those of you who don’t habla espanol) and a cyclone the days after we left.

People simply couldn’t stop talking about Indian experience on the ship. Some people were very affected emotionally by it, and some people preferred to stay on the ship our last day in port. I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience, and I guess I prepared a little too much for it, because as amazing and incredible and surreal as it was, I knew that I would see bodies in Ganges. I knew I would see terrible things in the train stations. I knew I would see people defecating in the streets. And I knew I would see the crazy traffic and the billions of people on the streets. Which means I might have made a protective buffer for India, and after immediately having the unknown of Myanmar as a point of reference, I think my experience in India was more intellectual than emotional. Life-changing? Certainly, I think. Not an immediate change, as I was told to expect and as many people on the ship experienced. Probably something a little more gradual, cummulative, as I still think about the experience, particularly Varanasi, the religious tension, my limited understanding of the caste system (which would be another four pages), and the future of the country, every day since. I hope to come back for at least a month next time. Because I will come back.

The digiweb is slow, so I’ll upload some pictures next, but in the meantime, check out Chris’s Mauritius pictures at http://www.shutterfly.com/progal/album.jsp?pg=2. (Hi Nicolle!) Starting with the pictures of me jumping over – gasp – another sunset, go a couple pages and you can get a sense of our excursion.

That's our wild tour of India in a nutshell. Next up: Myanmar.

Um.

2005-11-01T15:51:00.001-08:00

So a while back I asked people on the ship if they would guest blog for me once in a while. “I hang out a lot with Sony,” I thought. “She's hilarious - I’m sure she’ll have a funny story or two for the folk back home.”

I guess I wasn't expecting a work of fiction. Though she did come up with a pretty funny story... if Sony wanted to make me squirm, she succeeded. (This story is actually applicable to David from the Global Nomads).

A little about Sony… she is, hands-down, the best videographer I’ve ever seen at work. She’s shooting the voyage DVD and we had the honor of using her camera work on our fun Olympics video. You can read a little more about our adventures in her blog (http://sonyss.blogspot.com) or the travel articles she writes for GoNomad.

Warts and all. Warts and all...

When he shed his long locks on Neptune Day I cried out "No, not the hair!". When he took off for Salvador solo, I secretly wished I could come with. When he dressed in a longi surely I thought he'd look too feminine to find attractive. But then he had to go and pull out all the stops last night; donning a white-pressed captains uniform with crisp clean cut pants. What's a lonely single girl in the middle of the Bay of Bengal to do with her Brazilian crush on Halloween night? He's well aware of the hypnotic power he wields and works it like bait on a hook. Cunningly tossing a toothy smile and a couple winks my way when his ego needs massaging. Unfortunately, I'm behind a long long line of perfectly shaped 22 year old princesses, all battling for a few precious seconds of Rico's attention. Looks isn't everything though and so surely Rico lacks in other areas, like perhaps personality, charisma or brains? No, no and no again. The angels above crafted yet another man out of most women's reach. But nobody's immortal and so I'm determined to find the weakest link beyond Rico's perfectly polished exterior. What makes this guy squirm? What terrifies him? What or who or when isn't he comfortable? A decade of photographing people has me trained to be more observant than most and so Rico, my beautiful buffed Adonis, your my case-study until the end of the trip. One false move and your mine!

Goo!

Summers in Rangoon, Luge Lessons

2005-10-30T19:15:00.000-08:00

There was one question I was dreading more than any other when I returned home: what was your favorite country? Is it possible to pick, and Jason put it, between riding an elephant, being made leader of a tribe that has never seen a camera before, swimming with whales and learning their language? Can a father choose between his children? This blog, in essence, was a defensive mechanism against that question, so I didn’t have to sum up 100 days of experiences into a simple, “SAS is cool” response.

Then we arrrived in Myanmar.

Perhaps it was the fact that the our ATM and credit cards were useless thanks to the international economic sanctions imposed on that country. Perhaps it was the fear of the totalitarian state – is this what living in Germany in the 1930s was like? Or maybe it was the fact that I had to morally justify a visit to this country when the object of my heterosexual man-lust, Desmond Tutu, is the world’s most ardent opponent of the Myanmar government and told us he would not have joined us had he known we were traveling there (Danno – I would love to talk to Anna Eshoo at some point about why I think sanctions are the wrong approach to dealing with this country….)

But perhaps it was the fact that the white paste that the women and children use on their face elicited more surprise and culture shock to me than the sight of a burning funeral pyre. Or the fact that there are monks all over the place. Or the fact that huge and ancient city ruins - without a lot of tourists - still exist in the world.

Perhaps it was the fact that we just didn’t know what to expect.

All in all, my experience was the utopian ideal of Semester at Sea’s mission. Clearly not everyone had a similar experience. But I imagine that the early Semester at Sea trips into Communist China, Vietnam, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa must have been like. I’ve been waiting to write about it all week – I hope I can convey why I enjoyed this trip so much.

By the way, when researching what I should do in Myanmar before leaving on the ship, I had the hardest time finding people who had been there (I eventually found Brent Schulkin’s uncle who gave me some great suggestions). But turns out my sister Lilian has been here and I had no idea. Who knew?

I’ll finish the India report, then write about Myanmar. In the meantime, enjoy this picture – the meterological phenomenon that created a full halo around the Shwedagon Pagoda was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen (the halo was a lot brighter in person).

Myanmar State of Mind

2005-10-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

We’re docked in Myanmar, and it looks like Iowa right now. Somewhere we took a turn into the Mississippi River. With pagodas and locals that wear dresses. This is going to be awesome.

I must apologize for cutting the India report short. I ran out of time with only a 23 hour day to process India and prepare for Burma. I’ll have to write about both between Burma and Vietnam/Cambodia. I wrote 22 pages in my personal journal about India, so maybe I’ll just reprint them here. Here’s an excerpt:

And then the girls said, “Really, why won’t you make out with both of us right now?”

Just kidding. Kind of. I just wanted to see that in print.

Really, I’ll catch up with everything then. A ton of people sent me emails in the last ten days – I’ve read them all but haven’t had time to respond to any of them. But I will when I get back.

We’re in Burma. This is crazy. See you in a few days.

Varamazing

2005-10-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

I woke up 2.5 hours ago to watch the sunrise and went back to bed. I’m back, and wide awake! Where are we? In Myanmar about to enter the Aeyerwaddy River (which I incorrectly typed as Yangoon River in the previous entry). But that’s not important right now.

We’re in Varanasi, the holiest city in India, waking up at 4am to go to the shores of the holy river Ganges to watch the early morning religious rituals from a boat. Hindus see the Ganges as a godess, and even though it is a visibly polluted, this doesn’t stop the faithful from bathing and drinking the water, often times just feet away from…

Well, the bus drops us off about a ten-minute walk from the shore, and now I finally hear the sounds of India as we have been taught to hear. A funeral procession – no, a funeral celebration - is going on next to us, and the we pass the dozens of beggars and cows and faithfuls and holy men in our short walk to the shore.

(Allow me to interrupt this for a second – we’re in the river and our first sight of Burma is of completely rural countryside, with straw huts and villages and thousands of small fishing boats all over the place. I swear some of these boats will capsize on our ship’s wake. For the first time on this trip, I feel like we’re the first westerners to see some of this stuff, and in many ways, we probably are).

(This is awesome. I’m going outside for a while).

(Back to India).

We pile on the boats and the sight is something straight out of Star Wars, with buildings and people and colors that could be found in another galaxy. The fires on the funeral pyres light up the crematorium. People have gotten into the water, young and old, mostly clothed, though it was interesting to see that in such a conservative society, that we see very old women naked as they change into dry sarees. As the sun came up over the eastern shore of the river, we had the first up close view of the dead bodies.

(I can see four golden pagodas from where I’m sitting).

This was surreal. There are in fact floating bodies in the Ganges. We saw rotten ones. We saw fresh ones being dumped. Most of the time, people are supposed to be burned in the pyres before their ashes get dumped in the river, but some people, like holy men, those who died of snake bite, and those who can’t afford the cremation simply get dumped in the river. And since there are many faithful who also like to float while quietly meditating, the game “Is he dead or alive?” becomes a really fun game on the boat.

We exited the boat into the crematorium, where we did, in fact, see the bodies get taken into the river for blessing before getting taken to the funeral pyre to be burned. We saw the bodies get burned – one of which only the head remained. They would eventually move the head into the fire for full cremation.

This is as far away and alien as from our society as imaginable (or unimaginable). Yet there was this certain calmness and normalcy about it all. There was no culture shock. There should have been. This all made sense while we were there. This is what they do. They’re not hurting anyone (except perhaps the unhealthy practice of making use of the polluted river). Death is seen as a normal, mundane process in Varanasi; I asked our tour guide if there was mourning of the dead and he said there was momentary sadness in Hinduism, but for the most part, they believe the person has been reincarnated, so murning doesn’t exist as we understand it in the west.

I want to know more about this. I want to spend a month in India. Not to find some truth, but just to learn more as to what their thinking. This is simply surreal, yet so familiar and normal.

Ok, I have to stop now. We keep passing more pagodas and I need to see what is going on outside. It’s as if there are no western influences or modernities where we have been going. This is amazing.

Back in a few.

I Honk, Therefore I Am.

2005-10-25T03:10:00.000-07:00

There is a difference between honking the horn in India versus honking the horn in the United States. In the US, one could argue honking is an offensive move – one that tells your opponent, “Get out of my way!” , or, “I’m coming through!” This was my mindset as I first witnessed the crazy traffic just moments getting off the ship in Chennai, India, where the cars might as well come with a permanently sounding horn. It would certainly save the abuse those buttons suffer from the millions of drivers on the road at any given second.

After several days of experiencing the traffic – the honking, the weaving, the cows all over the road, and the endless games of chicken - I realized that not everyone is in a rush to get anywhere. The honking serves a different purpose in India. It is a statement of affirmation. It says, “I’m here, so please don’t decided to take a sudden turn to your left.” I tells us, “I exist.”

I Honk, Therefore I Am.

Once you come to that simple realization, Indian traffic suddenly becomes much calmer that what first meets the eye. Yes, it is chaotic. Yes, it is statistically unsafe. But yes, there should be thousands more accidents than there actually are. I know we almost hit several incoming vehicles – it was just too close. But really, were we truly ever in any real danger?

We were given five days in India. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that isn’t nearly enough time. The 1 billionth citizen of the country was born sometime in the last ten years, and the country is as vast and rich and complex as most continents. But five days was a pretty good start.

We woke up with the usual early morning pre-port sunrise crew, and the first thing we noticed as we arrived Chennai was that the sky and the water were brown. And there was a bad smell; not terrible, but something we hadn’t noticed in any of the previous ports. I won’t lie – I almost couldn’t picture arriving without the sounds of sitars and the site of bazaars in the background, but it really didn’t happen that way. We arrived in a concrete cargo ship port, and our first view of the Indian subcontinent was of industry, as should be expected in one of India’s largest city.

There was no easing into India. Immediately out of the port were the hundreds of rickshaws, the thousands of beggars, and the millions of people. Make no mistake – there is no doubt that India has a billion people. The four cities that I visited – Chennai, Delhi, Agra, and Varanasi – always looked like the end of a great concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco. There are people all over the place. Except they won’t clear up and go home… there will always be people all over the place.

But nevermind that, we had business to take care of. Yas, Jason, and I (and possibly Chris) decided against doing the huge SAS trip in China and have been planning a side trip to the province of Sizchuan, where they have holy mountains and great chicken. We wanted to purchase the tickets online, but the government run Dragon Air didn’t allow for e-tickets, so we would have to go to a travel agency to get that taken care of. With the help of a rickshaw driver that would not leave us alone, we found a travel agency, only to find out that the tickets we wanted were sold out.

Never fear. We improvised. We asked for a map of China, and without knowing anything about anything, we randomly picked a city on the map, Kunming, and asked if they had tickets there. They had exactly three. And they were cheaper that tickets to Sizchuan. Without hesitation, and knowing nothing about Kunming, we made the reservation leaving from Hong Kong. Better yet, the employees at the travel agency were extremely generous and didn’t charge us anything for their time. I’ll let you know more about Kunming when we actually do some research on it. But we’re going, and I can’t wait.

We left the travel agency, and the rickshaw driver had been waiting for us the entire time. He would not leave us alone. So what did we do? We negotiated a price with him, of course, of 25 Rupees a person to take us out the whole day. He accepted, and we crammed into the rickshaw – three people in the back, me sharing a one-person seat with the driver, and the crazy tour of Chennai began.

It was a great day. We drove all over the city, seeing everywhere the poverty that is often isolated in the slums and the favelas and the townships in other countries in the world. We did a little shopping (the driver clearly was getting commission on a few of the expensive, crappy gift shops around town, but that ended as soon as we threatened not to pay), ate great South Indian food (Is that redundant? Iisn’t all South Indian food great?), and went to the huge-yet-sewer-smelling Marina Beach, which was heavily hit by last year’s tsunami and where everyone goes fully clothed and no one wears a swimsuit. It isn’t part of Indian culture.

Then again, what is? At this point, we were well aware of many Indian customs, such as the need to dress conservatively – all SAS guys wore pants and all SAS women wore sleeves and loose clothes (by the way, why do Indian women dress so beautifully, by our standards, yet men are the polar opposite?), the use of the right hand and the disapproval of public displays of affection between the sexes (though it is perfectly acceptable for two straight men to walk hand-in-hand down the street). We did notice that a lot of these customs were only followed by the older generation, and wondered if, with the influx of western culture into the country, if there is going to be a generational schism in India similar to what the US experienced in the 60s.

Anyway.

By the end of the day, our driver had a name, Baboo, and I got to drive the rickshaw while my passengers almost wet their pants. The day was almost over, we went back to the ship (but not before Baboo tripled the price of the ride), and we finagled our way into the welcome reception, hoping it would be as good as the one in Brazil. It was nice, with Indian dance and food, but not nearly as fun as Brazil. Not even close. But it had a great day, I’d already seen many things, some of them sad, some of them different, that I’d never seen before, but I was still waiting for that life-changing experience that people told me I would have in India.

I was sure it would happen at some point. But as I got ready for my 4am wake up call to catch my early-morning flight to Delhi, I was sure my chances of doing so were greatly diminished by having signed up, months ago, to one of the largest SAS trip: a crazy, four day tour of Delhi, Agra, and Varanasi with 69 people. I didn’t want other people being my limiting factor on this trip.

But alas, I had already paid. Most of us fell asleep immediately on the plane, hit Delhi, and got a connecting flight to Hinduism’s holiest city, Varanasi, on the shores of the Ganges river.

Varanasi was a lot different from Chennai. I’d been in India for 24 hours and I could already notice big differences between the north and south of the country, which further emphasized the importance of not assuming that any single experience is representative of all of India.

Varanasi is also important as the birthplace of Buddhism, where Buddha gave his first sermon (on enlightment) in Sarnath. We visited a museum of Buddhist history in India, where I learned that Hindus, with their big and complex belief system, can easily claim Buddhism to be a branch of Hinduism, with Buddha being the ninth reincarnation of Vishnu. Interesting, interesting stuff. Sarnath is in ruins because of the many Muslim invasions that India endured over the years (I’ll come back to the tense relationship between the Hindus and Muslims that has grown in the last few years and is the greatest threat to world peace since both majority-Hindu India and majority-Muslim Pakistan are sitting on nuclear arsenals).

This was my introduction to Buddhism, since we haven’t hit it on the ship yet, but it served as a great buildup to the rest of Asia, which I’m most excited about on this trip.

Alright, sorry for the blabbing. You might notice there are not pictures up yet. Things have gotten busy… plus no one can stop talking about India, which is a pretty time-consuming activity. I’m going to sleep for a little bit, then I’ll continue with the rest of the trip. Looks like these will be long entries.

All four engines are running right now – the ship is crossing the Bay of Bengal at 28 knots per hour. You should see the wake behind the ship. We hit the Yangoon river at high tide in the morning on the way to Yangoon. Of course I’m watching the sunrise, again. I think Myanmar is the country I’ve been most excited about visiting this voyage.

Back in a few.

While my Sitar Gently Weeps

2005-10-23T19:22:00.000-07:00

Now that we’re well into the voyage and I feel I learned to travel, I must admit I was really hesitant about my choice of doing a massive four-city tour in five days in India. I’ve had so much success finding independent trips in our last three ports, and had so much fun in the less-touristy destinations, that the idea of criss-crossing the country with 69 other Semester at Sea kids to India’s greatest tourist trap suddenly sounded really unappealing.

But this is India we're talking about. I went, and between Varanasi and the Taj Mahal I experienced some of the most amazing things I’ve seen, and the trip was absolutely worth it. Since we don’t have a lot of time until the next port, I’ll probably post part of the voyage after I take a long nap tonight (to avoid the “blog books” that Mandy mentioned in the comments for the previous entry… and since she seemed to appreciate getting mentioned a while back, Mandy, this is for you:

(Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy

(Ok, back to the issue at hand).

So I’ll take care of that tonight. And since there is a new internet system on board, I’ll see if I can upload pictures from Mauritius. Two people asked if I had a picture with Desi, but I didn’t take any pictures of him. I did find out other people did, so here’s one of them.

Also, here’s one of me spinning the guitar on the pen during the Sea Olympics. I know there are better pictures out there, I’ll do my best to upload once I get it.

Also, I noticed on the comments that an SAS mom is reading this. Welcome aboard, Clara! I’m very curious how you found out about this site – it’s not really linked to anything… And who is your son/daughter? Tell him/her/it I said hi.

I feel the ship leaving port as we speak. I really need a shower. Next upload should be relatively soon.

Spring Break Fall '05

2005-10-19T02:21:00.000-07:00

Free internet day! The internet has been the biggest headache for everybody on the ship with lost minutes (I lost 3.25 hours I had purchased between Salvador and Cape Town), and they’re switching the whole system in India, so until then, the internet is free. The problem is that EVERYBODY is on – no one is going to class, and many, many students stayed up all night online. Which means the internet is EXTREMELY slow. Result: no pictures in this update. It’ll take all night to upload the text.

Freakin’ IM. Everyone’s on it. Here’s a sample of every conversation, as suggested by Photographer Chris:

John: Hey
Bette: Hey
John: Where are you?
Bette: In the middle of the Indian Ocean. Where are you?
John: That’s cool. I’m in my room.
Bette: That’s cool.

Or, this is becoming more common:

John: Hey
Sandy: Hey
John: Where are you?
Sandy: In my cabin. Where are you?
John: In the Library. I’m coming down.
Sandy: Cool. Let’s make sweet love.

Alright, I made up the last line. Sort of. But we’ve seen a lot of students locate each other on the ship, eating up bandwidth since every single line goes from the ship in the Indian ocean to a Satellite to a server in the United States and back again.

Freakin’ a.

Anyway, before we launch into Mauritius, we just finished the Sea Olympics two nights ago and these two days might have been last two days have been my favorite days on the ship. Every team is called a “Sea” – Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Aegean Sea, etc.. grouped by where you live on the ship. The (very old) adult passengers, staff, faculty, and dependents named themselves the Vitamin Sea, and since I control the media on the ship, we started a trash talking war that involved lots of slides coming up in the middle of lectures that involved the eminent dominance of the Vitamin Sea over the rest of the ship. It was a great way to get people into it early, and doggone it, they were into it.

There was an opening ceremony complete with the lighting of the torch (built by my counterpart Allan and I using an overhead projector, a fan, and colored streamers. It looked really cool). Our talent show included the video that I spend way too much time on, but it will now be the final act of the official voyage DVD since the students liked it so much (I hope Transvideo is ok with that…). We might make an extended version of it. We have plenty of great raw footage we can add.

There were many events, such as relay races, "lemonade pong", basketball, tug-o-war, etc... I limited myself to the push-up/pull-up (with Global Nomad David) and synchronized swimming competitions. I haven't worked out much on the ship at all but managed to 76 push ups and 24 pull-ups (1 min rest in between), good enough for third place, I believe. Doing that is soooo hard with the rocking of the ship because there are moments when you are incredibly light (when the ship is sliding down the swell), and then moments you become extremely heavy on the way up. That's usually when most people collapse.

Anyway, since all the old people were on my team, we put together a team of five of the older women on the ship and myself, and prepeared ourselves for the synchronized swimming competition. They went all out - dragon costumes, choreography, and headbands made from (unopened) condoms. The pool is shallow enough so I was going to pull out my best tricks - the apple trick, the balancing of the cans, parallel bars on the pool ladder, and lots of flips.

Because of weather conditions (Monsoon season in India), the competition was moved indoors, and it was hilarious. Everyone dressed appropriately (or inappropriately), and did their routines indoors. Plus, it was televised to the entire ship, so all the crew members saw it as well.

I went crazy with the tricks. I took two 65lb weights from the weight room to use as parallettes, figured out I could spin a balancing guitar on a pen in my mouth, relearned Russian circles on the floor, and the response was much greater the one from the one-arm Kolman surprise at the Alumni meet last year.

Realize that people know I'm a gymnast, but until that point no one had seen any tricks, so this came out of nowhere. I'll let Chris comment on it when he writes the next guest blog. Beth says she mentioned it in her blog, and when I the internet actually works again I'll read what she said. But I had a good time.

Today is also the 50-50 day, the midpoint of the voyage, and so much has happened so fast. This is the lamest thing I'll write this trip, but the ship's really become a community and feels like home. It's always a nice feeling to see the ship when you've been away from port for a few days. And before I came aboard, I thought only the moments off the ship would really "count", but there's an entire life aboard that is pretty significant.

Things get really busy now. We spent most of our days at sea on the first half of the voyage, and now we spend most of our time on land - for example, a week in India is followed by a week in Myanmar with only 1 day on the ship in between. Given how much we do in port, this is crazy. But I'm certainly looking forward to it, especially this India-Myanmar-Vietman/Cambodia stretch.

Before I get back to India, let me talk about Mauritius. Now how did 700+ people end up on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean that most of them had never heard of a week before? The threat of a pirate or a terrorist attack in East Africa is very real right now, and on a big ship full of American students, we are one of the most clear, visible, and easy targets imaginable. It was the smart decision. But I certainly wish we had gone to Kenya. I was looking forward to going to a majority Muslim country, but since the Global Studies class, (which I love and all faculty, staff, and students are required to take) focused on Kenyan and African subject matter even though we were going to Mauritius, it made for a little sadness that we didn’t make it.

Photographer Chris and I have decided we’ll do our own trip to Kenya someday – he’ll come in on his Canadian passport and I’ll come in on my Brazilian passport. Luckily, they made some time to talk about the island in class and cultural preport lectures, which showed Mauritius is a fascinating country in its own right - an island without original natives, it was populated shortly by Arabs, followed by Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French, with thousands of Hindus migrating to work on the sugar cane fields and Chinese to work in trade. The island has a developed economy not dependent on tourism, and is often cited as a model for peaceful racial relations. As a result, this incredibly diverse population is consisted mostly of French-speaking Hindus. It is a trippy experience. I can only imagine how many places with a million people we don’t know exist around the world – with their own history, culture, economy, etc… and how easy it is to forget other people are out there.

Mauritius is most famous for being the only home of the dodo - a huge flightless bird that was extinct in no time centuries ago since it didn't seem to have the fight or flight instinct in it. People would bonk one on the head and none of the birds would try to get away. What a dodo.

There’s a famous quote by Mark Twain about Mauritius – “You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius." I’m sure that was true at some point, but years of foresting and industrialization and dynamite fishing keep it far from being heavenly in most places, but it is still a beautiful place at times. Google "Isle de Cerf" and you'll see what I mean. Again, when I have fast internet, I'll post the pictures.

No one had really made plans on the island, so we decided to wing it and just pick a spot and go. Seven of us on staff decided to go to Grande Baie on the north side of the island, look for a villa, and just stay there. We got a cab driver to get us around, and after a lot of wasted time and negotiation, we got a great deal in Mont Choisy, two apartments for very cheap near the beach. Since I hate just sitting on the beach doing nothing, I took my snorkeling gear and immediately go in the water while the rest of the staff would grab a little sun with a few Mauritian drinks of choice.

I loved my first experience in the Indian Ocean. I've been diving/snorkeling in the Atlantic Ocean my whole life, and I'm pretty familiar with the fauna, which doesn't vary all that much from place to place. Especially in the Carribean. But immediately I saw sea life I'd never seen before, with this interesting fire coral all over the place. There was a lot of damaged coral - a lot - and the landscape wasn't striking at all because of it. But I was more fascinated with the new fish that I didn't care all that much. I was out for a while, managing to go about a mile off shore before coming back.

By the time I came back, the Mauritian beer had taken a hold of the group and things had gotten a little incestuous. Since I didn't feel like getting hit on by older staff members all week, and since Chris has a girlfriend at home, we made our plans to get away the next day. We decided to rent scooters to travel around the island to the nicest beach we knew about, Isle de Cerf.

Thinking it through, there were a LOT of reasons not to rent the scooters, including:

1. Mauritians drive on the left side of the road.
2. I have absolutely no riding experience with motorcycles.
3. Mauritian traffic can be very Indian. In other words, scary.
4. My headlight didn't work. But we didn't know that.

Students, by the way, are not allowed to rent motorized vehicles of any kind. Staff is, but we're supposed to keep it quiet. We thought it through a little more, and once the price tag came out - $18 for the full day with no ID check or collateral - we were sold.

Chris had done this before in other countries, so I asked to follow him. We had a little map of the island and we would guess the routes. I packed my snorkeling gear and he packed all his cameras. As the photographer, he wanted his National Geographic moment, and we found several of them. As soon as something looked cool, we would stop and shoot it. I can't wait to upload them (he might have uploaded them to his site already, which I think is http://37thframe.ca/sas.

We started out a little slow as I gained more confidence in my riding abilities, but soon we stopped in the very non-tourist town of Goodland, which I thought was a perfect combination of Carribean and what I imagine India to be, but with all the text in French. Chris was in his first heaven, with no SAS student in sight. I got some directions to the other side of the country, and then first thing we found ourselves in the middle sugar cane fields and other plantations in the heart of the island. By the way, every place we stopped we made a quick video making fun of the other staffers that they weren't there with us. I'll share those videos when I get back to the US.

The next thing he found to shoot were these old Hindu women picking chili peppers with the Mauritian landscape in the background. They didn't want us there at first, but Chris has done this for years and it was awesome watching him approach and befriend the ladies. He stayed them for a while, not speaking a word in each other's language except for a little of Chris's broken Canadian French, they were fast friends and shot away. We couldn't stop repeating to ourselves, "We're in the middle of island off the coast of Madagascar on the other side of the world picking chili peppers with old French-speaking Indian women."

We rode for hours, stopping to shoot, enjoying the ride, landscape, beaches, people, and Hindu temples. Finally, we arrived on the east side of the island, where Isle de Cerf was located. We paied this guy who assured us a boat ride to the beach with a lunch in between. It was cheap. We locked out bikes, took a ferry through saltwater marshes into a beach where delicious bbq chicken awaited us. Then we went to the beach, where (old) topless European women and several clothed SAS students awaited us. I put my snorkeling gear, Chris shot away, and had a good few hours over there. Our plan - get back with enough time to return the bikes at dawn so we didn't have to ride in the dark. We took the boat back to the mainland and headed back to the north of the country.

Well, turns out the best light for taking pictures is at dawn/dusk, and Chris knew that. He would see something, pull over, look over at me, and tell me with his Canadian accent, "Rico, I have to shoot this." As the sun set on the horizon, there was a man burning a sugar cane field (they do this twice a year), the sky looked beautiful, and ashes were all over the place. He took a camera, I took some video, and he really did have to shoot it. By the time we left, it was pretty dark. And I found out my headlights didn't work.

Crap. I'm riding on the left side of the road with no motorcycle experience in an unfamiliar country around uninviting traffic with nothing to indicate I existed. And we would find these awesome things to shoot. We stopped at a soccer game while the sky was still blue, and I figured out my turn signal was working, so I put it on even though the vespa went "beep beep beep beep beep beep" when I did so. And people thought I was turning, so they wouldn't pass me thinking I'd be out of their way at any time. But better be visible jerk and be alive than an invisible target.

Out of this complete darkness, we see another burning sugar cane field, but this one had men with net trying to catch the animals that would run out of the fire. It was hilarious - of course Chris had to shoot it. And I took more video of it with his still camera.

We made it back safely at 9pm or so. I think we'll always think of that bike ride every time we hear a beep for the rest of our lives.

The rest of the staff was still being incestuous at the villa, and since I really enjoy hanging out with the students, Jason and I left the incestuous staff (Chris went to sleep) and went to the clubs at the island where hundreds of SAS kids were enjoying themselves. We got back at 4:30am, concluding one of my favorite days of this trip.

Amy, the IT coordinator, had reserved a scuba dive for us the next morning. After a little hassle trying to convince the dive shop people to let her dive without her card, we put on our wetsuits (it was surprisingly cold) and made it in the water. Ultimately, Amy said it was the least impressive dive she's ever done, probably because of the damaged coral, but I was so fascinated with the new fish that I had a great time and didn't pay much attention to that. (I got in my usual scuba dive zone - Amy said I didn't make eye contact with her until the end of the dive). I did get to pet a 10 foot green Morray eel, which was awesome (Amy took her camera - I'll upload the picture when the internet...). Their "skin" feels like this slimy silk and is the coolest-feeling thing in the world. They should make pillows out of that stuff.

We got back, met up with Global Nomads Jason and Byron (who lived in Jessica Simpson's house), and hired a driver to take us to the south of the country to see the mountains and temples in that area. This is a lot like what I imagine Hawaii to be - lush, striking volcanic landscape against blue ocean water. The difference is that this area has many Hindu temples, including one with an enormous Shiva statue being built that looks like something out of Lord of the Rings. We hiked up to a temple where wild monkeys were feasting on offerings to Shiva, and the worshiping locals were being so incredibly generous by giving us some of the treats they had prepared. I was a little skeptical at first, but tried them anyway and they were delicious and no one got sick from it.

There are many waterfalls in the area, so the rest of the day involved us visiting them. Where possible, we would go right to the edge of the falls and enjoy the view for a while before hiking back. The only thing we didn't think was all that cool was this much-hyped seven-colored dirt, where hundreds of tourists were taken to see this mound in the middle of the forest. Granted, it is really nice dirt. Some of the nicest I've ever seen, actually. But it's dirt. It's not like the badlands, where the colored dirt fills your line of sight. It is more like someone noticed that Mauritius has really nice dirt, cleared some forest, and charged tourists 60 Mauritian Roupees to see it. But given the giant tortoises they add in for bonus, the $2 admission charge was worth it.

So that was our Mauritian experience. If the beginning of the voyage focused more on introspection, this trip was more all-out good time. Though it made me really, really excited for India. We crossed the equator again, making our way into warmer and more humid territory every day (by the way, we also hit Flatonia - this was the first time I've seen a swell-less sea on this trip).

I'm ecstatic about visiting India. I'm not sure what to expect. I'm waiting for a life-changing experience, since everybody tells me that India overwhelms the senses, but I don't know yet what that means. We've been studying it all week on the ship. We've been covering the carpets to protect from the filth that they've experienced in previous voyages. We've been told again and again of all the precautions needed to leave the country with a healthy stomach. We've been told to prepare psychologically. And we've been told to expect graciousness that can't be found elsewhere in the world. I don't know yet what that means. But I'll have a better idea in a week. I hope.

Rahul and Meg wrote a great essay on their visit to India in the TMTTV. I'd find it, but... anyway, I'm visiting the Delhi, the Taj, and Varanasi - one of the holiest places in India, and I'm waiting to see if it really does change people who go there. Even if it is only a couple of days.

I'll try to do a marathon blog session on our one day on the ship between India and Myanmar, for the "cobosceholics" as Anne calls it. Depending on what I find, it might be therapeutic. Who knows?

May the better half of the voyage begin.

Ranch at Sea

2005-10-16T00:19:00.000-07:00

Excuses, excuses, excuses. Ok, I know some of you might be waiting for the Mauritius report, but I've been extremely busy on the ship - all while having a good time, of course. Most of you reading this right now know that making the Executive Ranch and MS150-stylevideo clips is one of my favorites things to do in the entire world, and when the staff team was supposed to come up with a skit for the Sea Olympics talent show tonight, I suggested that we take advantage of the five video professionals on the staff and make a five-minute, slick-looking production on the Truman Show-esque premise that Semester-at-Sea is really a motion-control ride and that all the staff and faculty really are actors. Let's just say I haven't slept much the last few days. Though based on the response in the showing tonight, it was worth the effort. I can't imagine how it would have turned out if I had the Ranchmates to help brainstorm and make it happen.

Anyway, as soon as the Sea Olympics are done tomorrow (I'm competing in the pull-up, push-up, and synchronized swimming competitions), I'll immerse myself on the Mauritius report.

Speaking of videos, I was talking to Greg, a former Dutch gymnast on the ship a couple of days ago who mentioned that he was a huge fan of the Stanford Men's Gymnastics video pages, without knowing that we were the ones who developed it from scratch. I was pretty happy to hear how big those sites have gotten.

Yesterday I was officially as far away as San Fran as physically possible on earth, twelve hours ahead of y'all.

French-Speaking Hindus

2005-10-13T00:53:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate enough to hang out with Chris Bolin, the trip photographer (who is mentioned in the guest blog) for most of the best day in Mauritius, so I didn’t take too many pictures and am waiting to get his before writing the full report. It’ll be a fun one. Here are a few more previews, though, part of the reason it was so much fun:

The best and dumbest idea ever.

The best idea ever. (This is me hanging out with the videographers for the Global Nomads, Jason and Byron. Please check out their site - http://www.gng.org. Both those guys lived for three seasons inside the Jessica Simpson’s household working on the reality series and they just received insider information that the Nick and Jessica split up. But I’m not supposed to share that).

The water.

They're so nice!

...snicker, snicker....

By the way, this is the state department warning that caused us not to go to Kenya.

More as soon as I have el fotos!

The Hawaii of the Indian Ocean

2005-10-11T23:12:00.000-07:00

We just left Mauritius, and are about as far from home as physically possible without involving a space shuttle, en route to India. Mauritius is no Kenya, but we made the best of it and yesterday was one of my favorite days as a result.

You know the drill. I'll have a report up tomorrow at some point (hard to keep track about your tomorrows versus my tomorrows), and leave you with this preview pic.

Also, Sara uploaded some pictures from our visit to Cape Town to Ofoto. I haven't checked them out yet, but I'm sure they're great.

Mauri-what?

2005-10-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

I made the mistake of giving the cleaners ALL of my laundry yesterday and now they tell me it won’t be ready until I’m Mauritius. My solution, of course, is to purchase SAS gear at the campus store. I’ll be super-SAS-man for this trip! Woohoo! Another paradise island!

We land in Mauritius in the morning. See you in a few days.

Hit Me with at Tribal Pattern

2005-10-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

Before I continue, I just re-read some of my older entries and am shocked – SHOCKED, I tell ya – at all of the misspellings (tale instead of tail?... jeez...) and...err, "creative" sentence construction… yet I refuse to spend the money to fix it. I mention this only to let you know that I know that you know. That’s all.

Ok, where were we? Sitting next to the pool overlooking the Indian Ocean a skip away from Madagascar. But that’s not important right now.

We find ourselves in South Africa sans Sara. I’ve enjoyed a near all-nighter with the students and wake up a couple hours later looking for something to do. There wasn’t a shortage of ideas – I’d been talking to Sara all week about doing something extreme, as South Africa is apparently an adrenaline junkie’s paradise (which means I’m right at home). Most students went Great White Shark diving, skydiving, extreme bungee jumping, handgliding, paragliding or abseiling (repelling) down Table Mountain. The shark dives have too many people and lost their luster over the years; I’m a certified skydiver but am not current, so I didn’t spend time getting current; bungee jumping was an eight our drive away. My choices clearly were handgliding or abseiling. I left my cabin and set out to do one of these.

Instead, on my wait out I found a couple of students, who with the help of a Stanford student, Emmanuel, befriended a 24-year-old taxi driver who lived in one of the Coloured townships (the story of Emmanuel might get its own entry in the future), and the taxi had agreed to take them to his house.

I had wanted to visit the townships for a while, and SAS or local companies organize tours of the slums, but Sara and I had discussed this at some point and decided that it was voyeuristic and didn’t seem quite right to show up en masse with cameras flaring at the poverty. But the opportunity to go to this guy’s place seemed a little more personal, and after thinking about it for a bit, I asked if them if I could join them.

The first thing Lloyd, the taxi driver did before taking us to the black townships, where most of the commercial township tourism occurs. We did a little bit of everything, learning about the township organization and government, tasting local brew, and running into a large bus full township tourists, which seemed uncomfortable because of the endless clicking of the cameras but otherwise was much more respectful than I thought it would be. We stopped by a local medicine man, who had all sorts of healing trinkets hanging from store and wanted to talk to us about purchasing love potions (which several of the students bought). But after a while I had to be Debbie Downer and drop the AIDS question, but given the cultural significance of healers in South African society, and the fact that they are officially recognized by the government, certainly the community must look to him when their sick.

Sure enough, it sounded like he’d assume some sort of leadership position in this issue, telling us how he estimated the was losing four clients a month to the disease, but that he mostly took the role of alleviating pain but left the true treatment of the disease to doctors. He also worked as an educator, and hanging between snake heads and lizard skins and pigs feet were condoms. It was refreshing to see.

We moved on to the Coloured townships, where Lloyd lived. We asked about the safety of the small group and he assured us we were fine since everybody knew who he was. He seemed somewhat bitter that the black townships got all the tourism (“we have the same problems that they have”) and that the coloured township went unnoticed. I’m sure there is some truth to that – we saw no tourist but still saw children swimming in sewers and even a covered body that had just been run over – some fellow trying to cross the highway that bisects the township. The highlight was the illegal rasta bar that he frequented, where they make a bong by cupping a broken beer bottle and smoking through their hands. It was an impressive, impressive sight. People were coming in and out to purchase their marijuana the entire time we were there, and sadly, most of the people in the joint were children.

Finally, another taxi driver that had accompanied us took us to his mosque, and it occured to me that I’ve never been to a mosque before. The elders there were completely surprised and excited to see these students show up out of nowhere and gave us a full tour that lasted quite a while. We were there as one of the prayers had finished, and it seems to me like a mosque, with their large, quiet, carpeted rooms, can be an awesome place to just get away from it all We spent the rest of the early afternoon there before heading back to the waterfront for a huge-yet-very cheap sushi dinner (a warm up for our sushioke day in Japan! Yeah!)

The weather wasn’t the greatest, so being the sucker for aquariums that I am I convinced Jason that it was it was the place to go before 17 of the staff members went out for yet another big-game meal (springbok… yum…) and lots of bonding, as relayed in Jason’s guest blog entry. We didn’t get home until 4:30am. I think. Yet I managed to wake up early yet again.

I looked up table mountain that morning, and it was clear! I decided I was going to go up there by myself, by foot, from the ship all the way up to the top. I set out through some of the sketchiest places in Cape Town and took a complete walking tour of the city (including a long stop at the Jewish Museum and their exhibit on Helen Sussman as recommended by Sara. South Africa has some incredible leaders) and several hours later I was at the base of the mountain… where it was cloudy once again. Abseiling wasn’t happening. I headed back to the ship, ran into a bunch of girls who had attended services in Desmond Tutu’s church and shared a cab with them back to the waterfront.

(Allow me to interrupt this entry to let you knowf that I’m witnessing yet another phenomenal sunset right now. Everyone, as usual is trickling out the deck to see it.)

I’ve made time for gift shopping in every country we’ve been in, and even though Transvideo has sharpened my negotiating skills, they’ve done nothing about my taste in cheap trinkets. I have no clue what to buy. Do I get something practical? Who would ever wear that shirt? Masks are cool, right? Can I have one with a tribal pattern?
(Seriously. This might be the best sunset yet.)

(Hold on.)

(Ok. Sun is down. I can continue.)  I overshot my budget yet again - I kept miscalculating how much money to withdraw and always was out of cash… sorry, Sara - but managed to purchase some quality merchandise, just in time for the weather to clear at Table Mountain and for a group of us to make our way to Table Mountain where the weather was beautiful. We just sat there long enough to still get dinner before making it back on the ship.

I never went abseiling. But it was the perfect ending to the perfect trip.

I don’t know. Maybe I get overexcited about little things sometimes - at home or halfway around the globe. I’m trying really hard not to sound rah-rah-rah and “awesome this”, or “phenomenal that” and use the same descriptions in every entry. I’m try not to sound like a broken record, but I can’t help it. I think what idiots the three kids who got kicked off the ship in Cape Town are for losing this opportunity (including one more my four work-study students). We just hit the one-third-way mark of the voyage and it’s going by way too fast. I know I’m missing a ton of stuff at home, (the ONLY downside of the voyage), but I wish instead that you all got to see what you’re missing instead. If you’re reading this and you have the means, come join me. Seriously.

Because life is pretty good around here.

Editor’s note: Becky Chaplin – your mom is next to me and she asks me to tell you to email her.

Africa is Real

2005-10-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

Turns out Africa is real. It really exists. They weren’t lying to us since we were kids. It is a place, and it is there. I’ve been there, and I loved it. I’m excited to visit Mauritius, but make no mistake, I would have preferred to spend more time in Africa. At least we got two extra days in Cape Town, but the continent is so big and diverse and complex, with so much history (apart from South Africa), that I plan on coming back soon. Real soon. What you are about to read is strictly a (really long) travel log since we did so much, so this might turn into another two or three-parter so I can include some actual thoughts on the place. We’ll see.

I’m really glad there was an announcement about not missing the sunrise over Table Mountain as we arrived in port. People who didn’t wake up for it should receive dock time. Our first surprise: it gets cold in Africa! We got outside to FREEZING winds, and since I didn’t pack appropriately, and my hair was gone, I suffered accordingly. Cape Town is at about the same latitude as Buenos Aires, and this is the point where the cold south Atlantic current meets the warm Indian Ocean current, creating very rough seas and cold temperatures sometimes. It is whale breeding season, so it wasn’t long before we saw the first of many whales we'd see breeching as we approached the port.

Right away, I thought Cape Town was one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. It wasn’t until much later in the week that of the few cities I’ve been to, I thought Rio had a slight edge in shear beauty, with San Francisco in a somewhat distant #3 spot.

(For those of you who live in San Francisco and don’t think it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I recommend three things: 1) Visit the lookout point just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear, sunny day. 2) Visit the hookup point on Treasure Island on a clear night, and 3) Talk to any foreigner who has visited San Francisco and ask them what they think the most beautiful cities of the world are. But I digress).

We said our goodbye to the Tutus and I headed off to meet Sara at the Long Street Backpackers hostel. I’ve known Sara since freshman year at Stanford, where we lived in the same dorm. I knew she would be spending a year in South Africa in the city of Durban doing a med school rotation (internship? residency? fellowship? I can never get them straight) and we decided several months ago to meet in Cape Town.

The best thing about having a friend that lives halfway across the world? The fact that you have a travel agent in that country. Sara and I had been in touch by email about what we wanted to do, and, truth be told, she did all the work. I let her know what I wanted to do, and she added a lot of cool stuff to the list. She devoured the Lonely Planet book and set about making reservations and plans about where we were going. I was just along for the ride.

We had a couple hours before our rental car was to be delivered, so we decided to walk to the District 6 museum until then. This wasn’t the best time or place to visit the museum, as Sara and I were still catching up on the last few months, where needless to say, lots has happened to both of us. The museum is packed with information about the District 6 area of Cape Town, which was declared a white-only area during apartheid and 50,000 residents were displaced to the townships, very reminiscent of the way the jews were displaced from their homes in World War II. It really is a sad story, and given the cluttered presentation of the museum, and my intense interest in the subject matter, we didn’t do the place justice in the hour we were there.

But we had a car to pick up. South Africa is one of those “weird” countries where these crazy people think it’s ok to drive on the wrong side of the road. So dangerous! Good thing Sara was there, since I flinched at every corner from the taxi ride from the ship to the hostel, and she is experienced in driving from the passenger side of the car. When the rental car person asked if we wanted to insure a second driver, Sara and I mutually agreed that it was in our safety’s best interest that I didn’t touch the steering wheel. Sara made sure it wasn't going to happen.

(This was made especially clear in the hostel, where I encountered a many in the hallway. I stepped to my right to get out of his way, and he stepped to his left. We stood there starring at each other for five seconds before he decided to move to the right. Whoops.)

Having a car gave us a huge flexibility both to improvise and get away from the hundreds of SAS kids that take over the port cities (they’re not allowed to rent vehicles). We immediately took off for Cape Point, the southwestern-most point in Africa, giving me the opportunity to learn much about South African culture from Sara along the way.

Some of my favorite tidbits (some which were better understood later on the trip):
1. Stop lights are called “robots”. I wish I had take a picture of the street sign that said “robots” because it confused the bejesus out of me. I was waiting for C3PO ahead of us, but he never came.
2. Afrikaaners use “Is it?” like Americans use “Really?” and Canadians use “Eh”. A lot. And the use “AS well” with emphasis on the “AS” when saying “also”.
3. Afrikaans is a awful sounding language. As Sara put it, it is “a poor-man’s Dutch”.
4. Zulu and Xhosa, however, are the coolest sounding languages in the world. Not only to they have rich, deep, melodic syllables, but clicking is an integral part of the language! I thought I misheard things first time I heard it, but no, they have very different clicking noises that happens in conjunction with another sound, like some weird sort of ventriloquism. For example, “Ndegeochello” (as in Michelle, the singer) would have a click on the “N”. I vow to learn how to do this. Really. I’m not even kidding.
5. Black, Coloured, and Whites races are still officially recognized as such by the government. It is impossible to separate South Africa and racial issues – and is an issue that kept coming up over and over.

W e stopped along the way at Boulder’s beach to see the many penguins, the coolest birds ever. They are some mean mofos, though. Don’t get close to them. You can’t help but laugh watching them stagger around the rocks, because clearly their bodies weren’t made for rock climbing. But that doesn’t stop them.

(By the way, South Africa has the best traffic signs. This is one of my favorites, for two reasons. First, the morbid picture of a dying penguin, and second, because it has a picture of a bra. We found out later is the picture of a springbok, some form of antelope and the symbol of their national park, and delicious when barbequed… yummm.)

( This one also cracks me up. Poo.)

We found some students trying to make their way south, but alas, they had no car and we found ourselves away from SAS peeps at the point. The point, BTdubs, is beautiful. This is the Cape of Good Hope, the chaotic meeting of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans where so many ships have sunk over the years. The weather was perfect, and we took a long time to simply stroll around, go down to the beach where a southern right whale and her pup where breaching just yards from the shore. And I was fascinated by what Sara knew about South Africa (thank god she’s a history major), HIV, and waiting tables in Martha’s Vineyard.

A few extra pictures:

Cape Point View
Another View
The Beach

We made our way back after all the strolling, encountering baboons on the way out (who really have nasty bums which explain why their tales are up in the air… but I digress), and made our way to a big game restaurant to meet with some of the SAS staff members and people we had met up at the hostel. If you’ve never had big game meat before, such as springbok, kudu, ostrich, crocodile, or shark (I guess that counts), and you’re not a vegetarian, you should try it. It really is delicious. Made me want a bb gun every time we saw a springbok… tasty… yummm….

The cost of these exotic animals on your plate? For an amazing meal that included bottles of wine, I believe we estimated less than $35 per person.

We woke up to rain in Cape Town, and since we had a 2pm ticket for Robben Island, we decided against hiking Table Mountain and headed for the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens instead, which was such a pleasant surprise. As Sara described in her blog entry, it was a Garden of Eden and it really was one of the most beautiful, serene places we’d ever seen, especially when the sun came out. There was a little of everything, including these mystery Fynbos plants everywhere (I’ll let you guys figure out what they are because I’m still not sure we ever truly figured it out). Our (my) favorite part was a the fragrance garden, where we rubbed and smelled… the plants. We just looked funny doing it.

Amidst all the frolicking we ran out of time and had to get back to the wharf in time for the ferry that would take us to Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela lived for 18 of his 27 years in jail. Since much of the ANC leadership was also jailed there at the time, this became a place for discourse, and, in essence, the birthplace of South African democracy, which is why our tour left something to be desired. The country will still be talking about Robben Island 500 years from now, much like we do the constitutional convention, and it doesn’t deserve the short, crowded tour we were given. It doesn’t do the place justice.

Luckily, I had my personal historian Sara next to me. She’s poured through three or four SA history books in her short time there, including Mandela’s “A Long Road to Freedom” (which she finished on this trip), and gave me a much more better account than the tour gave us. I wanted to linger and ask questions, but there weren’t enough guides and we were rushed to the gift shop on the way out. I can only imagine the tour will get better someday. It has to get better.

The ferry ride back was a lot of fun… we managed to sit right in the splash zone of the boat, and the unfashionably white raincoat that I stole from the Ranch on my wait out proved not to be a raincoat but just a piece of cloth like any other. But boy, was it fun.

We headed back to the Kirstenbosch Gardens again for sunset before heading out to the quaint town of Hout Bay for dinner, which was amazing despite the fact that our uncomfortable waiter looked like an overgrown boy in his striped sailor outfit. But Sara (or her friends) did manage to get the best restaurants in South Africa, and this was one of them.

The next morning we set out to hike Table Mountain, something I’ve been wanting to do for a really long time. The mountain seems to have its own weather system – always cloudy when the weather at the bottom was gorgeous. We were running out of time, so we took a gamble and hoped the clouds would have cleared by the time we got to the top.

The view started out magnificent. We were told that the short route would take us between 1.5-2 hours to make it to the top, yet we were there in a little over an hour. As were the clouds. It was like entering the set of Lord of the Rings (Sara’s line), covering us with mist and looking just like Scotland. Not that I know what Scotland looks like. Anyway, it was really cool (and freezing) hanging out up there in there, but our view was less than stellar. The hike was nice, but I’m really glad I made it back on the last day in Cape Town. Sara, make sure you get up there on a clear day.

We took off for a coastal drive on the way to Hermanus, going through township after township after township., which is no different from a Brazilian favela or a Venezuela slum. Poverty is poverty anywhere in the world (though so many people in South Africa were systematically placed in the townships, but that’s another issue). I was really surprised by how many we see and how it there. This is where I made full use of my HIV researcher guide/driver, because as Sara put it, South Africa is AIDS right now. Africa has 16 of the 45 million AIDS cases in the world, and in places like Botswana, 47 percent of the population is infected with HIV and the life expectancy has dropped to 27 years (I’m 26 right now). The promiscuous culture and the stigma associated with the disease in South Africa makes it even more difficult to deal with the problem there, and it really hit it home when she said that one out of every three people we were looking at were infected, especially since we were looking at a lot of people. I’ll come back to this subject.

We made our way down the beautiful coast to Hermanus, about two hours west of Cape Town. If Noronha had the Bay of Dolphins, this was the Bay of Whales. During whale breeding season (September), as many as 70 whales come do whale things there, like breeding, breeching, and attracting tourists. They come very close to shore, and within a couple minutes of getting there, we had already identified seven. (by the way, Cape Agulhas, the true southernmost point in Africa, is visible in that picture). These southern right whales massive creatures, about the size of eight or so elephants, and but they look so calm and graceful bobbing up and down so close to shore.

We picked on one of the cliffs overlooking the bay, away from everybody else, and stayed there reading, and journaling (diarying? That sounds bad.), just watching a whale that wasn’t going anywhere, for about an hour or so. This was one of my favorite moments this entire trip, and I’m printing the full size version of my view from that spot when I get home:   (Can you find the whale in this picture?)

Hermanus is a such a nice little town, a place you wish your grandparents lived at, and is very quiet at night. We went to bed early and woke up very early since I wanted to watch the sunrise and Sara wanted to go out for her jog – part of her hardcore marathon training regimen. I went back to the same bay from the previous day where the sunrise was beautiful, made even better by the fact that five whales were bobbing less than fifty yards away. It was hard to leave that spot.

We set out through the mountains to the beautiful wine town off Franschhoek, where we tasted wine, bought cheese and chocolates, and enjoyed ostrich in a two-hour lunch at the best restaurant in South Africa, La Petit Ferme.. I could have stayed there all day.

The next stop was the town of Stellenbosch, an Afrikaaner college town famous for its wine. We enjoyed some Zanzibarian music in the Stellenbosch music festival (something I would never have thought of doing – thank you, Sara), which included, of all things, a woman whose butt did things butts were not supposed to do. Seriously. I think there was a Chinese dragon under her dress. I expected her behind to crawl up around her chest and up her neck at any point. It was as impressive as anything I’ve seen so far.

There were hundreds of SAS students in town, many of them in our hostel, so I spent most of the night chatting with them, until 3am or so. We had to return the car in Cape Town the next day, so we headed back (stopping in Spier) and took another walking tour of the city which included a stop at the Slave Lodge where an exhibit put together by the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre and highly recommended by the SAS students in Stellenbosch asked many influential people the question, slightly paraphrased, “If you had only one piece of wisdom to leave humanity, what would it be?” This is a traveling exhibit that should be in the US soon, so please go visit it when it comes to town. It is well-worth it, well-presented, and thought-provoking. Just neat.

After the tour, we kicked it at the hostel, hanging out with other fellow travelers (I love the atmosphere of hostels in South Africa – Cape Town is a great backpacker’s city), playing gin, drinking South African beer, and waiting for a live band that never showed up. I had a great week with my tour guide/driver/historian Sara, and we said our goodbyes. Maybe she’ll be there next time I come to Cape Town. Because I am coming back.

I left the hostel and met up with some SAS girls who were being badgered by a local man and they asked me to pretend to be a boyfriend so he would go away. I did, and he didn’t go away until I caught him with his hand in my pocket trying to pull out my camera and wallet. We left the bar, piled 12 of us inside a cab, drove to another part of the city where we danced until the wee hours of the morning.

I had two extra days that were unplanned for, so I had to improvise. I’ll continue the travel log of the last two days tomorrow. Here's a preview.

Special Bonding, Only On Julio Days

2005-10-04T16:59:00.000-07:00

The call to find guest bloggers returned a lot of favorable responses. Jason, the guy I once described as "would easily fit in the Ranch", already wrote two guest entries. I might regret posting this first one before my South Africa report.

Warts and all. Warts and all.

Rico isn't a happy camper. Oh, he may seem happy, but he's not. It's day six in Cape Town, and we're going somewhere, or doing something, or...well, you know. The days all blur. But there's a problem. Rico, you see, keeps missing out on the bonding.

There was initial bonding, of course. There were only about a hundred of us on board for the first four days, with little to do but ramble around a mostly empty ship, eat with each other and get very limited starts on our jobs. We hung out. We asked questions. We figured out who the cool kids were (for the curious, it was just about all of us, but we still figured it out). All good stuff, and everyone got to play. And Venezuela, where everyone seemed to have prearranged stuff to do, didn't feature much together time.

But then came Brazil. Rico took off for some sort of paradise, where he claims to have seen dolphins, been interviewed for TV, and been crowned King of the World or some shit. Whatever. I wasn't there, so I can't speak on it, but it all sounds a little made up. Put it on top of the rescue plane story and I think we've got a whiff of something pathological.

But I digress. Often, and at length. See, there it was again.

Anyway, there was a side trip in Brazil that featured me, Chris B. the photographer, and Yas, the cutest little Resident Director in the whole wide world (no, really, she's just the cute, bless her little heart.) What happened will forever be known as the Julio period of our lives, wherein we overshared while drinking Brazilian beer and caiprinhas. I'll spare you the details (mostly because Rico hasn't yet heard them all, and would once again feel left out. We can't have that.) Julio was this guy we ran into in the little beach town we stayed at; he had a glob of white something on his lower lip at just about all times, and we saw him about a dozen times. He spoke very little English, but acted like he did by carefully repeating anything you said and nodding. He was our BFF right away. Rico never met him. See what he misses out on?

The point is, there was bonding. Boy, howdy, was there bonding. I know so much about those two. I could mention Chris's technique, but I won't. I could talk about Yas's numbers, but I won't. I could tell you...well, everything about me, but that would be really, really boring after a while. A very short while. I'm not that interesting. Really.

Rico got back with his dolphins and interviews and BFF with people who run hotels on the islands story, and all we had was beers around Julio. So of course, we had to act like we were the winners on that trade. We had bonded, you see, and all he had done was spend a four days in paradise. Alone. As if any of us would want such a horror. I turn my nose up at it.

Funny thing was, Rico was bothered. Or at least, I must presume he was. Because we get to Cape Town, and he vanishes with Sarah, re-emerging for a single meal. A very good meal, of game meats of all sorts, that was really great, but still, just a meal. And then he misses going out for dinner and drinks, and hearing a cover band comprised of a tiny Goth girl singer and a fat guitar player singing “Africa” by Toto. And he misses CAP 100, The Winelands and Beyond, an unofficial Staff-only trip where we tasted a lot of wine and didn't really bond as much as we could have but still had a great time. Rico was in the same town as us, but we didn't call him. Because we're bitter that he has these great (and probably completely false) stories of what he did.

I'm sure you've heard what he did by now. Rode an elephant, was made leader of a tribe that has never seen a camera before, swam with whales and learned their language. Yes, it seems pretty incredible, but the way he tells the stories, you could almost believe it. Me, I think he was just trying to compensate for his lack of bonding.

Because he was sad that he had missed it, you see. Complained that we didn't call. Whined about the injustice of it all. Wailed and gnashed his teeth, even, which should tell you all how serious it was.

So now, back to the beginning, it's the day he gets back, Day 6 in Cape Town. We all go out for a birthday dinner, 17 of us. This is no bonding moment. Too many people. It's tough to bond in groups larger than will comfortably fit on one road trip. Dinner is followed by drinks, and we get down to 10. Still too large. But then, through the intervention of a fortuitous showing of gymnastics at a neighboring bar (okay, it was power tumbling, but what the hell do I know about that?) we end up, just me and Rico and Yas, in a bar together. Could we bond?

No, really, Rico asked that question. Could we bond, are we bonding, is this bonding, yadda yadda. We tried to patiently explain that if he had to ask, we weren't. It was like watching him try to do “For Example” (which he should tell you about at some point). Pitiful.

And then...breakthrough. We suddenly shared. We bonded. Oh, we had come close, when Yas was almost crushed by the door of a cab. When we sang about “working the streets down in Africa.” When we fought off that chain wielding gang of mutants...no, wait, that was “Weird Science”. But at long last, we bonded.

Again, I can't go into the details. I can only mention there was South African beer involved. And Long Island Iced Teas about the size of a swimming pool. (This is a lie. The Mexican bar by the ship had drinks the size of swimming pools. Served in tupperware bowls. Seriously.) And dancing. And milkshakes. And Rico getting to be a part of things. Okay, there were stories about getting walked in on during various acts, but that's all I'll say. So don't ask. I'm not telling. But it's Rico I'm talking about here. Just so you know.

The only problem is that now, poor Chris is behind. And no one else has even really gotten to start. So Rico has to come bonding again in Mauritius, and won't be able to rescue any creole-speaking Hindu princesses, or find a lost golden temple, or any of that. Just Mauritian beer (is there such a thing? God, I hope so) by the beach, and disclosure into the night, and a new, hopefully improved BFF who will almost assuredly not be named Julio.

But you never know. He might be.

Administrative issues

2005-10-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Friends. The staff of the Cobosce understands that you have a choice in blogs, and we thank you for choosing http://cobosce.blogspot.com. Having said that, I’ve been accused many times of holding back stories and, and Mandy called it, being mysterious. Perhaps there is truth to this rumor. Given the logistics of a 23 hour day, and the time and price of the internet on the ship (the Brazil entry cost me over $60 to upload), and the fact that I avoid internet cafes in port, this is not intentional. However, we at the Cobosce think we have a solution and will expand our staff accordingly. In an expansion of the guest blog paradigm, I will try to recruit fellow staff members, students, faculty, adult passenger, crew, people I like, people I don’t like, etc… to contribute a funny story or two that they might think my friends would want to hear. The only restriction is that the story can’t get me fired, otherwise, the comments will run unedited, warts and all.

I guess I should line up people to write first.

Anyway, I’m working on the South Africa posting and pictures and that’ll be up soon. I’ll also try to upload shorter blurbs as we make our way to Mauritius. I am flattered by the number of people who have requested that I write more, and I’m doing my best to honor the requests.

Speaking of rumors… spreading rumors around the ship is a lot of fun because it spreads like wildfire. For example, there's a rumor going around that I'm trying to dispel that I spent the entire time volunteering at HIV hospitals when I actually spent the time with an HIV researcher. Anyway, these have been my three of many favorite (innocent) rumors to start, but I’m sure there will be more in a few days.

3. Yas is organizing a thumb war tournament. This is funny when 700 students want to sign up for it. I put this on the Dean’s memo under her name with the tagline “Warm up those Dueling Digits!” and people kept bugging her to participate. And she had to tell them it’s not real (“Hey, can I sign up for the thumb war tournament?!”). But she decided to give in and really hold a tournament. I was the first name on her signup sheet. But I never signed myself up.

2. The staff waterskiis behind the ship at night. I posted this on Yas’s board one night (“Yas – I got the skiis… the Captain said we can go skiing at 4am… remember to set your clock ahead tonight!) and let’s just say students can be very, very gullible.

1. The ship hit a whale in South Africa. This one is still making it’s way around.

Here's a quick pic from our early morning arrival in Cape Town.

Full report shortly.

I Heart Africa

2005-10-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

I am on the ship as we are about to set sail after a perfect, long stay in South Africa. After much badgering, I convinced the lovely, funny, beautiful, all-around good-girl Sara to write a guest blog entry (a move shamelessly stolen from TMTTV). Below are her unedited comments; I’ll post my own at sea.

hi all. Sara here. I am taking a year off from med school in NY and living in Durban, South Africa for the year doing HIV research. this past week I had the good fortune of being able to take a week off of work and hang out with Rico in Cape Town. such fun.

Rico has asked me to write a guest blog entry – maybe he's worried that his readership is floundering and thinks the blog needs a bit of a boost (only kidding!)… I'll do my best.

in looking over his past blog entries, I feel confident that Rico will do an able job of thoroughly regaling you all with the details of our adventures together. so I'm going to gloss over much of the week and focus on a few highlights about Rico – a few vignettes that he might not necessarily relate…

first off – Rico as mayor. or at least that's how I now think about him with the SAS crew. whenever we ran into any of the students from the ship (and with 700 of them – it's not an infrequent occurrence) – they would all get huge grins on their faces and come running up to greet him. Rico would reciprocate with a big grin of his own, a series of friendly pleasantries, inquiries about their travels, etc. it's like he's some sort of celebrity – or a small-town mayor, if you will. shaking hands with all, making everyone feel welcome, sharing a bit of the Rico-love with all… if there were babies to kiss, he would have been doing that too (although thanks to the readily available supply of condoms on the boat it sounds like this hasn't been an issue!). it's very cute to see. Rico is definitely in his element.

despite all of the attention, Rico is still the same loveable, goofy guy as always. one of our many stops was at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens – a veritable Garden of Eden, truly the most serene, beautiful place I've ever been. we wandered around the grounds with Table Mountain looming as a backdrop and just couldn't get over how lucky we were to be in such an amazing place. at one point, we were wandering down one of the many paths and were both so totally engrossed in our surroundings that we had one of our rare moments of silence. I didn't even notice it was quiet though until the silence was broken. all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Rico started singing "Eternal Flame." yes, the Bangles. as soon as he realized what he was doing, he quickly stopped – but it was too late. I was on to him. he at first tried to deny the episode but I wasn't fooled and couldn't help but burst out laughing. clearly the fame and celebrity of his prestigious SAS audiovisual tech job hasn't quite gone to his head.

Rico also liked to engage in conversation, albeit one-sided, with the various animals that we encountered. this tendency first became apparent on our first afternoon when we stopped at Boulders Beach, a penguin reserve on the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. Rico launched into various imitations of penguin movements and then proceeded to narrate the internal monologue of a pair of penguins walking along a rocky precipice ("hey larry, you think I can make that jump?" "I don't know fred, looks awfully big to me…" "I'm gonna go for it… 1, 2, 3!" "man, that was awesome!"). similar scenes subsequently played themselves out with baboons and whales (with different voices, of course).

we had a great week though. a little of everything – hiking, mountain climbing, local music appreciation, whale-watching, museums, wine-tasting, eating up a storm… I'll let Rico tell you all about it in his own blog entry.

Rico is definitely having a true once-in-a-lifetime experience (as cliché as that sounds) and it was wonderful to get to tag long for a small piece of it. I'm only jealous that I can't stow away for the rest of the trip..

Sara,I miss you already. -Rico

Itinerary Update

2005-09-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

Quick update on the plan. We are staying two extra days in Cape Town (yes!), then traveling to the middle of the Indian Ocean to the island of Mauritius for three days. Good thing I brought my scuba gear. I wonder what 700 students are going to do in this tiny island.

Sara and I are in Hermanus, about two hours east of Cape Town. We'll have lots of stories.

My Man-Crush

2005-09-26T02:53:00.000-07:00

Every dude has his man-crush.

Reshad is in love with Tom Brady. Jason has something going for Chris Farley. Aden would have Dave Matthew’s children. Dunny gets a funny feeling every time Jackie Green is in town. And this is all perfectly natural.

I have a huge man-crush on Desmond Tutu and I’m proud of it.

The 1984 Nobel Peace Laureate from South Africa graced us with his presence on the Salvador to Capetown leg of our voyage. I’ve heard of Desmond Tutu all of my life, but the first time I really started paying attention to him was about six months ago, when I watched Anne Dowd’s video of her Fall 2000 SAS voyage. The Archbishop boarded the ship in Capetown that year for a brief speech, and the portions that made it into the final video, perfectly-delivered call for young people to dream and “soar”, was perhaps the most inspirational speech I’ve ever heard (and this is from someone who for various reasons is not a big fan of inspirational speeches). I secretly began rooting for him to join us again, if only for a day.

As with everything else related to this voyage, I wanted learn more about the man. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had two major impacts in South Africa, first by stepping up to the leadership of the country’s anti-apartheid resistance at a time most of its leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, had been put in jail.

His second major impact came when he was appointed to be Chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee in 1994. South Africa, having just gone through the terrible years of apartheid, was in the unique position of having to figure out how future generations of oppressor and oppressed people could live together. There were two main options:

1. The Nuremberg Solution – the oppressed punish the oppressor for all their deeds. This is a very problematic solution when the punished and the punisher need to coexist.
2. Forgive and Forget – this was impossible when there were so many wounds that were opened from years of apartheid.

The solution South Africa came up with was the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, in which anyone (black or white) could ask for amnesty for their crimes during the apartheid era if 1. they confessed in full to their crimes, and 2. if the crimes were demonstrated to be politically motivated.

This is a very simplistic summary of the TRC (I’m making it sound like the forgive and forget solution), but I highly recommend reading the bishop’s masterpiece called “No Future without Forgiveness”, which is essentially a discourse as to why the TRC is the best Reconstruction solution for South Africa.

(The book, by the way, introduced me to the word ubuntu, which broad concept under which, for example, a fractured relationship between two individuals is a problem of the community, and needs to be dealt with for the good of the community. I mention this because that’s how I usually deal with conflict, and I like the word.)

He’s one of the gentle giants, in the same line of leaders as Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, MLK, Ghandi, Jesus, etc. So I couldn’t have been more excited when I found out that he was joining us for over a week. In fact, this might have been what I was most excited about this voyage.

My first encounter with Desi was an indirect one. Every night, Semester at Sea puts on a community college of some sort, and on Tutu’s first day, there was a racial discussion in the room adjacent to the Union, where he was present. I had organized a massive, all-student Karaoke Rager that night, and since the Union was clear a little earlier than expected, I started breaking the ice with a full, loud, unabashedly solo rendition of “Like a Virgin” as the students waltzed in to see what was going on.

The bishop’s racial discussion was interrupted by my impression of Madonna and I don’t think they were too happy about it.

But I don’t think anyone was bothered for too long. Mr. Tutu physical presence is endearing – a small, Yoda-ish man with expressive hands and long fingers, a quick wit, and a high-pitched, accented voice. He is always laughing and or making fun of you in a way that makes you like him even more. I believe the wise baboon character in the “Lion King” was directly based on the Archbishop, so if you’ve seen the movie, you can have a good sense of his mannerisms.

This attitude (along with faith and his wife) are probably what got him through a lot of his ordeals over the years. His wife Leah, by the way, should get half of the credit for everything she does. She is a stereotypically large African woman who is gentle, funny, and extremely articulate – in fact, she answered half of the questions that were directed to Desi. They have been married for 50 years, and in a revealing moment as I was setting up his mic, he asked that he be seated so he could see his wife from where he was sitting.

He’s extremely approachable, from the time he starts exercising at 6am to walk his seventh deck, and all day, so I had the pleasure to have three meals with him and his wife, where we talked about the serious and the not-so-serious, and since I was around him a lot setting up his microphone for his many events, I became very comfortable around him.

So we’ve learned much about what he is all about. He is brutally honest – he told us that if he had known our ship was headed to Myanmar given the country’s human-rights violations, he wouldn’t have joined us on this voyage – which is refreshing because it becomes clear that his endearing-ness is not an act. The guy’s the real deal.

Capetown is around the corner and I will stop here because I need to go to bed. But given this eventful crossing of the Atlantic, I think I’ll be bringing up this leg of the trip for a long time.

Flexibility

2005-09-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

In a bit of sad news today, our trip to Kenya has been canceled due to Al Qaeda and piracy activity in eastern Africa, and since we’re a big, easy target as a shipful of American students, this was in our safety’s best interest. We don’t yet know where we’re going after South Africa. I was going to lead a camping safari in the Maasa Mari region, and after numerous conversations prior to the voyage with friends who have been Kenya, especially a really long one with Doni Thompson at the Nuthouse, it was one of the countries I was most excited about visiting.

Oh, well. This trip is all about being flexible. Anywhere we go will be new and exciting and somewhere I’ve never been before. So we wait.

Tomorrow I’ll share my thoughts on Desmond Tutu.