Hi all! We're out of India and well on our way to Egypt at this point...we get there in four days. We've been on the ship for about a week now and I'm starting to get cabin fever again, so I'm so excited to finally get to Alexandria. In other news, we entered the Red Sea early this morning and just a few minutes ago we passed by a recently-erupted volcano, which was amazing. (Not sure about the specifics of the volcano; I heard that it's currently erupting, but my friend's teacher told her that it erupted a couple years ago and the stuff that was coming out was volcanic ash from back then.) Either way, we could see something coming out of the volcano and how many people can say that?
Alright so there's a lot to tell and I know I haven't been the most devoted blogger, so I'll start way back with Vietnam and Cambodia. I can't believe it's been almost a month since I've been there!
We docked in Vietnam on September 27th, which was a Thursday. The clearing process went unbelievably quickly (to this date, the easiest country we've cleared) and we were able to get off the ship around 9 am. Rachel and I took our time getting showered and ready and we left the ship around 10:30 with our friends Erica and Bri. The port in Saigon wasn't super close to the downtown area, so SAS provided a 15-minute shuttle for us from the port to the city. We took the shuttle into the city center and immediately went in search for food. We weren't feeling too picky so we walked around for about 3 minutes, found a place that said "pizza" and headed on into it.
After our early lunch, we set out on our first order of business for Vietnam: having dresses made. Tons of students have dresses and suits made in Vietnam because the turn-around is so quick and the cost is so cheap. My friend Morgan had given me the name of a tailor that her sister had gone to and recommended, but we decided to look around for a bit and see if we could find a good place on our own. We couldn't find anything that looked promising, so we hailed and cab and headed to the recommend tailor's. The ladies who worked at the store were really nice, and we decided to have our dresses made there, even though there wasn't much of a selection on fabrics. (Silk only, and limited colors.) A lot of people went to the markets to pick out fabrics before they went to a tailors, but we didn't really care that much. I went with two designs in mind, and was measured, picked out the colors of silk, and sketched out the designs for them. We told them we wouldn't need our dresses until Monday and left hoping for the best.
When we walked outside of the tailor's, cyclo drivers immediately surrounded us. Cyclos are a form of transportation in Saigon that are basically bicycles with a seat/cart in front of them. We weren't quite sure what we wanted to do, so we looked at a list of places that the cyclo drivers could take us, and we decided to head to the War Remnants Museum. We settled on a price of $2 a person and each got into our own cyclo.
Traffic in Vietnam is something else. There are a fair amount of cars, but far outnumbering them are scooters and motorcycles. Also, there aren't really traffic lights and traffic is navigated by honking. The city is so loud with honking. It's so dangerous looking, but it somehow works. In addition to this, because there aren't traffic lights, there aren't really lights to help navigate pedestrian traffic. In Vietnam, if you want to walk across a street, you have to just walk. Everyone navigates around you. It's so frightening the first couple times you do this, but it's just how their traffic system works, and it actually, surprisingly, works.
We arrived at the War Remnants Museum around 1 pm. There are two areas to it: one building full of photos taken during the Vietnam war and blurbs about the war, and one building full of information on Agent Orange and the American war crimes. The photo building was interesting but it was really the latter building that got to me. Inside, there were tons of photos of people who had been affected by Agent Orange, pictures of dead bodies piled up, stories of people whose lives had been affected by Agent Orange, statistics about the way it affected following generations, even preserved bodies of infants dead because of Agent Orange. Plus, there was a wall of drawings by orphaned children in Vietnam, almost all of them having to do with peace. It was so hard to look at. Some people didn't like the museum because they thought it had a very strong anti-American bias, which it did in some respects, but it really made me think about everything our country had done to theirs. And despite everything, the Vietnamese people were so kind and so welcoming to us while we were there!
After the museum, our cyclo drivers offered to take us to some Chinese pagodas, which were pretty but not that interesting. Then we had a quick snack in the restaurant and, after a struggle with our drivers about how much we owed them, got in a taxi back to the ship. It had been raining almost all afternoon and we were ready to go back to the ship to clean up and get dinner. After dinner, I went with my friends Kate, Chris, and Stasi to a bar called Apocalypse Now (yep, themed after the movie) where we saw our Captain.
On the 28th, I went to Cambodia. You can only go to Cambodia if you're on a Semester at Sea trip, and it's a country I've always had a lot of interest in, so I was very excited for the trip. Our trip was supposed to have about 60 people on it, but it was split into two groups for some reason, a group of around 40 and a group of about 20, and I was in the bigger group. There was a parent trip organized by SAS that met up with the ship in Vietnam, and the Cambodia trip I went on was the one Cambodia trip that had parents on it. (Lucky me...no offense Mom and Dad, you guys are great, but my idea of a good time is not having other peoples' parents being bossy and parent-y when I'm trying to travel the world.) We left the ship around 12:30 pm and caught a mid-afternoon flight from Saigon to Phnom Penh, our first stop in Cambodia. It was a short flight, less than an hour long, and we got into Cambodia around 4:30. From the airport, we went to our hotel, which was sooooo nice. The total and complete opposite of my hotel in China! My roommate was a girl on the group that had been split from us, so she hadn't checked in yet. After putting our things in our room, we left the hotel for a sunset cruise on the Mekong Delta.
The sunset cruise might have been cool if it hadn't been raining, but there was no sunset so it was pretty anti-climactic. The Mekong Delta is really brown (I think from the silt, but definitely also because of pollution) and one of the grossest looking rivers I've ever seen, yet it's considered the "life-force" of Southeast Asia. What was interesting, however, was the riverboat village built over part of it. All these houses are built on platforms and are all tied together, and it was very interesting to see. They even had electricity in the houses, which I couldn't quite figure out.
From the "sunset" cruise, we went to dinner at a restaurant that was essentially a high-end buffet. I've never seen so much food in my life! Cambodian food is so delicious—lots of coconut, bananas, and soupy things. Then we went back to the hotel. A couple other girls and I decided to go get massages because there were a few massage parlors just down the street from where we were staying--$6/hour for a Khmer massage! After our relaxing massages, we had a glass of wine in the hotel bar and gossiped about shipboard life until the restaurant closed down.
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Ok, so I wrote all the above one day during class and didn't get another chance to write until just now—the day after Egypt! So here's the rest of the blog, written over a week later. The following parts talk about my visit to the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields and if you don't feel comfortable reading it, please feel free to skim to the part where I travel to Angkor Wat.
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We had to be in the lobby by 8 am the next morning for our first stop of the day—the Genocide Museum. It was really hard to see the Genocide Museum at such an early hour because I felt like I was almost half asleep and my emotions weren't ready for it. The museum is housed in what was a prison during the days of the Khmer Rouge; before the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison, it had been a high school. We saw the cells of the "important" prisoners first. These were small rooms with a bed that the prisoner was chained to. Next, we saw the regular cells. Brick cells were built in former classrooms and each cell was so small that a person could barely sit in them. There were several rooms filled with the photographs of the people kept in the prison, as well as photos of dead bodies and people post-torture. The Cambodian Genocide was so awful because the Khmer Rouge kept documentation of absolutely everything. It was so strategic and well-planned, and a lot of the people committing the crimes were just little boys that had been turned into soldiers. People were typically only held in the prison for a few weeks before being taken to the Killing Fields, but some stayed for up to four months.
We spent about an hour and a half at the Genocide Museum and then we went to the Killing Fields. The closest killing field to Phnom Penh was about 10-15 kilometers outside the city, and it was the area that all the people from the prison we had visited were taken. At the Field, there's a monument that's been erected which holds all of the skulls that had been dug up there. It's actually a very pretty piece of land, lush and green, and it was really hard to picture all the gruesome things that had happened there. The Field had 8 specific gravesites of excavation, and more people were presumed to have been buried there than they dug up; there was a swamp formed behind the main areas of excavation that couldn't be opened up. Basically, what we saw were relatively small holes in the ground, most of which had grass grown over them. The smaller holes had had between 20-40 bodies buried in them, but the two largest ones each had between 100-300 people buried in them; one of the larger holes was for children. Walking in between the grave sites, you could see pieces of clothing sticking up from under the ground, and I even saw a few teeth by the side of the path. The children's grave had a large tree next to it that our guide told us the soldiers beat the children to death on in front of their parents.
All in all, my visits to the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields were frightening. It's hard to believe that humankind can possess the kind of evil in it that can justify the mass murder of people just for killing's sake. Previous genocides, like the Holocaust, make more sense (if that's possible) because they were based on hatred of classes of people. Cambodians were killed for almost no reason by their own peoples...their family members, their former friends, one-time colleagues. Generations and whole lines of families disappeared in several years of bloodshed. Seeing the places where this happened was the most sobering experience of my life. There are no Cambodians who didn't know someone who died. Our tour guide's mother and entire extended family had been killed.
Yet Cambodia was one of the friendliest countries I've visited. The people in Cambodia have had it so rough, with the genocide and then with years and years of political unrest. Somehow, they've managed to maintain a kindness as a population that I witnessed almost nowhere else; they seem so down on their luck and so eager to improve their country that I think it's impossible to visit Cambodia and not want to help them.
After all that was done, we went to the Russian Market, which was really just your average bazaar/market. It's called the Russian Market because in the eighties, Russians were the only tourists to Cambodia and the market became the hotspot for tourist shopping. Once the Soviet Union fell and the Russian economy collapsed, there were no more Russian tourists, but the name stuck. When we'd finished with our light shopping (I got more pirated DVDs, yippee), we went to lunch.
From lunch we visited the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. I can't wait to post pictures of the Royal Palace because it was SO BEAUTIFUL. It's all made out of gold and looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. I believe they said that the king doesn't live there anymore, but he still holds diplomatic things there. The Silver Pagoda is on the property of the Royal Palace, and is also made of gold, so "Silver Pagoda" seems to be a bit of a misnomer at first. However, the floor of the Silver Pagoda is made out of sheets of silver. There's a gigantic emerald Buddha inside that is beautiful.
When we left the Palace, we went to the National Museum, which was in a similarly designed but red building. The museum holds pretty much only sculptures, and we breezed through it relatively quickly, but it was cool to see. From the museum we went to the airport for our flight to Siem Reap.
In Siem Reap, we went straight to our restaurant for dinner because we were running late. It was another buffet-style ordeal, but it was cool because we got to see a traditional Cambodian dance show with the meal. The Cambodian dancer women, who famously can stretch their fingers back really far, train their hands from the age of five. They were all so beautiful! We went to the hotel after dinner, which was another absolutely gorgeous place, and I went with some friends to the tourist bar area, where we frequented a bar called "Angkor What?".
The next morning, my roommate and I overslept through the optional sunrise tour of Angkor Wat, which I would've been disappointed about, but the people who went said it was really overcast and you couldn't actually see the sunrise. So I got up for a quick breakfast before we left at 8:15 for Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is an ancient temple in the middle of the forest that is falling apart and one of the most stunning places I've ever been. Part of "Tomb Raider" was shot there. What makes it so cool is that the forest has grown around it and through it. Gigantic trees are growing on top of fallen stone walls. It's seriously so frigging cool. I wish we could've stayed there longer than the hour we were there.
After Ta Prohm came the big attraction in Siem Reap—Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world (or at least that's what our guide told us) and was originally created as a Hindu temple, although it was changed to a Buddhist one later on. The main section of the temple is a huge building with very steep stairs that you can go up. The stairs were created so steeply so that people had to back down them and never turn their backs on the images of the Gods inside the temple. A lot of people went up into it, but one look at the stairs (seriously the steepest stairs I've ever seen in my life) had my stomach whirling and death fantasies spinning, so I opted to stay on the safer-looking ground. There were really complex symbols and stories carved in the stone all throughout the Angkor Wat, so I looked at those instead. In all, it was really cool and very beautiful but I honestly thought Ta Prohm was more interesting.
We had lunch at the hotel, and then went to Angkor Thom, which was the site of the ancient city that had been in the area. There was a large gate leading into the Angkor Thom, and when the city existed, people were searched before entering. If they were missing any fingers, ears, or toes, they weren't allowed into the city, because those were the signs of criminals; people had appendages cut off when they committed a crime. The gate was really cool and looked like something out of a Hayao Miyazaki movie; I feel positive that he must have visited Cambodia before animating "Spirited Away." Inside we visited several more temples, the coolest of which I believe was called Bayon—it was a large, winding temple that went up quite high and was ordained with somewhere over 200 faces of Buddha. So cool!
Then, to the airport once again for our flight back to Saigon. We were back to the ship a little before 8 pm, and I cleaned up quickly before leaving with some friends to go bowling. The bowling alley we went to was really neat—it was a combination bowling alley, Pizza Hut, arcade, sweet shop, bar...plus it was really clean and very new. Apparently bowling is cool in Vietnam.
On the last day, October 1st, I slept in until about 9 am and went out with my friend Kate. She and I hired a cyclo driver for the day and went to get our dresses, which were at different shops. We went to my shop first, where only one of the dresses was ready. It turned out really beautiful; it's a cap-sleeve v-neck dress in cream-colored silk with black silk around my waist and comes to a little above my knee. It fits like a glove. The other dress is a tacky purple color with thin straps and a drop-back, and it has a layered skirt that looks nothing like I wanted it to; the dress looks like a cheap high school dance dress and I think I'm going to wear it to a club in Croatia and never look at it again. We had to go back to my shop several times throughout the day to check on the production of the dress, which was irritating because I told them to have it ready by Monday. But that's Asia for you.
Then we went to Kate's dress shop, where they had neither of her dresses ready; they were apparently somewhere else and would be at the shop later in the day. So we went and had lunch, and then went to the Ban Pho market. Again, it was just another market. I've been to so many markets in the past two months that they have blurred together in my mind. They're all crammed full of stalls of people who shout at you in the language they think you might speak and hassle you to look at whatever shlock they're selling. We checked back at Kate's dress shop and they still weren't ready so we went and had massages; they were a bit pricier in Vietnam, a whole $12.
Finally, both of our dresses were ready and we met up with our friends Chris and Morgan for dinner. And then we said goodbye to Vietnam.
I wish that I had more time to spend in Vietnam, but I'm really glad that I was able to go to Cambodia because it's a country I've been interested in for a long time. Either way, they were both absolutely beautiful countries with so much to offer and I really hope that I get to go back to them someday.
Next...Thailand!
We arrived into Thailand on October 4th. I had plans to travel with Rachael (my roommate), Kate, Chris (from Japan, I'll call him Chris S), and yet another Chris (I'll call him Chris M to make things less confusing). We all had plane tickets to the island of Ko Samui for 2:30 in the afternoon. Well, Thailand ended up being the longest country to clear, and we didn't get off the ship until about 1:30 pm. On top of that, our ship was docked near Pattaya, not Bangkok, and the bus ride to Bangkok was about 2 and a half hours long. Needless to say, in the hours we spent on the ship freaking out about our flight situation, we ended up switching our flights to 7:30 pm.
Once our bus got into Bangkok, we took a cab to the new international airport. The new Bangkok airport is probably the nicest and biggest airport I've ever been in; it's absolutely gigantic. There were a ton of other SAS students heading to the same place as us, and we had 2 planes (the 7 pm and the 7:30 pm) almost completely booked with students. The 7 pm flight ended up being delayed and not leaving until almost 8, so they arrived at Ko Samui a few minutes after us. From the airport, we all were heading to the smaller island of Ko Phangan, which was a ferry ride away. However, the last ferry was at 6 pm, so we had to hire big speedboats to take us.
From the airport, we took vans to the dock and then got on the two speedboats. The ride to Ko Phangan was quick, less than half an hour. We got close to the island but the boats didn't have anywhere to dock so...they dropped us in the water, close to the shore, and we had to walk into the beach. It was absolutely hilarious and one of my flip-flops came off in the process, although I found it a few moments later.
Once we got to shore, we had to pile into taxis to our "resort," which was on the other side of the island. I use the term taxi loosely; taxis on Ko Phangan were basically pick-up trucks with benches in the bed. Finally, after a bus, a taxi, a plane, a van, a speedboat, and a taxi, we arrived at our "resort"—I'm putting "resort" in quotes because even though it was a really nice place, it wasn't a resort like the kind of places you would go to in the Carribean. It was called Milky Bay Resort, and we stayed in bungalows in the forest and around the beach. Beautiful! The bungalows were pretty nice, especially for the cheap $15/night we each spent to be there.
We put our bags down in our bungalow and cleaned up after our long day of traveling (it was close to 10 pm at this point), and then headed to the night's main attraction—a gigantic party in the forest. It was at this area that was cleared and used specifically for parties, and was equipped with crazy lights and DJ booths. Basically, it was a crazy European dance club, relocated to a forest. We danced the night away until about 5 am. There were Thai people there, plus all the SAS students, but tons and tons of foreigners—Australians, Europeans of all nationalities, and so many Israelis. In fact, we met a ton of Israelis all over Thailand. Almost all of them had just been discharged from the Israeli army, where enlistment is compulsory for people ages 18-20 and 2 years of service are required. However, after they've done their service, the state of Israeli sends the soldiers on a 6 month vacation to wherever they feel like.
The next day, we slept until about 10 am, got up and had lunch at Milky Bay, and then the 5 of us took a taxi back to the other side of the island, where the better beaches and the main restaurant/bar drag were. We spent the day laying on the beach, renting jet skis, and just enjoying the lovely weather. Ko Phangan was the best beach area I've ever been; mountains turned into beaches and then weather was fantastic. We went back to our hotel to shower and clean up, and talked for a while to one of the security men who worked there, an Australian who recommended a restaurant back on the main drag called Outback (not the steakhouse!). We had a fantastic dinner and then went back to the beach, which had turned into basically one big bar. There were fire dancers and dance contests and all sorts of wild things up and down the beach so we spent a couple hours walking and people watching, before going back to our hotel.
Kate and Chris S had an earlier flight from Ko Samui to Bangkok than Chris M, Rachael, and I, so they were up and out of the hotel by 6 am the next morning. We, however, stayed until about 10, and then took a taxi with a bunch of other SAS students to the ferry to Samui. From where the ferry docked, we took another short cab to the airport. The airport at Ko Samui was the coolest place—it was an outdoor airport with thatch-roofed open-air buildings, a testament to the perpetually nice weather on the islands. Our flight was at 1:30 pm but we were there so earlier that they bumped the three of us to the 12:15 flight.
We got to Bangkok around 1:45 and took a cab (real ones, this time) to the Davis Hotel. Chris M had several friends that were supposed to be staying there, and we figured we could either stay with them for a night or get our own room. After a lot of debate with the hotel staff about whether or not they had space for us, the three of us booked a room with a king bed. The Davis was a gorgeous boutique hotel, definitely too nice for us to be staying in, but I hadn't stayed in a nice hotel independently yet and the room was the equivalent, per person, to the guesthouse I stayed at in Japan. So we stayed there for two nights. The bed was so gigantic and comfortable, and the bathroom was all marble with both a large bathtub and a large shower and the whole experience was marvelous. I wish I had the kind of spare cash that I could travel like that in every country, but really all I ever need is a place to rest my head and hopefully shower. It was nice to feel pampered, though.
That night, we made friends with a waitress in hotel bar named Dao, and she decided to take us all out to a bar. She took us to the backpacking district in Bangkok, so we ran into a couple of other SASers. Here seems as good of a place as any to talk about Thailand's king. Thai people are OBSESSED with their king. He's on every bill, pictures of him are all over the place, there are huge signs at the airport that declare, "long live the King." It's the 60th year of his reign, and so Bangkok has billboard after billboard of pictures and sayings about the king. Anyway, on the cab ride to the bar, I asked Dao about it, and she rambled on and on for 5 minutes about how much she adored her king, what a great person he is, what a humanitarian he is, how he's done all these amazing things for Thai people. It was interesting to see because I've never seen a group of people that revered their ruler so thoroughly.
The next morning, October 7th, Kate and Chris S met up with us at our hotel at 9 am and we went to the Chao Phraya River for a boat ride. The river runs through Bangkok and is where the nicest hotels and apartment buildings are located. The boat ride was about 2 hours long and pretty uneventful, although we could see several monuments from the river, and we passed through residential areas, which were cool to see. When we got off the boat, we decided to head to the Grand Palace. However, when we got there, Rachael and I were the only people properly dressed (your knees had to be covered), so we broke off from the group and visited it by ourselves.
The Grand Palace is so beautiful! It's weird, though, it looks very similar in the architecture to the Royal Palace in Cambodia. Lots of gold, pointy buildings and fantastical creatures made of stone and precious metals. The main attraction in the Grand Palace is the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which is the holiest place in Thailand. Buddhism is the Thai religion, and I couldn't tell you what makes the Emerald Buddha so holy, but there you have it. Once again, I felt like I was back in Cambodia, with the whole Emerald Buddha thing. In Thailand, when you're sitting in front of an image of Buddha, you have to have your feet crossed or tucked behind you, because the Thais consider feet to be the dirtiest part of the body and it's really really rude to point your feet at something holy. (On that note, YouTube was banned in Thailand for a while because there was a video of someone pointing their feet at an image of the king.)
Rachael and I felt good having gotten something cultural out of the way, so we rewarded ourselves by going shopping! We went to this store called Playground! which was considered a concept store. The first floor had a Starbucks, a restaurant, and a music and magazine area. I've seriously never seen so many magazines in my life, and I bought a few because it was the first time in over a month that I'd had access to American mags. The CD selection was also pretty fantastic.
The second floor of Playground! had a bookstore area (mostly of the coffee-table variety), a stationary area, all sorts of weird toys and knick-knacks, and clothes. It was all so cool and hip, but a lot of it was really expensive. The clothes were interesting but more like art than clothing I would want to wear on a daily basis. The top floor had two more restaurants and a home design center. All in all, it was a really interesting and enjoyable store; I wish we had something like it in Chicago, I know it'd do really well. Even without buying much, Rachael and I spent well over 2 hours there.
When we got back to the hotel, everyone had left to go to see Muy Thai fighting, which neither of us had any interest in. The plan had been to meet up after they all saw Muy Thai for dinner. The two of us decided to take a nap and ended up sleeping almost 4 hours (I'm telling you, it was a really comfortable bed...plus we're both fantastic at napping.) We woke up at about 9:45 and decided to go out on our own. We had intended to go to this bar called Vertigo, which was a rooftop bar/restaurant at a really nice hotel and apparently had the best views of Bangkok. We got sort of dressed up and went but we couldn't get in because we didn't have closed-toe shoes on. C'est la vie. So we went to a different bar, called Syn, at a different hotel. There weren't many people inside, and the lighting was low and colorful. There were lots of little lights in the carpeted floor that lit up and faded and looked like glittering stars, and the chairs we sat in were plastic half-globes that hung from the ceiling.
The next morning, our last day in Thailand, the Chrises decided to go try and see the Grand Palace, and Kate came with Rachael and I to go to a crocodile farm. We went because we heard there were elephants there and we really wanted to ride one before we left Thailand. It's supposedly the largest crocodile farm, but it really was just depressing. The animals looked mistreated and miserable, and the lone elephant was so sad. We just fed him bananas and moved on. The crocodiles were laying in these rivers of what looked like weirdly dyed water, and we found out later it was to dye their skins and make them into handbags. It was a depressing last thing to do in Thailand.
From there, we went back to the mall we had to meet the bus at and then got on the bus back to the ship. Thailand was a lot of fun, but I really felt like it was the most vacation-y country we went to. I probably could've done more interesting cultural stuff if I had wanted to, but after being thrown into 4 countries into the 3 weeks leading up to Thailand, all I really wanted was some relaxing time to clear my mind. And I did, and it was great. I don't regret the way I spent my time there at all, and I hope I'm fortunate enough to vacation there again some day, because it was a blast.
Alright, so now I've gone through India and Egypt and tomorrow I'm going to be in Turkey. I'd like to try to get the India blog done tonight and posted before I have yet another country to write about, but once again, I can't make any promises. India and Egypt were AMAZING, though, and I can't wait to write about them. I'm going to be staying in Istanbul, I think, and I'm staying on the ship to save money, so maybe I'll have a little extra time to write.
I love you all and miss you lots! I'll be home in a little over a month...yikes!
Friday, November 9, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
china!
Sorry folks, I know it's been a while since I've written last. I promise I've been thinking about writing a lot! But life here aboard the MV Explorer has been hectic at best. I didn't really realize exactly how little time we had between each country...two days looks a lot different on paper. So I've now officially gone to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, and I have so much to share. This is probably going to take two or three posts, so I'm going to get China done in this first blog and try my hardest to have the rest done before we get to India.
Right now, I'm sitting in my cabin and the boat seems to be stationary, which means we're now docked in Singapore! That would be a lot more exciting if we actually visited Singapore, but we're just here to fill up on gas and stock up on water before we finish the voyage to India. I've just finished taking a midterm for my linguistics class, which was such a breeze and I feel silly for even stressing out about it. Meanwhile, I've acquired a terrible cough which has me running to Kleenex or a sink every five minutes, hacking up half my lung, and that's no fun at all. My body feels pretty out of whack, and I'm pretty sure I'm just not getting all the nutrients that I need thanks to all this ship food. I never thought I'd say this but I would probably fight a bull for some fresh romaine lettuce right now, or maybe some spinach...I miss my leafy greens! (We have salad on the ship, and I eat it at every meal, but it's a kind of iceberg lettuce that is literally crunchy water.)
Fresh, uncooked vegetables and fruits in the countries we've been visiting recently are a big no-no if you don't want to spend a couple hours praying to the porcelain god. (Traveler's diarrhea, folks.) It's soooooo tempting too, especially the fruit. On the upside, we now have a regular stock of Japanese pears on the ship, which are officially my favorite fruit ever. They're crunchy like apples but taste kind of like pears...delicious.
On the subject of traveler's diarrhea (how appetizing), we had an outbreak of infectious diarrhea on the ship that was so bad that we had debriefings telling us that we might not be let into Thailand! Apparently, only 2% of the ship can have diarrhea in order to dock in a country, and we were at a whopping 5%. Yours truly was not affected, thankfully. I guess people were eating some things they weren't supposed to in Vietnam. Anyway, after they let us know that we might not get to go to Thailand, a bunch of people who had reported themselves sick earlier went back to the nurse and let her know that they were better and the crisis was averted.
What else can be said about ship life? Well, as I'll tell you more when I get into the subject of China, I got really sick on our last day in Beijing and subsequently missed Hong Kong. I mean, I could see it out of my bedroom and it looked like a really killer city (seriously, it was the best looking city we've been to), but I was too sick to venture off the ship. So we got back to the ship on the 23 of September, I slept all day on the 24th (the last day in Hong Kong), slept through my classes and a lot of the day on the 25th (my birthday!), was feeling mostly better on the 26th but still slept through all of my classes. And then we were in Vietnam on the 27th. Starting to see why I haven't blogged in a while?
I love the routine of Semester at Sea and how we see these countries, pause to catch our breath and repack our bags, and dive back into it, but at the same time, it feels so great to have a break right now. We haven't spent more than two days at a time on the ship since we got to Japan on September 12th! I'm finally getting caught up and back on track with all my classes, as is everyone...there's really been zero time to do homework (which, let's be honest, I can't complain about.) We got back on the ship on Monday night, had Tuesday off from classes, and we dock in India on the 15th. I have to say, I think the best part about this short reprieve from traveling is that my hall finally had laundry day on Tuesday. However, I still haven't gotten my laundry back, so my outfits are getting really creative.
So I started a blog entry about China in between China and Vietnam, but like I said, I was pretty sick, so I got maybe a quarter of the way done with it and didn't really feel like continuing...I didn't feel particularly articulate, needless to say. Anyway, here's what I had, and I'll continue from there (bear in mind that this first part was written two weeks ago):
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I've finally recovered from China (and I mean that in a very literal way) and already I'm going to be in Vietnam tomorrow. If I felt like I didn't have enough time between Japan and China, I've had less than enough time between China and Vietnam. But that's half the fun, right? After spending tomorrow in Ho Chi Mihn City, I fly to Cambodia on Thursday, which I think is going to be life-changing. Either way, I'm excited to move on.
So we docked in Qingdao on last Wednesday. Because of the typhoon offshore, Qingdao was pouring rain and really nasty out. I headed with three of my girlfriends (Kate, Stasi, and Morgan) to the Tsing Tao brewery around 11 am. We went on a tour, which was relatively unenlightening (it was self guided, so we sped through it pretty quickly) and then ended our time at Tsing Tao in the bar. (Beer was included with the price of our tour...have you had Tsing Tao beer before? I think it's my favorite now!)
Here comes the good part of the story. There were two professional photographers near where we sat down, apparently with a wedding party or something. Anyway, the four of us young ladies got situated and they immediately started taking pictures of us. And not just a few. Easily hundreds. Two of the guys with the wedding party had their pictures taken with us. One of the professional photographers had a video camera with him and he interviewed Stasi for a news segment in Giulin. And the head photographer just kept taking pictures of me. He was being kind of sly about it, popping up from behind poles to catch me when I wasn't looking, but he eventually stopped trying to be coy. He knew that I knew. So he took picture after picture after picture of me. Only me. Before they left, the photographer ducked into the gift shop and bought me a pair of ceramic pigs that can hold a bottle of beer between them; a gift, the lesser photographer translated for me, because he thought I was so beautiful. Pigs! (They are REALLY ugly, by the way, but I'm pretty sure I'll have them forever because honestly, how often will I be given pigs in China?)
After the hilarity of the brewery, we got lunch and then walked around a market area of Qingdao. There really wasn't much to do, it was pouring rain, and we couldn't find an ATM that took American debit cards, so around 4 pm we decided to head back to the ship for the night.
The next morning, I was up and in the Union at 6 am for my trip to Beijing. The first couple hours were pretty uneventful (ah, the act of traveling itself) as we took a plane to Beijing and then got on our tour bus. I chose to do a university-hosted trip to Beijing, which means that our guides were university students instead of real guides and that we had a chance to interact with Chinese people our age. Our guides for our stay were named Kate and James (not their real names, the names the chose to be called because their Chinese names were too unpronounceable for us), and the university my group was paired with was Renmin University. My group was the smallest university-hosted trip, with only about 30 of us, and my trip leaders were my extended family parents, Jim (the assistant dean) and Nancy (his wife). (Following still?)
Anyway, we got into Beijing around 1 pm, had lunch, and went to our first attraction—the Temple of Heaven. Basically, the Temple of Heaven is where the Chinese emperor used to receive sacrifices. I made some jokes about human sacrifices, but it seems that there were only animal sacrifices (although, if there were human sacrifices, do you think the Chinese government would ever admit to it?). The Temple of Heaven was pretty but not worth describing in detail here...I suggest Googling some pictures of it, though. The most notable thing that happened at the Temple of Heaven was that I met and walked around with Stevie, Jenna, Danny, and Chris (different Chris than from Japan!), or, as we came to call ourselves for the duration of our trip, "Team Dragon."
After the Temple of Heaven, we went to our hotel (absolutely nasty grungehole called "Long Du Hotel"...also not worth describing, because I think it would gross my Mom out.) Our hotel was bad, but there are worse things in the world. Stevie was assigned as my roommate, which was awesome because she and I get along exceedingly well. We threw our stuff down in our rooms and then it was back to the bus. Dinner was at Renmin University! We had a banquet of sorts with the Chinese students, and we all sat at tables with them. The girl I sat next to called herself Nancy and she was so nice. I feel like I learned a lot about the way Chinese life works thanks to her. (For instance, the Renmin students all live in the dorms because they can't afford apartments in Beijing, and they only pay 100 USD a year to live there!! On the other hand, the living situation in the dorms sounds pretty grim and really minimal...ahh, the Chinese.) Once dinner ended, everyone at my table wanted to go out with the Chinese students, and we agreed on karaoke (or, as the Chinese call it, KTV). KTV was a blast and I have many invitations from Chinese students to come back and visit them (although I'm not really sure if I want to go to China again!).
This seems as good of a time as any to go on a rant about Beijing. It is SO dirty. Not just dirty like garbage in the street. That actually wasn't so bad. But it is straight up the most polluted place I've ever been in my life. You could hardly see a hundred yards in front of your face because it was so smoggy, constantly. I felt like every time I took a deep breath, I was losing a day of my life. I'm really confused as to how it was chosen as an Olympic city because I don't know how Olympic athletes will be able to compete in air like that.
Ok, this is where the original part of the post ends. Picking up from that...
The next morning (bright and early at 7 am!; Friday, Sept. 21) we left our hotel to go see the Ming tombs. On the way to the Ming tombs, we stopped at a jade factory, which was really just a lame tourist trap. Apparently, bus drivers take tour groups to places like this because they get a cut of the profit from it. Our bus driver made up an excuse about how traffic was really bad and we might as well stop and wait for it to get better...except that there was no traffic. Anyway, we eventually got to the Ming tombs, which was pretty anticlimactic. Thirteen out of the sixteen emperors from the Ming dynasty are buried there, and it's a gigantic area and maybe if we had a whole day to explore it, I would've enjoyed it more. We only went to one tomb, the Ding Ling tomb (yeah, it's really called that), which is the only tomb that has been opened and excavated. It wasn't very cool because it had been looted or something and there really wasn't anything to see, except a gigantic cement hole that you walked into. (This part of the trip, seeing useless touristy stuff that's really only interesting if you know a lot about the history, made me wish I had done an independent trip!)
After the Ming tombs, we went to lunch, but first we had to tour a cloisonné factory (gotta love that bus driver.) Then, after lunch, we headed to the exciting part of the day...the Great Wall!!
There are several parts of the Great Wall that are close to Beijing and open to tourists, and we just went to the section that was closest to the city. The sections that are open have obviously been rebuilt over the years, and aren't really the original Great Wall, but it was still probably one of my favorite parts of Semester at Sea to date. Of course, I'd heard all about the Great Wall since I first started taking history classes (so, what, first grade?), but I'd always pictured it as just a long stretch that you walk along. (Apparently, some of the sections are like that...the most touristy section, which some of the other Semester at Sea groups went to, features a cable car to the top and a slide to the bottom.) Anyway, the section we went to was not like that. At all.
Basically, the section of the Great Wall that we climbed (yes, climbed) was a never-ending, extremely steep staircase. You'd take the winding, swerving stairs up for a while, and then there'd be a stop at a tower, and then you'd start again. I think there were eight or nine towers, but I honestly stopped counting. Team Dragon started climbing the stairs all together, but then Jenna and Stevie were exhausted by the first tower and decided to go at a much slower pace, so I continued up to the top with the boys. It took about 45 minutes to get to the top and wow! The view was so spectacular. I kept stopping along the way and taking pictures, much to the chagrin of the two jumpy young men I was climbing with. It was a really difficult climb (probably because it was so frigging humid out) but it felt so great to get done. It's too bad, once again, that Beijing is such a polluted city, because the mountains were polluted too and the view would've been so much better if it had been in clean air. Regardless of the pollution, it was an awesome experience; I'll try to get some pictures up soon (I know, I know, I keep saying that, but the ship internet is really too slow!) because they're pretty cool.
We went to a Peking duck restaurant for dinner, which I obviously did not partake in, and then we went back to the hotel. Team Dragon (yep, it's really easier than naming everyone) went out to this nightlife area that's built around a small lake, called Houhai, which was pretty much full of tourists but pretty nonetheless. Not feeling up to spending too much yuan in a flashy club full of Americans, we bought some Tsing Tao beers from a stand for the equivalent of 30 cents US each and spent the night walking around the lake and people-watching.
The next morning (Saturday, Sept. 22), we were up again at 7 am and we started our day off at Tiananmen Square. It was interesting to see almost solely because of the historical value, but it really is just a big open public area. Here's something creepy, though: Mao's tomb is built on the square and there are viewings twice daily. I really wanted to go inside and check him out (I think he's mummified or plasticized or something), but there was an insanely huge line of Chinese people waiting to get inside and we just didn't have the time.
Here's an appropriate time to go on another rant about China: I HATE LATRINES. I've heard that squat toilets are supposed to be more sanitary or something but honestly. It's really hard to use a squat toilet unless you've been doing it all your life and have the appropriate muscles needed for it. With that preamble, now let me say: Chinese babies and young children don't wear diapers. They wear pants with slits in them and when they need to go to the bathroom, their parents help them squat whenever and wherever they happen to be. For instance, I saw two adorable Chinese toddlers squat with the help of their mothers in front of the Chinese flag and the gigantic picture of Mao that lords over Tiananmen Square and urinate in public. Right there. On cement. Not so adorable. Let me once again emphasize how dirty China is.
Anyway, after all that, we walked across the street and visited the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City seemed like it could've been pretty awesome. Seriously. But, along with everything else in Beijing, it's under renovation for the 2008 Olympics. So the main building was closed, along with a couple of the more important looking buildings. I don't really know what I saw there but it was all really beautiful and I left feeling disappointed because I think I'll have to go back and visit the Forbidden City again someday when it's not mostly closed. The disappointment is for having to go back to Beijing someday. I feel like this is all complaining and I really don't mean it to be; I'm really glad I got to see China and I got to see all these fantastic things that I've always dreamed about, but I think it just wasn't what I was expecting it to be. And I have to be honest, (once again, I'm so glad I got to see these things and feel so fortunate, but...) I really don't like what I saw of China and never plan on going there again. I guess I've made it pretty apparent that it's not my cup of tea, huh?
Well after the disappointing hour and a half we spent in the Forbidden City, we were scheduled for lunch and to go on tours of the hutong. Hutong are these communities built within little roads all throughout Beijing. They're kind of hard to describe, so once again, I'm gonna suggest you Google "hutong". They're important right now because the city of Beijing has been tearing down a lot of hutong in order to build new things for the Olympics and it's a really big controversy in China since they're a longstanding part of the city culture. I'd heard from some of the Chinese students that the hutong are really good to see by bike and I was getting pretty tired of scheduled group tours and itching to do something on my own. So Chris and I said farewell to the group and he and I left the Forbidden City in search of bikes to rent.
After about ten minutes of walking with no real direction, he and I decided to walk into a hotel and see if they knew anywhere to rent bikes. And, coincidentally, the hotel rented them out. So we found our bikes for the day! Now I actually have something positive to say about Beijing: it is an AMAZING bike city. There are huge bike lanes built next to car lanes and usually separated by a median, and the bike lanes even get a traffic light. It's such an easy city to bike in and the afternoon that we spent biking was, the Great Wall aside, the highlight of my trip to China.
So we rented our bikes and we decided to head to the Silk Market. The Silk Market area was, at one point, notorious for cheap fake goods. However, because of the Olympics, the city was trying to "clean up" the area, so it isn't the knock-off mecca that it once was. We parked our bikes in a bike lot and walked around the area for a few minutes before we were enticed by a man selling pirated DVDs. (Sorry, Dad.) It was actually a pretty sketchy transaction; we followed him to a restaurant, and sat down at a table at the restaurant. Then they brought out the DVDs and we looked through them and picked out ones we were interested in. We probably went through a few hundred DVDs and ended up getting around 30 between the two of us. After we left, another DVD hawker hooked me when he promised he had Sex and the City, so I bought the entire Sex and the City series, too. And you know what, it's really awesome having some TV shows to watch on this dang ship.
After our movie-buying marathon, we went into the actual Silk Market, which is a big building (4 stories with two basement floors?) filled with stalls of people selling knock-offs. Shirts, shoes, purses, even socks. Anything that you might want a knock-off of, they had it. But neither of us really wanted anything, so we just went to the mail room and I finally sent out all the mail I'd been meaning to for two ports (has anyone received anything yet? I feel like it will probably never get to you.) Then we got back on our bikes and continued with our adventure.
We biked through hutong, which was really cool and a very interesting perspective of Chinese life, and somehow at the end of all our biking we ended up back near the Houhai area we had been at the night before, so we found a restaurant around the lake that looked good and had dinner there. After dinner, we had to meet our group back up at the Beijing opera, so we had to book it to the hotel we'd rented the bikes from and drop those off. Then we grabbed a taxi and went to the opera!
Chinese opera is actually really fun to watch. It's kind of a spectacle; there's singing, there's acrobatics, there's really crazy costumes! I was really tired though and kept almost dozing off...oops. After the opera, we just went back to the hotel for the night and we all hung out in Stevie and my room for our last night in Beijing. I was really tired and started falling asleep but I was feeling kind of nauseous, and even told Stevie and Chris that I wasn't feeling very well. Well, that was the beginning of the end for me.
I woke up in the middle of the night and had to race to the bathroom to vomit. That happened four times throughout the night, and needless to say, I was having some trouble getting my stuff together and getting ready the next morning. For some reason, my legs were so sore and painful that I couldn't really walk; even when I was sitting completely still, my legs hurt. We went to the Summer Palace, which I really had wanted to see, but I wasn't feeling well enough to get off the bus and spent the entire three hours in the back of the bus sleeping. From the Summer Palace we thankfully started heading to the airport, but I got sick again as we arrived at the airport, and then one last time when we were in the airport. It was maybe one of the most miserable days of my life. Then we took our plane to Hong Kong. We got on a bus in Hong Kong, were shuttled back to the ship, and by that point I hadn't eaten all day and hadn't been able to keep almost any liquids down. We got to the line to get back on the ship and I almost started crying because I was having trouble holding myself up. Stevie and Chris took my bags from me and made sure everyone in the line knew that it was urgent that I got back on the ship first, so I thankfully cut the line and got my stuff from them later. The first thing I did was take a hot shower to try and make my muscles feel better. Then Jim, the assistant dean/my extended family father, came by my room and took me to the clinic.
Well, surprise. I had a 102-degree fever and was severely dehydrated. The nurse gave me anti-nausea pills and ibuprofen and then I went straight to bed for my Long Sleep. I can't say enough how nice everyone on my trip was that entire last day. Nancy kept coming with me to sit down at the airport because I couldn't stand for more than 5 minutes at a time, and people switched off who carried my bags. The nurse has no idea if I got food poisoning or if I just picked up something viral, but either way, I feel eons better now.
So basically, I didn't have the best time of my life in China but it was definitely an experience. I think I should probably end this blog here, because I've been writing this for about an hour and a half now and it's seven pages long and I need do some homework! But I really am going to try to post at least about Vietnam/Cambodia before we get to India. Just to let you know what you have to look forward to in that post: I am completely and totally in love with Southeast Asia and have been floored by every other country I've been too. The people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand are all so nice and so kind (in comparison to the Chinese, who I found to be loud, rude, and not so kind) and the countries have all been so beyond beautiful. (Although I think I might have allergies in Southeast Asia, which is weird because I've never had allergies in my life and I'm just kind of confused about what I'm feeling...I keep thinking I'm getting sick but maybe not?) I miss you all and love you so much. Thank you for sending me emails, they make my day, even though I haven't really been able to respond to them individually...just so you know, I am reading them, and I really hope you all keep writing because I love knowing what's going on with all of you in the States. It's hard to not feel pretty disconnected from home on this ship somewhere on the other side of the world.
Until later then, xoxoxo,
Eliza
Right now, I'm sitting in my cabin and the boat seems to be stationary, which means we're now docked in Singapore! That would be a lot more exciting if we actually visited Singapore, but we're just here to fill up on gas and stock up on water before we finish the voyage to India. I've just finished taking a midterm for my linguistics class, which was such a breeze and I feel silly for even stressing out about it. Meanwhile, I've acquired a terrible cough which has me running to Kleenex or a sink every five minutes, hacking up half my lung, and that's no fun at all. My body feels pretty out of whack, and I'm pretty sure I'm just not getting all the nutrients that I need thanks to all this ship food. I never thought I'd say this but I would probably fight a bull for some fresh romaine lettuce right now, or maybe some spinach...I miss my leafy greens! (We have salad on the ship, and I eat it at every meal, but it's a kind of iceberg lettuce that is literally crunchy water.)
Fresh, uncooked vegetables and fruits in the countries we've been visiting recently are a big no-no if you don't want to spend a couple hours praying to the porcelain god. (Traveler's diarrhea, folks.) It's soooooo tempting too, especially the fruit. On the upside, we now have a regular stock of Japanese pears on the ship, which are officially my favorite fruit ever. They're crunchy like apples but taste kind of like pears...delicious.
On the subject of traveler's diarrhea (how appetizing), we had an outbreak of infectious diarrhea on the ship that was so bad that we had debriefings telling us that we might not be let into Thailand! Apparently, only 2% of the ship can have diarrhea in order to dock in a country, and we were at a whopping 5%. Yours truly was not affected, thankfully. I guess people were eating some things they weren't supposed to in Vietnam. Anyway, after they let us know that we might not get to go to Thailand, a bunch of people who had reported themselves sick earlier went back to the nurse and let her know that they were better and the crisis was averted.
What else can be said about ship life? Well, as I'll tell you more when I get into the subject of China, I got really sick on our last day in Beijing and subsequently missed Hong Kong. I mean, I could see it out of my bedroom and it looked like a really killer city (seriously, it was the best looking city we've been to), but I was too sick to venture off the ship. So we got back to the ship on the 23 of September, I slept all day on the 24th (the last day in Hong Kong), slept through my classes and a lot of the day on the 25th (my birthday!), was feeling mostly better on the 26th but still slept through all of my classes. And then we were in Vietnam on the 27th. Starting to see why I haven't blogged in a while?
I love the routine of Semester at Sea and how we see these countries, pause to catch our breath and repack our bags, and dive back into it, but at the same time, it feels so great to have a break right now. We haven't spent more than two days at a time on the ship since we got to Japan on September 12th! I'm finally getting caught up and back on track with all my classes, as is everyone...there's really been zero time to do homework (which, let's be honest, I can't complain about.) We got back on the ship on Monday night, had Tuesday off from classes, and we dock in India on the 15th. I have to say, I think the best part about this short reprieve from traveling is that my hall finally had laundry day on Tuesday. However, I still haven't gotten my laundry back, so my outfits are getting really creative.
So I started a blog entry about China in between China and Vietnam, but like I said, I was pretty sick, so I got maybe a quarter of the way done with it and didn't really feel like continuing...I didn't feel particularly articulate, needless to say. Anyway, here's what I had, and I'll continue from there (bear in mind that this first part was written two weeks ago):
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I've finally recovered from China (and I mean that in a very literal way) and already I'm going to be in Vietnam tomorrow. If I felt like I didn't have enough time between Japan and China, I've had less than enough time between China and Vietnam. But that's half the fun, right? After spending tomorrow in Ho Chi Mihn City, I fly to Cambodia on Thursday, which I think is going to be life-changing. Either way, I'm excited to move on.
So we docked in Qingdao on last Wednesday. Because of the typhoon offshore, Qingdao was pouring rain and really nasty out. I headed with three of my girlfriends (Kate, Stasi, and Morgan) to the Tsing Tao brewery around 11 am. We went on a tour, which was relatively unenlightening (it was self guided, so we sped through it pretty quickly) and then ended our time at Tsing Tao in the bar. (Beer was included with the price of our tour...have you had Tsing Tao beer before? I think it's my favorite now!)
Here comes the good part of the story. There were two professional photographers near where we sat down, apparently with a wedding party or something. Anyway, the four of us young ladies got situated and they immediately started taking pictures of us. And not just a few. Easily hundreds. Two of the guys with the wedding party had their pictures taken with us. One of the professional photographers had a video camera with him and he interviewed Stasi for a news segment in Giulin. And the head photographer just kept taking pictures of me. He was being kind of sly about it, popping up from behind poles to catch me when I wasn't looking, but he eventually stopped trying to be coy. He knew that I knew. So he took picture after picture after picture of me. Only me. Before they left, the photographer ducked into the gift shop and bought me a pair of ceramic pigs that can hold a bottle of beer between them; a gift, the lesser photographer translated for me, because he thought I was so beautiful. Pigs! (They are REALLY ugly, by the way, but I'm pretty sure I'll have them forever because honestly, how often will I be given pigs in China?)
After the hilarity of the brewery, we got lunch and then walked around a market area of Qingdao. There really wasn't much to do, it was pouring rain, and we couldn't find an ATM that took American debit cards, so around 4 pm we decided to head back to the ship for the night.
The next morning, I was up and in the Union at 6 am for my trip to Beijing. The first couple hours were pretty uneventful (ah, the act of traveling itself) as we took a plane to Beijing and then got on our tour bus. I chose to do a university-hosted trip to Beijing, which means that our guides were university students instead of real guides and that we had a chance to interact with Chinese people our age. Our guides for our stay were named Kate and James (not their real names, the names the chose to be called because their Chinese names were too unpronounceable for us), and the university my group was paired with was Renmin University. My group was the smallest university-hosted trip, with only about 30 of us, and my trip leaders were my extended family parents, Jim (the assistant dean) and Nancy (his wife). (Following still?)
Anyway, we got into Beijing around 1 pm, had lunch, and went to our first attraction—the Temple of Heaven. Basically, the Temple of Heaven is where the Chinese emperor used to receive sacrifices. I made some jokes about human sacrifices, but it seems that there were only animal sacrifices (although, if there were human sacrifices, do you think the Chinese government would ever admit to it?). The Temple of Heaven was pretty but not worth describing in detail here...I suggest Googling some pictures of it, though. The most notable thing that happened at the Temple of Heaven was that I met and walked around with Stevie, Jenna, Danny, and Chris (different Chris than from Japan!), or, as we came to call ourselves for the duration of our trip, "Team Dragon."
After the Temple of Heaven, we went to our hotel (absolutely nasty grungehole called "Long Du Hotel"...also not worth describing, because I think it would gross my Mom out.) Our hotel was bad, but there are worse things in the world. Stevie was assigned as my roommate, which was awesome because she and I get along exceedingly well. We threw our stuff down in our rooms and then it was back to the bus. Dinner was at Renmin University! We had a banquet of sorts with the Chinese students, and we all sat at tables with them. The girl I sat next to called herself Nancy and she was so nice. I feel like I learned a lot about the way Chinese life works thanks to her. (For instance, the Renmin students all live in the dorms because they can't afford apartments in Beijing, and they only pay 100 USD a year to live there!! On the other hand, the living situation in the dorms sounds pretty grim and really minimal...ahh, the Chinese.) Once dinner ended, everyone at my table wanted to go out with the Chinese students, and we agreed on karaoke (or, as the Chinese call it, KTV). KTV was a blast and I have many invitations from Chinese students to come back and visit them (although I'm not really sure if I want to go to China again!).
This seems as good of a time as any to go on a rant about Beijing. It is SO dirty. Not just dirty like garbage in the street. That actually wasn't so bad. But it is straight up the most polluted place I've ever been in my life. You could hardly see a hundred yards in front of your face because it was so smoggy, constantly. I felt like every time I took a deep breath, I was losing a day of my life. I'm really confused as to how it was chosen as an Olympic city because I don't know how Olympic athletes will be able to compete in air like that.
Ok, this is where the original part of the post ends. Picking up from that...
The next morning (bright and early at 7 am!; Friday, Sept. 21) we left our hotel to go see the Ming tombs. On the way to the Ming tombs, we stopped at a jade factory, which was really just a lame tourist trap. Apparently, bus drivers take tour groups to places like this because they get a cut of the profit from it. Our bus driver made up an excuse about how traffic was really bad and we might as well stop and wait for it to get better...except that there was no traffic. Anyway, we eventually got to the Ming tombs, which was pretty anticlimactic. Thirteen out of the sixteen emperors from the Ming dynasty are buried there, and it's a gigantic area and maybe if we had a whole day to explore it, I would've enjoyed it more. We only went to one tomb, the Ding Ling tomb (yeah, it's really called that), which is the only tomb that has been opened and excavated. It wasn't very cool because it had been looted or something and there really wasn't anything to see, except a gigantic cement hole that you walked into. (This part of the trip, seeing useless touristy stuff that's really only interesting if you know a lot about the history, made me wish I had done an independent trip!)
After the Ming tombs, we went to lunch, but first we had to tour a cloisonné factory (gotta love that bus driver.) Then, after lunch, we headed to the exciting part of the day...the Great Wall!!
There are several parts of the Great Wall that are close to Beijing and open to tourists, and we just went to the section that was closest to the city. The sections that are open have obviously been rebuilt over the years, and aren't really the original Great Wall, but it was still probably one of my favorite parts of Semester at Sea to date. Of course, I'd heard all about the Great Wall since I first started taking history classes (so, what, first grade?), but I'd always pictured it as just a long stretch that you walk along. (Apparently, some of the sections are like that...the most touristy section, which some of the other Semester at Sea groups went to, features a cable car to the top and a slide to the bottom.) Anyway, the section we went to was not like that. At all.
Basically, the section of the Great Wall that we climbed (yes, climbed) was a never-ending, extremely steep staircase. You'd take the winding, swerving stairs up for a while, and then there'd be a stop at a tower, and then you'd start again. I think there were eight or nine towers, but I honestly stopped counting. Team Dragon started climbing the stairs all together, but then Jenna and Stevie were exhausted by the first tower and decided to go at a much slower pace, so I continued up to the top with the boys. It took about 45 minutes to get to the top and wow! The view was so spectacular. I kept stopping along the way and taking pictures, much to the chagrin of the two jumpy young men I was climbing with. It was a really difficult climb (probably because it was so frigging humid out) but it felt so great to get done. It's too bad, once again, that Beijing is such a polluted city, because the mountains were polluted too and the view would've been so much better if it had been in clean air. Regardless of the pollution, it was an awesome experience; I'll try to get some pictures up soon (I know, I know, I keep saying that, but the ship internet is really too slow!) because they're pretty cool.
We went to a Peking duck restaurant for dinner, which I obviously did not partake in, and then we went back to the hotel. Team Dragon (yep, it's really easier than naming everyone) went out to this nightlife area that's built around a small lake, called Houhai, which was pretty much full of tourists but pretty nonetheless. Not feeling up to spending too much yuan in a flashy club full of Americans, we bought some Tsing Tao beers from a stand for the equivalent of 30 cents US each and spent the night walking around the lake and people-watching.
The next morning (Saturday, Sept. 22), we were up again at 7 am and we started our day off at Tiananmen Square. It was interesting to see almost solely because of the historical value, but it really is just a big open public area. Here's something creepy, though: Mao's tomb is built on the square and there are viewings twice daily. I really wanted to go inside and check him out (I think he's mummified or plasticized or something), but there was an insanely huge line of Chinese people waiting to get inside and we just didn't have the time.
Here's an appropriate time to go on another rant about China: I HATE LATRINES. I've heard that squat toilets are supposed to be more sanitary or something but honestly. It's really hard to use a squat toilet unless you've been doing it all your life and have the appropriate muscles needed for it. With that preamble, now let me say: Chinese babies and young children don't wear diapers. They wear pants with slits in them and when they need to go to the bathroom, their parents help them squat whenever and wherever they happen to be. For instance, I saw two adorable Chinese toddlers squat with the help of their mothers in front of the Chinese flag and the gigantic picture of Mao that lords over Tiananmen Square and urinate in public. Right there. On cement. Not so adorable. Let me once again emphasize how dirty China is.
Anyway, after all that, we walked across the street and visited the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City seemed like it could've been pretty awesome. Seriously. But, along with everything else in Beijing, it's under renovation for the 2008 Olympics. So the main building was closed, along with a couple of the more important looking buildings. I don't really know what I saw there but it was all really beautiful and I left feeling disappointed because I think I'll have to go back and visit the Forbidden City again someday when it's not mostly closed. The disappointment is for having to go back to Beijing someday. I feel like this is all complaining and I really don't mean it to be; I'm really glad I got to see China and I got to see all these fantastic things that I've always dreamed about, but I think it just wasn't what I was expecting it to be. And I have to be honest, (once again, I'm so glad I got to see these things and feel so fortunate, but...) I really don't like what I saw of China and never plan on going there again. I guess I've made it pretty apparent that it's not my cup of tea, huh?
Well after the disappointing hour and a half we spent in the Forbidden City, we were scheduled for lunch and to go on tours of the hutong. Hutong are these communities built within little roads all throughout Beijing. They're kind of hard to describe, so once again, I'm gonna suggest you Google "hutong". They're important right now because the city of Beijing has been tearing down a lot of hutong in order to build new things for the Olympics and it's a really big controversy in China since they're a longstanding part of the city culture. I'd heard from some of the Chinese students that the hutong are really good to see by bike and I was getting pretty tired of scheduled group tours and itching to do something on my own. So Chris and I said farewell to the group and he and I left the Forbidden City in search of bikes to rent.
After about ten minutes of walking with no real direction, he and I decided to walk into a hotel and see if they knew anywhere to rent bikes. And, coincidentally, the hotel rented them out. So we found our bikes for the day! Now I actually have something positive to say about Beijing: it is an AMAZING bike city. There are huge bike lanes built next to car lanes and usually separated by a median, and the bike lanes even get a traffic light. It's such an easy city to bike in and the afternoon that we spent biking was, the Great Wall aside, the highlight of my trip to China.
So we rented our bikes and we decided to head to the Silk Market. The Silk Market area was, at one point, notorious for cheap fake goods. However, because of the Olympics, the city was trying to "clean up" the area, so it isn't the knock-off mecca that it once was. We parked our bikes in a bike lot and walked around the area for a few minutes before we were enticed by a man selling pirated DVDs. (Sorry, Dad.) It was actually a pretty sketchy transaction; we followed him to a restaurant, and sat down at a table at the restaurant. Then they brought out the DVDs and we looked through them and picked out ones we were interested in. We probably went through a few hundred DVDs and ended up getting around 30 between the two of us. After we left, another DVD hawker hooked me when he promised he had Sex and the City, so I bought the entire Sex and the City series, too. And you know what, it's really awesome having some TV shows to watch on this dang ship.
After our movie-buying marathon, we went into the actual Silk Market, which is a big building (4 stories with two basement floors?) filled with stalls of people selling knock-offs. Shirts, shoes, purses, even socks. Anything that you might want a knock-off of, they had it. But neither of us really wanted anything, so we just went to the mail room and I finally sent out all the mail I'd been meaning to for two ports (has anyone received anything yet? I feel like it will probably never get to you.) Then we got back on our bikes and continued with our adventure.
We biked through hutong, which was really cool and a very interesting perspective of Chinese life, and somehow at the end of all our biking we ended up back near the Houhai area we had been at the night before, so we found a restaurant around the lake that looked good and had dinner there. After dinner, we had to meet our group back up at the Beijing opera, so we had to book it to the hotel we'd rented the bikes from and drop those off. Then we grabbed a taxi and went to the opera!
Chinese opera is actually really fun to watch. It's kind of a spectacle; there's singing, there's acrobatics, there's really crazy costumes! I was really tired though and kept almost dozing off...oops. After the opera, we just went back to the hotel for the night and we all hung out in Stevie and my room for our last night in Beijing. I was really tired and started falling asleep but I was feeling kind of nauseous, and even told Stevie and Chris that I wasn't feeling very well. Well, that was the beginning of the end for me.
I woke up in the middle of the night and had to race to the bathroom to vomit. That happened four times throughout the night, and needless to say, I was having some trouble getting my stuff together and getting ready the next morning. For some reason, my legs were so sore and painful that I couldn't really walk; even when I was sitting completely still, my legs hurt. We went to the Summer Palace, which I really had wanted to see, but I wasn't feeling well enough to get off the bus and spent the entire three hours in the back of the bus sleeping. From the Summer Palace we thankfully started heading to the airport, but I got sick again as we arrived at the airport, and then one last time when we were in the airport. It was maybe one of the most miserable days of my life. Then we took our plane to Hong Kong. We got on a bus in Hong Kong, were shuttled back to the ship, and by that point I hadn't eaten all day and hadn't been able to keep almost any liquids down. We got to the line to get back on the ship and I almost started crying because I was having trouble holding myself up. Stevie and Chris took my bags from me and made sure everyone in the line knew that it was urgent that I got back on the ship first, so I thankfully cut the line and got my stuff from them later. The first thing I did was take a hot shower to try and make my muscles feel better. Then Jim, the assistant dean/my extended family father, came by my room and took me to the clinic.
Well, surprise. I had a 102-degree fever and was severely dehydrated. The nurse gave me anti-nausea pills and ibuprofen and then I went straight to bed for my Long Sleep. I can't say enough how nice everyone on my trip was that entire last day. Nancy kept coming with me to sit down at the airport because I couldn't stand for more than 5 minutes at a time, and people switched off who carried my bags. The nurse has no idea if I got food poisoning or if I just picked up something viral, but either way, I feel eons better now.
So basically, I didn't have the best time of my life in China but it was definitely an experience. I think I should probably end this blog here, because I've been writing this for about an hour and a half now and it's seven pages long and I need do some homework! But I really am going to try to post at least about Vietnam/Cambodia before we get to India. Just to let you know what you have to look forward to in that post: I am completely and totally in love with Southeast Asia and have been floored by every other country I've been too. The people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand are all so nice and so kind (in comparison to the Chinese, who I found to be loud, rude, and not so kind) and the countries have all been so beyond beautiful. (Although I think I might have allergies in Southeast Asia, which is weird because I've never had allergies in my life and I'm just kind of confused about what I'm feeling...I keep thinking I'm getting sick but maybe not?) I miss you all and love you so much. Thank you for sending me emails, they make my day, even though I haven't really been able to respond to them individually...just so you know, I am reading them, and I really hope you all keep writing because I love knowing what's going on with all of you in the States. It's hard to not feel pretty disconnected from home on this ship somewhere on the other side of the world.
Until later then, xoxoxo,
Eliza
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
nihon
Hi all! I'm back from my wonderful 5 days in Japan and we're already going to be in China tomorrow! I wish I had another day or two to recuperate from Japan before getting thrown into another foreign culture, but I've been having an amazing time. To update you on my life aboard the MV Explorer: I'm the executive producer of the student-run TV channel ("SeaTV") which is a lot of fun and keeps me blissfully busy, and I recently sang with my friend Jason in the talent show...it was nerve-racking but felt great. As far as Japan...well, it's probably best to start from the beginning here...
We docked into Japan around 8 am on Wednesday the 12th, but because Japan had such hard port regulations, I didn't get off the ship and into Yokohama until about 2:30. I traveled with a girl named Hannah from Hawaii, and a guy named Chris from Seattle. As soon as we were off the boat, we walked to the train station to exchange our Japan rail passes. Unfortunately, we went to the wrong train station and had to take a cab to the one that would exchange our passes. Yokohama looked like a really interesting city but we didn't get to see much of it.
The line in the Japan Rail office was really long with all the Semester at Sea students in there exchanging their tickets for passes, so we put in our information and went down to the basement of the train station to find some food. Japanese train stations are so gigantic, clean, and confusing. There's an American mentality that Japanese people all speak English; this is definitely false. However, there was a tourist information office that DID speak English, and they directed us to food. We walked into a Japanese restaurant and pointed at things on the menu, telling the waitress that Hannah and I were vegetarian with the help of Chris' Japanese phrasebook.
Once we finished eating, we went and got our rail passes and attempted to find a train that would take us to Tokyo. By this point, it was around 5 pm. Seems I have to pause for backstory now: I have a really good friend from Tokyo named Yumi Kawai, who I met at Woodlands. Yumi was in France while we were in Japan, but she hooked me up with her parents and two of her friends. We planned on being shown around by her friends all day Wednesday and Thursday and staying at her parent's house Thursday night. Her two friends names are Yukako and Tomoko, and I had originally told them that we would be in to Tokyo by noon. When I realized I wouldn't be getting off the boat in time, I called Yukako on a Japanese student's phone and told her I wouldn't be into Shibuya (the neighborhood we were supposed to meet her at) until 2:30. Once I got off the ship, I tried to call her several different times from different locations, but wasn't able to get ahold of her!
Anyway, we tried to find a train to Shibuya, which was difficult because we couldn't really read the train maps and we were having trouble finding an English speaker. We even boarded the wrong train at one point, realizing a moment before the doors closed that we needed to get off of it. Ultimately, we found the train we needed to be on with the help of a person who worked at the train station and we headed to Shibuya.
The train station at Shibuya is of note because there is a gigantic statue of a dog outside of it. The story of the statue is that there was a dog that used to follow his owner to work every day and wait for him until he came back. One day, the owner died, but the dog kept coming to the train every day to wait for him. The Japanese found the dog's loyalty so admirable that they erected a statue for him near the station. The Shibuya district is of note now because it's a really hot shopping district for young people.
It was pretty daunting getting off the train because there were people EVERYWHERE. We tried to find someone to direct us toward the public phones but, again, we couldn't find anyone who spoke English. We finally located the phones and I called Yukako, who sounded relieved to hear from me; it was 6 pm at that point and about 4 hours later than I told her we'd be meeting her. Yukako and Tomoko met us at the statue of the dog and showed us around Shibuya a bit. It was very colorful, very loud, and very full of people.
After about half an hour, Yumi's parents, Megumi and Takeshi, showed up, and the seven of us went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The Kawais are so nice and so kind; there wasn't an awkward moment the entire time we were with them and we had a great time together. The restaurant was the type where you take your shoes off and sit on the floor. Takeshi ordered us all a round of beers and sake and Megumi ordered all the food. Instead of an appetizer like bread, they served fried spaghetti, which was so good; I'd prefer it to popcorn in a movie theater if I had the choice. We had sushi, fried tofu, shrimp, tomato salad, and so much more for dinner. Then they ordered us some traditional Japanese desserts, which were yogurts and ice creams with fruit; delicious! All in all, it was such a fun and satisfying dinner.
We had plans to stay in a capsule hotel that night, and the Kawais were insistent that we give them our backpacks and anything we didn't need so we wouldn't have to carry them around the whole next day. We ended up giving them two of our backpacks, which was so nice of them. Then they hailed a cab for us and directed us toward the Roppongi district, which is one of the nightlife areas, and we parted ways for the night.
When we got to Roppongi, Chris, Hannah, and I went to a "manga cafe" (a super nice internet cafe that has isolated rooms you go into for privacy) to check our emails. Then we went down a floor to a capsule hotel that we had decided to stay at. Capsule hotels consist of little pods that you sleep in; it was way more comfortable than it sounds! Chris went across the street to a club called Gas Panic, where a bunch of Semester at Sea students were meeting. Hannah and I didn't really feel like going out to clubs, so we wandered around Roppongi just taking everything in. We went back to the capsule hotel around 1 am and enjoyed the public bath/spa in the women's area...it really helped my sore legs feel better. Thus ended our first night in Japan.
The next morning, I got up around 9 and showered and started getting ready. Then I woke Hannah up, and we packed up our stuff and met Chris out in the lobby of the capsule hotel. We grabbed a small breakfast from a coffee shop and navigated the frightening trains again to meet Megumi, Yukako, and Tomoko in front of the sumo-wrestling stadium. After getting lost around the station, we finally found Megumi, and we all decided that the sumo tournament was too expensive for something we didn't really care about seeing. Takeshi's office was across the street from where we were, so he met up with us and we all went to lunch at a soba noodle restaurant. Soba noodles are SO GOOD and really healthy! You dip them in soy sauce, and you have to slurp them in order to be like a Japanese person. We saw them making the noodles and it was really interesting.
After lunch, Takeshi took our one last big backpack to his office with him so we could walk around without it, and we parted ways with him for the afternoon. We all headed to the Edo Museum, which is a big museum dedicated to the history of Japan's Edo period. It was cool to see because we don't get much Japanese history in American museums! When we finished with that, we got into two cabs and went over to the Asukasa neighborhood to have tea and see a temple.
We had Japanese desserts/snacks in the tea restaurant and I honestly can't explain them. They were all dumpling things and beans and weird tasting...but good. The menu had a lot of English misspelling on it, which made Chris, Hannah, and I almost cry from laughing. (Such as: "Sweet syrup is sprinkled on the one that the block ice was plane" and "We will not eat two or more people in one dish. Hoochs such as beer and wine are not served.") When we finished tea, we went to a Buddhist temple, which was beautiful. I'll try and post pictures of it later, when I'm on a faster internet connection.
After the temple, the six of us took the train to Shinjuku to meet Takeshi for dinner. The Shinjuku station was connected to a department store and we went inside it to see what it was like. We entered the basement floor, which is apparently the food level of any Japanese department store. I have never in my life seen anything like that food level. Chris, Hannah, and I started calling it "Prada food" because the food (mostly delicacies and sweets) were laid out in glass display cases and sold in the same way that American department stores sell fine jewelry and expensive sunglasses. It was beyond cool and extremely mouth-watering. I ended up buying these cookies that Yumi always brings to me and sends me, which are a butter cookie shaped like a cigar. (They're absolutely delicious and I'm already almost through my box...although I have been sharing quite a bit.)
When we left the "Prada food", went outside and met Takeshi at a tempura restaurant, that the Kawais told us was very famous ("because it's so good!"). Yukako left us here because she had to go meet her boyfriend, which was a sad goodbye; she had been so helpful and kind the past two days! We exchanged emails, addresses, and phone numbers, and I encouraged her to come visit Chicago someday; we'll see if she takes me up on the offer. Tomoko was still with us, which was good because we needed people to do karaoke with!
The tempura restaurant was really amazing; we sat on the floor again with our shoes off, and they showed us the eel, squid, and fish we were going to eat before they cooked it. Hannah and I didn't really eat any of the fish, although I had some sushi and some shrimp. The Japanese seem to eat for hours, it's a miracle that they're all so thin. When we finally finished dinner, we did something that Chris, Hannah, and I had been craving...KARAOKE!
Tomoko was an amazing singer and it was such a treat to hear her sing. She's studying voice at a university in Japan, and her mother is an opera singer (her father is the head of a record label). She has such a clear and lovely voice; the Kawais pressured her into singing Amazing Grace at karaoke and it was beautiful. She and I sang the Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey duet "There Can Be Miracles" (from "The Prince of Egypt") and it made Takeshi tear up! The Kawais sang some Japanese songs for us, which was so cool to hear. It was so much fun.
When our hour+ of karaoke was finished, we said our goodbyes to Tomoko and got on the train with the Kawais. We only traveled about one stop on the train because their home is also in the Shinjuku district. They have a lovely apartment, and we stayed in an external room that I think people from the apartment building can rent when they have guests. They showed us pictures of Kyoto and told us good places to see, and then we exchanged gifts. We went to bed thoroughly satisfied with the time we had spent in Tokyo.
On Friday, we woke up early and went upstairs to have breakfast at 9. Megumi had prepared a gigantic traditional Japanese breakfast for us, complete with miso soup, vegetable rolls, salad, Japanese grapes and pears, and soymilk. It was probably the best breakfast I've ever had. (No offense Dad—your pancakes still own my heart!) After breakfast, Megumi drove us to the Shinjuku train station, parked her car, and got on a train with us to take us to Tokyo station. (She said we wouldn't have been able to navigate it by ourselves, and she was definitely right; it was the largest station I've ever been in and everything was in Japanese.) She helped us find a train to Kyoto and took us to the platform, waiting until our train pulled away. The Kawais were so great and beyond hospitable our entire stay and I feel so blessed that we were able to experience Tokyo with such great guides.
We got into Kyoto around 1 pm and spent about an hour and a half in the tourism office booking a hotel for the night. We had planned on renting bikes and seeing some temples that day, but it started raining, so we walked around the mall in the train station for a while and grabbed some lunch. Then we took a cab to our hotel, which was a traditional Japanese-style ryokan. It wasn't a very nice one, though, because we didn't want to spend much on a hotel we weren't going to be in for very long. However, it was good enough for us.
We started wandering around Kyoto, and it was around 6 pm by that point, so there wasn't too much to do. We popped into some vintage stores and did a little shopping, and I bought a crazy hat at a hat shop. Then we spent a really long time trying to find an international ATM. American ATM cards don't work in Japanese ATMs, and international ATMs are pretty much only in post offices and in Citibank. We couldn't find a Citibank and we couldn't find the international ATM that my Japan guidebook told us about, so we eventually gave up and decided we could only go to places that took credit cards.
Wandering around the neighborhood we were staying in, we found a hidden little bar that Hannah was dead-set on going into. The decor was really interesting and the halls were lit with neon lights, and we had to walk down a set of stairs to get to the bar. It was a really small bar with just a single bar and barstools, and it looked really nice, so we decided to have a drink there. We were the only people in there at first. The bartender had been bartending for 18 years and he was very proud of his profession, and spoke pretty decent English. There were a few drinks on the menu that he had created, and I tried one that was made with machi, the Japanese ceremonial green tea, which he said tasted like Kyoto to him. It was very delicious. After having a drink, we left the nice bar and kept looking for food.
We found a restaurant that looked good enough, so we went in and sat down. There were two other tables of people in there; a large table filled with about 20 Japanese businessmen and a table with about 10 friends who appeared to be in their early 30s. We ordered some food and some drinks and sat around having good political conversation for an hour or so. The businessmen cleared out and I'm not sure if it was because they finally were drunk enough or they had built up enough courage, but the table of friends next to us came over and started talking. They didn't really speak any English, but we were able to make conversation with my point-and-speak Japanese book and Chris' Japan phrasebook. They started buying us drinks; apparently the Japanese love treating foreigners. We had a really fun time with them and made some great new friends.
Saturday morning, we had to be out of our hotel by 10 am, and we had decided by that point that we were going to spend a second night in Kyoto. Chris and I went to ask if we could stay another night at the ryokan, but they were all booked up for the night, so they helped us get a room at a guesthouse near by. We all walked over to the guesthouse; it was owned by a woman and her husband and had several rooms that they rented out. It was a beautiful home, which she told us was around 130 years old. We had two large rooms (a bedroom and a living room area) and slept on the futon mats again. We put our bags down and cleaned up a bit and then rented bikes from the guesthouse. Then we began our adventure in Kyoto.
Hannah was feeling pretty under-the-weather, so we only got to one temple, but it was gorgeous. The gate in front of the temple is one of the three biggest in Japan and the view from the top of it was outstanding. It also had lovely gardens. After walking around the temple grounds for a couple of hours, we went in search of a bike/walking path called the "Philosopher's Path". It took us a while to find it, but it was one of the loveliest bike rides of my life. The path only took about 15 minutes on bike, and it wound near a little river and next to the mountains. We passed young couples on dates, happy families, senior citizens out for a walk—it was so nice. We stopped at a little shrine and lit some incense for the Buddha, and at the end of the path, we got tea flavored soft-serve ice cream that was a million times better than any American soft-serve.
We found a little Italian restaurant and had dinner there, all of us thoroughly sick of Japanese food. (It's so good and healthy but you can only eat noodles, rice, and seaweed a certain amount of times a day!) Then we biked back to our guesthouse because it was getting dark out, and turned our bikes in. After that, we hailed a cab and went to the Gion district (a great nighlife area and the home of geishas!) in search of geishas. Unfortunately, we didn't see any.
Our guesthouse had a curfew of 11, so we got a cab back to the neighborhood it was in and stocked up on Japanese snacks before we got back to our room. The three of us sat around on our futon mats and I fell asleep a bit after midnight...I was so wiped out from such a tiring day! I fell in love with Kyoto, though. At first I wasn't so impressed with it, but once we started biking around and we got near the mountains, it was the most lovely city I've ever seen. I'd adore living there someday.
The next morning, we had planned on getting up at 6 am and taking a train out to Hiroshima for a couple of hours. Hiroshima was 2 hours away from Kyoto by train so we had to be up and on a train by 8 am or 9 am. Unfortunately, Chris either turned his alarm off in his sleep or didn't set it right, but we didn't wake up until 8:30. So we had to cancel our plans to go to Hiroshima and left for Kobe to meet up with the ship.
Maybe it's because it was pretty grey out or we just weren't in the right areas of Kobe, but I didn't like it very much. We wandered around a bit and found a mall that we walked through, and then we decided to go ride the big ferris wheel in Kobe. There was a great view from it, which made me like Kobe a bit more. There was some sort of festival going on in the area around the ferris wheel, and we were able to see various troupes performing traditional Japanese dances. It was pretty cool but it started to rain.
We got back on the ship around 5 pm, exhausted and ready to be back to something familiar. I thought Japan was so cool—very colorful, technology-minded, loud, but strangely traditional and historical at the same time. It was much more foreign than I had expected it to be; I somehow always pictured Japan to be like America but just a little different. That's not the case at all. I'd like to live there sometime, but I don't think I could do it for more than a year. It's just a bit too much.
Tomorrow we get to China! We dock in Qingdao, and I'm there for a day before I go on my university-hosted trip to Beijing. I think my friend Kate and I are going to rent bikes and see some of the German architecture, and maybe go on a tour of the Tsing Tao brewery. I'm really excited for Beijing and seeing the Great Wall, as well as getting to meet some Chinese students. (Also, I'm going to rent a bike in Beijing as well...I can't wait!) After 3 days in Beijing, we take a plane to Hong Kong where I'll be for two days; some friends and I already have plans to celebrate my birthday (early) in Hong Kong, although we're not sure where exactly. It should be a really interesting trip and I can't wait to share my adventures with all of you. :D
Much love from the Sea of Japan,
Eliza
We docked into Japan around 8 am on Wednesday the 12th, but because Japan had such hard port regulations, I didn't get off the ship and into Yokohama until about 2:30. I traveled with a girl named Hannah from Hawaii, and a guy named Chris from Seattle. As soon as we were off the boat, we walked to the train station to exchange our Japan rail passes. Unfortunately, we went to the wrong train station and had to take a cab to the one that would exchange our passes. Yokohama looked like a really interesting city but we didn't get to see much of it.
The line in the Japan Rail office was really long with all the Semester at Sea students in there exchanging their tickets for passes, so we put in our information and went down to the basement of the train station to find some food. Japanese train stations are so gigantic, clean, and confusing. There's an American mentality that Japanese people all speak English; this is definitely false. However, there was a tourist information office that DID speak English, and they directed us to food. We walked into a Japanese restaurant and pointed at things on the menu, telling the waitress that Hannah and I were vegetarian with the help of Chris' Japanese phrasebook.
Once we finished eating, we went and got our rail passes and attempted to find a train that would take us to Tokyo. By this point, it was around 5 pm. Seems I have to pause for backstory now: I have a really good friend from Tokyo named Yumi Kawai, who I met at Woodlands. Yumi was in France while we were in Japan, but she hooked me up with her parents and two of her friends. We planned on being shown around by her friends all day Wednesday and Thursday and staying at her parent's house Thursday night. Her two friends names are Yukako and Tomoko, and I had originally told them that we would be in to Tokyo by noon. When I realized I wouldn't be getting off the boat in time, I called Yukako on a Japanese student's phone and told her I wouldn't be into Shibuya (the neighborhood we were supposed to meet her at) until 2:30. Once I got off the ship, I tried to call her several different times from different locations, but wasn't able to get ahold of her!
Anyway, we tried to find a train to Shibuya, which was difficult because we couldn't really read the train maps and we were having trouble finding an English speaker. We even boarded the wrong train at one point, realizing a moment before the doors closed that we needed to get off of it. Ultimately, we found the train we needed to be on with the help of a person who worked at the train station and we headed to Shibuya.
The train station at Shibuya is of note because there is a gigantic statue of a dog outside of it. The story of the statue is that there was a dog that used to follow his owner to work every day and wait for him until he came back. One day, the owner died, but the dog kept coming to the train every day to wait for him. The Japanese found the dog's loyalty so admirable that they erected a statue for him near the station. The Shibuya district is of note now because it's a really hot shopping district for young people.
It was pretty daunting getting off the train because there were people EVERYWHERE. We tried to find someone to direct us toward the public phones but, again, we couldn't find anyone who spoke English. We finally located the phones and I called Yukako, who sounded relieved to hear from me; it was 6 pm at that point and about 4 hours later than I told her we'd be meeting her. Yukako and Tomoko met us at the statue of the dog and showed us around Shibuya a bit. It was very colorful, very loud, and very full of people.
After about half an hour, Yumi's parents, Megumi and Takeshi, showed up, and the seven of us went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The Kawais are so nice and so kind; there wasn't an awkward moment the entire time we were with them and we had a great time together. The restaurant was the type where you take your shoes off and sit on the floor. Takeshi ordered us all a round of beers and sake and Megumi ordered all the food. Instead of an appetizer like bread, they served fried spaghetti, which was so good; I'd prefer it to popcorn in a movie theater if I had the choice. We had sushi, fried tofu, shrimp, tomato salad, and so much more for dinner. Then they ordered us some traditional Japanese desserts, which were yogurts and ice creams with fruit; delicious! All in all, it was such a fun and satisfying dinner.
We had plans to stay in a capsule hotel that night, and the Kawais were insistent that we give them our backpacks and anything we didn't need so we wouldn't have to carry them around the whole next day. We ended up giving them two of our backpacks, which was so nice of them. Then they hailed a cab for us and directed us toward the Roppongi district, which is one of the nightlife areas, and we parted ways for the night.
When we got to Roppongi, Chris, Hannah, and I went to a "manga cafe" (a super nice internet cafe that has isolated rooms you go into for privacy) to check our emails. Then we went down a floor to a capsule hotel that we had decided to stay at. Capsule hotels consist of little pods that you sleep in; it was way more comfortable than it sounds! Chris went across the street to a club called Gas Panic, where a bunch of Semester at Sea students were meeting. Hannah and I didn't really feel like going out to clubs, so we wandered around Roppongi just taking everything in. We went back to the capsule hotel around 1 am and enjoyed the public bath/spa in the women's area...it really helped my sore legs feel better. Thus ended our first night in Japan.
The next morning, I got up around 9 and showered and started getting ready. Then I woke Hannah up, and we packed up our stuff and met Chris out in the lobby of the capsule hotel. We grabbed a small breakfast from a coffee shop and navigated the frightening trains again to meet Megumi, Yukako, and Tomoko in front of the sumo-wrestling stadium. After getting lost around the station, we finally found Megumi, and we all decided that the sumo tournament was too expensive for something we didn't really care about seeing. Takeshi's office was across the street from where we were, so he met up with us and we all went to lunch at a soba noodle restaurant. Soba noodles are SO GOOD and really healthy! You dip them in soy sauce, and you have to slurp them in order to be like a Japanese person. We saw them making the noodles and it was really interesting.
After lunch, Takeshi took our one last big backpack to his office with him so we could walk around without it, and we parted ways with him for the afternoon. We all headed to the Edo Museum, which is a big museum dedicated to the history of Japan's Edo period. It was cool to see because we don't get much Japanese history in American museums! When we finished with that, we got into two cabs and went over to the Asukasa neighborhood to have tea and see a temple.
We had Japanese desserts/snacks in the tea restaurant and I honestly can't explain them. They were all dumpling things and beans and weird tasting...but good. The menu had a lot of English misspelling on it, which made Chris, Hannah, and I almost cry from laughing. (Such as: "Sweet syrup is sprinkled on the one that the block ice was plane" and "We will not eat two or more people in one dish. Hoochs such as beer and wine are not served.") When we finished tea, we went to a Buddhist temple, which was beautiful. I'll try and post pictures of it later, when I'm on a faster internet connection.
After the temple, the six of us took the train to Shinjuku to meet Takeshi for dinner. The Shinjuku station was connected to a department store and we went inside it to see what it was like. We entered the basement floor, which is apparently the food level of any Japanese department store. I have never in my life seen anything like that food level. Chris, Hannah, and I started calling it "Prada food" because the food (mostly delicacies and sweets) were laid out in glass display cases and sold in the same way that American department stores sell fine jewelry and expensive sunglasses. It was beyond cool and extremely mouth-watering. I ended up buying these cookies that Yumi always brings to me and sends me, which are a butter cookie shaped like a cigar. (They're absolutely delicious and I'm already almost through my box...although I have been sharing quite a bit.)
When we left the "Prada food", went outside and met Takeshi at a tempura restaurant, that the Kawais told us was very famous ("because it's so good!"). Yukako left us here because she had to go meet her boyfriend, which was a sad goodbye; she had been so helpful and kind the past two days! We exchanged emails, addresses, and phone numbers, and I encouraged her to come visit Chicago someday; we'll see if she takes me up on the offer. Tomoko was still with us, which was good because we needed people to do karaoke with!
The tempura restaurant was really amazing; we sat on the floor again with our shoes off, and they showed us the eel, squid, and fish we were going to eat before they cooked it. Hannah and I didn't really eat any of the fish, although I had some sushi and some shrimp. The Japanese seem to eat for hours, it's a miracle that they're all so thin. When we finally finished dinner, we did something that Chris, Hannah, and I had been craving...KARAOKE!
Tomoko was an amazing singer and it was such a treat to hear her sing. She's studying voice at a university in Japan, and her mother is an opera singer (her father is the head of a record label). She has such a clear and lovely voice; the Kawais pressured her into singing Amazing Grace at karaoke and it was beautiful. She and I sang the Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey duet "There Can Be Miracles" (from "The Prince of Egypt") and it made Takeshi tear up! The Kawais sang some Japanese songs for us, which was so cool to hear. It was so much fun.
When our hour+ of karaoke was finished, we said our goodbyes to Tomoko and got on the train with the Kawais. We only traveled about one stop on the train because their home is also in the Shinjuku district. They have a lovely apartment, and we stayed in an external room that I think people from the apartment building can rent when they have guests. They showed us pictures of Kyoto and told us good places to see, and then we exchanged gifts. We went to bed thoroughly satisfied with the time we had spent in Tokyo.
On Friday, we woke up early and went upstairs to have breakfast at 9. Megumi had prepared a gigantic traditional Japanese breakfast for us, complete with miso soup, vegetable rolls, salad, Japanese grapes and pears, and soymilk. It was probably the best breakfast I've ever had. (No offense Dad—your pancakes still own my heart!) After breakfast, Megumi drove us to the Shinjuku train station, parked her car, and got on a train with us to take us to Tokyo station. (She said we wouldn't have been able to navigate it by ourselves, and she was definitely right; it was the largest station I've ever been in and everything was in Japanese.) She helped us find a train to Kyoto and took us to the platform, waiting until our train pulled away. The Kawais were so great and beyond hospitable our entire stay and I feel so blessed that we were able to experience Tokyo with such great guides.
We got into Kyoto around 1 pm and spent about an hour and a half in the tourism office booking a hotel for the night. We had planned on renting bikes and seeing some temples that day, but it started raining, so we walked around the mall in the train station for a while and grabbed some lunch. Then we took a cab to our hotel, which was a traditional Japanese-style ryokan. It wasn't a very nice one, though, because we didn't want to spend much on a hotel we weren't going to be in for very long. However, it was good enough for us.
We started wandering around Kyoto, and it was around 6 pm by that point, so there wasn't too much to do. We popped into some vintage stores and did a little shopping, and I bought a crazy hat at a hat shop. Then we spent a really long time trying to find an international ATM. American ATM cards don't work in Japanese ATMs, and international ATMs are pretty much only in post offices and in Citibank. We couldn't find a Citibank and we couldn't find the international ATM that my Japan guidebook told us about, so we eventually gave up and decided we could only go to places that took credit cards.
Wandering around the neighborhood we were staying in, we found a hidden little bar that Hannah was dead-set on going into. The decor was really interesting and the halls were lit with neon lights, and we had to walk down a set of stairs to get to the bar. It was a really small bar with just a single bar and barstools, and it looked really nice, so we decided to have a drink there. We were the only people in there at first. The bartender had been bartending for 18 years and he was very proud of his profession, and spoke pretty decent English. There were a few drinks on the menu that he had created, and I tried one that was made with machi, the Japanese ceremonial green tea, which he said tasted like Kyoto to him. It was very delicious. After having a drink, we left the nice bar and kept looking for food.
We found a restaurant that looked good enough, so we went in and sat down. There were two other tables of people in there; a large table filled with about 20 Japanese businessmen and a table with about 10 friends who appeared to be in their early 30s. We ordered some food and some drinks and sat around having good political conversation for an hour or so. The businessmen cleared out and I'm not sure if it was because they finally were drunk enough or they had built up enough courage, but the table of friends next to us came over and started talking. They didn't really speak any English, but we were able to make conversation with my point-and-speak Japanese book and Chris' Japan phrasebook. They started buying us drinks; apparently the Japanese love treating foreigners. We had a really fun time with them and made some great new friends.
Saturday morning, we had to be out of our hotel by 10 am, and we had decided by that point that we were going to spend a second night in Kyoto. Chris and I went to ask if we could stay another night at the ryokan, but they were all booked up for the night, so they helped us get a room at a guesthouse near by. We all walked over to the guesthouse; it was owned by a woman and her husband and had several rooms that they rented out. It was a beautiful home, which she told us was around 130 years old. We had two large rooms (a bedroom and a living room area) and slept on the futon mats again. We put our bags down and cleaned up a bit and then rented bikes from the guesthouse. Then we began our adventure in Kyoto.
Hannah was feeling pretty under-the-weather, so we only got to one temple, but it was gorgeous. The gate in front of the temple is one of the three biggest in Japan and the view from the top of it was outstanding. It also had lovely gardens. After walking around the temple grounds for a couple of hours, we went in search of a bike/walking path called the "Philosopher's Path". It took us a while to find it, but it was one of the loveliest bike rides of my life. The path only took about 15 minutes on bike, and it wound near a little river and next to the mountains. We passed young couples on dates, happy families, senior citizens out for a walk—it was so nice. We stopped at a little shrine and lit some incense for the Buddha, and at the end of the path, we got tea flavored soft-serve ice cream that was a million times better than any American soft-serve.
We found a little Italian restaurant and had dinner there, all of us thoroughly sick of Japanese food. (It's so good and healthy but you can only eat noodles, rice, and seaweed a certain amount of times a day!) Then we biked back to our guesthouse because it was getting dark out, and turned our bikes in. After that, we hailed a cab and went to the Gion district (a great nighlife area and the home of geishas!) in search of geishas. Unfortunately, we didn't see any.
Our guesthouse had a curfew of 11, so we got a cab back to the neighborhood it was in and stocked up on Japanese snacks before we got back to our room. The three of us sat around on our futon mats and I fell asleep a bit after midnight...I was so wiped out from such a tiring day! I fell in love with Kyoto, though. At first I wasn't so impressed with it, but once we started biking around and we got near the mountains, it was the most lovely city I've ever seen. I'd adore living there someday.
The next morning, we had planned on getting up at 6 am and taking a train out to Hiroshima for a couple of hours. Hiroshima was 2 hours away from Kyoto by train so we had to be up and on a train by 8 am or 9 am. Unfortunately, Chris either turned his alarm off in his sleep or didn't set it right, but we didn't wake up until 8:30. So we had to cancel our plans to go to Hiroshima and left for Kobe to meet up with the ship.
Maybe it's because it was pretty grey out or we just weren't in the right areas of Kobe, but I didn't like it very much. We wandered around a bit and found a mall that we walked through, and then we decided to go ride the big ferris wheel in Kobe. There was a great view from it, which made me like Kobe a bit more. There was some sort of festival going on in the area around the ferris wheel, and we were able to see various troupes performing traditional Japanese dances. It was pretty cool but it started to rain.
We got back on the ship around 5 pm, exhausted and ready to be back to something familiar. I thought Japan was so cool—very colorful, technology-minded, loud, but strangely traditional and historical at the same time. It was much more foreign than I had expected it to be; I somehow always pictured Japan to be like America but just a little different. That's not the case at all. I'd like to live there sometime, but I don't think I could do it for more than a year. It's just a bit too much.
Tomorrow we get to China! We dock in Qingdao, and I'm there for a day before I go on my university-hosted trip to Beijing. I think my friend Kate and I are going to rent bikes and see some of the German architecture, and maybe go on a tour of the Tsing Tao brewery. I'm really excited for Beijing and seeing the Great Wall, as well as getting to meet some Chinese students. (Also, I'm going to rent a bike in Beijing as well...I can't wait!) After 3 days in Beijing, we take a plane to Hong Kong where I'll be for two days; some friends and I already have plans to celebrate my birthday (early) in Hong Kong, although we're not sure where exactly. It should be a really interesting trip and I can't wait to share my adventures with all of you. :D
Much love from the Sea of Japan,
Eliza
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
one week down...
Well, it's officially been a week since I've been aboard the MV Explorer. And what a week it's been! I feel like there's so much to say and share with all of you and it's really hard for me to know where to go begin. So I guess I'll start with ship life.
I have a cabin on the third floor (3105), on the starboard side, that I share with a girl named Rachael. I honestly couldn't have asked for a better roommate. Rachael's from Wyoming originally but she goes to the University of San Diego, where she studies International Relations. She's so sweet and so funny and we get along smashingly. The cabin is small, but it's pretty much what I expected. We have two single beds with a cabinet in between them. Over our beds is a window through which we have a fantastic view of...(you guessed it!) water. Across from our beds we have a small desk and mirror, as well as a little table/sitting area. Against one wall is a set of cabinets; the top two are false cabinets and are actually a tiny refrigerator. Above the refrigerator is a small TV where we get all our boat updates (where on the map we are, our latitude and longitude, the temperature outside, and the current time). The TV also has a couple stations, which usually have movies looping on them. Our bathroom is pretty small but not so bad.
There are two dining rooms on the ship, one of which has a patio connected to it so you can eat outside. There's also a grill/bar on the seventh deck, where the pool is. We have a fully functioning spa, which is attached to the fitness center; I'm tempted to try it out (they have massages and facials!) but fear for my wallet.
My classes are going pretty well so far. The one class I have every day is called Global Studies, which is a lecture class that everyone on the ship takes at 9 am. The lectures revolve around the ports we're going to, for the most part. Every day that we're at sea, we have class, and we run on a schedule that has "A" day and "B" day. On A day, I have Global Studies from 9:20 – 10:35 and then I get a break until my Genders and Sexualities in Cinema class, which is from 2:55 – 4:10. I usually spend the break up on the pool deck, laying out and doing my reading. On B day, I have Languages of the World: The Global Impact of English from 8:00 – 9:15, then Global Studies, then break again until my Hollywood and the World class at 2:55. All in all, I really have zero complaints about my schedule.
I'm sleeping so well on the ship! I think it has something to do with the fact that the ship pretty much rocks me to sleep every night. Because I've been getting up at 6:30 or 7 almost every day, I'm usually sleepy and ready for bed around midnight, which is a completely new thing for me (before, I couldn't fall asleep before 2 am most nights!) Also, I'm eating more healthily then usual, because there's salad at lunch and dinner every day and I always eat it. The ship water isn't amazing—it's purified from salt water—so it tastes better some days than others. However, they sell bottled water at the pool deck and also in the piano bar.
One thing that really amuses me about ship life is the drinking situation. On "pub nights" (every night we're at sea, aside from the day before we get into port), people are allowed to have 2 drinks with dinner and 4 drinks at the pool bar from the hours of 9 pm – 11 pm. The choice of drinks consists of American beers with low alcohol by volume percentages or 4 oz glasses of wine, and they cost $3.50/drink. We have drinking cards that they stamp when we purchase a beverage—it feels like rationing during wartime. Every night, when the pool bar starts serving, there's a line that looks something akin to the lines in front of liquor stores when the prohibition was lifted. It's actually pretty depressing to see how desperate the majority of my fellow students are for our allowance of bad and overpriced alcohol.
That seems to be all there really is to say about ship life—I'm really enjoying it and I'm meeting some nice people from all over the place (such as countries like Mauritius and Peru!) It took me a couple days to get used to the rocking of the ship, but I haven't been seasick yet. However, we'll see how I fare in the next couple of days...apparently, on this trip from Hawaii to Japan, the waves are going to be 10 times more violent than they were on the trip to Hawaii.
Which leads me to the next subject...Hawaii!! Ok, so as many of you maybe have heard me say, I'd been planning for a long time to go skydiving in Hawaii. I signed up to go (a girl on the ship organized a huge trip for us, and about 100 Semester at Sea students went) and have spent the past couple of months in unrelenting terror. I convinced Rachael to do it with in the morning group, and our friends Erica and Annie signed up to come too. As Hawaii got closer, Rachael and I got more and more frightened; she even tried to talk me into backing out of it and going snorkeling instead on the morning of. I, however, was adamant about going—I figured that Semester at Sea is all about confronting my fears and doing things that I have never done and would never do. So around 10 am yesterday morning, we boarded a van and headed to the north shore of Hawaii to skydive.
Reading the contract that Skydive Hawaii made me sign had me thinking that perhaps I shouldn't go. It said over and over again that skydiving is dangerous and that you can die or be seriously injured skydiving. Of course, they have to say that in order not to be held liable for anything that could happen. So I signed my contract and tried to push all thoughts of falling to my death out of my head. When we arrived at Skydive Hawaii, we were able to see people landing from jumping, and it helped alleviate some of my fears; it actually looked quite fun.
Rachael, Erica, Annie, and I made sure we were all in the same plane and then we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, around 1 pm, it was our turn. I met my instructor, whose name was Ed, and who had been a skydiving instructor for 17 years. He was very amusing and nice and teased me a bit about my fears. He showed me what positions I would need to know and then helped me into my harness. We all headed to the plane, which was a tiny little nothing of a plane (Mom, you would've hated it.) There was a large plastic door that opened and closed and we were to jump out of. The flight up was horrifying and beautiful; we could see all of Hawaii, all the mountains, the entire stunning blue ocean, but there was the looming knowledge that we were about to jump into the open air. Annie went first and watching her fall out of the plane with her instructor made my heart come up to my throat. However, I didn't get much time to be scared because Ed and I were next. And then we weren't in the plane anymore.
Skydiving was genuinely the coolest thing I've ever felt. I imagined I would've had a stomach drop, but I didn't. The first second is really jolting because you're freefalling and it's a completely new feeling, but after that it's really not a big deal. They dropped us over the ocean and the first 60 seconds is just a freefall. It was the windiest feeling I've ever had. Then, Ed pulled the parachute and we spent the next 6 minutes or so gliding, which feels like nothing. We spun around a lot, so my view went from the ocean to the mountains to the ocean to the mountains. Hawaii is so unbelievably gorgeous. Then, we navigated toward a field, where we came to our landing. I wanted to go back up again immediately! Well, I suppose there will always be next time. Jumping made me feel so at peace with the earth and the world, plus it was a major adrenaline rush. After jumping out of a plane, I don't think I will ever be scared to do anything ever again.
Once skydiving was done, they shuttled us back to the port our ship was in. We were all starving, so we found the first place we could to eat, which was a relatively sketchy Chinese food restaurant. When we finished lunch, the four of us got in a cab and headed to Waikiki beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the hot Hawaiian weather and the (perfectly warm!) Pacific. I have to apologize because I wrote a bunch of letters and postcards but didn't have any time to go get stamps before we had to get back on the ship, so they're all going to be sent out from Japan. My bad!
The line to get on the ship last night was absolutely ridiculous. We were told we had to be back on the ship before 9 pm or we'd get dock time in Yokohama. In order to avoid that, the four of us got back to the port around 7:30. It took until after 9 to get back in the boat. I accidentally split up from my friends when I stepped out of line to go to the bathroom and got back in line with a different friend, so I thankfully got on a few minutes before 9. However, all my friends were "late" and now may face dock time, which really stinks because we were there so early! Anyway, we'll see what happens.
We don't dock in Yokohama until September 12th, so it's going to be a long week and and a half on the ship. I'm getting more accustomed to being away from land all the time, though, so hopefully it won't be too tedious. And we lose a day when we cross the international date line!
Well, I should get back to all the reading I have to do for tomorrow, but I'll try and post another blog before we dock in Japan. I'm not making any promises, though, because I don't think anything really interesting will have happened before then. I tried to upload some pictures but the server on the ship is too slow, so hopefully I'll get some sent out soon to you all!
Lots of love!
I have a cabin on the third floor (3105), on the starboard side, that I share with a girl named Rachael. I honestly couldn't have asked for a better roommate. Rachael's from Wyoming originally but she goes to the University of San Diego, where she studies International Relations. She's so sweet and so funny and we get along smashingly. The cabin is small, but it's pretty much what I expected. We have two single beds with a cabinet in between them. Over our beds is a window through which we have a fantastic view of...(you guessed it!) water. Across from our beds we have a small desk and mirror, as well as a little table/sitting area. Against one wall is a set of cabinets; the top two are false cabinets and are actually a tiny refrigerator. Above the refrigerator is a small TV where we get all our boat updates (where on the map we are, our latitude and longitude, the temperature outside, and the current time). The TV also has a couple stations, which usually have movies looping on them. Our bathroom is pretty small but not so bad.
There are two dining rooms on the ship, one of which has a patio connected to it so you can eat outside. There's also a grill/bar on the seventh deck, where the pool is. We have a fully functioning spa, which is attached to the fitness center; I'm tempted to try it out (they have massages and facials!) but fear for my wallet.
My classes are going pretty well so far. The one class I have every day is called Global Studies, which is a lecture class that everyone on the ship takes at 9 am. The lectures revolve around the ports we're going to, for the most part. Every day that we're at sea, we have class, and we run on a schedule that has "A" day and "B" day. On A day, I have Global Studies from 9:20 – 10:35 and then I get a break until my Genders and Sexualities in Cinema class, which is from 2:55 – 4:10. I usually spend the break up on the pool deck, laying out and doing my reading. On B day, I have Languages of the World: The Global Impact of English from 8:00 – 9:15, then Global Studies, then break again until my Hollywood and the World class at 2:55. All in all, I really have zero complaints about my schedule.
I'm sleeping so well on the ship! I think it has something to do with the fact that the ship pretty much rocks me to sleep every night. Because I've been getting up at 6:30 or 7 almost every day, I'm usually sleepy and ready for bed around midnight, which is a completely new thing for me (before, I couldn't fall asleep before 2 am most nights!) Also, I'm eating more healthily then usual, because there's salad at lunch and dinner every day and I always eat it. The ship water isn't amazing—it's purified from salt water—so it tastes better some days than others. However, they sell bottled water at the pool deck and also in the piano bar.
One thing that really amuses me about ship life is the drinking situation. On "pub nights" (every night we're at sea, aside from the day before we get into port), people are allowed to have 2 drinks with dinner and 4 drinks at the pool bar from the hours of 9 pm – 11 pm. The choice of drinks consists of American beers with low alcohol by volume percentages or 4 oz glasses of wine, and they cost $3.50/drink. We have drinking cards that they stamp when we purchase a beverage—it feels like rationing during wartime. Every night, when the pool bar starts serving, there's a line that looks something akin to the lines in front of liquor stores when the prohibition was lifted. It's actually pretty depressing to see how desperate the majority of my fellow students are for our allowance of bad and overpriced alcohol.
That seems to be all there really is to say about ship life—I'm really enjoying it and I'm meeting some nice people from all over the place (such as countries like Mauritius and Peru!) It took me a couple days to get used to the rocking of the ship, but I haven't been seasick yet. However, we'll see how I fare in the next couple of days...apparently, on this trip from Hawaii to Japan, the waves are going to be 10 times more violent than they were on the trip to Hawaii.
Which leads me to the next subject...Hawaii!! Ok, so as many of you maybe have heard me say, I'd been planning for a long time to go skydiving in Hawaii. I signed up to go (a girl on the ship organized a huge trip for us, and about 100 Semester at Sea students went) and have spent the past couple of months in unrelenting terror. I convinced Rachael to do it with in the morning group, and our friends Erica and Annie signed up to come too. As Hawaii got closer, Rachael and I got more and more frightened; she even tried to talk me into backing out of it and going snorkeling instead on the morning of. I, however, was adamant about going—I figured that Semester at Sea is all about confronting my fears and doing things that I have never done and would never do. So around 10 am yesterday morning, we boarded a van and headed to the north shore of Hawaii to skydive.
Reading the contract that Skydive Hawaii made me sign had me thinking that perhaps I shouldn't go. It said over and over again that skydiving is dangerous and that you can die or be seriously injured skydiving. Of course, they have to say that in order not to be held liable for anything that could happen. So I signed my contract and tried to push all thoughts of falling to my death out of my head. When we arrived at Skydive Hawaii, we were able to see people landing from jumping, and it helped alleviate some of my fears; it actually looked quite fun.
Rachael, Erica, Annie, and I made sure we were all in the same plane and then we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, around 1 pm, it was our turn. I met my instructor, whose name was Ed, and who had been a skydiving instructor for 17 years. He was very amusing and nice and teased me a bit about my fears. He showed me what positions I would need to know and then helped me into my harness. We all headed to the plane, which was a tiny little nothing of a plane (Mom, you would've hated it.) There was a large plastic door that opened and closed and we were to jump out of. The flight up was horrifying and beautiful; we could see all of Hawaii, all the mountains, the entire stunning blue ocean, but there was the looming knowledge that we were about to jump into the open air. Annie went first and watching her fall out of the plane with her instructor made my heart come up to my throat. However, I didn't get much time to be scared because Ed and I were next. And then we weren't in the plane anymore.
Skydiving was genuinely the coolest thing I've ever felt. I imagined I would've had a stomach drop, but I didn't. The first second is really jolting because you're freefalling and it's a completely new feeling, but after that it's really not a big deal. They dropped us over the ocean and the first 60 seconds is just a freefall. It was the windiest feeling I've ever had. Then, Ed pulled the parachute and we spent the next 6 minutes or so gliding, which feels like nothing. We spun around a lot, so my view went from the ocean to the mountains to the ocean to the mountains. Hawaii is so unbelievably gorgeous. Then, we navigated toward a field, where we came to our landing. I wanted to go back up again immediately! Well, I suppose there will always be next time. Jumping made me feel so at peace with the earth and the world, plus it was a major adrenaline rush. After jumping out of a plane, I don't think I will ever be scared to do anything ever again.
Once skydiving was done, they shuttled us back to the port our ship was in. We were all starving, so we found the first place we could to eat, which was a relatively sketchy Chinese food restaurant. When we finished lunch, the four of us got in a cab and headed to Waikiki beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the hot Hawaiian weather and the (perfectly warm!) Pacific. I have to apologize because I wrote a bunch of letters and postcards but didn't have any time to go get stamps before we had to get back on the ship, so they're all going to be sent out from Japan. My bad!
The line to get on the ship last night was absolutely ridiculous. We were told we had to be back on the ship before 9 pm or we'd get dock time in Yokohama. In order to avoid that, the four of us got back to the port around 7:30. It took until after 9 to get back in the boat. I accidentally split up from my friends when I stepped out of line to go to the bathroom and got back in line with a different friend, so I thankfully got on a few minutes before 9. However, all my friends were "late" and now may face dock time, which really stinks because we were there so early! Anyway, we'll see what happens.
We don't dock in Yokohama until September 12th, so it's going to be a long week and and a half on the ship. I'm getting more accustomed to being away from land all the time, though, so hopefully it won't be too tedious. And we lose a day when we cross the international date line!
Well, I should get back to all the reading I have to do for tomorrow, but I'll try and post another blog before we dock in Japan. I'm not making any promises, though, because I don't think anything really interesting will have happened before then. I tried to upload some pictures but the server on the ship is too slow, so hopefully I'll get some sent out soon to you all!
Lots of love!
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Port Addresses
Well, so far there isn't much to say, seeing as how I haven't left Chicago yet. In due time, I imagine I will have LOTS to share with everyone as I journey around the world--so please be my penpal! Below is the link to the various port addresses I'll be arriving at. Semester at Sea recommends sending letters from the U.S. two weeks in advance of our arrival date in any port. And if you write me, I promise I'll return the favor.
Port addresses here!
-Eliza
Port addresses here!
-Eliza
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