Good Afternoon Vietnam

On the second day in Vietnam, we left on a group tour to the Mekong Delta, about 4 hours south of Saigon. The bus ride was long but we had an interesting tour guide who made the first half of the trip fly by and was willing to let us sleep the rest of the way. The bus drove us first to the upper part of the delta and we took a tour of the water by boat. It was wonderfully breezy compared to the humid heat of the rest of Vietnam. After sailing for about an hour we stopped at a coconut candy factory. We were expecting to see a big industrial building, but instead the factory was a three man operation under a large tent that stood on the shore of the river. We watched the entire process from coconut to candy and then had the opportunity to try them ourselves. It was pouring rain by the time we left the candy “factory,” so getting back on the boas was a little bit scary. Luckily there wasn’t any lightning and the rain didn’t last long (in case you’re wondering why its been raining in pretty much all of these blog entries, it turns out its currently typhoon season in asia). We sailed from the factory to a pretty place to have lunch where we ate yummy fresh fruit and held snakes.

After spending the afternoon on the Delta we went into town for the evening, spent some time wandering the streets and then had a traditional Vietnamese dinner at a restaurant that was rented out especially for our big group. We tried to go to bed early because we had a 6 o’clock wake up call the next morning. My roommate and I ended up watching BBC news for a couple hours instead of sleeping because we’ve been completely news deprived and had no idea what was going on in the world.

After waking up at 6:00 (too early) and having breakfast at the hotel, we got back on the boats and went to the floating market in the Lower Mekong Delta. The floating market was amazing. Its all on water and people sell things things from their boats (which are also their houses). Every boat has a big tall pole on the front of it that advertises what they are selling (for example, the vegetable merchant has carrots and onions tied onto his pole). The market was fun, but it also felt slightly invasive to be touristing through these peoples lives and taking pictures of their stores/homes. After the market we toured a Cambodian –style Buddhist temple and then we hit the road for the 4 hour drive back north to Saigon.

The next day in Vietnam (today) I did a whole lot of things. I went to Catholic mass this morning with my friends (two of whom are catholic and the other 3 of us were just interested) and had fun listening to it in Vietnamese. Then we headed out to try and find the art museum. We never found the museum but instead found a memorial to a famous Vietnamese guy (not Ho Chi Minh) and then found a store that sold cheap knock-off movies that everyone but me was really interested in buying. We went from there to the marketplace and spent a few hours bartering for souvenirs (I’m getting pretty good at the haggling, though not as good as one of my friends who is hardcore about it and always gets the best deal). After that we had lunch that took about 2 hours from start to finish and wasn’t even that great until the chocolate cake for dessert.

After lunch we split up and I went with two of my friends to try and find the War Remnants Museum – a memorial to the Vietnam War that was supposed to be really interesting. We got a little lost and by the time we found a taxi who would take us there the place was closing in about fifteen minutes. We went in, saw some horrifying pictures, started to feel really sad, and then they kicked us out. I slipped on the wet steps on my way out and cracked my back on a stair. It hurt a lot and I’m pretty sure I’ll wake up to a lovely bruise in the morning.

I’m still not completely sure what I’m up to tomorrow. I may be heading north for part of the day to see the Cu Chi tunnels (used by the Vietcong during the war) and get better sense of the jungle-ness of this country or I’ll keep exploring Saigon and try and get back to the War museum. Not sure, but I’ll let you all know what happens, after it happens.

Good Morning Vietnam!!

I'm at the end of my first day in Vietnam, using the free internet at the fancy hotel in downtown ho chi minh city (we bought food so its ok that we're using it). I just had a really fun first day in vietnam. I woke up at 5:00 this morning to watch the ship sail upriver into Vietnam toward Ho Chi Minh city - it was a pretty incredible view! Then I went back to bed for a few hours to wait for us to actually get to the city.

After the ship docked, a couple of friends and I spent the first couple hours wandering around the city to get a feel for the lay of the land and then we headed to the Rex Hotel (where I am again now!) for a massage, which we had heard were very good and very affordable here in vietnam. So.... because I had never had one before, a cheap and good one seemed like the best way to start. It was incredible! we had a little trouble finding the right floor of the hotel, but once we did we went in and found out that everything we had heard was true. We didn't have any other plans for the afternoon, so we ended up signing up for the 3 hour massage/body scrub/manicure/pedicure/facial for $36.00 US dollars. It was awesome, it was completely relaxing and fun. A good super-girly experience that I definately needed to have at some point in my life. And what better place to get a massage than Vietnam?

Tomorrow I leave for an overnight boat trip to the Mekong Delta where I will see lots of boats and pretty scenery and a floating market - it should be excellent! Then I have two more days to spend in HCM city, where I'm sure I'll find plenty more adventures.

Chinese Wonder-Bliss

I have spent three cold, windy, rainy days in China that have been absolutely awesome and I’m incredibly excited for the one more that I have left. My first two days in China were spent in Qingdao, an industrial city that is really only known for its shipping and its beer. It was definitely not a city that was designed for tourists. When we climbed down the stairway from the ship, the port that awaited us was grey and wet and dirty. We walked between a line of trucks being unloaded from a huge ship and train tracks, getting honked at by Chinese men driving construction equipment. When we got out to the street we found ourselves on the corner of a busy intersection where the cars drive fast and ignore traffic signals. They honk to warn you that they’re coming, which is lucky, because they’re not planning on stopping. Walking around the city was quite an adventure, as we were also lacking a readable map and basic Chinese language skills, but we eventually figured things out. We wandered through lots of sketchy marketplaces and commercial districts where people chose to either point at us or pointedly ignore us and eventually found ourselves in a huge market district where we found a 3-story Wal-Mart and a fabulous lunch. Lunch was slightly scary because the night before the ship’s doctor had warned us all (at length) about the horrors of nausea and diarrhea that could come from eating the wrong food in China, but we stuck to the fried and otherwise thoroughly cooked meats and we figured we were pretty well off. After lunch, we spent more time wandering around the city; we found the art district, the brewery district, and the office supplies district (Stationary Street). We walked through a food marketplace where the seafood was so fresh it was still spitting at us and then climbed our way up Qingdao “mountain” to see the little pagoda on top and were exhausted and drenched before we were even halfway up. By the time we were climbing back down it was starting to get dark so we decided it was a good time to head back to the ship. We started heading back in the completely wrong direction, so by the time we got ourselves turned around it was totally wet and dark and we were lucky to find cabs to hop into the understood enough of our crappy Chinese to get us back to the port. The cab ride was terrifying (poor driving and the fear of being completely lost) but he took us exactly where we needed to go, and we were all very happy to get back to our ship, with its boring but safe food and its hot showers.

The next day lots of my friends were leaving on trips to Beijing and The Great Wall (which ended up being waaaaay more than I could afford) but myself and three other girls had another day to spend in Qingdao. This time we did a little more research and started off with a little bit of a plan and a map. The weather was worse the second day, instead of just rain and wind, it was rain and wind-so-strong-it-turned-our-umbrellas-inside-out, so we started out by just taking a cab to the artsy/bank area that was our planned first stop. We managed to exchange money but had a hard time getting another cab to take us to the marketplace that was our next stop. We decided to escape the rain by heading to the Global International Seafood Restaurant for lunch. The second day’s lunch was even better than the first, super-fancy food that was served to us in our own private dining room. They don’t really have menus in Qingdao, but instead just have a display of mock-ups of all the dishes and you order by pointing to whatever looks good. It was actually a really good way for us to actually know what we were eating. After lunch we immediately managed to catch a taxi to the beach, where we found a temple and a jewelry market. We spent the afternoon buying incredibly cheap pearls and making ourselves the much beloved American customers of the merchants. We haggled over prices and everybody ended up quite satisfied. We discovered the German-influenced part of the city and were entertained to find a Germanic cathedral in the middle of a Chinese city. In the cab ride back to the ship at the end of the day, we coined the phrase “wonder-bliss” to describe how happy we were with the day.

I spent the next two days on the ship sailing around China, form Qingdao to Hong Kong. There weren’t many people onboard so it was a good opportunity to relax and get some schoolwork done. I probably ended up doing a little more relaxing and a little less schoolwork, but oh well, sometimes that’s just the way things go.

I woke up early our first day in Hong Kong to watch the incredible view as we sailed into port. Hong Kong is a huge and absolutely beautiful city. The high rise buildings seem to grow right at the edge of the water and then they back up against the mountains. Once the ship was cleared, I headed off with a group of friends to a couple traditional marketplaces and we spent most of the day doing the whole tourist thing, buying souvenirs, eating good food (eel fried rice!!), smelling weird smells, and taking pictures. That evening we watched a laser light show on the buildings, which was incredibly cool. Hong Kong was weird in that until it got dark and the beautiful colorful lights came on, the city felt pretty much exactly like NYC, except with more Chinese. Since Hong Kong used to be a British colony, English is one of the official languages, so it was wonderfully easy to get around and to communicate with people. It was a wonderful change after the two days of confusion that was Qingdao.

…. Another day goes by….

My second (and sadly last) day in Hong Kong I spent at the Chinese Cuisine Training Institute learning about, well, chinese cuisine. We started the day by touring a local marketplace, where EVERYTHING was basically as fresh as it could possibly be. Our tour guide jokingly told us that the Chinese will eat anything with four legs (except the table and the chairs) and this market definitely proved that. We saw cages of frogs, turtles, little mammals, and chickens that were all getting ready to be supper tonight. They didn’t bring in the cows and pigs alive, but there were fresh carcasses that you could point to and have your hunk of choice cut out of. It was a really cool place to walk through. We then headed to CCTI for our class. We took a tour of the institute, watched a master chef do his master-chef thing, learned how to make two dishes ourselves (spicy beef and sweet and sour pork), and then sat down to a six course meal that included absolutely crazy things (like sea cucumber!!) and was weirdly delicious. It was so sad to leave, my friend Nicole and I decided it would have been a much better trip if we could have stayed for dinner too. We all got certificates that officially recognize us as “culinary ambassadors” – which is what I think I’m going to call myself from now on. “Culinary Ambassador Prengaman” has such a nice ring to it.

After today, its two more days of sailing (and classes) until we get to Vietnam. And then its Thailand…. And then its Egypt… and then its everywhere else!!!! AHhhhhhh!!!! Sometimes it still feels unreal that I’m traveling around the world on a giant ship.

Pictures!!

So in my last blog (that I managed to quickly type up last night) I said I hadnt had the ability to put up pictures, because I hadnt found an internet cafe. Today after about an hour and a half of searching, we found one in Kobe. So here are some pictures!!! I hope you enjoy them because they might be the last ones for a while, or until I manage to find another place with cheap internet.

The Land of The Rising Sun

Konnichiwa Everyone!!!
I’m in JAPAN!!!! I’m having the most wonderful, fabulous, amazing time!!! I don’t even quite know where to start. But here goes:

We got into Yokohama, Japan on the 12th, and after spending an incredibly long time waiting for the ship to get cleared (all of our passports and paperwork needed to be checked out by official Japanese administrative people) My group of girlfriends and I headed to the Yokohama train station to catch a train to Tokyo (about 45 minutes away). We got to the station and after realizing that none of us speak Japanese nor are good at understanding maps, we met the most amazing man in the world! After he tried to point out the points on the map to me with his umbrella, and he realized I had no idea what he was talking about, he actually just offered to show us how to get there himself. He was on his was home (to Tokyo) so he was willing to take us under his wing and point us to the right transfer. It was so nice of him!! We spent the train ride telling him about our program and he told us about his own world travels as a free-lance journalist.

We got off the train in Asakura, a marketplace-type district of Tokyo where we saw a Shinto shrine and shopped and ate a crazy meal of Chinese food in Japan. We ordered food by pointing at pictures of it on the menu and we had to push a button to call the waitress. A lot of the food was very strange but after lots of crappy meals on the ship it tasted delicious (it was possibly delicious anyways). It was a really awesome day. The next day I went on an official SAS trip to Kamakura and Hakone. It was one of those everybody-get-on-a-tour-bus-and-follow-the-tour-guide-with-the-flag-trips, but it was surprisingly fun, the tour guide was really good and the sights were awesome. We saw another Shinto Shrine and a 46 ft high statue of Buddha. I ate sweet potato ice cream!!! We took a boat ride across a lake to see Mt. Fuji and then took a cable car up the second highest mountain in the area and we felt like we were on top of the world (this is again where I really ought to throw some pictures in but our sea-internet is too slow to upload pictures and I haven’t had time to find an internet café yet). I spent the evening back in Yokohama, wandering around with two friends. We went out to dinner at a Korean barbeque where there weren’t even pictures on the menu to point to and somehow managed to eat another delicious meal (we got to cook the meat ourselves!)

The next day I was back on the ship to sail from Yokohama to Kobe. I spent the day laying out by the teeny-tiny pool working on my tan – I mean journal/sketchbook. The crew served the small amount of people that chose to get back on the ship a fancy five course meal for dinner (it still tasted like ship food, it just took us longer to eat it) and it gave us an excuse to get dressed up and take pictures.

Today I went on another SAS tour, this time it was to Kyoto. Kyoto was the most incredible city, and if anyone out there is planning on going to Japan, you would have to make sure you see Kyoto. We went to a couple different temples, saw the golden palace, the old shogun’s palace, ate lunch in a beautiful park, and took part it lots of little superstitious rituals. It was so much fun. The last temple we saw was definitely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, it was all traditional Japanese architecture surrounded by a rugged landscape of rocks and trees. The most amazing thing about the Japan is that the view actually does look like an old Hokusai print. There ARE mountains and fog and strange twisty trees and picturesque little houses. There’s also a lot of big grey industrial looking stuff, so its an interesting mixture.

I spent this past evening wandering around Kobe, and I’m planning on staying here tomorrow to sight-see and try to not pay for very much. Then its back on the ship and two days of classes and then we’re in China! Wow!


Other notes on Japan:

Its very quiet here
It is very clean here
Everybody drives on the wrong side of the road
There are a lot of crazy bright lights
There are a lot of ferris wheels
The food is good
The food is weird and gooey
Red bean sortof tastes like chocolate

Water Water Everywhere

Today’s revelation: The Ocean is HUGE. It’s absolutely ginormous. Unbelievably big. I honestly never understood how big the ocean was until now. We have been sailing for five days (I think – it is starting to seem more like weeks and months) since we left Hawaii and are still only a little over halfway to Japan. We’ve been traveling about 18-20 knots the entire time. Since we’ve been at sea, I have seen three things: the ship, the sky, and the water. Well, actually yesterday we saw a beautiful rainbow that arched the entire way across the sky and today at dinner a school of dolphins swam past the ship. But we’ve spent so much time staring out at water that I’ve started to notice differences in the size of the waves and the sheen of the water (you can tell when it is raining far away because the surface of the water looks less shiny and more grey). In other words, I am very much looking forward to seeing land again. Somehow, in all my planning for this trip I only ever thought about the time spent in other countries, not the amount of time that would be spent getting to other countries (Which at the moment is turning out to be a LOT of time).

So how have I been spending my time? Well since I only have class for about three and a half hours a day and not a whole lot of work to go along with my classes (lots of reading… but that’s not too bad) I spend a lot of my time sleeping and eating. I’ve had lots of time to exercise in our tiny little gym where running on the treadmill becomes not just a calorie-burning workout but also an exercise in balancing on the rocking ship. When I go eat with friends, we normally stay at the table for at least an hour just kindof talking. At night, we still play cards and board games, we watch movies, and sometimes we end up out on the deck simply watching the stars. I can’t even spend my time cleaning or cooking because the ship’s crew does that for us. I keep trying to remember how on earth I spend my time back on home – I guess class and work just take up considerably more time back in the ‘burgh. And ultimate! I am definitely missing going to practice (so you guys who are there better be appreciating it!!)

Tonight I went to a lecture by the biology professor onboard the ship who was talking about her experiences as a national park ranger. She told us a lot of amazing stories about fighting fires and rescuing people who had fallen over the edge of the Grand Canyon. It was pretty incredible; I had never realized how many exciting things happened in national parks….. ahhhhhh parks….. land and trees and plants and animals…. How I miss thee!

The most exciting thing that has happened is actually something that didn’t happen. We sailed across the International Dateline yesterday. Which means that yesterday was September 6th and today is September 8th. So I’m hoping that all of you out there who did get to have a September 7th enjoyed it, because for me September 7th, 2007 is the day that simply did not exist in my life. It is actually slightly creepy to realize that everyone else in the world had the chance to live a day that I didn’t get. Everyone on board the ship felt bad for the kid who didn’t get to have a birthday – I guess sailing is a good way of staying young.

Aloha Hawaii!

I saw land again!!! The night before we reached Hawaii a group of students (myself included) decided we ought to spend the night out on the deck so we could wake up super-early and see the lights in Honolulu and know that there was land somewhere out in front of us. Sadly, around 2:30 in the morning a member of the staff came out to yell at us, saying we’re not allowed to take the blankets and pillows from our cabin outside. It was very sad; I went back down to my cabin and slept through the first sighting of Hawaii.

When we woke up the next morning we had to go through customs – all 800 people had to have their passports and greencards and so forth checked. It took a horrendously long time. It was crazy to get off the ship, it actually felt like the land was rolling back and forth under our feet. My equilibrium is so confused! After getting off the ship, and maneuvering ourselves through the bus system, I took a group of girls to Diamond Head. It was a really vertical hike that gave us a beautiful view of the island. (This is one of those places where I ought to be putting pictures up, but I haven’t completely figured out how to do that yet). The trail was incredibly busy, possibly because it was Sunday, but it was covered in tourists and real people alike. It also felt so good to be walking/running/hiking and knowing that we were actually going some where (unlike working out on the treadmills on the ship)

After our hot and sweaty hike, my new friend Julie and I stopped to eat the most delicious refreshing shaved ice in the world and then went swimming at Waikiki beach. The beach was crowded, but beautiful. The water was warm, but still refreshing.

After the beach, Julie and I took another bus back to the port where the ship was. We had a sort-of fancy dinner (we actually ate gourmet-type pizzas, figuring it would be our last chance to eat pizza for a very long time). There was live music playing at the bar while we ate, so we got a small taste of Hawaiian music while we ate. We then shopped around the Marketplace of tourist-y shops and took pictures of ourselves with funny statues.

Our day in Hawaii was perfect, but it was still really sad to have to get back on the ship and to hear the stories of everything else that everyone else did. People went waterfall jumping, and skydiving, they hiked, and they went to places like Pearl Harbor and the art museum. I didn’t have nearly enough time in my 8 hours on shore to see and do as much as I wanted, so I guess I’ll just have to find a way back (hint hint!)

Now we’re back at sea to cross the rest of the Pacific on our way to Japan – we have about 7 more days of classes before any of us are going to see land again. In the meanwhile, I’m going to lose an entire day of my life when we cross the International Date Line. Hopefully, nothing too exciting will happen back home on Sep. 7th – because to me, that day doesn’t even going to exixt.