Emily's Adventures at Sea!!!

2010-11-13T00:46:00.000-08:00

Well this might be it... the last post from the other side of the world. I head home tomorrow. TOMORROW!

I've done a pretty good job of keeping myself busy in the face of all the stress and anxiety and excitement of homecoming that is filling up my brain. I spent three days in Northern Vietnam in a little town called Sapa. My days were spent hiking through jungly mountains and terraced rice paddies, my nights were spent shivering under a mountain of blankets in an unheated guesthouse (it gets cold up north!). So the days were lovely, and I had to buy myself a disposable camera so I could capture the best of the scenery.

Here's a picture stolen from a tourist website.... yup, it really was that good.

I got back from Sapa early this morning. Today I wandered around Hanoi. I picked up a couple more souvenirs for friends, and for myself. There was a point in this trip, only a couple days ago, when I thought I'd actually head home with fewer pairs of shoes than I'd left with seven months ago. That dream will not become a reality. Sigh. But I think I'm okay with that.

In between fits of spending every last dong that I have, I went to the Hanoi Fine Art Museum. The collection was really interesting. I saw a lot of scenes of brave soldiers fighting against the "American aggressors" in traditional laquer-painting style. There was also a really interesting collection of massive oil paintings that glorify Uncle Ho.

When I just wander around the streets, and look at pretty things, it is easy to forget about our history with Vietnam, in a way, the art museum today reminded me of it. I saw some pieces that were very beautiful, and very sad.

My plan for tomorrow is pretty simple. I don't have any grand adventures in the works, because I'm not sure my brain could handle it. Instead, I've got a book, and a lovely lake to sit next to and drink coffee. If I make it to another museum or monument, that'll be fine, but I don't want to pressure myself into seeing one more thing.

I am so excited to be going home. I feel like I've been out here the right amount of time because I do feel ready to go home. But I'm also feeling nervous, and anxious. It is going to be a big change to step back into a world where everybody speaks English, and there aren't a thousand motorbikes trying to kill, and you can drink water out of the tap.

US of A, here I come!

2010-11-01T19:23:00.000-07:00

Halong Bay.

(not my picture, but simply stolen from the internet to prove how pretty this place is)

I've been in northern Vietnam for about a week now.

It has been wonderful. The weather up north is cool and dry, so I don't end up breaking into a sweat every time I step outside. The coffee is wonderful here, and thanks to colonial French influences I get to eat a crunchy baguette with that coffee every morning, and after months of rice, that is a very great small joy.

I've spent most of the week living on Cat Ba island. It is the biggest island in Halong Bay, which is surely one of the more beautiful places on earth - giant limestone karsts rising straight out of the ocean. We've gone on a bunch of adventures around the area: kayaking around the bay, going on a hike through the interior of the national park, sailing around at suset, but the highlight may have been the chance to go climbing up these giant rock formations and simply falling into the warm water if you happen to lose your grip.

Today I'm going back to basics, I have plans to read my book on the beach and eat mangoes for lunch, but that is probably all the excitement I'm looking for. Tomorrow I'm hoping to do a little bit of biking around the island, and the next day we'll probably catch a ferry and head off toward somewhere new!

2010-10-25T04:06:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while, because I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit down in front of a computer. This traveling thing has kept me pretty busy, but now I'm about halfway through my six weeks of fun touristing (which means I'm three weeks away from flying home! wow!) and I thought I'd mention where I've been and where I'm headed.

My sister flew out here the day after my job ended. We went on a whirlwind tour of Bangkok and Kanchanaburi, spent waaay too many hours in vans and buses to see Angkor Wat (which was simply incredible, but my camera died in awe of it, so I have no pictures to post) and then headed north to Chaing Mai and Pai. We went rafting down the river Pai, took a fancy Thai cooking class, and I failed at riding a bike up the highest mountain in that part of the country. All in all, I had a magnificent time (Thanks for coming to visit, Kate!).

Then a week ago, I took a long bus ride south to Koh Tao island where I started an introduction to scuba course (to get my basic certification) and ended up loving it so much I stayed on to get the advanced degree! Scuba diving was truly one of the most magical things I have ever experienced, it opened up a whole new watery world that was better than even "Planet Earth" made it look. I saw stingrays! I saw barracudas! I saw triggerfish and moray eels! I saw my fingers and my fins lit up in bioluminescent water!

It was so beautiful, I never would have stopped if I didn't have this darn plane ticket to Vietnam in two days.

My plans for Vietnam aren't entirely concrete, but I fly into Hanoi, and I'm hoping to spend a couple days there drinking good coffee and eating french baguettes, before traveling to Halong Bay and Cat Ba island. Then who knows? Maybe up to Sapa, to see the terraced rice paddies near the Chinese border?

The crazy thing is, I leave Thailand in two days, a country I've been living in for more than six months.... and I don't know when I'll be back again. There are just a couple more weeks of travel ahead of me, but in a way, I feel like leaving Thailand will be the beginning of heading back home.

2010-09-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

Final Friday Explanation Point!

Today is my last Friday as a kindergarten teacher in Nonthaburi. You'd think that would be the same same as my last day as a kindergarten teacher, but no, I still have to work four more days next week. However, the finals have all been taken, the grading is about halfway done, and all thats left is for me to spend hours and hours wasting away at my desk, organizing picture cards and dreaming about the next 7 weeks of adventures.

Looking back on this semester, I am honestly amazed at how much my students have learned. All of them say "Good Morning, Teacher!" when I walk into the room. 75 percent of them can say the words "cat," "ice cream," and "fish" when they see a picture of that item. When they say the word "kangaroo," they jump up and down (sometimes I wonder if I've just trained them to do things that make me laugh - I also have them make lots of silly faces every day). Three year olds have a much huger capacity to learn and remember than I ever expected.

Even now, when I'm not quite done with my job, I look back on it and think, "well, that wasn't so bad, I probably ought to do this again sometime." That thought in my head is a funny thing, because I honestly have to force myself to remember the times when I was so frustrated I wanted to walk right out of the classroom and out of the school, the times when all of the assistant teachers left and I was stuck with 36 screaming children hitting each other in a pile on the floor or jumping up and down on top of their desks. Memory is such a wonderful, crazy thing that those moments are already fading.

Yup, I think I want to do this again sometime.

2010-09-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts about Bangkok:

The ugliness of the stray street dogs put those weird zombie ones from Resident Evil to shame (why did anyone let me watch that movie?)

I can get a two-hour long Thai massage at the spa on the first floor of my building that is the best feeling my body has ever had (it is like having someone lovingly do yoga to your body) for ten bucks.

The Bangkok Art and Culture Center is a contemporary gallery but also a space for collective community art organizations to exist and promote themselves and their artists, and going there makes me feel like a hipster again.

I can get the best papaya salad in Thailand from the lady outside my apartment who sometimes lets me taste it before she sells it to me, and sometimes chases me with tiny blue crabs.

Every single day I step outside and feel assaulted by pollution and concrete, and somehow, I'm already starting to feel nostalgic for it.

The bus system here is as confusing and convoluted as the traffic jams themselves. But I love paying 25 cents to go anywhere in the city and feeling like I'm on the slowest moving tour in the world at the same time.

Yesterday I saw two rats fighting in a trashcan.

2010-09-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I went to what is supposedly the largest market in the entire world (in terms of the largest number of vendors, I believe), Bangkok's Chatuchak Weekend Market. Vendors at the market sell new and used clothing, handicrafts, food, collectibles, and live animals. It was an incredible place to wander around, I saw something new and interesting every time I turned my head.

We took a city bus there, so after about 45 minutes of slowing creeping through Bangkok traffic we made it to the market, which is in a park, so it was surrounded not only by big city buildings, but also green trees and a little pond with rowboats.

The market had everything and more than you could ever possibly want. I was expecting more of the same cheap, tourist-y stuff that we see everywhere, but there was actually an incredible selection of handmade items, used clothes, antiques, stationary supplies, fake flowers, and lots and lots of puppies (that I still wasn't allowed to touch!)

We snacked as we walked, on shaved ice topped with condensed milk and fresh mangoes and coconut ice cream served in a coconut shell. There were big stalls and little ones. Some people sold sunglasses and fake perfumes off of mats on the ground, while others had shops with two or three interconnected rooms and atmospheric lighting. One section of the market entirely sold vintage western shirts and leather goods, another corner was full of local art, with contemporary paintings lining the white walls of mini galleries.

If you could imagine something, some impossible, crazy thing, I have no doubt it would exist somewhere within the winding aisles of Chatuhak Market.

The other excitement from this weekend is that yesterday, the census-people came knocking on my apartment door! After a moment of confusion for all of us when I opened it, from me, because no one ever knocks on my door, from the census takers because they weren't expecting my farang face, they found me a form that was written in English and handed it over.

So as of yesterday, the Thai government now knows that I am the only resident of my apartment. They know I have a college degree but am unable to read or write in Thai. They know I have a tv, a fridge, and air conditioning (they don't know I lack a chair, a spoon, and actual sheets). They know that I have an actual flushing sit toilet in the house and that I don't drink water from the tap. They know everything there is to know about me!

I was out of the country when the US census happened back home, so all this time I've been worried that maybe I didn't actually exist, but now I definitely do! I exist as a foreigner who doesn't even know her address or phone number to fill them in on the census form! I exist in Thailand!

2010-08-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I traveled about an hour north of Bangkok to go to Ayutthaya, which is the former capital of Thailand that was sacked by Burmese invaders about 300 years ago. That means it is a place full of historical value, where ancient ruins poke up every which where around a modern town and you can tour through the ruined temple grounds. Which is what we did. It was a little bit of a drizzly day, but the weather seemed to perfectly match the moment of meandering around and looking at pretty old things. It was a magically photogenic little world, here's a snippet:

2010-08-16T05:50:00.000-07:00

Well, I've fallen behind a little bit in my blogging, but I have the pictures from an amazing weekend in Kanchanaburi to make my apologies for me (we actually went a week ago, this past weekend was spend on a rather boring beach in Hua Hin, where the highlight was that there was good coffee everyday, olive tapanade, and a tv with english movies in our hotel room - so good things, but not really exciting ones)

But last weekend, I went back to Kanchanaburi (of the elephant riding and the waterfall swimming) It was, again, an immensely happy and fun weekend. I'm beginning to think its my favorite place in Thailand.

went back to the elephants, they're still hungry

it is still incredible to swim on them, with them

we saw a cave, with a temple in it

giant buddha relaxing in a natural cave

and then for the amazing day! On Sunday a friend and I went to the Safari Park, where, we'd heard, you rode around in a big safari van and got to be accosted by giraffes who were hungry for your company (or really, for your carrots). It more than lived up to my wildest dreams of a Safari Park in Thailand. Here are the highlights:

feeding carrots to kissing giraffes (and one of them kissed me!)

freaking out over how many giraffes had entered our bus

meeting the sweetest, saddest gibbon that has ever existed

holding on to that gibbon's hand, when he really didn't want to let go

Katie fed a baby tiger

I fed a baby leopard (and oh my gosh.... he just looked up at me with these big green baby leopard eyes. It was the most incredible thing, he was basically calling me mom)

2010-07-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

We had a four day weekend for Buddhist Lent Day this past weekend. My friend Katie and I traveled to the second biggest island in Thailand, Koh Chang, which is on the eastern side of the country, close to Cambodia.

The holiday was characterized by rain, rain, bugs, rain, power outage, water outage and a lot of naps. I managed to get a ridiculous looking sunburn in the few moments that it wasn't raining. But actually, for all that the biggest thing we did was eat grilled corn and we spent most of our hours hanging out on the porch of our beach hut, looking out at the waves, it was a pretty perfect weekend. It was absolutely relaxing.

Now I'm back at work and we're learning the letter I this week! Tomorrow is English Day at school and apparently I'll be performing in a "Fable Puppet Show" which has no script for two hours. The head of the English proram has already warned us that the day will be "utter chaos." I'm excited.

2010-07-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

Pictures from an awesome weekend!
(I apologize for them all getting a little bit out of order...)

the view off our porch/raft

at the waterfalls

waterfalls!

feeding elephants!!

petting elephants! (their skin is so rough, kindof leathery)

elephants have impressively long eyelashes, apparently, they never stop growing

so big!

working hard to cut down the elephants' food

hauling grasses (no, I'm not super skilled at it)

back at the waterfalls.... absolutely idyllic

back at the elephants, where it is also pretty much paradise

my hand is magically covered in butterflies

swimming with elephants

2010-07-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

This past weekend may well have been the absolute best 48 straight hours I've spent in Thailand. The only part that wasn't perfect was that it ended.

With 8 of the other English teachers I know here in Bangkok, we went to Kanchanaburi for the weekend (a little over an hour west of Bangkok) a little hippy-ish town on the banks of the river Kwai. It was a perfect town, with delicious restaurants, outdoor bars, easy access to amazing adventures AND I got to sleep on a raft floating in the river!

On Saturday we went to see the waterfalls that the area is known for; seven waterfalls of varying sizes all along one upward trek. Each one has a pool to swim in and rocks to clamber about on. There are fish in the waters that nibble the dead skin off your feet (something you can pay for in Bangkok as a tourist attraction!). I slid down a natural rock slide and spent about an hour tanning on a fallen log over the waterfall, while butterflies walked all over me. One butterfly literally sat on my nose for about 10 minutes (they didn't love on any one else, just me. it was awesome.).

We didn't make it the entire way up to the 7th waterfall because clouds rolled in and it started to pour. We hiked back down the mountain, splashing in mud, getting soaking wet (but we'd been swimming, so getting wet wasn't much of a problem) and marveling as the entire path seemed to turn into one long, muddy waterfall.

I was starving by the time we got back to town, so a friend and I went out to dinner and found a tiny little cafe serving thai food and white wine. I hadn't had a glass of wine in weeks, so that, accompanied by an amazingly delicious massaman curry made for a pretty fabulous dinner. Which was followed by drinks with more of our friends and the chance to make new friends at a couple of the little outdoor bars around the main road.

The next day was even better. I woke up early-ish to find a group of my friends getting ready to go on some elephant adventure. They weren't quite sure what they were getting into, but we'd met a Thai guy the night before who told us all about this place and said he could take us there. So of course, without knowing what on earth I was getting into, I went.

Five of my friends and a Spanish guy we met on the way all climbed into the back of a pickup truck with our Thai friend from the night before. We drove about an hour into the countryside, past fields of grasses, herds of skinny cows with big ears, surrounded by the rounded peaks of gorgeous green mountains. Turned out we were headed to a place called Elephant World which is a refuge for older elephants who used to work but have been injured or simply gotten to old. It is not a tourist destination, its more of a non-profit do-good magical place. We were not only the only white people there, we were the only people there who didn't work/live there. It was paradise. There were five elephants in the field and Day, our guide, led us to each one, told us a little about them and let us feed them bananas. the elephants would reach out to us with their trunks and take a banana (still in its peel) out of our hands. But I also put a banana in an elephant's mouth and got to feel how remarkably rough its big pink tongue is!

We did a little bit of work (which was more fun than actual work) going out into the fields to chop down the grasses the elephants would eat that day - with machetes!! and then delivering and feeding that glass to the elephants.

After the elephants had eaten, we went swimming in the river to cool off.

AND THEN the workers brought the elephants into the river, so they could cool off too. So I swam with the elephants. And I got to climb up onto them as they swam in the river. I brushed the dirt off their faces with a scrub brush. I held on as they swam underwater.

The elephants seemed to love the water. They squirted it out of their trunks, and on the command of the Thai guys who live/work there they would try to buck us off their backs, going under water and flipping around. Attempting to cling to an elephant's head using only my knees and my hands on its ears as it rolled into the water is officially one of the most difficult things I've ever done. And one of the most fun.

When the elephants were done swimming they all went for a walk in the woods and we dried off, packed up, and headed back to the city so we could eat and then catch a bus back to Bangkok. The van ride home was pretty tame, but it was fun to meet up with the rest of our friends and hear about how they'd spent their day (with tigers!). There is no doubt in my mind I'll be headed back to Kanchaburi again, I want to do it all over again and more.

I'll try and get some pictures of it all up later this week, but suffice it to say that this was an absolutely splendid and magical weekend. And it only got better when I got home to find two big wonderful packages of goodies waiting for me at the front desk of my building.

Thank you!!

2010-07-01T23:58:00.001-07:00

It is the end of our first week of midterms, and honestly, I'm surprised how well it went. I was complaining a lot last week about what I considered to be the absurdity of giving a midterm to a three year old, but it turned out to be pretty interesting. This week was the first chance I've had to be one on one with any of my students away from the distractions of the rest of the classroom. It was actually amazing to find out how much some of them get.

I can show a picture card of the letter A and ask "what is this?" and they respond "A!" I can show them a picture of a cat and ask"what is this?" and they say "cat!" or sometimes "c! cat! me-ow" because thats how they've learned it and I think thats an acceptable answer. If I tell them to stand up, they stand up. If I tell them to clap, they clap. Granted, they can't all do all of it, and some of them don't seem to understand anything, but a couple students in each class have more than aced their midterms so far. I'm so impressed with my students. And I'm a little excited to have had this opportunity to really find out what they can do.

One of the highlights of the week was a little girl who, when I said "touch your mouth" put two fingers into her mouth and stretched it into silly faces at me. Of course, I responded in kind. One of the low points was a little boy who was crying even before I called him out to take his test and could only keep crying while I asked him questions. So I wiped the snot off his face and gave him a passing grade (side note: they all get passing grades)

Next week we will finish up the speaking and listening and do "reading and writing" which will be tracing letters and matching letters and pictures. I still think the concentration on the alphabet is probably not the best way to learn a new language, but even so, it seems they are learning something!

2010-06-28T20:26:00.000-07:00

I spent this past weekend in Bangkok. But on Sunday I desperately needed to escape the concrete and highways of city life, so I went to this little tiny island (Ko Kret) in the river just north of the city, to spend a couple hours wandering around shops and seeing handmade pottery being made. Most importantly, I went for a long walk and admired all the greenery.

one of the temples on the island

a house on the shore

green! the most vibrant swamp you could ever imagine.

a tiny house seemingly floating in that vibrant swamp of green

almost forgotten little shrines, hidden around the trees

an orchid in its natural habitat

2010-06-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

"Hey Emily! How's life in Thailand going?"

"Oh, its pretty swell."

"What did you do today?"

"I gave midterm exams to three year olds."

"Huh??"

"Exactly. And thats what I'll be doing for two more weeks."

2010-06-22T18:43:00.001-07:00

Pictures!

Finally!

A random assortment from the past couple weeks... its not great, but its something!

the grounds around the Emerald Buddha Temple

so much shiny gold!

Around the Grand Palace

and then.... this is my home:

the mall right next door

the view upon walking outside

looking up the street, another mall

And these ones are from this weekend in Khao Yai National Park

that little blur in the center is a herd of wild elephants

pretty nature

grasslands where the grasses grow taller than me (and can cut you)

jungle

bridge into wild Thai jungle

a monkey that ignored me

2010-06-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Teacher Appreciation Day. It meant we spent the morning sitting outside watching a parade of students present flowers to the school administration. They walked up in pairs of boys and girls with massive flower creations (some shaped like eggs, some shaped like chickens, some just crazy flower creations that I've never seen the like of before) and bowed to St. Peter and then to the adminstrators and then to the teachers and then scooted off stage on their knees. There were prayers and speeches and songs (I even got to sing "Shine Jesus Shine" with my fellow teachers) and the ceremony took all morning. Then yesterday afternoon, I didn't have to teach any classes.... because the kindergartners were practicing for their special ceremony for us that would happen today.

So today, I was appreciated again! And this time was simply so much more adorable than yesterday. Because tiny little four year old girls stood up and gave speeches and the flower arrangements were often bigger than the student attempting to carry them. And, today, I actually knew the students who were up on stage and man.... they may be hugely frustrating sometimes, but they are also absurdly adorable. When kindergartners sing they basically cover their ears and then yell as loudly as they can. They don't sit still well, unless they've fallen asleep and a couple of them spent the entire ceremony fascinated by the ceiling. So damn cute.

We never had a celebration like this back home. We never had a day that was absolutely about students appreciating their teachers . I like that they do that here. Before the ceremony, I was afraid the students would actually be bowing and presenting flowers on their knees to me personally, and the idea of that was a little intimidating. I don't feel enough like a teacher to deserve that yet. But as it was, I got to watch from the sidelines, included at a distance, and know that the ritual being enacted on stage was for me, but more for teaching and education in general. Certainly something worth commemorating.

2010-06-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

A slight worry has been niggling at me, but I think I've discovered a way to fix it!

Ever since I left the country, I've been concerned that there may be a lack of baked goods being made if I'm not there to bake them. And being here, being without kitchen and oven and any kind of baking or cooking implements, is hard. So. I have a simple request. This week, or this weekend, or even next week, could those of you that love baking, love eating (or at least love me) take the time to make a pie or a batch of muffins and share them with friends or family? If you all bake something wonderful, then I can live vicariously through all those various Emily tribute baked goods, and I shall no longer fear a paucity of baked deliciousness.

Thank you in advance and I appreciate your support of this worthy cause.

2010-06-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

At this point, I'm going to go ahead and presume that you are all quite bored of learning the letters of the alphabet (this week: E! Elephant, Ear, and Egg!) so I'll move on to a subject that I know most of you care deeply about; the subject that is quite possibly the reason I moved out here in the first place: the food.

I've got to admit, that like a lot of other things, the food here doesn't quite meet much expectations of it. Not so much that it is bad, just that most of the time, it is weird. I can't handle traditional Thai breakfasts simply because eating rice three times a day, every day, might be a tad overkill. So most mornings before I head to school I just eat a banana a peanut butter sandwich. And I recognize that that is entirely boring, but it gets the job done.

My eating habits get much more interesting at lunch. The school serves us lunch every day. There is always rice, always chilies, always fish sauce, and almost always some creepy unknown meat soup/curry that terrifies me. A couple days ago they served us chicken foot soup. I am brave, but sorry, I'm not brave enough to eat a stewed chicken foot (they still have little claws on!!). Sometimes there are greens, sometimes there is egg, sometimes there is meat that doesn't frighten me. Those are the good days. We eat our lunches off big metal prison trays and use extremely bent forks and spoons. We drink water. On the days when all I eat is spicy rice off a dinged metal prison tray, I feel very pious.

After school, there is always a necessary snack. Often it is fresh fruit. The fruit here is certainly a highlight of this whole adventure. Fresh papaya, pinapple, and mangoes whenever I want them and I've discovered all sorts of amazing new fruits like rambutans and mangosteens (mangosteens make my heart melt.... they are so so so good).

And then in the evenings I just eat street food from the vendors around my apartment. I have a favorite egg lady (an omelette over rice is an amazingly perfect meal) and a favorite curry lady (who last night had the most incredible ridiculously spicy mushroom curry) and I visit one of those two stands most nights of the week. But I also sometimes branch out and find soups or noodles or unidentifiable fried things. The problem is that so much is unidentifiable, and I never quite know what I've ordered until I'm tasting it - and sometimes not even then. Thai people eat all the parts of the animal, and they use all sorts of sticks and leaves and berries that people back home would never be willing to eat. So a perfectly safe looking curry can sometimes contain "foods" I'd never expect.

On weekends my eating habits tend to diversify, but that often means I want hummus or Indian food or simply a salad (fresh, raw vegetables are a surprisingly difficult thing to find here) so I spend the money to go to more touristy parts of town where I can find the foods of other cultures and where the local food is advertised with signs in English and higher prices.

Overall, I suppose the food is good, aspects of it are great (the fruit! the curry! the noodles!). But sometimes its scary. I tried pig intestine. It was bad. I tried fish cheek. It was good! I am finding it amazing how satisfying spicy eggs and rice can be (when supplemented with carrots from the grocery store). And my tolerance for spiciness it becoming impressive. I eat things that make my lips burn and my face sweat and that is just normal at this point. The Thai teachers laugh at us at lunch, because we actually spice up the food more than they do.

There are a million foods I miss from back home. Coffee, wine, crunchy whole wheat bread, and cheese are at the top of the list. Luckily, mangosteens go a long way toward making up for all that.

2010-05-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

I just had an absolutely wonderful weekend!

We had last Friday off school because it was a Buddhist Holiday (the anniversary of the days that Buddha was born, achieved enlightenment, and died). So with a three day weekend ahead of us, I left with three other friends after work on Thursday to head south to the ocean, the beach, and the islands. We went to Koh Samet (the nicest, close-ish island, I believe) and the journey there was a bit of an adventure, but somehow every part of it worked out. We took a taxi to the bus station in Bangkok. The ride that should have taken about 45 minutes took over two hours so we missed the bus we'd been hoping for, but instead were approached by a man with a van and a plan to take us down to Ban Phi in less time than the bus and for only a little more money. The van was quick and easy and air-conditioned and he took us right to the pier where we chartered a speedboat to take the four of us across (we made it long after the last ferry, so again, the speeboat was faster, more expensive, and our only option). We got a little lost upon reaching the island a bit after midnight, but miraculously made it to the guesthouse we'd rented. All in all, it seemed incredible that every little bit of transportation logistics fell into place so I could wake up friday morning, walk out the door and have a cup of coffee on the beach.

Friday morning was glorious and I had my feet in the ocean with minutes of being out of bed. The afternoon was actually a little dreary, It rained but we made the best of it. After all, there was ocean and there was sand and there we were, not in Bangkok anymore. We learned that we could replace pina coladas and margaritas with irish coffee, and that makes a perfect beach cocktail on a rainy day. More friends made it down as the day went by, so by the mid-afternoon we had a whole crowd of holidayers. The weather cleared up in the evening so we went swimming and had dinner on the beach. We ate and drank sitting on beanbag chairs with the water lapping up at our toes. People shot off fireworks and we watched some immensely talented Thai guys juggle fire and jump through a flaming hoop. As the evening went on we were roped into a (flaming) limbo and a (flaming) tug-of-war and then an epic Thai and tourist dance party that stretched from club to club and all across the beach. We danced for hours that night. The sky let loose again at the end of the night, meaning my walk back home got me utterly drenched. But still, it was an almost perfect day.

On Saturday the weather was pretty much glorious the entire day. I woke up early and had my breakfast and my banana pancakes on the beach by our guesthouse and went for a walk while I waited for my traveling companions to rouse themselves. I then went with the girls to a more secluded beach than the party beach we'd been on the night before to spend the day swimming, tanning, eating, drinking, and getting the ride of our lives on a massive inflatable banana boat. It was basically another perfect day. The sky was bright blue. The water was shimmering turquoise. There were people who walked past selling snacks and fresh fruit out of baskets, we happily obliged. After many hours of sand, I walked home, showered, napped and then went out again for a quieter but still entirely lovely evening on the beach.

The next day was sadly our last. It was probably the prettiest day we'd had yet, so of course it was sad to know we would be heading back home and back toward work in another couple hours. But I again got to have a solo walk on the beach, a lovely breakfast and tasty lunch (so many fresh fruit smoothies!!) and an afternoon rest in a hammock before we had to catch the ferry to make the van to get a taxi back home to our apartments.

Altogether it was a splendid weekend. It came at the end of a long and semi-stressful first month of work, so it really felt like a well-deserved, relaxing holiday. I had the chance to meet some new people, see a new place, eat a lot of good food, and simply relax. It felt awesome to be out of Bangkok, away from the highway that is my home, to see some trees, to breathe some fresh air. And right now, I'm back at work, halfway through Monday, and it is going ok. The break helped. A lot. And knowing that there will be more breaks, more adventures, and that there are simply so many more places to go, is what will help me get through the tedium of the letter D.

2010-05-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

I've made it into week three now (the letter C for those of you keeping score at home) and I suppose teaching is starting to feel a bit more routine. The first lesson of the week always follows a simple pattern of songs and games and then the introduction of the new letter and new vocab and then a worksheet and then more songs and games (or at least, that is how its supposed to go, sometimes things like vomit get in the way) And the second lesson of includes some review and new information (like body parts or numbers). I've learned that "5 Little Monkeys" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" are total crowd pleasers, but for some reason "Little Green Frog" absolutely fails to make a splash (ba dum!).

I love the moments when I can make the students laugh. Their happiness energizes me to keep going. But a lot of the time, they're distracted and not paying attention, and in those moments, it is really hard for me to care about what I'm saying too. How well the class goes seems to depend a lot on the time of day. I think the morning is easier. In the afternoon they've either just woken up from a nap, so they're still sleepy and disoriented, or they are ready to leave for the day so they are extra hyper and distracted. I count a lot on the help of the Thai homeroom teachers to make the lesson go at all smoothly. Pure chaos would rule without them in the room.

Right now, one of my life challenges is to figure out exciting ways to spend my time when I'm not at school. The nice thing about this job is that there is nothing to take home with me at the end of the day. When I leave, I'm done. So what to do with my evenings and weekends? Last weekend I spent with other friends in Bangkok, essentially just be silly and lazy together. This coming weekend is a holiday so I've got a long weekend and am hopefully going to travel somewhere fun and take a break from the highway and the malls that surround my life in Bangkok. A break would be much appreciated. I'd like to see a tree. And breathe some fresh air. That doesn't seem like too much to ask right?

After work, some nights I'm really lame and I just take a nap and hunt down dinner and then maybe write in my journal. But I am trying to do better than that, so tonight we are having a scrabble and movie night with the friends who are my neighbors. And I'm hoping for more company tomorrow night and maybe a nicer dinner out? By nice I mean sitting down and eating off a plate, not takeout back to my room in a plastic bag that I then eat out of a cup. (I am remarkably and tragically lacking in household goods right now. Though actually, I'm really not that bothered by it.)

So, that is pretty much how my life goes right now. I'm amused by the mundane moments of my "big adventure." And I'm hoping for more legitimately adventure-y moments. But it is all new and fascinating and I am quite sure I'm learning things that I won't recognize as learning and changing for many months. I'm hoping to take some pictures soon, of my apartment and the environment I'm living in. I'll post them when I have them.

2010-05-15T23:57:00.000-07:00

I have now made it through my first week of official teaching. Looking back on it, it possibly went ok, and it went by faster than it felt like at the time (but isn't that always how time works?)

I said "A" a lot. Many many times, and I did some math to figure out that I flapped my arms about a hundred times a day and probably jumped up and down the same amount. If nothing else, being a kindergarten teacher may turn out to be an excellent form of exercise. Except that, to recover from the week, I ate a lot of ice cream and then went out and had quite the night on the town..... so.... maybe not as healthy a life as it could be. I am hoping that this coming week will be better, I'll be introducing the letter B and the words balloon, bird, and banana and I think I've learned at least a couple things not to do in the past week. This coming week, I've got fun worksheets prepared that wil give my students some writing/drawing practice and allow teacher Emily to conserve her voice for a couple more minutes every lesson, and I am very much looking forward to using them.

The weekend has been pretty nice. I met up with friends from my training program both nights and we ventured out to the super backpacker touristy part of the city where we could eat non-thai food. It is a good road to be on, because I got to eat non-thai food (mmmm hummus) and I got to judge all the super-touristy looking folks for being more touristy than I am, as I am actually employed in this country! haha!

It is an interesting little part of Bangkok, this super touristy street (Khao san Road) where all sorts of things exist that I don't see in my everyday life of home and school. There are things like: lots of white people, signage in English, Indian food, overpriced everything, and all the hippy-dippy clothes that I love but am working hard at not buying - at least not until payday!

As far as the political situation goes, it does maybe seem to be escalating (a red shirt general was shot the other day while being interveiwed by a new york times reporter and the red shirts continue to demonstrate in the section of town they've taken over), but my daily life is happening out in the burbs, way far away from the actual action. So don't worry, I feel perfectly safe where I am right now.

2010-05-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

The job actually started yesterday. There I was, dressed in all my boring and professional glory, epic amounts of sweat dripping down my back, standing in front of 36 miniature people with teeny tiny hands and no sense of personal boundaries with two cards in my hand, one of the letter A, and one a picture of an apple. These were my tools. With them and a whole lot of loudly and poorly sung songs I made it through the day. I taught four classes for an hour each. The first three pretty much went by as a blur, it was incredible how long an hour could be when I only have the letter A to fill it with, and, lets be honest, the letter A is really not that thrillling but that is what the Thai curriculum wants from me (my ability to say "A. A. A. AAAAA. A.")

But at least Day 1 is over. And none of the other days will be as bad, because I won't ever be that nervous again, and hopefully, I'll learn some of how to do this as I do it.

The students were good, really. I feel rather bad for them that they have to try and listen to me teach them things for a straight hour (though, they have figured out, that really, they don't have to listen to me and at any given time at least 2/3 of them are totally off in their own little worlds). An hour is a really long time for me to concentrate on things! So it must be harder for them. They do get chocolate milk. And nap time. That would help. But they play along. They like to clap and jump and yell. Some of them do try to repeat after me like they're supposed to.

This teaching gig is going to be exhausting. I already find myself tired all the time and I don't know if that is because of the heat, or because life in another culture can be overwhelming, or because my main form of sustenance is white rice, but add to that needing to stay high energy all day long to clap and jump and run around. Wow. I will be tired. I wish they had real coffee here.

2010-05-04T21:35:00.000-07:00

Would you like the chance to become one of my favorite people ever?

It's easy! Send me mail!

Emily Prengaman
Bangyai Square 137/135
Talingehan-Suphanburi Road
Bangrakpattana, Bangbuathong
Nonthaburi 11110
Thailand

and hopefully such lovely things as you are sure to send me will speedily make their way to this side of the word and bring me immense amounts of joy!

2010-05-03T07:04:00.001-07:00

Today was my first day of work. I went to my school, met some of my fellow teachers, ate lunch in the cafeteria, etc. Best of all, I did not yet have to teach any children! This is a good thing, because I was feeling entirely unprepared to just jump in to the wonderful world of teaching without the time or direction to plan out a lesson. As it turns out, the students don't start school until next week, so I do actually have some time to steel myself for the challenge that lies ahead.

The challenge being..... that I will be teaching students who are 3 years old. THREE. Seriously, three? In what world do you send your 3 year old child off to school for the entire day and entrust their care to an utterly unqualified farang? Oh. Oh ok, right. That world is Thailand.

So here it is that I, Emily Prengaman, the newest English teacher at Kasintorn St. Peter School in Bangkok will be teaching English to multiple classes of (of maybe about 30 per class) 3 year old Thai children everyday. This could be insanity.

Here is a question for all you early childhood education folks out there, all you education-in-general folks out there, and hell, any of you that have had a kid... what on earth can I teach a 3 year old? Especially when I will have 30 of their fellow students running crazily throughout my classroom?! The next six months of my life are going to be filled with tears and snot and naptimes and songs and art and maybe the alphabet if we get around to it. Today's news has simply left me feeling utterly overwhelmed.

I suppose I'm still looking forward to it. It shall still be a grand adventure! Just one with more diapers than I was expecting.

In other news, I do now have my own little apartment. (so if you have any interest in sending me exciting mail, I can email you my address!) It is a tiny little efficiency place that as of right now does not have any electricity, but does have a very shiny new television that I dream of turning on. It is on the side of a freeway, but also next to 3 giant malls, a million vendors lining the streets, and the handy little internet cafe that I am sitting in RIGHT NOW. It is certainly not the prettiest location, but looks aren't everything and the price is right and I'm quite close to school.

Basically, in the past 3 days, my life has gone through immense changes. I have a job and an apartment on the other side of the world. I have a couple friends here, I'm hoping to make some new ones. I'd forgotten how intense a city Bangkok is, it is so hot, so humid, so smelly, so busy, so chaotic. The traffic is terrifying. The number of people that live and work here is massive. I forgot what it feels like to be surrounded by a language I do not speak.

The past couple days have not been easy. I don't quite feel like I'm living my actual life yet, it is all quite surreal. I feel exhilerated one moment, exhausted another, and exasperated the next. I think what I am coming to realize is that teaching (or glorified babysitting?) is simply going to be so much more work than I was expecting.

2010-03-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

My training program is about halfway over at this point. And that is simply crazy.

Today, for the first time, we got to practice teaching in front of a classroom of real Thai students. It was incredible. Exhilerating. Nerve-wracking. Coming out of that half hour lesson was like coming down from a ridiculous adrenaline rush. But. I think it went pretty well. I taught a lesson about sports to a class of 20-25 (they kept coming in and out) 7 yr olds. I got to use lots of pretty coloured pictures and lots of very basic words. I sang a song. I did a dance. These are not activities I do well, but I did them. I wore a granny skirt, a classy long-sleeved shirt that buttoned up to my neck and practical shoes. My hair looked neat - not my normal attire. The kids spent a lot of the class wiggling in their seats, and we played a lot of games to keep their energy up, but maybe they learned a couple words? That is pretty much all I can hope for.

Tomorrow I'll teach again, this time a lesson to an older group of students, they'll probably do a better job of staying in their seats. They probably won't be quite as ridiculously adorable either, so I won't be at risk of wanting to just squeeze all the cuteness out of them (note. I did not squeeze any children today... but I wanted to)

The most incredible part is that my program has my teaching job all lined up, I will officially be a teacher in less than two weeks. Incredible. At a Catholic School with about 3000 students here in Bangkok. Crazy. This will not be the rural, primitive experience I may have been expecting... it will be... gasp! A job. Work. Eek.

But, I'll have a paycheck (thats a pretty crazy thought, eh?) and an apartment and I'll have weekends and holidays to explore more of Thailand.... Check out the beaches, the islands, the jungles.... and the great news is that some of the friends I'm making will end up in different parts of the country, so I'll have people to visit, and potentially couches to sleep on!

Speaking of couches, I will let the world know as soon as I have one of my own, I would love visitors. At the moment, I don't make the most capable cultural ambassador and tourguide, but I'm getting better at the language every day (I can count to ten!!!) so by the time you get here, I'll be pretty pro.

2010-03-09T02:57:00.001-08:00

Sawadee kha!

So here goes.... my first blog entry from Thailand! It is my third day here, and today was my second day of teacher training. And well, so far so good. My initial impressions are that it is hot, most of the people are smaller than me, and that I am so ridiculously happy to be here.

The day before I left was a ridiculous and traumatic day in a lot of ways, that don't at all seem worth getting into, but suffice it to say, that I am very happy to even be here. The flight was fine. It only took about 32 hours from leaving home to get to my hotel in Bangkok. That seems... reasonable? Funny enough, for the flight from Chicago to Tokyo (the longest flight) I sat next to a guy who is in a masters program at CMU. Small world. But he was a nice guy, and it was good to have someone to laugh with as we entered jet-lag delirium together. When I arrived I made it through customs, found a taxi, got to the hotel, all easy-peasy like I'm good at this or something. And really, that easiness, that things-are-going-my-way feeling hasn't worn off yet. There is a good vibe in the air in Thailand. It feels good to be here.

My program is super-duper exciting. I have met incredible people in the past two days. We come from all different walks of life. I was expecting more people in my situation- the I can't find a real job, and I don't really want to variety - but instead there are those types and people who are twice my age or older, who are retiring or mid-life crisising. We come from the US, from the UK, Australia, Portugal, and lots of other places. I am hearing so many different Englishes, that in itself is exciting. My roomate is great. I want to talk to her all the time, which is challenging, because I want to talk to everyone else all the time, AND I want to talk to all the Thai people.... perhaps six months will not be enough time?? (sorry, parents......) The variety of life histories and experiences that have come together to do this is fascinating. There are people who haven't been in one place for more than a year in years and there are people who have never left their native countries. Incredible!!

And then... Thailand. My gosh. It is beautiful and it is welcoming and sometimes it smells really bad. There are bright pink taxis. There are pictures of the king everywhere. There is food everywhere. It is SPICY. It honestly feels really good to be back.

Bangkok is huge. And chaotic. It has a very different feel than the tiny little rural village I was in before. I think maybe all big cities have something in common, between the crush of people, the tall buildings, the opportunity for almost anything.... and yet, of course, it is special and it is unique and I am looking forward very much to the weekend so I can spend some time being touristy and taking pictures of everything I see (no pictures yet, I'm sorry, I haven't had time). There are so many places to go, just exploring the little alleyways around our hotel is interseting and exciting.

I feel like I'm absolutely blithering right now, this post is perhaps lacking in an overall theme other than "oh my god this! oh my god that!" but that is simply the state of my brain and my life right now, so, dear reader, you'll have to accept it.....

Classes have been really interesting so far. We are learning how to teach, learning bits and pieces of Thai language and Thai culture. It is both theoretical and practical and I feel like I will actually know what I'm doing when the three weeks are over. I am also quite sure the real teaching will be far more difficult and challenging than I can even imagine. So that is a bit of a contradiction. But it will all work out. Buddha says its all okay.

So that, in a nutshell, is everything and nothing about the past couple days. There was a lot of freaking out that happened inside my head the week before I left, and now? Actually there is a lot of peace and a lot of happiness. So I think that is a great sign.

Sawadee kha!

(it means hello and goodbye!!... sortof.)

2010-02-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

Right now I am finding it incredibly difficult to believe that I week from today I will be in an entirely different country. After approximately 27 hours spent on airplanes and airports I will be on the other side of the world. The time spent traveling seems more than reasonable for that kind of magical transportation (and yet, if you were to ask me how I feel about it on hour ten of the fourteen hour flight to Seoul, I might answer quite differently).

Am I ready to go? No. Not at all. I need to clean, I need to pack, I need to make a million lists, and do a million tiny errands. I need to say some serious goodbyes. But will I be ready by the time I board my plane? I sure hope so.

The truly important question: how many pairs of pretty shiny heels do I get to take with me? None. I've got a pack (brand new and pretty blue from REI) and I plan on fitting six months worth of material goods into it and onto my back. That in itself will be an adventure. In restraint.

2010-02-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

The fact that I am sitting at my computer, wrapped in many layers, woolly socks, and fuzzy slippers, watching thousands of snowflakes fall on top of the two feet of snow that has already accumulated inspires in me a rather ridiculous amount of excitement that a month from today I will be far far away from snow, in sunny warm Thailand, ready to start a new job that will hopefully provide much fodder for the writing of an engaging blog.

Where I am.

Yes indeed! If you haven't already heard, and I have no idea if you have (and likely, no one is even reading my blog anymore, so I'll have to tell you all about it again) I am going to Thailand in March to take on a job teaching English. I couldn't find a real job here in this country, so I found one abroad! I'll spend my first month there in training, learning how on earth one teaches another language without speaking any of the language one's students speak. The new school semester doesn't start right away, so I'll spend the next month traveling goodness knows where and hopefully having some grand adventures! The job will start after that, a 4-5 month teaching position at a Thai school. I'm not sure yet exactly where that will be, or what ages my students will be, but I'm excited to find out.

Where I'm headed.

So I have about two weeks left here in Baltimore, and then I'll pack up my life, pray that it stills fits into my car and head home to Ohio, hopefully stopping to see some favorite friends and family on the way. Then a week or so at home where I can unpack, repack, store everything else in Mom and Dad's attic (thanks guys!), get some shots, see the dentist, freak out about everything etc., etc... Then I fly away on March 5 and spend more than a day in airports and airplanes. I'll arrive in Bangkok in some surely crazy, exhausted, exhilarated, and most likely hungry, state of mind and start my training program the next day! Can't Wait!

Spain!!

2007-11-29T00:16:00.002-08:00

We just left Spain, the very last port of this voyage. I’ve got really mixed feelings, because its sad that its over, but I’m very excited to be headed home, back to friends and family and all that good stuff. I’m looking forward to the stability of being in one place for more than a week. But Spain was good, really really good.

The first day in Cadiz, it was a little cold and rainy, so I just explored the city with two of my friends, and we visited lots of churches and cathedrals to try and stay dry. We also went into a convent, which was sortof cool. We walked to the shore and admired the Atlantic for a little while, each of us trying to figure out how long it had been since we had last seen that ocean and then the rain got a lot harder and we ended up spending the next two and a half hours sitting under a playground in the park, just talking and eating all the Spanish chocolate we had bought earlier that day. When the rain finally went away, we found a big stone fort that had been turned partially into a museum that was displaying lots of very weird contemporary art, and that was fun to look at. Then we had lunch at a random little street corner café where I had the most amazing thing. According to the menu, they were shrimp tortillas, but they weren’t shrimp wrapped up in tortillas they were crispy fried tortilla type things that had teeny little shrimps in the batter itself. They were awesome. Then we walked back to the ship because ewe all had tickets to see Flamenco that night as an SAS trip. The Flamenco night was a lot of fun. The first stop we went to was outside (and cold!) a bull ring where we saw a dancing horse and a cow who was in training to become a fighting bull. The mini bull fighting session was actually really weird and sortof sad. It seemed like the guys were just being mean to the little calf by tiring him out making him run at a stupid waving cape. We never found out if he had passed the test to become a real bull. Then we went inside to watch flamenco, drink sangria, and eat tapas, and that was altogether lots and lots of fun. The flamenco dancers were amazing, and after the show they opened up a dance floor and we all had the chance to dance for ourselves.

The second day in Spain was when things got exciting. Three of my friends had made last minute plans the night before we got to Spain to go to Paris, and I was really jealous of them for getting to do something really exciting like that. So my friend Erin and I decided that we wanted to go somewhere cool too (that would hopefully be cheaper to get to than Paris). And so…. Bright and early the second day we hopped a bus that took us down to the southern tip of Spain and then we took a ferry to….

(drumroll please…..)

MOROCCO!

I went to Morocco!!!! It was so much fun!!! It was an absolutely ridiculous, spur of the moment decision, but we went and it was amazing. It was incredibly simple to just take a ferry to Africa. A stamp on our passports and filling out a little form and we were there, in Tangiers! Erin had been to other parts of Morocco before, so we had some idea of what to expect, but not really a whole lot. It rained the entire first day we were there, so we spent the morning trying to dodge the rain (but not really minding it because it was Moroccan rain and that is cooler than normal rain). We shopped a little bit and found a cheap hotel where we could leave our stuff and know we actually would have a place to sleep once it got dark. We had lunch in a restaurant that was really good. Erin ate pizza and I had tangine-cooked chicken in vegetables. Ordering lunch was really funny, we were expecting everybody to speak Arabic, (and neither of us really know much more than please and thank you in that language) but Erin had a little bit of Spanish and since we were right across from Spain we figured that might come in handy, but when it came to the restaurants and the shopping, it was actually mostly my high school French that came in handy, since Morocco used to be a French colony. So they entire time we were in Tangiers, we spent speaking a very strange combination of French, English, Spanish, and Arabic, and eventually, I think we got everything figured out. So lunch was awesome, then we spent the afternoon getting soaking wet wandering around, stopped in a men’s only gambling type place (I don’t think real gambling is legal, so they all played with bottle caps) to escape the rain and drink delicious Moroccan tea (super sweet and minty, and miraculous even better than Turkish apple tea had been) and then the sun started to go down and we realized we were soaking wet and horribly lost and had no idea where our hotel with all our stuff in it was. It probably took us more than two hours to find the hotel, getting wetter and wetter as we searched. We finally had to walk all the way back to where the ferry had dropped us off to retrace our steps. We we so happy to find the hotel, and we immediately got inside changed into the small amount of dry clothes we had, pulled all the blankets off one bed and put them on the other (the room wasn’t heated – turns out that’s why it was so cheap) and we curled up in bed, playing cards, until we warmed up enough to go out again. We never did manage to go out again that night because we ended up falling asleep.

We woke up the next morning to much nicer weather, put on our still soaking wet clothes and found breakfast of tea and croissants at a nearby café. Then we did basically the same thing we had done the day before of wandering around, looking at stores, and laughing over the absolute craziness of our presence in Morocco. We walked along the beach for a while. We ate delicious bread in the marketplace. We almost got talked into buying expensive carpets (they were lovely) but had to resist. And then, in the midafternoon when it started to rain again, we took the ferry back across to Spain. We met a guy from Indiana on the ferry who had been backpacking around Europe for the past three months and we all made friends and shared travel stories. When we got back to Tarifa (Spain) we decided to hang around there for the night and the three of us found a hostel to stay in and spent the evening exploring Tarifa, walking through the old city, playing on the beach, and climbing up a steep hill to an old abandoned castle were that evenings big entertainments.

The next morning our new friend left for a kitesurfing lesson and Erin and I spent the morning looking around some of the parts of Tarifa that hadn’t been open the day before (it had been Sunday). Early that afternoon we took the bus back to Cadiz and it was really nice to get back to the ship and put on actually dry clothes – my shoes had been sopping wet for the past two days.

The last day in Spain I spent in and around Cadiz. I hung out with a bigger group of friends, and we walked around in search of a shopping mall for people who needed last minute suitcases to pack up everything they had bought over the past three months and shared stories about our adventures in Morocco, Paris, Sevilla, Barcelona, Madrid, etc. We spent our last afternoon drinking Sangria in the park, enjoying the sunlight. It was quite lovely.

It was a little bit sad to get back onto the ship, knowing that it mean this trip is essentially over (aside from finals). But I really am very excited about coming home. I miss lots of people, and things and all that. And its really awesome that I’ll be getting home during the Christmas season, because that’s one of my favorite times of year. For those of you out there that are really excited for me to get back, I’ll be in Miami on Friday December 7th, then I’m spending the weekend down in Florida with Kate and I’ll be flying back into Delaware late on Sunday night. I’ll spend a couple days in Ohio and then I think I’ll drive to Pittsburgh maybe on Thursday and spend a long weekend helping all my friends from school study for their finals (ha!). So if you want to get a hold of me, I’ll be back in the country in a little over a week! Yay!!

Croatia!!

2007-11-29T00:16:00.001-08:00

Wow. I am so sorry to all of you out there you have been loyal fans to my blog all semester that it has taken me such a ridiculously long time to update it after Istanbul. (actually, I have no idea if any loyal fans really exist, but I thought I’d apologize anyways). But here it is!

Croatia.

Croatia was not actually a particularly exciting place, but it ended up being really nice to just relax a little bit in port without the worry of trying to see it all and fit everything into five days. Instead, the highlight of Dubrovnik is a cute little walled city where you can walk on the walls, look out over the ocean, and meander the little cobblestone streets. You might eat some delicious food while you’re at it, but basically that can all be accomplished in one day. You don’t actually need five.

So to keep this kindof short and sweet because I’d rather talk about the exciting things that happened in Spain. The first day in Croatia I did all the things I talked about above. We had horrible weather that day, it was cold, rainy, and when we were up on the walls it even started hailing. But Dubrovnik was a beautiful city, walking around the old part of the city was a bit like going back in time a couple hundred years.

The second day my friends Lauren and Erin and I took a bus to Split, the second largest city in Croatia. We left super early in the morning to catch the bus at 6:00am and got to Split a little after 10:00. The bus ride had been beautiful, I saw the sun rise and the whole drive was along the coast of the Adriatic (I think…) which was covered by these rugged, craggy mountains. We also drove for about half an hour through Bosnia and actually took a rest stop there, so I can now say I’ve officially stepped onto Bosnian soil. Once we were in Split it was just another cute little town, it didn’t feel like a big city at all. But we had fun walking around, visiting book stores and looking at travel books and making more plans for other trips. We walked around the old palace, saw a church turned into a cultural museum that along with historical artifacts had a show up of photographs from Tibet (made me really want to go to Tibet too, so I’m adding that one to my growing list). We had lunch at a little pizza place and drank Croatian beer (pizza was really good, the beer not so great) and then we had ice cream for dessert (even though it was still really cold out). We caught the bus back that same day around 5:00, so we had another couple hours of beautiful scenery before the sun set and we drove back through Bosnia (so now I’ve been there twice!) and back home to Dubrovnik.

The second day I walked around Dubrovnik by myself. It was the first time I had spent a lot of time out and about in a country by myself, and it was actually really nice. I walked along the water for a long time, went to a couple museums, and treated myself to a fancy lunch. It was very peaceful.

The third day we took a ferry boat ride out to one of the nearby islands and spent the day exploring. We walked through the woods and lived off the fresh clementines and pomegranates that we picked from trees along our path. We were walking through what I think were public areas, so I’m not sure if anyone actually owned the fruit trees. We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t stealing if we picked the fruits that hung over the path itself and we’d offer to pay if anyone came out and yelled at us. Nobody yelled, and the fresh fruits were absolutely incredible.

The last day I went back to the old city and walked around the walls one more time. And then spent a couple more hours just wandering around, even though at that point I think I had seen it all already. It was actually really nice to not have anything pressing that I needed to see or do. Dubrovnik was a lovely little town and I’m sure we would have had an incredible time if we had been there during the actual summer tourist season when the beaches would have been fun and there would have been tons of other things to do. As it was, the area was slowing down, getting ready for winter. To enjoy our stay in Dubrovnik, you had to mentally avoid calling the place boring, and instead call it relaxing and soothing.

Happy Turkey Days!

2007-11-16T13:55:00.001-08:00

I realize its not yet Thanksgiving back at home, but I just finished up my turkey days in Istanbul and had an awesome time!

The first day in Istanbul I spent walking around with three of my friends. Our ship was parked on the Asia side of the city, but we walked from Asia to Europe and took lots of pictures of ourselves on the bridge that connects the two continents (I know people that have stood in four states at one time, but not many people who have done two continents at the same time). So we ended up spending most of our first day on the Europe side. We had breakfast in a cute little patisserie where the guys spoke no English at all, so we placed out orders by pointing – which is always fun. We walked through the spice bazaar and were just absolutely inundated by smells of spices and teas that were wonderful, especially when compared to the smells we’ve been recently assaulted by in India and Egypt. The spice bazaar was really fun, the salesmen here were so much more easygoing than they had been in most of the other countries, they didn’t hassle you the moment you walked in, and would serve you delicious apple tea once you got a little more involved in the sale. We left the spice bazaar and wandered our way uphill looking in little stores with no particular destination in mind. We found ourselves drawn to the shops selling hats, gloves, and scarves, because for the first time this whole trip, it finally felt like the right temperature for the season – and for me, in November, that means cold and rainy. And that’s what we got. We were all happy to see red and brown leaves falling off trees because autumn doesn’t actually happen in a lot of countries it seems. But, back to our meandering walk, at the top of the hill we found a pretty mosque that we looked at, it was prayertime, so we couldn’t go in, but we stopped for lunch at a café across the street and then went back into the mosque afterwards. It was a pretty place, we wondered if maybe it was the blue mosque or something, because we thought that was supposed to be somewhere in the area, but realized the blue mosque is probably something you know you are seeing when you see it (this one really wasn’t impressive enough) so this one was just a smaller mosque, of which there are many dotting the city and making the skyline very pretty. From the mosque, we continued wandering through the hilly streets and little stores in a meandering sort of way. We found lots of cute little shops and ogled lots of cute Turkish guys, and so that was a fun afternoon. When it started to get darker and colder, we headed back to Asia and on our way back to the ship found a place selling really cheap phone cards so we all took the opportunity to briefly call home and that was nice. Mom had to rescue cookies from the oven, so she couldn’t talk long, so I grabbed a cup of hot chocolate and waited for my friends to finish up their conversations in a little café nearby.

The second day in Istanbul, I spent exploring the Asia side with my friend Sam. We started off the day with fresh squeezed orange and pomegranate juice from a street vendor and a loaf of fresh baked bread from a baker as we climbed up a hugely steep hill to the Galata tower – from which you can see an incredible view of the city. We then continued walking along the hilly part that sort of overlooks the river and the other bank because it was super pretty up there and we came upon a tiny little art museum, where, funny enough, they were having an Andy Warhol show (because I don’t see enough of that back in Pittsburgh). But we decided to go it and it was fun, because they had an interesting collection of modern American/Western art and also a collection of more traditional Western oil paintings of Turkish people done rather stereotypically or imagined (sexy ladies in harems and the like) and from the blurbs you could tell that even though the pieces were lovely, the Turkish museum didn’t really approve of their content or their context. We walked from the museum toward Taksim (one of Istanbul’s many districts) stopping in churches and window shopping along the way. We had lunch, got over-charged for food we didn’t mean to order, and left frustrated. We kept walking through the business district and eventually found our way to an outdoor theater and form there to a pretty park where we see-sawed for the first time in years. Both of our cameras take video, so we filmed each other bouncing up and down on the see-saw (teeter-totter? I’m never sure what to call them) and its pretty funny to watch. We finally reached the Dolmabache palace (which was our ultimate goal for the day) but it was closed when we got there, so that was sad.

The third day, we took a boat ride up the bosphorus to a tiny little fishing village. The ferry ride was a lot of fun, the scenery was just beautiful, we sailed past the ruins of lots of stone walls and fortresses. We had lunch in the little village (yummy fresh caught fish!) and then decided to walk around because we had a few hours before the next ferry would come to pick us up. We picked a random direction in hopes of climbing up into the hills for a good view of the river and ended up finding not only a spectacular view, but the ruins of an ancient castle that you could climb around on. The view from the very top of the hill was incredible because you could see the bosphorus on one side and the black sea on the other. The day was clear and sunny, and it was absolutely perfect to spend the afternoon climbing on potentially dangerous rocky ruins. On the ferry ride back, we made sure to sit on the other side of the boat so we could check out everything on the other side of the river. We got back into Istanbul just as the sun was starting to set, and it was the most incredible moment to see all the mosques backlit by the sun from the water with seagulls flying all around. We stopped back into the spice bazaar to buy more delicious teas and Turkish delights and then walked back across the continents to find dinner in Asia. We went back to the ship for a while, but went back out to spend the evening in a Turkish café/bar, smoking a hookah and drinking yummy apple tea and super-strong coffee (like in Egypt, smoking a hookah/shisha/waterpipe is totally the cool thing to do). We made friends with our server, it was quite fun.

The next day we took the tram to Sultanamet – which is one of the most important districts to visit in Istanbul when you’re touristing there, because that’s where the blue mosque and the haggia Sophia are. We tried to go to the blue mosque first, but we got there during prayer-time so we weren’t allowed in. So we walked across to the Hagia Sophia and went in there first and it was absolutely amazing. The story behind the place is that the majority of what still stands was built as a basilica around 400 ad., but when the Muslims took over the city in 1400, they turned the church into a mosque by adding minarets and covering up lots of the old Christian frescoes. Since then, the place has been secularized and the frescoes have been uncovered, so now its an incredible combination of Christianity and Islam. The inside of the Haggia Sophia was most definitely one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. It was huge and so ornate, it was unbelievable. There were two art shows within the hagia Sophia. On the first floor was an exhibition by a Turkish painter of turkey and mosques and other cultural things done in a somewhat abstracted, contemporary fashion, they were very cool, very fun to look at, they were also all for sale, but completely out of my price range. The exhibition on the second level was of photography of the haggis Sophia itself – they were absolutely beautiful photos, so wonderfully detailed, they captured the place so much better than my little tiny pictures with my little tiny camera ever could. Seeing the photos and the real thing at the same time was magical. When we left the Hagia Sophia, we went back to the blue mosque and it was open now. It too was very beautiful inside, but also sort of felt like just another beautiful mosque (its rather ridiculous how many mosques I’ve seen in the past two weeks after having never been inside on until this point in my life) it was lovely, but by no means as fantastic as the Hagia Sophia. Then we had lunch at a street corner café – we had these sliced meat sandwiches that are THE thing to have (they’re called doner sandwiches) they are for sale absolutely everywhere. Then we went to the grand bazaar and spent a few hours being overwhelmed by the enormity of the place and resisted the urge to buy large-scale stained glass/light pieces (he offered me a pretty good deal by the end of it, but there was no way I could have gotten in home). After the bazaar, our group split up, and Erin and I headed back toward the mosques in search of the basilica cistern that we had heard was really cool. It took a while to find, because the whole place is underground, with only a small ticket booth above ground. The cistern is a huge underground cavern supported by 360some columns that used to store water back in the day of aquaducts. Now, its open to the public and when you go down, it feels like what the creepy place in the phantom of the opera probably feels like. Its wet and slippery, and sortof creepy with eerily lit columns and the sound of dripping water from the rain. It was a place with definite atmosphere, it was very cool. There are two large medusa head sculptures in the back of the cistern, one of which is upside-down, the other is sideways, and no one quite knows why they were built that way, but they were.

On our last day in Istanbul, Erin and I decided to sortof take it easy. We slept in and then took a tram back to Sultanamet because our goal was to see the Topkapi palace that had been closed when we had tried to go there the day before. Since we got there in the morning, it was open, and we spent a long time looking through the multiple courtyards. It was a very pretty place, there are four gardened courtyards and all of the palace rooms have been turned into museum spaces where they exhibit collections of historical Turkish things. We saw everything from carriages, to a collection of Chinese pottery, to clothing and jewelry, to portraits if the sultans, and an armory of swords and rifles. It was a really interesting opportunity to learn a lot about Turkish history simply by looking at the artifacts and reading the little blurbs about them. The palace was very different from the European-type castle that I had sortof been expecting, the layout of the courtyards was different and it wasn’t build up tall at all, it just spread out to cover lots of ground. Anyways, it was different. The view from the palace of the bosphorus and the other side of the city was also quite incredible. I wouldn’t mind living in the palace and having a view like that. Erin and I walked back from the palace, exploring a little bit more as we went and then stopped back into the hookah place to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the soccer game and drinking more tea. It was fun, it was nice to end on a sort of relaxing day. As my third to last country, I’m realizing that I’m ending the entire voyage in a more relaxing way, I no longer have huge cross-country train trips coming up, and I’m planning on spending a little more time just getting to know individual cities, the back alleys and the teeny cafes and all that good stuff. I think it’ll be nice after all the busyness.

EGYPT!!!!

2007-11-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Oh my god!!! I just went to Egypt. It was amazing, incredible, wonderful…. I still can’t believe I just had the opportunity to actually live out one of my elementary school dreams!

We sailed into Egypt through the Suez canal, which was a really fun experience. We had the day off of classes and instead had the Sea Olympics (we’re all in seas… like teams depending on which deck we’re on) and we played lots of dumb games to win the ultimate prize of who gets to get off the ship first in Miami (my team came in dead last L). Sailing through the suez canal was beautiful, and it was so incredibly nice to see land after ten days of pure ocean.

We got into Alexandria the next day, and as soon as the ship was cleared, I left on my four day Cairo/Luxor trip. The bus ride from Alexandria to Cairo took about 3 hours, and I was tired so I slept most of the way. I woke up in Cairo when my tour guide started pointing out important sites to us, and it was amazing to see the pyramids (THE PYRAMIDS!!!) rise up behind all the high rise hotels. They’re right there, they’re just right there on the edge of the city!!! We had a delicious lunch at a fancy restaurant and I basically ate tomatoes and dessert because right now the tomatoes are in season and the dessert buffet was incredible.

After lunch we hopped back on the bus and drove to Sakkara to see the step pyramid. It was so cool, it was huge, and … steppy. We then drove back into Cairo as the sun was setting to see a light show on the pyramids (the big three). The light show was horribly hokey, but also really cool, simply because we were at the pyramids. The talking sphinx told us, and I quote, “the world fears time, but time [pause] fears [pause] the pyramids… bum…bum. .bum…” it was hilarious. Then we went to a night bazaar (the second oldest bazaar still in existence in the world) and in the process of buying a couple scarves, and Egyptian woman showed us the correct way to actually wrap a veil on. It was pretty cool. The Egyptian men are very loud and… affectionate? That’s not really the right word… but anyways, they really enjoy cat-calls so we got lots of “senorita, I love you’s” , whistles, and “I have what you looking for” (though I think that time he was just trying to sell me a shirt). We got back to our hotel around 11:00, ate dinner (again, absolutely delicious food – it was more Mediterranean than I was expecting: hummous and pita, tomatoes, eggplant, good olives, lots of fruit, and many many desserts), and then we went up to our rooms. I was rooming with my friend Sam and we had fun bouncing on our incredibly fluffy beds and watching the news (in English!!) to catch up a little bit on what been going on in the world.

We had a wake up call at 4:00 the next morning so we could drive to the pyramids to see them at sunrise. Normally the area doesn’t open to the public until 8:00, but somehow semester at sea got special permission to be there two hours early to actually see the sun rise. It was incredible. Beautiful. Wow. I saw the sunrise at the pyramids – that’s just insane. But I did it. It was really cool (temperature) that morning before the sun was the whole way up, which surprised me after how hot it had been the day before (I guess what I’ve heard about crazy temperatures in deserts is true). We were at the pyramids for a long time, we went on camel rides, and had the chance to actually touch them and climb on them and take lots of amazing pictures. It was awesome, and then we saw the sphinx and that was also unbelievable. We drove from the pyramids to Memphis (the first capitol of Egypt) and wandered around there. There’s really not a whole lot at Memphis anymore except a couple statues and men trying to sell you stuff, but it’s cool to be able to say I was there. From Memphis, we drove back into Cairo to have lunch on the Nile. We had lunch on the nile. The NILE!!! We were on a big boat which served us a buffet lunch and we had live music by three guys on crazy traditional instruments and there was a belly dancer and a whirling dervish and it was very very fun to see.

After lunch we got back on the busses to see the Citadel of Saladin and the Alabaster Mosque. The mosque was built for Mohammed Ali (not the boxer) a long time ago and it was the most beautiful example of Islamic architecture I’ve ever seen (though istanbul is next, so maybe that’ll win). The ceiling was a huge round dome with dangling glass lights and super-intricate designs in metal and wood and carpet. It was beautiful. We were there during a call to prayer, so we were able to watch the Muslim men actually praying toward Mecca. We went from the mosque to the Cairo Museum (the official Egyptian Archaeological Museum) and it was marvelous too. We didn’t have nearly enough time to be there (as you may see, we had packed quite a lot into one day), but Sam and I did manage to make it through pretty much the whole place. We saw rooms full of sarcophaguses, jewelry, ancient tools, statues, the king Tut collection (his gold mask!!!!), the only thing we missed were the mummies, because it cost extra to see them and we didn’t have time for that anyways. The museum was insanely crowded, there was just so much of everything, so much history just laid on in front of us, on shelves, in cases, everywhere. It was wonderful, I felt like I could have spent days there.

We went back to the hotel for a late dinner and then I headed out for an evening in Cairo with three of my friends. We had a wake up call at 2:15 the next morning, so we figured there was really no point in letting it be a wakeup call, we might as well stay up all night. So after dinner, Sam, Erin, Lauren, and I found a shishah bar (which is where EVERYONE in Egypt spends their evenings) and we hung out there for a few hours and smoked and drank yummy mint tea and mango juice. We made friends with the other customers and the guys running the place, and I think they all got a big kick out of our being there. We left the bar around midnight and spent the next hour and a half strolling along the Nile enjoying the cool breeze, the lights on the riverboats, and the fact that we were strolling along the Nile. Cairo really is a city that never sleeps, there were crowds of people around the whole time we walked, I guess it makes sense to try and be awake when the temperature is most agreeable.

So Sam and I got back to the hotel in time to shower and repack our stuff before we boarded the buses to drive to the airport for our 5:00am flight to Luxor. The airport was a crowded mess and it was pretty hectic trying to get on the plane in time. The power on the plane shut off moments after we got on (before we flew) which was sortof scary, but by this point I was pretty exhausted and it didn’t really bother me as much as it probably should have. My sleep-deprived self actually found it more annoying when the lights finally came back on and woke me up. The flight was only about an hour, but I really don’t remember anything between the lights coming on and the announcements that we would soon be landing. The view out the airplane window of luxor and all the sandy desert was wonderful.

We went from the airport to the Valley of the Kings, where I saw the tombs of King Tut, Ramses IV, Ramses VI, and some other famous dead guy. The tombs were (like everything else) incredible. King tut’s was packed full of people, and hot and humid (you understand how that paintings are being destroyed by the humidity the moment you walk in) but I was about 4 ft from his actual mummy, and that is just so unbelievable. The paintings in Tut’s tomb weren’t actually that spectacular, but the ones in those of the rameses’ were. It’s almost impossible to believe that we were seeing paintings that are literally thousands of years old – they’re still carefully detailed and colorful. I really wasn’t expecting them to still be that colorful.

We went from the Valley of the Kings to the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut which is this huge columned complex that is basically carved right out of the cliff face in the desert. Then we saw the Colossi of Memnon which sounds a lot cooler than they actually were. Just two big statues in the middle of the desert, but again, its good to be able to say I saw them. We drove back to Luxor for lunch and afterwards while some people went on an optional (ie pay more) tour of the city in horse drawn carriages I finally had the chance to fall asleep (which after about 34 hours of being awake, I think was a justified choice). I got a good 2 and a half hour nap in before we left to go to Luxor Temple and see it all lit up at night. Luxor temple was one of those huge columned places, where there’s no longer a roof, but there are lots of a awesome statues and carvings and the columns are absolutely massive. After the temple, we went back to the hotel for dinner (mmm…. More delicious food! But I wondered how truly Egyptian it was, if it was served in a fairly westernized hotel. There was pita, but there was pasta too – still, it tasted good) Once we’d finished off a big plate of chocolate mousse Sam and Karen and I explored the area around the hotel in search of an internet café. We finally found a nice cheap one where I had the chance to figure out my spring course schedule and what was even more exciting was that Sam let me borrow her Skype account and I called home and got to talk to Mom. That was really awesome, she didn’t know who I was at first, but she figured it out.

I got to sleep in the next morning till the super-late hour of about 7:00 am and we broke our fasts at the hotel before driving to the Karnak Temple. It was the same concept as the Luxor Temple, except even more complex and massive. I had thought the columns the day before had been huge, no, these were ginormous. The thing with the temples, is that each pharaoh would try to leave their mark by adding something onto the temples, so over time, they just got huger and grander. We had lunch after that and then had to head back to the airport to fly back to Cairo to drive back to Alexandria. That took awhile. I somehow couldn’t sleep, so I spent the travel time zoning out with my music.

The next morning, Sam, Erin, Lauren, and I spent the day enjoying Alexandria. We shopped, and saw some of the touristy places (the library, the fort where the famous light house used to be…) but we mainly just relaxed and shopped. We all needed stamps and there were a couple packages that needed sent home, so we ended up spending a good part of the afternoon searching for a post office and when we finally found one, they would only ship things express (re. expensive). The nicest man in the world led us from that bank to another branch where they would ship things for us (he worked at the second branch, and he spoke excellent English, so he was very helpful). By the time we got there, though, for some reason they couldn’t ship things out that day, so our new friend offered to mail the packages out for us the next day – it was so incredibly nice of him. In all, we probably took up almost 2 hours of his day, and he still invited us back to visit him the next time we were in Egypt so that was wonderful. After lots of Egyptian men who just wanted to whistle at us or sell us stuff, it was really nice to find one who was simply willing to help us. Actually, that’s something about the entire trip that’s been amazing, there’s almost always been someone willing to help us, or try to help us. I think I’m going to have to be nicer to tourists when I’m back home. Even just saying “welcome to the U.S.!” or something like that, because we heard a lot of “welcome to egypt’s!” and that was really nice, very friendly.

India!!!

2007-10-21T01:30:00.000-07:00

It’s the second day back on the ship after my five days in India, and I finally have found the time to update me blog and check my email, and try to catch up a little with life back home in my real world. So here’s the India story:

On the first day in Chennai, we finally got off the ship around noon and my friend Kait and I hired a autorickshaw driver to take us around the city for the day for about 5 dollars. It seemed like a good price, and there is no other easy way to get around. Our first stop was a Hindu temple where a guy tried to give us a tour we didn’t want and then attempted to make us pay for it, but we had the chance to see a very pretty place and get a first taste of the sights and sounds and smells of India. Then we pointed to a couple other destinations that were on our list of sightseeing stops, and told the driver he could figure out the best way to take us to al those places, since we didn’t really know the city. Instead he drove us to a bunch of fancy emporiums that sold really beautiful really expensive things like lifesized bronze elephants and ginormous oriental rugs – neither of which could we afford or fit back into our rooms on the ship. We realized pretty quickly, that like in some of the other countries we’d been to, the drivers get paid to take their customers to shops, or they get things like free t-shirts. The driver eventually tried to hike up the price of our day while we were driving, and when we wouldn’t pay more, he simply took us back to the ship. We were a little disappointed, but had wanted to stop by an orphanage that afternoon, so we changed our plans a little and set off again in the other direction. We got a ride from the family of one of our inter-port students, which turned out to be a great thing because the orphanage was pretty hard to find. My experience at the orphanage was a harsh shock of reality. We saw deformed kids who were missing arms or legs or had serious burns and rashes all over their bodies. We played and fed little babies who seemed so mentally challenged that they barely even responded to our touch. It was so sad, but also nice that they were at least taken care of by good people. Kait and I went from the orphanage to the beach – this time finding a more reliable driver – and we spend the late afternoon people watching (the beach was completely different from any beach back home) before heading back to the security of the ship once it got dark.

I left early the next morning (around 5:00) for my three day trip to see Delhi and the Taj Mahal. We spent pretty much all of the first day in travel. We spent the morning on the plane, had lunch in Delhi, took a tour of the city from the bus, only getting off at a single stop, and then spent seven hours that evening on the train to get to Agra. Our single stop was actually a very beautiful place, but the rest of the day was pretty crappy – I felt like we spent way too much time transporting ourselves from one place to another, without actually seeing the places. Actually the train station was a pretty intense experience too. The whole time we were waiting for our train, we were surrounded by beggars and homeless people sleeping between the tracks. We saw rats and cockroaches, and were incredibly thankful that our tickets got us seats in the air-conditioned part of the train. Just the general dirt and grime of the station was a bit of a shocker. We finally got to Agra around 12:30 or 1:00 and then it was another 45 minutes or so before we made it to the hotel and into our beds. It was a long day.

We woke up at 5 the next morning so we could watch the sunrise at the Taj Mahal, and it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. The Taj was amazing. It was just so indescribably beautiful and so surreal to actually be seeing and touching something that I’ve seen pictures of my entire life. I never thought I would actually see the taj mahal, and I did, and I still can’t believe it, but I do have pictures to prove it to you guys and to myself. After sunrise we went back to the hotel for breakfast and then drove about an hour outside of the city to see an ancient Muslim city that was also amazingly beautiful in a falling-apart-ruins sort of way. We had lunch (mmm spicy Indian food!!) and then spent the early afternoon at a fort in Agra that was built I think about 600 years ago by the grandson of the guy who build the taj mahal. It too was incredible. The view from the palace was magnificent, you could see fields and the river and the Taj Mahal in the background. We then went back to the Taj Mahal again for sunset and this time it was considerably more crowded with tourists, and beggars, and cute little kids trying to sell us stuff. The point of seeing the Taj and sunrise and sunset, by the way, is so you can see the white marble changing colors in the changing light. It is pretty cool. I took a ridiculous number of pictures. The other funny thing about the whole day was how many times I had my picture taken. People would come up to my friend Christina and I at all of the sightseeing places and ask if they could take a picture with us. We were asked by everybody, little kids, twenty-something guys, entire families, its sortof crazy how many Indians now have pictures of me at my hot and sweaty, dirty, unshowered best. According to our tourguide, many of the people asking for pictures were from more rural areas, and hadn’t seen many white people before – so I guess they wanted proof of seeing us now, but it was pretty weird. Before dinner, we went to a marble workshop where we saw workers decorating white marble with inlaid precious stones the same way it was done hundreds of years ago on the taj mahal. They were also selling the marble pieces at the shop and I was really tempted to buy an inlaid table for a couple thousand dollars but had to resist the urge. We had dinner back at the hotel (this time they served us a weird buffet of a variety of asian food and some attempts at western food that didn’t really come out the way it maybe was supposed to… but the ice cream and the naan was good) and then we went back to the train station to catch an evening train back to Delhi. This time we were on a faster train, and we made it in about three hours without any stops. They served us another dinner on the train, and that one was actually really good. We got back late into Delhi and spent the night in a really fancy hotel that had the most blissfully comfortable beds in the world as well as a working shower that was also heavenly to use after a long day.

The next day we slept in a little later and then took another driving tour of Delhi in the morning before heading to the airport to spent pretty much the entire day flying or waiting to fly. Both of our flights got delayed, so it was s ort of a frustrating trip home. Actually, the entire trip was somewhat frustrating in that although the middle day was incredible and perfect and I wouldn’t have changed a minute of it, the days of travel on both sides kindof sucked.

On my final day in India I went on a class trip to the Working Women’s Forum of Chennai, an organization that works to empower women by giving them loans, job training, and classes in their legal rights. It was an awesome place. We met the president of the organization who told us all about the place and how it works and the amazing number of women it has helped in the thirty years of its existence. We also got to attend one of the classes and asked the women themselves questions about their experiences with the organization and how they and they’re families have benefited from it. From there, two friends (Erin and Christina) and I got a ride to the giant shopping mall (Spencer’s) in the center of Chennai and spent the rest of the day doing a combination of window shopping at the really expensive things and bartering and buying the more affordable ones. It was a wonderful place. We’ve all decided that its going to be really hard to go home and have to pay fixed prices for things. I picture myself walking into a store and seeing something for thirty dollars, telling the clerk I would give them five, and then getting thrown out. It’ll be fun. After spending all of our rupees (and without going back to the ATMs to get any more) we took another autorickshaw back to the ship so we could unload our purchases, shower, and eat free food that we knew to be clean and pasteurized.

India was a really interesting experience. Before we got there, they gave us tons of lectures on how sad and how impoverished some of the things we would see would be. The actuality of it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined (though there were some shady areas) but it was still really sad to see in a lot of places. I think the combination of seeing the train station and the Taj Mahal in the same day was probably a really good summary of India – both its highs and its lows.

Thailand

2007-10-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

My time spent in Thailand has probably been the best part of the entire Semester at Sea experience so far. I went outside the normal realms of being a tourist to volunteer at an English camp in Northern, rural Thailand. It was an SAS trip that was organized/sponsored by the Volunthai program (An organization that works mainly to teach English to Thai students).

Our group was small, only about 16 people (15 students and one member of the staff who was our leader), so we fit easily into two vans for the long drive to the Ban Khwao province. We stopped briefly for lunch at a Thai mall and then hit a couple rest stops, but spent the majority of our first day in Thailand in the vans, watching beautiful scenery pass us by (about 8 hours) and wishing we could get out to tae pictures. When we finally got to the hotel, we were tired and hungry, so we luckily only had enough time to set down our bags and bounce a couple times on the beds before they put us back on the busses to drive us across the road to dinner. At dinner on the first night we met the people who had organized the camp and who were in charge of doing all the real work. Most of them spoke English and Thai, so they would also serve as our translators in the next couple days. Dinner was amazing, fried fish, soup, veggies, fruit – and pretty much everything was at least a little bit spicy. It was also at dinner that night that I committed the huge social faux pas of attempting to shake the hand (they just don’t do that here, they bow their heads and make prayer-hands) of the big man who was in charge of everything. It was really awkward. Luckily, the Thai people are also incredibly warm and friendly and not easily offended by stupid Americans, so I’m pretty sure it all worked out. But it was horribly quiet and awkward for a good many seconds after I touched his hand. After dinner we had a quick meeting that explained how the camp would work, the tentative schedule, and really just got us super excited about meeting the kids the next day.

Our first day of camp was a busy one. We woke up around 7:00, got ready, had breakfast at the school, and had time for another short meeting before the kids arrived. I keep saying kids, which is rather incorrect, because the students were aged 15-18, not the little elementary-school kids we had been expecting. We went through the boring speeches of the opening ceremony and then got to spend the rest of the day singing songs, playing games, and dancing, to give the students a chance to practice the English they already knew (we weren’t really there to teach them, we were there to give them the opportunity to get comfortable using English with native English-speakers). Kids in Thailand don’t feel the need to grow up as fast as high-schoolers do at home, so they were all willing and excited to play games with us, and sing our silly songs, and that was really surprising. After camp that day, we took a tour of the silk factories in town (the major industry of the area) and I ate a silk worm!!! (terrible texture, but it tasted like a bean!). We had the chance to watch every step of the process, from the worms themselves to the dying of the threads to the little shop where they sell silk everything. And that night we had another amazing meal with our Thai hosts (pad thai in Thailand is the best thing ever!) This time they pulled out the karaoke machine and we had ourselves a multi-cultural little dance party that night that was ridiculously fun. It was so cool that people who don’t even speak the same language can have so much fun laughing and dancing together. They attempted to teach us how to dance traditionally, and as a group we failed pretty miserably, but had a lot of fun.

The next day we played more of the same awesome camp games, sang songs, and ate lots of interesting Thai snacks. We had a traditional Thai lunch where we sat on the floor (feet pointed away from everybody else) and ate sticky rice with our bare hands. We had another long fancy closing ceremony at the end of the day where everyone who had played any part in camp at all got recognition for it, which was very nice. We then headed back to the hotel, packed up, and were sent off to spend our last night doing a home-stay with on of the students and their family.

My Thai sister (Nat) picked me up in a tuktuk (old truck/taxi-type thing) and we drove to her home for the evening. The home stay was the most incredible part of the whole experience. I feel like I learned so much in those few hours. I went to temple, was given a bracelet by a Buddhist monk, saw a crocodile, helped to cook dinner, sang and danced with the family, learned to weave baskets, took a shower from a bucket on the back porch, figured out how to flush the toilets, fed the monks, met the whole family… everything. I did everything. And I’m sure there is also so much that I missed out on. My experiences at the Buddhist temple were probably the most interesting. Meeting the monks, having the opportunity to offer them food and bow to them and just to take part in a really important ritual of daily life was so cool. Indescribably cool.

Heading back to the school the next morning, we took a tuktuk ride of the area. I’m amazed by how absolutely beautiful Thailand is, everything is green and growing. There are chickens and skinny cows and buffalo running everywhere. And the air is perfectly clean and pure. I’m doubtful its as nice in the big cities, but it was pretty much a paradise in this rural province. When we got back to the school, we had to load up for the long drive back to the ship. I was surprised by how emotional the goodbye became. As we said goodbye to the students, the teachers, our host families, there were hugs and crying all around. Nobody wanted to leave. Nobody wanted us to have to go. It was awful. But we did it, we got in the vans and drove away, waving for as long as we possibly could. We stopped for lunch on the drive and again had incredibly delicious Thai food and at a rest stop a little bit later and I ate a grasshopper!! (there was a guy selling them on the side of the road and we thought we ought to try them out – tasted a lot like a potato chip!) The rest of the ride we basically spent reliving our experience and making plans to return to Thailand.

I’m actually serious about the idea of returning to Thailand. We were so completely welcomed there, that it would be hard not to go back. I had thought people were kind in Vietnam, but deep down they wanted us to buy things, whereas the people I met in Thailand really just wanted to meet us, to learn from us, and to let us into their homes and their lives. It was awesome. It was one of those almost cliché feel good experiences in which you are sure you learned more from the people you were helping than them from you (the workcamp feeling). I’m going to try and stay in touch with my host family and with the other volunteers who had been there to be in charge of everything. Thailand is an awesome country, I’m going back. There is so more to see and do than I got the chance to experience, and I want to re-experience all the things I just did for more time and with more people. So, I’ll just have to go back.

Good Night and Goodbye Vietnam!

2007-10-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

So on my final day in Vietnam, Molly and I decided to take a trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. The tunnels are about an hour and a half north of Saigon, Cu Chi is famous for its 200-kilometer network of underground tunnels. The tunnels were built and used by the Vietcong forces during wars with the French and the Americans.

There was an official SAS program that would have taken us to the tunnels, but we decided that going independently would be the much more affordable way to do it. We found a travel agency that gave English-speaking tours to the tunnels and bought tickets with them. We took a taxi to the travel agency, bought our tickets, and then had breakfast at the next-door French restaurant. Then we hopped on the bus, for an exciting 2 hour drive. The traffic was really bad that morning, but even worse, the air-conditioning on the bus kept shutting down. Every time the AC would quit, the bus would slow down (but not stop) and two guys would jump off and run along side the bus, pounding on the sides of it until the AC started back up again. The bus driver would be yelling out the window to them whether or not it was working. It was quite the experience!

When we got to the tunnels, we watched a video explaining their history and construction that was interesting not really for its information, but for how propagandistic it was (and it was biased to the side that I never get to hear bias for back home). After the film we toured the area, seeing the carefully hidden doors to the tunnels, the air vents, the smoke vents, and the traps. Then we had the chance to crawl through the tunnels ourselves. What was amazing was not just how dark and creepy the tunnels were but how small they were – and we were seeing them after they had been enlarged 40% to accommodate tourists. It was impossible to imagine actually living for months at a time without being able to stand, and spending most of that time crawling on your hands and knees, or in the lower sections, even on your belly.

The other cool thing about the Cu Chi was that we were seriously out in the jungle. We walked on a winding muddy path through dense forest that you really couldn’t see through. Gunshots rang out over the area because there was a shooting range for people to try out an AK-47, and that sound added a lot of atmosphere to the place. We were there for about 2 hours total, and by the time we were done, we were all hot and sweaty and ready to climb back onto our (semi) air-conditioned bus.

The ride back was pretty uneventful, and once were in Saigon again Molly and I got lunch at a little hole in the wall restaurant that had awesome food. At lunch we met a really cool American lady who has been living in Vietnam, teaching, for the past couple years. She was really awesome, she told us all about her love of Vietnam, gave us some shopping advice, and even some tips about what we ought to do in Thailand. It was really great to have the opportunity to share our Vietnam experiences with her, to tell her about the awesomeness of our entire trip, and just to reflect for a little while on how amazing this place was with someone who felt that way so strongly that she had picked up and moved here.

Though I basically loved all of my time in Vietnam, the thing that stands out the most to me was how incredibly friendly, kind, and welcoming everybody we met was to us, even when we are so obviously American. I had expected to meet people who continued to hold grudges against the U.S. for the war (which would have been completely understandable), but nobody did, at least not to us. Tung, our tour guide from the Mekong Delta trip said it was because the Vietnamese are Buddhist, and they choose not to hold onto regrets, not to live in the past, and I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that not a single person was unkind to me in any way shape or form in Vietnam, and that was wonderful.

On a last note, I also have to include the song I made up with Molly and Sam that sums up the hardships of our fourth day in Vietnam. To the tune of the 12 days of Christmas, the countdown part:

12 bikers honking
11 knee-deep puddles
10 different tailors
9 streets to cross
8 knock-off movies
7 pairs of shoes
6 shots of liquor
5 tired girls
4 dollars left
3 slippery steps
2 broken ankles
And 1 horrible, motorbike death!

Good Afternoon Vietnam

2007-09-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

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!!

2007-09-27T05:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-24T01:58:00.000-07:00

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!!

2007-09-15T18:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-08T03:30:00.002-07:00

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!

2007-09-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

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.

My Life At Sea!!

2007-08-31T13:14:00.001-07:00

Today is my third full day at sea. In the past couple days, I have been to all of my classes, and as I expected, I think I’m going to like all of them except the one I’m required to take. At the moment the ships alarms are beeping SUPER loudly (just as a practice exercise – don’t worry Mom and Dad!!!) we’ve been practicing lots of safety drills the past couple days. I now know how to put on a lifejacket and how to stand in a straight line while waiting to board a lifeboat. I’ve also learned lots of nautical terms: the difference between port and starboard, fore and aft, and bow and stern. The captain corrects us any time we accidentally call the ship a boat.

Life on board the ship at the moment is a lot like being at camp. We have scheduled meals and snacktimes. Nobody really knows each other so we all still spend lots on time introducing ourselves and trying to remember names. Since nobody really has any classwork yet, and we’re completely surrounded by water we spend lots of time hanging out and playing card games and board games. Last night, I learned two new card games that we played outside on the lower deck of the ship, under the moon and the stars (it is soooooo pretty out here!!) Unlike camp, I haven’t met anyone who is homesick yet, though I do know lots of people who have been seasick. Luckily, by now we’ve all pretty much gotten our sea legs and are walking around just fine – it’ll be weird to be on land again this weekend!

We also all spend lots of time trying to figure out what we’re going to do when we actually reach land again; we have the option of going on all sorts of amazing trips that are set up by SAS (but they all cost extra money) and planning our own adventures. We are also required to do some things in each country for our classes (like interviewing people or going places of great cultural importance). I already signed up for some program-trips but I’m currently trying to plan my own hiking trip in Hawaii, a 2-day train-trip to the Great Wall of China (staying in a cheap little hostel along the way) and other things like that. It is still so absolutely crazy to think that I’m actually going to these places!!!! I won’t believe this is actually happening until it does. I mean, for all I know at the moment, we could just be sailing in circles (though I suppose we are really sailing in one really big circle…also known as THE WORLD!!!)

Really Big Boat

2007-08-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

I now live in a teeny, tiny cabin on board a great big ship. The ship has seven decks, two dining halls, a weight room, a gym, a spa, 500-600 cabins (I haven’t counted), and an incredibly small pool. I’m told that compared to other cruise ships its actually very small, and will actually get smaller as time passes. Supposedly it is also the fastest cruise ship in the world. The name of my new floating home is the MV Explorer (sounds classy huh?)
We spent our first day on board the ship waiting in lines to get checked in and meeting each other (as far as I can tell every one in from California). We spent the second day being orientated – learning the rules, talking about safety, learning the rules, being seasick, and learning the rules.
Today was our very first day of classes; I just got out of my first one. The class was Global Studies, a mandatory class that we all have to take as an introduction to the program and the countries and cultures we’re visiting. On paper it sounds interesting, but in reality that doesn’t seem like its going to be the case. I’m hoping my afternoon class will be more exciting….

AHHHHHHHHH

2007-08-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm leaving bright and early tomorrow morning to begin my trip around the world!!! I've been ready to go for weeks now, I think I'm completely packed but, I'm stressed out about the possibility that I'm forgetting something. So I've been running around the house screaming all morning (it's been fun).
Here's my itinerary (be jealous):

Ensenada, Mexico
Honolulu, Hawaii
Yokohama, Japan
Kobe, Japan
Qingdao, China
Hong Kong
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Bangkok, Thailand
Chennai, India
Port Suez (Adabiya)
Alexandria, Egypt
Istanbul, Turkey
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Cadiz, Spain
Miami, Florida

I'm really excited!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!