Sunday, April 29, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
Vietnam and Cambodia
Hello everyone! I am still alive, happy, and healthy. I am on my way to Hong Kong right now; the MV Explorer just left Vietnam, and is traveling down the Saigon River. As soon as the ship docked in Vietnam my SAS trip left for Cambodia, so I am going to talk about Cambodia first.
This was my first big SAS trip, and I mist admit it was pretty nice to have everything all planned out for you. Our trip leaders were Bob McGowan, a business professor, and Judy Al-Bilali, a theater arts professor. They are two of the “cool” professors on the ship so it was really nice to have them both there because they are laid-back.
We left for the airport at 10am for our flight to Phnom Penh. The flight was only about 40 minutes long, so that was nice. According to our itinerary, we were supposed to go to the hotel to check in when we arrived, but everyone was really hungry, so we went to lunch instead and didn’t check in until later that night. After lunch we went to the Silver Pagoda and Royal Palace. The Royal Palace is where the King of Cambodia lives, and he apparently was there with some guests so that was closed off to us. The Pagoda was really nice though, and I got some pictures. After visiting the Pagoda for a while, and being absolutely disgustingly sweaty, we drove to the Mekong River. We got on little riverboats, and drove down the Mekong as the sun set. It was really beautiful; I love when we go somewhere specifically to see the sunset. On the boat, we drove past what I guess could only be called a neighborhood. It was a whole area of floating homes. It was really amazing to see, and I took a ton of pictures as usual. One of the best things we saw here was a boy going to his neighbor’s house. How do you get to your neighbor’s house when it is in the middle of the river? The boy was sitting in a small tub and using his arms to paddle himself. It was so crazy. After our sunset cruise we went back to the hotel to check-in and get showers and all that stuff. We were supposed to meet in the lobby for dinner with the group, but a few of us decided to do our own thing for dinner that night. We went to this local pizza place, and there were about 10 of us there. The street kids in Cambodia are far worse than we have seen anywhere else. They came into the pizza place and were standing there as we ate asking us to buy stuff from them. A few people bought things from them, but we gave them all of our leftover food, which was a lot. After dinner we all went to bed because we had an early wake up call the next day.
Our wakeup call was at 5am to wake up, eat breakfast, and pack. We had to be checked out of the hotel since we had another flight later in the day. After getting all packed up and everything, we drove to the Toul Sleng Museum. This was S-21 where the Khmer Rouge took people to torture them. Before the Khmer Rouge took over, this was a school building, but they turned it into a place for killing millions of people. There are three separate buildings, each with three stories. We walked around these different buildings going in all of the rooms. Many of the rooms still had remnants of what was there before. Quite a few had the large iron bed that the prisoners were tied to, and the small iron box that served as the prisoner’s toilet. Many of the rooms had bullet holes in the walls and ceiling. Some had pictures of that same room when the Vietnamese found them. There were pictures of that exact bed that I was looking at, with someone tied to it and either cut up, shot up, or beat. The first floor of Building B housed pictures of the victims of the Khmer Rouge. The majority of the pictures were taken before they were killed. There were so many men, women, and children. There were even a few pictures of women holding their infants who were too young. Only 7 people survived S-21. I looked at every single one of the pictures because I felt it would be disrespectful not to. I looked at, I don’t even know how many, people who were tortured and killed for no reason besides being educated. There was one wall of pictures that were taken after the people were tortured or killed. It was really hard for me to look at these pictures, but I felt like I had to. This set of pictures was the one that really made people the most sensitive. I’m not going to go into details about some of the pictures I saw just because I don’t know who is reading this, but I will definitely want to talk about this with people when I get home. When it was time to leave Toul Sleng you could see the difference in people’s attitudes right away. The bus was absolutely silent besides hearing someone’s sniffling due to their crying. Our next stop was the Killing Fields. When we arrived here, we all went on our separate paths and walked around the grounds on our on. Close to the entrance is this building with shelves that go really high up housing skulls of the people who were buried here. Once a year, monks, family members, or anyone really, come to the Killing Fields, and set up a nice little ceremony. They have offerings, candles, and other things. During this one-day a year the people chant and pray that those who did not have a proper burial here could rise up and be free from this place. How lucky am I that I happened to be at the Killing Fields on this day. I didn’t really realize that impact of that on me until we learned about it in my religion class today and I got to share my pictures. After watching the chanting for a few minutes, I started walking around the grounds. I am not sure of the exact number, but there are a lot of mass graves here. Some were specifically for women and children, some were specifically for decapitated people, and then there were other ones. As you walk around the Killing Fields, you have to be especially careful to watch the ground you are stepping on closely. There are remnants of clothes, teeth, and bones stuck in the ground around the mass graves. The Killing Fields is where the people were taken to be put in mass graves after they were at S-21. Being here only emphasized the feelings that all of us had had all day. Again, it was really hard to see all of these things, and then just up and leave. I guess the tour operators know how much those sights affected us, so our next stop was to go shopping at the Russian Market. We got to stay there and shop for about 40 minutes, but I couldn’t even stay in there that long. It was SO hot! Everyone in my group looked like they had just stepped out of the shower that is how hot it is in Cambodia. After the market, we drove to a restaurant for lunch, and then headed to the airport. We took a 30-minute flight to Siem Reap, which is more in the interior of Cambodia. We went directly from the airport to Angkor Wat to watch the sunset. Angkor Wat is a huge ancient temple. It used to be part of the Wonders of the World, and the Cambodians are arguing to make it that again. After visiting Angkor Wat, and getting eaten by mosquitoes, we took the bus to a restaurant that had buffet style dinner and a cultural dance show. A lot of people from our group didn’t stay for this because they wanted to go to the hotel and get showers. I am glad I stayed because the cultural show was really nice. After dinner we went back to the hotel, got showers, and then I met up with Terron, Erik Silk, and Hanaan and we went towards the night market. There were a few shops here, but the SAS’ers were mainly at a few bars. The most popular one was Angkor Whhhaaat. Since I didn’t feel like drinking, Erik and I went to get massages, and then we met back up with everyone else at the bars. As we were sitting at the outside table, I was watching the street kids run around asking people for money. There was this one little boy holding an infant so I got up to go talk to them. I was asking him questions, but I could tell he was not being honest with me. He said that he was 11 years old, and that he was holding his 1-year-old brother. After talking with him for a few minutes and asking him questions he handed me the baby and told me to hold him because he didn’t want to anymore. So I was standing in the middle of the street holding this infant while my friends were at the bar. After a few minutes this Canadian woman came over and was telling me that she had been in Cambodia for a few days, and she has come to this same restaurant every night and has watched the mother of these kids “pimp” them out to the tourists in order to get money. She also said that this is the first time in the last few days that she has seen the baby sleeping in someone’s arms. Another one of the street kids came up to me and was asking me questions. She was a 14-year-old girl who seemed like she would be a lot more honest with me, and she spoke English so she was also my translator. I asked her about the boy and this baby and she said that the boy was actually 8 years old and the baby is only 1 month old. She took me over to the baby’s mother, who is actually the sister of the 8-year-old boy. I was talking to her through a mix of translation and non-verbal communication. I found out that she has 3 kids under the age of 5, and she is only 21 years old. She then said something to my teenage translator that made her look a little nervous. She shook her head and responded as if she didn’t want to tell or ask me whatever it was the mother wanted to say. I told her that it was okay and she could ask me whatever she wanted. She said that the mother wants me to take her baby back to America for her because she doesn’t have enough money to buy milk, and I was very comforting to him. I told her no I could not do that, and handed her back her baby. I said bye to the other kids, and went back to find my friends. After about 5 minutes I said I couldn’t stay there anymore, and everyone else was ready to leave too. The tin-tin ride back to the hotel was pretty hard for me because of all the emotions and “what-ifs” going through my head. Obviously, I would never take a baby like that, but it really makes you think. I know a lot of people were saying before I left to not come back with a Cambodian baby in a joking matter. The one thing I am asking all of you is to not comment either on my blog or directly to me about this incident. Do not make jokes about it or anything because even though you are reading what I am telling you are my experiences, you have NO idea how that felt to me. I will be willing to talk about it when I get home if you want, but just please don’t make jokes about it. Thanks.
The next morning there was an optional sunrise tour of Angkor Wat that met at 5 am. There were about 20 of us that woke up for it. It was a horrible day for it because it was extremely cloudy and it began raining. After it got brighter, which I took to mean the sun rose, I went back to the bus just in time for it to start pouring. I fell asleep on the seats and didn’t wake up until we got back to the hotel. At that point we got breakfast and then headed out to another section of Angkor Wat. During this one, we had the opportunity to climb up to the 3rd level of Angkor Wat, which is the Nirvana level. The steps to get up to this level were extremely steep, and it was really scary to climb up, but I did it. After that tour, we went back to the hotel for a short nap, lunch, and check-out. We got all of our stuff together and headed to Ta Promh to look at more temples. Terron, Erik, and I took a ton of pictures on the different rocks and statues. Also, there were little kids following us around trying to sell us things, so we stopped and had a conversation with them. We all bought these little paper fans from them, and gave them some money. Let me just say that the fans were amazing in the extreme heat of the Cambodian jungle.
That evening we headed to the airport for our flight back to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This was one of the first times I wasn’t extremely excited to see the ship, because I really didn’t want to leave Cambodia. We all got showers because we were gross, and then met up with Eric for dinner. We went out for a little while, but didn’t stay out too late because we were so tired. The next day I woke up early to go shopping with my roommate, Ashley. We went to Ben Tanh market, which was this inside market with tons of little stands and just so much stuff. We didn’t shop around too much because of the heat and the fact that there was nowhere for us to eat (the food was not so good). We got a few things, and then decided to just go back to the ship and sleep. That night Jordi and her mom were getting back from their Cambodia trip, and we were all supposed to do dinner together, so Terron, Eric, and I all got ready for that and then sat in Eric’s room waiting for them to get back. We watched the entire season 2 of Weeds waiting for Jordi to call us, but she never did. It turned out that their trip got back late, so Jordi decided to go to the hotel with her mom and go to sleep. Terron and I completely understood because we knew how drained we were the night that we got home. The next day, which was also our last day in Vietnam, I had to wake up early for an orphanage visit, which was also an FDP for my HIV/AIDS class. We took a bus to the Tam Binh 2 Orphanage; which is for kids whose lives were affected by HIV/AIDS. Either they are HIV positive or their mothers were. There were 25 students on this trip, and we were all matched up with a child that we were to stay with all day at a local amusement park. All of the children from the orphanage that came with us were HIV positive. They all seemed very healthy and were very friendly. We spent the whole day with them going on rides and walking around. At the end of the day it was hard to leave them back at the orphanage. No one could guess the future of “their kid” as we lovingly called them. After getting back to the ship I went out to the market by myself to get some last minute shopping done. I also walked around the city by myself; which gave me a lot of time for reflection and thinking. In Vietnam, they have cars for taxis, but the most popular means for transportation are motorcycles. There are men with motorcycles waiting on every corner to ask if you need a ride somewhere, and you get on the back and he takes you wherever you need to go for $1. They were so scary! A lot of girls got bad burns on their calves because they didn’t get off of the motorcycles properly and touched the exhaust pipes. After spending the day by myself, I was ready to get back to the ship and see people I knew. When I got home I had a note from Jordi on my door saying that she came to find me because her mom was going to take us to get massages and pedicures, but I wasn’t there. I didn’t see Jordi until after on-ship time, so I didn’t get to meet her mom L. No worries though because we are all going to meet for dinner in Philly. Cambodia was definitely one of my favorite countries that we have visited, and I would love to go back there someday and work with street kids to get them into school. Vietnam was also nice, but the whole time I was there I was thinking about going back to Cambodia. We waited until the next morning to sail back up the Saigon River because of currents, and were on our way to Hong Kong.
This was my first big SAS trip, and I mist admit it was pretty nice to have everything all planned out for you. Our trip leaders were Bob McGowan, a business professor, and Judy Al-Bilali, a theater arts professor. They are two of the “cool” professors on the ship so it was really nice to have them both there because they are laid-back.
We left for the airport at 10am for our flight to Phnom Penh. The flight was only about 40 minutes long, so that was nice. According to our itinerary, we were supposed to go to the hotel to check in when we arrived, but everyone was really hungry, so we went to lunch instead and didn’t check in until later that night. After lunch we went to the Silver Pagoda and Royal Palace. The Royal Palace is where the King of Cambodia lives, and he apparently was there with some guests so that was closed off to us. The Pagoda was really nice though, and I got some pictures. After visiting the Pagoda for a while, and being absolutely disgustingly sweaty, we drove to the Mekong River. We got on little riverboats, and drove down the Mekong as the sun set. It was really beautiful; I love when we go somewhere specifically to see the sunset. On the boat, we drove past what I guess could only be called a neighborhood. It was a whole area of floating homes. It was really amazing to see, and I took a ton of pictures as usual. One of the best things we saw here was a boy going to his neighbor’s house. How do you get to your neighbor’s house when it is in the middle of the river? The boy was sitting in a small tub and using his arms to paddle himself. It was so crazy. After our sunset cruise we went back to the hotel to check-in and get showers and all that stuff. We were supposed to meet in the lobby for dinner with the group, but a few of us decided to do our own thing for dinner that night. We went to this local pizza place, and there were about 10 of us there. The street kids in Cambodia are far worse than we have seen anywhere else. They came into the pizza place and were standing there as we ate asking us to buy stuff from them. A few people bought things from them, but we gave them all of our leftover food, which was a lot. After dinner we all went to bed because we had an early wake up call the next day.
Our wakeup call was at 5am to wake up, eat breakfast, and pack. We had to be checked out of the hotel since we had another flight later in the day. After getting all packed up and everything, we drove to the Toul Sleng Museum. This was S-21 where the Khmer Rouge took people to torture them. Before the Khmer Rouge took over, this was a school building, but they turned it into a place for killing millions of people. There are three separate buildings, each with three stories. We walked around these different buildings going in all of the rooms. Many of the rooms still had remnants of what was there before. Quite a few had the large iron bed that the prisoners were tied to, and the small iron box that served as the prisoner’s toilet. Many of the rooms had bullet holes in the walls and ceiling. Some had pictures of that same room when the Vietnamese found them. There were pictures of that exact bed that I was looking at, with someone tied to it and either cut up, shot up, or beat. The first floor of Building B housed pictures of the victims of the Khmer Rouge. The majority of the pictures were taken before they were killed. There were so many men, women, and children. There were even a few pictures of women holding their infants who were too young. Only 7 people survived S-21. I looked at every single one of the pictures because I felt it would be disrespectful not to. I looked at, I don’t even know how many, people who were tortured and killed for no reason besides being educated. There was one wall of pictures that were taken after the people were tortured or killed. It was really hard for me to look at these pictures, but I felt like I had to. This set of pictures was the one that really made people the most sensitive. I’m not going to go into details about some of the pictures I saw just because I don’t know who is reading this, but I will definitely want to talk about this with people when I get home. When it was time to leave Toul Sleng you could see the difference in people’s attitudes right away. The bus was absolutely silent besides hearing someone’s sniffling due to their crying. Our next stop was the Killing Fields. When we arrived here, we all went on our separate paths and walked around the grounds on our on. Close to the entrance is this building with shelves that go really high up housing skulls of the people who were buried here. Once a year, monks, family members, or anyone really, come to the Killing Fields, and set up a nice little ceremony. They have offerings, candles, and other things. During this one-day a year the people chant and pray that those who did not have a proper burial here could rise up and be free from this place. How lucky am I that I happened to be at the Killing Fields on this day. I didn’t really realize that impact of that on me until we learned about it in my religion class today and I got to share my pictures. After watching the chanting for a few minutes, I started walking around the grounds. I am not sure of the exact number, but there are a lot of mass graves here. Some were specifically for women and children, some were specifically for decapitated people, and then there were other ones. As you walk around the Killing Fields, you have to be especially careful to watch the ground you are stepping on closely. There are remnants of clothes, teeth, and bones stuck in the ground around the mass graves. The Killing Fields is where the people were taken to be put in mass graves after they were at S-21. Being here only emphasized the feelings that all of us had had all day. Again, it was really hard to see all of these things, and then just up and leave. I guess the tour operators know how much those sights affected us, so our next stop was to go shopping at the Russian Market. We got to stay there and shop for about 40 minutes, but I couldn’t even stay in there that long. It was SO hot! Everyone in my group looked like they had just stepped out of the shower that is how hot it is in Cambodia. After the market, we drove to a restaurant for lunch, and then headed to the airport. We took a 30-minute flight to Siem Reap, which is more in the interior of Cambodia. We went directly from the airport to Angkor Wat to watch the sunset. Angkor Wat is a huge ancient temple. It used to be part of the Wonders of the World, and the Cambodians are arguing to make it that again. After visiting Angkor Wat, and getting eaten by mosquitoes, we took the bus to a restaurant that had buffet style dinner and a cultural dance show. A lot of people from our group didn’t stay for this because they wanted to go to the hotel and get showers. I am glad I stayed because the cultural show was really nice. After dinner we went back to the hotel, got showers, and then I met up with Terron, Erik Silk, and Hanaan and we went towards the night market. There were a few shops here, but the SAS’ers were mainly at a few bars. The most popular one was Angkor Whhhaaat. Since I didn’t feel like drinking, Erik and I went to get massages, and then we met back up with everyone else at the bars. As we were sitting at the outside table, I was watching the street kids run around asking people for money. There was this one little boy holding an infant so I got up to go talk to them. I was asking him questions, but I could tell he was not being honest with me. He said that he was 11 years old, and that he was holding his 1-year-old brother. After talking with him for a few minutes and asking him questions he handed me the baby and told me to hold him because he didn’t want to anymore. So I was standing in the middle of the street holding this infant while my friends were at the bar. After a few minutes this Canadian woman came over and was telling me that she had been in Cambodia for a few days, and she has come to this same restaurant every night and has watched the mother of these kids “pimp” them out to the tourists in order to get money. She also said that this is the first time in the last few days that she has seen the baby sleeping in someone’s arms. Another one of the street kids came up to me and was asking me questions. She was a 14-year-old girl who seemed like she would be a lot more honest with me, and she spoke English so she was also my translator. I asked her about the boy and this baby and she said that the boy was actually 8 years old and the baby is only 1 month old. She took me over to the baby’s mother, who is actually the sister of the 8-year-old boy. I was talking to her through a mix of translation and non-verbal communication. I found out that she has 3 kids under the age of 5, and she is only 21 years old. She then said something to my teenage translator that made her look a little nervous. She shook her head and responded as if she didn’t want to tell or ask me whatever it was the mother wanted to say. I told her that it was okay and she could ask me whatever she wanted. She said that the mother wants me to take her baby back to America for her because she doesn’t have enough money to buy milk, and I was very comforting to him. I told her no I could not do that, and handed her back her baby. I said bye to the other kids, and went back to find my friends. After about 5 minutes I said I couldn’t stay there anymore, and everyone else was ready to leave too. The tin-tin ride back to the hotel was pretty hard for me because of all the emotions and “what-ifs” going through my head. Obviously, I would never take a baby like that, but it really makes you think. I know a lot of people were saying before I left to not come back with a Cambodian baby in a joking matter. The one thing I am asking all of you is to not comment either on my blog or directly to me about this incident. Do not make jokes about it or anything because even though you are reading what I am telling you are my experiences, you have NO idea how that felt to me. I will be willing to talk about it when I get home if you want, but just please don’t make jokes about it. Thanks.
The next morning there was an optional sunrise tour of Angkor Wat that met at 5 am. There were about 20 of us that woke up for it. It was a horrible day for it because it was extremely cloudy and it began raining. After it got brighter, which I took to mean the sun rose, I went back to the bus just in time for it to start pouring. I fell asleep on the seats and didn’t wake up until we got back to the hotel. At that point we got breakfast and then headed out to another section of Angkor Wat. During this one, we had the opportunity to climb up to the 3rd level of Angkor Wat, which is the Nirvana level. The steps to get up to this level were extremely steep, and it was really scary to climb up, but I did it. After that tour, we went back to the hotel for a short nap, lunch, and check-out. We got all of our stuff together and headed to Ta Promh to look at more temples. Terron, Erik, and I took a ton of pictures on the different rocks and statues. Also, there were little kids following us around trying to sell us things, so we stopped and had a conversation with them. We all bought these little paper fans from them, and gave them some money. Let me just say that the fans were amazing in the extreme heat of the Cambodian jungle.
That evening we headed to the airport for our flight back to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This was one of the first times I wasn’t extremely excited to see the ship, because I really didn’t want to leave Cambodia. We all got showers because we were gross, and then met up with Eric for dinner. We went out for a little while, but didn’t stay out too late because we were so tired. The next day I woke up early to go shopping with my roommate, Ashley. We went to Ben Tanh market, which was this inside market with tons of little stands and just so much stuff. We didn’t shop around too much because of the heat and the fact that there was nowhere for us to eat (the food was not so good). We got a few things, and then decided to just go back to the ship and sleep. That night Jordi and her mom were getting back from their Cambodia trip, and we were all supposed to do dinner together, so Terron, Eric, and I all got ready for that and then sat in Eric’s room waiting for them to get back. We watched the entire season 2 of Weeds waiting for Jordi to call us, but she never did. It turned out that their trip got back late, so Jordi decided to go to the hotel with her mom and go to sleep. Terron and I completely understood because we knew how drained we were the night that we got home. The next day, which was also our last day in Vietnam, I had to wake up early for an orphanage visit, which was also an FDP for my HIV/AIDS class. We took a bus to the Tam Binh 2 Orphanage; which is for kids whose lives were affected by HIV/AIDS. Either they are HIV positive or their mothers were. There were 25 students on this trip, and we were all matched up with a child that we were to stay with all day at a local amusement park. All of the children from the orphanage that came with us were HIV positive. They all seemed very healthy and were very friendly. We spent the whole day with them going on rides and walking around. At the end of the day it was hard to leave them back at the orphanage. No one could guess the future of “their kid” as we lovingly called them. After getting back to the ship I went out to the market by myself to get some last minute shopping done. I also walked around the city by myself; which gave me a lot of time for reflection and thinking. In Vietnam, they have cars for taxis, but the most popular means for transportation are motorcycles. There are men with motorcycles waiting on every corner to ask if you need a ride somewhere, and you get on the back and he takes you wherever you need to go for $1. They were so scary! A lot of girls got bad burns on their calves because they didn’t get off of the motorcycles properly and touched the exhaust pipes. After spending the day by myself, I was ready to get back to the ship and see people I knew. When I got home I had a note from Jordi on my door saying that she came to find me because her mom was going to take us to get massages and pedicures, but I wasn’t there. I didn’t see Jordi until after on-ship time, so I didn’t get to meet her mom L. No worries though because we are all going to meet for dinner in Philly. Cambodia was definitely one of my favorite countries that we have visited, and I would love to go back there someday and work with street kids to get them into school. Vietnam was also nice, but the whole time I was there I was thinking about going back to Cambodia. We waited until the next morning to sail back up the Saigon River because of currents, and were on our way to Hong Kong.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Hey everyone! I started my Cambodia blog, but there is so much that happened! I didn't get a chance to finish it before I got to an internet cafe, but I will try to do that soon. You should all be glad to see pictures though!! Currently it is 1 pm in Hong Kong which means it is 1 am at home. At 9 am this morning we had our usual diplomatic briefing. First we were told about the events of Virginia Tech yesterday. We had a moment of silence for those killed and then Archbishop Tutu spoke to us. What he said made everyone tear up a bit because he is so eloquent and just amazing. Basically, it came down to just caring for each person and loving everyone because we all go through hurt. There are a lot of students and staff on the ship from the Virginia area so today is going to be a hard day for a lot of people. So I'm sorry to whoever this is affecting. Tell everyone you love that you love them. Until next time...
Monday, April 16, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
A short update
Hi everyone!
I am currently in an internet cafe in Cambodia. This country is amazing so far.. We are waking up at 6 am tommorrow to visit the Toul Sleng Museum and the Killing Fields. It will probably be an emotional day. Hopefully I can get to a phone sometime soon, but if not, I'll talk to everyone as soon as I can. Please please keep e-mailing me, I feel like even though I am traveling the world, I don't know whats going on in it. I just wanted to give everyone an update on that! Also, Jordi's blog is:
http://jordiatsea.blogspot.com
Love you all!
I am currently in an internet cafe in Cambodia. This country is amazing so far.. We are waking up at 6 am tommorrow to visit the Toul Sleng Museum and the Killing Fields. It will probably be an emotional day. Hopefully I can get to a phone sometime soon, but if not, I'll talk to everyone as soon as I can. Please please keep e-mailing me, I feel like even though I am traveling the world, I don't know whats going on in it. I just wanted to give everyone an update on that! Also, Jordi's blog is:
http://jordiatsea.blogspot.com
Love you all!
Saturday, April 07, 2007
INDIA!!!
Hey everyone! I am currently a few miles east of Thailand about to enter the Strait of Malacca, and we arrive in Malaysia in about 16 hours. We only had 2 days of class between India and Malaysia, which is not enough time to get all of our papers and tests done, especially because everyone needed some time to process what they saw and did in India. Again, I don’t really know where to start, but I’ll just do the day-by-day thing, and yes I am leaving some stuff out just because I can’t put everything into words.
When we docked in Chennai we had to visit with the customs officials and get our passports and then get our immigration cards. After we got some lunch on the ship Jordi, Kelsey, and I decided to venture out into Chennai. I could only stay out for a few hours because I was meeting Max to go to the airport at 3:15. We walked off the ship and were greeted by tons of rickshaw drivers wanting to take us to their friend’s shops. We kept walking “past the gate” because that is what Dean Mike told us to do, and were greeted by even more rickshaws. We told them that we wanted to go to Spencer’s Plaza, and a few of them told us that it was closed, but we can go somewhere else. From reading past SAS’ers blogs I knew that they were lying, so we insisted that we wanted to go to Spencer’s. After negotiating a price we got into the rickshaw, and started driving. The driver turned around and said, “Okay I will take you to my friend’s shop, he has very nice”. After telling him no he told us to get out of his rickshaw, and get into another one, so we did that. The next rickshaw driver tried doing the same thing to us, so we had to get out and change rickshaws again. Finally, we found a driver to take us to Spencer’s. When we got to Spencer’s we tried giving him the 100 rupees that we agreed on, but he said that he will wait for us and we can pay him there. We tried telling him that we don’t know how long we are going to be, and we may not find him, but he insisted. So we went shopping for about 2 hours, and I bought some stuff. We left Spencer’s and found our rickshaw driver and made our way back to the ship. One thing that really bothered me in India, probably because of my extreme sympathy for people, is the fact that these small children would stand in the streets, and if you stopped for traffic or a red light or something, they would come up to you and stick their hands in your face and make an eating gesture. It is hard to avoid them when you are in the rickshaws because they are completely open. Our rickshaw driver was very nice, and would shoo the kids away or drive through the red light to get rid of them. It is really sad, and I have quite a few more examples of this kind of thing. I’m sorry I’m not writing this like a novel, there is just so much going on it is really hard.
Okay, so we got back to the ship, and I went to my cabin (4082) to pack my bag for Delhi. Max and I had a flight at 6 pm for Delhi where we were going to meet up with his friend Bharat who is from the US, but has family in India and is spending 6 months there. For now on I am just going to say we, so I will be talking about the 3 of us. Max and I got a taxi to the airport at around 4pm. We drove past the beach on our way there and passed this untouchables village that was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. The houses looked like tents made out of tarps or old billboards. The people were sitting on the ground or walking around with no shoes, and barely half of the people had clothes on. There are no restrooms, so it is quite common to see people relieving themselves on the side of the road. Also, there are goats and cows walking around the streets, and living with these people. In Hinduism, cows are considered to be sacred, so even though these people are starving, they will never kill a cow for food.
Max and I got to the airport, and saw a few of the SAS groups there, so we were talking to them. I was standing in the security line with Max talking to some of the SAS’ers when I was told that I was in the wrong line. Apparently, there are 4 lines for men to stand in, but one line for women. I moved over the women’s line, put my bag on the x-ray, and then had to walk behind a curtain. There were two women security guards standing behind this curtain, and we had to show them our boarding passes, and then they thoroughly checked us for contraband. Not once did they check our ID, wonderful. The airline we took was not as bad as I was expecting. Max sat in the aisle seat, me in the middle, and some older Indian man sat in the window seat. This was my first encounter with something that I would experience a lot in India. Almost the whole entire plane ride, the man’s eyes were glued to me. If he wasn’t sleeping, he was staring at me. I felt so uncomfortable; I just had my head turned toward Max the whole time so I couldn’t see him looking at me. I did read about how Indian men will stare, but it is still really awkward. So we arrived in Delhi at about 9 pm and met up with Bharat and his driver. We drove around to look at a few of the sites, and then went to the Ashok Hotel. The Ashok is where the SAS groups were staying, so we decided it would be best to stay there for a night just to get our bearings and figure out a plan for the next few days. This hotel is absolutely gorgeous; it wouldn’t be my first choice just because of money, but it was okay since we decided it was only for one night. We got a room for a ridiculous price, and then ordered Dominoes because it was really late and we were hungry, and we figured we had every other day to eat Indian food. Max and I looked like little kids in a candy store- pizza, MTV, HBO- it was so nice.
Oh yeah- just in case any of you forgot à I am traveling around the world right now, and it is beautiful. I am loving life, and the people I am with. I can’t speak highly enough of Semester At Sea (what a plug).
Day 2 in Delhi was spent driving around to different historical sites and doing some shopping. We went to Palika Bazaar, Connaught Place, Cottage Emporium, and the Janpath Market. We spent a majority of the time in electronic stores because Max was looking to buy a new camera, so I didn’t have much time to shop for myself. After some shopping we went to Raj Ghat; which is a place on the river where Gandhi was cremated. That was a cool place to see, and there were a bunch of other people there praying to the spot. After that we went to Jama Masjid, which is the largest mosque in India. We had to take these little cycle rickshaws through a market to get there- SCARY! I took a video of us almost getting hit by cars. While I’m on the subject; driving in India- very interesting. To sum it up, let me just say, why step on the breaks when you can just honk your horn? Okay back to the mosque, so we get up to it, take our shoes off, and walk through the arch. As soon as we are inside, I notice that we are being stared at. I wasn’t sure if people thought we were disrespectful because we are blatantly not Muslim, or we are just interesting looking. We had a few people come up to us and ask us for pictures, and Bharat said that they don’t have cameras, so they just want their pictures taken. Then, a boy of about 16 came up to me and said, “Excuse me, excuse me, just one picture please”, so I took my camera out, but he shook his head and took his own camera out. I was really confused for a minute, but then realized that he wanted to get a picture with me. After some people saw him doing that, then a few more asked to get pictures with me. They were all just around me smiling, and taking pictures with me while holding my hand. The same boy got like 4 pictures with me, and then his friends were fighting over whose turn it was next. Max and Bharat were standing there laughing at me saying that apparently the Indians think I am attractive or something, I don’t know. So that was quite interesting to say the least. Although I am not going to lie, it was definitely a confidence booster, haha. After leaving the mosque we walked around this street to get back to the market. Basically the street was just lined with homeless people and families in their little makeshift homes or cardboard and old blankets. This area was mainly Muslim, and, as a woman, I felt very uncomfortable. I know a little about Islam, and I know how women are viewed. For every 50 men walking around, there was 1 woman. Basically, my natural reaction was just to walk behind Max and Bharat and not look anyone in the eye. The boys did keep me in front of them so that they could watch me, but I really have never felt so uncomfortable in my life. It was like I was ashamed to be a woman there, especially an American woman à not a good feeling.
We walked around the market for a little bit, and then went to this restaurant called Parikrama. The word parikrama means revolution, and this was a revolving restaurant so that was cool. We got a bunch of different Indian food to share; naan=amazing. After dinner we went back to the Ashok hotel and just crashed in some other SAS’ers room since we had to wake up at 6 am anyway.
630 am the next day we were on our way to Agra to see the Taj Mahal! We rented a car for the day to take us all around, and as soon as we got in we fell asleep. About 45 minutes or so into the ride we got woken up by people banging on the windows. Actually, it was a monkey banging on Max’s window. A boy had a monkey on a leash, and was hitting it with a stick to make it to tricks for us that we would pay him. For real, I have never seen as extreme animal cruelty as I did in India; anything for some money I guess. The driver had gotten out of the car to show his registration and some other stuff since we were leaving the Delhi city limits. The driver was gone for about 10 minutes, and by the time he got back the whole car was just swarmed with little kids begging, and monkeys on leashes. So we continued on our way to Agra and after about 2 hours we stopped in Vrindivan (I have no idea if that is how it is spelled). This is a village with a ton of temples, and it is believed in Hinduism that this is where lord Krishna was born, so it is a pretty holy place. We walked around here for a little bit and looked at some of the different temples.
When we got into Agra we went to this hotel that some SAS’ers had stayed at. They sell t-shirts that have Taj Mahal India on the front and Welcome Semester At Sea on the back. We had lunch here and bought some t-shirts, then drove to the Taj Mahal! Entrance fees to the Taj are 10 rupees for Indian citizens, and 750 rupees for everyone else. Okay so we walked around the Taj for a while, it is absolutely gorgeous! We also went to this other mausoleum type of place that had all these different animals roaming the grounds. After that we started to head back to Delhi for the night. We went back to the Ashok to see what SAS’ers were staying there for the night. I turned a corner and saw Dannie and got really excited. She told me that I could crash on the couch in her hotel room, so I dropped my bag off there, and then went to the lobby to wait for the SAS group coming from Delhi. As soon as I saw Jordi walk through the door I like jumped on her because I was so excited and then I heard “It has only been 2 days!” and turned around to see Terron, and got more excited! It is so crazy how much you miss people and the ship when your away for a few days. I don’t know what I am going to do at the end of the semester. So I hung out with them for a while, and then went to sleep on Dannie’s couch. The next morning I woke up, went to a few temples with Max and Bharat, and also did a little more shopping. I wanted to try to find a flight home that night, but there weren’t any flights we could get so we just enjoyed our last night. The boys wanted to go to dinner at Spice Route, which is a south east Asian restaurant in the fancy hotel, so we went to the hotel, got a room, and got ready for dinner. I had gotten a dot on my head from one of the temples earlier, so I looked very ethnic with my garb on. I’ll post the picture if I can.
Max and I woke up around 630 am, and left for the airport to catch our flight back to Chennai. When we got to the Air Deccan office we found out that they had pushed the flight back, and we didn’t want to be late for the ship, so we looked for another company to change flights. After an absolutely ridiculous run-around and stress, and spending a ton of money we bought tickets on another airline. This whole thing makes me so angry, so I’m skipping over it. When the flight landed Max, Isaiah, and I got a taxi to Spencer’s Plaza for some last minute shopping, then went back to the ship.
Since it is now over a week since this, I forget if anything else interesting has happened, but I doubt it. Keep reading my blogs, and everyone stay in touch with me. Love and miss you all!
When we docked in Chennai we had to visit with the customs officials and get our passports and then get our immigration cards. After we got some lunch on the ship Jordi, Kelsey, and I decided to venture out into Chennai. I could only stay out for a few hours because I was meeting Max to go to the airport at 3:15. We walked off the ship and were greeted by tons of rickshaw drivers wanting to take us to their friend’s shops. We kept walking “past the gate” because that is what Dean Mike told us to do, and were greeted by even more rickshaws. We told them that we wanted to go to Spencer’s Plaza, and a few of them told us that it was closed, but we can go somewhere else. From reading past SAS’ers blogs I knew that they were lying, so we insisted that we wanted to go to Spencer’s. After negotiating a price we got into the rickshaw, and started driving. The driver turned around and said, “Okay I will take you to my friend’s shop, he has very nice”. After telling him no he told us to get out of his rickshaw, and get into another one, so we did that. The next rickshaw driver tried doing the same thing to us, so we had to get out and change rickshaws again. Finally, we found a driver to take us to Spencer’s. When we got to Spencer’s we tried giving him the 100 rupees that we agreed on, but he said that he will wait for us and we can pay him there. We tried telling him that we don’t know how long we are going to be, and we may not find him, but he insisted. So we went shopping for about 2 hours, and I bought some stuff. We left Spencer’s and found our rickshaw driver and made our way back to the ship. One thing that really bothered me in India, probably because of my extreme sympathy for people, is the fact that these small children would stand in the streets, and if you stopped for traffic or a red light or something, they would come up to you and stick their hands in your face and make an eating gesture. It is hard to avoid them when you are in the rickshaws because they are completely open. Our rickshaw driver was very nice, and would shoo the kids away or drive through the red light to get rid of them. It is really sad, and I have quite a few more examples of this kind of thing. I’m sorry I’m not writing this like a novel, there is just so much going on it is really hard.
Okay, so we got back to the ship, and I went to my cabin (4082) to pack my bag for Delhi. Max and I had a flight at 6 pm for Delhi where we were going to meet up with his friend Bharat who is from the US, but has family in India and is spending 6 months there. For now on I am just going to say we, so I will be talking about the 3 of us. Max and I got a taxi to the airport at around 4pm. We drove past the beach on our way there and passed this untouchables village that was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. The houses looked like tents made out of tarps or old billboards. The people were sitting on the ground or walking around with no shoes, and barely half of the people had clothes on. There are no restrooms, so it is quite common to see people relieving themselves on the side of the road. Also, there are goats and cows walking around the streets, and living with these people. In Hinduism, cows are considered to be sacred, so even though these people are starving, they will never kill a cow for food.
Max and I got to the airport, and saw a few of the SAS groups there, so we were talking to them. I was standing in the security line with Max talking to some of the SAS’ers when I was told that I was in the wrong line. Apparently, there are 4 lines for men to stand in, but one line for women. I moved over the women’s line, put my bag on the x-ray, and then had to walk behind a curtain. There were two women security guards standing behind this curtain, and we had to show them our boarding passes, and then they thoroughly checked us for contraband. Not once did they check our ID, wonderful. The airline we took was not as bad as I was expecting. Max sat in the aisle seat, me in the middle, and some older Indian man sat in the window seat. This was my first encounter with something that I would experience a lot in India. Almost the whole entire plane ride, the man’s eyes were glued to me. If he wasn’t sleeping, he was staring at me. I felt so uncomfortable; I just had my head turned toward Max the whole time so I couldn’t see him looking at me. I did read about how Indian men will stare, but it is still really awkward. So we arrived in Delhi at about 9 pm and met up with Bharat and his driver. We drove around to look at a few of the sites, and then went to the Ashok Hotel. The Ashok is where the SAS groups were staying, so we decided it would be best to stay there for a night just to get our bearings and figure out a plan for the next few days. This hotel is absolutely gorgeous; it wouldn’t be my first choice just because of money, but it was okay since we decided it was only for one night. We got a room for a ridiculous price, and then ordered Dominoes because it was really late and we were hungry, and we figured we had every other day to eat Indian food. Max and I looked like little kids in a candy store- pizza, MTV, HBO- it was so nice.
Oh yeah- just in case any of you forgot à I am traveling around the world right now, and it is beautiful. I am loving life, and the people I am with. I can’t speak highly enough of Semester At Sea (what a plug).
Day 2 in Delhi was spent driving around to different historical sites and doing some shopping. We went to Palika Bazaar, Connaught Place, Cottage Emporium, and the Janpath Market. We spent a majority of the time in electronic stores because Max was looking to buy a new camera, so I didn’t have much time to shop for myself. After some shopping we went to Raj Ghat; which is a place on the river where Gandhi was cremated. That was a cool place to see, and there were a bunch of other people there praying to the spot. After that we went to Jama Masjid, which is the largest mosque in India. We had to take these little cycle rickshaws through a market to get there- SCARY! I took a video of us almost getting hit by cars. While I’m on the subject; driving in India- very interesting. To sum it up, let me just say, why step on the breaks when you can just honk your horn? Okay back to the mosque, so we get up to it, take our shoes off, and walk through the arch. As soon as we are inside, I notice that we are being stared at. I wasn’t sure if people thought we were disrespectful because we are blatantly not Muslim, or we are just interesting looking. We had a few people come up to us and ask us for pictures, and Bharat said that they don’t have cameras, so they just want their pictures taken. Then, a boy of about 16 came up to me and said, “Excuse me, excuse me, just one picture please”, so I took my camera out, but he shook his head and took his own camera out. I was really confused for a minute, but then realized that he wanted to get a picture with me. After some people saw him doing that, then a few more asked to get pictures with me. They were all just around me smiling, and taking pictures with me while holding my hand. The same boy got like 4 pictures with me, and then his friends were fighting over whose turn it was next. Max and Bharat were standing there laughing at me saying that apparently the Indians think I am attractive or something, I don’t know. So that was quite interesting to say the least. Although I am not going to lie, it was definitely a confidence booster, haha. After leaving the mosque we walked around this street to get back to the market. Basically the street was just lined with homeless people and families in their little makeshift homes or cardboard and old blankets. This area was mainly Muslim, and, as a woman, I felt very uncomfortable. I know a little about Islam, and I know how women are viewed. For every 50 men walking around, there was 1 woman. Basically, my natural reaction was just to walk behind Max and Bharat and not look anyone in the eye. The boys did keep me in front of them so that they could watch me, but I really have never felt so uncomfortable in my life. It was like I was ashamed to be a woman there, especially an American woman à not a good feeling.
We walked around the market for a little bit, and then went to this restaurant called Parikrama. The word parikrama means revolution, and this was a revolving restaurant so that was cool. We got a bunch of different Indian food to share; naan=amazing. After dinner we went back to the Ashok hotel and just crashed in some other SAS’ers room since we had to wake up at 6 am anyway.
630 am the next day we were on our way to Agra to see the Taj Mahal! We rented a car for the day to take us all around, and as soon as we got in we fell asleep. About 45 minutes or so into the ride we got woken up by people banging on the windows. Actually, it was a monkey banging on Max’s window. A boy had a monkey on a leash, and was hitting it with a stick to make it to tricks for us that we would pay him. For real, I have never seen as extreme animal cruelty as I did in India; anything for some money I guess. The driver had gotten out of the car to show his registration and some other stuff since we were leaving the Delhi city limits. The driver was gone for about 10 minutes, and by the time he got back the whole car was just swarmed with little kids begging, and monkeys on leashes. So we continued on our way to Agra and after about 2 hours we stopped in Vrindivan (I have no idea if that is how it is spelled). This is a village with a ton of temples, and it is believed in Hinduism that this is where lord Krishna was born, so it is a pretty holy place. We walked around here for a little bit and looked at some of the different temples.
When we got into Agra we went to this hotel that some SAS’ers had stayed at. They sell t-shirts that have Taj Mahal India on the front and Welcome Semester At Sea on the back. We had lunch here and bought some t-shirts, then drove to the Taj Mahal! Entrance fees to the Taj are 10 rupees for Indian citizens, and 750 rupees for everyone else. Okay so we walked around the Taj for a while, it is absolutely gorgeous! We also went to this other mausoleum type of place that had all these different animals roaming the grounds. After that we started to head back to Delhi for the night. We went back to the Ashok to see what SAS’ers were staying there for the night. I turned a corner and saw Dannie and got really excited. She told me that I could crash on the couch in her hotel room, so I dropped my bag off there, and then went to the lobby to wait for the SAS group coming from Delhi. As soon as I saw Jordi walk through the door I like jumped on her because I was so excited and then I heard “It has only been 2 days!” and turned around to see Terron, and got more excited! It is so crazy how much you miss people and the ship when your away for a few days. I don’t know what I am going to do at the end of the semester. So I hung out with them for a while, and then went to sleep on Dannie’s couch. The next morning I woke up, went to a few temples with Max and Bharat, and also did a little more shopping. I wanted to try to find a flight home that night, but there weren’t any flights we could get so we just enjoyed our last night. The boys wanted to go to dinner at Spice Route, which is a south east Asian restaurant in the fancy hotel, so we went to the hotel, got a room, and got ready for dinner. I had gotten a dot on my head from one of the temples earlier, so I looked very ethnic with my garb on. I’ll post the picture if I can.
Max and I woke up around 630 am, and left for the airport to catch our flight back to Chennai. When we got to the Air Deccan office we found out that they had pushed the flight back, and we didn’t want to be late for the ship, so we looked for another company to change flights. After an absolutely ridiculous run-around and stress, and spending a ton of money we bought tickets on another airline. This whole thing makes me so angry, so I’m skipping over it. When the flight landed Max, Isaiah, and I got a taxi to Spencer’s Plaza for some last minute shopping, then went back to the ship.
Since it is now over a week since this, I forget if anything else interesting has happened, but I doubt it. Keep reading my blogs, and everyone stay in touch with me. Love and miss you all!
MALAYSIA!!
Hello everyone..
I am still in the process of writing my blog about India. I need a lot of time to reflect on everything, but haven’t had that time. We arrived in Malaysia just 3 days after leaving India. Now, I am on my way to Vietnam.
Malaysia was beautiful. I’m not sure what kind of expectation I had for it, but it was exceeded. We arrived in Penang at about 8 am on Monday, and I had an SAS trip at 9 am. The dock in Penang is under construction or something like that, so we had to anchor the ship out in the middle of the ocean and take our lifeboats as tenders to the dock. My trip was the Penang Island Orientation. We got on huge air-conditioned buses and drove around the island, stopping at a few different spots. We went to the Penang Butterfly Garden, Snake Temple, a Buddhist Temple, and a few other spots. It was nice getting to hit all the popular attractions in one day. That night I had signed up for the Welcome Reception, so we left the tour a little early to get the tender in time for that. So these tenders leave the ship and the dock about every half hour or so, but the line for them is ridiculous. I really hope we never have to do it again because it was so horrible and HOT. Malaysia is the hottest place we have visited yet. So Eric, Terron, Jaime, and I went to the Welcome Reception, which was nothing but sitting in an auditorium and watching a shadow puppet performance. Every single one of us fell asleep.
Okay, so Tuesday Jordi, Mary, and I went to this huge mall in Penang that is like 7 levels and has all these different hallways and stuff. We went to an Internet café in the mall, but it was about 5am at home, so no one was online L. As we were walking around the mall, Jordi saw a girl wearing these pants that she has been searching for since Mauritius, so she asked her where she got them. The girl said that she had just gotten them from the market in Kuala Lumpur (KL). Well, there was no question; we had to go to Kuala Lumpur in search of these Magic Pants. We stopped off at the bus station and looked at times, then went back to the ship to pack our bags. The bus didn’t leave until 10 pm, so we got some dinner and some snacks from 7-11, and then headed to the bus station around 930. The bus ride to KL took about 5 hours, so we arrived around 330am.
We weren’t even sure if we were actually in KL because we thought we should be getting there around 2:30am so we got off anyway hoping we weren’t in Singapore. So, praying that we were in KL we asked a taxi driver to drive us to a hotel so we could get a few hours of sleep before the long day of shopping ahead of us. We woke up around 11 and walked to the Twin Towers of Malaysia (some of you may know them from the movie Entrapment). We walked into the towers and saw Eric, Terron, Darren, and Lydia; which was so random because, well, we were in KL, and didn’t expect to see any SAS’ers let alone our friends. They said that they had bus tickets for 1 am, but we weren’t sure what time we were leaving yet. So after walking around the towers we got a taxi to a mall, but it wasn’t what we were looking for, so we got another taxi to Central Market. Basically, Central Market is Canal Street in NYC times 1,000. We walked around the market all day buying tons of stuff (I got lots of gifts for people). We were at this stand at the very end of the market, the last shop because Jordi was bargaining for a purse, and I looked across the market at the shop and saw something that resembled Magic Pants. I ran across, and asked the lady and she got really excited that I knew what magic pants were, so she got all the colors together for us. Jordi came running over super excited, and because of this we couldn’t bargain with her haha. So Jordi got 3 pairs of these magic pants, and I got 2 so our mission was accomplished. By the time we were done shopping it was about 730 pm. We stopped at Pizza Hut to get some dinner before heading to the bus station. We saw these really cool buses that had super reclining seats slash a bed so we paid a few extra ringgits to get that bus. The company told us that the bus left at 10 pm, but it didn’t end up leaving until almost 12. This was the most amazing bus ever! The seats were so comfortable, and each seat had it’s own personal entertainment system with movies and music to choose from. We all fell asleep, and when we woke up we were back in Penang. It should have been 4 am right? Nope, it was 6 am. We got a taxi back to the pier, and got in the tender boat, and the boys were already there! They were so surprised seeing us because I guess they thought we would have gotten there about 5 hours earlier.
I got a few hours of sleep before I had to wake up for my orphanage visit that day. We went to St. Joseph’s orphanage in Penang. There are 52 children here between the ages of 5 and 18. Some of the children were still at school, but we had the opportunity to play or talk with the kids that were there. I made friends with a 17-year-old Malay girl named Avita. She talked to me about her family, school, and her hobbies; I told her about myself. We were there for a few hours, and when it was time to leave Avita and I exchanged e-mail addresses, and I took a picture with her that I promised to send to her. Even though I have done other service visits with SAS this one was one of the hardest to leave. I was crying the whole way back to the ship, as were a few of the other students. I got back to the ship at about 530 pm, and decided I was not going to get off again because on ship time was 9, and I knew the line for the tenders was going to be ridiculous. Jordi, Mary, and I watched a movie until 930 when we called our friends to find out who got dock time. Now, I am on my way to Vietnam. We are having a Passover Sedar on the ship tonight, and Easter is tomorrow. Archbishop Tutu is having a sunrise Easter service, but I am not waking up at 6 am. Happy Easter and Happy Passover everyone! Keep sending me e-mails, I love getting them. Happy Birthday Tal if I don’t get to talk to you before then!!
P.S. Check out Jordi’s blog- she posted pictures.
I am still in the process of writing my blog about India. I need a lot of time to reflect on everything, but haven’t had that time. We arrived in Malaysia just 3 days after leaving India. Now, I am on my way to Vietnam.
Malaysia was beautiful. I’m not sure what kind of expectation I had for it, but it was exceeded. We arrived in Penang at about 8 am on Monday, and I had an SAS trip at 9 am. The dock in Penang is under construction or something like that, so we had to anchor the ship out in the middle of the ocean and take our lifeboats as tenders to the dock. My trip was the Penang Island Orientation. We got on huge air-conditioned buses and drove around the island, stopping at a few different spots. We went to the Penang Butterfly Garden, Snake Temple, a Buddhist Temple, and a few other spots. It was nice getting to hit all the popular attractions in one day. That night I had signed up for the Welcome Reception, so we left the tour a little early to get the tender in time for that. So these tenders leave the ship and the dock about every half hour or so, but the line for them is ridiculous. I really hope we never have to do it again because it was so horrible and HOT. Malaysia is the hottest place we have visited yet. So Eric, Terron, Jaime, and I went to the Welcome Reception, which was nothing but sitting in an auditorium and watching a shadow puppet performance. Every single one of us fell asleep.
Okay, so Tuesday Jordi, Mary, and I went to this huge mall in Penang that is like 7 levels and has all these different hallways and stuff. We went to an Internet café in the mall, but it was about 5am at home, so no one was online L. As we were walking around the mall, Jordi saw a girl wearing these pants that she has been searching for since Mauritius, so she asked her where she got them. The girl said that she had just gotten them from the market in Kuala Lumpur (KL). Well, there was no question; we had to go to Kuala Lumpur in search of these Magic Pants. We stopped off at the bus station and looked at times, then went back to the ship to pack our bags. The bus didn’t leave until 10 pm, so we got some dinner and some snacks from 7-11, and then headed to the bus station around 930. The bus ride to KL took about 5 hours, so we arrived around 330am.
We weren’t even sure if we were actually in KL because we thought we should be getting there around 2:30am so we got off anyway hoping we weren’t in Singapore. So, praying that we were in KL we asked a taxi driver to drive us to a hotel so we could get a few hours of sleep before the long day of shopping ahead of us. We woke up around 11 and walked to the Twin Towers of Malaysia (some of you may know them from the movie Entrapment). We walked into the towers and saw Eric, Terron, Darren, and Lydia; which was so random because, well, we were in KL, and didn’t expect to see any SAS’ers let alone our friends. They said that they had bus tickets for 1 am, but we weren’t sure what time we were leaving yet. So after walking around the towers we got a taxi to a mall, but it wasn’t what we were looking for, so we got another taxi to Central Market. Basically, Central Market is Canal Street in NYC times 1,000. We walked around the market all day buying tons of stuff (I got lots of gifts for people). We were at this stand at the very end of the market, the last shop because Jordi was bargaining for a purse, and I looked across the market at the shop and saw something that resembled Magic Pants. I ran across, and asked the lady and she got really excited that I knew what magic pants were, so she got all the colors together for us. Jordi came running over super excited, and because of this we couldn’t bargain with her haha. So Jordi got 3 pairs of these magic pants, and I got 2 so our mission was accomplished. By the time we were done shopping it was about 730 pm. We stopped at Pizza Hut to get some dinner before heading to the bus station. We saw these really cool buses that had super reclining seats slash a bed so we paid a few extra ringgits to get that bus. The company told us that the bus left at 10 pm, but it didn’t end up leaving until almost 12. This was the most amazing bus ever! The seats were so comfortable, and each seat had it’s own personal entertainment system with movies and music to choose from. We all fell asleep, and when we woke up we were back in Penang. It should have been 4 am right? Nope, it was 6 am. We got a taxi back to the pier, and got in the tender boat, and the boys were already there! They were so surprised seeing us because I guess they thought we would have gotten there about 5 hours earlier.
I got a few hours of sleep before I had to wake up for my orphanage visit that day. We went to St. Joseph’s orphanage in Penang. There are 52 children here between the ages of 5 and 18. Some of the children were still at school, but we had the opportunity to play or talk with the kids that were there. I made friends with a 17-year-old Malay girl named Avita. She talked to me about her family, school, and her hobbies; I told her about myself. We were there for a few hours, and when it was time to leave Avita and I exchanged e-mail addresses, and I took a picture with her that I promised to send to her. Even though I have done other service visits with SAS this one was one of the hardest to leave. I was crying the whole way back to the ship, as were a few of the other students. I got back to the ship at about 530 pm, and decided I was not going to get off again because on ship time was 9, and I knew the line for the tenders was going to be ridiculous. Jordi, Mary, and I watched a movie until 930 when we called our friends to find out who got dock time. Now, I am on my way to Vietnam. We are having a Passover Sedar on the ship tonight, and Easter is tomorrow. Archbishop Tutu is having a sunrise Easter service, but I am not waking up at 6 am. Happy Easter and Happy Passover everyone! Keep sending me e-mails, I love getting them. Happy Birthday Tal if I don’t get to talk to you before then!!
P.S. Check out Jordi’s blog- she posted pictures.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Random Pictures
My friend from my South African township tour.
Jordi and I on the beautiful beach in Mauritius!
A beautiful beach in Mauritius!
Mauritius- the place you have never heard of
Bonjour everyone! First let me just say that 48 hours in Mauritius is not enough time, especially since the ship docked a few hours late. Because of this, I did not get a chance to use the wireless Internet, so I lied when I told everyone you would be receiving emails from me. Sorry L --I’ll work on it. Ok, so Mauritius- the small island that the majority of you have probably never heard of- GORGEOUS! The first day there we walked around the market, and I bought a new camera woo hoo. Around 4 pm I went on an SAS trip to visit an SOS Children’s Village, which was a good experience. SOS Villages are small communities with houses that hold about 10 children and a “mother”. The majority of the kids in the villages have been abandoned by their parents, not orphaned, which is really sad. We basically just played with them for a little bit before returning to the ship. I met up with a bunch of people at the ship and we all walked to China Town to get dinner. I don’t usually eat Chinese food, but I split some stuff with Jordi, and I’ll admit it was pretty good. So after that Jordi and I went back to the ship, and then boys called us to see what we were doing. Eric, Terron, and Darren got a villa in Flic en Flac along with a ton of other SAS’ers, so we took a cab over their place. The next morning we went to the beach at Flic en Flac, and it was so nice. It was really hot and there were a bunch of flies, so we didn’t stay for too long. Instead of staying in the villa again that night the boys decided that they were going to go back to the ship, so we all took a taxi together. That night we went out to dinner and then to the casino on the waterfront. I have really bad luck with slot machines L.
On our final day Eric, Jaime, and I all had the same SAS trip, which was a catamaran and snorkeling. The catamaran was so cool- I am definitely going to have one of those when I am older. It was kind of windy, so it was hard to see things under the water because of the waves, but we got to see dolphins! They were like mini-dolphins, they were so small, and they were swimming next to and under our catamaran. It was a really good trip though; they cooked us amazing BBQ chicken yum. Afterwards I was so tired, just from being in the sun all day and swimming, but we only had a few hours left in Mauritius and I needed to get some more shopping done. So we got showers, met up with some other people, and then walked around and looked for a place to eat dinner. We went to this cool place, but it took a really long time for all the food we ordered. By the time we got out of there it was about 815, and on ship was 9. Of course we all got distracted by a few shops that were still open, so we were in there shopping when Jordi yelled that it was already 840. We all went to catch the water taxi back to the ship, which we had to wait for. By the time the water taxi dropped us off it was 850 so we all started sprinting to our dock, which was not very close. Also, it was raining, and we were all wearing flip-flops which doesn’t help in running. So I swiped into the ship at 857, and everyone else did at 858.. no dock time!!!!!! We were really lucky because having dock time for India would be horrible. Oh yeah- HAPPY ST. PATTY’S DAY!
We had Sea Olympics yesterday (Sunday). I was part of the Bering Sea black pirates. We were all decked out in pirate gear, and I thought we did well in events, but we got last place L. The winners (Agean Sea) get to be the first off the ship in San Diego. I don’t know if that means that we are the last ones, but if so, Mom and Katie you guys will be waiting on the dock for a really long time. I participated in the Synchronized Swimming event. Actually, it was Interpretive Synchronized Swimming. The ship was really rocky that day, so they didn’t fill the pool, so the event was held on the floor of the Union. It was interesting- I hope somebody videotaped it.
Now we are on our way to India! I am spending the majority of my time there in Delhi, and I am going to visit the Taj Mahal. I am so excited about this port. I hope I am able to post this soon. The satellite that we and other cruise ships use is broken or something, so internet is barely working, and the phone system is not working, so I hope there are no emergencies. That is it for now, I hope everybody is doing well and staying safe! Keep sending me emails and hopefully I can get to read and respond to them soon. I haven’t forgot about anyone. Love you all!
On our final day Eric, Jaime, and I all had the same SAS trip, which was a catamaran and snorkeling. The catamaran was so cool- I am definitely going to have one of those when I am older. It was kind of windy, so it was hard to see things under the water because of the waves, but we got to see dolphins! They were like mini-dolphins, they were so small, and they were swimming next to and under our catamaran. It was a really good trip though; they cooked us amazing BBQ chicken yum. Afterwards I was so tired, just from being in the sun all day and swimming, but we only had a few hours left in Mauritius and I needed to get some more shopping done. So we got showers, met up with some other people, and then walked around and looked for a place to eat dinner. We went to this cool place, but it took a really long time for all the food we ordered. By the time we got out of there it was about 815, and on ship was 9. Of course we all got distracted by a few shops that were still open, so we were in there shopping when Jordi yelled that it was already 840. We all went to catch the water taxi back to the ship, which we had to wait for. By the time the water taxi dropped us off it was 850 so we all started sprinting to our dock, which was not very close. Also, it was raining, and we were all wearing flip-flops which doesn’t help in running. So I swiped into the ship at 857, and everyone else did at 858.. no dock time!!!!!! We were really lucky because having dock time for India would be horrible. Oh yeah- HAPPY ST. PATTY’S DAY!
We had Sea Olympics yesterday (Sunday). I was part of the Bering Sea black pirates. We were all decked out in pirate gear, and I thought we did well in events, but we got last place L. The winners (Agean Sea) get to be the first off the ship in San Diego. I don’t know if that means that we are the last ones, but if so, Mom and Katie you guys will be waiting on the dock for a really long time. I participated in the Synchronized Swimming event. Actually, it was Interpretive Synchronized Swimming. The ship was really rocky that day, so they didn’t fill the pool, so the event was held on the floor of the Union. It was interesting- I hope somebody videotaped it.
Now we are on our way to India! I am spending the majority of my time there in Delhi, and I am going to visit the Taj Mahal. I am so excited about this port. I hope I am able to post this soon. The satellite that we and other cruise ships use is broken or something, so internet is barely working, and the phone system is not working, so I hope there are no emergencies. That is it for now, I hope everybody is doing well and staying safe! Keep sending me emails and hopefully I can get to read and respond to them soon. I haven’t forgot about anyone. Love you all!
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
SOUTH AFRICA = MY NEW HOME!
Hey everyone! Sorry it took me so long to post this, but I have been so busy, and I am also incredibly fed up with technology. Something is wrong with my computer battery, and it only lasts for like 10 minutes if it isn’t plugged in. Also, my camera is broken—my memory cards are fine, but I can’t take pictures or anything so I am going to look for a new one in Mauritius. I’m sorry I haven’t responded to anyone’s emails either. We get to Mauritius in less than 2 days and the whole island is wireless, so I am trying to conserve some of my Internet minutes. Ok so here are my experiences in South Africa:
First and foremost- you all knew it was going to happen, and it did- I got attacked by monkeys. Let me explain- I was at Kruger National Park for my safari and our campsite was like fenced off from the animals, but there were still monkeys everywhere. So there were these Vervet monkeys in our campsite just hanging out, and I wanted to get a picture of them. So I started walking towards them, but then they started walking towards me too, which I did not want. So I turned around, and started walking away from them, but I guess that wasn’t good enough because 2 of the monkeys ran at me and jumped on to the back of my leg. I wasn’t sure if they bit me or anything, but they did something because it hurt. So after I finally shook them off and then was terrified, I checked my leg. It didn’t break skin thankfully, but it did give me a nice scratch. Right now, about a week later, I have a HUGE bruise- I guess it punched me or something haha I have no idea. But I went to Dr. Matt and since it didn’t break skin I don’t have rabies, and they were supposed to check for some weird Vervet monkey disease and call me if there was anything, but they haven’t called so I am taking that to mean that there are none so that is good. Also, I don’t know if any of you who read this read other SAS’ers blogs as well. There is a kid who wrote about a girl getting attacked by monkeys and how she deserved it. Yeah, that is talking about me, and no I didn’t deserve that. God forbid anything happened to him during this trip and anyone said he deserved it- that was just a jerk thing to say, and I am really mad about it. But anyway, back to AMAZING South Africa.. I woke up at 5:30 am to watch the sunrise over Africa the day we pulled into port. We were still a few miles away, but the sun rising over the mountains was beautiful!!
On March 2nd, which was our first day in Cape Town Jaime and I walked around the V & A Waterfront which has a huge mall and tons of restaurants and stuff like that, but it is really expensive. We came upon Nobel Square I think it’s called which has about 8 foot tall statues of the 4 South African Nobel Peace Laureates. I spotted Tutu’s statue from like a mile away haha.. We walked around there for like 2 hours and then had to meet back on the ship for our Khayelitsha Township tour. For our tour we walked around the township for a while and played with the kids, went into a craft market, and also visited Philani, which is a nutrition center for mothers and children. It was an amazing experience to be able to go into this township, but it was also really hard to see that people lived like this. I see know why a lot of people who do Semester At Sea join Peace Corps or just have this desire to help people in the world.
After we got back from the township, Jaime, Jordi, Dannie, Eric, Terron, Darren, and I got ready and went out to Long Street to a couple of bars. It was fun, but we had to wake up early for our safari the next day so we didn’t stay out too late.
We were supposed to meet up at 430 am in Purser’s Square for our safari. Jaime had to come and wake me up at 445 because my alarm didn’t go off (:-o), so I just grabbed whatever I had packed the night before which definitely wasn’t everything I needed. So we got to Purser’s, and we were still waiting for Alex. We called her tons of times and knocked on her door, but no response so by 515 am we decided to leave, and hope that she would find her way to the airport. Which she did! Yay! So we took our 2-hour flight to Jo’burg, and were greeted at the airport by a sign that said “O’Neill Group” hehe. I am going to cut out details that aren’t very important. We took a 5-hour bus ride to Kruger National Park, got all set up in our tents, and went out on our first game drive. Throughout the 3 days we went on 6 game drives. Each one lasted about 3 hours so it was perfect. Altogether, we saw tons of elephants and rhinos, giraffes, zebras, lions, kudu, a warthog, a buffalo, and I think that’s it. By our 3rd game drive we had seem almost everything except lions so we would be driving past rhinos and we were like, “It is just a rhino, keep driving” haha. Our safari guide’s name was Edwin. He is 23 years old and lives in a small village outside of the park. On our last day we decided to put in 100 Rand ($ 15 USD) each for his tip so with 10 of us that came out to 1000 Rand. I put it slickly in his hand, and a couple minutes later we saw him count it and then run over to the other guides with this HUGE smile on his face. We found out later that the guides make 1300 Rand each month, so we almost doubled that with just a tip, and it was so worth it, I would have even given him more because he was the best guide ever. I miss him L. Ok so then we took the 5-hour bus ride back to the Jo’burg airport and then caught our flight back to Cape Town. We got back pretty late, and I think the majority of us decided to stay in and sleep. March 6th and 7th were spent shopping for the most part. There was this really cute market called Green Market Square so I bought a bunch of stuff from there. On the last day in Cape Town I had an FDP to the Desmond Tutu HIV Center. It was interesting to see their facilities, but my favorite part of the day was that we got to take a tour of another township, Masiphumele. This one was a lot “nicer” than Khayelitsha- each home had electricity and running water. I would bet that barely 10% of the Khayelitsha homes had that.
When we got back to the ship I couldn’t find any of my friends so I walked to the mall to get some last minute shopping done. I ran into Jaime and Hilary, so I had lunch with them and then we went back to the ship. We still had a few hours before on-ship time so Jaime came with me to get a phone card and I called my parents and sister. Then I lost Jaime, which is nothing new, but I ran into Terron, Darren, and Eric and decided to go to dinner with them. On-ship time was 830 pm, we didn’t get out of the restaurant until 805 pm, but we made it to the ship, and didn’t get dock time- yay us!
So now we are on our way to Mauritius. The past 2 days have been absolutely horrible. Everyone is getting seasick and you can barely walk it is so rough. The Voice just told us that because of the rough seas we wont be getting to Mauritius until 1600 tomorrow, instead of 0800 which sucks. I was supposed to have an orphanage visit at 1500 hours so I wonder if that will be rescheduled. They are going to tell us about the repercussions at Pre-port tonight. FREE WIRELESS IN MAURITIUS!!! YAYYY! Everyone should be expecting emails from me, hopefully! Sea Olympics are scheduled for the day after Mauritius, but we will see what happens with scheduling and stuff now. That is it for now, maybe I will be able to post pictures on here finally. I love everyone and miss everyone. Hope everyone is having a good spring break! Stay safe!
First and foremost- you all knew it was going to happen, and it did- I got attacked by monkeys. Let me explain- I was at Kruger National Park for my safari and our campsite was like fenced off from the animals, but there were still monkeys everywhere. So there were these Vervet monkeys in our campsite just hanging out, and I wanted to get a picture of them. So I started walking towards them, but then they started walking towards me too, which I did not want. So I turned around, and started walking away from them, but I guess that wasn’t good enough because 2 of the monkeys ran at me and jumped on to the back of my leg. I wasn’t sure if they bit me or anything, but they did something because it hurt. So after I finally shook them off and then was terrified, I checked my leg. It didn’t break skin thankfully, but it did give me a nice scratch. Right now, about a week later, I have a HUGE bruise- I guess it punched me or something haha I have no idea. But I went to Dr. Matt and since it didn’t break skin I don’t have rabies, and they were supposed to check for some weird Vervet monkey disease and call me if there was anything, but they haven’t called so I am taking that to mean that there are none so that is good. Also, I don’t know if any of you who read this read other SAS’ers blogs as well. There is a kid who wrote about a girl getting attacked by monkeys and how she deserved it. Yeah, that is talking about me, and no I didn’t deserve that. God forbid anything happened to him during this trip and anyone said he deserved it- that was just a jerk thing to say, and I am really mad about it. But anyway, back to AMAZING South Africa.. I woke up at 5:30 am to watch the sunrise over Africa the day we pulled into port. We were still a few miles away, but the sun rising over the mountains was beautiful!!
On March 2nd, which was our first day in Cape Town Jaime and I walked around the V & A Waterfront which has a huge mall and tons of restaurants and stuff like that, but it is really expensive. We came upon Nobel Square I think it’s called which has about 8 foot tall statues of the 4 South African Nobel Peace Laureates. I spotted Tutu’s statue from like a mile away haha.. We walked around there for like 2 hours and then had to meet back on the ship for our Khayelitsha Township tour. For our tour we walked around the township for a while and played with the kids, went into a craft market, and also visited Philani, which is a nutrition center for mothers and children. It was an amazing experience to be able to go into this township, but it was also really hard to see that people lived like this. I see know why a lot of people who do Semester At Sea join Peace Corps or just have this desire to help people in the world.
After we got back from the township, Jaime, Jordi, Dannie, Eric, Terron, Darren, and I got ready and went out to Long Street to a couple of bars. It was fun, but we had to wake up early for our safari the next day so we didn’t stay out too late.
We were supposed to meet up at 430 am in Purser’s Square for our safari. Jaime had to come and wake me up at 445 because my alarm didn’t go off (:-o), so I just grabbed whatever I had packed the night before which definitely wasn’t everything I needed. So we got to Purser’s, and we were still waiting for Alex. We called her tons of times and knocked on her door, but no response so by 515 am we decided to leave, and hope that she would find her way to the airport. Which she did! Yay! So we took our 2-hour flight to Jo’burg, and were greeted at the airport by a sign that said “O’Neill Group” hehe. I am going to cut out details that aren’t very important. We took a 5-hour bus ride to Kruger National Park, got all set up in our tents, and went out on our first game drive. Throughout the 3 days we went on 6 game drives. Each one lasted about 3 hours so it was perfect. Altogether, we saw tons of elephants and rhinos, giraffes, zebras, lions, kudu, a warthog, a buffalo, and I think that’s it. By our 3rd game drive we had seem almost everything except lions so we would be driving past rhinos and we were like, “It is just a rhino, keep driving” haha. Our safari guide’s name was Edwin. He is 23 years old and lives in a small village outside of the park. On our last day we decided to put in 100 Rand ($ 15 USD) each for his tip so with 10 of us that came out to 1000 Rand. I put it slickly in his hand, and a couple minutes later we saw him count it and then run over to the other guides with this HUGE smile on his face. We found out later that the guides make 1300 Rand each month, so we almost doubled that with just a tip, and it was so worth it, I would have even given him more because he was the best guide ever. I miss him L. Ok so then we took the 5-hour bus ride back to the Jo’burg airport and then caught our flight back to Cape Town. We got back pretty late, and I think the majority of us decided to stay in and sleep. March 6th and 7th were spent shopping for the most part. There was this really cute market called Green Market Square so I bought a bunch of stuff from there. On the last day in Cape Town I had an FDP to the Desmond Tutu HIV Center. It was interesting to see their facilities, but my favorite part of the day was that we got to take a tour of another township, Masiphumele. This one was a lot “nicer” than Khayelitsha- each home had electricity and running water. I would bet that barely 10% of the Khayelitsha homes had that.
When we got back to the ship I couldn’t find any of my friends so I walked to the mall to get some last minute shopping done. I ran into Jaime and Hilary, so I had lunch with them and then we went back to the ship. We still had a few hours before on-ship time so Jaime came with me to get a phone card and I called my parents and sister. Then I lost Jaime, which is nothing new, but I ran into Terron, Darren, and Eric and decided to go to dinner with them. On-ship time was 830 pm, we didn’t get out of the restaurant until 805 pm, but we made it to the ship, and didn’t get dock time- yay us!
So now we are on our way to Mauritius. The past 2 days have been absolutely horrible. Everyone is getting seasick and you can barely walk it is so rough. The Voice just told us that because of the rough seas we wont be getting to Mauritius until 1600 tomorrow, instead of 0800 which sucks. I was supposed to have an orphanage visit at 1500 hours so I wonder if that will be rescheduled. They are going to tell us about the repercussions at Pre-port tonight. FREE WIRELESS IN MAURITIUS!!! YAYYY! Everyone should be expecting emails from me, hopefully! Sea Olympics are scheduled for the day after Mauritius, but we will see what happens with scheduling and stuff now. That is it for now, maybe I will be able to post pictures on here finally. I love everyone and miss everyone. Hope everyone is having a good spring break! Stay safe!
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
I Love Brasil!
Bom dia! We left Salvador, Brazil 2 nights ago, and we are now on our way to Cape Town, South Africa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have been thinking about how to start this blog since so much happened in Brazil, but I think I will just recount my days in order.
Okay, so we arrived in Salvador at about 6 am on Saturday, got our passports, and went to the Diplomatic Briefing. Throughout the briefing, which was extremely long, we were told countless times how dangerous it was going to be in Salvador, and all of these precautions we must take at all times. Basically, almost everyone (at least the people who paid attention) was completely terrified to even get off the boat. We kept hearing for the past week how at least some of us were going to be robbed, beat up, held at gunpoint or by a knife. Thankfully, I was traveling to Lencois (Len-soiz) for the majority of the time in Brazil, and that town is known for being safe. So after the briefing, the 24 of us who signed up for this indy trip to Lencois got on the bus immediately. We met our guide, Daniel, who we had all been corresponding with through e-mail since we first heard about this trip, and started our 6-hour drive. The beginning of the drive took us through Salvador, past the favelas, which were so interesting to see (I will post a picture even though it doesn’t do it justice). We stopped twice along the way- once for a bathroom/snack break at a gas station type of place and another at a restaurant for lunch. The restaurants in Brazil are funny you put whatever you want on your plate buffet-style and then bring it over to the register where they weigh it to get your price. Since I was somewhat terrified to eat the food, my meal cost only 2 reals, which is like 1 US dollar. While we were sitting in the restaurant it started STORMING outside- it got really dark and it was raining like crazy. The weather was like that for the rest of the bus ride. The rain slowed down a bit as we entered into Lencois, and as soon as we turned up the hill to our hotel, one of the girls on the trip spotted a rainbow- I guess you had to be there, but it was really cool because we were all marveling at the beauty of the city right before that. So we had like 5 minutes to drop our bags off in the hotel before we had to get back on the bus, and nobody knew where we were going. The bus dropped us off in town and we walked a few blocks in the rain to a community center. I can’t remember the name of the center even though I asked about 50 times, but it is an NGO that helps build community in these Afro-Brazilian towns. We walked in here, soaking wet, to find about 25 men, women, and kids playing instruments, singing, and dancing. Being the shy United Statesians and 1 Canadian that we are, we all just stood there watching until they started pulling us into the circle and dancing with us. After listening to them sing the most beautiful song I have ever heard (I will go into further details later), we did a dancing train to a different room. Here, we all took our shoes off and stood in a huge circle. Some of the girls at the center had scripted a welcome to us, but it was in Portuguese so we had to have Daniel and Cesa (I’m sure that is not spelled right) translate for us. They taught us a few songs and dances to go along with them. One of the songs, which is in Portuguese, translates into something about a snake losing a part of its tail (?), and the dance for that was nuts. 3 people start it out and go around the circle, and each time they get to this one part of the song they point to someone in the circle. That person has to crawl under their legs and then get behind them and start a train (or snake in this case), they go around doing this until everyone is in one of the 3 lines. Eventually, the 3 lines come together, so by that point everyone would have crawled under everyone else’s legs. It was really fun, and probably a good place to indicate the start of the relationship we all formed over those few days. For our last song of the night, we got into a large circle and a smaller circle inside of that. We all interlocked arms and were told to close our eyes and sway our bodies. All of a sudden one of the girls started singing a slow song and I am not exaggerating when I say that she had the most beautiful voices I have ever heard. After that we all sat in a circle and opened the floor to questions and comments. We had dinner at a restaurant in town and then walked back to the hotel, got our rooms situated, and went to bed.
The 24 of us were split into 2 groups, so the next morning 1 group left at 8 to go hiking up the waterfall, while my group left at 8:30 to go hiking through a cave. I am not going to write all of the details of that day because there are far too many. In a nutshell though, I have never done something so difficult in my life. I climbed through a cave in pitch dark. I don’t think I have ever been so scared to do something. We had to climb up rocks with nothing to hold on to and I slipped quite a few times. I was so proud of myself that I made it all the way through that. I don’t think I could begin to describe my feelings after we got back to the hotel. My first instinct was to just cry because of everything I was feeling. If there were some sort of scale for how much one steps out of their element, I would have been off of it. I exceeded any expectation I could have ever had for myself, so I know I exceeded expectations that others had for me.
More happened on that trip then just hiking though. We got to a place in the cave that had a body of water we were able to swim in. We were all disgustingly sweaty, so it felt amazing to swim in this freezing cold water. After we were swimming for a while, Daniel asked that we all sit in a circle in the water. After saying some prayers and Oms to mother nature, he turned off the one lantern that was lit. We could not see a thing; we were in the middle of a cave with no light. Daniel told us to keep our eyes open because we can still see the energy. This lasted for a while, but again I’m not going to get into all the details. It was an amazingly spiritual moment for everyone though. Also, when we got to the other end of the cave, some people hiked a little more to the top of the cave opening and bungee jumped off of it! I was terrified to do that of course. I got to take pictures of everyone hanging upside down though, and I got to see their faces when they got down. For a minute I thought I was going to regret not doing it because everyone was talking about how amazing it was, but I don’t. I did more these past few days than I could have ever imagined myself doing, bungee jumping would only be extra icing on the cake that I don’t need. That is only the first full day, if that is any inclination to how amazing my time in Brazil was.
After dinner and resting on Sunday night, we all got ready and took a bus to Palmeiras, which is a small town about an hour away from Lencois. In Palmeiras they have a traditional carnival unlike the ones in Salvador and Rio. I was so happy I got to experience this. It was just tons of dancing and having fun, It was also a good bonding experience for those of us in the group, Daniel, and Kikiu (another one of our tour guides). If I ever come back to Brazil for carnival, I’m staying there (I’ll describe my Salvador carnival experience shortly).
So the third day (Monday) we got to do what group 1 did on the first day. We hiked 9 miles! We hiked to the top of Smoke Falls (I forget the Portuguese name), which is the 2nd highest waterfall in the world. It was absolutely gorgeous, and it is definitely debatable which hike was harder. The first hour or so was just straight up vertical. My muscles have never hurt so much in my life. The next hour and a half was pretty much flat ground until we got to the waterfall. Hiking back down the mountain was quite the interesting experience as well. I, of course, was taking my good ol’ time because I was scared I would slip and go flying down the mountain, but there are these locals who like run down the mountain barefoot and don’t care if they knock into you. I did take one little spill and cut up my hand and legs a good bit, but nothing too serious. Everyone was so relieved when we made it back to the bus and then got back to the hotel.
Funny story: since leaving the community center that first night, you would randomly hear some of the people in our group humming or mumbling a song that they didn’t know the words to. We asked Daniel about it, and he said that the song is called Mama Africa by Chico Ceza. That is the song that they were singing when we arrived, and I am telling you it was just so beautiful it stayed in all of our heads. The entire time in Lencois people would randomly start humming it, or singing any words that they knew. So basically this is what you hear all day and night: Mamaaaa Africaaa haha.
The people from the NGO were supposed to be coming over at 8pm and it was about 6 at this point so Kim and I took a nap, and we were awoken by the sounds of the African drums. We got up, not bothering to see what we looked like (not that it mattered since our hotel room didn’t have a mirror) and joined the rest of our group and the adults and kids from the NGO right outside of our room. Here we were taught more songs and dances from their ancestors. We had another circle of questions and comments, but this one was a lot different. This time was more of a thanks and reflections on the past few days. Also, Daniel informed us that he would be leaving us that night because it was the only time he could get a flight. After all of the comments were said, and we thought it was time for dinner, Matt stands up and says the night is not over yet. I had no idea what was going on because apparently they had been planning something during my nap. Matt told us all that since they were so kind and welcoming to us, and taught us songs from their ancestors, that we were going to teach them a little song and dance from the States: The Hokey Pokey! It was cute to teach them that, and I think they enjoyed it. It is just so funny though because the things they taught us were so meaningful, such as the songs the Brazilian slaves, their ancestors, used to communicate with, and here we come teaching the Hokey Pokey, haha.
Anyway, after that we all went down into the kitchen and had pizza that the hotel workers had made (no such thing as ordering out). After eating, and attempting to communicate with some of the kids, we all said our goodbyes to Daniel. This was incredibly sad for everyone because he was definitely a major reason why all of us had such an amazing time in Lencois. Our new Brazilian friends stayed for a little while longer, and they sang Mama Africa for us because we were all begging them to teach it to us haha.
For our 4th and final day, we all had the option to either hike to another waterfall and go swimming or just stay at the hotel and explore the town until the bus back to Salvador left at 11am. About half of us chose to do the waterfall thing. My favorite part of the day: MONKEYS! There were about 6 tiny little Marmosets hanging out in the trees by the waterfall. I was literally like a foot away from them. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love monkeys, and these ones were really cute. There were some people there feeding them, but none of us had any food to give L. It was still cute to see them though. Around 11am we met our bus at a gas station to start the 6-hour ride back to Salvador. Since Daniel was no longer with us, Kikiu and Ari accompanied us back to Salvador, and also to Carnival at night for a little bit.
The bus ride back was pretty fun. Everyone was really excited about getting to go to Carnival, finding out about their friend’s trips to Rio and the Amazon, and just about getting back to the ship. When we got back to Salvador, Dave told us that we had 10 minutes to get on the ship, put our abada on, and get back outside to the bus. Well the line to go through security was more than 10 minutes long, but as soon as I got through I sprinted to my room and got ready. Dave and Kevin were still going through security as I was disembarking, so we did have to wait for a little while.
Now about carnival:
We got to our Trio electrico at about 6:45, and it was supposed to start moving at 7, but actually didn’t start until like 7:45. So all of us were just standing around waiting, and the local teenagers standing on the side of the street kept throwing water bottles at us. One kid flicked his cigarette, and burned Andrea’s arm. So we moved farther away from the side of the street, and I was keeping my eyes open and paying attention, but apparently not good enough. Someone, I don’t know who, threw a bottle filled with urine and excrement (trying to not be vulgar for my readers) and it hit a kid that I was talking to on the chest and sprayed all over me and about 6 other people. Right then I was ready to go back to the ship. I was so tired, sick of seeing drunk people, and I smelled really really bad. But I am a trooper and I stuck it out because “it’s all part of the experience”. Finally the trio started moving and we could start dancing down the street. It was a lot of fun for a while, but then our bloco just got extremely crowded all of a sudden. I could barely move my arms and we were all smushed so tightly together I could hardly breathe. So at around 9:45 7 of us made our way out of the crowd and to a smaller street. We found 2 cabs and made our way back to the ship. As soon as I got there I went right into the shower and literally just stood there for about 20 minutes. I have never felt so dirty in my life. After the amazing shower, I went up to the 7th deck and got a Gatorade, which I drank in about 5 minutes because I was so dehydrated, and a pizza, which was amazing. I think I consumed about 2000 calories altogether the past 4 days, it was crazy. I got an amazing night’s sleep that night.
On our last day in Salvador, Eric, Jaime, Max, and I (the Philly people) walked around the market and the upper city and went shopping. We were all pretty sick of the Brazilian food so we found a cute little Italian restaurant for lunch. After we were all pretty much out of money we found our way back to the ship and were ready to get back to the high seas. So right now we are sailing in the middle of the ocean, although we did pass some small island a little bit ago. Tomorrow (Saturday) is Neptune Day, and we have no classes! Woo hoo! On Neptune Day, it is a tradition for people to shave their heads, so last night we had a “Rock the Hawk Night” Where people who are going to shave their heads tomorrow would start by having a mohawk for 2 days. Today was quite interesting seeing tons of guys and girls with mohawks. Apparently King Neptune has more in store for us tomorrow, but it is being kept pretty hush hush. I guess I will let you all know what happens with that.
I didn’t get any mail in Brazil because the post office was closed for carnival and Ash Wednesday, so it is all being forwarded to Cape Town. I also didn’t mail out any postcards because I couldn’t find any stamps, sorry.
This is an insanely long post, and it is not even close to being everything that has been going on, but I feel like there is some stuff I have to keep to myself. I have learned so much about myself just in this past week; I cannot wait to see how much I will learn by the end of this voyage. I miss you all so much, and I will post pictures within the next few days I promise!! Love you!
I have been thinking about how to start this blog since so much happened in Brazil, but I think I will just recount my days in order.
Okay, so we arrived in Salvador at about 6 am on Saturday, got our passports, and went to the Diplomatic Briefing. Throughout the briefing, which was extremely long, we were told countless times how dangerous it was going to be in Salvador, and all of these precautions we must take at all times. Basically, almost everyone (at least the people who paid attention) was completely terrified to even get off the boat. We kept hearing for the past week how at least some of us were going to be robbed, beat up, held at gunpoint or by a knife. Thankfully, I was traveling to Lencois (Len-soiz) for the majority of the time in Brazil, and that town is known for being safe. So after the briefing, the 24 of us who signed up for this indy trip to Lencois got on the bus immediately. We met our guide, Daniel, who we had all been corresponding with through e-mail since we first heard about this trip, and started our 6-hour drive. The beginning of the drive took us through Salvador, past the favelas, which were so interesting to see (I will post a picture even though it doesn’t do it justice). We stopped twice along the way- once for a bathroom/snack break at a gas station type of place and another at a restaurant for lunch. The restaurants in Brazil are funny you put whatever you want on your plate buffet-style and then bring it over to the register where they weigh it to get your price. Since I was somewhat terrified to eat the food, my meal cost only 2 reals, which is like 1 US dollar. While we were sitting in the restaurant it started STORMING outside- it got really dark and it was raining like crazy. The weather was like that for the rest of the bus ride. The rain slowed down a bit as we entered into Lencois, and as soon as we turned up the hill to our hotel, one of the girls on the trip spotted a rainbow- I guess you had to be there, but it was really cool because we were all marveling at the beauty of the city right before that. So we had like 5 minutes to drop our bags off in the hotel before we had to get back on the bus, and nobody knew where we were going. The bus dropped us off in town and we walked a few blocks in the rain to a community center. I can’t remember the name of the center even though I asked about 50 times, but it is an NGO that helps build community in these Afro-Brazilian towns. We walked in here, soaking wet, to find about 25 men, women, and kids playing instruments, singing, and dancing. Being the shy United Statesians and 1 Canadian that we are, we all just stood there watching until they started pulling us into the circle and dancing with us. After listening to them sing the most beautiful song I have ever heard (I will go into further details later), we did a dancing train to a different room. Here, we all took our shoes off and stood in a huge circle. Some of the girls at the center had scripted a welcome to us, but it was in Portuguese so we had to have Daniel and Cesa (I’m sure that is not spelled right) translate for us. They taught us a few songs and dances to go along with them. One of the songs, which is in Portuguese, translates into something about a snake losing a part of its tail (?), and the dance for that was nuts. 3 people start it out and go around the circle, and each time they get to this one part of the song they point to someone in the circle. That person has to crawl under their legs and then get behind them and start a train (or snake in this case), they go around doing this until everyone is in one of the 3 lines. Eventually, the 3 lines come together, so by that point everyone would have crawled under everyone else’s legs. It was really fun, and probably a good place to indicate the start of the relationship we all formed over those few days. For our last song of the night, we got into a large circle and a smaller circle inside of that. We all interlocked arms and were told to close our eyes and sway our bodies. All of a sudden one of the girls started singing a slow song and I am not exaggerating when I say that she had the most beautiful voices I have ever heard. After that we all sat in a circle and opened the floor to questions and comments. We had dinner at a restaurant in town and then walked back to the hotel, got our rooms situated, and went to bed.
The 24 of us were split into 2 groups, so the next morning 1 group left at 8 to go hiking up the waterfall, while my group left at 8:30 to go hiking through a cave. I am not going to write all of the details of that day because there are far too many. In a nutshell though, I have never done something so difficult in my life. I climbed through a cave in pitch dark. I don’t think I have ever been so scared to do something. We had to climb up rocks with nothing to hold on to and I slipped quite a few times. I was so proud of myself that I made it all the way through that. I don’t think I could begin to describe my feelings after we got back to the hotel. My first instinct was to just cry because of everything I was feeling. If there were some sort of scale for how much one steps out of their element, I would have been off of it. I exceeded any expectation I could have ever had for myself, so I know I exceeded expectations that others had for me.
More happened on that trip then just hiking though. We got to a place in the cave that had a body of water we were able to swim in. We were all disgustingly sweaty, so it felt amazing to swim in this freezing cold water. After we were swimming for a while, Daniel asked that we all sit in a circle in the water. After saying some prayers and Oms to mother nature, he turned off the one lantern that was lit. We could not see a thing; we were in the middle of a cave with no light. Daniel told us to keep our eyes open because we can still see the energy. This lasted for a while, but again I’m not going to get into all the details. It was an amazingly spiritual moment for everyone though. Also, when we got to the other end of the cave, some people hiked a little more to the top of the cave opening and bungee jumped off of it! I was terrified to do that of course. I got to take pictures of everyone hanging upside down though, and I got to see their faces when they got down. For a minute I thought I was going to regret not doing it because everyone was talking about how amazing it was, but I don’t. I did more these past few days than I could have ever imagined myself doing, bungee jumping would only be extra icing on the cake that I don’t need. That is only the first full day, if that is any inclination to how amazing my time in Brazil was.
After dinner and resting on Sunday night, we all got ready and took a bus to Palmeiras, which is a small town about an hour away from Lencois. In Palmeiras they have a traditional carnival unlike the ones in Salvador and Rio. I was so happy I got to experience this. It was just tons of dancing and having fun, It was also a good bonding experience for those of us in the group, Daniel, and Kikiu (another one of our tour guides). If I ever come back to Brazil for carnival, I’m staying there (I’ll describe my Salvador carnival experience shortly).
So the third day (Monday) we got to do what group 1 did on the first day. We hiked 9 miles! We hiked to the top of Smoke Falls (I forget the Portuguese name), which is the 2nd highest waterfall in the world. It was absolutely gorgeous, and it is definitely debatable which hike was harder. The first hour or so was just straight up vertical. My muscles have never hurt so much in my life. The next hour and a half was pretty much flat ground until we got to the waterfall. Hiking back down the mountain was quite the interesting experience as well. I, of course, was taking my good ol’ time because I was scared I would slip and go flying down the mountain, but there are these locals who like run down the mountain barefoot and don’t care if they knock into you. I did take one little spill and cut up my hand and legs a good bit, but nothing too serious. Everyone was so relieved when we made it back to the bus and then got back to the hotel.
Funny story: since leaving the community center that first night, you would randomly hear some of the people in our group humming or mumbling a song that they didn’t know the words to. We asked Daniel about it, and he said that the song is called Mama Africa by Chico Ceza. That is the song that they were singing when we arrived, and I am telling you it was just so beautiful it stayed in all of our heads. The entire time in Lencois people would randomly start humming it, or singing any words that they knew. So basically this is what you hear all day and night: Mamaaaa Africaaa haha.
The people from the NGO were supposed to be coming over at 8pm and it was about 6 at this point so Kim and I took a nap, and we were awoken by the sounds of the African drums. We got up, not bothering to see what we looked like (not that it mattered since our hotel room didn’t have a mirror) and joined the rest of our group and the adults and kids from the NGO right outside of our room. Here we were taught more songs and dances from their ancestors. We had another circle of questions and comments, but this one was a lot different. This time was more of a thanks and reflections on the past few days. Also, Daniel informed us that he would be leaving us that night because it was the only time he could get a flight. After all of the comments were said, and we thought it was time for dinner, Matt stands up and says the night is not over yet. I had no idea what was going on because apparently they had been planning something during my nap. Matt told us all that since they were so kind and welcoming to us, and taught us songs from their ancestors, that we were going to teach them a little song and dance from the States: The Hokey Pokey! It was cute to teach them that, and I think they enjoyed it. It is just so funny though because the things they taught us were so meaningful, such as the songs the Brazilian slaves, their ancestors, used to communicate with, and here we come teaching the Hokey Pokey, haha.
Anyway, after that we all went down into the kitchen and had pizza that the hotel workers had made (no such thing as ordering out). After eating, and attempting to communicate with some of the kids, we all said our goodbyes to Daniel. This was incredibly sad for everyone because he was definitely a major reason why all of us had such an amazing time in Lencois. Our new Brazilian friends stayed for a little while longer, and they sang Mama Africa for us because we were all begging them to teach it to us haha.
For our 4th and final day, we all had the option to either hike to another waterfall and go swimming or just stay at the hotel and explore the town until the bus back to Salvador left at 11am. About half of us chose to do the waterfall thing. My favorite part of the day: MONKEYS! There were about 6 tiny little Marmosets hanging out in the trees by the waterfall. I was literally like a foot away from them. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love monkeys, and these ones were really cute. There were some people there feeding them, but none of us had any food to give L. It was still cute to see them though. Around 11am we met our bus at a gas station to start the 6-hour ride back to Salvador. Since Daniel was no longer with us, Kikiu and Ari accompanied us back to Salvador, and also to Carnival at night for a little bit.
The bus ride back was pretty fun. Everyone was really excited about getting to go to Carnival, finding out about their friend’s trips to Rio and the Amazon, and just about getting back to the ship. When we got back to Salvador, Dave told us that we had 10 minutes to get on the ship, put our abada on, and get back outside to the bus. Well the line to go through security was more than 10 minutes long, but as soon as I got through I sprinted to my room and got ready. Dave and Kevin were still going through security as I was disembarking, so we did have to wait for a little while.
Now about carnival:
We got to our Trio electrico at about 6:45, and it was supposed to start moving at 7, but actually didn’t start until like 7:45. So all of us were just standing around waiting, and the local teenagers standing on the side of the street kept throwing water bottles at us. One kid flicked his cigarette, and burned Andrea’s arm. So we moved farther away from the side of the street, and I was keeping my eyes open and paying attention, but apparently not good enough. Someone, I don’t know who, threw a bottle filled with urine and excrement (trying to not be vulgar for my readers) and it hit a kid that I was talking to on the chest and sprayed all over me and about 6 other people. Right then I was ready to go back to the ship. I was so tired, sick of seeing drunk people, and I smelled really really bad. But I am a trooper and I stuck it out because “it’s all part of the experience”. Finally the trio started moving and we could start dancing down the street. It was a lot of fun for a while, but then our bloco just got extremely crowded all of a sudden. I could barely move my arms and we were all smushed so tightly together I could hardly breathe. So at around 9:45 7 of us made our way out of the crowd and to a smaller street. We found 2 cabs and made our way back to the ship. As soon as I got there I went right into the shower and literally just stood there for about 20 minutes. I have never felt so dirty in my life. After the amazing shower, I went up to the 7th deck and got a Gatorade, which I drank in about 5 minutes because I was so dehydrated, and a pizza, which was amazing. I think I consumed about 2000 calories altogether the past 4 days, it was crazy. I got an amazing night’s sleep that night.
On our last day in Salvador, Eric, Jaime, Max, and I (the Philly people) walked around the market and the upper city and went shopping. We were all pretty sick of the Brazilian food so we found a cute little Italian restaurant for lunch. After we were all pretty much out of money we found our way back to the ship and were ready to get back to the high seas. So right now we are sailing in the middle of the ocean, although we did pass some small island a little bit ago. Tomorrow (Saturday) is Neptune Day, and we have no classes! Woo hoo! On Neptune Day, it is a tradition for people to shave their heads, so last night we had a “Rock the Hawk Night” Where people who are going to shave their heads tomorrow would start by having a mohawk for 2 days. Today was quite interesting seeing tons of guys and girls with mohawks. Apparently King Neptune has more in store for us tomorrow, but it is being kept pretty hush hush. I guess I will let you all know what happens with that.
I didn’t get any mail in Brazil because the post office was closed for carnival and Ash Wednesday, so it is all being forwarded to Cape Town. I also didn’t mail out any postcards because I couldn’t find any stamps, sorry.
This is an insanely long post, and it is not even close to being everything that has been going on, but I feel like there is some stuff I have to keep to myself. I have learned so much about myself just in this past week; I cannot wait to see how much I will learn by the end of this voyage. I miss you all so much, and I will post pictures within the next few days I promise!! Love you!
I Love Brasil!
Bom dia! We left Salvador, Brazil 2 nights ago, and we are now on our way to Cape Town, South Africa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have been thinking about how to start this blog since so much happened in Brazil, but I think I will just recount my days in order.
Okay, so we arrived in Salvador at about 6 am on Saturday, got our passports, and went to the Diplomatic Briefing. Throughout the briefing, which was extremely long, we were told countless times how dangerous it was going to be in Salvador, and all of these precautions we must take at all times. Basically, almost everyone (at least the people who paid attention) was completely terrified to even get off the boat. We kept hearing for the past week how at least some of us were going to be robbed, beat up, held at gunpoint or by a knife. Thankfully, I was traveling to Lencois (Len-soiz) for the majority of the time in Brazil, and that town is known for being safe. So after the briefing, the 24 of us who signed up for this indy trip to Lencois got on the bus immediately. We met our guide, Daniel, who we had all been corresponding with through e-mail since we first heard about this trip, and started our 6-hour drive. The beginning of the drive took us through Salvador, past the favelas, which were so interesting to see (I will post a picture even though it doesn’t do it justice). We stopped twice along the way- once for a bathroom/snack break at a gas station type of place and another at a restaurant for lunch. The restaurants in Brazil are funny you put whatever you want on your plate buffet-style and then bring it over to the register where they weigh it to get your price. Since I was somewhat terrified to eat the food, my meal cost only 2 reals, which is like 1 US dollar. While we were sitting in the restaurant it started STORMING outside- it got really dark and it was raining like crazy. The weather was like that for the rest of the bus ride. The rain slowed down a bit as we entered into Lencois, and as soon as we turned up the hill to our hotel, one of the girls on the trip spotted a rainbow- I guess you had to be there, but it was really cool because we were all marveling at the beauty of the city right before that. So we had like 5 minutes to drop our bags off in the hotel before we had to get back on the bus, and nobody knew where we were going. The bus dropped us off in town and we walked a few blocks in the rain to a community center. I can’t remember the name of the center even though I asked about 50 times, but it is an NGO that helps build community in these Afro-Brazilian towns. We walked in here, soaking wet, to find about 25 men, women, and kids playing instruments, singing, and dancing. Being the shy United Statesians and 1 Canadian that we are, we all just stood there watching until they started pulling us into the circle and dancing with us. After listening to them sing the most beautiful song I have ever heard (I will go into further details later), we did a dancing train to a different room. Here, we all took our shoes off and stood in a huge circle. Some of the girls at the center had scripted a welcome to us, but it was in Portuguese so we had to have Daniel and Cesa (I’m sure that is not spelled right) translate for us. They taught us a few songs and dances to go along with them. One of the songs, which is in Portuguese, translates into something about a snake losing a part of its tail (?), and the dance for that was nuts. 3 people start it out and go around the circle, and each time they get to this one part of the song they point to someone in the circle. That person has to crawl under their legs and then get behind them and start a train (or snake in this case), they go around doing this until everyone is in one of the 3 lines. Eventually, the 3 lines come together, so by that point everyone would have crawled under everyone else’s legs. It was really fun, and probably a good place to indicate the start of the relationship we all formed over those few days. For our last song of the night, we got into a large circle and a smaller circle inside of that. We all interlocked arms and were told to close our eyes and sway our bodies. All of a sudden one of the girls started singing a slow song and I am not exaggerating when I say that she had the most beautiful voices I have ever heard. After that we all sat in a circle and opened the floor to questions and comments. We had dinner at a restaurant in town and then walked back to the hotel, got our rooms situated, and went to bed.
The 24 of us were split into 2 groups, so the next morning 1 group left at 8 to go hiking up the waterfall, while my group left at 8:30 to go hiking through a cave. I am not going to write all of the details of that day because there are far too many. In a nutshell though, I have never done something so difficult in my life. I climbed through a cave in pitch dark. I don’t think I have ever been so scared to do something. We had to climb up rocks with nothing to hold on to and I slipped quite a few times. I was so proud of myself that I made it all the way through that. I don’t think I could begin to describe my feelings after we got back to the hotel. My first instinct was to just cry because of everything I was feeling. If there were some sort of scale for how much one steps out of their element, I would have been off of it. I exceeded any expectation I could have ever had for myself, so I know I exceeded expectations that others had for me.
More happened on that trip then just hiking though. We got to a place in the cave that had a body of water we were able to swim in. We were all disgustingly sweaty, so it felt amazing to swim in this freezing cold water. After we were swimming for a while, Daniel asked that we all sit in a circle in the water. After saying some prayers and Oms to mother nature, he turned off the one lantern that was lit. We could not see a thing; we were in the middle of a cave with no light. Daniel told us to keep our eyes open because we can still see the energy. This lasted for a while, but again I’m not going to get into all the details. It was an amazingly spiritual moment for everyone though. Also, when we got to the other end of the cave, some people hiked a little more to the top of the cave opening and bungee jumped off of it! I was terrified to do that of course. I got to take pictures of everyone hanging upside down though, and I got to see their faces when they got down. For a minute I thought I was going to regret not doing it because everyone was talking about how amazing it was, but I don’t. I did more these past few days than I could have ever imagined myself doing, bungee jumping would only be extra icing on the cake that I don’t need. That is only the first full day, if that is any inclination to how amazing my time in Brazil was.
After dinner and resting on Sunday night, we all got ready and took a bus to Palmeiras, which is a small town about an hour away from Lencois. In Palmeiras they have a traditional carnival unlike the ones in Salvador and Rio. I was so happy I got to experience this. It was just tons of dancing and having fun, It was also a good bonding experience for those of us in the group, Daniel, and Kikiu (another one of our tour guides). If I ever come back to Brazil for carnival, I’m staying there (I’ll describe my Salvador carnival experience shortly).
So the third day (Monday) we got to do what group 1 did on the first day. We hiked 9 miles! We hiked to the top of Smoke Falls (I forget the Portuguese name), which is the 2nd highest waterfall in the world. It was absolutely gorgeous, and it is definitely debatable which hike was harder. The first hour or so was just straight up vertical. My muscles have never hurt so much in my life. The next hour and a half was pretty much flat ground until we got to the waterfall. Hiking back down the mountain was quite the interesting experience as well. I, of course, was taking my good ol’ time because I was scared I would slip and go flying down the mountain, but there are these locals who like run down the mountain barefoot and don’t care if they knock into you. I did take one little spill and cut up my hand and legs a good bit, but nothing too serious. Everyone was so relieved when we made it back to the bus and then got back to the hotel.
Funny story: since leaving the community center that first night, you would randomly hear some of the people in our group humming or mumbling a song that they didn’t know the words to. We asked Daniel about it, and he said that the song is called Mama Africa by Chico Ceza. That is the song that they were singing when we arrived, and I am telling you it was just so beautiful it stayed in all of our heads. The entire time in Lencois people would randomly start humming it, or singing any words that they knew. So basically this is what you hear all day and night: Mamaaaa Africaaa haha.
The people from the NGO were supposed to be coming over at 8pm and it was about 6 at this point so Kim and I took a nap, and we were awoken by the sounds of the African drums. We got up, not bothering to see what we looked like (not that it mattered since our hotel room didn’t have a mirror) and joined the rest of our group and the adults and kids from the NGO right outside of our room. Here we were taught more songs and dances from their ancestors. We had another circle of questions and comments, but this one was a lot different. This time was more of a thanks and reflections on the past few days. Also, Daniel informed us that he would be leaving us that night because it was the only time he could get a flight. After all of the comments were said, and we thought it was time for dinner, Matt stands up and says the night is not over yet. I had no idea what was going on because apparently they had been planning something during my nap. Matt told us all that since they were so kind and welcoming to us, and taught us songs from their ancestors, that we were going to teach them a little song and dance from the States: The Hokey Pokey! It was cute to teach them that, and I think they enjoyed it. It is just so funny though because the things they taught us were so meaningful, such as the songs the Brazilian slaves, their ancestors, used to communicate with, and here we come teaching the Hokey Pokey, haha.
Anyway, after that we all went down into the kitchen and had pizza that the hotel workers had made (no such thing as ordering out). After eating, and attempting to communicate with some of the kids, we all said our goodbyes to Daniel. This was incredibly sad for everyone because he was definitely a major reason why all of us had such an amazing time in Lencois. Our new Brazilian friends stayed for a little while longer, and they sang Mama Africa for us because we were all begging them to teach it to us haha.
For our 4th and final day, we all had the option to either hike to another waterfall and go swimming or just stay at the hotel and explore the town until the bus back to Salvador left at 11am. About half of us chose to do the waterfall thing. My favorite part of the day: MONKEYS! There were about 6 tiny little Marmosets hanging out in the trees by the waterfall. I was literally like a foot away from them. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love monkeys, and these ones were really cute. There were some people there feeding them, but none of us had any food to give L. It was still cute to see them though. Around 11am we met our bus at a gas station to start the 6-hour ride back to Salvador. Since Daniel was no longer with us, Kikiu and Ari accompanied us back to Salvador, and also to Carnival at night for a little bit.
The bus ride back was pretty fun. Everyone was really excited about getting to go to Carnival, finding out about their friend’s trips to Rio and the Amazon, and just about getting back to the ship. When we got back to Salvador, Dave told us that we had 10 minutes to get on the ship, put our abada on, and get back outside to the bus. Well the line to go through security was more than 10 minutes long, but as soon as I got through I sprinted to my room and got ready. Dave and Kevin were still going through security as I was disembarking, so we did have to wait for a little while.
Now about carnival:
We got to our Trio electrico at about 6:45, and it was supposed to start moving at 7, but actually didn’t start until like 7:45. So all of us were just standing around waiting, and the local teenagers standing on the side of the street kept throwing water bottles at us. One kid flicked his cigarette, and burned Andrea’s arm. So we moved farther away from the side of the street, and I was keeping my eyes open and paying attention, but apparently not good enough. Someone, I don’t know who, threw a bottle filled with urine and excrement (trying to not be vulgar for my readers) and it hit a kid that I was talking to on the chest and sprayed all over me and about 6 other people. Right then I was ready to go back to the ship. I was so tired, sick of seeing drunk people, and I smelled really really bad. But I am a trooper and I stuck it out because “it’s all part of the experience”. Finally the trio started moving and we could start dancing down the street. It was a lot of fun for a while, but then our bloco just got extremely crowded all of a sudden. I could barely move my arms and we were all smushed so tightly together I could hardly breathe. So at around 9:45 7 of us made our way out of the crowd and to a smaller street. We found 2 cabs and made our way back to the ship. As soon as I got there I went right into the shower and literally just stood there for about 20 minutes. I have never felt so dirty in my life. After the amazing shower, I went up to the 7th deck and got a Gatorade, which I drank in about 5 minutes because I was so dehydrated, and a pizza, which was amazing. I think I consumed about 2000 calories altogether the past 4 days, it was crazy. I got an amazing night’s sleep that night.
On our last day in Salvador, Eric, Jaime, Max, and I (the Philly people) walked around the market and the upper city and went shopping. We were all pretty sick of the Brazilian food so we found a cute little Italian restaurant for lunch. After we were all pretty much out of money we found our way back to the ship and were ready to get back to the high seas. So right now we are sailing in the middle of the ocean, although we did pass some small island a little bit ago. Tomorrow (Saturday) is Neptune Day, and we have no classes! Woo hoo! On Neptune Day, it is a tradition for people to shave their heads, so last night we had a “Rock the Hawk Night” Where people who are going to shave their heads tomorrow would start by having a mohawk for 2 days. Today was quite interesting seeing tons of guys and girls with mohawks. Apparently King Neptune has more in store for us tomorrow, but it is being kept pretty hush hush. I guess I will let you all know what happens with that.
I didn’t get any mail in Brazil because the post office was closed for carnival and Ash Wednesday, so it is all being forwarded to Cape Town. I also didn’t mail out any postcards because I couldn’t find any stamps, sorry.
This is an insanely long post, and it is not even close to being everything that has been going on, but I feel like there is some stuff I have to keep to myself. I have learned so much about myself just in this past week; I cannot wait to see how much I will learn by the end of this voyage. I miss you all so much, and I will post pictures within the next few days I promise!! Love you!
I have been thinking about how to start this blog since so much happened in Brazil, but I think I will just recount my days in order.
Okay, so we arrived in Salvador at about 6 am on Saturday, got our passports, and went to the Diplomatic Briefing. Throughout the briefing, which was extremely long, we were told countless times how dangerous it was going to be in Salvador, and all of these precautions we must take at all times. Basically, almost everyone (at least the people who paid attention) was completely terrified to even get off the boat. We kept hearing for the past week how at least some of us were going to be robbed, beat up, held at gunpoint or by a knife. Thankfully, I was traveling to Lencois (Len-soiz) for the majority of the time in Brazil, and that town is known for being safe. So after the briefing, the 24 of us who signed up for this indy trip to Lencois got on the bus immediately. We met our guide, Daniel, who we had all been corresponding with through e-mail since we first heard about this trip, and started our 6-hour drive. The beginning of the drive took us through Salvador, past the favelas, which were so interesting to see (I will post a picture even though it doesn’t do it justice). We stopped twice along the way- once for a bathroom/snack break at a gas station type of place and another at a restaurant for lunch. The restaurants in Brazil are funny you put whatever you want on your plate buffet-style and then bring it over to the register where they weigh it to get your price. Since I was somewhat terrified to eat the food, my meal cost only 2 reals, which is like 1 US dollar. While we were sitting in the restaurant it started STORMING outside- it got really dark and it was raining like crazy. The weather was like that for the rest of the bus ride. The rain slowed down a bit as we entered into Lencois, and as soon as we turned up the hill to our hotel, one of the girls on the trip spotted a rainbow- I guess you had to be there, but it was really cool because we were all marveling at the beauty of the city right before that. So we had like 5 minutes to drop our bags off in the hotel before we had to get back on the bus, and nobody knew where we were going. The bus dropped us off in town and we walked a few blocks in the rain to a community center. I can’t remember the name of the center even though I asked about 50 times, but it is an NGO that helps build community in these Afro-Brazilian towns. We walked in here, soaking wet, to find about 25 men, women, and kids playing instruments, singing, and dancing. Being the shy United Statesians and 1 Canadian that we are, we all just stood there watching until they started pulling us into the circle and dancing with us. After listening to them sing the most beautiful song I have ever heard (I will go into further details later), we did a dancing train to a different room. Here, we all took our shoes off and stood in a huge circle. Some of the girls at the center had scripted a welcome to us, but it was in Portuguese so we had to have Daniel and Cesa (I’m sure that is not spelled right) translate for us. They taught us a few songs and dances to go along with them. One of the songs, which is in Portuguese, translates into something about a snake losing a part of its tail (?), and the dance for that was nuts. 3 people start it out and go around the circle, and each time they get to this one part of the song they point to someone in the circle. That person has to crawl under their legs and then get behind them and start a train (or snake in this case), they go around doing this until everyone is in one of the 3 lines. Eventually, the 3 lines come together, so by that point everyone would have crawled under everyone else’s legs. It was really fun, and probably a good place to indicate the start of the relationship we all formed over those few days. For our last song of the night, we got into a large circle and a smaller circle inside of that. We all interlocked arms and were told to close our eyes and sway our bodies. All of a sudden one of the girls started singing a slow song and I am not exaggerating when I say that she had the most beautiful voices I have ever heard. After that we all sat in a circle and opened the floor to questions and comments. We had dinner at a restaurant in town and then walked back to the hotel, got our rooms situated, and went to bed.
The 24 of us were split into 2 groups, so the next morning 1 group left at 8 to go hiking up the waterfall, while my group left at 8:30 to go hiking through a cave. I am not going to write all of the details of that day because there are far too many. In a nutshell though, I have never done something so difficult in my life. I climbed through a cave in pitch dark. I don’t think I have ever been so scared to do something. We had to climb up rocks with nothing to hold on to and I slipped quite a few times. I was so proud of myself that I made it all the way through that. I don’t think I could begin to describe my feelings after we got back to the hotel. My first instinct was to just cry because of everything I was feeling. If there were some sort of scale for how much one steps out of their element, I would have been off of it. I exceeded any expectation I could have ever had for myself, so I know I exceeded expectations that others had for me.
More happened on that trip then just hiking though. We got to a place in the cave that had a body of water we were able to swim in. We were all disgustingly sweaty, so it felt amazing to swim in this freezing cold water. After we were swimming for a while, Daniel asked that we all sit in a circle in the water. After saying some prayers and Oms to mother nature, he turned off the one lantern that was lit. We could not see a thing; we were in the middle of a cave with no light. Daniel told us to keep our eyes open because we can still see the energy. This lasted for a while, but again I’m not going to get into all the details. It was an amazingly spiritual moment for everyone though. Also, when we got to the other end of the cave, some people hiked a little more to the top of the cave opening and bungee jumped off of it! I was terrified to do that of course. I got to take pictures of everyone hanging upside down though, and I got to see their faces when they got down. For a minute I thought I was going to regret not doing it because everyone was talking about how amazing it was, but I don’t. I did more these past few days than I could have ever imagined myself doing, bungee jumping would only be extra icing on the cake that I don’t need. That is only the first full day, if that is any inclination to how amazing my time in Brazil was.
After dinner and resting on Sunday night, we all got ready and took a bus to Palmeiras, which is a small town about an hour away from Lencois. In Palmeiras they have a traditional carnival unlike the ones in Salvador and Rio. I was so happy I got to experience this. It was just tons of dancing and having fun, It was also a good bonding experience for those of us in the group, Daniel, and Kikiu (another one of our tour guides). If I ever come back to Brazil for carnival, I’m staying there (I’ll describe my Salvador carnival experience shortly).
So the third day (Monday) we got to do what group 1 did on the first day. We hiked 9 miles! We hiked to the top of Smoke Falls (I forget the Portuguese name), which is the 2nd highest waterfall in the world. It was absolutely gorgeous, and it is definitely debatable which hike was harder. The first hour or so was just straight up vertical. My muscles have never hurt so much in my life. The next hour and a half was pretty much flat ground until we got to the waterfall. Hiking back down the mountain was quite the interesting experience as well. I, of course, was taking my good ol’ time because I was scared I would slip and go flying down the mountain, but there are these locals who like run down the mountain barefoot and don’t care if they knock into you. I did take one little spill and cut up my hand and legs a good bit, but nothing too serious. Everyone was so relieved when we made it back to the bus and then got back to the hotel.
Funny story: since leaving the community center that first night, you would randomly hear some of the people in our group humming or mumbling a song that they didn’t know the words to. We asked Daniel about it, and he said that the song is called Mama Africa by Chico Ceza. That is the song that they were singing when we arrived, and I am telling you it was just so beautiful it stayed in all of our heads. The entire time in Lencois people would randomly start humming it, or singing any words that they knew. So basically this is what you hear all day and night: Mamaaaa Africaaa haha.
The people from the NGO were supposed to be coming over at 8pm and it was about 6 at this point so Kim and I took a nap, and we were awoken by the sounds of the African drums. We got up, not bothering to see what we looked like (not that it mattered since our hotel room didn’t have a mirror) and joined the rest of our group and the adults and kids from the NGO right outside of our room. Here we were taught more songs and dances from their ancestors. We had another circle of questions and comments, but this one was a lot different. This time was more of a thanks and reflections on the past few days. Also, Daniel informed us that he would be leaving us that night because it was the only time he could get a flight. After all of the comments were said, and we thought it was time for dinner, Matt stands up and says the night is not over yet. I had no idea what was going on because apparently they had been planning something during my nap. Matt told us all that since they were so kind and welcoming to us, and taught us songs from their ancestors, that we were going to teach them a little song and dance from the States: The Hokey Pokey! It was cute to teach them that, and I think they enjoyed it. It is just so funny though because the things they taught us were so meaningful, such as the songs the Brazilian slaves, their ancestors, used to communicate with, and here we come teaching the Hokey Pokey, haha.
Anyway, after that we all went down into the kitchen and had pizza that the hotel workers had made (no such thing as ordering out). After eating, and attempting to communicate with some of the kids, we all said our goodbyes to Daniel. This was incredibly sad for everyone because he was definitely a major reason why all of us had such an amazing time in Lencois. Our new Brazilian friends stayed for a little while longer, and they sang Mama Africa for us because we were all begging them to teach it to us haha.
For our 4th and final day, we all had the option to either hike to another waterfall and go swimming or just stay at the hotel and explore the town until the bus back to Salvador left at 11am. About half of us chose to do the waterfall thing. My favorite part of the day: MONKEYS! There were about 6 tiny little Marmosets hanging out in the trees by the waterfall. I was literally like a foot away from them. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love monkeys, and these ones were really cute. There were some people there feeding them, but none of us had any food to give L. It was still cute to see them though. Around 11am we met our bus at a gas station to start the 6-hour ride back to Salvador. Since Daniel was no longer with us, Kikiu and Ari accompanied us back to Salvador, and also to Carnival at night for a little bit.
The bus ride back was pretty fun. Everyone was really excited about getting to go to Carnival, finding out about their friend’s trips to Rio and the Amazon, and just about getting back to the ship. When we got back to Salvador, Dave told us that we had 10 minutes to get on the ship, put our abada on, and get back outside to the bus. Well the line to go through security was more than 10 minutes long, but as soon as I got through I sprinted to my room and got ready. Dave and Kevin were still going through security as I was disembarking, so we did have to wait for a little while.
Now about carnival:
We got to our Trio electrico at about 6:45, and it was supposed to start moving at 7, but actually didn’t start until like 7:45. So all of us were just standing around waiting, and the local teenagers standing on the side of the street kept throwing water bottles at us. One kid flicked his cigarette, and burned Andrea’s arm. So we moved farther away from the side of the street, and I was keeping my eyes open and paying attention, but apparently not good enough. Someone, I don’t know who, threw a bottle filled with urine and excrement (trying to not be vulgar for my readers) and it hit a kid that I was talking to on the chest and sprayed all over me and about 6 other people. Right then I was ready to go back to the ship. I was so tired, sick of seeing drunk people, and I smelled really really bad. But I am a trooper and I stuck it out because “it’s all part of the experience”. Finally the trio started moving and we could start dancing down the street. It was a lot of fun for a while, but then our bloco just got extremely crowded all of a sudden. I could barely move my arms and we were all smushed so tightly together I could hardly breathe. So at around 9:45 7 of us made our way out of the crowd and to a smaller street. We found 2 cabs and made our way back to the ship. As soon as I got there I went right into the shower and literally just stood there for about 20 minutes. I have never felt so dirty in my life. After the amazing shower, I went up to the 7th deck and got a Gatorade, which I drank in about 5 minutes because I was so dehydrated, and a pizza, which was amazing. I think I consumed about 2000 calories altogether the past 4 days, it was crazy. I got an amazing night’s sleep that night.
On our last day in Salvador, Eric, Jaime, Max, and I (the Philly people) walked around the market and the upper city and went shopping. We were all pretty sick of the Brazilian food so we found a cute little Italian restaurant for lunch. After we were all pretty much out of money we found our way back to the ship and were ready to get back to the high seas. So right now we are sailing in the middle of the ocean, although we did pass some small island a little bit ago. Tomorrow (Saturday) is Neptune Day, and we have no classes! Woo hoo! On Neptune Day, it is a tradition for people to shave their heads, so last night we had a “Rock the Hawk Night” Where people who are going to shave their heads tomorrow would start by having a mohawk for 2 days. Today was quite interesting seeing tons of guys and girls with mohawks. Apparently King Neptune has more in store for us tomorrow, but it is being kept pretty hush hush. I guess I will let you all know what happens with that.
I didn’t get any mail in Brazil because the post office was closed for carnival and Ash Wednesday, so it is all being forwarded to Cape Town. I also didn’t mail out any postcards because I couldn’t find any stamps, sorry.
This is an insanely long post, and it is not even close to being everything that has been going on, but I feel like there is some stuff I have to keep to myself. I have learned so much about myself just in this past week; I cannot wait to see how much I will learn by the end of this voyage. I miss you all so much, and I will post pictures within the next few days I promise!! Love you!
Monday, February 12, 2007
Im in the middle of the ocean...
Hola! We are en route to Salvador, Brazil, and according to the map channel we are in the middle of the ocean at a speed of 19 knots. Earlier today I was sitting on my bed reading for one of my classes, and I looked out my window to see that we were 3 miles off the coast of Barbados. From what I could see it is an absolutely beautiful island. We also sailed past Martinique and St. Lucia earlier this morning. Tonight is our first Pub Night on the ship so the 7th deck is busy with people all dressed up and drinking. I decided that there are plenty of opportunities to party, and I don’t feel like wasting my money, so that is why I am sitting on my computer writing this instead! J.
Puerto Rico was amazing. I got to speak Spanish and amazing. I got to speak Spanish, and it was just a great place to start our journey. I don’t think I have ever been so excited in my life to wake up and see that my cell phone had service. Not only that, but I had 3 texts! Haha. On our first day in Puerto Rico Kim, Meredith, and I disembarked around 11am and walked to Old San Juan. We did some shopping and walking around the city for a while. It was so hot, so we went into this little restaurant and got frozen drinks. We met up with Jordi and Dannie and walked around some more. After we got back to the ship we got ready for the Welcome Reception, which took place at a few local universities. We all went to the Universidad de Puerto Rico and met some students there. Everyone had a pretty good time, but I was a little homesick so I snuck away to talk on my cell phone- I know it is bad. After the Welcome Reception everyone wanted to go out but I was feeling “land sick” so I decided to stay in and get some sleep. The next day Jordi, Ashley, and I took the city bus (which was interesting) to Kmart to stock up on some stuff, and then just took a taxi back. I got back to the ship in time to meet up with a group of students who were kayaking on the Bioluminescent Bay indy, so I hopped on that trip. We rode in a squished van for about an hour and a half to the bay and then paired up and got a little lesson on kayaking. Max and I were partners, and I must admit I am an excellent kayaker. So it is pitch dark out and we are kayaking in a single file line through mangroves (crashing into them) for about a mile. Then we get to this huge open lagoon surrounded by mountains. The leaders tied all of our kayaks together and gave us a little science lesson about bioluminescence and the dynoflagellates that cause it. Then it was time to go swimming! It is extremely hard to describe swimming in this bay. I describe it as something I have only seen in the movie Fern Gully with the different colors that come about when they touch the trees. My roommate Ashley described it as looking like fairy dust. Basically, when you move in the water it lights up a gold color, it is really amazing. So we were allowed to swim around for a while, and then we kayaked the mile back to the shore, and took our bus ride back. Later that night Dannie, Jordi, Kevin, Andrea, and I went to Old San Juan and found a little place to eat, drink, and dance. I didn’t want to party too much because I had to meet up with the SAS group at 8am the next morning for the Rio Camuy Caves.
The caves were crazy! First of all it was a 2-hour BUMPY bus ride to get there- no fun. But I fell asleep for a little bit, so that was good. Apparently everyone on the island decided to go to the caves that day because we waited for at least 3 hours before we even arrived at the opening of the cave. I walked around the caves with Eric and Tim, and took A LOT of pictures. I know I keep saying I will post pictures, and I haven’t been doing that, but I will. So anyway the caves are extraordinary. They were so beautiful; it was hard to make myself believe that it was a natural place. So we walked around the caves for a while, but not as long as had anticipated, and then had a picnic lunch before getting back on the bus for the 2-hour ride back. I slept the entire way back it was great. We got back to the ship at about 530pm and on-ship time was 900pm so Eric and I decided to look for an Internet café. We were told that McDonalds had free Internet so we walked there, but we couldn’t get on, so we went back to the ship, met up with Jaime and Terron, and took a cab to Starbucks. I didn’t have much battery on my computer so I just checked my email, Facebook, and my blog comments quickly. Thank you for reading and commenting by the way everyone!! So after that we went to this cute restaurant and ate dinner. We got back to the ship around 820 and I was freaking out because I thought there would be a long line and we would end up getting dock time, but there was no one in line and it was fine. It was really sad to leave Puerto Rico for many reasons. For me at least there was a slight comfort about being in Puerto Rico as opposed to other places on our itinerary. I speak Spanish- I won’t be able to speak the language anywhere else. My cell phone worked- I’m going to have a hard time communicating with home for now on. Also there was just something about it being a US Territory that made me feel good. So I was just sitting on the 7th deck talking on my cell phone, when apparently we left the dock early. I started freaking out because I hadn’t called my family to say goodbye or anything. So I quickly called up whomever I could before my service cut out. I was really upset to be leaving, and I was not expecting that at all. But now we are at sea for 7 days on our way to Brazil (yes, with class everyday :p). Ship life is very interesting. I don’t know if it is because of the situation we are all in, but everyone has gotten so close so fast. We have only been here for a week, but I feel like I have known these people for a lot longer, and I have been hearing the same thing from other people. Okay, I actually stopped here last night and now I am trying to continue where I was. Last night was the roughest we have had at sea, and it is not much better now. Until now when we looked out into the ocean it was relatively calm, but it is so wavy now and the ship is rocking like crazy. We had the activities fair the other night where we could learn about and sign up for different clubs. I signed up for Ambassadors Club, Students of Service, Extended Family, and Diversity Committee. The diversity committee should be really interesting considering the lack of diversity on the ship. During orientation the dean spoke about diversity on the ship (at least one person from each state, 65% female 35% male, 1 person from Switzerland, 1 from Puerto Rico, and a handful from Canada), but I don’t think I would consider that diverse. Oh well I guess it just makes me more excited about meeting people in the countries we are visiting. People have been asking me about the food on the boat—its good, but it is the same thing everyday. There is always salad, fish, chicken/beef, potatoes, pasta, and veggies. There is also always PB & J and bread. We had our first Taco Day for lunch on Saturday- it was excellent haha. The one thing that really bothers me about the dining halls is the hours. I don’t start class until 9:20 everyday, but breakfast is over at 8:30, and I mean 8:30 on the dot. They take everything away, and don’t care if you just got there. It’s really annoying, but I get up anyway J. I did get my letters from Bay Hey and Mom and Dad in Puerto Rico and I must admit I was so excited; I have them magnetized to my wall. My roommate got like 4 letters L lol but its ok. I can’t wait to get Brazil and go on my Lencois trip- it is going to be great! Hopefully I will be able to post on here from an Internet café on my last day in Brazil or something. I miss everyone a lot, please send me emails about what is going on in your lives. Love you!!
Puerto Rico was amazing. I got to speak Spanish and amazing. I got to speak Spanish, and it was just a great place to start our journey. I don’t think I have ever been so excited in my life to wake up and see that my cell phone had service. Not only that, but I had 3 texts! Haha. On our first day in Puerto Rico Kim, Meredith, and I disembarked around 11am and walked to Old San Juan. We did some shopping and walking around the city for a while. It was so hot, so we went into this little restaurant and got frozen drinks. We met up with Jordi and Dannie and walked around some more. After we got back to the ship we got ready for the Welcome Reception, which took place at a few local universities. We all went to the Universidad de Puerto Rico and met some students there. Everyone had a pretty good time, but I was a little homesick so I snuck away to talk on my cell phone- I know it is bad. After the Welcome Reception everyone wanted to go out but I was feeling “land sick” so I decided to stay in and get some sleep. The next day Jordi, Ashley, and I took the city bus (which was interesting) to Kmart to stock up on some stuff, and then just took a taxi back. I got back to the ship in time to meet up with a group of students who were kayaking on the Bioluminescent Bay indy, so I hopped on that trip. We rode in a squished van for about an hour and a half to the bay and then paired up and got a little lesson on kayaking. Max and I were partners, and I must admit I am an excellent kayaker. So it is pitch dark out and we are kayaking in a single file line through mangroves (crashing into them) for about a mile. Then we get to this huge open lagoon surrounded by mountains. The leaders tied all of our kayaks together and gave us a little science lesson about bioluminescence and the dynoflagellates that cause it. Then it was time to go swimming! It is extremely hard to describe swimming in this bay. I describe it as something I have only seen in the movie Fern Gully with the different colors that come about when they touch the trees. My roommate Ashley described it as looking like fairy dust. Basically, when you move in the water it lights up a gold color, it is really amazing. So we were allowed to swim around for a while, and then we kayaked the mile back to the shore, and took our bus ride back. Later that night Dannie, Jordi, Kevin, Andrea, and I went to Old San Juan and found a little place to eat, drink, and dance. I didn’t want to party too much because I had to meet up with the SAS group at 8am the next morning for the Rio Camuy Caves.
The caves were crazy! First of all it was a 2-hour BUMPY bus ride to get there- no fun. But I fell asleep for a little bit, so that was good. Apparently everyone on the island decided to go to the caves that day because we waited for at least 3 hours before we even arrived at the opening of the cave. I walked around the caves with Eric and Tim, and took A LOT of pictures. I know I keep saying I will post pictures, and I haven’t been doing that, but I will. So anyway the caves are extraordinary. They were so beautiful; it was hard to make myself believe that it was a natural place. So we walked around the caves for a while, but not as long as had anticipated, and then had a picnic lunch before getting back on the bus for the 2-hour ride back. I slept the entire way back it was great. We got back to the ship at about 530pm and on-ship time was 900pm so Eric and I decided to look for an Internet café. We were told that McDonalds had free Internet so we walked there, but we couldn’t get on, so we went back to the ship, met up with Jaime and Terron, and took a cab to Starbucks. I didn’t have much battery on my computer so I just checked my email, Facebook, and my blog comments quickly. Thank you for reading and commenting by the way everyone!! So after that we went to this cute restaurant and ate dinner. We got back to the ship around 820 and I was freaking out because I thought there would be a long line and we would end up getting dock time, but there was no one in line and it was fine. It was really sad to leave Puerto Rico for many reasons. For me at least there was a slight comfort about being in Puerto Rico as opposed to other places on our itinerary. I speak Spanish- I won’t be able to speak the language anywhere else. My cell phone worked- I’m going to have a hard time communicating with home for now on. Also there was just something about it being a US Territory that made me feel good. So I was just sitting on the 7th deck talking on my cell phone, when apparently we left the dock early. I started freaking out because I hadn’t called my family to say goodbye or anything. So I quickly called up whomever I could before my service cut out. I was really upset to be leaving, and I was not expecting that at all. But now we are at sea for 7 days on our way to Brazil (yes, with class everyday :p). Ship life is very interesting. I don’t know if it is because of the situation we are all in, but everyone has gotten so close so fast. We have only been here for a week, but I feel like I have known these people for a lot longer, and I have been hearing the same thing from other people. Okay, I actually stopped here last night and now I am trying to continue where I was. Last night was the roughest we have had at sea, and it is not much better now. Until now when we looked out into the ocean it was relatively calm, but it is so wavy now and the ship is rocking like crazy. We had the activities fair the other night where we could learn about and sign up for different clubs. I signed up for Ambassadors Club, Students of Service, Extended Family, and Diversity Committee. The diversity committee should be really interesting considering the lack of diversity on the ship. During orientation the dean spoke about diversity on the ship (at least one person from each state, 65% female 35% male, 1 person from Switzerland, 1 from Puerto Rico, and a handful from Canada), but I don’t think I would consider that diverse. Oh well I guess it just makes me more excited about meeting people in the countries we are visiting. People have been asking me about the food on the boat—its good, but it is the same thing everyday. There is always salad, fish, chicken/beef, potatoes, pasta, and veggies. There is also always PB & J and bread. We had our first Taco Day for lunch on Saturday- it was excellent haha. The one thing that really bothers me about the dining halls is the hours. I don’t start class until 9:20 everyday, but breakfast is over at 8:30, and I mean 8:30 on the dot. They take everything away, and don’t care if you just got there. It’s really annoying, but I get up anyway J. I did get my letters from Bay Hey and Mom and Dad in Puerto Rico and I must admit I was so excited; I have them magnetized to my wall. My roommate got like 4 letters L lol but its ok. I can’t wait to get Brazil and go on my Lencois trip- it is going to be great! Hopefully I will be able to post on here from an Internet café on my last day in Brazil or something. I miss everyone a lot, please send me emails about what is going on in your lives. Love you!!
Monday, February 05, 2007
En route to Puerto Rico
Hello everyone!! Right now we are almost half way to Puerto Rico!! We have been doing all kinds of orientation things today and last night; nothing too crazy—just mainly talking about safety on the boat. We also had our first Global Studies class. It was just an introduction to the class, and we got our syllabus and discussed the theme. The Global Studies theme for this semester is Peace and Conflict in the Developing World.
It seems like it will be interesting. I have been meeting a lot of people, and I even met a few from UM that I didn’t know where coming- of course I’m wearing my UM gear all the time J.
Yesterday we had a lifeboat drill before we departed, and we have to wear long pants, long sleeves, sneakers, a hat, and our lifejackets- it was SO hot! We stood there for like 45 minutes waiting for the captain to go around and make sure everyone was there and prepared. That was horrible, I hope we don’t have any more of those. I took a picture with my roommate in our lifejackets so I will post that later on. My roommate’s name is Ashley and she is from Omaha, Nebraska, and goes to the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Apparently there is one other girl on the boat from Nebraska, but she hasn’t met her yet. Last night we did this roommate questionnaire that our RD gave us about our style of living, and we both put the same answers for almost everything so that is good.
I’m going to backtrack to the Bahamas since my last post wasn’t that long.
So first of all I stood in the wrong line at the Miami airport for about 25 minutes because no one speaks English and the signs were confusing. I never flew international by myself before so I was just like ah! Where do I go? beside the fact that I could barely drag my bags. So I finally found the right line and it was so long! I stood in that for about an hour before I got to the counter and had to pay $25 for one of my bags being heavy L. Then I dragged my bags off to the security thing and they asked for my boarding pass. The lady was like your late you have to run to your gate! Great… I didn’t even get through security yet! So I went to security, and the line wasn’t long, but there was this guy who didn’t speak very good English and he was fighting with the TSA guy because he kept beeping, but wouldn’t take his metal off (not suspicious at all). So finally I got through with no problems and I was like running to my gate. I only had 1 part of my battery left on my cell phone and I still didn’t call anyone to say bye so I was like freaking out about that. After 2 people my cell started beeping LOW BATTERY. I was standing at my gate calling people as fast as I could like hysterically crying- I really must have been a sight to see. I am so sorry Tal and Jenna that I didn’t get to call you guys before I got on the plane!!!
So I took the bus to my incredibly tiny plane on the tarmac, boarded, and fell asleep right away. I didn’t wake up until we landed (which was only 46 minutes, but still). The Nassau Airport is so cute. It’s really tiny and all colorful. I went through customs easily because the guy knew I was with SAS, so I went on to baggage claim. I was so nervous about my luggage because I had heard that 4 people’s bags were lost already, so I was standing there all anxious and I didn’t see anyone else who resembled an SAS’er. Thank god my bags came out pretty fast. There were about 50 Bahaman men with carts who keep asking if you need help, and I didn’t really want help but I was blantantly struggling with my bags so this one guy was just like no, I’m helping haha. So then I had to go through the other customs guy and tell him what was in my bags. We went outside and I walked past 4 people agreeing to share a cab to the Atlantis, and there was no one else around really so I was like Oh man, I have to go alone.. But I asked if I could share anyway, so we did that. There was a mother and daughter- the daughter is on SAS, a woman whose mother is a Lifelong Learner passenger on SAS, and a man on business or something random.
So then I got to the Atlantis, got a key to the room I was staying in, and maneuvered my ridiculously large bags. When I got to the room, Hilary and Monica were already in there so I got my bathing suit on and went to get something to eat. Hilary went to the beach for a little bit because she was leaving to go home because of a family emergency. I wish I got to spend more time with her, but she is going to fly and meet the ship in Puerto Rico.
I just have to add right here that I just looked out my window and it is the most amazing thing I have ever seen!
Anyway, Monica, Jordi, Kim, Dan (who turns out is Eric’s roommate on the ship), and I hung out all day going on the lazy river and just hanging out. At night we met in the Atlantis lobby with about 120 other SAS kids and a few of us (15) decided to go to a local bar that Kevin suggested since he had been there for a while, instead of the expensive places with everyone else. So we all packed into a cab and went to Joe’s. Let me attempt to describe this place. It is a tiny building in the middle of the block in a residential part of Nassau. There were about 10 Bahaman men in there (all much older, missing teeth, smelling of alcohol and pot) drinking and playing pool. At first I was like what in the world are we doing here? But after a little while, and talking to the guys I realized that these were so cool! Everyone was just listening to reggae, playing pool, and dancing. It was such a good time! And when we were about to leave they were like please come back here if you are ever in the Bahamas! It was so cute.
On the morning of the 4th, Kim and I met up at like 645 am and got a taxi with 2 other girls to the port!! We got in line, but it wasn’t too long so we only had to wait a little while. Once we got our bags searched and got our id cards we were allowed to board! Dannie was a greeter at the gangway so we stood and talked to her for a little before getting our carry-ons searched and going through the metal detector. Then we both ran to our cabins, but mine was being cleaned L so one of the RD’s let me put my carry-ons in his room and then gave me a quick little tour. When I got back from breakfast one of my bags was there so I went in to unpack. Our room was one of the junior suites! It is awesome! Our beds are actually turned the other way (bow to aft) instead of port to starboard so the rocking of the ship feels like a cradle or something instead of making us sick- it is so nice! We even got a little mini couch and more storage space than other cabins. Woo hoo!
So basically for the past 24 hours I have just been hanging out, meeting people, and organizing my room. It’s been fun so far and I’m really excited for classes to get started tomorrow. That’s all I really have for now. I hope you are all getting your free SAS Internet postcards. They are so sweet to send, but I don’t like that I can’t get a free response lol. I will be checking my gmail tonight, and probably responding to any letters with internet postcards. Hope everyone is doing well! Love you all!
PS. I heard the Colts won the Super Bowl!!! I hate the Bears haha :\
I’ll talk to everyone soon! J
It seems like it will be interesting. I have been meeting a lot of people, and I even met a few from UM that I didn’t know where coming- of course I’m wearing my UM gear all the time J.
Yesterday we had a lifeboat drill before we departed, and we have to wear long pants, long sleeves, sneakers, a hat, and our lifejackets- it was SO hot! We stood there for like 45 minutes waiting for the captain to go around and make sure everyone was there and prepared. That was horrible, I hope we don’t have any more of those. I took a picture with my roommate in our lifejackets so I will post that later on. My roommate’s name is Ashley and she is from Omaha, Nebraska, and goes to the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Apparently there is one other girl on the boat from Nebraska, but she hasn’t met her yet. Last night we did this roommate questionnaire that our RD gave us about our style of living, and we both put the same answers for almost everything so that is good.
I’m going to backtrack to the Bahamas since my last post wasn’t that long.
So first of all I stood in the wrong line at the Miami airport for about 25 minutes because no one speaks English and the signs were confusing. I never flew international by myself before so I was just like ah! Where do I go? beside the fact that I could barely drag my bags. So I finally found the right line and it was so long! I stood in that for about an hour before I got to the counter and had to pay $25 for one of my bags being heavy L. Then I dragged my bags off to the security thing and they asked for my boarding pass. The lady was like your late you have to run to your gate! Great… I didn’t even get through security yet! So I went to security, and the line wasn’t long, but there was this guy who didn’t speak very good English and he was fighting with the TSA guy because he kept beeping, but wouldn’t take his metal off (not suspicious at all). So finally I got through with no problems and I was like running to my gate. I only had 1 part of my battery left on my cell phone and I still didn’t call anyone to say bye so I was like freaking out about that. After 2 people my cell started beeping LOW BATTERY. I was standing at my gate calling people as fast as I could like hysterically crying- I really must have been a sight to see. I am so sorry Tal and Jenna that I didn’t get to call you guys before I got on the plane!!!
So I took the bus to my incredibly tiny plane on the tarmac, boarded, and fell asleep right away. I didn’t wake up until we landed (which was only 46 minutes, but still). The Nassau Airport is so cute. It’s really tiny and all colorful. I went through customs easily because the guy knew I was with SAS, so I went on to baggage claim. I was so nervous about my luggage because I had heard that 4 people’s bags were lost already, so I was standing there all anxious and I didn’t see anyone else who resembled an SAS’er. Thank god my bags came out pretty fast. There were about 50 Bahaman men with carts who keep asking if you need help, and I didn’t really want help but I was blantantly struggling with my bags so this one guy was just like no, I’m helping haha. So then I had to go through the other customs guy and tell him what was in my bags. We went outside and I walked past 4 people agreeing to share a cab to the Atlantis, and there was no one else around really so I was like Oh man, I have to go alone.. But I asked if I could share anyway, so we did that. There was a mother and daughter- the daughter is on SAS, a woman whose mother is a Lifelong Learner passenger on SAS, and a man on business or something random.
So then I got to the Atlantis, got a key to the room I was staying in, and maneuvered my ridiculously large bags. When I got to the room, Hilary and Monica were already in there so I got my bathing suit on and went to get something to eat. Hilary went to the beach for a little bit because she was leaving to go home because of a family emergency. I wish I got to spend more time with her, but she is going to fly and meet the ship in Puerto Rico.
I just have to add right here that I just looked out my window and it is the most amazing thing I have ever seen!
Anyway, Monica, Jordi, Kim, Dan (who turns out is Eric’s roommate on the ship), and I hung out all day going on the lazy river and just hanging out. At night we met in the Atlantis lobby with about 120 other SAS kids and a few of us (15) decided to go to a local bar that Kevin suggested since he had been there for a while, instead of the expensive places with everyone else. So we all packed into a cab and went to Joe’s. Let me attempt to describe this place. It is a tiny building in the middle of the block in a residential part of Nassau. There were about 10 Bahaman men in there (all much older, missing teeth, smelling of alcohol and pot) drinking and playing pool. At first I was like what in the world are we doing here? But after a little while, and talking to the guys I realized that these were so cool! Everyone was just listening to reggae, playing pool, and dancing. It was such a good time! And when we were about to leave they were like please come back here if you are ever in the Bahamas! It was so cute.
On the morning of the 4th, Kim and I met up at like 645 am and got a taxi with 2 other girls to the port!! We got in line, but it wasn’t too long so we only had to wait a little while. Once we got our bags searched and got our id cards we were allowed to board! Dannie was a greeter at the gangway so we stood and talked to her for a little before getting our carry-ons searched and going through the metal detector. Then we both ran to our cabins, but mine was being cleaned L so one of the RD’s let me put my carry-ons in his room and then gave me a quick little tour. When I got back from breakfast one of my bags was there so I went in to unpack. Our room was one of the junior suites! It is awesome! Our beds are actually turned the other way (bow to aft) instead of port to starboard so the rocking of the ship feels like a cradle or something instead of making us sick- it is so nice! We even got a little mini couch and more storage space than other cabins. Woo hoo!
So basically for the past 24 hours I have just been hanging out, meeting people, and organizing my room. It’s been fun so far and I’m really excited for classes to get started tomorrow. That’s all I really have for now. I hope you are all getting your free SAS Internet postcards. They are so sweet to send, but I don’t like that I can’t get a free response lol. I will be checking my gmail tonight, and probably responding to any letters with internet postcards. Hope everyone is doing well! Love you all!
PS. I heard the Colts won the Super Bowl!!! I hate the Bears haha :\
I’ll talk to everyone soon! J
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