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Qingdao, China

The last day in China. The last day of the port before the last country. It's getting more and more bittersweet. But not worrying about it yet. Not yet. We woke up after sleeping restlessly in our fairly uncomfortable dorm beds. I had had such high hopes, after the boards we'd slept on in the hotel in Beijing. It had looked comfortable and soft, but we were sleeping on the box springs. But that didn't stop me from absolutely loving the hostel experience. I got in the shower again that morning and plotted how I'm going to travel around this summer after Tanzania. I thought about how I'd love to fly back to South Africa, or maybe Egypt, or Morocco and then going up to Spain and backpacking around Europe for the rest of the summer. I've heard of people doing it on low budgets. I was just convinced, taking my shower in the shower with half a door that let water spill out over the rest of the bathroom, that I can never stop traveling. I loved the dirty floor, and sleeping in a room with three other people we didn't know. Side note, it was only supposed to be with two people we didn't know, but a Japanese guy came in at 2am claiming that Lauren was in his bed, but we'd gotten four of the six beds in the room, the other two of which were already taken. He started rummaging through Lauren's stuff, accusing her of taking his towel because he saw hers hanging off of her bed. She assured her she hadn't seen it or taken it, and asked if it would be okay if he slept in the only open bed in the room that should have been Matt's but he'd slept in Becca's bed. He huffed and mumbled something in we think Japanese before turning off the lights. When we woke up, his stuff was still there but he was gone. I also met the guy sleeping underneath the Japanese guy, who had nearly moved into the hostel from what it looked like. He had pictures and maps taped to his walls, he had rows of empty beer bottles on the ledge of his bed, clothes absolutely everywhere. But I loved it. I couldn't believe we'd waited that long to experience the hostel. I wish that we would have been put up in hostels on the other trips rather than in hotels. There I was, sharing a room with seven people, three of whom I'd never met before, sleeping in a terrible bed with a fluffy blanket and flat pillow, my stuff jammed into a locker, and showering in a dirty blue-tile shower. It was perfect, and it made me want to go through Europe that way. I mentioned it to Lauren, but she said she had to work this summer, so I suggested next summer. We're tentatively talking now, about backpacking through the major cities of Europe at the very least, and as many countries as we can, the summer after we graduate. We discussed it as we walked to McDonald's for breakfast. We'd asked our Irish roommate (the guy sleeping under the Japanese guy, who was quiet but the few words he spoke were like a small slice of heaven because I'm such a sucker for an accent) had said we could get breakfast on the street, which we were a little wary to do. So we went to McDonalds. It wasn't as busy as the ones at home always are, but it seemed to be the place to go and have a cup of coffee. Half the people we saw sitting in the restaurant didn't even have food, simply a cup of coffee. We ate quickly before setting out to explore Shanghai for the morning. Our flight was at 3 and we wanted to have time to get back to the hostel and pick up the backpacks we'd checked at the front, so by ten we were heading back to the Bund. Becca had wanted to see the sightseeing tunnel, which we thought was going to be a tunnel where we could, you know, see some sights. But when we went down under the road and went left to get to the tunnel instead of right to go back outside, we started to wonder what we'd gotten ourselves into. I found myself in hallway with posters and ads for a sightseeing tunnel but no real description of what it was, a Chinese sex culture exhibit, an aquarium exhibit, and an arcade. I was interested in seeing the Chinese sex culture show because I thought it would provide some interesting insights into the culture, but we decided to just do the tunnel, so we bought roundtrip tickets, even though we had no idea where it was going to take us, how long it would take, or still any real sense of what it was. After we got our tickets we took an escalator down and I swear we entered the tunnel from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Bright lights shone all around as we descended, and we saw little enclosed cars coming around on a track, which we were ushered into before the lights dimmed completely and we stared out of the glass car into a black tunnel with fiber optic lights creating designs in the darkness. We really had no idea what was going on, what the point of this thing was. We were in a psychedelic tunnel with gold and neon lights swirling around in a waterfall style, until we got going and passed blinking lights that looked like stars, followed by deep red and orange colors that looked like magma, all the while listening to a deep voice giving us little blurbs about meteors and magma. Then suddenly, a fog machine was turned on, the lights stopped blinking and the only light came from the end of the tunnel and illuminated a waving inflatable arm tube man was blowing its arms against our car. And then, the lights came on and we were at the end. Honestly, I don't understand it. I don't know what the point was, beyond being a really weird way to cross from one side of the Yangtze river in Shanghai to another section of the city, or why it was called sightseeing because we didn't see sights on the tunnel. Although, it did get us across so that we could then go see sights. At least , it would after we made it through the random kind of adult souvenir shop at the top of the stairs leading up from the tunnel. We saw tables lined up with magic trick displays, a stand where you could get a 3D figurine made of yourself, a 3D picture slideshow of Chinese nature photos, pearl jewelry, and other things. The whole thing was just weird, like an arcade for adults, full of really pointless but somewhat entertaining excursions. I did get to see what the Chinese sex culture show was going to be like. At a kiosk in the center of a room, a poster displaying mountains that looked like anatomy of humans, so I didn't feel like I was missing anything. I really think someone who was on drugs thought it would be a good idea to throw all of this stuff together, pitched it to someone who was also on drugs, had it built by someone who was on drugs, and didn't realize how silly the whole thing was until they opened it up to the sober tourists to Shanghai. That was really the only explanation I could come up with. Lauren had wanted to get a figurine made of herself because she just thought the idea of doing such a thing was incredible and bizarre, but she ended up not wanting to stand around for twenty minutes while they molded it for her. So instead, we went up the second flight of stairs and out to the more normal world of Shanghai. We weren't entirely sure what to do or where to go, so we just walked and figured we'd come up with something along the way. I was totally fine with that, to just walk and take it in. We made our way back towards the tower and decided to go to the aquarium. We had to pass the tower on the way, which was playing American music over the loud speakers and NSync right as we were walking by, so Lauren and I gave everyone around us a free little show as we displayed our talents for singing and dancing boy band style. Seriously, it's a little bit sad how much of the "Bye, Bye, Bye" dance I remember. Everywhere we go, we provide entertainment for the locals. After we got into the aquarium, I went to an exhibit on the Yangtze that I thought I could use for my project and then going to the underwater exhibit. It was the nicest aquarium I've ever been to, blowing the shark exhibit at Sea World out of the water, so to speak, with a nearly half-mile long winding moving walkway underneath the fish and shark habitats, but honestly, with all of the people it made me claustrophobic. I didn't like that I felt trapped from above underneath the water, or in between the people that were tightly packed on the moving walkway and the foot-wide path you could get onto to stand and observe. Both paths were completely full, but I pushed my way through all of the people and almost run to the end because I felt so trapped. I didn't like feeling like I couldn't go anywhere, and seeing the water above me tricked my mind into thinking that I couldn't breath. I didn't know these things about myself, how afraid of heights I am and that I fear enclosed spaces so much. After getting out, I'd had enough with the fish. I love aquariums, but you can find one anywhere and I was just so much more interested in watching people and their interactions with one another. I think Sunday is family get together day because every family had Mom, Dad, baby (usually a girl), Grandma and/or Grandpa, and maybe aunt or uncle. Every family had at least five, and only the one child. And these Moms were all about their kids. They don't care about anything else except the happiness of their children because they push more than the rest of them. It doesn't matter if you're standing looking at something, she'll come in with her child in her arms and get you out of the way. I didn't get upset because hey, I'm all about the kids getting to see the cool fish and sharks because I've seen a lot of them before, but come on. A little common courtesy would have been nice. And of course, we got stared at some more all throughout our walk through the aquarium, so Lauren and I just started waving at people and saying hi. Some people waved back, and others gave us dirty looks. I don't know, maybe some people found it rude that we'd say hi to them or wave to them, but it is also rude to point at people. Lauren and I came up with an idea when we saw a man get hit in the head with a big backpack when another man was getting it out of the overhead compartment on the plane. The man who got hit said nothing, did nothing, didn't even make a face. We thought maybe that it's about saving face, losing credit if you make a scene, but then we remembered seeing people get in fights at the airport, over taxis, so that wasn't it. I'm not sure if people just don't find it rude to just do your own thing regardless of how it affects other people, are just laid back about it and don't mind, or what. But no one really seemed to mind when others would cut except for us. Perhaps because everyone does it and at one point or another the people being cut have cut before so they just accept it as how it is. I'm not sure. But everyone watches out for themselves and will step all over you if you don't hold your ground. After the aquarium we went to Hooters, where girls were still thin but actually had some curves to them and natural boobs, which was a huge thrill to me. I mean, you don't expect girls who work at Hooters to still have their natural boobs. Matt had never been before, and it had started pouring while we were in the Aquarium and it was close, so we went in and I ate a delicious Southwestern salad. I'd forgotten how much I missed decent salad after the my pear and Roquefort salad the night before, so I had to have another one before returning to the icky lettuce on the ship. We ate and looked at the photos of all the famous people who had visited the restaurant, and also read the signs posted all over the restaurant. We all got a kick out of the sign on the wall that said "Caution: Blondes Thinking" on it when Becca was the only blonde in the place. All of the workers were Asian, and none were blonde. We enjoyed our lunch, but Shanghai was too sweet to last and before we knew it was one and we needed to catch a cab back to our hostel to get our bags. Driving here is terrifying because no one believes in lanes either, and in the rain its even worse, but luckily the rain was fogging the windows so I couldn't see the cars cutting us off and who we were cutting off and who was right next to us, but I could hear the honking, a honking that never leaves your ears. Lauren talked to the cab driver, who whenever he had the chance would look over and stare at her, and convinced him to drive us to the hostel and then the airport. We'd checked out before breakfast so we ran in and got our bags before heading to the airport. I gazed out the window, trying to imagine when I'll be able to come back here. We were talking at dinner last night, and I said something about if I could base myself out of Vegas, because I really am attached to my home and like being near my family, and just travel all the time, I think I'd be set. But, that was that afternoon, because if there's one thing I've learned on this voyage it's that I have a ton of ideas for where I'd like to end up but no clue which path I'll end up following. We got to the airport early because we wanted to be prepared for the fact that we'd probably have problems with something at the airport because we have terrible luck with airports, but Lauren and I made it through just fine. Becca and Matt had gotten a later flight because they thought they'd want more time, but they wanted to try to get on ours but weren't able to get seats. Lauren and I just hadn't wanted to risk getting back at 7pm, especially since they kept insisting that if you miss the ship you can't fly to Japan; you go home because you'd be kicked off. And I wasn't risking a couple extra hours in Shanghai for that. I slept on the plane, and made a bigger face about being mowed down in the aisles when we landed than the guy who got hit in the head did because two rows of men, a group of six that were together, saw me and started laughing and chatting about it in Chinese. I don't know what they were saying about it, but I knew it was about me because they looked right at me and laughed. I felt bad, because I'm really trying to be more open about things, but they were hitting me with bags and I was tired so (sorry Mom and Dad) I rolled the eyes, which I've been known to do from time to time when I'm annoyed. My parents tried to get me out of that habit, but some things I just can't fix completely no matter how hard I try. We went through the airport in Qingdao, which of course was impressive and big and grand, and were solicited by a taxi driver. We had seen a line waiting for cabs so we thought it a bit odd that he had come right up to us. We asked how much and he said 200, but Lauren and I weren't biting so he lowered it by fifty. I looked at the yellow paper, using it as my prop to let him know I knew the port's not so far that he can charge us that much. Of course, I don't know that, but he didn't know that I don't know, so I figured I'd see how much it would help me to act like I knew what I was doing. Lauren, though, the goof, outright says there's nothing about it on the paper, and of course the guy laughs. I tell him thank you but we're going to talk to some other drivers, and we walked towards the line of cabs when all of a sudden this man pops out from around a pole and asks us if we need a taxi. He tells us he'll charge us 100 Yuan, so we decide to go with him. We didn't walk to a cab, though, but instead into a parking lot, full of normal cars. I think we hired a regular guy to drive us and not a taxi driver, which I'm not entirely sure if there are rules against that, but we went with him anyway. As we drove along, I at first wished we'd had more time here in Qingdao, because it was just beautiful and clear, a city but not a huge one. It was smaller, a more suburban town in the mountains, with no buildings more than three stories, and fewer people, which surprisingly was nice after all of the cities. But then, about twenty minutes in, I started to get frustrated with the driving. The roads had four lane roads and people drove positively all over them. People cut each other off to try to pass each other, but then would end up getting stuck behind a bus or some other large slow-moving vehicle. If they would all just stay in their lanes, we'd all have to stopping and going because we cut off and get cut off. I had to stop watching the traffic because I was getting too agitated. Always, I am reminded that some things just won't change about me. I'm getting much more patient, but not too patient. Our driver had told us it would be a forty-five minute drive, and fifty minutes in he pulled over to the side of the road and asked us for the paper. We hadn't seen any sort of water yet, and when he stared at the paper again, asking us in something in Chinese and pointing, I really started to freak. It was a bad idea, this guy. And why did he tell us he knew where it was if he didn't? So I started imagining this scenario that we were on the other side of the city and we would have no way of getting back to the ship, but I said nothing. Lauren tried to explain it to him, which in my panicky state annoyed me because he didn't understand English. No matter how many times she read to him what was on the paper, he wasn't going to understand English. After studying it for nearly five minutes, he finally was able to make out a street name he recognized, even though the directions were printed in Chinese as well, and we were off again. I hid a smile and looked at Lauren, whose expression was one of relief and humor, because what do we get ourselves into? We're two American girls, students who are 21 years old, and we're out here in the big bad world hoping we can trust it enough to prevent us from getting kicked off SAS. But, you can't live in a box forever, I suppose. I thought about it while we were driving, thinking back on our dinner conversation the night before, it seems like our purpose in life is to just be in it and make the world change that way. Because even if your life isn't big, it's going to affect someone in a way that they'll remember and make themselves better because of it and perhaps make changes that affect more people because of it. And after we're here, the world is never the same as it was when we weren't here. And after we die, family will remember us and live with a piece of us still in them, a piece that will determine in some way, even if its small, how they live and raise their children, and so on. And the world will continue on in that way, so that your role was to be in it and create change. But still, that doesn't help me figure out specifically where I want to go after I graduate. Who knows? For some reason, I thought this trip would help me narrow down my options, give me some direction, but that was just plain stupid thinking. I'm out in the world, and it's a huge place. How could I have expected that after seeing the abundance of things I've seen, after going around the whole planet, that I'd be able to narrow down my options? In some way it really does make sense though, that I'd be changed by something and decide I wanted to spend my life devoted to that cause, but I've been touched by so many things that I don't know what direction to go in, and then not even necessarily being touched by the city of Cape Town or Hong Kong except that I love their characters and want to live there for some time. Who knows. After all these thoughts racing through my head I found myself watching the apartments and homes and restaurants go by a little bit slower, because our driver was slowing down. He was lost, again. I saw the sails of a ship in the distance, so I knew we had to be near, and Lauren saw a sign that said port on it, so he turned around and we got out. I tried to tip him, which he wouldn't accept, and we walked up to the gate to the port, but the security guard started yelling. He started yelling at the cab driver and pointing down the road, and the cab driver just laughed. Lauren and I didn't know what to do because we didn't understand. I'm not sure if we just weren't allowed to walk through that way, or if he was telling our driver to take us closer, or if we just weren't at the right place at all, but he laughed and escorted us back to the car and drove us about half a block down the street and dropped us off at another gate. We made it through this one and had to walk about twenty minutes through a construction zone right on the water to get to our ship. Big industrial buildings, tractors, cranes, all this we passed in the wide open construction zones. We took in our last stares from the Chinese, the workers stopping their work to look, wave, or say hi, before we walked up the stairs and onto the boat, off of China. And as always, I'm sad. It's getting harder and harder because the next time we do this, it will be the last time we do it. No one counts Hawaii as a port, because it's part of the US and we're only there for a day, so in one week, that'll be it. And I hate that. I hate it so much. I've had so much fun and its been so amazing that it feels like it's not even real, so it's hard to wrap my head around it and think, okay, right now, this is what you're doing. Enjoy it while you're on it, because once it's over it's over. But it's so big and so mind boggling that I just haven't been able to come to terms with it as the reality of my life for the semester. I just can't convince myself with 100% certainty that I'm really doing it. But that's part of what's so cool too, that it's been that good. We went to Classroom 5 and turned in our passports to the Chinese officials before getting dinner in the dining hall and spending the rest of the night listening to music, catching up on journals (actually, just outlining so I can go back later and really write them because I have another paper due tomorrow that I'm probably not going to start until Global because I haven't gotten a good night of sleep since the night before the night before Hong Kong). So now, I'm going to go to bed, being lulled to sleep by the gentle rumble of the engines as they kick into gear and take us back out to the ocean and to our last real port. I still have three weeks, and I am going to cherish every moment, not take a moment for granted, even if I'm bored out of my mind by a lecture about zooanthelles on coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean. It's once in a lifetime. It's the experience of a lifetime. Yet, I refuse to let it be the high point of my life because if this is it, what are the next forty, fifty years going to be like if, at 21, I've already hit my peak? My goodness, how quickly my mood can change. Emotional, this all is. You just feel it. You feel everything. I want to feel everything, but it weighs you down sometimes. This big old world and little me, out in it. But, I love being out in it and can't wait to figure out how to do it again in some other way.

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177205700/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177205700/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177205700/tpod.html Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:37:19 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Shanghai, China

We woke up at 4:30, Lauren and I, to go to Shanghai. That's exactly why I didn't want to go out the night before. She got in at 2:30, and was exhausted, all day long. All she wanted to do was sleep. She actually fell asleep with her forehead in her hand at the lunch table. I was disappointed because I really had wanted to go out with Linda again the night before, but I had gone out with her the first night and I wanted to be alert and on my game for Shanghai. We'd arranged for a cab to pick us up at the hotel at 5am for our 7:30 flight, because we'd heard that it would take almost an hour to get to the airport. Well, at that hour, the huge city hadn't yet started to wake up, so we made it there in seventeen minutes, which worked in our favor because we ended up needing all the extra time we could get. This was the most difficult airport to navigate on the entire voyage, because all of the signs that gave any indication of where things were located were in Chinese and the place was huge. Lauren and I spent ten minutes just walking back and forth, trying to find the ticket counter, then someone to ask where the ticket counter was, but we ended up finding Becca and Matt. We went to the check-in counter, and that's when all the fun of the morning began. Air China claimed that they didn't have reservations for us. Even though we had confirmation numbers, booking numbers, a letter that said we were guaranteed seats, we were told that we didn't have reservations. We went to the manager, and he told us that yes, we did have reservations but we'd opted for paper tickets and would have to go to the Air China office, pick up our receipts for the tickets, and then go back to the ticket counter and get the receipts exchanged. A little bit of an annoyance, yes, but at least we had our tickets. We went on the search for the Air China office down the mile-long entrance of the airport, only to find that the Air China office would not open until 7am. It was 5:45 by this time, and our flight was at 7:30. We went back to talk to the manager again to explain to him that our flight was only a half-hour after the office opened so could he print our receipts for us. He said no, and that if we missed our flight, there was one an hour later that we could get on without any costs for changing the tickets. That was our only option, to wait, so we went back and napped while we waited for the office to open. At 6:40, Becca came back from having tried again to talk to the manager, but only had a story about how the same thing had happened to a pair of men. They had purchased tickets online, had checked the e-ticket option but were being denied their tickets. Well, they argued enough that the manager printed out a pair of tickets for them, and they went through security and sat at the gate, while we waited for the office to open. Sometimes, it's so frustrating to be young. If we push to get what we want, we're rude. If adults do it, and men especially, they can usually get what they want. But, that's life I suppose. When the office opened at 7am, we learned that, hey, we really didn't have airline reservations. We would have to buy new tickets. I really hope that I didn't get charged for airline tickets that Air China says we didn't purchase, or else this problem isn't over yet. We bought new tickets and made it just in time for the 7:30 flight. That seems to be a trend for us, making it at the very last moment. Becca was in a mood, so the fact that people were pushing in front of her because they really don't have any concept of lines (seriously- Katie told me that until the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, people will be spending eight hours every Sunday practicing standing in line, just because that's not part of their culture; they don't do it, so they're going to have to practice for when the world visits their city) was really agitating her. A middle-aged woman cut in front of us, despite Becca's attempts to coax me to not let her in. But what was I supposed to do, body check her? I'd learned to deal with it, but I can understand how she felt. Sometimes, when you're already agitated things get on your nerves much easier than they normally would. And we'd just had a stressful hour and a half trying to make sure we'd be able to get to Shanghai and not for double the price. We got on the plane and slept for the two-hour flight, and when we got off the same woman cut Matt off in the aisle, pushing her way through to get off the plane, even more so than everyone else. Well, I'm not going to say either way if I'm proud of my next move, but the plane was a 737, with the row of five seats in the middle, so when I turned around the corner to get off the plane, pushy lady was just coming across the aisle to get out, so I cut her off, and I heard Becca cheering in the background. But, if it's really not rude for her to keep pushing in front of people, she shouldn't have been offended, right? Okay, not necessarily, and I know that. And you could say that it would bring bad karma, but on my way up the aisle a woman was having trouble reaching into the overhead compartment to get her jacket, and everyone kept passing by her and all she wanted to do was get her jacket so she could leave. There's another thing I don't understand. Asians aren't the tallest of people, so why is everything in China much higher than it needs to be? Even I can't reach halfway into the overhead compartment with my fingertips if I stand on my tippy-toes. So, I helped her out, and I received a smile that nearly matched one my parents would give me when they're really proud. It was simple, and it was something I could do, so I did. Then I turned around and cut the lady off. So, in terms of karma, I had broken even. Or maybe it hadn't. I got off the plane, and I realized I didn't have the hostel information. This morning was turning out so incredibly well. I had my laptop, and the email with the name of the hostel, its address, all that necessary information. So while Becca, Matt, and Lauren went to purchase our return tickets, I went on a hung for an internet connection. I went to information and they told me to go to the business wing in the main terminal, and I tried to explain to them that I had just arrived so couldn't really get through the terminal, so they pointed me to another information desk. They understood what I meant by internet but I couldn't understand where they were trying to tell me it was. This man just kept moving his hands around and speaking in Chinese and nodding, as if I understood him. I looked at him in confusion, shook my head, threw my hands up in the air and shrugged my shoulders, but he still kept chatting away in Chinese. Finally, another man came out from the back room and he led me out the door and told me to go to the hotel in the airport. Perfect. I walked to the hotel, praising God that I hadn't screwed us over once we'd finally made it to the actual city. I walked into a restaurant of the hotel and asked a waitress, and she led me to a seating area and pulled out the chair for me. I tried again, telling her I needed internet and pointing at my computer, and she pointed at the outlet in the wall. I didn't have a cable. I shook my head to indicate I didn't have one, and she pointed me down the stairs. I found my way to the front desk and asked one of the managers where I could find internet. He pointed at the lounge across the room, where a group of about twenty middle-aged men were smoking cigarettes and cigars and drinking. This I found a little bit strange, because it was only 10:30 in the morning, but their steady stares, taking in my every move reminded me that I was the foreigner here. They watched, talked, and laughed as I approached, as I sat down, and as I walked back to the counter to begin to plead with the manager to just let me use his computer. My laptop wasn't recognizing the wireless connection. I really wanted to cry, but I kept it together. I had to get internet, because I had to find the hostel information. I think I might have been begging, just asking him if I could pay him to let me use the computer behind the counter just for a moment so I could get the name and address of our hostel. He disappeared around the corner before returning to tell me to wait a minute. I waited about three or four until a woman came over from the lounge area and led me back there. She took me to the back area, past all the men who continued and comment (in Chinese of course but you know when people are talking about you, even if you don't know what they're saying; and of course if I were an older Chinese man and I saw an American girl walking back and forth by herself looking confused and flustered and wearing a huge backpack, I'd probably have a couple comments too), and sat me down. And what do you know, she pointed to an outlet. I started screaming a little bit inside my head, but kept it together when I told her too that I didn't have a plug. But she, she was my hero. She retreated back behind the bar and emerged with, a cable. That I thought was both weird and amazing at the same time, because who keeps an internet cable behind a bar? But I was in absolutely no position to ask questions, so just as Becca, Matt and Lauren showed up I hooked myself up to the internet and got the address of our humble seven-dollar hostel right off of the Bund. By now, the manager and I were old friends so I marched back up to the front, telling him I promised I wouldn't ask anything more of him if he would just write down "Mingtown Hiker's Hostel" down in Chinese characters along with the address so we could show a cab driver. He did, and off we went. The line for a cab was even worse than the lines I've waited in at JFK in Manhattan, and we talked about doing things the Chinese way and just cutting everyone, but of course, those things we really only fantasize about. Instead, we lived vicariously through the countless other people who cut in front of each other. One man even had the audacity to climb over the rail right at the very front of the line. But, the four of us seemed to be the only ones who had any problem with it, so c'est la vie. After twenty minutes we were huddled in a cab with our bags and on our way to our hostel in the Bund. Just driving through Shanghai, I was already in love with it. I'm just a city girl. I love towering buildings lining the streets, I love the traffic (most of the time), I love the noises, and even the dirty smells. I don't know why I keep expecting big Asian cities to feel a certain way, like Chinese or Japanese, but for the most part, the overall look is quite similar to a cosmopolitan area in the US, except with the occasional Chinese roof strewn in here or there. The traffic is a lot more haphazard, darting in and out of lanes and around bikes and scooters. Again, the line concept, it doesn't stop with people standing in them. I don't even really understand why I saw people repainting the lines on the streets because absolutely nobody pays attention to them anyway. You go where you want to go, when you want to, and that's acceptable. So why waste paint? But anyway. We pulled off the main highway and into a slightly sketchy area. I hesitate to say sketchy because of some of the other places I've seen, but nevertheless I was a little nervous driving down the narrower streets with people hanging out in dark doorways painted with splotches of spray paint, the abandoned buildings, and just all of the browns, greys and blacks of the third world that I'd gotten so used to seeing. And this smell, this smell wasn't the city smell I like. No, this was burning street food, decay, mold, and garbage. I was beginning to question what we'd gotten ourselves into, because we were four young people, in a shady place, in the middle of Shanghai, China. But then I realized that hey, this was going to be an amazing cultural experience. After all of the really nice hotels, this was going to be fun, a real adventure. We continued making our way through the area, but when we turned another corner and found our hostel, the four of us were in complete shock. The hostel was clean and compact, with couches in the lobby, posters and fliers everywhere with ideas of things to do and helpful tips, a self-service kitchen, laundry services, and free internet access on any of the three computers in the lobby- all for seven bucks a night. But, we hadn't been up to the rooms yet. After we checked in, I took a deep breath as I opened the door but again, was pleasantly surprised. The room was a decent size, for having three bunk beds, six lockers, a table, and a private bathroom. Already, I was loving it. Even though we had to tiptoe around because one of the people we'd be sharing with was still asleep, I just loved the idea of not being in a hotel. Instead, we were in a room with people we didn't know, who were our age, who were just as excited about exploring the city as we were. I showered in the shower big enough to require two glass doors but only had one, so I understood why there was water all over the floor when I'd gone in. It was a dark bathroom, a little bit moldy, and you couldn't stand in the shower barefoot unless you wanted to risk leaving the hostel with more than you came with, but I was just eating it up. I really felt like a backpacker. We'd gotten there on our own, without the assistance of SAS, and it was damn rewarding. By the time I had finished showering it was only noon, and I wasn't as tired as I thought I would be after such an early morning; I was just excited. My favorite way to travel in a city I think is to not really have any plans, because you can just walk and find things that spark your interest. We walked outside and straight, and I got back into my picture taking mode I'd just fallen out of in Beijing. I just wasn't impressed by it. I realized that while I really enjoyed my time in Beijing, I did not enjoy the city itself. It was just so expansive, in some parts so busy and in others clean and commercialized; built up in some areas, but barely livable in others. Normally, seeing so much diversity in a city would excite me, and it was interesting, but I just didn't feel anything beyond respect for it. I hate to admit, but I just have no love for the city, or any real desire to ever go back to Beijing.
We found a convenience store along the bustling streets of Shanghai and bought some coffee before continuing our walk to the bubble-looking communication tower. We made it through the older part of town and into the main part of the Bund along the river, which just filled me with joy. I'm such a city girl! I love the movement and the hustle of it all, the beautiful, clean stone buildings, commercial buildings, wide streets filled with people, and lush parks. It reminded me of Chicago a little bit, just on the banks of the historic Yangtze instead of the Chicago River. We walked along the river, watching all of the families and people out at the parks and enjoying a relaxing Saturday afternoon. I still can't get over the concept of children's pants being split down the middle so they can more easily go to the bathroom. But, overall, it's kind of cute to walk along and see a little bum sticking out when a child is bending over. We kept walking, me just as happy as could possibly be, even though we really didn't have a plan beyond going to the bubble tower. We wanted to get something to eat first, but we could not for the life of us find a restaurant. Lauren and I climbed up a winding staircase of a museum with European-style architecture that looked like it had a restaurant at the top, but it was only a bar. So we decided to just take the ferry across the river to the where the tower was. The ferry was supposedly a big deal because it was air conditioned, but because we had just barely made it on in time so there weren't any seats in the air conditioned areas. Instead, we stood at the window, watching all of the barges and boats go by. Apparently, Shanghai is supposed to have the busiest port in the world, and the water traffic was indeed pretty dense. Boats carrying huge television screens with advertisements went up the river, others transported materials, ferries brought people across the river, and many more just cruising. We got off and found ourselves on a wide street at the back side of the more commercial areas, which was filled with more people and street vendors than cars. Women swept the street, men and women sat on blankets spread out alongside the sidewalk selling random trinkets, and more men and women sold all kinds of food from their carts: candied strawberries, steamed corn on the cob, a kind of pita with eggs and sauces, seasoned meat on a stick, and beverages. I tried to take a picture of a woman with her strawberry cart, but she hooted at me before I could. I suppose if I would have bought something from her she would have let me, but I didn't want to stick around. Lauren was absolutely starving by this point, as she was exhausted from going out the night before until 2:30 and getting up at 4:30, and she already just gets cranky when she gets hungry, so we ate some Pepto and bought some snacks. She tried the beef skewers, which ended up being fried fat, I got corn, and Matt got the pita/taco thing. His was pretty good, and my corn was corn, but Lauren's fried fat was awful. It was supposed to be meat, I'm sure, but we didn't get any of that. We finally found some restaurants by the water, so we went into an Italian place and ate spaghetti and Caprese salads. We'd all agreed, we'd eaten way too much Chinese food in the past week. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner was always the same, and we were needing to get away from all of the grease and fried foods. The manager had to come over and wait on us because none of the waiters spoke English. After our spaghetti meals and caprese salads we all felt one hundred percent better, but we made another coffee stop at Starbucks (I had to get my Shanghai mug because I've been collecting them from every city) before walking about fifteen minutes to get to the tower. I found it quite amusing that they were playing American pop music over the loud speakers, so we rocked out and took pictures before going inside. The most significant cultural experience at the tower was the bathroom break. I have never seen anything like it in my life, and probably never will unless I return to China. It even beats the dirty squat toilet at the train station in India. Here's why. Old Chinese women, as I've mentioned they don't wait very well, were hovering in front of the stalls, waiting and pacing until one opened up. But the weird thing was, the women who came out of the stalls would still be buttoning their pants. These woman came out with their pants and undies and pants at her their knees, pulling them up as they waddled out. I just didn't understand this. Had they just waited so long to use the restroom that they weren't able to wait the extra few seconds it would take for the women already in the stall to get dressed before emerging? Or was it simply a more efficient way of getting people in and out, to not worry about privacy? Maybe privacy isn't something they're worried about. In fact, it's clearly not something they worried about, and I have the images forever burned in my mind to prove it. So beyond seeing more old lady than was really necessary, it drove me nuts because even though you "wait in line" everyone paces and hovers in order to get the next stall, even if they just walked in and you were standing and patiently waiting. In this country, you really just have to learn to just push your way through, or you're as visible as a fly. After the bathroom extravaganza, we waited in line to get up to the tower. I was in a good mood so fortunately the pushing and darting through lines wasn't bothering me as much. It just fascinated me, the way people interact with each other, or more accurately disregard each other. While we waited for the elevator, and young Chinese boy with his Mom were standing behind a girl, who apparently was getting in the boy's way even though she could go nowhere, as she was standing in front of the closed elevator door. Still, he decided to tell her to "move, fat ass," in English so that we understood, but I am not entirely sure if his mother knew what he'd said because she just smirked at him and gave him a hug. The four of us were cracking up, and I doubt the girl with the big bum (at least in the boy's eyes) understood either, unless both of the women had understood him but neither said anything to him about what he'd said. We, on the other hand, just could not believe what he'd said to her, and at his age. We all figured, he'd learned it from American television. Super. We made it up to the top but couldn't really see anything because of all of the fog, or smog. We had tried asking the manager at the restaurant which it was, and he said simply "Yes, outside." So apparently, we were looking at something, outside. That's all we needed to know. What we could see around the base of the tower were parks, tennis courts, the river, and commercial buildings. I may be a little bit spoiled, coming from a city where I can pretty much go up and look at panoramic views whenever I'd like, so for that reason I wasn't as enthusiastic about going up every tower in every city we went to, especially if we could see farther ahead of us on the ground than we could at the top, but it was still fun to be at the top of the third tallest building in the world. When we finished looking around we took a taxi over to the YuYuan Gardens, a famous area with temples, lots of shopping and obviously, gardens. A ten-minute cab ride took us to a busy market area, and we were off in search of the gardens. We got out of the taxi right where the street dead-ended into the outside walls of another market area where the gardens were. We walked through the narrow streets and courtyards with traditional Chinese architecture, where we found plenty of people beckoning us and the hundreds of other tourists to go into their shops, but we could find no gardens. We asked several people and were pointed in several different directions, so we decided to just keep winding through the streets and see what we could find. Standing outside of the gates of a temple in a main square, we met a couple from Washington. It's easier to meet other tourists in these places than locals because we so clearly stand out, so whenever you find someone else that looks like you, you strike up conversation. They didn't know where the gardens were either, but they told us that inside was a little bridge you could follow over a beautiful little pond, so in we went. We watched turtles try to climb up the walls and took pictures of several statues in the middle of the water. It was the most nature we'd seen in the area, so we assumed we'd finally found the gardens. However, as we made our way through at 5:05 we saw metal guardrails blocking off a huge ornate door, which was apparently the entrance to the actual gardens. A young guy, around twenty-four, from Los Angeles told us all we would have to do was go back tomorrow and get a ticket for them, because they were absolutely worth seeing. He then asked us if we'd want to go out with him that night, because he was leaving his tour group that he'd been going through China with to stay in Shanghai another week. We had no idea what we were going to be doing or where, and we had no cell phone to call him, which was disappointing because he was quite outgoing and sweet, so he would have been fun to hang out with. We wanted to try to catch the older part of the city, while we still had some daylight, that was supposed to boast of lovely architecture and great restaurants, so we said the cordial "maybe we'll run into each other" as we parted ways. We stopped in a dress shop on the way out, and as we walked out I thought I'd left my camera so we ran back inside the main market area to try to retrace our steps, but I realized that I'd just placed it in another pocket of my purse. So instead of finding ourselves on the main street we'd come out on, where there were plenty of taxis, we found ourselves on another busy street, with no taxis. We waited for forty-five minutes for one, taking bets and saying things like "if one doesn't come in the next twenty cars I'm finding the nearest bar", silly things to amuse ourselves. Taxis came sporadically, but many wouldn't take us to the area we wanted to go. I think because we didn't have a specific enough location they wouldn't take us, because we'd heard it was about a fifteen-minute ride to the location we were looking for, so it's not like we were asking them to take us around the corner. The first three we let go because they seemed to be charging too much, and when we were finally ready to crack and pay what they'd demanded, we could find no one. A van pulled up and was ready to take us, but Victor hailed another taxi that was pulling up behind the van so we decided to try for that instead. We should have just taken the van. This driver waved us off, but according to the local guy who was trying to help us hail a cab and translate for us, he said he needed to go get gas and then he'd come back for us. Twenty minutes later, we were still waiting. Our translator had hailed half of our cabs for us so we felt bad leaving because he was still waiting around to help us, but it was getting dark and we had absolutely no other way to get back to the Bund except to walk at this point. So off we went. And let me tell you, navigating Chinese maps is no easy task. We couldn't tell where we were on the map because the street signs were in Chinese and we couldn't read them. After twenty minutes following the road through parks and past more bridal shops than I've ever seen in one area, we stopped a girl on the street to ask her to point to where we were on a map. This turned out to be the best move we'd made all day. She called her friend over, who in turn asked another man for help before she was able to figure it out. She didn't speak any English, but she used enough sign language to point us down a street perpendicular to us. We gathered that she was trying to tell us to keep walking down it and eventually we'd find it. We thanked her, but before we could take another step she called us back in her high, cartoon-like voice, conferred with her friend and before we knew it, she had grabbed Becca's hand and was running us across the street. We spent the next thirty minutes following these two girls through night sidewalk markets, a shabby neighborhood with locals standing outside and watching us go by in the darkened streets, and through a few other winding streets before we arrived at a square with a beautiful park and pond in the middle and bright lights across the way. They indicated to us that the lights were where we wanted to be, and said goodbye. We offered to buy them dinner, but she didn't understand what we were saying and just took off with her friend, after we thanked her about ten times. She attempted a "you're welcome" before going back around the corner we'd just come around. The rest of the evening we were just in total shock. These two girls we'd passed, going in the opposite direction, had gone entirely out of their way to help the lost Americans get where they wanted to go. They asked for directions at every corner to make sure we were headed in the right direction, bounced up and down when they learned they were right on track, turned back every few minutes to make sure we were all still with them. Lauren and I talked, as we too held hands while we made our way through the sketchy part of town, that we would never again be rude to foreigners. Now, we really understand how difficult it is to try to get around in a big city you don't know, with everyone around you speaking a language you don't know. No one in Manhattan, if you stopped them to ask for directions, would put their plans on hold to walk you to where you wanted to go, let alone give you two minutes of their time to thoroughly explain to you how to get there. I will never be that person again. And if I don't know how to get there, I'll find someone who does. Reflecting on it even now, two weeks later, I still can't get over how incredibly giving these people are. They were our age, and they walked us through the ghetto. Granted, it may have just looked like a ghetto to me, the foreigner, and maybe they frequented the area, but regardless, they were amazing to us. To not even know us, or speak our language and yet walk us for a half hour, would be absolutely unheard of in the States. If you ever encounter someone in the States who will physically take you where you need to go, regardless of how far away it is from where you meet them, they're probably going to be an SAS alum. We crossed the street and walked by the park, where we saw shadows and outlines of couples sitting together on blankets and benches, and it warmed my heart. No longer was I tense and fearful that we wouldn't make it back to our hostel. Instead, I had found a new love and respect for the Chinese people. We made our way down the street covered in Christmas-like lights, and I once again felt a surge of excitement. I was thrilled with what had just happened. While the others were a little tired from the walking and frustrated about the taxi, I was ecstatic. That's why I think it's my favorite way to travel because even in doing the simplest of things, you can find the greatest adventures and most wonderful people. I got to wander through Shanghai, parts we wouldn't have seen before, and had had a terrific encounter with its people. Really, the greatest things happen when there are no plans, because you just never know what you're going to happen upon. We found the restaurant area, a street jammed with people trying to decide on a place to eat with all the options available to us. We stopped at a place called Luna for a couple hours and dined on a variety of foods, including nachos as an appetizer and an exquisite pear and Roquefort salad for me. I feel like perhaps we haven't eaten the most ethnic of foods during this last leg of the voyage, but I'd anticipated the food being a little bit more authentically Chinese. I'd had the idea in my head that American Chinese food is just so completely different from what I would find in the actual country, but from the places I ate at I found that it just wasn't so. I could still eat my sweet and sour chicken and my fried rice as I liked it and variations of beef and broccolis. And since we'd been eating it, three meals a day, for four days prior to Shanghai, we decided that to branch out would be okay. I've missed salad so intensely, as the lettuce on the ship is either the bright white iceberg chunks or brown romaine, neither of which a salad makes. So, for the next two hours, we dined on a variety of cuisines, and enjoyed every moment of it. The place was made just for tourists, because the only Chinese people we saw in there were the wait staff and the occasional businessman having a meal with his foreign clients, but I didn't mind. I feel like perhaps things are starting to get a little, I hate to say it, but less impressive as time goes on. That's the only downfall of this trip that I've found, aside from the very obvious fact that I just don't seem to have enough time in each place. But after nine, ten new countries, it starts to run together just a little bit. Either that or I just never really had that great of an interest in China to begin with. I haven't quite figured that one out yet. I've loved every moment of the journey, but it's just that when I think back to the very first port, to Puerto Rico, there was nothing that didn't impress me. Nothing went over my head; I captured it all. And now, I find myself not really wanting to write my journals because hey, it's just another city. I hate that, I really do. I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting lazy as the voyage comes to a close, if I was genuinely indifferent to the country, or if I'm just so overwhelmed by it all at this point that I can't formulate any insights or deep attachments to any one particular place. I mean, six countries in six weeks? India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Japan all within a matter of a month and a half, when one of those six weeks is time spent on the ship? I so enjoyed the first part of the voyage, when I had a week in between to digest it all, to think back and complete my thoughts before I got to the next place. I feel like it sounds like I'm complaining. I don't intend to, but rather to pose an observation that I do a lot better when I have time to gather my thoughts, to stop and take a breath. I couldn't truly enjoy Malaysia for what it really was because I was still stuck in the endless emotion of India. Vietnam and Cambodia I developed a love-hate relationship with, but as I tried to pen those emotions I was already in China. So was it China I didn't really care for, or the fact that I was stuck in the past while I was there? And I realized and I might have written this before, that there's an extreme difference between enjoying my time somewhere and enjoying the actual country. I loved my time in China, but not necessarily the country. At least those are my thoughts at this point, as everything is jumbled together in an enormous melting pot of emotions and thoughts and "what the hell am I going to do now"s. But I am thankful for it. I'd rather be this confused individual, struggling to piece it all together, than to have never experienced it at all. So, you can't really think that I'm complaining now, can you?

At dinner, we got into some deep discussions. We talked about whether or not we felt like we'd been changed by this voyage. I bet you can guess what my answer was. Of course, but I couldn't tell you exactly how. Becca said she's not really different. She feels that she's traveled before, and seen things that have shocked her before, and this is no exception. Me, I feel changed. I can't tell you how yet, and I may never be able to say hey, before this voyage I was A, B, and C, but when I returned I was X, Y, and Z. Perhaps as I reread my entries when I get home I'll notice subtle changes. Maybe you all are recognizing changes in me even before I am. I just feel solidified in my desire to spend my life helping people, to whatever measures I need to go. I have an image right now of what I would like my life to be like, but it's probably different than the image I'll have tomorrow, and I know it's different than what I thought about this morning. But I am reminded of his words. His refers to the man I met and talked to at Bertolini's, the one who told me that I'd fall in love with everything but would just have to wait until I got home to make any real decisions. When I get home, I'll figure it out. One day at a time. As I am overwhelmed with the rate at which my world grew within this last year, from the start of 2007 until now, I think that is the best choice. Patience. I've learned some along this voyage, but not as much in regards to my personal life as the exercise of the virtue when it comes to other people. Yet, I don't want to wish my life away. I will look back on these days, no doubt, when I had no idea. When I'm old and everything is set and clear and defined, I'll miss the days of not knowing. At least, that's how I justify it all to myself. I suppose, in response to that, you never really know, but it seems that there are times in your life when you are more and less certain. These days, it is less certain. So I will relish them.

After dinner we caught a cab, which again was quite the adventure. No one wanted to take us to our hostel, which I had written in Chinese. Well, no one wanted to drive by the river so that we could see the lights on the Bund before we went to our hostel. It took us awhile to find a cab in the first place, and then my feisty side came out a few times before we were able to negotiate a deal. At one point, a cab driver nearly drove away with my directions back to the hostel, but I ran a foot or so after him so that I could get the directions back. As the story goes, I snatched the paper out of his hands and told him to "hey, give me that!" I don't even lose my temper like that with my best friends, but there was something about the cab drivers here. And yet, as I reflect on it, they knew we relied on them, so really, they could do whatever they wanted. They could steal off with our directions home if they chose. They could deny us a ride. When you are in control, when you have the power, you can do anything. Interesting. But anyway, I put up a fight with the driving-away taxi man and eventually we found one, on a street full of cars that were barely able to move more than a few feet because of the traffic, and it dropped Becca and Matt off so they could take pictures of the lights and would take Lauren and I back to the hostel. I was exhausted by this time, so when I opened my eyes again after getting in the cab it was to Lauren poking me and telling me we were there. I stumbled out of the cab and paid the driver, trying to will my eyes to stay open long enough to get me into my bed. When I finally made it up the stairs and into the room, I was disappointed by the beds that had looked so soft and comfortable. Instead, a set of box springs and a flat pillow awaited me, but after a twenty-hour day, I could have slept absolutely anywhere. Yet, I wasn't too tired to think just one more time how much I loved the hostel experience. Having to tiptoe into the room so as not to wake one of our unknown roommates, having to be careful not to slam my belongings around as I locked them into my number three locker, and wash my face in the dark, I realized that it wouldn't be the last time I spent time in a hostel.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177119120/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177119120/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177119120/tpod.html Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:34:00 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Beijing, China

I woke up, showered, and ate breakfast (again, the same noodles, yellow jiggly, and eggs we'd had the day before) before taking the hour-long drive to Tiananmen Square. Today was a little bit better in terms of viewing the city, as we staying in the city rather than driving out of it to get to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. Kai, Linda, Lauren, Katie, Dan and I had a discussion about children the whole way there. Kai initiated it by asking each of us girls how many kids we wanted, and when Lauren said that she really wants to adopt a child, probably from China, Linda gave her quite a bit of grief for it. Neither of them really liked the idea, asking how we'd feel if we were Chinese and had a blonde mother. Linda had no problem telling Lauren her opinion that if she wanted kids, she should have her own. It was an interesting conversation concerning a cultural difference. I'm still trying to understand why they would be so against adoption, and more specifically us adopting Chinese children. Perhaps it's a sense of nationalism, that even children who are orphaned should remain close to their culture and their heritage rather than leaving for a chance at a better life. I'm not entirely sure. All I know for sure is, Lauren was a little bit offended by their questions. When we initially arrived at the Square, I didn't even know we had arrived. The bus parked and we looked like we were on any other street. As usual, I had envisioned something different, a museum-like lot with a big fence around the square and a huge sign naming it as such. But no. It was a simple city block with a statue in the middle, and across the street from the entrance to the Forbidden City. The girls, Linda and I ended up a little bit behind the rest of the group because we had to stop at an ATM, and also because we stopped to watch a group of kids playing a game of hackeysack in the parking, but they used a small metal disc with feathers attached to it instead of a little bean bag. When we got to the Temple of Heaven later on these feather-sacs were being sold all over the place, but this was the first we'd seen of them. We had to cross under the street to get to the Square. It was incredibly busy, as expected, with tourists from all over the globe. I totally understand now why Asian tourists are made fun of so frequently, with their bright matching hats huddling together and following the tour guide carrying a big flag (which could be a Chinese flag, in the shape of a butterfly, anything). The square itself was a huge city block full of statues and monuments to great Chinese leaders, with a few buildings with traditional Chinese architecture surrounding the perimeter. The girls and I followed Linda around, who kept telling us to hurry and not fall behind because Katie and I being Katie and I, stopped and took pictures of everything. A guide's flag with the face of a warrior. A cute little kid. A monument. One of the guards. Anything and everything we'd take pictures of. We're not entirely sure if we were allowed to stand next to the guards and take pictures, but when we weren't off taking pictures on our own, Linda talked to us about the massacre but she'd only give us spurts of information before telling us we needed to keep walking. We were supposed to meet at the flag poles once we past the big monument in the middle, but unfortunately and not surprisingly there were more than one set of flagpoles, so we spent some time searching for the correct poles where the group were. The real allure of the square, aside from the fact that it's an important historical site, was the masses of people walking around. When you think of China, you think of crowds, and this place was swarming. It was almost exhausting, being with that many people, but at the same time so much fun, with so much energy in the air. We finally found the group and crossed back under the street to get to the entrance to the entrance of the Forbidden City. We waited for our turn to go through the first entrance, then waited for almost an hour before we were able to go inside. While we I met a woman whose sister had done Semester at Sea almost fifteen years ago, so we chatted about our trip so far, and she told me that her sister is now living in somewhere like Thailand teaching English. She'd done a volunteer program soon after she graduated as a result of her SAS experience, and ultimately wound up doing international work because of it as well. So, Semester at Sea really can change your life. Once we got into the Forbidden City, we walked around with earphones and an electronic tour guide (my lady spoke in French for the first few minutes, but then her batteries died). The others finally took theirs off as well and we just wandered. I'm not really sure why, but I just wasn't that impressed with the Forbidden City. I mean, not that it wasn't magnificent to look at and be in proximity to all of that history and those beautiful buildings, but I just couldn't fully get into it. I wasn't connecting to it like I had to other places. There really were times in China when I just thought, okay, another this or another that. It's awful to admit, but I suppose there does come a point when you can overdo it. I think too with less travel time between the Asian ports, you didn't have as much recuperation time and reflection time from the previous country before taking on another one full force, so as a result I missed some stuff in China. But the grounds itself was huge, spanning across square miles of space, but even so it was filled with people. And they were all pushers. They didn't care about anything but their own enjoyment and viewing pleasure, so if you were where they wanted to be, you can be sure to catch some shoulder from them. Once we made it through the city we came upon a stunning garden with beautiful rock sculptures. We bought ice cream from a stand and ate while we wandered through the garden before stopping in the bathroom. We waited just so we could use one of the two Western style toilets, and it was our first real experience with the insanity of Chinese women's restrooms. Just like out in the open, they push and don't know the concept of lines. We actually heard a story of how the Chinese are having to practice standing in line for eight hours a day on Sundays just to prepare for the 2008 Olympics. And honestly, it'll do them some good. It was quite a frightening experience, women rushing around all over the place and banging on doors, and rushing out of them still buttoning their pants. That much intensity to use the restroom made Lauren and I quite nervous. After that adventure, we sat down outside on a bench for the last forty minutes waiting for everyone to return. I was quite surprised when I saw someone walking past us with a Starbucks cup, and we were informed that a Starbucks just recently opened INSIDE the Forbidden City. Not just outside and nearby, but inside the gates of the Forbidden City. For a huge Starbucks junkie (drink their coffee every day, worked there, study there and basically live there), it's saying something when even someone like me thinks that having a Starbucks inside a historical site like the Forbidden City is simply asinine. While we were sitting and relaxing for a bit, I had an epiphany. I was never hugged on the trip, and I really missed that contact with people. Not that I didn't want to hug my friends or feel compelled to hug them, but we just didn't hug each other. I told Lauren this and she pulled me up and gave me a huge bear hug, and then proceeded to sit on my lap for awhile and cuddle with me until Katie jumped on top so we could all have a hug. I didn't really think about it for awhile but then once it dawned on me, I really noticed how much it was affecting me. I'm a huge hugger, in that I give huge hugs and hug often, so I'd missed it, without even really realizing it. For the rest of the trip, we hugged daily. After we left the Forbidden City we walked on a pristine tree-lined street that followed alongside a moat outside, and it was one of those moments that made me realize, okay, you're in China, because it was what I'd imagined to see there. The moat, the Forbidden City on the other side of the moat and the wall, Chinese architecture across the street, and tons of people bustling about, and even more attempting to sell us things. Katie and I couldn't quite figure it out because our telling peddlers no just wasn't enough. Firmly or nicely, they'd keep hounding us. Lauren, on the other hand, could tell them once in any tone and they'd walk away. And it would get quite nerve-wracking, with them coming right up into your personal space and shoving their products at you, waving them within inches of you. We followed the street through a neighborhood, passing through a elementary school's parking lot, so we were able to stop and play with the children for a few moments. They were positively adorable, with their little uniforms and precious faces looking up into ours. Some would grab their mothers' hands, as they were being picked up after school, and point at the strange-looking people; others would smile and wave; others would run up and poke us, tap at us to see if, even though we looked different, were the same as their parents and teachers. Our bus was parked alongside the school parking lot, so a few tried to follow us onto the bus as we got on to go to lunch. Kai sat next to Lauren on the bus, as he'd developed a little crush on her after she'd told him she "loved him" at dinner the previous night. Apparently, you can't kid around about those things. He asked her if he could be her boyfriend for the rest of the tour, and by the end he was even talking to her about going to visit him at the University of Michigan, where he was planning to start graduate school in the fall, and also going to visit her in California. He was cute and incredibly sweet, but she just wasn't interested and was having a little trouble handling it because he saw something in front of him that he wanted, so he wasn't going to let her slip away that easily. Katie and I benefited from it for sure, however, because we got much more insight into our tours and had the opportunity to talk to him much more since he hung out with us the rest of the time. We ate lunch in a restaurant four-story building with a different restaurant on each floor. We were escorted up two flights of stairs and into a back room, where we were served the traditional Chinese way, with course upon course placed on a spinning piece of Plexiglas. I've never seen so many cooked whole fish in my life than I did in China. However, I don't think I ever ate anything really that strange, at least that I know of. Now that I think about it, we did assume a lot of it was chicken and beef, so who really knows. Nevertheless, it was all quite tasty and much more like the Chinese food you find in the States than I thought. Then again, we were in touristy areas for much of our time there so perhaps if we'd gone to smaller towns we would have experienced more of intimidating dishes. We'd all agreed to stop at a market for an hour before visiting the Temple of Heaven, and this was the most nerve-wracking shopping experience I've ever had. After coming back to the States, it's so nice to be able to walk through an entire mall and be able to make your own decisions. You choose what store you go into because you have the authority to decide what it is you want. In China, when you go into a market, you are not in the least bit in control. As soon as you walk in those doors, you are at the mercy of the vendors. This particular market was three stories of an open area filled to the max with every possible thing you could think to buy. Enclosed rooms lined the perimeter of each story, and then the interior of the room was lined with rows and rows of vendors' tables. Katie needed a pair of shoes, so we went up the escalator to look, and as soon as you walk by, or even simply look in the direction of their stand, they call out to you. "Miss, miss, come look at this! You want sneaker? You want high heel? You want sandal?" Over, and over, and over. You say no, and they offer you something else. It was hell for me, strong-willed when it comes to shopping because I am not easily swayed, but it must have been the worst possible of all human conditions for someone like Katie, who is the quintessential impulse shopper. She went in there looking for a pair of shoes, and came out with three knockoff pieces of Coach luggage, clothes, and backpacks. And she is exactly why the Chinese women hound the way they do. They show off every last article they have on their stands, and usually, something will appeal to you. So, if you're like Katie, you have to buy it because it's just so cheap. But then, you haggle with them to try to get it for a cheaper price, and if the women are really good saleswomen, they'll find yet another piece that you like and off you "two for your original price" or God forbid three or even four pieces, when really, you didn't want anything to begin with. You only happened to walk by on your way somewhere else. I tried to see it as a cultural experience, an insight into the culture, because I HATE being yelled at to come look, come look. Some women almost hit me in the face with one of her shoes because she was wagging it in her hand, trying to get me to pay attention to it. If we hadn't gotten out of there when we did, after walking down the shoe and bag aisles a couple of times and through one area of clothes, I would have probably yelled at someone working in that market. All you hear is high-pitched Chinese accented English shouting at the top of their lungs, in attempt to be heard over all of the rest of the screaming vendors. All you see is miles and miles of tables packed feet in the air with junk and people weaving and shoving. I understand, you make your living through sales. I understand that. I'm the daughter of a salesman. But seriously, learn some tact. It was scary, and intimidating, and frustrating, and nerve-wracking. No isn't a word they understand, at all. Above all, though, I do give them some credit for their skills. I can appreciate their skills. But they just didn't mesh with me. After the shopping extravaganza/torture session, we visited the Temple of Heaven. The entrance to the temple was like walking through a park, with wide sidewalks and trees and large spans of grass. Once we got inside, we had to walk through covered walkways filled with people playing that same feathered hackeysack game and old men and women playing cards and instruments and singing. That was the coolest part of the temple, were these areas. They were like adult hangouts. Nobody hounded the tourists for money either. They simply sat there enjoying their pastimes. I mean, how cool is that, to after work or on the weekends go hang out and do your thing at the Temple of Heaven? Seriously. After we walked through a second set of gates (we had to walk up this slippery, slanted walkway to get to these gates, so we had some interesting times trying to get up without sliding and falling), you walk underneath a kind of awning and all of a sudden, there's this huge, exquisite temple before you. It was like no temple I'd ever seen before, just a cylindrical structure with windows and a roped off door you can peak through to see pieces of furniture that once belonged to royalty. Katie, Lauren and I ran around taking pictures from every possible angle, even laying on the ground to get good shots. Being blonde, Katie continued attracting a lot of attention, including from a group of Venezuelans and Brazilians. We had a fantastic time chatting with them about how we'd recently been there, and they wanted to meet up with us later but we had a full night planned and plus...it's nice to meet and mingle but sometimes that's all it's meant to be. We'd lost Kai once we'd reached the temple itself and in our photo shoots, but we ran into him again and he tried to take us to the Echo Wall, kind of like the dome in DC you can stand at one end of and whisper at and someone standing in just the right place on the other side can hear you. We walked about a half mile through the garden grounds looking for it, but when we came upon a directory we realized we were going to be incredibly late for our meeting time if we went. So we walked back, talking about religion (Lauren asked what religion Kai was and he replied that he is "a member of the Communist party"). We arrived out front at five pm, our scheduled meeting time, and found no one. Kai called Linda and he related to us that the bus had left us. Katie, Lauren and I were incredibly confused as to how the bus could have left one of the tour guides. The three of us made more sense if they just hadn't counted off yet, but how do you forget Kai? So naturally, we're freaking out because we have no idea how we're going to get to dinner because we don't even know where it's supposed to be, and Kai hadn't said anything about them coming back to get us. So we start walking. Well, we start following Kai, who has started walking. We have no idea where he's going, and he won't answer our questions because he's been trying to call Linda, who won't answer. Finally she calls back and she says she's going to come get us. It was then that we realize they hadn't actually left without us, they'd simply gone to the bus without us. We walked back to the site and saw Linda coming from the back parking lot to save our lost souls. When we got on the bus, Dan threatened, teasing of course, to give us dock time (normal on-ship time for the night you leave port is 9pm, but if you get dock time you have to go back early, or else wait a couple hours to get off the ship when you arrive in the next port) but we had Kai with us so he couldn't really say anything too much about us being late. Safely on the bus, we went to dinner at a place that looked like the Chinese version of the Rain Forest Café (although of course we didn't eat in the main part of the restaurant but in a back room, where we were waited on by women who put red ribbons on our wrists and watched a short dance performance), and after dinner we went to an acrobat show. A teacher would come out on stage and explain, in Chinese, some philosophical aspect of the universe while his words, in both Chinese and English, were put up on screens in a way that reminded me of the beginning of the Star Wars movies on either side of the stage. Then, he would turn the stage over to the performers to do stunts or dances that really had nothing to do with his spiel. And the performances themselves? This show was Chinese Mystere with children. Children. The youngest was no more than eight, and the oldest was eighteen. It seemed a little unethical for children to be doing the things they were doing, the discipline that these sometimes young children were practicing, five of them climbing over each other and balancing thirteen parasols among them, or six standing on one another's shoulders and then tipping completely forward and somehow managing to not shatter themselves. And yet at the same time, it was so incredibly fascinating and cool to watch. They performed things that adults in shows in the States train for. I loved, too, watching the difference between the intense, adult-like focus of these children when they'd perform a stunt, but they also had opportunities to just dance to the music, and you'd be watching kids again. Beyond feeling bad for these kids for the intense training they must go through (and is it even by choice, I wonder?), it was amazing to watch. After the show, I spent the walk home talking to Dan, our RD and a voyager on the Fall '97 trip, talking about plans for the future. Or, more precisely, talking about how I'd banked on something from SAS inspiring me and therefore laying out my next steps. He encouraged me and calmed me, though, by telling me that looking back ten years ago when he went on the voyage, that he can tell me to just relax and let life come my way. Plans I make may fall through, and other unexpected opportunities may arise. He promised me that SAS wouldn't be the last of my travels, that I'd most likely wind up trying to find every opportunity to continue traveling, and to just trust that having a plan isn't always the best way to go. These things I knew already, really, but talking to him about it grounded me, because after all, he's been there before. After we got back to the hotel, most of the girls in the group started getting ready to go
out but I was too tired and I knew we had to get up at 4am to catch our flight to Shanghai, so I stayed behind. I stood outside because I heard some people yelling and banging on pots and pans walking down the street outside of our room, and I watched for awhile, trying to figure out what was going on. It seemed like some kind of demonstration, with one man drumming and others following along behind him, dropping flaming pieces of paper on the ground. I didn't ever hear any sirens so they weren't doing anything illegal, but it was still quite bazaar. And no one could tell me exactly what was going on because no one on shift that night at the hotel spoke English. I learned this because I decided I wanted to go to that internet café by myself. I just really wanted to do something on my own. I wanted to pick somewhere to go, go, and get back to the hotel on my own, without relying on anyone else to get me there. I went down to the front desk to ask for directions, but no one at the front desk spoke English. I was a little frustrated, because you're a hotel and how are you supposed to accommodate me if you can't even understand what I want? But at the same time, I am, after all, in their country so they shouldn't be entirely expected to cater to me. So I was a little flustered and frustrated at first, but then I realized, hey. This is part of the challenge. I could go back up to my room and go to bed, or I can figure this out. So I ripped off a piece of paper with the hotel name written on it in hopes that, if I needed to take a cab, I could show the paper to them and they'd get me back. But I remembered the way, as it was just down the street, make a right and then another right, cross the bridge and you're there. So I walked, with a determined look, down the street and through the residential area behind the hotel. It was so incredibly invigorating, doing this all on my own. I passed street vendors selling corn out of carts and out of the back of their trucks. I watched children play in the street as their families looked on. I passed people sweeping the street. And no one bothered me. I walked quickly, but no so fast that I would look like a nervous, lost tourist, and made my way there. It was seriously a ten-minute walk through a residential neighborhood, so nothing major, but it really felt good and reassured me that yes, I can travel on my own. I'd gotten so used to having SAS do everything for me for the most part that I didn't know if I'd be able to do it any other way. But, hey, I can. I went into the café and bought some time, which was quite difficult because this is a local hangout and I was THE only white person in the place, so even as I stood in what I thought was a line at the counter, the girls behind the desk passed me over and would help people who came up minutes after me. I finally had to lean over the counter a little bit and wave my money at her to get her attention, which I felt rude doing but I wanted to be helped! When I finally got a seat at one of the nearly 100 computers in the café, I sent some emails to friends and tried to not pay too much attention to the stares. I will never forget that experience, of feeling incredibly vulnerable but at the same time so empowered. I didn't care that people were intrigued by the foreigner, because hey, I could have been watching a TV movie alone in my hotel room, the same movie I saw a young guy next to me watching on the computer. When I was finished I went outside to try to catch a cab. I didn't know if I was going to be able to catch one at 11 at night or I'd have to walk back, but when I got outside there was a cab parked out front. I showed the old man driver my piece of paper with the hotel written on it, and he waved me in. We hadn't exchanged a word so I didn't yet know if he spoke English. Next time, I'll be sure to check, just in case there's a misunderstanding about the location of a place. So I get in and he starts driving, and he doesn't turn on the road I know. At first I think, okay, he lives in Beijing, he knows it better than I, so I told myself to remain calm. All the while, this man is blabbering away at me in Chinese as he looks at me from the rearview mirror, and he can tell by the confused expression on my face that I don't understand him. I say in English I don't understand and shrug, and he simply laughs and keeps talking. A few minutes more pass, and he starts to get on the freeway. Now, I don't know much but I know for certain we don't need to get on the freeway. Now I start to panic because he knows I don't speak Chinese, he doesn't speak English, and he's taking me on the freeway to God knows where and all I have is a piece of paper with the hotel name written on it. Thoughts race through my mind of how I'm going to be stuck in Beijing by myself surrounded by people who know nothing of my language. I wave to him and point behind, obviously frantic, and the dude laughs. I point again behind us, then point at the paper, and he blurts out some more in Chinese but turns the car around. He keeps talking and I think even asking me questions, judging by the fluctuations in his tone of voice, which, now that we're back on the right track I can appreciate and laugh at because, you know I can't understand you. I start to recognize buildings, and all of my butterflies fade, and five minutes later I was walking through the doors of the hotel. So, yes, Brianna, you can travel solo.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177032360/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177032360/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1177032360/tpod.html Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:30:05 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Beijing, China

Lauren and I were roommates at the hotel with a hole in the hallway floor, and we woke up for breakfast together at 7am. We went downstairs but it wasn't clear to us exactly where we were to dine, since the area that looked like the dining room was completely empty. We were approaching the front desk to ask to where to go when Kai came out of a side door of the lobby. Apparently we looked confused because he yelled over to us before sticking his arm straight out in front of him and snapping three times. Lauren and I couldn't help stifling small chuckles, because we'd never seen anyone snap like that at anything other than a dog or in movies that want to make a point about how snotty someone is (usually a woman- I'm thinking of the character Natasha in Bridget Jones's Diary). And they, that's just how they do it in China. If you don't know someone, to get their attention, you snap. After he got our attention and directed us to a back room, we me the rest of our group seated together at three tables to eat Chinese noodles, a yellow squiggly jiggly with a slightly sweet taste, hard-boiled goose eggs (much saltier than chicken eggs), noodle soup, and rice. This is what we ate for breakfast every day, and often times lunch, along with the fried meats dishes. Unfortunately, I found out that even after my extensive chopstick lesson the previous night, I was still inept at using chopsticks. (I have since mastered the technique...well, mastered in terms of being the best I've ever been at using chopsticks, but I am still by no means a whiz at them.) But I struggled through, refusing to give up, even though the area around my place was by far the messiest part of the table. After breakfast, we loaded up the busses and drove to a Jade factory. I had no idea that this was going to be part of the itinerary, but these countries have such a way of sneaking in excursions to factories and markets to try to generate revenue. We drove nearly an hour from our hotel in order to get there, and normally I would enjoy the long rides and take advantage of the opportunity to look at the scenery, but Beijing just isn't pretty. The entire city is covered in smog and you couldn't see anything when we got out to the freeways that should have allowed me more views of the landscapes and cityscapes in the distance. Instead, I became fast friends with the color grey. We did drive past a few sites where Olympic events will be held, which was pretty exciting. I have to say, we've really been fortunate in that nearly every place we've gone to has had something significant going on there, whether it was Carnaval in Brazil, Cambodian New Year, or preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games. I'm pretty upset at myself that I wasn't able to find a Beijing 2008 t-shirt once I finally decided I wanted one, but I'm sure it's one of those things you can find online, somewhere. I just didn't buy a lot of shirts in the different countries like everyone else did. I only bought t-shirts in Cambodia because I spilled yogurt on me the instant we got on the bus to fly there, so I needed a shirt to wear the last day. But really, what was I thinking? It's not like the next time I go to China I'm going to be able to just pick up an Olympics shirt. I'm just not a shopper. And I really, really got worn out from shopping because really, I was going through my stuff the other day, trying to figure out how I'm going to pack all of the stuff that I bought, and I didn't buy much at all from China or Japan aside from my fabrics and good luck charms and my presents for other people. I just felt like I was dragging while I was in China. On the drive to the Jade factory, I just didn't feel like I wanted to look out the window and take it all in, like I did in the first few countries. Perhaps because these bigger cities are closer to what I'm used to back in the States. Or just because Beijing wasn't as attractive. I've seen urban areas before, and what I'm really interested in seeing are the areas that aren't built up and urbanized. I know what urban looks like. I think that's one of the downsides of Semester at Sea, is that you only have so much time and if you want to go do the big things, like the Taj or the Great Wall, you're getting shuffled by SAS to the sites and therefore you don't get to go to go where you want. I feel myself rambling and constantly shifting topics as I write this, but as I reflect on China it just ticks me off a little bit. Why did I have to spend so much time shopping? I didn't want to go to a Jade Market. I didn't want to go shop. I'll admit, it was fun. It was fascinating to see jewelry and statues crafted right in front of me. We were taken on a tour and we could watch the workers through the other side of the glass. But at the same time, Dan (my RD and the trip leader) was discussing how odd it must be to work there and be put on display all of the time. It seemed a little bit like a human zoo. Me, personally, I hate when people look over my shoulder when I'm working, especially writing. So for that to be my job, to be expected not only to make things but to be watched as I make them, I'd struggle with that. After a brief tour of the work areas, we were escorted into a room where our guide, who was a little bit robotic in her presentation, taught us how to test for real Jade. Hold it up to the light and scratch it. Real jade, unlike glass, won't be as transparent because you'll be able to see the nuances of the gem in the light. Jade will also leave a mark on paper because it's softer. Lauren, as we were sorry to learn, had been fooled into buying a glass bracelet passed off as jade in Cambodia. Following the presentation, we had time to shop. I saw the most interesting products of all, which were a pillow and a mattress. I had no idea that one could produce pillows out of pieces of jade tautly strung together in cylindrical shapes. We could test them out by pressing our faces up against them, and they seemed like they would be comfortable enough. I almost bought one just so I could see what the side of my face would look like after having jade pressed to my cheek for six hours. We then moved on to peruse the miles and miles of jewelry cases and shelves full of all kinds of sculptures. My favorite was a carving of jade where the technician worked from the outside in, creating different rings that are still attached to the main outer ring, to symbolize family. I also enjoyed the hand-painted perfume bottles and the necklaces in different colors of jade. I spent some time bargaining for the pieces I bought as gifts, which they said you couldn't do in a factory, but as Dad told me, the worst they can say is no, right? Everyone knows that prices are higher in factories, and with the number of things I was getting as presents, they could afford to give me a little discount. I got a huge kick out of the show my salesman put on for me, though. When I finally did decide what I wanted, after having the "best necklace" and the "best bracelets" pointed out to me, I'd tell him my price. He would fold his hands, bow slightly, and ask me to wait one moment as he went to check with his manager. The manager would come back, the salesman would tell his boss my price, and the manager wouldn't hesitate before agreeing to it. A perfume bottle caught my eye so I went to look at it as he wrapped up my other selections, and when I told him I wanted to add it to my collection if he could give me everything for a certain price, we went through the same routine. Honestly, it looked like the manager was getting a little annoyed with my salesman for continuing to call him over to approve my prices. The manager would approach with determination in his walk but as soon as he saw it was me, he'd just chuckle to himself, pretend to listen to his guy tell him my price, smile, and nod. Thinking back on it now, I probably could have done a lot better with my bargaining if it had been so easy. Oh, well. When I was done I made my way back to the front and bought some coffee and a couple of shot glasses with Olympic events on them. The mascot is a Power-Puff Girl looking thing, sort of humanlike but looking a bit like a panda, and on each shot glass it was playing a different sport. Classy, the only Olympic Games paraphernalia I bought was shot glasses. Again, oh, well. Our next stop after the factory was a visit to the Ming Tombs, which are actually spread out over miles and miles of land, so we just went to one area, and it was absolutely stunning. We had to walk past rows of screaming ladies, trying to get us to buy their t-shirts and parasols and memory cards. At least in China people trying to sell you things don't come up to you and wave their merchandise in your face; no, here, they literally scream at you. "Madame, madame! T-shirt!" It must be really difficult for children to visit these places, because they always want to touch things, at the very least look. So I'm sure as soon as they touch something, the vendors are heckling the mothers and fathers for money. But then at the same time, I feel terrible ignoring them. This is, after all, how they make their living. Really, though, a chill pill would help. At least to us Americans, being screamed at isn't going to tempt us to buy things. And it just cracks me up how each of the ladies sells the same thing at her table as the women on either side of her. And yet, when you say no to one and walk to another with the same things you said no to the first time, somehow it's going to be more appealing at this table? And I'm not swayed by pretty people, so I'm not going to buy something from her just because she's prettier. Perhaps that works sometimes, I'm not sure. I think it's just their culture though. They're loud, they are in your face, they are pushy. So since they shove past you in line, I can't really be surprised that their sales techniques include yelling out at people. After we made it past the screaming women, we found ourselves in a beautiful garden, and not a tomb like I'd expected at all. Linda explained to us that the tombs are actually scattered all over, and that many different locations actually comprise what is called the Ming Tombs, and we were just at once location. We were in a gated, mile-long walkway through a garden with statues of famous Chinese leaders, poets, and other people of influence, as well as animals. We walked past green grass, flowers, and the statues while soft classical music played from speakers planted all over the garden. I'd been expecting a tomb, but this was absolutely spectacular. Katie, Lauren and I walked with Linda most of the way and took pictures together. She was just such an outgoing person, so ready to jump into a picture or direct us to this statue of the lion because we'd look really cute peeking out of its legs. And Katie and I had started a new tradition of getting dizzy wherever we possibly could, which Linda thought was hilarious so she joined in. It took us about an hour to walk through, and we just chatted and took pictures the whole way, with Linda hurrying us along if we took too long so as not to get too far behind the rest of the group. She stuck with us on our climb up the Great Wall as well. That's what I liked so much about my visit to China, was the opportunity to get to know these two students so well. That's what makes the world seem so small to me, is that in talking to them, aside from different traditions and cultures, they're really not that much different, at least to me. They too have families, and problems with school, and problems in general, goals, and opinions, and the desire to go out and have fun. Regardless of how we think we should deal with the problems of the world or of what government you support or how you spend all of your spare time studying because the country is so competitive that you feel you have no other choice or of how you leave your chopsticks in your bowl, from what I've seen people are all fundamentally the same, aside from the obvious differences in temperaments and everything else that makes us different from one another. But it's when things begin to get bigger and groups start to form, that's when you start to see differences. Duh. But really, I don't think I expected people to be as similar to me as they were. Perhaps it was a naïve expectation, but I remember just being surprised at how similar Linda and I were, and how I thought about how I knew people like Kai who were shy and nervous and anal. I guess I just had this thought process that these people from other countries were going to be so different, but in so many ways they're not. And that's what makes it so hard for me and makes me question so much now is because how can people do some of the things we do to each other when if we simply had a conversation with most of them, we'd see just how similar we could be? The Chinese don't hate us, as most of the world doesn't really hate Americans. They just dislike our leaders but they understand that we are not our leaders and thus they have no reason to not like us. And in talking to her, the three of us were becoming fast friends with her. We left the tomb and drove to the Great Wall, which I couldn't really see until we got right up close to it because of all of the pollution. But once I did see it and started climbing, I thought, what else could I possibly say at this point? We were on the Great Wall. Enough said. Though it really wasn't what I expected it to be. I thought it was going to be one, continuous wall built up on the hills that we would have four hours to walk alongside, but our one section of the wall, of many many miles of sections, we were at we had to actually climb. It was climbing stairs. And silly me, I'm looking up at the wall from the parking lot below thinking, okay, I can see the watch tower from here. Why do we need three hours here because we can totally make it to that point, which is the top right?, in so much less time than three hours. Of course, when we climbed the stairs passing elderly folk and being passed by energetic youngsters and reached that point, we quickly realized we had much further to go until we reached the top. So we continued climbing. We climbed for an hour and a half, up stone stairs. At the beginning of the climb we'd stop every once in awhile to look at the view, which unfortunately wasn't as impressive as I'd hoped it would be because of the thick blankets of smog on the hills (and we were quite a few miles outside of the city itself). My pictures came out terribly because the wall was barely visible in them, but that doesn't matter much anyway because on the way down my memory card, the two gig memory card I'd purchased from an old lady at a stand outside of the Ming Tombs for the equivalent of twenty US dollars, failed. Looking back on it, it was quite obvious that it would probably be flawed, so why I used it to take all of my pictures on the Great Wall I haven't a clue. And of course I'd left my other memory card in my bag on the bus, so I was SOL, except for Katie who took pictures for me. But, until that point, I kept snapping away on the way up to the top. It was quite interesting too how the farther up the wall you climbed, the cheaper the merchandise became. At every lookout tower women would be perched selling souvenir t-shirts and sweatshirts reading "I climbed the Great Wall" and of course, bottles of water. A sweatshirt that cost 50 bucks at the bottom of the wall cost 20 at the top. I suppose, if you're lazy, you have to pay more. I just felt horrible for the people who have to make that climb every single day, just to sell their stuff even cheaper than the people who work at the bottom. Maybe they all work together and they rotate. I'd actually hope so because my goodness, to have to sweat and struggle up those stairs like that on a daily basis, just to sell your goods at a significantly reduced price, that's awful to me. The last stand was still about a half an hour from the top, though it was the last watch tower. It may have been half an hour, however, because by this point Lauren, Linda and I were quite tired so we were going a bit slower than we'd started out going in the beginning. Linda was a trooper though, continuing to encourage us and at times push us, because we only had so much time, we have to make it to the top before the bus leaves us! We had plenty of time still, but we appreciated her encouragement, for the most part. When you're huffing and puffing, hot and sweaty, and discouraged by the fact that everyone's saying you're close and yet you still can't see the top, sometimes you can get a little bit annoyed. But indeed, we persevered and we all made it to the top. Looking out over everything- nothing but the hills and the wall on three sides, the tiny speck of a parking lot and the line of wall we climbed to get to that point, it was amazing. There I was, standing on the Great Wall of China. I had burned my calves and thighs intentionally to see and touch this phenomenal piece of history that I'd been reading about in my history books since elementary school. But the coolest part of reaching the top was that it's tradition to scream once you get to the top. By the time Lauren, Linda and I made it up there were twelve or so other girls up there and a few more trickled up after us, so Linda orchestrated a group scream rather than fifteen individual screams, so in unison we all yelled at the top of our lungs for as long as we could. Our voices filled the air for miles around us and of course my ears, and as I listened, my arms outstretched and my face looking up at the sky, it was one of those moments when you truly feel alive. It was a release, a cathartic moment to let out all of this energy and emotion that had been filling my entire being for so long. It made everything real. The excitement, the doubt, the supreme essence of this entire journey, of experiencing and taking in the entire world, it was all rushing through my veins. I knew that it hadn't all been a dream because here I was, feeling its effects as I stood there at the top of the Great Wall screaming. I'd had to convince myself before that I wasn't dreaming, but at that moment, I could feel how real it had all been. To let it all out, all of the emotions from panic to ecstasy that I'd been experiencing day in and day out for the past 75 days, it had to have been there in the first place. And when out it went into the Chinese air in the form of a scream, I knew it had all been real. On the way back down the Wall, which was obviously much easier than the trek up, we had to stop constantly because everyone wanted to take pictures with Katie. Blonde hair isn't all that prevalent in Asian countries, so tourists from all over wanted pictures not with the Great Wall they were climbing, but with the blonde girl. It was hilarious to watch, because as desperately as they wanted the pictures they were too embarrassed to ask her for a picture. So what they would do instead is follow close behind or in front of her and pretend to take pictures of the wall, but really get her. When they'd stop in front of her, she'd keep running into them. Or, when she'd try to move out of the way, they'd chase after her so she wouldn't leave before they got their pictures. After she realized what was going on she'd just ask them if they wanted a picture, and they were so incredibly pleased to not have to be sneaky about it. So I played photographer for them, because brunette hair was boring, and Katie was a star for the day. I loved it. Once we finally made it down, we stopped at the shop at the very bottom to buy shirts and sweatshirts, but realized how much more expensive they were so we hiked the first set of stairs again to get to a little cheaper price for "I Climbed the Great Wall" memorabilia. I could have killed someone at that point, walking back up the stairs. My legs burned like no other point in my life. We still had about a half-hour before getting back on the bus, so we treated ourselves to a beer and ice cream bars. We contemplated sleeping in the Great Wall, but we had no idea how to go about it at that point. A cab didn't seem too promising to catch to take us to a spot where we could, plus it was still early so we would have had nothing at all to do. So, disappointed about not being able to sleep there but amazed we'd actually climbed the Wall, we climbed back onto the bus and drove back into the city for dinner, and it was incredible to realize that even after the passage of three hours, the skyline didn't look any different. It was no darker at 5pm than it was at 2pm because of the smog. Just unbelievable. After we made it back in, which took forever because the city's so damn big and so damn busy, we went to the Remnin University campus to have dinner. The University had set up a special room attached to the cafeteria for us, and each of the seven or so tables had a university student there for us to talk to. After piling our plates with amazing food from the buffet line, we ate and played a game with our student, whose name I couldn't understand. He asked if we'd ever played the Number Game, and taught us how. He gave someone his cell phone, had them pick a number, and we went around the table guessing the number. With each guess they'd tell us higher or lower, and whoever guessed the number essentially lost because he or she had to do whatever the cell phone holder asked them to do. The first time, Lauren "lost" and was instructed by the Chinese student, who had picked the number, to make an announcement to our student tour guide, Kai, that she was in love with him. (This backfired tremendously, which I will get to later) I "lost" and was instructed by Katie, who'd chosen the number (I obviously shouldn't have guessed 666 which I just knew she'd pick because I know her too well) to stand up in front of the room and do something funny. Our exchange student suggested that I get up and dance, but obviously I couldn't dance alone so, quite to his surprise, I pulled him up with me and we did a little jig in front of the group. He had no idea how to dance, so we completely fudged it, but it was so much fun to laugh and make fools of ourselves. By this time, everyone was done eating so we were ushered outside to meet with our student tour guides from the University. We were split up so that each tour guide had no more than two SAS students. I was lucky and had one eighteen-year old girl, Claudia, all to myself. She introduced herself and led me around campus. We talked about our families (including about her mother's procedure after she gave birth to Claudia because of the one-child limit), the education systems in China and in America (her best test scores in high school awarded her a scholarship to Remnin to study Economics, so that's what she's doing, and not surprisingly she was fascinated by the freedom I have to choose where I wanted to go and what I wanted to study), and she told me about how she wants to do an exchange program at MIT in the next year or two. She first took me to her apartment where she lives with her five other roommates, most of which she gets along with. I asked if she goes home often, and she says that she stays on campus over the summer and only goes home for a week or so at Christmas. Home for her is the same town that Mao was from, a piece of trivia she was obviously very proud of. I asked her a couple of other times where she was from, to try to get her to tell me the name of the town, but that seemed inconsequential if you knew Mao was born there as well. She told me about the holiday tradition there, when the entire family gathers together, eats, and shoots off fireworks. She didn't quite know what to call them when she was explaining them to me. She told me you shot them off and they exploded light, which I thought was just adorable. She also stopped so we could take pictures constantly, and her favorite pose was standing next to me and giving me bunny ears. So I have bunny ears standing in front of the library of the University, in front of the soccer field and track where everyone was hanging out after night had fallen, and in front of statues with the founders of the University. She took me to one of her favorite lounges, a coffee house type hangout on the main floor of one of the dorms, where she'll do homework or hang out with her friends when she has time, and it looked just like any other big university. She then took me to the building where most of her classes were in, and the coolest part about it was the reader board that they had in the entrance of the building, listing which classes were being offered which that day, what room they were in, what time they were at, and the professor. We then walked down a hallway so I could peek into a classroom, all of which were full even at 8:30 at night. As we walked from the academic building to the main park on campus, I asked her what she likes to do for fun. More specifically, I asked her what she did in her free time, and she told me she studies. She says a couple of times a week she'll go play tennis, but has to for a tennis course she is taking at the University. She says she never sees friends and rarely talks to her family because she is busy with school work from her eight-course load. I looked at her in amazement, asking how she could ever find the time to take eight courses, as I sometimes find my four-course schedule overwhelming, and she made it seem like it wasn't that big of a deal to her at all. She explained she only has some of those classes once a week, so that seemed to satisfy her. We walked through the park and realized we were running late, so we rushed back to meet the rest of the group. We exchanged email address, and I gave her the red Frisbee with "SAS" printed on it, and she was so touched that she took her charm her Mom had given her off her cell phone to give to me. I tried to insist she didn't need to do it, but it's rude not to accept gifts, so I gratefully accepted it. We hugged each other several times before saying goodbye, and even after only an hour it was hard to say goodbye. The mood as we left the campus to walk back to our hotel was a mixture between excitement and sadness. Even in such a short time, many of us had gotten close to our students. I laughed at myself, too, because all day I'd been nervous about one-on-one time with a student. I don't know why it is that I fret so much about interacting with people, wondering what I'm supposed to say and talk about. And then of course, it all came so naturally and I had to wonder why I was ever nervous at all. On our walk back to the hotel I talked to Dan about my going to Tanzania to volunteer for a month and he convinced me that if I had a choice, I should opt to teach English because of how great it would look on a resume. That coupled with my Semester at Sea experience, he said a lot of people would be interested in talking to me. That's one of the things I really feel I missed out on with the whole Semester at Sea experience was the life-changing part of it. Of course, I am changed because of it, but unlike with so many people I know, Katie included, my experience wasn't so much life-changing as it was life-assuring. I'd already had ideas of what I wanted to do before I went on the voyage, and what I saw and did only deepened my desire to use my life to do good in this world. I'd hoped it would help me figure out more specifically how, which it didn't. At least, not that I recognize yet. But it's a hard question to be asked now that I'm home, is how do you think it's changed you? I feel like now that I'm home, in some ways I've done exactly what I feared I would do. I was talking to Amanda the other day as I was rereading all of the emails that I'd sent to friends and family while I was away, and I remember as I read them so vividly the emotional experience of it all, and yet when I look at what I'm doing now, not a lot has changed. I do silly things like make sure I turn off the lights when I leave a room or not leave the water running or don't waste, things that I should have been doing before anyway, but I definitely do things like that now. For awhile once I got home, I didn't want to drink Starbucks anymore for fear of how big corporations take advantage of developing countries, but here I sit at Starbucks, drinking my soy latte. If something like what I experienced can't truly change a person, is there anything that ever will? Will we ever find a way to make the changes the world needs to make it better for everyone? We all, myself included, can talk about our desires to and our ideas of how to do it, but then we return to our lives. It's exactly what our wine tour guide was talking to me about. You can only do what you can do. But I'm desperate to find a way out of that. I mean, I suppose the fact that even after leaving my journals all summer I've now returned to them, with every intent to keep working on them until I either get lucky and get them out there or have at least tried like hell to. I suppose right now, at this point in my life, it's what I can do.

After we walked back to the hotel, Lauren, Katie and I got ready to go out with Linda and two other girls from our SAS group. We all agreed we didn't want to have too late of a night so we'd save karaoke for another night, but we wanted to do something. So, we piled into two cabs and drove to a pretty deserted-looking area with one strip of bars and restaurants. We tried one but for some reason Linda wasn't satisfied, so we walked through the mud to one a couple doors down. This place was the cutest place I've ever seen. There were pictures and dried flowers and books pasted to the wall, the booths were cozy and intimate, and the place itself was no bigger than a small coffee shop, and with five American girls we were certainly a hit. Everyone came by to at least say hi, and several people sat down to talk to us. We ordered popcorn to snack on, and Linda insisted that we try her favorite drink, Green tea and Chivas whiskey. We sipped our drinks and visited, talking girl talk and gushing about how we'd all climbed the Great Wall only a few hours ago. Truly, I still can't fully grasp how lucky I was to do all that I did in those three months. Amazing.

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176945660/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176945660/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176945660/tpod.html Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:25:43 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Beijing, China

Okay, so I'm trying really hard not to get too frustrated. But, I got my hopes up that I would be able to get my cell phone to work, and it seems like it's just not written in the stars for me to be able to access my voicemails or call home from my cell phone while I'm out of the United States. I went to an internet café to get the toll free number for T-Mobile so that I could call from the hotel and see if I would be able to get my phone to work. However, the 1-800 number isn't working. I'm not surprised, but I'd heard from so many people that their cell phones work in China. And mine, I'm just having trouble with my SIM card and if at least I can talk to someone from T-Mobile and have them tell me that there's no hope, at least I will have exhausted all of my options. Right now, though, I feel like I would be able to do what I wanted to do if I had resources available to me, like Internet in the hotel so I could email them, or make sure I had the correct number. But, I have no Internet, no phone number, so no cell phone. And I'm trying, really hard, not to be frustrated. On the other hand, though, the gentleman at the front desk of our little hotel on the Remnin University campus in Beijing was incredibly kind to me, despite our language barrier. He spoke little English, but never got frustrated with me when he did not understand. In fact, as his forehead wrinkled in concentration when he was trying to find the English words in his head to translate to me, I felt bad for him and thus felt like I'd be a horrible person if I got frustrated with him. But it was not him I was frustrated with, that I am trying to not be flustered by. Everything is simply more complicated when you leave home. Nothing is a walk in the park. I suppose I hadn't really learned that lesson as well as I should have by this point. I went to an Internet café and couldn't find what I wanted online so I thought, hey, I'll just get the 1-800 number and call the US using the payphone and put it on my credit card. Silly me to think it was going to be that simple. First of all, the pay phone in the hotel isn't working. You insert your credit card and can dial three numbers, in my case 1-8-0, before it gives you a busy signal. Okay, that's fine. I can use the phone at the front desk, right? No problem. I go up and ask him, fighting to come up with the simplest words possible to explain what I want. I tell him I want to call a toll free number. He doesn't understand that. He sees my cell phone that I'm wanting to troubleshoot, or something, when I call T-Mobile, and he says that I cannot use the house phone to call my cell phone. I tell him no, I want to call the company in the US. He understands this, and picks up the phone. I pull out my credit card to ask him if I could use this to pay, he says no, because it is a national card. His hotel only accepts Chinese credit cards. I think I breathed out heavily, not at him but at the situation, which I knew in my head but he didn't, and yet he showed no emotion on his face except for a smile. Katie came over to me, as she was sitting on the couch waiting for help to call Victor at another hotel in Beijing, and says she has cash. I ask the man if this will work, and he says yes. Finally, we're getting somewhere. I pick up the phone and he says no, no, not yet. He calls the operator, waits a few moments, and tells me I can now open the phone. He explains to me that I need to dial 9-0-0-1 and then my number. I do, and I get a busy signal. I try again. A male voice speaking Chinese comes on the line. Again, a sigh, and I shut the phone. I try once more, and when the voice comes up again, I listen through, and a woman speaking English tells me the phone number is unavailable. Okay, it's alright. I didn't write it down, but typed it out a few times over the keyboard at the internet café as muscle memory. I tried a second number, hoping I'd just remembered wrong. Nothing. I put the phone down, a little harder than I should have, but I had my laptop. I had more options still. I set my laptop on the counter to see if I could set up an internet connection, but the hotel has no internet. So, I couldn't get on and get the correct number. Instead, I typed all of the possible numbers on my laptop, called each one, and every time arrived at the same lady who was becoming increasingly annoying to hear. It's just not meant to be. And here's this little man, a little taller than me and probably in his early fifties but still claiming a full head of dark hair, square glasses, a blue suit, and a smile. It must be hard, really, dealing with impatient Americans at least twice a year when the ship ports in Hong Kong. I'm not entirely sure that these people don't have a word in Chinese for "impatience". Flustered I am, but frustrated I am not. In fact, I am grateful because as I sit here, I'm watching our exchange student walk back outside after she came from wherever she was to help another girl try to figure out how to make an international phone call using a prepaid phone card. Really, we have something to learn from these people.

I woke up today at 6:45am. I hadn't set an alarm, but woke up on my own. I didn't want to get up yet, even though I knew I had to pack, eat, and be ready to go to the Union at 9am. I dozed off and on until 7:45 when I called Lauren to wake her up, but she'd gone to breakfast already. I showered and went to eat with Blake and Katie before doing my final packing and meeting our group in the Union. My resident director, Dan, is our trip leader, and he handed out Frisbees to us to give to the university students we'll meet on our program. A group of twenty-five of us have traveled to Beijing to go on tours led by students of Remnin University and spend our nights dining with them and hanging out with them. It's sort of a student exchange, but we all travel to them at their home university. We left on time and got on the bus for the forty-minute drive to the airport. (Okay, and the girl that came to help Roxanne out with the phone card situation just came down to talk to me and ask me what I was doing. We chatted about why I wasn't going out because I should go out and see the nightlife in Beijing, and we agreed to talk tomorrow about some good places to go over the next couple of nights. The best part was, though, when she asked me my name. She tried to say Brianna, but I told her she could just call me Bri if it was easier for her, and she exclaims "Desperate Housewives"! Thank you, Marcia Cross, because now Linda's never going to forget my name.) On the way there, we crossed the longest suspension bridge in the world over a beautiful harbor, and Lauren and I decided that not only does Hong Kong remind us of Manhattan and San Francisco, but also Hawaii. Put the three together in one city and you've got Hong Kong. She asked me as we looked out the window at the lush tropical landscape on the mountains if I was serious about moving to Hong Kong, and I didn't get to answer before our guide came over the loudspeaker to make an announcement, but I'm considering it. I'm not ready to make any decisions about anything while I'm on this trip, because it's easy to fall in love with absolutely everything and want to send your life in one direction or another while you're there. I'd love to do my IHP program after I graduate. But then, if Lauren's serious and I realize I'm serious about it, why not move to Hong Kong for a year? But then, a lot can happen in a year, so what happens if I meet someone, or Kat and I decide we really do want to go to London? There are so many possibilities, and when I look back to high school, all of the changes in direction I took over a period of six months or so, I feel hesitant to make any plans whatsoever. But, it's wonderful to know that I am lucky enough to have so many possibilities. We were eating dinner tonight at a restaurant, after we made it to Beijing, that Semester at Sea made him want to travel even more, and that he uses his summers because he's a teacher to travel all over the world, and that he met his fiancée while he was hiking Machu Pichu in Peru. There is positively no end to the number of possible ways my life could play out. None. But then I arrive at the same question. Who am I anymore? Am I someone who never wants to remain in one place and travel all the time? Am I someone who wants to move to my tent in Africa and work with the people there? Do I want to get a job somewhere in the States but travel as much as I can? Do I want to live in a major city in the US other than my home town, or do I want to live close to my family? None of these questions do I have clear answers for at this point. But, again, I suppose now is not the time to have answers. I know it will all work itself out, but it never stops feeling so big and so impenetrable. But then again, what fun would life be if I had all the answers before I got to live and find them? After we got to the airport, another one with a setup much more like a mall than an airport, we checked in and found a Starbucks and some food before our flight. The security checkpoint was incredibly efficient, with multiple lines being sent through multiple metal detectors, and with women dispensing containers to us to place our smaller items in and taking our bags from us to put on the scanners. It made the process so much smoother, having someone there to do it for you and keep it all moving. Within five minutes of getting in line our group of four, Katie, Lauren, Bryan and I, had made it through and were looking out at the huge multistory complex, trying to decide which way was going to take us to food. We found an interactive computerized map, but it didn't work so we just started walking. We finally found the Starbucks and the fast food area, and feasted on some Popeye's Chicken and Burger King. "We need comfort food when we're traveling," she said, so comfort food we ate. We bought out the entire Millie's Cookies store to hold us over on the three hour flight and made our way to the gate. The airport, I can't get over it. Normally they're so stressful because people are rushing around, stressed about something. But this place is just so massive that there's room for everyone to be in whatever mood they want to be in and not bother anyone else. And because you never really got too close to anyone else, didn't encounter higher stress levels than your own, it was an incredibly relaxed atmosphere. Plus, the staff and security guards and attendants were cheerful and smiling constantly, so it put all of us travelers at ease. Just as I signed onto the free wireless internet it was time to board the plane, where I sat for the next three hours writing journal entries, sipping a glass of complimentary white wine, and rocking out to music with Katie and Lauren that they had on their iPods. Lauren and I had had a crying episode at the bar last night, after our emotional conversation with Becca, realizing that in less than a month we won't have each other there every moment of every day. I've said it and I'll say it again, traveling around the world with people bonds you to them in a way like nothing else. It's not better or stronger than the bonds you have with friends back home or at school, simply different. But it's there, and it's going to hurt like hell to say good-bye until I get to see them next. And I realized it again, as we sat together in the middle row of the eight-row plane after we'd juggled people around so we could sit together, dancing to the music in our ears. I love these girls, and I love my life. I was just so excited to be on this trip with them, and going to Beijing, that nothing could calm me down. I felt giddy, and it intensified when we finally landed (and by the way, there's a camera on the plane that videos the taxi, the take-off, and the landing of the plane, so we got to watch our take-off and landing on the TV screens- pretty bizarre), made it through Customs, and got on our busses, Katie and I got even more wild. She shared her headphones with me and we sat in our seats, dancing to club music as Lauren and Bryan in the seats next to us and Dan in front of us gave us strange looks throughout the hour-long bus ride to the restaurant from the airport. Beijing isn't what I expected it would be, at least not yet. It's a big city, with a lot of wide open spaces but also a lot of concentrations of tall buildings. We couldn't see very far out because of a thick layer of something, either pollution or haze or something, but driving on the freeway certainly wasn't anything exciting. We passed a couple of fields of trees that were planted precisely and in perfect alignment forwards, backwards, and sideways, but the rest of the time it was a view just like one you'd see in any other major city. We arrived in a more downtown area, where the streets began to gently roll and the restaurants and bright neon Chinese characters started to appear. The Chinese balls are everywhere on the outside of buildings, as is "Beijing 2008" as they are to host the Olympic Games next year. We pulled up to a restaurant that looked like a Chinese pagoda from the outside, and we all shuffled in to eat a meal of Peking duck. I never said it before because I'd never really experienced it, but I don't like duck. If I had the way we ate it would have been delicious, in a rice crepe smothered in sweet sauce and filled with duck, cucumbers, and another crunchy vegetable I couldn't identify. The sweetness of the sauce mixed with the crunchy and tender textures of the stuffing would have been even more of a culinary delight had I enjoyed the flavor of the duck. Everyone else at the table loved it, but me, I'm just not a fan. But I did try it, along with some other meats and vegetables. Our next stop was the hotel about ten minutes away, in a more residential, local neighborhood than where our restaurant was. Traffic was thick and people filled the sidewalks by our restaurants, and the view beyond was blocked by the neon lights outside of three and four story buildings, but our hotel's on the university campus, and I have to say it's quiet. It's borderline creepy, like a neighborhood I probably would have avoided otherwise. It's safe, I think, but incredibly dark. The only light comes from the buildings, so streets are dark around the hotel. We checked in and dropped our bags off before exploring the area for a bit. One of the university students who will be our tour guide, Chi, walked a group of us wanting to go to an internet café out of the hotel and basically in a big square to a more commercial area, and the walk there was a little bit nerve-wracking. Like I said, it was dark, and not a lot of activity was going on in the shops and restaurants we passed. Instead, people were walking on the sidewalks and families were selling fruit and snacks out of carts or out of their cars. I saw one pickup truck completely filled with watermelons and the man just hanging out in the cab, the window down and his leg propped on the door. It just seemed so quiet, with only a few cars driving by, and absolutely no motorcycles. After about ten minutes and two right-turns, we made it to our intended destination, or at least closer to it. Chi told us the internet café was across the street, over the bridge and above the KFC, and a supermarket was right ahead if we wanted a snack. The group split up at this point, and Katie, Lauren and I went into the supermarket to find a bottle of water or a soda. It was at this point that it became incredibly apparent that we are in a local area. People actually stopped to stare at us as we walked by, and they didn't try to hide the fact that they were talking about us. I don't think it was necessarily bad, because it's a local grocery store and I'm sure it's not a usual occurrence for a larger group of white people to go walking in, but I feel like when I get home to the States and am not constantly being stared at I'm going to be a little offended. The supermarket was two stories and the first floor was all meat and seafood. And these people, they sell and eat every last part of the ocean. Fish, shrimp, crab, all of the normal seafood you could find, along with actual seaweed soaking in water, some other sea plant I recognized because I know I've seen it floating at the surface on occasion during my time at the beach, and sea shells, just everything they had on ice to sell. The same with the land animals. It's all there to be bought for food. I have to say, I'm getting pretty used to seeing the meats and the full ducks, roasted with their beaks still on, and pig's feet and legs, and cow heads. I don't even flinch anymore. We passed all this in search of a cold beverage and found one at the back wall opposite of where we came in, but realized the long was about two miles long so we decided to try somewhere else. We walked out, attracting no less attention with every move we made, and crossed the bridge over the freeway. I was terrified at one point by the man lying on a landing of the set of stairs leading us back down to the street, because he was lying face down banging his head repeatedly against the ground. He was clearly homeless, from the dirty, shabby clothes and coat he was wearing, but I really thought something was wrong with him. Obviously there was, but it seemed like he could have fallen and wasn't able to get up, but no one approached him. I think us three were the only ones to even look down at him. But even the officers standing at the foot of the stairs didn't do anything to help him and I know it wasn't really our place to do anything, but I felt horrible for him. I felt like even if I'd bent down to ask him, to let him know someone was there, it would have helped. To be stepped over, ignored, even if your mental state isn't quite up to par, can't make you feel very good, especially if you need help. But along we walked, towards the KFC and the next door over to go to the Internet café. We walked in and we might as well have been elephants because the guard sitting by the door eyed us up and down as we passed to go up the stairs. We made it half of a flight before we ran into some girls who said all of the computers were full, so we went back outside to try to figure out a game plan. All we really wanted to do was find a beer somewhere to relax, and it looked like there was a restaurant next door so we tried it. The next hour was the funniest one I've had in a long time. One girl in the whole restaurant spoke enough English to wait on us, and I suggested just being adventurous and just pointing to the menu and seeing what drink we were served. The girl, once she realized we wanted drinks, said she had beer so we just said three, no other questions asked. I felt bad sitting at a table in a restaurant and just drinking, so we decided to order dessert. The pictures in the menu didn't help us much, so she came back over and we tried to ask her if the menu had desserts on it. We tried "sweet", "after dinner", "sugar", and "dessert", but she didn't understand. She laughed nervously, trying to figure out what to do next, and as I scoured the menu I recognized something that looked like the sticky rice I'd eaten in Cambodia, so I pointed to it. "Sugar," she said. Yes, yes, that's what we wanted we said, and she suggested what I'd pointed to and an item next to it, so we said fine, bring one of each. Another woman gave us chopsticks, and I tried out the extent of my knowledge of the Mandarin language. I tried to pronounce thank you, which evoked a chuckle from her, but at least I tried. A few minutes later our sticky rice that looked like confetti cake cut into diamonds and that smelled like a sausage breakfast sandwich came out, along with what looked like a loaf of bread covered in sesame seeds and stuffed with custard. The custard turned out to be beans, which apparently can taste sweet and are used in desserts. It tasted okay, but I was more intrigued by the chopsticks. I can use them, but I don't use them correctly so I tried to get Lauren to teach me how to use them properly, since she dated an Asian for a couple years and learned how from him and his family. Well, for the next twenty minutes I took a class called Chopsticks 101 and attracted the attention of the entire restaurant. She was trying to explain to me how to bend my fingers, and I swear my fingers just don't bend the way she was wanting them to, so I said something along the lines of having broken fingers, which cracked the three of us up. And the laughing wasn't the first reason why everyone had their eyes on me. Lauren and Katie were holding up their hands as I tried to imitate what they were doing, and I'd place the first chopstick in between my fingers and then the second, and of course I was holding it up in front of me and because we were the only Americans, actually the only foreigners in the place, we were already being watched. And then with the free show of watching one of the said Americans learn how to use chopsticks, everyone was watching and laughing. But of course, it was absolutely hysterical and all of us- the three of us, the wait staff, and other customers at the tables around us- enjoyed ourselves. What a way to break the ice, because clearly we didn't know what we were doing. We had to be given our chopsticks, personally handed our wet hand towels, all of those customary things we knew nothing about. So why not make them laugh at our, and in this case my, ignorance. We enjoyed our desserts and waved back at everyone who walked by. Everyone was just so friendly, saying hi and goodbye to us as they left. And as we left, a guy about our age said hello to us and the other three girls at his table started laughing and giggling, so we had a really great time. It really was so much better, making fools of ourselves at the local place (but not in an intentionally disrespectful way) where very few people could say more than a greeting in English. It just makes the experience all that much richer. We'd originally wanted to scope out the night life, but after that ordeal we were able to consider our night complete, so we stopped by the internet café for a bit before coming back to the hotel in a cab. Even at 10pm, some families were still hanging out in and around their vehicles and carts, selling fruit on the dark streets. I had a good night, simple but so much fun. I really enjoy the people, obviously, and it helps that they seem to enjoy us too. I haven't seen much of the city yet to be impressed by it beyond the fact that it's Beijing, so I'm excited to see some of the sights tomorrow and of course the Great Wall. The Great Wall. Wait, as the reality of it sinks in. So off to bed I go, because when I wake up tomorrow, it will be time to go there.

(Okay, maybe not, considering it's now September and I'm back in Lake Forest...please forgive the tense confusion, as some of this was written soon after China, and some in the months after coming home. Thanks!!)
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1175100420/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1175100420/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1175100420/tpod.html Mon, 21 May 2007 19:06:03 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Chennai, India

Today we went on a quick tour of New Delhi in the morning to catch a couple of the city's highlights before catching our flight back to Chennai. We got to sleep in until eight, which, after 3:30 and 5:30 the previous two days, was glorious. We were on the bus by 9:30 to make our way to the tallest stone tower in the world, 250 feet high and built in the 12th century. Unlike the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the stone tower was built on a strong foundation so even after 650 years it still remains straight and tall. We didn't get to actually go up to it, but instead parked on the side of the road some miles away from it for a quick photo op. I didn't quite understand this, because we spent an hour driving there, so why couldn't we have taken a few more minutes to get closer to the thing? But we did get closer to it. We drove right up alongside it but for some reason kept on going, to a spot on the side of a main road. I didn't mind, but I just found it slightly odd. I also enjoyed being able to see more of urban India, but it bothered me a little bit. Actually, it bothered me a fair amount. It had less poverty than Chennai and certainly Agra, but it was still present. It probably only seemed like less because we were in a major city, so the government could spend money to make it look like it. I hadn't seen trees lining the freeway since South Africa, or beautiful tailored lawns with flowerbeds in the medians. And yet, across the street from the beautiful tailored lawns I could see a man getting his hair cut because the barber's shop on the second story didn't have a front wall. Why, when there is so much poverty, so many people living on the streets even in this major city and running their businesses out of literal holes in the wall, does the government feel the need to decorate the freeway with roses? To make it look pretty, and seem like a real city? Because if they've got nice freeways then it must be developed, it mustn't be all that bad. Well, it's hard to keep up the façade when what you're trying to distract attention away from is only a turn of the head away. Out the left side of the bus, roses and pretty green grass. Out the right side, deprivation, people peeing on the street, women carrying naked children. Seriously, the government can't find a better place for it's money? Perhaps there's some other underlying reason that I don't understand, but it pissed me off. If they're trying to make it more attractive because it's a major city, a place where tourists go, it didn't work, at least not for me. Obviously, for me it did the exact opposite. When we drove by the government buildings I wanted to march right in and ask them what the hell they were thinking. But that's just me. And I'm not entirely rational these days, what with the slew of information I'm being exposed to and new places I'm seeing. But I liked Delhi. I liked how it was more urban but with traits still so incredibly Indian. The cows in the streets still surprised me, every time I saw one. Our tour guide spent a lot of time explaining the situation with the cows for us, which I found fascinating. The cows are seen as mothers, because they provide milk to the people. Bulls cannot, so they're not as sacred. But the cows provide five things that are very important to the Hindu people: milk, butter, which is the only real source of fat in the Hindu diet because they don't eat meat, yogurt, urine which is supposed to heal wounded skin when applied, and manure for their homes. I also particularly enjoyed the story of how cows get high. Because they just sit in the middle of the street, in the middle of the insane India traffic, with no concern for getting hit. The Indian did a study to find out why the cows weren't scared away by the traffic and found that they get high off of the diesel fumes. So not only does the traffic not both them they actually enjoy it. And they never have to worry about not having enough food to eat because the owners of each cow lets it wander freely during the day to find food, either in the streets or from families who save their leftovers for any cows that pass by. Strangely enough, the cows always return to their original owners. I like cows, and I also appreciate religious conviction, so I'm not saying it's strange or wrong for people to feed cows before themselves, or swerve out of the way and into another vehicle or a pedestrian to avoid hitting a cow, because that's not for me to judge. It's simply different. People live in different cultures, and abide by different beliefs. Me, I would feed my family before the cow, and if it came down to the cow or the child, well, I wouldn't choose the cow. But I'm not Hindu. But I enjoyed that story, obviously an incredible amount because I rarely remember specifics. My brain just lets those little things slide. I can't even remember the name of the emperor who built the Taj Mahal for his wife, or the wife's name, but I can remember all five of the reasons why the cow is considered sacred. Weird. I do also remember, however, the story that our tour guide told us about Gandhi on our way to the Mahatma Gandhi museum. He told us about Gandhi's advocation of non-violence, of inflicting aggression upon himself rather than on any person who disagreed with him. Instead of fighting the opponent, he basically fought himself so that the opponent was morally obligated to make a change. He also talked about going back to the basics, talking about giving everyone a loom to make their own clothing so they could take care of themselves. Our tour guide also brought up Desmond Tutu, and how these two great figures were able to accomplish so much without the use of violence. It got me thinking again, about what we can possibly do, what I can do to make this world better. I feel like coming to these places and hearing first-hand accounts from people and listening to their stories of how their lives have been affected by the actions of people really gives me a swift kick in the pants about doing something. Our tour guide, this man's life was changed because of Gandhi. I spoke to a man whose life and whose family life was forever changed because of that great man who promoted non-violence. I wish that reading books or hearing things on the news touched me as much as actually speaking with these people and hearing their passion and seeing their tears, but it loses something in the translation. So my mind started going, wondering if I could somehow set up a foundation that gave grants to students to travel in between high school and college, instead of going to school right away, so that they can really see what's out there and what they respond to before they go to school to further their education. I don't feel that my three years have been wasted at all, but I feel like I wouldn't have spent my freshman year taking random classes and I could have gotten into philosophy sooner and double-majored in IR. If people who truly care, like those of us on this trip, about changing this world, going out into it and being inspired by it seems like the best place to start. I'd talked loosely about the Independent Honors Program, weighing the option of doing another nine months of school after I graduate to go to D.C., Great Britain, Tanzania, India, New Zealand and Mexico to take classes studying Globalization, but now I know for certain that's what I want to do. Surprise, surprise, I'm always wanting more. As if going around the world once wasn't enough, I've making plans to go and do it again. But I knew from the beginning that my semester at sea would either satisfy my desires of travel and I would realize that I'm just not cut out for living in international communities, or it would solidify my desire for it. Well, guess which one it's done. Again, surprise, surprise. I guess some things never change. Ever since I was little, it was always one more time, one more time. Dad, throw me over your shoulders one more time. Let me go around the mountain on my four-wheeler one more time. I want to go skydiving one more time on this trip. That's me. I find what I like, and I'm hooked. I'm hooked on the world.

We went to the Gandhi museum and got to visit the preserved home where he spent his last days, walk the path of his last steps, and visit the memorial erected on the place where he was shot. I took some pictures of me with a pretty stupid look on my face because I didn't feel comfortable smiling so I just look pissed off. But in reality, I felt overwhelmed. Standing at the spot where he was killed, sailing around with Archbishop Tutu, it can feel like a little bit too much sometimes, as great as it is. I tried to imagine the scene from the movie, with everyone gathered around him, and how they must have felt watching him die on that patch of lawn. But he knew. He said he was willing to die for his cause, if that was his fate. And it was. Right there, where I was standing, my foot resting on the imprint of his next to last step. His final step is part of the memorial, a fresh flower resting on it. After spending a few minutes there, I got out of the way so others could take pictures as well and I spent some time walking through the gardens reading some of his quotes. My favorite was "My life is my message". I wish I had that kind of devotion to something. But I am too much a woman of the world to completely give it all up. I want the normal things too, so I'd never be able to live as completely as he did for my message, if I ever have one to share. It surely is inspiring, though. I also took a picture with the world peace gong before getting back on the bus to head to the hotel. I thanked the tour guide and asked to take a picture of him, which he did. He also joined my male harem. Well, what he said was that if I ever decided to return to India and form a male harem, I had to be sure to give him a call. . I promised to do so and went in to pack my bags and check out. We had time to spare even after lunch, so Lauren and I bought cokes and sat in the one of the tea lounges, little rooms set up down the middle of the lobby with couches and chairs to sit and drink tea, or cokes in our case. We stared out over the pond and talked about our emotional exhaustion. . India is just so incredibly intense. It gets under your skin and deep into your brain and fills your heart without you even realizing it. You can realize it, feel it, acknowledge it, but even then it still gets to you in ways you can't anticipate. I wanted something mindless so I bought an Indian copy of Seventeen and an Indian rag mag. I slept on the way to the airport and made it halfway through my rag mag before falling asleep on the plane. I'd really wanted to go to a hookah bar that night, but even after managing to get on the bus that beat the other four busses of students returning from trips so that we didn't have to wait in a huge long line to get back on the ship, we were all too exhausted and too clean to go out and get dirty again. So I unpacked the things I'd bought, put Grey's Anatomy on my laptop, and went to sleep. I'd heard wonderful stories about Varanasi and have to say was a little bit jealous, but if all goes according to plan I'll be back in India in about two years through IHP and we stay for seven weeks, so I can go see the Ganges River then. Am I spoiled? Yes, I'm a little bit spoiled. As if I didn't have a good enough time on my trip. More than anything I was just ticked at myself because the first real memories I have of learning about India in my history books was about the ceremonies and rituals performed at the Ganges. And yet, I didn't even read the trip ternaries that included a visit to the city of Varanasi where I could see the river because for some reason I wanted to do the shortest trip to the Taj offered so I could have more time in Chennai. Silly me. So yes, I'm spoiled sometimes. And I have to say, it's nice to know that I am still me. I was worrying that I was losing myself in the emotion of India. It feels good to recognize an old feeling within myself, even if it is a touch of negativity.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176839340/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176839340/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176839340/tpod.html Sun, 20 May 2007 15:54:46 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Hong Kong, Hong Kong

It's a huge city, Hong Kong. It's the hub of the world, the culmination of every single big world city. London, New York, Chicago, Sydney, all of these cities I see bits and pieces of right before my eyes, as we sail in between souring sky scrapers and luxury hotels on the river. Skyscrapers are right on the water, reminding me of Chicago. But as Lauren pointed out, no, in Chicago there's Lake Shore Drive between the buildings and the water but here, they come right up to it. A Ferris wheel that reminds me of London hides in plain site at the wrong angle, but turn the corner just a little bit and you can see a small, spiky wheel in the foreground of yet another building. A squatty building that looks like it could be a stadium also makes it look like Sydney. Behind all of the commercial buildings, peaking out from the blanket of clouds, are mountains, presumably green but at this moment I just can't tell because everything is tinted grey from the weather. How is it possible to love every city we go to? Can there be that much love in a person? And where does it come from? Is there a "love store" somewhere in the metaphysical world that provides an endless supply of it, because these days, every time I come into a new city, I feel like I'm taking enough to supply the whole world, all for myself and my countries I'm visiting. I'm starting to wake up panicky, like I do when I know something's off. This year, my junior year of college, is the first time it wasn't happening. Working at Starbucks and my classes, my whole life at school was absolutely wonderful, so I didn't wake up panicky. I always know what I'm feeling underneath, inside places I can't tap into, when I wake up in the morning. This year, and along with this trip, I never panicked. Now, I'm starting to, because I know the end is near, arriving sooner and sooner with each coming day. And I wish so much that I could slow it down, turn it back. How is that only yesterday I was sitting illegally at the bar at my favorite restaurant having conversations with my friends and other customers about the adventure I was going on? What happened to those days, that really were only yesterday? Before I know it, it will be the tomorrow it's over. But, right now, out before me, is Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, it's amazing. Lauren and I are already making plans to move here, to stay for a year after we graduate college. Next year, after we graduate, we want to come and stay for just a year. If this trip has taught me anything, and she agrees, it's that I absolutely love to travel, but I very much have my comfort zone. I'm not proud of it, and being young I wish I could break away from it a little bit more, but Hong Kong is comfortable for me because it's incredibly different form home and yet so much the same. It's enough of a change to make it exciting, and yet similar enough to home to keep me sane and satisfied. We sat and we talked, after hanging out at a wine bar for the afternoon, that we want to live here, just to try it out for awhile. We want to go somewhere different, but not so drastically different that we'd be homesick the entire time or so familiar that we felt like we were back at home. It's beautiful, it's culture, it's everything I expected it would be. I didn't imagine a city on the water, but I imagined a place similar to Manhattan, clean and crowded, active and on the go. I imagined a place full of shops and food and skyscrapers, and from the moment we began our sail up the river towards our port that's exactly what I got. I got a city, a lively and bustling developed city, on a different continent than my own. I knew I'd recognize it even though I'd never been before, and recognize it I did. We went through the regular processes, minus a diplomatic briefing because of the tragic events at Virginia Tech, so we went ahead with immigration and obtaining passports after an address from the Dean and Archbishop Tutu about the shooting. I ran into Aya, the only other girl from Lake Forest, and we talked briefly about what it would have been like if it had been our school. Thirty-three people dead, at our school? We would have known every single one of them. Students that weren't even affiliated with the college, didn't have friends or family there or even attend themselves, were incredibly shaken up. I felt like I did when Princess Diana died back in August of 1997. I'd had plans to go out to the lake with friends, and I did but the entire day, something felt off. I felt a part of me missing, even though I didn't have any connection to her whatsoever, except for the fact that my mother adored her and I'd declined the opportunity to go see a showing of her dresses only two days prior. I know it still has nothing to do with it, but I felt responsible for the longest time, like if I'd cared enough to go to the mall and look at the collection of her dresses she still would have been alive. Unlike back then, I knew that there was nothing I could do and there was nothing I had had to do with it, but it still put a damper on the day just the same. I found myself thinking about the families of victims when I was at my happiest, staring at the bright lights of Hong Kong and the masses of people, smelling the thick air and steam from sewage pipes and humidity and sweat. I felt saddened in these moments, that they were suffering in the very moments I was on top of the world. In these moments, I would hear from others that my life is mine, I have to live the life I've been given, but I won't let that prevent me from sympathizing with the desperate situations of others. I might not always know the thing to say or how to provide any sort of comfort, but I certainly know how to feel bad and pray that they feel something of what I'm sending their way, sorrow for their losses yet hope for the future. And yet, as badly as I felt, I was able to put away my feelings on the matter and enjoy Hong Kong. We had to follow a winding path in order to get off the ship; the gangway dumped us into a mall, which we had to navigate our way through in order to get to the street. As the signs are all in Cantonese, we had a bit of trouble figuring out which way to go but luckily, some of us had good senses of direction and managed not to get us too lost. Once we'd made it through the mall and to the street, we were ready to begin our mission: Japan rail passes. For some reason, you can't purchase them while you're in Japan but before you get there, and since we hadn't done it yet, that was our first and most important activity we had planned for the day. Everything else would be a bonus. We walked through the city, a city that reminded me a lot of Manhattan, more than any other city I've visited yet, because of all of the bright signs and crazy, twisted streets and loads of people and traffic. It still surprises me how much I get used to cities not being clean, because every time I encounter one that's not filthy I am taken aback. The only thing that reminded me that I was out of the United States was the prevalence of Asian people wandering the streets, wearing everything from sleek work clothes to wild and hip outfits. It felt so good to be somewhat at home here, except for the whole ducks and chickens and pig legs we saw in the windows or right outside of restaurants. We made a couple pit stops on the way to the travel agency that we were told would sell us our rail passes, including a 7-Eleven to purchase a Sim card for me (which ended up not working because I have to call T-Mobile to activate it) and an ATM (which addresses you personally: 'What can I do for you? and 'Wait one moment while I process your request'. Silly as it may seem, it made me feel special. It's a great tactic, really, making one feel that even a machine is truly interested in pleasing you even though, clearly, it's not a thinking or feeling thing so of course it isn't. But, being the crazy picture lady, I took a picture of the ATM addressing me personally. That's just me. I like to photograph. After taking out some Hong Kong Dollars, we continued our search for the travel agency with our handy-dandy map. This map served us well, even though we didn't quite know how to read it apparently. It took us about a half hour longer than it should have and a couple of extra detours to office buildings and souvenir shops to ask for directions, but finally we made it. We passed parks and walked through a crosswalk that took us up and over the main road, then past the Science Museum to a large skyscraper/office building that was supposedly home to the travel agency. Well, we asked a security guard where the particular office was and he directed us up the elevator (it took us a moment to realize that 3/F meant 'third floor'...still not sure what 3/E meant, though) that took us to our floor. However, we didn't find our travel agency. We wandered the halls of the semi-abandoned hallways, with only two or three businesses on the floor, and asked one for directions to our intended office. Well, we learned that our travel agency had moved to another building. Luckily, the woman we'd asked for help let us use her phone book so we called and got the new address, which was practically down the street from the ship, where we'd come from. Katie and I opted to take a cab, but we were overruled so we walked back from where we'd come and found ourselves in a mall. The directory told us to go to the sixth floor, so we took the escalator up to the sixth floor only to learn that the only place of business on that floor was a restaurant. We took the escalators back down to the ground floor and asked yet another security guard, who directed us to another area of the mall. We took an elevator up to the sixth floor and practically cried, while we actually did cheer out loud, when we saw "NTA Travel" on the sixth floor directory. We spent the next hour sitting in leather chairs leafing through Japan brochures while we waited for our rail passes to be printed and our credit cards to be processed. I was quite surprised at myself, because usually I am incredibly impatient in these situations, especially when I only have one day in a place and want to see as much as possible. But I think I'm starting to realize, my expectations of absolutely everything are entirely too high. I've been wondering, what exactly constitutes travel? What makes a good traveler, and what makes a good traveling experience? What are you supposed to do when you go to a new city? Are you supposed to shop, or visit tourist destinations, or walk, or eat? I'm not sure how to answer those questions, but I know that exploring, just walking and getting lost in a new city makes me happier than strolling through malls. As long as I'm on the streets of a place, observing the people and seeing the city, I'm happy. And I was seeing the city, having gotten lost with the group a couple times, even though we'd spent most of the morning and early afternoon trying to get our train tickets for the next country. But I had fun, and didn't get upset or impatient at all. At least until it was 1:30 and I was ready for lunch and we could not for the life of us find a restaurant, and when we did it was either too expensive or somebody didn't want to eat there or it wasn't Chinese food. We'd all agreed we wanted to eat Chinese and not stop at the Spaghetti House or Pizza Parlor because who wants to eat there on your only day in Hong Kong? We literally walked for an hour, up and down the escalators in the mall to a restaurant we'd seen but ended up being too pricey, then along the streets that had become more crowded with people since the morning, which surprisingly had no restaurants. I swear, every time you're looking for something you can't find it but when you don't need it it's right in front of you. We'd passed about fifteen restaurants on our way to the travel agency, but when we were ready for lunch we couldn't find anything that was working for us. We'd come up with a game plan, to take the ferry across to Hong Kong Island and take a ride on the world's longest covered escalator, so we made our way to the ferry in hopes of finding a restaurant by the pier, which we did. We sat down to eat, ordering entirely too much food, most of which we ended up eating. We scoured through sprouts, mixed vegetables, veggie and chicken lo meins, sweet and sour pork, prawn dumplings, and drinks. The restaurant was pretty nice, with big tables and covered booths, and when we sat down and some of us put our bags on the empty chairs the waitresses came up and covered our stuff with table cloths. I think that's because modesty is appreciated here, so a purse on the chair in plain sight probably wasn't appreciated. It's so interesting here, and around the world in general, with thing we take for granted that aren't appreciated by other cultures, and vice versa. After we ate we paid our ticket and headed back downstairs to our ferry. I tried stopping at another 7-Eleven to purchase a new Sim card because I'd tried too many times to figure out the pin number, which ended up being listed in the instruction booklet, but they promised me that the pin wasn't the problem and even buying a new Sim card wouldn't fix the problem. I was getting a little aggravated because all I wanted to do was check my voicemail because apparently friends have been calling me just to say hi and asking if I've gotten their messages, which I have not. However, I did appreciate the honesty on their part for telling me that my purchase from them wouldn't help me. Good people, I tell you. I don't think you'd find such honest and helpful people in the states, especially if it's a chance to make a profit. Or perhaps I just haven't been there in awhile, but it seems to me that no one would turn down the opportunity to make money if it meant telling the truth, that their product wouldn't work as I'd hope it would. So we headed towards the ferry for the seven-minute ride across the river, watching Hong Kong Island get closer and closer to us. We all laughed because normally a ride that would have thrown us around as the ferry wobbled back and forth on the waves didn't bother us at all because we're so used to the movement on our ship. After an eight-minute ride we docked at the pier and tried to make our way to the world's longest covered escalator that would take us past cosmopolitan Hong Kong. We found a map but got confused with our directions, because we ended up walking away from it instead of towards it. We walked through construction area, cutting in front of cars while the little red man blinked at us to not walk. I knew that being in Vietnam would cause some problems crossing streets in other places we go. I swear, even after only dealing with cutting in front of traffic for five days, I already got accustomed to it. So much traveling and being bombarded with new customs and norms, it gets into your head and confuses you. Thank goodness the streets have "Look Right" and "Look Left" painted at the crosswalks because that would get me into even more trouble. We made it to a covered sidewalk and spent the next ten minutes dodging all of the businessmen and women hustling by. Becca stopped us when we reached a crosswalk that would take us to a mall, explaining that we'd gone the wrong way, so we stopped and tried to reorient ourselves, and I tell you it's situations like that that cement my reasoning behind being as silent as I am at times. Six strong personalities fighting over which way to go in a city we've never been to, it's overwhelming and confusing, so what's one more voice piping up about it? And then some would acquiesce, saying they didn't really care, others would relinquish the map and tell others to figure it out, and still others would say they just didn't care where we went. Me, I surprised myself by being so laid back about everything yesterday. Normally, I'm so intent on going places and get pretty pissed off when we're wasting time, but I really was just as happy a camper as I've been during times when we just wander around the city. I think it's because Hong Kong reminded me so much of New York, the hustle and bustle of it all, the visual smorgasbord and overall sensory overload, I didn't really care where we were or what we were doing. I was happy because I'd eaten (whereas before I was getting increasingly pissy when we kept changing our mind about restaurants and passing by perfectly adequate ones), and I was in a big Asian city. So perhaps that's why I kept my mouth shut too. I occupied myself with the sights and just followed along when we finally made a decision. We finally got smart and just asked a security guard, who told us we were closer than we thought we were. Within five minutes, we were standing on the ascending escalator that reminded me a lot of the ones back home at the Venetian, except the views of this one were a little bit cooler. Times Square-like squares full of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, small markets tucked in alleyways between tall modern buildings or old apartment buildings, all sorts of business establishments from ground level up. I loved seeing hair salons and women doing laundry in their homes at eye level. I'm sure the customers and women in their home didn't appreciate it as much as I did. The first escalator ended and we approached a second one that had broken, but of course it started working again right as we finished climbing the stairs alongside it. Becca, Matt, Lauren and I stayed on one more before seeing signs for the most beautiful temple in all of Southeast Asia and Hollywood Road, the supposed Hong Kong equivalent of our American Hollywood, so we split up from Katie, Victor and Bryan. We walked down an incredibly steep flight of stairs before walking single-file down the narrowest sidewalk I've ever been on. It was higher than the rest of the street so there were little steps between the sidewalk and the road that took one, took up space and two, I kept slipping off of. I think we'd gotten ourselves away from the more touristy areas because every little old lady hobbling the opposite way in the street or little old man dragging a stack of cardboard boxes down the hilly streets we passed would stare at us as we walked by. Hong Kong reminds me a lot of San Francisco as well as New York because of the incredible hills. And people set up markets on these hills, selling souvenirs for the tourists and fresh produce and seafood for the locals. As we continued our walk we realized we were already on Hollywood Road, as noted by the stars in the sidewalks. I'm not sure what exactly was Hollywood about it, but the neighborhood was quaint and fun. We passed by a park set up on a hill above our sidewalk and suddenly, there was the temple. That's what amazes me about the construction of temples in these cities, is that they squeeze them in anywhere. At home, it seems like churches are given some space, some extra property around them to section them off in some ways. Or perhaps that's just in Vegas, because there are huge cathedrals in neighborhoods in Manhattan, so I suppose it's just the fact that I'm looking at colorful Eastern religion temples rather than stone cathedrals that blend into the stone buildings surrounding them. Eastern temples, with their unique architecture and prevalence of gold coloring, tend to stick out a little bit more in neighborhoods filled with standard window shops. I have to say, though, that I did know we were coming up on the temple because of the smell of incense in the air. Once inside the temple, I realized why I could smell it yards away. Large coils of burning incense about a foot in diameter to smaller ones only six to eight inches in diameter covered every square inch of the ceiling, which also meant that the entire room was filled with smoke, making all of the colors look just a little bit less vibrant. Also set up in the middle of the temple was a shrine to the particular god. The only thing I didn't like about the temple was that I have no idea what kind of temple it was, whether it was a Buddhist or a Confucian or Taoist. It didn't seem like the kind of temple that a lot of tourists frequented because we were the only white people in there and we were being stared at by the two men selling incense behind the counter, even though it was listed in the Hong Kong guidebook, so we felt a little uncomfortable asking what kind of temple we were in. So we simply walked around, appreciating the devotion of the followers and the beautiful adornments on the statues of the gods. We went into a door over from the main entrance where you could buy souvenirs from the temple (so it really was also a tourist destination- I don't know what the man's problem was then, because we weren't being obnoxious and weren't dressed inappropriately) or get your fortune told. I really wanted to get my fortune told because I've never done it before and thought it would be fun, getting my palms read at a temple, but the line was long and we wanted to keep walking. I did find my name written in Cantonese, which was a huge deal because I rarely find key chains or little souvenir license plates with my name on them, or even if I do it's usually not spelled my way. So of course, I had to buy the little piece of paper. Afterwards we went back outside, trying to decide what we wanted to do next. Again, I didn't really care because I was happy just wandering the streets, so we decided to head back towards the market area and see what we found. We passed a wine and cheese bar that we all wanted to stop at, so we spent the next hour sampling white wines and eating delicious Parmesan, Brie, Comte, and goat cheeses. Lauren and I practiced our skills of discerning smells and flavors that we'd learned in South Africa while the four of us sat at a wooden table and chatted. The bar was incredibly cute, with a little seating area downstairs and the wine and cheese cellars upstairs. We were allowed to go into the freezing room and sample quite a few of the cheeses before picking which ones we wanted on our platter, which pleased me immensely because I love cheese. Lauren loves cheese as well, so we picked out our favorites because Becca and Matt really didn't get into it as much as we did. They brought our cheese out with breads and biscuits, which we sat and nibbled for awhile before moving on. Lauren and I walked out onto the street, breathing in the city air and watching people go by as they got off work, and I forget who mentioned it first but one of us said something about moving here after we graduate. I know I need both of my hands to list off all of the places I've said I've wanted to move after this trip, so who knows what's going to happen, but she and I are both interested. It's enough like home that I feel like I wouldn't be homesick, but different enough to make moving to another continent worthwhile. By this time the sun had started to set and the night markets had started to open, so we wandered through the alleyways full of fresh, live crustaceans and fish, fruits, vegetables, poultry and beef. Everyone must come and do their shopping once they get off work because we had to fight our way through the crowds along with try to keep our balance on the hills and stairs that were slippery from all of the water in the splashing out of the containers of seafood and to wash the produce. Women vendors mostly sold to male customers, which I thought was interesting. And I didn't see many children working like I had in Vietnam and Cambodia, which was a nice change. After a couple of turns around a couple of corners, we found out of the market areas and back to more commercial shopping, with sporting stores, camera and electronic stores, clothing boutiques, and restaurants. Around just one more corner we found the bar and restaurant district, and we just decided to pick one to sit down in and have a drink before catching the ferry back to our Kowoloon Island, where our ship docked. We had our choice between Asian bars, Irish pubs, sports bars, and a slew of others, and every one we passed by had people soliciting us to take advantage of their happy hour specials, but we chose an Asian themed one that had just opened up two days prior. We walked down two flights of stairs dimly lit from the red light streaming in from the bar area below and into the bar, which had the most interesting décor I've ever seen in a bar. The blue flower-designed wallpaper looked like it was from the 1970s, the chairs and bench seating were upholstered in a zebra-like print, and the only light was from candlelight or red rope lighting. Just from the crazy way it was decorated I understood why no one else was in there. But we ordered a round of drinks and hung out, enjoying the techno music before getting into a slightly heated discussion with Becca about her wanting to get liposuction when she gets home. It frustrates me so much because as much as you want to try to explain that those desires and the thought process that you were completely happy when you were a size two and now that you're a nine your life is falling apart, that those feelings are a result of other inward turmoil and distress. She thinks that when she gets home and gets the surgery done and can get the excess fat cells in her body removed, then she'll be happy like she was before the trip. Never mind that before she left on the trip her Dad was alive and while we were in India he passed away. As someone who has dealt with body image problems, I understand that it's not just about the way you look, but you can't tell someone else that if they don't want to see it. You can't even convince yourself of it if you want to disguise other pain. Lauren's a fighter and she held her ground too, but hearing from someone else that your self worth has nothing to do with your weight and believing it for yourself are two different things. Matt got up because he didn't want to listen to it anymore and when he came back we decided it was time to head back because we had to wake up early to catch flights to Beijing. We ended up catching a cab back to the island because while we were inside it had started to pour. I sat in the front and watched the glare of the lights of Hong Kong go by as we drove a little too quickly through the rain. I just love the feel of being in a big city, with all of the lights and traffic and honking of horns as you drive on the freeway. And something about the rain just makes it even more exciting, more fast-paced because everyone's rushing to get out of it. We arrived at the mall attached to our pier, and after driving through the city I had decided I wasn't done exploring yet, so Becca and Matt went back to the ship while Lauren and I continued our night on the streets of Hong Kong. We stopped at a Starbucks so I could get a Hong Kong mug, and then we just cut corners and crossed streets, not exactly sure where we were going, but neither of us cared. I just wanted to be out in the thick of the excitement rather than watching it from my porthole on the ship. The rain had stopped but puddles still covered the ground, so everyone was bumping into each other trying to avoid them even though the streets weren't as crowded as they had been earlier. Many of the restaurants were still open but we weren't hungry, but we did see a lit sign advertising foot reflexology and back massages so we decided to stop in and see if they were open. It was 9:45 by this point so I really didn't think they would be, and as we climbed two flights of stairs past closed doors my hopes continued to drop, but we found a woman who took us back down one flight and into a tiny little room divided in half by a screen that could fit no more than five customers. They said they had room and weren't closing yet, so Lauren and I indulged in the most fabulous foot massage I've ever received in my entire life. At first I was a little miffed because while I'd gotten up to go to the bathroom Lauren had gotten a tub of water for her feet and women kept shuffling past me and ignoring me, but as soon as a man sat down, lotioned up my feet and stared kneading them, I felt nothing but bliss. He rubbed and massaged and kneaded every bit of my feet, my toes, and my calves up to my knees, and every moment felt amazing. I told Lauren, if I found a man who would massage my feet like that every night, I'd have and raise his kids, pay all of his bills, do anything he wanted me to. I really felt like I was in heaven. The lady who gives me my pedicures has a tough act to follow, that's for sure. After forty-five minutes of him working on my feet, he gave me a ten minute back massage, which I was thankful for it being so short because it meant he spent more time on my feet and also he really dug in to the point where it was slightly painful. But overall, it was the best way we could have spent an hour of our evening in Hong Kong. I'm such a dork that while Lauren was paying for hers I studied the foot reflexology poster, trying to remember if I felt anything in the parts of my body when he massaged the parts of my foot that are supposed to correspond to them. Whether reflexology really works or not, I neither noticed nor did I care because what he was doing to my feet made them feel damn good. Afterwards I was incredibly relaxed and felt like I'd squeezed in as much of Hong Kong as I was going to get, so we took our time walking arm in arm back to the ship. Actually, taking our time on occasion meant taking a wrong turn, but we had fun watching the people enjoying late-night dinners at sidewalk cafes and running home, shielding themselves with newspapers and umbrellas. We made it back to the mall after it had closed down already, so we had to slip through a couple of ribbons that sectioned off a few hallways, but we made it back safe and sound, a much easier process than we'd had trying to find the way out earlier that day. I'm going to miss Hong Kong, and of course, as usual, I needed more time. So, who knows. Perhaps Lauren and I will figure out a way to spend a year here after we graduate. The world, it really is at our fingertips.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176493320/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176493320/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176493320/tpod.html Sun, 20 May 2007 15:49:28 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Siem Reap, Cambodia

Today, I woke up at 4:45 to go visit Angkor Wat at sunrise. My roommate I'd been assigned to for the trip wanted to sleep in, which surprised me because hey, how many times are you going to see one of the most magnificent temples in the world at sunrise, but everybody's different. We shuffled onto the bus and Sang, a little too bright and cheery for the hour with his New York accented English, reminded us that we were going to the "ti-emple". Becca and Matt got several videos of our guide, and I was pleased to learn when Lauren, Katie, and I reunited back on the ship the last night in Vietnam that they had had the same tour guide. He was just the funniest, most entertaining guide I've ever had, and not always because he meant to be. His high voice, his big arm movements and flimsy wrists, his over-exaggerated facial expressions, in the US he would have been pegged right away as a homosexual, but I'm not entirely sure that we can be so quick to label him because hey, we were in Cambodia. Perhaps culturally people are more feminine without necessarily being gay. But even more than that, he just repeated himself over and over to the point it became entertaining rather than frustrating, because listening to him talk just made you smile. "Ho-ti-el" and "ti-emple" were the words he repeated the most, and now the joke amongst Becca, Matt, Lauren, and I. Everything he said, he said five times. "First, we're going to leave the ho-ti-el to leave for the ti-emple, and once we get to the ti-emple we're going to see the ti-emple, after we leave the ho-ti-el. Okay? So, we'll visit the ti-emple. We're leaving the ho-ti-el, to go see the ti-emple." So, everyone was always informed about what we were doing because if you missed it the first four times, he'd say it a couple more, before the bus started moving. Siem Reap at 5:30 was absolutely mystical. I felt like I was back in Britain during the time of King Arthur and Merlin, with the mist hovering over the streets and trees once we left the town, which had already started to awaken even at the early hour. I was surprised that even children, a young girl around nine or ten, was out riding a bike with goods strapped to the back of it. Really, it tears you apart to think that these people have to begin working as soon as they are able to do, age wise, time wise, everything. If you're able, you're used for your labor so that the family can bring in money. However, we didn't see very many people at all yet, let alone children, selling postcards and Lonely Planet books and bracelets when we arrived, so at least they waited until 7:00 or 7:30 to get going for the day. We arrived, and more than on our drive through the forests to get to the temple in the mist, I felt like I was in a storybook. It wasn't dark, but it was cloudy so we didn't even get to see the sunrise, but it was still so fantastic, sitting on the ruins of a much smaller temple alongside the walkway towards the main temple. I sat in awe, my back against the front wall of the temple, my mind far away. You know when you zone out and you don't see what's right in front of you but instead you imagine you're seeing your thoughts, the things you're thinking about? Instead of looking at the sun rise over the grey morning in front of Angkor Wat, I was looking at myself, seated on the remains of the temple. I was watching myself think about what I was seeing. It's like what I was seeing was too much, too grand, so I had to pull back and just see myself. After sitting there for a little while, we decided to go inside the temple and look around, as we weren't really going to get to watch the sun rise. I walked up to the entrance and turned around to look at the walkway, yellow fields, small temple ruins, and the magnificent temple under my feet and behind me in the pale morning light. It felt like everything, in that moment alone in the stone doorway, was perfect. Everything was quiet, simple, beautiful. So I had trouble imagining how anything could possibly be wrong with the world, with a view as pristine as the one I was looking at. And then, as quickly as it had overcome me, it escaped again, and I carried on through the temple. I climbed over and through the stone, peeking out windows to stare at more stone, and up and over stairs and greeted by golden statues of the Buddha wrapped in a bright orange sash and Buddhist monks wearing robes in the same color lighting incense to pay respects to him. I was offered one and set it before him, not because I'm a Buddhist but out of respect for the people who created this structure so many hundreds of years ago. We eventually made our way through to the central part of the temple, where we were greeted by a huge, narrow, stone staircase of at least one hundred stairs. Becca and Matt immediately started climbing, but me? Not so quickly. Lauren and I had talked about how it makes no sense that I love skydiving but am terrified of heights. I think it's because, falling thousands of feet, you have a parachute on you and the ground is so far away it doesn't even seem like you're that high. When you're climbing, however, you don't have a safety net and the only thing to break your fall is your body, so the fall ends up breaking you. Whatever the reasoning, though, I was not at all excited about climbing up those stairs to get to the top of the temple, but I knew that if I didn't do it I'd always regret it, so I just went to my happy place (just imagining myself on solid ground- easy enough) and climbed my way up. Once I got up there, I was so glad I did. I could see everything: temple stone in front of me and behind me, the yellow fields and trees out around me speckled with the bright orange of the monks' robes, and the moat in the distance. I mean, after seeing Angkor Wat at sunrise, what else is there? Plenty, obviously. But really, though, the experience was unforgettable, irreplaceable, never to be repeated. Even if I ever get the chance to make it back there, which I would love to be able to do, it won't be the same. I won't be the same person I am now, and I am not the same person I was when I started this. And every time I go somewhere and I see something that is so much bigger than me, whether it's something like a temple or just a woman holding a child with severe deformities (like the woman I saw outside of the temple), something that's so outside of me, beyond me, greater than me, there's this weird feeling of empowerment and despair that fills me. I felt so alive, yet so much in a dream state. I'm just basically an emotional roller coaster these days, a walking contradiction sometimes. I have no idea what I'm going to feel at any given time, if I'm going to be elated or if I'm going to be terrified, if I'm going to feel lonely. I was homesick in Vietnam and Cambodia, but was loving it too. I was loving how it was challenging me to keep pressing on. I'd wanted so badly the night before to get out of there. I'm not sure what it was about Cambodia that just made me so homesick. I think it was more the combination of Easter being the Sunday before, the parent visit being during that port, and Cambodia itself. I'm not sure what it was. Perhaps it was just being in places where so much has happened in the past forty years, after seeing the War Remnants museum in Vietnam. It ripped me apart, being there. The people were wonderful, and the scenery beautiful outside of the city. In the city, it was no worse than what I'd seen before, so I have yet to pinpoint exactly why it was so hard for me, why I was so homesick and get out of Cambodia, get home. But on the top of Angkor Wat, I wasn't worried about being homesick. I was just filled with love and joy and peace, which I hadn't felt much of the past few days. We walked through that part of the temple for awhile longer before we had to climb back down (thank goodness there was a handrail for this adventure) and ran back to the bus to make it on time. By this time, the young girls and boys had come out to sell their goods. We pushed through them to get back on the bus, swatting away their arms and hands as softly as possible, and got back on the bus to go to the ho-ti-el. We had breakfast and left for the Jung-kle Ti-emple (I have to write it with Sang's accent, or else it's just not the same), which was another drive through the forests. I enjoyed this temple, roaming around the ruins covered in tree roots and branches, but I think it was more the first encounter with Chinese tourists. That was the highlight of the visit. I almost twisted my ankle falling off of a step because a Chinese woman would not let me get by. I know she understood English because her guide was speaking English, and she turned around and looked at me when I said 'excuse me' and she simply turned her head around to look at me, and ignored me. Okay, fine. Not a problem, but I didn't want to fall down the two-foot ledge so I had to just push my way around her. And we did this, many many times. The entire temple was filled to capacity with mostly Chinese tourists, so we had fun fending them off for an hour. And after China (yes, I'm really behind so I'm writing this sitting in preport for Japan tomorrow!!), I realized that's just how they are. They wear their little red hats and follow their guides carrying a flag, and just push, push, push. Becca was about to take someone out if they pushed her around anymore, but all I could do was laugh. They're not going to respond to you, they're not going to pay any attention to you if you're falling off the roof of a temple, so I just went with it. I was also quite taken with the Cambodian amputee bands that would play music outside the entrances of the temple. I'd been warned that many amputees would be around the country, what with the war and the presence of landmines to this day, so it was neat to see men with missing an arm or a leg or sometimes both, gathered together on a blanket on the ground playing flutes and other traditional Cambodian instruments. They were offering CDs to purchase as well and I should have gotten one, but I didn't. And, of course, I should have. But, oh well. After the Jung-kle Ti-emple we went back to the hotel for lunch and to check out, so Becca, Matt and I made some hostel reservations for China and Japan, I called Mom before she left for Italy, then off we went to Angkor Wat once more. We were dropped off at the back entrance this time, which was pretty cool because there were no people entering the temple grounds this way, so it was just SAS students. Becca, Matt and I were free to run around and take pictures all we wanted without having to dodge other people or worry about being in other people's ways. At the back, also, were etchings of Hindu gods and demons along the walls. My favorite was the churning of the sea milk, a depiction of gods and demons lined up in a tug-of-war stance in the ocean pulling on a snake to swirl the waters, which were special waters that when they evaporated the gods would absorb the moisture and become immortal. And it was simply beautiful, these detailed etchings in the sandstone walls of the temple. To be looking at something so old and up close, sometimes seeing so many temples and structures, I hate to say, takes away from the experience a little bit. However, Angkor Wat lost nothing on me. In fact, it reinvigorated my appreciation for old temples and constructions, and it really made me further appreciate museums. When the heads of temples are chopped off of them and shipped to museums, and you're looking at the original piece, it's pretty awesome. The things you're seeing aren't just bits and pieces of rock, but from an actual construction somewhere in the world. And yes, we all know this, but again, seeing it up close and personal really hits it home for me sometimes. We didn't have much time, only an hour, and we knew how long it would take to get through the entire temple to get back to the front to the bus, so we just took a quick browse through the temple one more time, smelling once again the air thick with incense and taking a few more pictures of monks and Buddha statues. I didn't want to leave the place, at all. I wanted to just sit there for days, think, write. Maybe, someday I can come back on a trip on my own where I will be free to go where I want to go when I want to and not be shuffled so much, so I can. Until then, my memories of it are enough to keep me satisfied and awe-inspired. We then went to visit a couple more ti-emples, Angkor Thom and a temple that had pretty much collapsed before that. I absolutely loved the collapsed temple, climbing through and over the stones, even more so than Angkor Wat because at least that was fully constructed. It was there that I had my epiphany about the museum relics. We walked through a long, wide walkway lined with statues of just bodies because the heads had been cut off to be shipped to museums because the entire body was too heavy to send. I felt like I was in the movie Congo, where they're in the middle of the jungle searching through temples for diamonds. Granted, we weren't looking for diamonds, but we were climbing. And I loved it. Climbing through the remains of a 13th century temple, how do you not love that? After this temple, we had to wait about a half-hour for our busses to come get us, so we sat around at a restaurant, where the workers' children were lounging about on hammocks tied to trees at the back of the outdoor eating area. We tried not to stare at the men wining and dining their Cambodian prostitutes, but it was difficult not to do. The men fed the girls, the girls giggled and flirted, the usual, except for the shabby location. But, I suppose when all that's available to you is the sidewalk café, and I mean literal sidewalk café because it was right off the road, that's where you go. I hadn't really expected to see men picking up prostitutes behind a temple, but I suppose you never really know what to expect in these countries. After the busses finally came for us, Sang took us to the Happy Room before we went to Angkor Thom, the famous face temple. There were more stairs, as there are stairs everywhere, but I was a little bit more confident with them this time. And as always, the Buddhist monks were there offering incense and asking for money. Matt gave some money for both of us, but she wanted me to give some money as well and when I told her I only had large bills, she hissed at me. So much for spreading the spirit of Buddhism. Becca saved me and gave her some more money before we carried on. We took pictures and I reveled in the fact that I was where I was, at a temple in Siem Reap, Cambodia, before we exited the temple and went to enjoy a cool bottle of water while we waited for the bus to take us to the airport. While we waited, I encountered the cutest little girl I have ever seen, trying to sell me bracelets. She had the same low, monotone sing-song voice. "Miiiiss'mm, only one dooollar'mm. Pleeeeease'mm." Over and over again, her footsteps breaking up the steady hum of her voice. She was persistent, following me about a quarter of a mile down the road between temples. Once we got to an area behind Angkor Thom where tables were set up with goods to buy and sell, we sat on plastic chairs for awhile, just watching the children of the shopkeepers play with each other. I tell you, Cambodian children are the cutest children in the world. Their faces are just precious, round and brown with big dark eyes, and they are so animated. A little girl no older than four and not much wider than the handle of a rake carried around her little brother, a baby probably around eighteen months. He chased after his sister, crawled on top of her as she toppled over him, ran around from chair to chair to play with us, and back over to his mother. The little girl was wearing only a dress, the baby just a diaper, and another little boy, probably closer to two, was wearing absolutely nothing. He had a huge little potbelly, probably from malnourishment, and as big of a personality. He knew how to flirt, and he smiled and charmed his way into all of our hearts, as he came over to us and took our sunglasses to play with, and anything we would hand him to play with. We watched them run around for awhile until our busses came, and then we drove for the last time through the Cambodian countryside to get to the airport. We got to the airport much too early so Becca, Matt and I camped out at a restaurant outside of the main part of the airport and ate before going through security. These airports that we've been to, they're all such beautiful structures, with beautiful lighting and décor that completely outdoes any of our airports in the States. We took a tram over to the plane and I slept on the hour-long flight back to Ho Chi Minh. The airport wasn't busy at all so we were on our way back to the ship within half an hour, all seventy of us in the group. On the way back, I watched the lights of Saigon go by, and I couldn't help but wish I'd had more time there. I thought back to sailing up the river when we arrived, and I have no one experience that really sticks out in my mind in Vietnam, at least not yet, that would explain the immediate attachment I had to it. But perhaps in time I will come to understand it, and perhaps I'll be going back there one day. As we drove along the streets that I recognized from only two days there, a Josh Groban song kept running through my head. The lyrics talk about him saying goodbye to his child while she sleeps, but tells her not to stop believing that he'll return to her. It felt like the city was telling me, in those moments, that it knew I had to leave but one day, I would come back. I've just not felt such a strong connection to a place before for reasons I don't understand, so maybe one day it will all play itself out. So as soon as I got on the boat, leaving Vietnam behind, I turned into my passport and went to my room to shower before putting the Josh Groban song on repeat. I listened to him croon his lullaby to me, and I sang along with him to the city outside my window. There's never enough time to do all I want to do, but even two days is enough time to be affected by a place, if you let it. "Hush now baby, don't you cry./Rest your wings my butterfly./Peace will come to you in time./And I will sing this lullaby./ And though I must leave my child,/I would stay here by your side./And if you wake before I'm gone,/Remember this sweet lullaby./And oh, through darkness,/ Don't you ever stop believing./With love, oh love, with love,/You'll find your way, my love./The world has turned the day to dark./I leave this night with heavy heart./When I return to dry your eyes,/I will sing this lullaby./Yes, I will sing this lullaby." It did wake before I was gone, because we didn't leave until the next morning, and when I did leave it was with a heavy heart. So, it will have to remember, know, that some day, I'll be thinking of it and our time together, about how it's touched me so.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176320400/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176320400/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176320400/tpod.html Sun, 20 May 2007 15:42:05 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Cambodia. Today I'm going to Cambodia. I have to admit, I'd first learned about from the Angelina Jolie/Clive Owen movie "Beyond Borders" last year, but ever since seeing it I've wanted to go. So of course, when I learned that I had the opportunity to visit the country on Semester at Sea, I had to go. I woke up a little disappointed because I really did want to spend more time in Vietnam, but I can't have everything, can I? I got up early and had breakfast and packed, which I hadn't managed to do the night before as I'd intended because I laid down on my bed to just "close my eyes" before packing but ended up not opening them again until morning. So when I woke up early, I had breakfast and packed before meeting my group in the Union to board the busses. We drove to the airport and checked in before waiting an hour to board the plane. At the last minute (meaning I'd already gone through the second security checkpoint and given my ticket to the attendant on the other side of the gate between security and the waiting area at the gate), I saw a place where you could purchase stamps so I ran back through security to buy them. The woman didn't quite understand why I wanted them, because I didn't want to send them; I just wanted to have them to put in my journal. I asked her the price and she told it to me, but then went on to help another man, followed by another. I had to flag her down and tell her I wanted to purchase three, and she looked at me again with a tilt of the head and proceeded to help a third person who had come up behind me. Behind me perhaps isn't the best word, because it was a circular counter so people gathered all around her rather than in a line. So she wasn't looking past me to the next people in line, but I knew what I wanted and she didn't seem to want to give my three stamps to me. And because of this, because it took me ten minutes to do a task that should have taken about three, I had to wait in a long security line (they let you through by flight, and the flight to Phnom Pen had finished and security had moved on to Singapore) and the attendant had to come and find me in line, usher me through again and herd me down the stairs to get on the trolley to board the plane. I thought about it, and I don't think it was one of those situations in which I was an ignorant American with this woman. She took dollars, she sold stamps, she understood what I wanted. But of course, I am the foreigner so there might have been a step in the process that I missed. At any rate, I made the trolley wait. We took the short drive over and boarded the plane for our fifty-minute flight to Phnom Pen. We landed in Cambodia and had to go through the process of getting Visas in the airport, which required us to stand in three lines before we were cleared. All of us collected around the ATM because the rest of the country doesn't have ATMs, and then we boarded our busses to take us to the hotel. The city reminded me a lot of Vietnam with a little bit more rural landscapes and rivers along the sides of the road. Bikes and motorcycles were just as popular in the city, as were street vendors and rickety shops along the sidewalks. We had to drive about twenty minutes from the hotel to our airport, where we were served drinks as we waited for our room keys. Right outside the hotel was a park on a hill, with temples and elephants and lots of locals that Becca and I really wanted to explore, but the only free time we were going to have in Phnom Pen was the forty-five minutes between arriving at the hotel and leaving for our visit to the National Museum. Becca and I got our keys, ran to our rooms, threw our stuff down, and ran across the street to the hill. Our tour guide had warned us that we would see a lot of amputees around the country, from all of millions of landmines, two million of which are still unexploded. And they were indeed everywhere. They slept in carts, on blankets in the park, on the steps up to the temples, or just on the sidewalks. We ran across the street to the park, an uneven-stoned walkway that wound around the large hill in the middle. We passed more people hanging out relaxing, others selling books and postcards, or attempting to sell books and postcards, beggars, women carrying their babies to evoke sympathy, or worse little children carrying, presumably, their siblings. We passed two temples in our five-minute walk along the walkway. I'm sure we would have seen more had we continued, but we were stopped by the elephant. Just like in Malaysia, you could pay to feed him or ride him, but since we didn't have a lot of time we just got some bananas to feed him. This guy was a lot more animated than Lasah, our elephant in Langkawi. I was given a bunch of bananas, attached to the stem, and I fed him all the bananas, his trunk tickling my hand, and I held the stem in my hand and walked away with it because I wasn't supposed to feed it to him. Well, he didn't like that very much, that I still had food that I wasn't giving to him because he reached out for me with his trunk. Of course, I loved it. I just ate it up. Elephants! I love elephants, and I love it even more when their trunks come after me. It was like when my dog used to nuzzle me when she knew I had food, but she snapped. The elephant wasn't really a threat, even though he was a couple tons and easily could have done a lot of damage if he wanted to. Ironic. After we fed the big guy and took pictures, we ran back the bus, or as good as I could with the huge spaces in the uneven brick sidewalk. I feel like I had to stare at my feet the whole time so I wouldn't trip. We got on the bus and took a five minute drive to the National Museum. It dropped us off on the corner, and as soon as we got off we were bombarded, for the first time of countless times for the rest of the stay in Cambodia, by children trying to sell us bracelets, Lonely Planet books for Cambodia, and postcards. They just come right up to you and plant themselves in front of you, and just like in India, telling them no doesn't work. I don't flinch as much as I used to, just ignoring them and walking away, saying nothing. There's still some part of me that thinks it's a rude thing to do, but sometimes you've got no other choice. If you interact with them at all, it's at least two to three minutes before they'll leave you alone, even if you do buy something. You buy one thing, and they'll find something else to offer you, even if it's more of the same product. Becca, Matt and I made it through the sea of children and women with their babies, pointing at their mouths with one hand and the other wrapped around the child in their arms, and into the dirt walkway of the beautiful stone museum with pointed roofs with snakelike designs on the edges. We took pictures with elephant statues in the lush gardens out front before going inside to look at the sandstone carvings and statues in the rooms of the building surrounding a courtyard with four ponds of fish and a statue of a Hindu god at the center. We wandered for about an hour, looking at the statues and images of gods, beautifully and precisely etched in the sandstone before we went outside and fed the fish. Becca has a thing for animals so she bought four packets of fish food so we could feed the fish in every pond. We still had another hour before we had to get back on the bus, so we decided to walk and find a snack because we hadn't eaten since breakfast and we still had another couple hours before dinner. We crossed the street, much like we did in Vietnam when we just walked out in front of traffic and trusted that they would move around us, and made it to the sidewalk, dodged street vendors and, crossed over the gutter filled with garbage and crossed the second, sandy street to the side of the street lined with restaurants. We chose the one on the corner, a little Irish pub that opened up onto the sidewalk because it had salad on the menu. After the ship's yellow lettuce they pass off as salad, we were craving salads that were actually salads. We ordered our snacks and an Anchor, the local Cambodian beer, and watched Cambodia go by for the next hour. The people here are so polite. Even when our preport packet told us to not order food that wasn't on the menu, they accommodated us and what we wanted. The people passing by the restaurant obviously noticed us, and when we smiled they waved back. A man wearing a Brasil soccer jersey, when he saw me looking around at the bar, came over and asked if we needed service, even though he didn't work at the restaurant. Everyone pays attention to one another here. I couldn't so much as look up and someone would scamper over to ask if I needed anything. I already loved the place, but for some reason, I was starting to feel homesick. I don't know what it was exactly. Probably the combination of it being a few days after Easter without my family, it being the port when families could visit their kids, and the fact that I really felt far away from home. I really liked Cambodia already but for some reason I can't quite figure out, it felt much further away from home than I had before. Even in India at my highest level of discomfort on the train pulling into Agra, there's something indescribable about this country that gets under your skin. It's there, and I feel it still, but I don't know what it is. Just a feeling of sadness at everything around you, even though it really wasn't that distressing. There were people begging, but we have that back in the states. The areas of Phnom Pen I was in for the most part were commercial areas, where people had their shops and businesses that were allowing them to make a profit. It's not like we were in a destitute area, but I felt a heavy weight on my shoulders that felt a lot like sorrow. I couldn't get excited about being there. It was exciting to be in a new place, but not an exciting place to be, if that makes any sense. The country has tourists, but it didn't feel like Brazil or South Africa or even India. I felt like I did when I was visiting the hospitals in South Africa, like it was a good learning experience for me but I really shouldn't have been there. And I don't know why. I tried to push the feeling down though, as we paid the bill and caught our bus to the Mekong River for a sunset cruise on a riverboat. It wasn't exactly sunset, but we did get to take a riverboat, a lot like the one we stayed on in the Amazon, through the floating villages. Plus, it was the Mekong, so who cares if it was technically sunset or not. We basically did a loop around, around the villages with people fishing off of their floating front porches attached to their floating homes. I can't even imagine living like that. Becca and I were talking and I admitted to the fact that I still very much like my luxuries from home. I really wished I would have been less attached to them after this trip, seeing the ways in which other people live. But Becca mentioned how cool it would be to live in one of those homes for a month, going fishing every day to gather food. Maybe the girl going to Tanzania for a month shouldn't admit it but I just couldn't see myself even doing that. But then again, there was something of a Cambodia syndrome going on with me. Normally, staying in a floating home sounds like something I'd really like to do, but it was just another example of me not really feeling comfortable there. I'm pretty adventurous, but right then, having that conversation, I just wanted to go home. And I hated feeling that way. The entire trip, I'd been waiting for my chance to go to Cambodia. I'll probably never go back there, even though I'd love to go back to Angkor Wat because I already miss it, and yet I couldn't shake it off. It was my first night in Cambodia, and already I was thinking about leaving. It was the first time I'd wanted to leave a country, and I know I'm supposed to have more than that, to have a reason or be able to pinpoint a particular emotion or thought process that made me feel that way but I can't. Even now, reflecting on it a few days later as I write, I can't figure it out. After the cruise Becca, Matt and I separated from the group that was going to dinner and went to find a Mexican restaurant we'd read about in the Lonely Planet book. It had been so long since we'd had Mexican food, so we decided to just do it. Not very ethnic, but I was definitely looking for something familiar for my taste buds, given my mood. We walked across the street from the pier to the Rose Bar, through motorcycles and bikes clogging the street out front, past locals sitting on covered sidewalks watching us, where the white kids were going. We went into the bar, except for the girls behind the bar and out on the floor to serve us and one couple playing pool in the back room. It wasn't all we'd imagined it would be, being an empty, dark, and fairly quiet place to hang out. We wanted something a little more upbeat and headed out to do some shopping along the way to the restaurant. DVDs and CDs are dirt cheap there, and they get bootleg copies so the first thing I looked for was Season 3 of Grey's Anatomy. I found it, along with the second season of Weeds in the first store we went into, and bought both for five bucks. Granted, each only came with two discs of each season, but it was something. Certainly better than nothing, and a few new episodes for us girls to cuddle up together and watch. Becca and Matt came back to tell me that there was a store a few doors down that was selling the same seasons for cheaper, so I decided to go over and take a look, even though I'd made my purchases already. They were still looking around, so I figured what the heck. I asked the ladies if they had Season 3 of Grey's, and they pointed me to it. Because it was in a clear packet, I could tell that they had three discs to sell, whereas I'd only bought two, and they were going to give it to me with Weeds, also with three discs instead of two, for four dollars and fifty cents. I decided to go for it and told the girls I was going to return the first set, because that would get me four more episodes of each. They even played the discs on a DVD player to show me that they worked, which I appreciated because they very easily could have been dud discs. They worked fine, so I purchased them and went to return the first sets I'd bought. Well, the woman from the first store took everything from me. She took what she'd sold me along with what I'd bought from the second woman. I tried for about five minutes to explain to her that I'd only purchased two discs from her and I was returning those to her, but I'd purchased three discs from someone else and she couldn't take them from me. I figured she was trying to scam me, take my money and leave me with nothing. So I started to leave, because I had the discs I'd bought from the second store, but she grabbed my arm saying she'd call the cops if I left because I was stealing. At this point, I should have just given them back to her and asked for my money back, but she then threatened to go next door and talk to that store owner, which sounded like a much better idea than getting cops involved. I was a foreigner, after all, so who were they more likely to believe. I think it was more about pride at this point, because I really didn't need the seasons that badly but I didn't want to sit back and let her take advantage of me, claim that I was trying to steal from her when in fact she was trying to steal from me. I know, I should have let it go, but I didn't. We went next door and the two women chatted back and forth with each other in Khmer, as I tried to explain what had happened. I tried to tell the second woman that she was trying to take DVDs I'd bought from her and leave me with no merchandise and minus four bucks, but all she could tell me was that there had been a mistake, that I'd misunderstood her. She suddenly decided that she'd only charged me that amount because I'd bought the first two discs because the two were in business together. I was starting to lose track of what had happened and had had enough. I was starting to lose my cool, which I'd kept at first. I'm getting pretty good at being firm but not being rude because even when the first woman pushed me and grabbed me, I didn't lose control. I told them they could have their DVDs back and I wanted my money back. I didn't want to have anything to do with it anymore, and with the first woman still claiming to call the cops, all I wanted to do was get out of there. Becca had come over at this point and was trying to explain the situation to them as well, but it had just become a situation of my word against theirs, so I swallowed my pride and apologized for the misunderstanding, and got out of there, sans Grey's. It was stupid and the whole situation got out of hand, but it just really pissed me off. It just made me realize that I really was a foreigner and because of that, no matter what had happened I was going to be in the wrong. Even now it still pisses me off, but that's just the way it goes sometimes. It definitely was an experience. Afterwards we found an internet café as we continued walking through the crowds of people who had come out with the moon, eating late dinners at sidewalk cafes and children playing and in some cases still selling little trinkets. We stopped in and checked email before catching a rikshaw to the Mexican restaurant for a dollar, which only ended up being a few more restaurants down. And we thought a dollar per person was a great deal. I tell you, sometimes being an ignorant foreigner sucks. And to think, I was already struggling before all of this. When we sat down to eat our burritos and chips and salsa, I wondered to myself if it was me, because I recognized that I wasn't quite myself. I'm still not sure because it doesn't add up and seems like each player in the situation was wrong in some way, so I just let it go and enjoyed a night out with friends. At first we were the only SAS people around, which was nice, but later in the evening more showed up because we were right next door to a pizza joint that apparently makes special pizza with special kinds of "herbs" in it. I didn't know whether or not to believe it, but Becca wanted to go buy a shirt because either way a t-shirt with Happy Herb Pizza written on it is kind of funny, and Matt went with her while I waited for the bill. And sure enough, when they came back, Matt told me he'd started talking to the owner, who had taken him back and shown him a large bag of marijuana. I was partly mortified and partly tickled by this. I mean, who runs a restaurant that uses weed in pizza? We finished up at our Mexican joint and went next door to get Becca's shirts and ran into a bunch of the SAS kids who were eating the pizza. They kept saying how high they were, but they seemed pretty normal and pretty sarcastic about it, so I have no idea exactly what they'd gotten themselves into, but I didn't really care to stick around and find out, so we caught another rikshaw back to the hotel, past the hill all lit up, and went to bed. It had been a long, emotional day and we had an early morning the next day for the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields. My roommate was gone, so I turned on the TV to King Kong and fell asleep to Adrian Brody. That certainly cheered me up, because I love Adrian Brody. I just felt so out of my element there, in every way. It was good, because being forced out of my comfort zone helps me grow and makes the experience all that much richer, but it was a hard day. I'm definitely aware of the fact that I'm not in any world I recognize anymore. Phnom Penh
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176319860/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176319860/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/hayesbk/semester_at_sea/1176319860/tpod.html Sun, 20 May 2007 15:40:13 -0400 Brianna's Voyage of Discovery aboard the MV Explorer...an adventure around the world!

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Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, Cambodia

I woke up in Phnom Penh today. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It still boggles my mind, some of the places I've gone on this trip. I never in my life imagined that I'd ever go to Southeast Asia, let alone Cambodia. But, there I was, in a spectacular hotel across the street from the hill with adorable Cambodian children, amputees, women carrying huge loads of fruit on their heads, elephants that we could feed, and temples. Becca and I went to have breakfast before the group left to go to the Genocide Museum. I'd heard that it was powerful and grim, and after visiting the War Remnants Museum I wasn't going to take a warning like that lightly. It wasn't a long drive, but we made our way through a quieter part of town, off of the crowded marketplace streets filled with people and traffic and instead were driving through quiet streets past apartment-style homes until we reached the gates of a school, an old high school that had been converted for use by the Khmer, and then into the museum. We walked along the dirt road to the gate, the rocks crunching beneath our feet, and we stopped for a brief introduction about before we were let loose. The museum, the school, was set up with two large, open courtyards divided into two by one two-story building, two lining each end, and two next to each other along the length of the property, opposite the gates. Benches were set up sporadically around the campus, which I sat on frequently after going inside each of the buildings. The museum was divided up by what prisoners had been sent where, and how each of the classrooms had been turned into cells, and each building was numbered. The first building, at the left end, was devoted to leaders who had either betrayed the Khmer or opposed it to begin with, and they had just been left to die. The classrooms were the original size, and they had only a box-spring and a canister in their rooms with them. Pictures of what the room looked like when the prisoners were found dead were on the walls, and I felt strange walking through the balcony-style hallway, room to room. I felt like I needed to tiptoe, to not disturb anything or anyone, out of respect for the people who had died there. It was so eerie, to stop and think that only forty years ago, these rooms had been filled with suffering. I just really don't understand what it takes to do that to another person. I hurt people, I cause them to feel pain but it's usually emotional. Sometimes that's harder to heal than physical pain, but I could never torture someone in the ways that these people were tortured: let them suffer alone and die, beat them, tie them to posts and dip them in buckets of water to get them to speak, stretch them, whip them. One of the buildings on the right side of the campus was devoted to displaying all kinds of torture methods the Khmer used, and it made me sick. In the first room, we were able to see the tubs that were used, and the tables that the wrists were chained to so they could be stretched. Then, we could walk through a doorway and look at the skulls of victims who had been shot to death, while looking at pictures of their faces displayed on the walls. I'd made it there after walking through the second and third buildings along the length of the courtyard, where the classrooms on the first floor had been divided into smaller cells, eight to twelve to a room, to hold prisoners. On the second floor were displays of stories, told by family members of those who had been seized by the Khmer. After I walked out of the gates toward the bus, I was so empty emotionally. I hadn't wanted to move. I hadn't wanted to breathe for the past hour, thinking of all the prisoners who couldn't. I felt like my whole body was drained of everything, all emotions, all energy, and it was only nine in the morning. As I came upon the back of the bus, I took a picture of an alleyway. I looked down at the camera to check the picture as I rounded the corner at the back of the bus, and just as I was thinking that there was nothing interesting in the photo, I looked up and found myself right in front of a burn victim begging for money. The skin was black and red, his face deformed with no real bone structure, and skin had grown over one of his eyes in a thin layer so I could still see the muscle movement underneath. He had no lips, just teeth and gums in a locked jaw. This was the man who greeted me, just as I was thinking that there was nothing interesting in my picture. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. And I was okay with the fact that the picture wasn't particularly interesting. I kind of needed something dull to look at for a minute or two, to let myself regroup, and then there he was. I couldn't react, but it startled me. I looked him in the eye as I got on the bus, and I'm not sure if it was intentionally or not. I really didn't have any money for him, and I wasn't trying to be rude and stare at him, but he was looking at me, and I looked back. He reached out to me, and just then Sang came up and pushed me onto the bus, saying something in Khmer to the man. I couldn't even cry. I couldn't muster any more strength to raise my eyes as I passed Rebecca. I could only collapse into my chair and stare at my hands. I studied the little blonde hairs on the green tinted veins, and just tried to breathe. I collected myself and then grabbed my notebook and started scribbling down everything I'd seen, while the emotion was overwhelming and I needed to get it out. I'd seen pictures of smiling adults and children on the walls of the school. Smiling, because they'd been brainwashed by the Khmer. I'd been terrified walking through the rooms divided into smaller chambers, because I was all alone in that room. Alone with the history of all that had occurred there, until I saw Becca and Matt through the doorway that connected the classrooms to one another, and I'd wanted to hug them. The morning was so bleak, and it was cloudy so the sun nowhere to be found and our SAS group was the only group at the museum. So seventy people spread out over the whole campus, it was empty. And Becca and Matt walked through it much faster than I did, so I ended up wandering it alone. I think that added to the intensity of it, because I didn't have anybody to talk about it with. I didn't have anybody to hear me, to agree with me, when I sighed audibly, or inhaled sharply in shock. I saw the guillotines, the pools, the inclining tables where prisoners would be chained down and have clamps attached to their nipples to torture them. I saw a papier Mache mannequin of a man chained to the wall at his wrists, his arms and legs bound together. And of course I knew it wasn't real, but I was so emotionally vulnerable that seeing a figure of a person on the floor as I entered the room, it too startled me. All of the rooms had been empty except for furniture thus far, so I wasn't expecting a model of a person. At places like this, though, there is no sense of security. Anything can frighten you, from a papier Mache figure to a photo to an uneven brick on the floor that makes you stumble. Then, I thought, if I'm this terrified and vulnerable as a tourist, how must the prisoners have felt?

We left the Genocide Museum and drove for about an hour to the Killing Fields. The road was a long, straight one, alongside rivers with rice paddies and small homes and markets. It was an interesting experience, seeing all of these markets out in the countryside, rather than in the cities. In the cities, even though they looked different to me and were unfamiliar, I still had the city feel that I knew to rely on. But here, in the outskirts of Phnom Penh, I had nothing. I had nothing to relate to, to comfort me. So, just as I'd told my Dad the night before that when the running makes you tired and you want to stop, that's the time to keep going because that's when it will benefit you the most, I kept going. I got out of the bus at the Killing Fields once we got there. I walked up to the monument, filled to the top with skulls of people who had been slaughtered there. I walked through the fields, looking at pits in the ground that were designated for specific groups: children, mothers with children, men, specific numbers of victims. Our guide had warned us that we might see bones poking up through the ground, with the rain washing the soil away. And I did. I did see bones embedded in the soil. I also saw piles of arm bones that had been collected in piles by the pits. I also saw shreds of clothing in the ground as well. I hate to say but I really couldn't think while I was there. I couldn't really comprehend the magnitude of what I was seeing before me. I simply walked over the grassy hills looking at the shreds of clothing and the bones and the pits, and I felt sorry about all of it, and mortified, but mostly my head and thoughts had gone blank. I could only feel. Everyone's face that I saw as I passed looked somber, as did mine I'm sure. I found a couple of boys on the outskirts of the fields, on the opposite side of a chain-link fence separating us, and they pointed at my camera, wanting me to take a picture of them. I did, and showed it to them, and then they asked for money. I suppose when you live there you do what you have to do, but I couldn't imagine hanging around outside of the Killing Fields every day and asking tourists for money. I couldn't even go inside the souvenir shop there. It just didn't seem right to me, that it had been turned into a place used to make money off of shirts or hats. It just seemed disrespectful to me. Yet, I suppose, I was paying money to go visit the fields, so. I don't know. I don't know what makes sense, and what doesn't. Does it make sense to pay money to visit the place? I think so, but is that different than paying for a shirt sold on the property? Or does it even matter and I'm making too much out of nothing? But the point is, it all gets inside your head, and you can't think straight. After making my way back through the rolling fields I removed my shoes and went into the monument. What kind of person isn't made sick by looking at glass cases twenty, thirty feet in the air filled with skulls and bones of victims, and won't really acknowledge it? I know I was looking at skulls, at human bones, but I couldn't bring myself to really understand that each one of them had once been living. It didn't seem real. And yet, it was. Every one of those skulls represented a human life, a family it had been a part of, a future it had once anticipated. And now, it sits in silence on a shelf, for people like me to come and take pictures of and ache for. But what else can I do? I can appreciate it, but that's not enough. On the other hand, what will I really be able to do when it comes to the world? I feel the weight of it, but it's even heavier when I think about the fact that as much as I'd like to do to change it, I probably won't do a percentage of the things I want to do. Everyone when they're in college and getting ready to graduate wants to get out and change the world, but not very many accomplish the grandiose goals they set for themselves. Will I really be any different? Will I ever be able to do more than just feel immensely sorry for the ways of the world? I can't answer that now, and I can only say that I hope I can do more. That I can do something, whether it's big or small. I lit a stick of incense, donated some money, and got back onto the bus. I stared out the window, not really taking in any of the sights, on the way to a palace (I can't remember the name right now). It probably should have been quite a site to see, with elaborate golden temples and shrines, and beautiful gardens, but I just couldn't get it together. I was on emotional over-drive and it was such an extreme, going from the Killing Fields to the elaborate palace grounds. So I walked, I took some pictures on the steps of a Buddhist temple, along with some other pretty temples and landscapes, but I just couldn't do any more than that. I couldn't think about much after the morning, so I just walked through and made my way back to the bus. We left someone at the palace, because we always have to be at the bus on a certain time, and we had to make it to the airport on time so after waiting twenty minutes for him, the bus left. A block away our tour guide got off the bus and went back to find him, but we proceeded without him. And for the rest of the trip to Angkor Wat, an argument ensued over whether or not we should have left him or if we all should have missed our plane to wait for him. Some girls, after making fun of him not six hours earlier for throwing up on the front steps of the hotel because he ate too fast, were exclaiming how cruel it was to leave him in a foreign city. I was more frustrated with them than with the whole situation. Our leader had gone back, he was going to be fine. But these girls, they were my real problem with the situation. "Ew, can't you at least brush your teeth before you get on the bus? Ohmygooood, he is so gross. " "Yeah, why can't he at least find a bathroom before he vomits everywhere?" But then as soon as the bus starts to pull away, these same girls refuse to leave him because "he's such a sweet guy. How would you felt if you were lost in a foreign city? I will stay with him if no one else will." For ten minutes. "Just stop the bus, we'll get off and go with him to the airport. If we miss our flight, we'll get new tickets and meet you at the hotel in Angkor Wat." Please. And when the bus stopped, like they'd wanted it to, and the driver asked if anyone wanted to get off to stay, who went? Who got off, to make sure he would be okay? Not the girls. But, we all made it safe and sound to the airport, all of us on a bus and Bryan in a taxi, just in time for our flight. We ran through the airport, through security, and made it to the gate just as announcements were being made for us to board. An hour and a half later, after flying on a plane that didn't hold a single person other than SAS students and leaders, we were driving through the forests to Siem Reap, the town of Angkor City we were staying in. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous, with towering trees and little rivers flowing along the roads. Once we got into town, though, everything picked up. The streets were once again congested with motorcycles and bicycles and tour buses, people running around all of the outdoor markets that were teeming with "Happy New Year" decorations, because we had arrived two days before Cambodian New Year. We arrived at the hotel and checked in, and it was a spectacular hotel. After staying in the hostels in China and realizing how much more of an experience a hostel is, I wish we hadn't been put up in such nice hotels on SAS trips. It's hard to immerse yourself completely in a culture when you get to go right back to comfy beds and sweeping staircases and marble floors. In the case of India, it was a nice comfort factor, but the hostels were just so much more fun and exciting. But I'll get to that when I get to China (because I'm really behind- I'm playing catch-up while I'm passing the fields of Japan on the Bullet Train on my way to Mt. Fuji from Kyoto). We had a few minutes to check in and get settled before we went to visit the temple for the first time. We were driven back through the town and out into the forests again, which were hazy with all of the tree cover and the clouds hiding the sun, so it really felt surreal. Driving down a tree-lined dirt road in our tour bus alongside a young girl riding a bike, we saw the temple peeking through at the end of the road. The bus dropped us off, and we had to fight our way through the children waiting around the parking lot to sell us postcards and bracelets, cross the street-Vietnam style, and stepped onto the mile-long walkway that would take us to the temple. The walkway that led to the entrance to the temple went over a moat, which lucky for us was full because of the season, and we climbed down the giant steps to the banks of the moat to take pictures. Looking out over the moat in front of me, and turning around to look at the wall of Angkor Wat and the temple rising above it, I was complete. I was content, I was complete. In that moment, I didn't need anything else except air to breathe. It was a powerful moment, yet a scary one, to be so happy that you feel like you don't need anything else in the world, because obviously I do, but taking in the splendor before me, I was full. We made our way through the entrance and onto the part of the walkway that would take us directly to the steps of the temple. Monks sat on the wall and walked around the yellow fields between the entrance and the temple, and tourists speckled the grounds. It was getting late so it wasn't as crowded as it could have been, so we were able to stop and take pictures every five feet or so if we felt like it and not stop anyone. We made our way to the steps of the temple but it had closed, so we went over to the pond at the base of the temple and took pictures of the reflection in the water. We also got a kick out of the Chinese tourists climbing onto a donkey with a brightly-colored blanket on its back and something that looked like a beaded birthday party hat on its head. They could even choose to hold a whip in the picture if they wanted. It was an interesting choice of an attraction at the temple, to say the least. We then went over to line of shops. The first little girl to approach us was selling postcards, and not only did she have an adorable face and smile, but she knew how to sell. She promised twelve postcards for a dollar, but she didn't just promise it, she counted them out for you, one by one. I couldn't say no, so I bought them from her and also got a picture with her. I was so impressed with her, and I soon realized that they were all trained to do that, but it's a good tactic if you're not used to it. After India and Vietnam, where they just shoved things at you, to have her show us exactly what we were getting made me want to give her my time and my dollar. Plus, who isn't a sucker for an adorable little girl. After the postcards, I went over to buy a coconut to drink because I'd been waiting since Brazil for one, and we proceeded down the row. We could buy scarves, table runners, Lonely Planet books, postcards, paintings, just about anything along the way. I had an absolute ball bargaining as far down as I could get, and wound up with three Lonely Planet books for a grand total of six dollars. I could have gotten a beautiful piece of cloth to use as a wall hanging or a table cloth or curtains, but the boy selling it to me was a tricky one. I didn't want to pay his price, so I walked away. They do the funniest thing, where you say "Five" and they'll say "No, six" so you walk away and they go "Okay, six, okay?" No, five, you'd say,and continue walking. I made it about ten feet until he agreed to my price but when I went back he said he had agreed to five dollars for a book, and not my cloth. They just crack me up. I'm probably going to get back to the States and try to bargain just because I've gotten so used to it. We were running out of time but we kept getting stopped by people and seeing things that caught our attention, so after our bargaining extravaganza, we had to run back to the bus with our books, our paintings (I bought a painting) and Becca's drum. We didn't get to see much of a sunset because of all the clouds, but I didn't mind. It could have been pouring rain and I would have been a happy camper, just being within yards of the temple. We drove to dinner, which was luau-style. We got our food out of buffet lines and sat in tables lined up in front of a stage, where we got to watch traditional Cambodian dances performed by a dance group of teenagers. They were really neat performances, little plays acted out with music and dance. My favorite was a group of boys and girls fishing by the river, and a boy and a girl who liked each other flirting when they were alone but pretending to not notice one another when the rest of the group would return. Our SAS group stayed for about three dances but we left early because we'd had a long day and had an early morning, so I went back to the hotel and called Dad before I went to bed. It was the first time I'd talked to him without being 100% excited about everything, because I was really homesick and really emotionally parched. I wasn't sure yet how I felt about Cambodia overall, even though I knew I was already in Angkor City and its sites. It was just a lot to take in, from the museum to the Killing Fields and not being home for the Easter holiday and not having my family come for family week. It was one of the valleys that I had been promised I would experience as part of a study abroad program, but I got lucky because mine only lasted for a couple of days. The hard part was over, in leaving Phnom Penh, and all that remained was awe and wonder at the temples. So, I went to bed after talking to Dad for awhile and startling the man behind the front desk who was handling the payment of the phone call (he put his hand over his mouth to try to warn me that it was getting expensive). I climbed into the big, fluffy bed and thought of home as I fell asleep.
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