Harmon Eyes

Hawaii/Guatemala/Home

2009-06-19T18:57:00.000-07:00

Oahu, Hawaii.

I was getting a little worried. I’d expected to love Japan; it had fascinated me, but I definitely did not love it. Then we got to Hawaii, or more precisely to the island of Oahu, and again I found myself out of love. This pattern began to worry me. I had never heard of anyone who wasn’t wild about Hawaii. Was I getting jaded? Tired of travel? Was too much travel a possibility? Even asking the question made me cringe. I knew that shortly I would be at home, sitting on a rickety lawn chair in my back yard on Long Island, wondering what my next adventure might be---a trip to the 7-ll.

But the fact was: I didn’t much like Oahu. It was physically stunning. We took a day-long tour of the island, and saw beautiful beaches, aqua blue water, palm trees, coral reefs, blooming flowers, and the scene at Waikiki. But everyone walking along the street was loud and large; everyone was American. We were spending dollars again, and lots of them. The entire island was devoted to the pursuit of pleasures that I don’t take much pleasure in: eating meat, drinking alcohol, baking on a beach, surfing. After months of being in foreign environs, of struggling with other languages and different ways of life, we were suddenly back on U.S. soil, even if we were floating on an island in the middle of the Pacific. The consumption was conspicuous. I wasn’t ready to be home.

One morning, we went out to Pearl Harbor to see the memorial to the USS Arizona. It was moving, although after Japan, my mind was full of the war memorial at Hiroshima. All I could think about was how surgical the strike on Pearl Harbor had been. How solicitous the Japanese had been of civilian lives, and how cavalier we had been when we took our revenge. 140,000 civilians were killed by the bombs in Hiroshima; most of the city was wiped out. At the USS Arizona Memorial, we only mourned the loss of 1,100 or so American sailors who’d been trapped beneath the sea; only 68 civilians were killed. Those numbers seemed small to me. The fact is we care more about dead American sailors than dead Asian civilians. Just as we rail against the 4,000 plus American soldiers killed in the Iraq war, we ignore the fact that over 80,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Is it human nature to privilege the deaths of our own? Is there something wrong with my nature?

Memorial at the USS Arizona.

Our last port was Guatemala. Between Hawaii and Guatemala, we had ten days at sea, with back-to-back days of classes, final exams, and for me, over 300 papers to grade. The weather was wet and grey; the ship was rocking and rolling. Without much else to do, we hunkered down and amused each other. Many events, many drinks together, many dinners lingered over, music made, scrabble played, yoga classes shared---the usual day-to-day life on the ship. Jo and I made plans to travel to Antigua for a couple of days with our friends Bill and Joan, and our friend Joan Walters. Our pre-port preparation for Guatemala was a spate of admonitions: don’t wear your jewelry; don’t carry your lap top or your expensive camera; don’t carry your passport; don’t carry much cash—and don’t use the ATMs. We were braced for a disparity of wealth that we’d not seen before. The US embassy representative told us that Guatemala was a country threatened by an alarming level of crime and violence that the official security forces seemed at a total loss to contain. Tourists were routinely robbed at gunpoint. Semester at Sea trips to Tikal and Copan would all have body guards on board the buses; we ought to be back in our hotels after dark, and to avoid Guatemala City altogether. The prospect of staying three days in this lawless place seemed daunting.

Street scene in Antigua.

The warnings were appropriate. We were shocked by all the young men who walked the streets with rifles slung over their front chests, standing outside of stores, guarding banks, or just hanging around the Parque Central in Antigua. Some Semester at Sea kids were robbed; others had to pay off taxi drivers to deliver them safely to their destination. It was a tough, rough lawless place to be, and sometimes downright scary.

The ubiquitous rifle.

But absent from the pre-port preparation were warnings about the beauty and lushness of Guatemala, its steaming volcanoes, the charm of its colonial architecture, the stunning handicrafts, particularly the embroidery, the fascinating interaction between the indigenous and persistent Mayan culture and the Spanish colonial influence, the eager, kind people. It was a poor country, and one that seemed battle-weary from its years of civil war, but I saw much beauty there. I saw much to fall in love with. I could actually say: I want to go back to Guatemala, to visit the Mayan ruins I didn’t see on this trip, to go to Lago de Atitlan, to hear the rush of the waterfalls at Semuc Champey, and to dip my feet into its cold lagoons. Guatemala restored my faith in the joy of travel. My ennui had lifted, and I was capable, once again, of finding wonder at not being home.

We spent most of our time in Antigua, the Spanish colonial capital of Guatemala, and now a designated World Heritage Site. Most of the architecture in Antigua is eighteenth century. Even though the city was founded in the middle of the sixteenth century, a great earthquake destroyed it in 1773. Its focal point is the broad, tree-lined Parque Central, a broad and beautiful plaza with many wooden benches from which to watch the Antiguenos, the tourists, the hawkers, the artists, and the Spanish students strolling in or through the park. In the center is an outrageously tacky fountain, a 1936 reconstruction of the original 1738 version, complete with concrete nymphs sporting breasts that spewed water. On the east side of the park is the Catedral de Santiago that has been demolished, damaged by earthquakes, wrecked in the last eighteenth century, and then partly rebuilt in the nineteenth century. It looks best lit up at night, as is true of many old, decaying queens. Three blocks away from the park is the Arco de Santa Catalina, built in 1694 to enable the nuns to cross the street without being seen. There are many other churches in Antigua, ruins of monasteries, remains of 16th century convents and the like. Many of these buildings that were once gilded, baroque treasures are now romantic rubble, having suffered from too many earthquakes and not enough money to restore or maintain them.

Scenes of Antigua.

Walking the cobbled streets of Antigua, you feel very much the presence of history, of an earlier regime that once had power, and gold, and military might, and the crushing weight of the Catholic Church. Only the ruins and the artifacts of that regime remain---and the language. Those whom the Spanish conquered, the Mayan people, persist. They are nominally Catholic, but their religious beliefs were never stamped out, but appropriated, or hidden beneath the surface. Most of the Mayan women selling their textiles in the Parque Central, and the small shops of Antigua, came from the highlands, and they were poor. Very poor.

Mayan women in the market.

Antigua had many pleasures for the tourist, however: wonderful restaurants, art galleries, internet cafes, coffee shops and bakeries, bars, jade stores, and shops full of amazing handicrafts---masks, Mayan dresses, huipiles (Mayan tunics), silver jewelry, and textiles, textiles, textiles. Bill led us on a long walk through the local market where we were the only gringos, weaving our way through dark labyrinths of make-shift stalls, and through fruit stands, pineapple bars, and Mayan vendors who sold everything under the sun, pink plastic basins, baseball caps, underwear, chickens (dead and alive), T-shirts with corporate logos, hair brushes, flip flops, all spread out on blankets on the ground.

The local Antiguan market.

We stayed in a lovely three-story 18th century mansion with tile floors, tall ceilings, roughly hewn beams and wooden windows that opened out onto an inner courtyard. We were able to open those wooden windows which for me was an intense pleasure. One of my few gripes about ship life was the lack of access to soft breezes. I lived in a room hermetically sealed off from the world, with a window that looked out onto the sea and the sky, but with no fresh air. When I sought fresh air on the deck, it came with a blasting, blinding sun and a wall of wind that blew me away. I realized in our room in Antigua how much I was missing a soft breeze, with slanting rays of sunlight on my bed, the sound of a barking dog in the distance, the tinkle of my wind chimes, hanging on the tree outside my bedroom. It dawned on me in Antigua: I was missing home.

Our hotel (and Louise's feet looking out her wooden window).

And home we are. We’ve been back for about a month, and I’m amazed at how easy the transition has been---a little rocky the first few days, missing Semester at Sea friends and students, missing the movement of the sea, missing the ship, and our little life there, ephemeral, and now gone. But it’s lovely to be on terra firma again, and in our little red house in the woods, Jo back at school with all of her friends, me back at work with all of my friends. We’ve acquired a new kitten for Gray who did very nicely with our cat sitter, Ali, in our absence. Her name is Sidney, and she’s driving us crazy. (I’d forgotten how much fun kittens are, and how much work.) I bought a cotton rope hammock for reading in under the pine trees. Long Island is lush and green in June, and the air is fragrant with the scent of honey suckle. The azaleas are outrageous in their oranges and their hot pinks. My hair is growing back in.

And so, our Semester at Sea adventure has come to an end. Having been home for awhile, and adjusted to the familiar grooves of our lives, the trip begins to take on a surreal quality---all those foreign places, in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America, all those tastes and sounds, those languages, those strange coins, the deserts, the mountains, the horn-honking cities, all that sun and sea, all those wonderful new friends, now here, now gone. It’s hard to know where to put so many memories. I can’t seem to squeeze them into any convenient corners of my mind. Maybe over time, I’ll package it up; maybe I’ll never succeed. Who knows what Jo will make of the whole experience, but of this I am certain: She’ll never be the same.

People have warned me that Semester at Sea can become an addiction. Once is not enough. I believe that. Jo’s already rooting for 2013. I say: we’ll wait and see. But the truth is we’re already plotting. We’re already planning. Half the fun of travel is anticipation.

Someday I expect to be a very old woman, no longer able to navigate the world, and I’ll have the comfort and company of three doting daughters in their middle-age, with little red houses in the woods and children of their own. But Jo and I will always share something that no one else will be privy to---the memory of this remarkable trip. Even now, just one month home, I find myself driving her to school in our Subaru, thinking that we need gas, worrying about whether I’ll be late to work, remembering that I need to pick up milk on the way home, and then I’ll suddenly look over at her and say with dubiety, “We did sail around the world, didn’t we?”

And she’ll nod and give me a secret smile. “Yes, Mom, we did.” And because she says so, I believe her.

LH and JJ
**********

Jo and Louise back home on Long Island.

Processing Japan

2009-05-25T18:34:00.000-07:00

Cherry blossoms in full bloom.

The ubiquitous old ladies of Japan. On the streets, in the marble malls, on the trains, and in the parks, they were everywhere, teetering around in Minnie Mouse shoes, wearing woolen suits with long, slender skirts, and matching tailored jackets, printed silk blouses showing shyly at the collar. Many sported hats, some elegant with silk flowers demurely attached to a satin ribbon that circled the base, some utilitarian and discordant with the rest of the sartorial splendor, oddly reminiscent of what my father used to refer to as “old man fishing hats.” Their faces were perfectly painted, with ruby lips creating a bow, salmon-colored cheeks, covered with white powder; they looked like apparitions. Frail, thin, these old ladies of Japan looked as if the smallest breath of spring wind might blow them away. They reminded me of the fragile pink petals that had already pulled off from the sap of the cherry tree, waiting for a nine-year old boy to shake the branches just to watch the velvety snow to fall.

That is one thing I noticed immediately in Japan: there are lots of old ladies, and very few children. Indeed, the birthrate is very low; one of our guides told us that each woman might be expected to produce only 1.3 children. She also told us that many professional women in Japan choose not to have children because they impede the development of their careers. Many of those same professional women end up living in apartments with their aged mothers. Housing is brutally expensive in Japan, and their aged mothers need them. I saw those duos everywhere: a middle-aged woman wearing a dark business suit shepherding her mother through the crowds. One of her arms was burdened with a briefcase, and the other with a wraithlike mother, turned out to perfection. A sturdy crow in designer glasses, with an elderly, delicate sparrow on her wing.

Kimonos of Kyoto.

Japan seems to be obsessed with germs and cleanliness. I couldn’t get used to all the white crinoline face masks that many people in Japan wore. When asked, a variety of answers came my way, all of them related to one form of pollution or another. One answer: the people in face masks have bad colds, and don’t want to spread their germs to others. Another: the people in face masks are worried about getting bad colds, and don’t want to breathe in the germs of others. Another: Too many cedar trees were planted after World War II, and the people in face masks were suffering from cedar allergies. Whatever the reason, it gave the population in the streets, in the trains and train stations, even walking in the parks, a distinctly ghostly, non-human appearance. I saw one young couple in Kyoto, strolling under the cherry blossoms, hand in hand, both wearing white crinoline face masks. I wondered how they kissed. Do they kiss? He stopped and posed the object of his affection in front of a particularly splendid tree, and she removed her mask for the photograph, and then promptly put it back onto the front of her face, arranging her hair deftly around the stretchy elastic that held the mask on. Hand in hand, the noseless, mouthless creatures disappeared from my view, their faces an odd combination of furrowed brows, dark eyes, and an expanse of smooth, sterile fabric that looked like a codpiece.

The toilets in Japan were utterly wild, and not only carried out this theme of cleanliness, but suggested a national obsession with private functions. In the hostel that we stayed at in Nara, sleeping in a communal room on tatami mats with some Semester at Sea friends, there was a toilet that was so high tech, I had to fetch Jo to show me what to do. The seat was heated, and had a dial that regulated how hot you wanted to bake your butt. (This feature was terrific; how primitive our chilly toilet seats on the ship seemed when we returned.) There were two different sprays of water that one could select, depending upon what geographical region you were aiming for---a whale spout effect from down below, and then another stream of water that came at you directly from the rear of the toilet. These too had dials that regulated the strength of the streams. Then there was a dial for what turned out to be the equivalent of a hair dryer for the general region, presumably to evaporate all the warm water. (This feature was alarming.) When you were duly dried, you were supposed to push the button that said, in English and Japanese, “Super Powerful Deodorizer,” that blasted you with some sweet smelling noxious chemical that I disliked enough to start pushing all the water spray buttons once again. My favorite of all, however, and a feature in almost every public toilet I used in Japan, was a button that masked the sounds of one’s elimination with either a faux flushing sound, or the sound of a rushing waterfall.

I was totally fascinated and repelled by Japan. The cities were ferociously dense in population; the train stations teemed with well-mannered, well-groomed, efficient, restrained, obedient, hard-working, and distant people. Of course, I generalize. Many acts of kindness, complete with full waist bows, were showered upon the bumbling, illiterate Americans who couldn’t figure out the Byzantine railway system. Courtesy abounded, but Japan offered none of the warm embrace of India, none of the sweet, shy curiosity of the Thais, none of the open-heartedness of the Vietnamese, even any of the rough and ready---but always friendly---brusqueness of the Chinese.

Tokyo from on high.

The streets of Tokyo.

Perhaps it was the documentary I’d seen the week before on the Hikikomori children that colored by perceptions of Japan. The term “Hikikomori” means “withdrawn,” and applies both to the social condition and to the people who suffer from it. The Hikikomori are adolescents, usually male, who collapse under the pressure to succeed in school, to be the best and the brightest, to fulfill their family’s high expectations---they fall apart and refuse to leave their bedrooms for months, sometimes for years. They sit in darkened rooms, and surf the internet and play computer games. Our Japanese lecturer on the ship told me that she knew two Hikikomori who haven’t been out of their bedrooms for over a year. One of the families is so ashamed of their son’s withdrawal from society that they have told everyone he’s studying in the United States. He is violent towards his parents, and only comes out to go to the bathroom; they feed him by leaving trays of food at his door. The other child has been living for awhile in a half-way house for Hikikomori, slowly coming out of his self-imposed exile. There are some instances of Hikikomori in Korea and in China, but it is mostly a Japanese phenomenon. As I walked past groups of young Japanese men in the train station, wearing tight jeans and black leather jackets, their hair dyed red or blonde, in a style reminiscent of Rod Stewart of yore, I’d ask myself: Who are these children? And what kind of culture creates a social category like the Hikikomori?

Part of my problem with Japan was me. I’m not a big fan of shame, and in Japan, the avoidance of shame motivates a great deal of behavior. I would see commuters on the train, perched circumspectly, anxiously on the green velvet seats, and I wanted to lunge across the aisle, grab them by the lapels, shake them, and yell, “Smile! Whatever it is, it’s not so bad. You’re doing just fine, or at least good enough. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Stumble on a little joy. Have some fun!” Of course, I just sat there in silence, but my repressed outburst worked its way down into my very core, and before you knew it, I’d be sad and depressed. I’m not sure Japan and I could spend a lot of time together.

We did have a magical day in Nara. The weather was splendid---a little chilly, but sunny, and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. A whole group of Semester at Sea families arranged to travel a few days together, and we generated our own fun and our own joy. The first capital of Japan, Nara is famous for its free-ranging deer who stroll through the city parks, begging for food, and posing for photographs. It was molting season, so their coats were uneven and patchy, but they had such sweet, trusting faces, and I loved the confidence with which they walked among us. We did most of the sights in Nara, but my favorite was the Todaiji Temple, the largest edifice in Japan, and one of the oldest, having been built in 743 C.E. Perhaps it was the sweetness of the deer faces, but for some reason in the Todaiji Temple, I was feeling very sad about the loss of our cat, Sweetie, right before we left for Semester at Sea.

Our Semester at Sea friends.

The deer at Nara.

Jo feeds a deer.

You may wonder how the loss of a cat relates to Japan, but it does. Sweetie had been with us for about ten years. She was never an easy cat. Beset with medical issues, a constantly snurfling, snot-laden nose, obsessive compulsive licking, the shivers and shakes, Sweetie was a trial. For a decade, she dominated our household, with her bed on the sofa, her kitty heat lamp, her constant supply of hot water bottles because she was always so cold. But that said, Sweetie was the only grateful cat I have ever known. Cats usually approach the world with a sense of entitlement, but not Sweetie. She knew that she was a burden, and she lavished affection upon us. It was impossible not to love her. And then one day in October, she took a stroll out onto the driveway, and disappeared. Nan and Jo scoured the neighborhood, put up flyers, registered her at the pound, but to no avail. Sweetie had vanished into thin air. The vet opined that a hawk had taken her. Hawks were in the neighborhood that week, and had made off with a number of small pets. We were utterly devastated.

Anyhow, the deer in Nara reminded me of Sweetie, and I was feeling blue. Then our friends, Bill and Joan, told us about a program at the Todaiji Temple. The priests were raising money to replace the roof, and for ten dollars, you could buy a roof tile, and with a brush dipped in black ink, dedicate the tile to whomever you pleased. Bill and Joan were going to memorialize their beloved dog, Sabaii, a soft-coated Wheaton Terrier who had lived with them for fifteen years, and had died in 2007. We loved the idea, and decided to claim the tile next to theirs so that Sabaii and Sweetie could hang out together in pet heaven---surely located somewhere in the eternally blooming cherry trees above the roof of the Todaiji Temple. It was our way of saying goodbye to Sweetie, and we signed the tile “Louise, Nan, Kate and Jo” for the sisters who were also mourning her loss. Sweetie was a very maternal cat, and would surely lick Sabaii’s head, and he would, we were assured, valiantly protect her. I would never have anticipated that we would lay Sweetie to rest in a Buddhist temple in Nara, Japan, but we did.

A priest at the Todaiji Temple in Nara.

Our memorial to Sweetie in the Todaiji Temple.

We did so many other things in Japan in the nature of seeing sights: Kyoto, also in full cherry blossom bloom, and Tokyo. The former was lovely; the latter overwhelming. We took a full day tour of Tokyo, and aside from a visit to a really stunning Shinto Shrine built in the 1920s, the Meiji Shrine, it was too new, too shiny, too fast, too impersonal---too much for me. I did grow very fond of the Shinto shrines in Japan. Usually located right next to a Buddhist temple, the Shinto shrines house the indigenous, local gods---the kami---who inhabited Japan before Buddhism was introduced in the sixth century C.E. The shrine itself is almost always surrounded by a quiet woods and pebbled paths; you enter through a large wooden gate without a door known as a torii. The torii marks out sacred space from the mundane, and is meant to purify you from the top down; as your crunch through the pebbles, you are purified from the soles of your feet up. Before you enter the Shinto shrine, you stop at the purification trough and wash yourself in an elaborate cleansing ritual. You clap hands loudly before you go in; you clap hands loudly as you finish your prayer, all to let the kami know that you are there. I loved that the kami had jurisdiction over the day-to-day problems of life: getting a new job, becoming pregnant, doing well on an exam. Nothing was too small to bother a kami with, unlike the Buddhist temple usually looming nearby that was devoted to death and eternity. Shinto shrines were all about the business of living, and we saw many Japanese couples bringing their newborn babies to be introduced to the kami. Outside the shrine, you could buy amulets and other trinkets blessed by the priests. At the Meiji Shrine, I bought a medallion in a white silk bag to ward off evil, and for all the administrators at Touro, I bought a “success pencil,” guaranteed to bring good luck to its wielder. Everything was open in the Shinto shrines; you could never tell if you were outside or inside, or somewhere in between. That was true of much of the architecture. Subdued, elegant, organic---the aesthetic was the best feature of Japan.

The wash basin outside a Shinto temple.

Priests inside a Shinto temple.

I wish I had loved Japan more. If I understood why I didn’t love Japan, I might know more about myself. My response wasn’t due to any lack of beauty, that’s for sure. Maybe some day I’ll return, and be able to see Japan through new eyes. Maybe I’ll find something there to compel me, or to pull at my heart. Nara---now there’s a place I’d love to visit again, and of course, I’ll have to go back to pay homage to the spirit of Sweetie, and her faithful companion, Sabaii. LH

Jo in Yokohama.

At Sea

2009-05-06T10:52:00.001-07:00

Morning view from Deck 7.

I am ensconced in my little cave. As I lift my eyes from my laptop, my window is cut in half: below, an endless expanse of restless, pewter water; above, an endless sky of billowing, brooding clouds. The relationship of sea to sky changes with each sideways roll of the ship. From my vantage point, my window is a receptacle that fills up with grey sea; we tip backwards, and the sea drains out. Suddenly there is more sky, more clouds; we tip forward, and the receptacle fills up with grey sea again. I’ve grown used to this rhythm, this rocking and almost imperceptible rolling, so much so, that when we get into port, I miss it. Indeed, I don’t suffer from any sea sickness at all, but when my feet take those last steps off the gangway, I am land sick. My inner ears are still at sea, my legs are full of lead. Too much gravity.

Most of the time, I love sleeping on the ship. My theory is: Before birth, we were all rocking gently back and forth, up and down, sea horses adrift in a maternal sea. The ship, on a good night, repeats that lulling motion, although I like things a little bit wild. My favorite nights are when the ship is rolling enough to lift my arms off my body as I lie in bed. I do have my limits. My least favorite nights are when there’s a storm, and the ship has gone beyond rolling, and is lurching, up and down, and then a crash, up and down, and then a crash, up and down, and then a crash…This particular rhythm is not soothing; no one sleeps well on those nights for fear of falling out of bed. A nocturnal visit to the bathroom---only about fifteen steps away---can be perilous. One gropes. One hangs on. One bruises. I wonder: do some babies in utero also sail in choppy seas? Do they spend nine months, lurching, up and down, and then a crash, up and down, and then a crash? Odd to think about journeying as in inchoate, vulnerable, water-born creature, although that’s how it feels, drifting off to sleep at sea.

This blog is about our life at sea. Most of my writing has been about our ports, and with good reason. That’s where the travel is---the Hindu and Buddhist temples, the muddy rivers, the sprawling Asian cities, the delicious food, the funky hotels, and all of our adventures. But the fact is more than half of our time is spent at sea. Semester at Sea is an academic community, crammed into a very small space, not unlike a hotel, and we eat together, drink together, study together, hang out together, make music together, play cards together, whine together---you name it, we do it together. It has all the accoutrement of a campus: a Union where the entire community convenes; a library; a book store; coffee shops and bars. But the space is small, and there’s no escaping students, night and day. I would advise anyone who thinks they’d like to teach in this program: you absolutely must love college students. If you don’t love college students, you may as well walk the plank. Teaching at Semester at Sea is akin to those early, unremitting stages of parenthood: your young are huddled around you, and they don’t go away. I happen to love college students, but if I didn’t, I’d have gone round the bend. A few have.

Students leaving the Union.

The library the day after the final Global exam.

Students, faculty, administration, staff, crew---about a thousand of us are on the M.V. Explorer, and at the moment, we’re surrounded by water with nothing on the horizon. When we’re at sea, classes are held; there are no weekends on board. Because we have no school when we’re in port, we teach every day in order to make up a semester of classes. That means no one on the ship ever knows what day it is. Monday or Thursday? It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is whether it is an “A” day, or a “B” day. On A days, I have two classes, Biomedical Ethics at 8:00 a.m., and History of Immigration Law at 10:45 a.m.; on B days, I have Classical Asian Philosophy at 8:00 a.m. Every day, we all take a course called “Global Studies,” in which we study the country we’re about to explore.

Classical Asian Philosophy Class.

Here’s my routine on board. I’m up by six, and go right to Deck Seven where the weights are, and where you can walk on the deck, although not romantically all the way around the ship as I’d dreamed it would be. Imagine this: hamster peddling mindlessly in her wheel. I stride back and forth, forth and back, the small expanse of Deck Seven devoted to what is called the “Wellness Center.” (Gag.) In my Long Island life, I swim at the Y every day, but here I’ve had to settle for a regime of weights, stationary bicycle, and mindless hamster peddling. There’s a frigid pool of salt water the size of a postage stamp that I got into once. (Twice, if you count Neptune Day when Jo and I, holding hands and covered in fish guts, jumped in together.) When I’m done working out, I treat myself to ten minutes of tai chi on the uncovered portion of Deck Seven. That’s my favorite time of day: there is nothing in my life but an empty expanse of deck, sea as far as I can see, wind blasting in my ears, a sunrise that never fails to surprise me, and the slow meditative movements of tai chi.

I grab a quick breakfast before class. There are two dining rooms: the Garden Lounge on Deck 6 which has an outside deck, and some pretence of elegance; and the Fifth Floor dining room that is dark and cavernous. After classes, Jo and I meet every day for lunch in the Garden Lounge at 12:30, and if weather permits, we eat outside with the same movable feast of friends: Joan, the ship nurse, Ann, the ship doctor, and her husband, Dale, the dependent’s school coordinator, Dee, a marketing professor, Jodie, a communications professor, Joan, a retired government administrator, a “life long learner” (someone who travels independently with Semester at Sea), or if the weather’s bad and we’re inside, we might eat with Nassim, an Islamic scholar, and his wife Nilo, or with Beth, the librarian, or with any random combination of faculty, students, or staff who might be around. The afternoon, at least for me, is spent preparing for class or writing; Jo studies for her Advanced Placement exams. A nap must be had every day. Then often around 5:30, I often go up for drinks with our good friends Bill and Joan, both faculty in sociology and education. On their deck, a motley crew---always the same, always different---drink wine, eat weird little crunchy Japanese things, gossip, complain, watch the sun set, and listen to the tenor lap, lap, lap of the waves against the hull of the ship. Two nights ago, three huge boobies were soaring around right next us, and we tried feeding them some dried wasabe from the balcony. That didn’t work.

The Garden Lounge.

Beth and Nilo in the Garden Lounge.

Dinner is always on the Fifth Floor, this time with a totally different set of friends, our Dinner on the Fifth Floor Friends---Bill and Joan, Joyce who teaches history, and Bob who does audio visuals and IT, and sometimes Jodie. On rare occasions, there’s a mingling of the Outside Deck of the Garden Lounge Lunch Friends and the Dinner on the Fifth Floor Friends, and then we have to squeeze around one of the larger tables. Jo and I almost always eat dinner together, and then she goes off to have her social life, and I go back to my cabin not to have mine.

After a day full of people, I desperately need solitude. In my cabin at night, I get ready for class, or work on my article, or watch wonderful movies they put on TV, or write nasty little short stories, or mess with my blog, or catch up on my email. Sometimes, there’ll be a program in the Union at night. A faculty member or “life long learner” might give a talk on something that amuses him or her---the importance of the Battle of Midway, the genesis of the Gregorian calendar, the engineering of the Panama Canal, recognizing the correct fork with which to spear your shrimp cocktail, the latest teaching of Guru Somebody-or-Other. Being an education junkie, I almost always go. Jo almost never goes; she’s seventeen. The evening is her time to socialize, sometimes up at the Pool Bar, sometimes in the Garden Lounge Bar, but more often in a college student’s cabin where they hang out at night in groups of ten or twelve, crammed in on the beds and the floor like the seals on the shore in Walvis Bay, sleek skin to sleek skin. Monica, Molly, Erin, Erica, Michael, another Michael, Peter, Holly, Heidi, the list goes on. Jo and I sometimes see each other across the Garden Lounge later at night, when I am filling my hot water bottle for my freezing feet, and she’s with her herd, waiting for the snack the kitchen puts out for the students at ten. (I swear, college kids EAT all the time.) She waves at me across the room, and I wave back, but we don’t speak. I can’t imagine how it must be for her to have the her mother intruding on the fringes of her social space, but as with all adversities, Jo bears it with grace.

Louise's little monk cell--Cabin 4091.

Then I go to bed, and it all starts up again. I’ve just re-read this description, and it sounds like a very little life, some might say, a monotonous one, repeating itself over and over again, clouds and sea, exercise, tai chi, classes, teaching, food, friends, students, writing, emails, naps, drinks, hot water bottles, movies, sleep, more clouds and sea. That’s about it. Note also what is not in this description: no traffic, no commute, no making the bed, no trash to put out, no lines to stand in, no cooking, no grocery shopping, no bills, no money, no cell phones, no news, no meetings---the list goes on and on.

Life at sea drives some faculty crazy. They can’t stand having nothing on the horizon, or living in a close community. They’re claustrophobic. They’re sea sick. They’re tired of pasta and ice-berg lettuce the color and texture of ivory alabaster. They’ve lost patience with the energy, the noise level, the persistent, cheerful foolhardiness of the young. Why can’t the students be more serious? Why do they spend all of their time on the deck, half naked? Why aren’t they more interested in things that matter? Why aren’t they more interested in me? What makes Semester at Sea a fabulous experience for them is their time spent on land---the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the smells of foreign ports of call.

I too love those foreign ports of call, but for me, there’s no greater thrill than the rumble of the ship starting up her engines. She shudders, she lets loose the ropes that tie her to the land, and we head out of the harbor for open sea. Jo and I are both convinced that we must have sailed in a former life. We’re too good at it, and we love it too much, for this to be our first time living and working on a ship.

I’ve also learned this on this voyage: I like a very little life, a close community, and nothing on the horizon. If I just had a cat with me… LH

Jo and her friends outside of the Garden Lounge.

Hong Kong and Shanghai

2009-05-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong from the Peak.

For me, Hong Kong was not new. Touro’s summer law program spends its first few days in Hong Kong, so I’ve been four times before, most recently in May 2008. On that trip, I had Nan with me; on this trip, I had Jo with me. The way I figure it: I now owe Kate a trip to Hong Kong, under the perverse logic of sibling parity.

We decided to sail for three days with the ship from Hong Kong to Shanghai. By sailing with the ship, Jo was deprived of a trip to the Great Wall of China, but for the two of us to have made that journey would have cost more than a thousand dollars. I’ve been to the Great Wall four times already, one of them last summer, and while it is a great Great Wall, I was more interested in the two days in Shanghai where I’d never been before. Neither of us had ever been to Japan, and our friends were lobbying for us to join them in Nara and Kyoto. So we spent two days in Hong Kong, had a quiet three days sailing on the ship with the hundred or so of us too broke to fly around China, and then had two days in Shanghai.

Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities. This was also the first time I’ve ever been to Hong Kong when it wasn’t dreadfully hot. In late May, the tourist is dependent on Hong Kong’s over-achieving, and ubiquitous, air-conditioning. Walking outside of your hotel in the morning is like moving from a freezer into a bowl of pea soup; your glasses steam up. On this trip to Hong Kong, however, it was early spring, cloudy and grey---sweater weather. The air-conditioning was gratuitous, and sometimes not on at all. It reminded me of when Eileen Kaufman and I made our first trip to Delhi in December, having been there many times before, but always in June. In June, the night air in Delhi is like a tandoori oven. In December, the night air in Delhi is cool and crisp, and full of the fragrance of jasmine. What a difference 30 degrees Fahrenheit can make.

Jo and I made a deal in Hong Kong: she’d go her way with her friends, and I’d go my way with mine. The poor thing---four days alone with her very sick mother, trapped alone in a hotel room in Bangkok, has probably scarred her forever. Besides, since February, she’s part of a protean group of college kids, and I knew that she’d have more fun exploring Hong Kong with them. I spent my first day with our friends Joan and Bill, both faculty members, and we did all the touristy things since Bill had never been to Hong Kong before. That was fun for me, and truth to tell, I hadn’t been up to the Peak on the cable car since 2000. The view was still stunning, but the entire area around the Peak has been enclosed, and made into a multi-storied mall. This meant that you couldn’t get outside on the Peak without purchasing a second expensive ticket, so we decided to eat in one of the high-end restaurants that had a view. Just what Asia needs, we grumbled, another multi-storied mall?

Bill and Joan dining on the Peak.

But let me say this about the malls of Asia: you have to see them to believe them. Some of the other faculty on Semester at Sea are critical of our students who visit the malls of Asia, but not me. Malls are the market places of our century, and if you want to see the Chinese enjoying their leisure time, and the fruits of their capitalistic labor (which they have embraced with a vengeance) then you go to the mall. If you want to see the Japanese out and about, strolling, eating ice cream, drinking coffee, with their children and grandmothers in tow, then you go to the mall. We’ve also discovered that the malls of Asia have fabulous, ambitious food courts offering delicacies from around the world, and the price is a third of what you might pay in a restaurant. Many of our best lunches on this trip have been eaten in the malls of Asia.

Aesthetically, the malls of Asia put ours to shame. They have eight and nine stories, shiny marble floors, polished brass railings, glass-encased, neon-lined escalators, indoor fountains and creative landscaping, and pristine bathrooms with an amazing array of hand-drying machinery. I suppose too, there’s shopping. Actually, we didn’t shop in the malls of Asia because we can’t afford to. Jo and I used the malls as palatial pit stops, and perhaps for the urban Chinese in particular, the mall is a kind of palace---except in this case, the palace is not Forbidden; it is open to all. All are free to window shop at the mall, and in the muggy summer, to enjoy the air-conditioning. Indeed, that may just about sum up the individual freedoms in China. Don’t get me started…

Ok, just to be clear: I am not proposing that our students should only visit the malls of Asia, but they can be a lot of fun.

On our second day in Hong Kong, Jo and her friends took off for Stanley Market, and I spent the day alone, my second day of blissful solitude in almost four months. I walked up and down Nathan Road, had lunch in Kowloon Park and watched geriatric tai chi, and spent most of the afternoon at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. I never miss a visit to this museum because it has one of the best book stores in town. (I’m usually on the hunt for books in English on Chinese art and culture.) On this trip though, I lucked out with the art. The exhibit was of the paintings of Ding Yanyong (1902-1978). Ding was from Guandong, but had studied modern art in Tokyo in the twenties, and later became a part of the western painting movement in Shanghai, adopting a style reminiscent of Matisse. In the 1930s, he became interested in traditional Chinese art, and from that time on, his work synthesized the art of the West and the East. I particularly loved his ink on paper scrolls, and the playful one-stroke paintings that he did as an old man. The museum played a film on a loop from the 1970s of Master Ding performing these later paintings, and interacting with his students who were oozing filial piety. I watched it three times, all alone in a dark room, collapsed on a museum sofa. His personal life was tragic. Ding migrated in 1949 to Hong Kong, leaving behind his wife and four girls; he was never reunited with them. All of his art work in China was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution; his family was sent to re-education camps as “feudal bourgeoisie.” Living a bare-boned existence alone for years in Hong Kong, he was alienated from his country and from his family. Even Ding’s humorous, satirical pieces---of which there are many---betray a palpable loneliness.

Here was something new in Hong Kong: at eight p.m., there’s a laser show between and among the sky scrapers on Hong Kong Island. Our ship had a fortuitous mooring spot---I could see the Star Ferry from my window without lifting my head off my pillow. While we waited to set sail for Shanghai, we sat on deck seven with a gaggle of students and watched huge flood lights scan the darkness and green laser beams zig zag from building to building. It was like watching someone play a computer game across the Hong Kong skyline. I love the way the Chinese understand the dynamics of light. It was whimsical. Why can’t New York City muster some whim?

Hong Kong's laser show.

The MV Explorer at night.

After two quiet, cloudy days on the ship, we came into the harbor of Shanghai. As we chugged up the Huangpu River, I leaned over the railing with two colleagues who were in a state of shock. They hadn’t been to Shanghai for over twenty years. We were gazing at the urban panorama of the area called the Pudong. Twenty years ago, the Pudong had been boggy farmland. Now it was Shanghai’s bustling financial district, with the most amazing and eclectic cluster of skyscrapers and architectural anomalies, including the Oriental Pearl Tower that looks like space ship on a tripod. Later in the day, Jo and I and another faculty family took something called the “Bund Sightseeing Tunnel.” It connects the city with the Pudong via a train that conveys tourists through a tunnel of pulsating, spiraling lights, with a god-like, booming voice in the background announcing the various themes, “Now we are in volcanic lava….now we are in heaven…now we are in hell.” We had three kids with us, ages 17, 12 and 9, and they were enthralled. (Well, ok, I was enthralled too, but I have a weakness for neon and flashing lights. It’s one reason I love China.)

The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel.

I only have Beijing to compare Shanghai to, and let me say this: Shanghai is not Beijing. Beijing is laid out in a predictable, rational design; Shanghai is not. It’s difficult to navigate, and none of the city maps makes any sense whatsoever. Beijing is international and cosmopolitan; Shanghai feels more parochial, and is distinctly Chinese. Its population is far more homogenous, and I was impressed by how big the people were, many over six feet, with broad-faces and eyes that looked quite different from the eyes of Beijing. Beijing has many stunning tourist sights, but the rest of the city was torn down to make way for rows and row of monotonous, shiny glass boxes. Shanghai has very few stunning tourist sights, but has preserved its historical heritage. The Bund, and the French Concession, are stunning, and south of the Bund, you can find something that no longer exists in Beijing: an Old Town. We spent several hours in that Old Town, walking through the maze of narrow lanes, ducking under laundry hung in front of and between the closely packed houses, dodging bicycles, our eyes stinging from the smoke of small, local temples and open fires where food was cooking right on the street. I much prefer Shanghai to Beijing, and look forward to spending more time there. If I never went to Beijing again, it would be just fine with me.

Shanghai's Old Town.

On one of our afternoons in Shanghai, I took a small group of students to a neighborhood center that provided a wide range of services to the community----health care, music and dance for senior citizens, public education, and family planning services. We met with two sturdy, middle-aged women who ran the family planning clinic. Our translator, a young man of about 25, did his best to translate the questions and answers about China’s One Child Policy. (In China, since 1979, an urban couple is only allowed to have one child; second children must be paid for. The policy is relaxed somewhat in the country, and the ethnic minorities are not subject to it, but in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, most couples only have one child, and more than likely, that one child is a boy.) Our translator got flustered on more than one occasion. I asked him whether the clinic offered the “Morning After Pill,” and the trio was clueless. I had to tactfully explain the circumstances under which a woman might take such a pill, and he had to translate into Mandarin, “After the night of unexpected, or unplanned-for intercourse.” That wasn’t as difficult as having to explain to us: “The young women are taught the time in their menstrual cycle when they should not be having sex.” It was a challenge for him. They were mystified when a student asked whether free birth control was also available to unmarried women. Apparently the thought of an unmarried woman needing birth control just wasn’t part of their mental sky.

Representatives from the community center.

By and large, the two women were forthright, although I’m fairly sure that we were not only getting the party line, but that the neighborhood center was something of a showcase for westerners, evidence of enlightened social policy. Upstairs, we watched a very elderly group of musicians playing Chinese traditional music, although when they discovered their audience was American, they played a rousing rendition of Jingle Bells. In another room, a group of elderly women were rehearsing a somewhat flamboyant dance that entailed flapping fans in unison, and dipping and bending in ways that I no longer dip and bend. They also sang for us, and then demanded we reciprocate by singing a song to them, so we performed our own rousing rendition of Row, Row, Row your Boat---in a round, mind you. Luckily, we’d all been to camp.

I was sad to spend only those few days in China. China has grown on me. The first time I went to China and lived in Xiamen for a month, I found it fascinating, but it did not call my name---not the way India does. India is a large, rowdy democracy where anything goes, and often does. China is a totalitarian state. Censorship keeps their population ignorant of their government’s policies, and few feel free to speak out. On a tour of Tiananmen Square, one of our students asked how many were killed in 1989 in the military’s forcible---and deadly---dispersal of student protesters, and the young tour guide responded, “Oh, not so many as they say, only a few. Most of those photographs you see are ‘photo-shopped.’”

That answer makes me weep. The Chinese government has “photo-shopped” their recent history, their record on human rights, their appalling excuse for a criminal justice system, their planet-threatening pollution, their repression of religious groups who threaten their authority, their rampant consumerism and energy consumption, their myriad intrusions into the lives of their citizenry---uh oh, you got me started.

But I’ll stop. The truth is: Regardless of how I feel about the Chinese government, I still have a deep affection for the Chinese people, for the perpetuation of their ancient culture under extreme adversity, for their industry and tenacity, and at least in my dealings with them, for their great kindness.

The students at Semester at Sea have experienced a lot of anti-American sentiment as we’ve traveled around the world. We’ve talked about it repeatedly in our “Post-port Reflections.” To have someone in a foreign country blame you personally for our war in Iraq (which you didn’t support) or for dropping a bomb that killed 90,000 civilians (when you weren’t even born yet)---those accusations hurt. Some of the students have responded with anger; some with shame. Here is where travel educates. You learn to distinguish the people from the government. It’s possible to love one, and not the other. By someone covering you with a careless stroke of a brush, you learn to paint your own canvas with more care. LH

Thailand and Vietnam

2009-04-11T19:59:00.000-07:00

Jo and Louise feed a tiger cub in Thailand.

Bangkok, Thailand
Bangkok is a blur for me. On our first day, we took a tour of a tiger zoo, and crocodile farm, and while sitting on a wooden bench in a large amphitheater, a phe, or spirit, climbed onto my back, and took possession of my body. I started to shiver and shake, and the next seven days were spent in a feverish haze. The doctors on board the ship seem to think that I had dengue fever. I must have picked it up in India from a mosquito.

Jo and I had reservations at a hotel in Bangkok, and I decided, perhaps foolishly in retrospect, that I might as well be sick there as on the ship. I thought that I just had a virus, and that the fever would pass in a day or two, but I was wrong. It lasted about a week, with spikes and low ebbs, night sweats followed by teeth chattering chills, terrible headaches, aches and pains like a truck had run over me, bleeding gums, no appetite, and utter misery. The fever was not inconsequential, almost 104 at night, and I was totally wiped. It’s been over with for two weeks now, and I am definitely on the mend, but it made for a bizarre four days in Bangkok, with most of the time spent in the hotel room trying to stay warm. Poor Jo. I don’t think it was much fun for her. It made me think of the many cemeteries in Africa and Asia we have seen along our travels, full of the bodies of colonists from northern Europe who had fallen prey to the grip of a phe. (I kept telling Jo, if I die, you and your sisters are actually better off financially---you can sell the house and go to whatever college you want. She kept saying, don’t die, please, not yet.) One of the doctors on the ship visited a tropical medicine hospital in Chennai, and reported that most of the patients were being treated with dengue fever. Some died of it, but they had started out the illness in a debilitated state from a life of poverty. Life in the tropics can kill you---but not me, not this time. Let’s hear it for being a well-nourished, healthy specimen, the product of good medical care and a privileged existence.

We did get out every day, at least for a few hours, and saw the Grand Palace which is a remarkable, absurdly gaudy extravaganza. We made our pilgrimage to the Emerald Buddha, and to the golden Reclining Buddha, and moved around the city, sliding in and out of one hot pink cab after another, driven by the sweetest people I think I have ever met. At night, we took walks around our hotel which was in an older section of Bangkok, and enjoyed the night life on the streets, with family groups eating and cooking outside of shops. There was music playing, and children and dogs running up and down the alleys, and old people sitting on low plastic stools, slurping noodles out of huge bowls. It was hard to navigate.

The reclining Buddha in Bangkok.

I love the way that Asia pours out onto the streets at night, and turns their front stoops and store fronts into an extension of their homes. Anyone who is willing to wind their way through the cheerful chaos is invited to the party. I love the smells of cooking food, the clatter of pop music, the sounds of languages I don’t understand, the smiles and nods, and sometimes the looks of surprise that we foreigners were still with them after the sun had gone down. At night, no one is interested in selling me anything. It’s family time, eating time, relaxing time, laughing time, and I suspect, story time. I never get tired of roaming the streets of Asia at night. Never.

Vietnam
Semester at Sea sponsors overnight trips, most of which are prohibitively expensive, but the cheapest one on the menu was an overnight trip that went up and down the delta of the Mekong River on a variety of wooden boats. I didn’t think I could figure out Viet Nam on our own, the price was right, so Jo and I signed up for the trip. Our group consisted of 18 young people, and aside from one Resident Assistant, who was all of age thirty-one, everyone on the trip was 22 years old, or younger. They were just the ages of my two friends who had been drafted into the army to go to Viet Nam over forty years ago, Bill from Kansas, and Will from Columbus. Both had come to the Mekong Delta to fight a war that neither of them believed in. I remembered them from the days after the war when they had come home to college in the early seventies, shattered, battered, and old beyond their years. Bill carried with him the painful memory of having killed an elderly, bearded Vietnamese man who wore a coolie hat, and Will, who was in law school with me, had woken up in a hospital bed in Saigon, the only one of his unit who had survived. Neither of those Williams was ever quite right again. Both of them lived among us, but at distance, far away from those of us who had not gone to Vietnam, but who had sat out the war in our respective universities, protesting our government’s policies.

Houseboat on the Mekong Delta.

I carried those two young men around with me in the Mekong Delta, listening to the chatter of the Semester at Sea kids as they talked about their majors, their boyfriends back home who were too possessive, their mothers who loved them and called them on their cell phones too often, their fathers who were hoping they would get summer jobs even in a lousy economy. We went up and down the muddy Mekong River, took pictures of the floating markets, bought ice cold sodas from a little boy in a small wooden boat who rowed up to our boat, offering his wares. We chatted, we dipped our hands in the brown water, we took off our shoes and socks, we drank coconut juice from coconuts that had been macheteed open by our guide, we felt the hot, dry wind evaporate the sweat off our heads, we swatted at mosquitoes, and took too many photographs.

Floating down the Mekong River.

The students eventually forgot that I was there, and I was able to perch silently on the edge of their youth. I listened to their worries, and observed their flirtations, and witnessed the silly things that made them laugh. Their laughter made me laugh even though I almost never saw what was funny. They were---they are---so gloriously and so un-self-consciously young. They do not even know that they are young---and in the midst of all their glamour and blonde pony tails and baseball caps sitting on their heads backwards, surrounded by their enthusiasm and innocence, I thought about my two ghost boy passengers from the Midwest whose youths had been stolen from them.

Having tea and fruit with SAS students.

I felt sad and sorry about the war. Our guide, a young man named Kha, had lost his three older sisters and his father at the hands of the Americans. This he told me quite matter of factly, staring out across the muddy water of the Mekong River, sipping on a coconut, and instructing a young man from Semester at Sea to keep his arms inside the boat. And so I added the older sisters of Kha, and his dead father, to my ghost load, and they rode around in the back of the creaking wooden boat with me, along with the frightened, lost boys named William, who probably still haunt the heads of two sixty-plus-year-old men living somewhere in Kansas, somewhere in Texas, men who have wives battling weight and grandchildren they love, and plasma TVs. This was how it felt to be in Vietnam.

The outings didn’t always hang together all that well. In the morning of one of the days, we went to the Cao Dai Temple, a religion founded in South Vietnam in the early 1920s that purports to be a synthesis of Buddhism, Daoism, and Catholicism. We were fortunate to visit during one of their services, and watched from a balcony as prayers were chanted through a haze of incense, and traditional Vietnamese music poured out from a band of twenty or so musicians. The huge hall was packed with devotees dressed in white robes, kneeling in tidy rows, underneath the brilliant pink pillars encircled with writhing black dragons. It was ethereal, and mesmerizing.

The Cao Dai Temple.

Then we headed off to the Cu Chi Tunnels, perhaps one of the oddest tourist destinations on this voyage. It is about 70 kilometers northwest of Saigon, and consists of a 200 kilometer cobweb of underground tunnels that housed hundreds, maybe thousands, of Vietnamese villagers and guerilla fighters beneath some of the most hotly contested areas during the war. We first had to watch a propaganda film that was virulently anti-American, and then the white devils were led around the tunnel system, stopping for tea and fruit in the middle of the tour, and for time to purchase Cu Chi Tunnel souvenirs at the gift shop where ice cream and bottled water and alcohol with dead snakes coiled in the bottom of the bottle were also for sale.

The Cu Chi Tunnels.

It was over a hundred degrees, and I just couldn’t put the whole scene together in my muddled mind. I had a gaggle of ghosts in a cart that I was dragging around behind me, and they were extremely confused and upset, and I was weak from a week of dengue fever, and overall, it was bizarre and distressing. And the jungle was so very hot. In the background, you could hear the shots of guns where for a few Dong, tourists were allowed to shoot at the outline of black cardboard guerilla fighters. We were drenched in sweat, and the mosquitoes were following us around in menacing clouds. (Perhaps I was feeling a bit paranoid about the mosquitoes, but I made one student who was puffing up with multiple bites wrap herself in a green hemp hammock that she had purchased at the Cu Chi Tunnel gift shop.) I am told that My Lai has also been turned into a tourist destination, and our fellow Semester at Sea travelers who had ventured up to Cambodia had walked across the Killing Fields, stepping on human bones, as they were led up and down the backdrop of former horror by courteous, opaque young tour guides in white shirts, most of whom had the remains of family members beneath their feet. Irony was nonexistent. The war had simply become a commodity. Now we stop here for ten minutes, to use the toilet, to buy a souvenir. It’s just the way things were.

The ghosts on the Mekong River.

On our last day in Vietnam, Jo, Beth, the ship librarian from the University of Virginia, and I had a glorious, frivolous day of shopping in Saigon City. Aside from the traffic, which was by far the scariest I have ever experienced anywhere in any of my travels due to the rivers of motor bikes that pulse through the veins and arteries of the city with a fierce, perilous energy, Saigon is a modern, beautiful city, with trees, and broad avenues, French architecture, designer shops, cool, glittering malls, ice cream parlors, and trendy stores with the most amazing objects to buy---shiny lacquer ware, leather, red paper lanterns, silks of the most startling hues. We didn’t spend much money, but a little money could buy you a marvelous cluster of plastic bags full of lovely treasures. The city is booming, and on the move, mostly from an influx of capital from Singapore and Taiwan. We ate a sinful lunch in a small, cool dark room, of individual pizzas in thick, cast iron pans, with extra cheese, and fresh pineapple chunks, and then went for a foot massage on the fifth floor of the Rex Hotel that started off with a ten minute soak of our feet in a wooden bowl full of warm, cinnamon flavored water. For an hour, listening to soft, plinky plink music, and resting in a lounge chair under a light blanket, a smiling, young Vietnamese woman massaged my feet and my legs with peppermint oil, and worked her thumbs into my sore pressure points. My ghosts got bored, and decided to go home.

Traffic of Saigon.

I don’t know what else to tell you about Vietnam. Both Jo and I loved it, probably the most of all the places that we have been to so far. (Excluding India. I don’t count India in the mix. I love India above all; she knows that well.) Still, Vietnam was incredible. I will forever remember those many hours going up and down the muddy waters of the Mekong River in little rickety wooden boats. The food, the greenness of the rice-paddies, the water puppets (I forgot to tell you about the water puppets!), and most of all, the kind people we met---and their generosity of spirit. In a country where we might have been shunned, we were greeted with open arms, and open hearts. We loved Vietnam. LH

India

2009-03-22T05:39:00.000-07:00

Louise with Sara and Dana, two students.

Thirty of us went right from the ship to Mother Theresa’s home for “unadoptable girls” in Chennai. Going right to Mother Theresa’s might have made for a fairly rough landing in India. Other students had left for the airport, to see the Taj Mahal, or the ghats of Varanasi, but the kids who sign up for the service projects at Semester at Sea are quite remarkable, and sturdy. The truth is you need to be sturdy to go into Mother Theresa’s.

Traffic in Chennai.

The first floor housed about 20 profoundly retarded girls (and a few boys) who were curled up in their metal cribs, blind, deaf; limbs locked, many of them not in any kind of recognizable human form. To me they seemed to be in a profound dream state. All had been abandoned on the streets of Chennai. The nuns had picked them up and now care for them with great love and affection. The second floor had about thirty girls and young women with varying degrees of retardation, but they were conscious, curious and ready to play. They sang. We sang. We taught them clapping games, tossed balloons and blew bubbles, played Duck Duck, Goose Goose, a game I will never understand. I sat in a plastic chair and watched it all from the corner. A little girl with a sloping head sidled up her chair next to me, and fell asleep on my lap while I petted her back like a kitten. We also met two individuals who were not retarded, but who were severely disabled, one a ten year old boy with a cleff palate and no arms and legs, but with a devilish sense of humor, and the other a 36 year old woman, also missing limbs. But she had a fine mind, was conversant in English, although she told me that she preferred to read in Tamil. She slept on a small mat on the concrete floor among the profoundly retarded. She was safe, clean, and had made a life for herself among the sisters. It was a day to count one’s fingers and toes, one’s blessings, and to have the utmost respect for those nuns.

The next day, I took Jo and her friend Erin to Pondicherry, a city about two hours south of Chennai on the coast. Pondicherry is an interesting amalgam of French colonialism, southern Indian culture, and an overlay of western hippies and utopian idealists. Pondicherry was one of the few French forays into colonialism on the Indian subcontinent, and if you judge the success of a colony by longevity, it failed. On the other hand, if you judge it by influence, it did not. The French are still a vital force in Pondicherry. I’m not sure why, but a substantial number of French still live there, and there is an active Alliance Francais for those on the subcontinent who want to learn French language and culture. We stayed on the third floor of a heritage hotel in a room with twenty foot ceilings, its own balcony, marble floors, and carved wooden platform beds that stood waist high. The building itself looked like it belonged in the French quarter of New Orleans.

Our street in Pondicherry.

Pondicherry has a big university, and hosts a lot of foreign exchange students, so it feels very much like a college town, with bookstores, cheap eateries and coffee shops, and young people buzzing around recklessly on small motor bikes. It’s on the sea, and there’s a glorious Promenade that you can stroll up and down, watching India at play---there was surf, kites, kids, cotton candy, music, weird whirly things that glow in the dark. I could easily live in Pondicherry. Jo kept spotting aging hippies on the streets of Pondicherry, saying, “Look, Mom, there’s a friend for you.” One of the things I hate about getting older: I am not going to have the time to lead all the lives I want to lead. It’s a good thing I believe in reincarnation. It takes some of the pressure off.

Selling scarves at the sea.

Election propaganda.

The food in Pondicherry was outstanding. Every meal had three or four orders of buttered nan and Indian yoghurt, and the main meals were often curries, usually very spicy. One night the food was so hot we simply could not consume our main dishes. I have a Flip Video of poor Erin weeping over dinner, complete with nose running and steam coming out of her ears. We went twice to a place called the Rise Inn, a small family owned restaurant, and for dessert, we feasted on crepes with butter and honey and lemon. Fresh, hot crescents were part of every breakfast.

Jo and Erin at the Rise Inn.

On our way out of Pondicherry, we stopped at Auroville, the utopian community begun in 1968 by the “Mother,” one of the disciples of the famous Sri Aurobondo who founded the ashram in Pondicherry. It remains a thriving, sustainable, international community of several thousand people, and while we didn’t have time to do the tour of the remarkable looking temple, we spent a hour or so, just walking around, and sitting under the trees. Auroville was green, beautifully landscaped, spotlessly clean, and apparently thriving. I wished we could have stayed longer.

Auroville.

On our last day, we went to Kanchipuram and Mamalapuram. In Kanchipuram we went to a 16th century Hindu temple and were lucky enough to have visited on an auspicious day yielding great celebrations of music, with horns blowing, drums beating, incense swinging, chanting of priests, and transportation of large, wooden painted gods and goddesses throughout the dark temple chambers. It was electrifying. In Mamalapuram, we saw the amazing rock carvings and Shiva temples of the Pallava dynasty, including one huge rock carving called Arjuna’s Penance that had families of elephants, and flying goddesses, and snakes, and flowing rivers and tricky cats and---you name it. The rock carvings were so beautiful, all from the sixth century, some Buddhist imagery, some Hindu, but so different from later Indian temple art that tends to be repetitive, and stylized. The animals in these carvings were so naturalistic, so individualized, and the subjects were all captured in quiet moments of intimacy, young girls fixing their hair in a mirror, cows being milked, baby elephants hiding shyly under their mother’s massive weight. I had a lot of fun in Pondicherry, but if you asked me: what was the most remarkable thing you saw in India? It would be the temples and rock sculptures in Mamalapuram. I would travel far to see such a thing. Indeed, I did. LH

Kanchipuram.

Arjuna's Penance.

Shiva Temple, Pallava Dynasty.

Cape Town/Cognitive Dissonance

2009-03-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

It has taken me almost a week to process our stop in Cape Town, South Africa. For me, it was the most emotionally draining of all our ports so far. Cape Town put me into a state of profound cognitive dissonance.

No other port has been so beautiful. The way the city wraps around a set of knock-out, rugged mountains, its aqua blue waters, its bright colors, its almost Manhattan-like glitter and pace---with African music being performed on the streets everywhere. The ship squeezed into a stunning harbor, and nuzzled right up to a five-star hotel, a tastefully designed four-story mall, and block upon block of enticing restaurants, coffee shops, clubs, bars, expensive gift stores, and an array of outdoor activities such as shark diving, surfing, sand-boarding, windsurfing, kite surfing, one-day safaris---you name it, with enough cash, you can do it in Cape Town.

The Waterfront at night.

I was not immune to these pleasures. I loved leaving the ship every day to go to a coffee shop named Melissa’s, to sit in an elegant, soothing public space, alone and in silence, to read a newspaper, to listen to jazz, and linger over a wonderful café au lait and a piece of outstanding ginger biscotti. There were at least three bookstores at the Waterfront to poke around, and it made me realize how much I have missed some of these simple, creature pleasures. My Starbucks, my Barnes & Noble.

It also made me realize how much I have missed being alone. Ship life is intensely communal, and the community is wonderful. My fellow faculty are across the board engaged, interesting, adventurous, fun, funny, irreverent, a little fractious at times, but overall, they’re great. How could they not be? They’ve all struggled to put their lives on hold for five months, to make almost no money so they could sail around the world, teaching and traveling with a shipload of young people. It’s been such a treat to make so many new friends. But truth to tell, I need a lot of solitude, and South Africa gave me that. Jo had a stomach virus through part of the port stay, and was out with friends at other times. Almost everyone in the program was off on an expensive Safari. Only a handful of us were left in Cape Town so I enjoyed the city on my own.

Our first day though was a trip to Simon’s Town with two other faculty families to see the colony of 3,000 African penguins who hang out at Boulder’s Beach. Simon’s Town is one of the Victorian villages that hugs the coastal strip of the Cape Peninsula around False Bay. At Boulder’s Beach they have constructed a board walk that winds around the colony, so it is possible to walk out among the birds without disturbing them. I have a real weakness for penguins, so I loved it. Truth to tell, they didn’t do much but stand facing the sun, like small, formal statues, all dressed up in their tuxedos with no place to go. They were also a bit redolent of guano and penguin body odor, I have to presume. Not a smell I was familiar with, but birdy, and definitely not subtle. For lunch, we had wonderful fish and chips, dipped in beer batter, right on the bay in Simon’s Town, drank fresh lemonade, listened to a group of African singers who sounded like Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s band, and looked out at the beach, the incredible shades of blue water and the rugged rocks of False Bay. It was a crisp, bright, sun blasting day, and except for those who served us, or sang for us, I only saw white faces.

Simon's Town.

Then we had to head back to Cape Town, dropping off a mathematician and his family at the airport, and that detour took us through the townships in the Cape Town Flats where people of color were forced to live during Apartheid until 1994 and where the majority of them still live today. The townships go on forever, mile after mile of abject poverty, with most people living in tin shacks lacking electricity, water, and sanitation. Then the next day, Jo and I did a service project with an N.G.O., Operation Hunger arranged by Semester at Sea in two different townships. Our busload of forty college kids was given the task of rounding up, weighing and measuring every child in a certain area of the township. (Operation Hunger is monitoring the levels of malnutrition.) Jo and I hung out mostly in the crèche where the little kids were being cared for. Some had parents who were working, even though the unemployment rate in the township was over 80%; other children were “unknowns,” toddlers who had just drifted into the crèche because ostensibly no one was taking care of them. Almost all of them were without shoes; some were without names.

The Semester at Sea kids were great; they dug right into the project, and within four hours, we had measured and weighed probably over fifty black kids, all of whom spoke only Xhosa, one of the “clicking” languages. We noticed they had no toys to play with, so we took up a collection on the bus, raised $250, and then Jo, and another faculty member and I went toy shopping to send toys, primarily legos, blocks, and trucks, for the next day’s service visit.

Weighing children in the township.

Our second stop of the day was at a soup kitchen in a colored area where our kids bought the bread at a grocery on the way, and helped to serve the long line of people who came for a free, hot meal. Once again, our kids jumped right in, and because many of the colored, which includes people of mixed race (many of Indian descent, some Muslim) had some English, we could communicate. Alcoholism, astronomical rates of AIDS (almost one in five South Africans is infected with HIV), unemployment, malnutrition, total lack of infrastructure, no medical or dental care, little in the way of schools---the situation is bleak, and unfortunately, the politicos in the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma and his crew, just sold their own people down the river in a series of scandals and a spate of corruption. There is currently little hope in sight, although elections are in April.

The soup kitchen in the township.

On the other end of the spectrum, my friend Dee who had lived in South Africa for years, spent her four days being wined and dined by old friends, and the buzz among the white elite is: how do we get out of South Africa? The main reason for the white flight is violence. South Africa has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, with over 50 killings a day. Car jackings and muggings are common, and some 800,000 whites have left out of a total population of 4 million since 1995. Anyone who has spent even one day in the townships, however, doesn’t find this crime rate remarkable. When there is such a gap between those who have so much and those who have so little, violence can be anticipated. Even understood.

And so, coming back from measuring black children who were remarkably small for their ages, if indeed anyone had a clue when they were born, the café au lait, the ginger biscotti at Melissa’s, the windsurfing and the stores in the malls selling high-end Africana, even the cable car ride up to Table Mountain, all seemed bizarre and unreal. What is remarkable about Cape Town is that inside the bubble of beauty and white affluence of the Waterfront and the City Bowl, there is no hint of the miles upon miles of desperate poverty laying just a few miles outside in the townships. No hint at all. It seems to be a conspiracy of silence. A commitment to remain delusional, and to turn their backs on it all. The whole thing made me unutterably sad and anxious.

On our way to India, we stopped for a day on the island of Mauritius to refuel, and for the kids to go to the beach and blow off some steam. Mauritius was a surprise and a delight. It was just like being in India, with so many people of Indian descent having come many generations back as indentured servants. All the sounds and smells and sights on the streets were South Asian in nature, and familiar to me. We felt at home. After buying some Dodo paraphernalia---Mauritius is where the large pigeon, the Dodo, was rendered extinct within thirty years of sailor poaching---Jo and I spent most of the afternoon in the Port Louis Botanical Gardens, sitting in our own private thatch-roofed gazebo in the middle of a banyan tree forest. Except for the very rare, amorous couple, we were completely alone. Rain threatened. The air was perfectly still. A calico cat came to visit. After so many days of yang energy in Cape Town, and on the ship, with bright, hot sun, high winds, and the dazzling, sparkling surface of the testy sea, it was a relief to spend an afternoon enveloped in yin energy. All the colors that afternoon were saturated. We lolled on the benches of the shady gazebo, gossiped about people on the program, and ruminated about what the sisters were up to. For awhile, nothing moved. We didn’t move. The banyan trees didn’t move. Time didn’t move. Even the calico cat, once she settled in, didn’t move. It was very peaceful. Very yin.

Jo in the botanical gardens of Port Louis.

We’re in the Indian Ocean right now in the Horse Latitudes. That means we are cutting a swathe through a smooth, opalescent sea. The air is still, the waves are almost nonexistent---I can see why the sail boats dependent on the wind had to throw the horses over. In five days, we’ll be in India. LH

Namibia: Ship Fever/Been There, Dune That

2009-02-19T10:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes memorable days are quite empty of content. I had read in history books about ship fever, when entire shiploads of immigrants would be struck with cholera, and arrive in a port with three quarters of the souls having been tossed over the side swathed in a sheet, having succumbed to an illness that swept through the close quarters of a confined population. About ten days ago, a virus struck our ship, upper respiratory in nature, with low grade fever, congestion, and a wicked cough. Despite the efforts of our crew to wipe down every possible surface with disinfectant, most of us were tackled. First one person went down, then another, then another---watching the virus spread was like watching the train from Port Jefferson come into Huntington Station, slowly, inexorably, at a stately pace, right to the edges of your feet. First I keeled over, and then Jo, right before we landed in Namibia. It wasn’t an ideal way to start a three-day African adventure, with chills and aches and a cough that started from the bottom of your heels. We’d booked a bed and breakfast in Walvis Bay, however, and decided to go ahead and get off the ship. Since we were both sick, neither of us had to pretend to be feeling up to anything but collapse.

Our bed and breakfast, The Spindrift, was located on the other side of town. Our host, Liz, showed us to our spacious, airy quarters. All the windows and doors were open, and white voile curtains from all sides billowed into the room. A sweet, stupid black lab named Thor nosed around, coming in and out, and a shy, elderly Siamese hovered at the doorway, hoping to make contact, fearing to make contact. It was windy, as seems to be the constant state of affairs on the west coast of Africa, and the trees were rustling a soothing, silvery sound. A spider worked away silently in the ceiling corner, some fourteen feet above my head. We took a quick swim in the cool pool at the back of the house, and then sank into our respective beds. All day, we slept, read, then made some tea, hello Thor, then slept, read, hello Thor again, slept again. Are you hungry? We got up, both of us feeling greatly restored, and took a long walk along the lagoon to meet friends at a restaurant on stilts called The Raft. It was a raucous night, with cheese fondue and South African wine, and five desserts for five people. We played a marvelous game: take two bites, and pass the dessert to the left. (We’d already shared the virus, no need for prevention.) Berry crepes, vanilla ice cream with hot butterscotch, a ridiculous banana extravaganza, and some kind of mystery tart. It was a lovely, terrestrial day. A healing day.

Liz, Thor and the kitchen helper at The Spindrift.

The next morning was quiet as well. I let Jo sleep late while I sat at the kitchen table with our host, Liz, pouring over a map of India, planning the itinerary of her trip in 2011. In between the descriptions of Varanasi, Udaipur, Goa, and Kerala, she told me her story of growing up in Malaysia as the daughter of a rubber baron, of having to leave her home, of returning to Holland and marrying a Dutch engineer, of finding herself out of place in Holland, confined to a narrow, dark house with all the doors and windows shut, the dreary long grey winter with its rain and cold, missing her colonial home that was no more, of their finally settling in South Africa and raising a family. It was one of many conversations that I’ve had in the last month with children of colonials, now all in their early to late sixties, who experienced vivid childhoods in Africa and Asia, who were displaced due to revolution, and then tried to return “home” to England or to Holland or to Germany, only to discover that they were not at home at “home.” Finding a place in the world has not been easy for them, and as one of my colleagues here on the ship said of her childhood in Rhodesia, I can only go home in my memories.

That afternoon we took a trip to the Namib Desert in a four-by-four. Our guide on the desert trip was a critter conjurer, and we all got to hold a black, hairy scorpion, about six inches long, with wildly waving creepy crepe paper legs that felt like dancing velcro, and to pet a gecko, and a shimmering, iridescent sand-diving lizard, and a forest green chameleon with hot pink accents the size of a kitten. The trip in the four-by-four was something like a rollercoaster, going up and down the dunes at great speed, spinning out, with much satisfactory squealing and anxious laughter from the passengers. I loved it when we went slowly down a large dune in neutral, and listened to the dune moan. I didn’t know that dunes could moan, but they can. The phenomenon was explained to us, but I tuned out, as I am wont to do on nature hikes. I simply loath stuff like scientific processes, life cycles, etc, and in this instance, the story was about air pockets around dense, metallic sand particles. I just like to look and listen, and I am telling you: the dune moaned. The visuals in the Namib were stunning. I simply cannot find words to describe what we saw. It was just like being Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, desolate, vast, empty, hostile, haunting. I will let Jo’s pictures do the job.

Jo holding a Scorpion.

On our last day in Namibia, we took a small boat ride out into Walvis Bay to see the colony of seals and other marine life. We fed pelicans from the boat, and seeing them in flight was magnificent. We were also visited several times on the boat by savvy seals with unfortunate names like Goggles and Waggles who swim in the bay and know the routine: climb aboard the boat, slither across the middle seat, and beg some fish from the captain. So we were up close and personal with some lovely seals who were sort of stinky, but very sweet. They have big, soulful brown eyes, and respond to cooing and petting just like a dog. Their flippers are black and hard and feel like the smooth side of an emory board, but their skin is very soft, and oddly dry, once you penetrate the outer oily layer. Seals are big, and bob up and down a lot, and when they are nine inches away from you, a little scary. I didn’t want to bring one home. Neither did I want to bring home a black hairy Scorpion, but the elusive old Siamese kitty at The Spindrift---now him, I could have brought on board as a stow-away..

There is an old custom at sea. They call it Neptune Day. When a sailor crosses the equator for the first time, he must roll around in fish guts, kiss a fish, and shave his head. Jo did the first two, and I did all three.

LH

Louise and her fellow initiates on Neptune Day.

Rough Seas and Morocco

2009-02-10T05:03:00.000-08:00

The Rock of Gibraltar from my room.

The seas were very rough between Spain and Morocco, and we were unable to bunker in Gibraltar as planned. This meant we got to Morocco a day later than anticipated which threw off a lot of travel plans. It also meant that we spent two days lurching around the Straights of Gibraltar. The weather was wintry and wet, and so windy you couldn’t go outside on the deck for fear of being blown over. I can only express it this way: the sea was angry. The ship would lift up in the front, and slap down onto the surface of the water with a crack, sending the hull into a spasmodic shudder. After trying to navigate the hallways, I finally decided just to go to bed. It wasn’t that I felt ill---I didn’t. I was worried that I was going to be thrown against a wall, or down a set of stairs. Crawling into bed seemed like the safest thing to do.

As we were finally coming into the Port of Casablanca, the captain’s mellifluous British accent came over the intercom at dinner and warned us that in ten minutes, the ship would be taking a “giant dip” when we made a ninety degree turn without our stabilizers on. We were going to find ourselves in a huge wave, caught in our own “back water.” We were admonished to secure everything in our cabins, and to go to a safe spot. I ran downstairs to my cabin on the 4th deck, put my computer safely on the bed, and proceeded to watch the turn---and the giant dip---from my window. Everything flew off all surfaces in my cabin---books and course materials came crashing in a heap on the floor, the entire contents of my bathroom counter were swept into the sink, and two glasses shattered. From my window, the ship looked as if we were first headed directly into the water, then we suddenly were jerked upwards into the sky, and then came crashing down again into mouth of an eighteen foot, grey green wave. My window was suddenly covered with water, and I couldn’t see. I thought for sure: this is it, we’re going to die at the bottom of the sea. But then we righted ourselves, and it was all over.

They say things will get rough again when we go around the Cape of Good Hope.

I am trying very hard to be mature about this. No one had mentioned the need for physical courage in the Semester at Sea brochure. Physical courage is not on my list of attributes, my years on the perilous mountain roads of northern India notwithstanding.

The port of Casablanca was a tough one. Unlike Cadiz, where you could walk off the ship, cross the street, and find yourself in the middle of an elegant eighteenth century European town, the port in Casablanca is full of cranes and huge container ships---in a marginal part of a sprawling, industrial city of 13 million on the north coast of Africa. Jo and I traveled to Fez with two friends, Joan one of the ship nurses, and Lori, an administrator from the University of Virginia. We took the train, a journey of about four hours. When we got to Fez, another friend had arranged for us to have a “guide.” I had initially scoffed at the idea, believing myself to be an intrepid traveler, but when Joan---who has been around the world several times before---insisted, I relented. As it turned out: Joan was right. We could never have negotiated the medina in Fez without the protection of Abdullah. I was also glad to have Lori and Joan help me keep an eye on Johanna who is easy prey, being tall, blonde, and beautiful. Upon maternal urging, she had pulled her hair back in a bun, and dressed conservatively, but still many male eyes were upon her, at times with a degree of predation.. To no avail---she was surrounded by a trio of harpies, and Abdullah too hovered around her. I can say to her father in all honesty: Jo would not be sold into white slavery. (While she loved Fez, I think Jo was very happy to escape from the scrutiny of the matrons, to get back to the ship---and to resume her social life with the other faculty kids. She is a pack animal, this third child of mine.)

Jo modeling a headscarf.

Abdullah was a Berber, a man of about 45, well over six feet, dignified, a gentle giant, dressed in a floor length grey jellaba that made him look like a medieval monk, particularly when he put up the hood. Abdullah took very good care of us, and seemed to be a minor celebrity in the medina. He was the seventh of nine children, and his brothers still lived in their home in Fez that had been in his family for over 250 years. He was university-educated, with French, Arabic, two kinds of Berber, Italian, Spanish, and English at his command, and knowledgeable about the architecture, the history, and the culture, and helpful with our pitiful attempts at bartering. As is de rigueur with tours of this type, we were marched to and through his friend’s ceramic factory, carpeteries, both Fez and Berber, and a few other handicraft industries. At times I felt captive, particularly in the carpet store where we were served glasses of lovely, sweet fresh mint tea, and forced to listen to the story of the cooperative of orphans and divorced women who allegedly tied the hundreds of knots per square inch of the rugs that were flopped down in front of us by a small army of Moroccan men, one after the other, in a dazzling sequence of abstract patterns and lush colors, particularly the Fez blue and the Islamic mint green. I always feel so pressured by these bartering dramas, and guilty for the tea, for the labor involved in making the carpets and displaying them, for those orphans and husbandless laborers, but the fact is: I didn’t really want a carpet. Joan bought one, however, which redeemed us all. At least in the ceramic factory, I was able to bring out my credit card and buy a trivet---to cover the cost of two glasses of tea.

Abdullah.

Following Abdullah through the medina.

What can I ever say to properly describe the medina in Fez? It lived up to my memories from 1969. Indeed, little has changed except for perhaps there was less hashish and in places, better pavement on the winding, precipitous streets, and maybe slightly fewer donkeys. But the donkeys are still carrying most of the cargo in Fez, and they stop for no one. At one point, I had to grab Joan to keep her from being plowed over by a donkey who was hurtling down the cobblestones, his cargo swinging wildly from right to left, touching either side of the narrow alley way. His owner was barking out, “Balak, balak,” which triggered no response in us, but later we learned it meant, “Watch out! Watch out!” in Arabic. As Abdullah put it, “Donkeys don’t have brakes.” They do, however, wear special shoes made of car tires to give their hooves some grip.

The donkeys of Fez.

The Berber carpet store.

For centuries, Fez has been the cultural and spiritual capital of Morocco. It has a twelfth century mosque that can accommodate 20,000 people at prayer. (As non-Muslims, we could only peak inside.) Fez also claims to have the world’s oldest university, the Medersa Bou Inania, and you can still visit the courtyard of its main theological college. Built in the 1350s, the building is an exquisite combination of tile work, plasterwork, and elaborate cedar wood carvings, all pieced together in elegant Islamic style. (I love the symmetry and simplicity of this architecture, even when being ornate.) We also went to the famous tanneries where the super soft leather of Fez is processed and dyed, and it’s possible to lean over the terraces of the leather shops and watch the workers knee-deep in red or green dye vats, coloring the animal skins just as their predecessors did in the fourteenth century. The tanneries really stink, by the way, as does the poofy, green leather footstool I purchased for my new little house in Northport. My cabin currently is redolent of dead goat.

The Medersa Bou Inania.

The tanneries of Fez.

It rained off and on all the time we were in Fez, magnifying all the senses. The smells and sounds of Fez reminded me very much of being in the lower bazaar in Shimla, and the puddles of water and mud and donkey dung and slick vegetable peels on the semi-paved alleys reminded us of walking through McLeod Gang in Dharamsala during the monsoon. Everywhere the smell of burning cedar was in the air, and devotional and pop music poured out of stalls. The smell of fresh bread would assail your nose every block or so from the large, communal bakeries that baked all the bread for the neighborhood. (Abdullah introduced us to a delicious, anise-flavored bread that we picked right off the hot baking tray.) Hawkers peddled their wares. Women were filling large brass vessels with water at the brilliantly tiled public fountains, leaning under canopies of intricately carved wood to seek respite from the rain. In a public square, the metal workers pound, pounded, pounded brass plates with their anvils right through the rain. Chickens about to be killed on the spot were singing their last songs, and every hour or so, there would be that eerie, evocative call to prayer. My favorite thing: everywhere there were cats, some sleek and happy, some not. I had not remembered the cats of Morocco, but they were in every shop, on doorsteps, and huddled in the corners of the alleyways. I’ve since learned that in Islam, the cat holds a place of reverence. Muhammad loved cats, and believed them to be more highly evolved than dogs. It’s almost enough to make me convert.

As you might have guessed, I loved Fez. This is my kind of travel.

Coming out of port in Casablanca was actually worse than going in except that we were emotionally prepared. The students all went up to the large open reception hall which had been cleared for the dip, and lay down shoulder to shoulder so that when the boat dipped, they rolled together en masse. Others were in the Union, and the stage fell on two boys, breaking two arms. (Both are now splinted and drugged up until we get into port in Namibia in seven days.) Another student may have broken a hip falling from the lurch in his room. One adult passenger split his head open on the bathroom step when he foolishly tried to get up from his bed; another has a displaced shoulder. Jo did the dip with her friends in the reception hall, and I went up to the faculty lounge and did the dip with mine. I figured if I was going to die and sink to the bottom of the sea, I’d just as soon have company.

Some have asked: doesn’t the ship have stabilizers? And the answer is yes, it does, but she is built for speed and capable of doing 30 knots per hour. Furthermore, she has a shallow draft. So we pay for the speed with the rocking and rolling. I don’t think the folks at Semester at Sea can do much to make things better---we are, after all, in a tin can bobbing up and down on the surface of a deep and capricious sea. Usually I can tolerate the bobbing, but the dips are truly terrifying. I noticed when I staggered up to the lounge that some faculty were already draped over the screwed-to-the-floor tables, and had obviously been drinking for awhile. I was one of the few foolish enough to be sober.

I’m thinking of doing the Cape of Good Hope looped. If I’m going to die anyway, why not go out giddy?

LH

Making Memories/Spain/January 31st, 2009

2009-02-02T00:55:00.000-08:00

Jo and Louise at the Necropolis in Carmona.

Forty years ago, I traveled to Spain in my 19th year, roaming around with two friends in a turquoise VW, camping in a pup tent, sleeping on empty beaches and under white-netted olive trees. We almost never ate out, subsisting on bread and cheese and wine. Those were the days of Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and a hundred dollars got me through almost a month. At that time, Spain was under Franco, and we were visited every night by soldiers in three-cornered hats and floor-length capes, poking their machine guns into our tent to inquire about who we were and why we were there. We were broke, and so was Spain. Tourists were an oddity.

I hardly recognized the Spain of my youth. Franco has been dead since 1975, and Spain is now a healthy democracy. To my eyes, it looks as if Spain has a standard of living very close to other E.U. countries. The cities we visited---Cadiz, where we docked, Seville, and Cordoba---were clean, prosperous looking, and bustling with activity. With wide avenues, sporting elegant shops, modern cities have grown up outside of the Centros Historicos. The noise of the traffic was deafening. (The use of the horn is a mode of expression in Spain. Unlike the staccato beeps of New York that just say---MOVE IT---the horns of Spain whine in sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs.) Tourists are no longer an oddity. Spain knew that we were coming, and indeed had created an entire industry devoted to our comfort and exploitation.

Here is the sad fact: We can’t afford to travel in Spain. Thank goodness the major items such as hotel, and car rental, were not only reasonable, but cheap by U.S. standards, but the costs of staying hydrated, fed and caffeinated were astronomical, and admission to any tourist sight was usually eight Euros. (And it really galls me to pay to enter a church; it ought to be free.) We collapsed at a sidewalk café in Cadiz for lunch, ordered one small 8 inch plate of Manchego cheese, a miniature loaf of bread, and a Coke that we split--- the bill was almost thirty dollars! Our best, and least expensive meals, were in rest stops along A-4, the four-lane highway we took between Cadiz and Seville. There we had fresh, hot tapas for under eight dollars, a garbanzo bean stew, hot potatoes in a gooey white sauce, and café con leche that would grow hair on your chest. Pizzas too were a bargain, and delicious with goat cheese and fresh verduras. Another favorite was something called Chocolate con Churros, a deep-fried dough dipped in a chocolate glop so thick that you couldn’t drink it. But the bottom line: my hundred dollars a month of yore had turned into a hundred dollars a day, and that was just to maintain metabolism.

Manchego Cheese.

Chocolate con churros.

But sticker shock aside, we had two great days in Seville and Cordoba, with a day in the countryside between them. Jo and I traveled with another faculty member on Semester at Sea, Jodi Cohen, who teaches Communications at Ithaca College in upstate New York. Jodi did all the driving, and I was supposed to be the navigator, but Jo ended up taking over the map. Once we got into the tangled knots of narrow, one-way medieval streets in both Seville and Cordoba, I not only made NO contribution, with my dyslexia, I was a liability. (At least I was partly responsible for Jo’s presence in the world. Among the three of us, Jo was hands-down the most competent.) Jodi managed the stick shift with skill, and more importantly, with good humor. True, her shoulders were hunched up around her ears when we were hopelessly lost during rush hour in Seville, but she never lost her temper or her equanimity.

In Seville, it was a great pleasure to watch Jo experience her first European cathedral, complete with stained glass, soaring Gothic arches, the biggest altarpiece in the world, a gilded extravaganza with over 1,000 carved figures, and inside the southern door, the tomb of Christopher Columbus. (Whose bones may, or may not, be buried there. The Dominican Republic claims that Columbus’s remains are in Santo Domingo. The fact is he’s been shuffled around and sifted so many times post-mortem, what’s left of Columbus may be in two places at once. That poetry might have pleased him.) We also climbed up to the top of La Giralda which used to be the minaret of the mosque that once stood on the site. Seville lay at our feet in all directions, looking peaceful and pink, and full of trees laden with oranges.

Cathedral at Seville.

Our second day we got off A-4, and wended our way to Cordoba on back roads. We spent mostof the morning in Carmona where I bought a mink blanket, Jodi bought a bra, Jo bought a jacket made in China, and we went to a Roman Necropolis. Carmona has an active archeological site where they are unearthing a vast Roman city of the dead, as well as an amphitheater. We spent an hour or so poking around the ruins---we were the only living visitors there. When we first arrived, a young woman at the reception desk asked if we wanted to see a film about the excavation. She then led us upstairs to a large room with a screen and a set of long benches, and after setting up the film and darkening the room, she closed the doors and disappeared. Jodi and I decided that we were going to do some stretches. We were creaky from being in the car, so while we watched the film, Jodi did yoga on the benches, and I loosened up in the corner with tai chi and some animal poses from Chi Gung. (I did both the Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon, and the Phoenix.) Jo sat stationary in her chair and made cracks about what it’s like to travel with two insane, post-menopausal women. When the film was over, we went downstairs, and Jodi asked at the reception desk for a book about the Necropolis for her class. “For your yoga class?” the young woman asked. That was when it dawned on us: we’d had an audience for our exercise, probably via a security camera. For all we knew, the entire museum staff had been having a good laugh watching us at the closed-circuit TV. An hour or so later, as we were leaving, a guard waved at me from the top of the hill. I couldn’t see his face, only his profile, but when he raised his other hand in the air and turned slowly to the right and then to the left, I knew: For sure, we’d been seen. It was definitely a Spaniard doing Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon.

Jo and Jodi among the Roman dead.

We got to Cordoba too late for anything but getting lost and eating dinner, but this morning we got up early and went to see La Mezquita, that masterpiece of Islamic architecture, with its rows and rows of terra-cotta red and white arches that seem to go on and on into a dark infinity. When I’d been to the mosque with my friends in the spring of 1969, we were the only visitors. I remember sitting alone on the cold floor for quite awhile in the dusky light with my back against a pillar. Today, after forking over 16 Euros, the mosque was full of cultural pilgrims, with guides spewing information in many languages around clumps of intense tourists, and people staggering in and out of the shadows with audio guides clasped to their ears. No one could, or would, have sat alone on the floor. It was still wonderful to be there, but now no one can experience the mosque at Cordoba privately. All must be experienced publicly, mediated through the trappings of touristry.

View from our hotel in Cordoba.

La Mezquita.

Will Jo go back to the necropolis in Carmona in forty years, and remember how she and her mother and another crazy lady roamed through a Roman city of the dead all alone?

We’re on our way to Morocco. The institutional food and bad coffee notwithstanding, we’re both glad to be back on the ship. It was so much fun to see our shipmates at dinner, everyone showered and full of stories, running on adrenaline---a sort of manic post-trip energy. I’m so looking forward to sleeping in my little cell, under my new mink blanket.

I wonder if Fez will have changed as much as Spain? Will it measure up to my memories?

LH

A cat from Cadiz.

Not Bored on Board/Celebrations

2009-01-25T06:22:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2009/Midway between the Bahamas and Spain

MV Explorer: Bahamas

Today was Jo’s seventeenth birthday, and she spent it at sea. I think she was missing her friends from school tonight. It’s Friday evening, after all, and her entire crew would be headed to the European Republic in Huntington, to eat bags of long, greasy fries dipped in honey mustard sauce, to hang out, to see each other, and to be seen. But her wistfulness was fleeting. She’s had no time for wist.

Me neither. The schedule on board has been daunting. When we first arrived last week, the staff and faculty had four days of orientation, with endless meetings in which procedures were explained, staff introduced, pedigrees exchanged---all the rituals academics engage in when first they convene: one graduate degree battling another, one discipline seeking domination. On the Spring 2009 Voyage of Semester at Sea, the scientists reign supreme. But there is a small but flourishing underground of faculty from the humanities, and I gravitate towards them. Jo goes to the “dependents school” every day with about a dozen or so faculty kids, some being home-schooled, and others taking courses on line. She has a roommate her age, by the way, and lives on the floor above me.

Cleavages in world-view aside, a community on board begins to form. On Tuesday, we gathered in the “Union,” the large lecture hall on the ship, and watched the inauguration of our 44th president. Here we are, a thousand souls plowing through the Atlantic Ocean, and yet the miracles of satellite technology made it possible for us to feel a part of things. I scanned the wobbling screen for the faces of good friends in that undulating mass on the Mall, but to no avail---but I was with them in spirit. And there was plenty of spirit here too. We cheered, we clapped, we hugged each other, and we shared a hushed silence as he spoke. I find myself so worried for this serious young man who has become our president. So much on his shoulders, and to me, he had aged. Standing there on the platform, he looked cold, somber---and grey. I worry that we will lose him. After all these years of having nothing to lose, it feels foreign to me---to experience flickers of sorrow over imagined loss. On Tuesday, I learned that tears wreak havoc with my new disposable contact lenses.

We only spent two days in the Bahamas. On the first day, at the urgings of everyone, we made the pilgrimage to the Atlantis resort, an opulent, lugubrious extravaganza ---Walt Disney does Las Vegas, decorated in a maritime theme carried out with a vengeance. Everywhere I looked, multi-storied concrete mollusks held up ceilings and formed balustrades, and all the many cavernous rotundas sported fountains, pulsing with water and galloping dolphins, or galloping mermaids, or galloping sea horses. (Not so easy to gallop without the legs.) In the dark, marble hallways roamed the rich from all over the world, buying designer bags, golf clothes and Columbian emeralds, drifting in and out of the casino and the over-priced shops and restaurants. Atlantis’s only saving grace was a wonderful aquarium located on the lower level that allowed you to meet a fish face to face. At one end of the resort, a shopping center wound its way around the docks loaded with yachts. It was a simulacrum of the Bahamas. You could shop at The Gap and Coach and Starbucks, all ensconced in faux clapboard houses with pink and pale blue siding. Reggae music played over the loud speaker. It was possible to pretend that you were not at Tangier Outlet on Long Island---to pretend that you were traveling.

On our other day in Nassau, we had a few mundane shopping missions before our trans-Atlantic crossing: to buy batteries, an alarm clock, and a pair of shorts. Jo and I, her friend Erin (the brunette next to my blonde daughter in the picture above) and her younger brother, Ryan, took the Number One bus, and enjoyed a rollicking half an hour ride through Nassau Town. The conductor played his radio at a deafening decibel level, music that sounded like a fusion of Reggae and Jesus rock. We hung out of the open, steel-rimmed windows, and felt a steady rush of warm, tropical air on our faces. The driving was utterly irresponsible, and utterly thrilling, and we had a fascinating ride through the downtown, through wealthy residential neighborhoods, through a very poor section of town, through an industrial complex. Sometimes things looked poor and depressed; sometimes things looked very prosperous. The houses were splashed with colors that we might decorate a birthday cake with, and yes, some of them were made of genuine wood clapboard, pink and pale blue. The kids and I were the only Americans on the bus, or in the store where we shopped; everyone else was dark-skinned and Bahamian. I thought to myself: I would like to come back to this sunny place and know more about it.

I almost forgave myself the trip to Atlantis. Almost.

The view from my pillow.

People keep asking: are you sea sick? Neither of us is affected, and for that I am deeply grateful. Others are, and the boat does more than rock. It rocks. It rolls. It stutters. It dips. It lurches. It even groans and grinds. The experience is vertiginous, and for some, incapacitating. One faculty wife has been in bed since we left port, nauseous, and very ill, and probably wishing she were dead. Just a guess.

We have been on the ship for eight days, and reach Spain in four days. Here is a sign that we are midway: we are running out of fresh fruit on the ship.

Canned peaches. I have never understood the canned peach. LH.

Sunset from the ship.

Cold Feet

2009-01-07T17:55:00.000-08:00

January 7, 2009

We leave in a week. Oh, no. We leave in a week.

I love to travel. Really, I love to travel, but every time I take a trip, the week or so before is so hectic, so emotionally draining, so full of goodbyes and stacks of cat food and bills and unmatched socks and Dramamine and broken suitcase wheels and pathetic memos about work I wanted to do, but didn't---I come to the conclusion that I don't want to go. All I want to do is toast my toes beneath my hot water bottle, curl up on the bed with my cat Gray, and disappear into the second season of The West Wing.

Jo too is crabby and stressed out from school. The floor of her bedroom is a swirling maelstrom of unfolded clothes, books, and clumps of shoes competing for the privilege of walking on the cobblestones of Cadiz or sinking into the sandy beach of Walvis Bay in Namibia. We both wonder how we will survive the week. But we are women of commitment, Johanna and I, and we have made a commitment to board a ship next week in Fort Lauderdale and sail around the world.

This commitment was made over a year ago when I traveled to the University of Virginia to convince the academic dean of the Spring 2009 Semester at Sea voyage that I would be just the person to teach Asian Philosophy, Biomedical Ethics, and Immigration History. Why Spring 2009? Because I am an academic, and academics value sanity over material gain---I was on sabbatical. Jo would be in her junior year of high school: perfect timing for an adventure.

Here is our itinerary: Bermuda for four days of orientation; a chilly North Atlantic crossing to Cadiz, Spain; then to Casablanca, Morroco; Walvis Bay in Namibia on the west coast of Africa; Cape Town; Chennai, India; Bangkok; Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam; the glitter and glitz of Hong Kong; Shanghai; Kobe, Japan; Hawaii; a long trip down to Guatamala; slide through the Panama Canal, and home. Total time of the trip: four months. We leave next week, and will be home in early May. While we are on the water, school is in session. When we dock at each port for four days,,we explore. There will be approximately 670 undergraduates on board from all over the United States, and a faculty of about 60. Some of those faculty have children. Like me.

We had to get permission from our school district to home school Jo. It was a Herculean task to get all of her teachers to help craft IEPS (Individual Educational Plans) for her home schooling, but we finally got approval from the superintendant. I am the designated home schooler, but Jo is going to tackle four months of US History, Environmental Science, Italian, Math B, and English lit all on her own. Well, no, English we will do together because I like reading the books with (and sometimes to) her. We'll be doing Huckleberry Finn and Hamlet on the high seas.

Where will her sisters be while we are gone? And what about Gray? Nan is going to Equador to travel, study Spanish, and work; she's meeting her friend Jessica in Quito in the first week of February. Kate is returning to finish her freshman year at SUNY New Paltz. My winsome Gray is going to stay at home in our little red house in Northport with a friend of Nan's, Ali, who is going to house and cat sit. With great regret, I am leaving Ali my hot water bottle, my warm bed, and my TV.

Ok, ok, I'll admit it: I have not been forthcoming., Last week I sent ahead four boxes of books---I get very anxious without my books---and I snuck in enough toothpaste and kleenix packs for four months, two hot water bottles (one for Jo, and one for me), and the entire seven seasons of The West Wing. If I am to be wrenched from my home next week, I want to be prepared. LH