Dr. B

//

 

A quote I liked today from Dr. Barnett, when talking about having a party with our Pakistan class:

 

"Invest in memories.  They are not an extravagance."

 

Peace out.

Mauritius!

THIS IS ALL OUT OF ORDER I'M SO SORRY.

READ HE SECOND POST FIRST AND THEN THIS POST WILL ACT AS THE THIRD POST I THINK.

//


The plan for the night was to get Xiaoxia a good buzz, since she had had a few drinks before but never been drunk.  I thought that we were just going to some place on the waterfront, but Emerson and the few other people insisted on going to Grand Bay, which was a fairly expensive cab ride, and I wasn’t really down for it, because I’m just not that into bars.  Emerson said he really wanted me to go though and offered to pay for my share of the taxi rides, and I said that I’d go if he just paid for me one way, and he said yeah, so I went.

The bar where everyone was – Banana Bar – was INCREDIBLY expensive.  I mean, for a single shot of kamikaze, it was $12 US.  So we walked down the street a bit to a smaller bar, the four of us (Scott, Emerson, Xiaoxia and me), where they also served food, which was great because I was hungry, but less great because the kitchen was closed.  Anyway, they gave us the drink menu and the other three all got a rum and Coke, and then Xiaoxia had another shot of rum.  We figured that two drinks should pretty much be enough to get her a fair buzz since she’s so small and doesn’t drink much, so we all decided to chill on alcohol pretty much for the night.  After that we found an ATM to make sure we could pay our way back, and went for a walk on the beach and took some pictures.  Xiaoxia said her face felt warm, which we thought was fine, because that’s kind of how it’s supposed to go, right?

Well anyway, the bar was way more crowded with SASers by the time we got back.  It was good to see people but also kind of annoying, and Christina (who I was trying to find there) had sort of mysteriously disappeared.  I did see Nic there though, and she was excited to see me, but bars are totally not my thing and so I didn’t want to be an anchor around her.  I stepped outside after a while and had a good conversation with the girl who had found me at that bar called Philadelphia in Japan.  She was talking about how she went on the Taj Mahal trip that I was supposed to go on and how she thought it was awful and that she really didn’t like her trip leader, and it was so bad that on the last day she signed out of the trip and just did everything on her own.  She complimented me on how passionately I played piano and said she wished she could play like that, and that she used to play but her parents forced her to and she never really got into it.  She had a little bit to drink but she was definitely nothing more than a little bit buzzed.  She was really really nice to me and I was totally flattered which is great except for I’m bad at taking compliments so I felt a tiny bit uncomfortable, but she’s really nice anyway so even if she noticed she wouldn’t have cared.

One funny thing about the bar was that the tables and stools were INCREDIBLY low, like below your knees, and so it was impossible to see them all when you were walking around.  People kept trying to walk toward their friend and then getting shinned pretty good with a low-lying stool and looking like a fool even if they were hardly drunk in the least.

We made Xiaoxia drink some water to make sure she didn’t get dehydrated.  She said she felt dizzy, which again we thought was okay because it was only two drinks and she should be fine and she was with two totally sober people, one with two drinks, and etc.  But she started to seem kind of tired, and a few minutes after I stepped outside again, Emerson said he thought it was time to go.  It was about 1am at this point, and we had showed up at around 10:30pm.

We got a cab ride back home for slightly more money than on the way there.  Xiaoxia laid on my shoulder because she was dizzy and kind of tired, and she was also saying some funny stuff at this point, which we thought was just first-time overreaction.  She kept going back and forth between “I feel great!” and “I feel bad…,” and she thanked me for getting her drunk(?), and asked me to sing.  It was a little bit strange.  The cab driver asked if she was okay, and we said yeah, only two drinks, and we were watching her.

The conversations in the cab rides were pretty nice both times actually.  On the way there we talked people who play the Let’s Get Some Chicks game and how I could sniff them out and stuff like that, and how to deal with being sexiled.  I forget exactly what we talked about on the way back but I remember thinking it was a nice cab ride.  It was very quick, and the turns around all the roundabouts were pretty jostling.  There was also a dog in the middle of the highway at one point and our driver SWERVED LIKE MAD to avoid it and he did avoid it, but it was pretty jarring for us.

We got back and someone paid for the cab and he left and we were going to work out the exchanges between the rest of us.  As we were doing so, though, Xiaoxia took a couple steps to the side and threw up a little bit.  We were pretty surprised, and we thought she was done, but she ended up having to do some more and so we held her hair back.  It was kind of crappy timing because we were RIGHT in front of port and security, but at the very least it wasn’t in the cab.  I think maybe the cab ride’s dizzying had something to do with it.  She said that she felt bad about it, but that it made her feel better after she had gotten it out, but now she just wanted to sleep.

We all went inside and took her to her room and made sure she was okay and asked her to drink a tiny bit more water and made sure she basically just got into bed okay and wasn’t in any danger, then we left.  We all felt a little bad.  We really did not want her to have any bad experience at all on her first time, and we had no idea that two drinks would be too much for her.  Maybe it was just the specific type of alcohol.  I’m not really sure.  But yeah.  I stayed up doing some sort of work for a little while although I honestly can’t remember what it was, and Christina knocked on my door at some point and we ended up talking till pretty late in the morning, which was very nice, although I was pretty sleep deprived the next day because of it.

The next morning I talked to her at breakfast with some other people and asked her, So now that you’re all better, did you actually enjoy the feeling of being drunk?  And she said yeah, it was fun.  And then I felt a little bit less bad, but still a little bit bad.  But at least she wasn’t like NO IT WAS AWFUL WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME.

//

We didn’t have a whole lot of time in Mauritius, and I didn’t really feel like putting out the effort to do all the pretty parts and all the in-depth cultural parts in the 30 hours that we had, and I’ve been sort of exhausted from all the travel, so I decided to just chill out and do the pretty parts of Mauritius.  So I think I’m basically going to do this all in one post, and it won’t be too long.

Just some background on Mauritius and its culture and whatnot first.  It’s a very very small island about five hundred miles east of Madagascar and is considered part of Africa by geographers.  It’s about 60km from North to South and about 40km from West to East.  Port Louis in the Northwest is one of its nine provinces and while it’s the smallest, it’s also the capital, the most populated, and the most important.  It’s a very young island geologically, about half the age of Hawaii, and it’s one of the only islands on the planet that is completely ringed by a coral reef.  There are also some huge jagged mountains in the middle parts of the island which are visible everywhere, because it’s so damn small, there’s always a mountain in your line of view.

There are no native inhabitants of the island.  There’s no society that was beaten to death when colonizers came in, etc.  Some Arabs were the first people to show up, and that was sometime around 800.  I think sometime in the 1500s some Europeans rolled in and brought in the sugar plantations, and I think in about 1710 the French rolled in and called it Ile Maurice.  A while later Britain got pissed off at France for beating them somewhere else, and so they retaliated by taking over Mauritius in 1810 and renaming it.  It stayed under their control until 1968, when it became an independent democratic regime which has had only one “political scare” in its short history.  Basically, some sort of fringe group started causing trouble and scaring people and elections were put on hold for a year or something, but after they were taken care of, elections have taken place on time and freely with no intimidation since.

The government and people of Mauritius are incredibly receptive to the outside world in general and it does them quite well for the most part.  The island has a few main racial groups, the largest being of Indian descent, then next African, then Arab, European, and Chinese.  About 80% of the people speak Creole, but everyone understands “proper” French as well, and most of their media is in French.  English is their official language, though only about 1% of the population speaks it, and most people maintain their “mother tongue” as a third language to use in the home.

As for the government, they do a pretty good job in general.  Crime is pretty low, especially race-based crime, which is great considering that every group is a minority in Mauritius.  Education is provided for everyone, and they’ll help pay for university if you can’t.  Essentially no one is homeless or starving, and if they are, it’s typically because they don’t take advantage of government programs designed to help them.  When the government realized that sugar plantations needed less physical labor, they took action quickly and opened up a duty-free port in Port Louis, and it was so successful in creating jobs that the government actually had to go abroad and ask people to come in and fill positions.

So yeah, it’s a pretty cool, chill place.  Everyone fits in even though they’re all very different.  You can never tell a tourist from native unless they open their mouth and don’t speak Creole.  The culture is fairly progressive but not incredibly.  People are allowed to date and have premarital sex and there are billboards with scantily clad girls, but they’re still pretty afraid of homosexuals although hate crime is rare at the very least.  For fun they go to the beach or play pool or go to a bar or a casino or watch TV/movies, and there’s a pretty strong local culture of music/dance/fashion called sega which sometimes mixes with reggae into what they call seggae. 

Oh, and it’s also amazingly beautiful.  When we went snorkeling, I hardly even wanted to go in the water, I just wanted to sit on the boat and look at the coast and the mountain and the trees and just stare at the water and how blue and clear and beautiful it was.  I did go in for like 15 minutes or something but I honestly spent more time just admiring how beautiful the water was.

//


Anyway, as for what I did.

First I went on an FDP to the Jummah Mosque, which is the biggest and most important mosque on the island.  It’s like twenty minutes from the ship if you drive (OH.  TRAFFIC IS HORRIBLE), and it’s just kind of on the corner of a city block.  We went in and they showed us the bottom floor, which is sort of pretty and made of marble and has a fish well to amuse the children and a place to pray and clocks to remind you when to pray.  Then we went upstairs for a speech. They sat us down and basically preached to us for ninety minutes about Islam and their brand of it and why it was the only true, correct path and code for your entire life and how whatever else we might believe is wrong and that they were totally correct, and if we ever found something wrong with what they believed, then it wasn’t what they believed because it was wrong, and they were always right.  It was more boring than almost anything I’ve ever done, and I literally spent ninety minutes just trying to find ways to amuse myself and keep myself awake because I didn’t want to be rude.  I looked through my wallet.  I used my phone discreetly, although I didn’t get internet, so there was only so much I could do.  I rummaged through my pockets.  I thought about the song Seaweed Sheets and considered in detail what a music video for it might be like.  Dr. Medora asked a question about women praying separately from men and they answered it for a half hour.

After what seemed like fifteen eternities, it was over and it was time for lunch.  Thank god!  We sat down together in the same room and got some food, which was pretty good (beef, chicken, potatoes, rice, etc.) and some Pepsi and water and a cake-like dessert and some plain rice and some chicken on a stick which was AMAZING.  I talked a bit to the other kids on my trip, including Cosette and Sandy who sat beside me.

After a while I realized that other people were talking to the clergy, so I tried to jump in their conversations, but I wasn’t really able to penetrate very well.  I didn’t learn a whole lot from the trip and I left feeling kind of let down about the whole thing.

So the ship was leaving at 2:45pm and wouldn’t dock again until 4:45pm just to reposition.  We were supposed to get back at 2, and at that time, not everyone was back on the bus.  This including the professors who were leading out trip.  We understood that you shouldn’t be rude, but they had already given us the go ahead to leave from the mosque like three times, and if we didn’t get on the ship by 2:40 or so, there was no way we’d be able to get off it before it took off for two hours, and we might just be stuck without the ship for two hours, both of which would suck because people had plans.  Anyway, the leaders of the trip FINALLY made it back from a tour of the roof at about 2:15 and we made it back to the ship in time to get off before it left for two hours.

I ended up catching a few friends (Cosette, Justin, Nat, and Dylan?) while I was walking to town.  My plan was to locate an internet café and find a supermarket, since I heard there was a big one nearby.  We ended up finding a fairly small supermarket after going through the underground and stopping at an ATM, and I bought some Chips Ahoy cookies, some Oreos that I split with Cosette, some wafers that I’m in the process of eating, and some really bad Fruit Loop imitation cereal which I think I’ll throw away.  I located the internet café but couldn’t use it because I didn’t bring my webcam, so I’d have to come back later.  I also got some postcards but didn’t get any stamps.

We decided to walk back to the ship since it looked so close.  WE WERE VERY WRONG.  It ended up taking almost an hour to walk to it, especially because we took some dead-end paths a few times which looked like good bets.  But we saw the waterfront on the way, the nice developed touristy area near the port, which was nice.  The others wanted to stop in the casino and play like literally a dollar on a machine, so I went in with them.  I ended up breaking a dollar into coins to play at the slot machines and promised that I would do nothing except for put in the coins I had to start with, play them all the way through once, and then cash out.  I put them in three at a time (max) on a slot machine.  I started out with 14 coins and ended up with 17, which I think translated into something like a 12 cent profit.  I considered going through the 17 coins again, but remembered that I promised myself to stop, so I stopped.  That was cool I guess.

From there I had dinner on the ship and talked to some people on the back deck.  Emerson was there, and I think so was Brook or Shannon, but now that they both shaved their heads it’s kind of hard to remember.  The dinner was NOT nearly as good as port dinners usually are, and I was kind of disappointed, but oh well, life’s tough.  Apparently lunch was awesome though.

After dinner I tried to get a taxi to the waterfront, but they said it would be $5.  That was totally ridiculous considering that it was literally like a two minute ride, but I stuck firm that I would not go for anything more than $2, and they said no.  Someone told me later that they plan with each other to set prices before our ship arrives and refuse to budge.  I tried a little bit to get them to budge, but they wouldn’t, and neither would I, so I just left.  There was a water taxi for $2, so I hopped in that, waited a little bit, and we took off.  We ended up going literally to the door of the mall which contained the internet café.  We heard that you could get free internet somehow, so my friend and I stopped and tried to figure that out quickly and talked to a restaurant owner who spoke good English about it, and while we could connect to the internet, we couldn’t actually access webpages, so we just went to the internet café.

It was like $3 for an hour or something, which wasn’t bad at all.  I got some headphones from another computer with the help of the attendant and put my webcam on and found Jeff S on Skype and we had the interview.  I had applied for Social, Canning, and Exec chair, and so the interview was a lot longer and somewhat more intense than I had anticipated, although honestly most of the questions were very similar to ones they had asked in the application files, so I could draw from those pretty easily most of the time.  I think that overall I did pretty okay.  I didn’t really “stumble” or get “stumped” by any answers.  The only thing is whether or not they buy my vision.  Shrug.  I swear to god I referenced drumline like 300 times and they were probably sick of it by the end, but I guess I really have learned a lot from it, especially about time management and community building, so it was pretty relevant to the discussions we were having.

Anyway, I only had like 15 minutes left of my hour or something when I was done the interview, and so I tried to download a few things or look up a few things but it got really slow for some reason after I got off Skype, so I just closed up like ten minutes early or so and went back to the ship.  The water taxi took FOREVER to get going but I had a good conversation with Gabe and his good friend (Mike?) before heading back, including a bunch of stuff about atheism.

//


The goal for that day was to go to the beach and chill and snorkel, and I found a group of people who wanted to do that as well, including Aleeza and Erin from UVA and Maria from Italy and Natalie the Mexican/Lebanese girl and Margalit and Lauren and a bunch of others – ten in total.  We went to the desk and arranged for a minivan to pick us up, and we started planning sometime before 8:30 and planned to leave at 8:30, but we ended up not getting on the bus until like 9:45 for some awful group of reasons including the guy driving to the wrong side of the port.  We were all getting pretty impatient but there was nothing we could do about it.  Apparently some people got some cabs for cheaper but whatever.  Furthermore, we arranged a ride back with the guy for half the price ($3 each) which was great.

Anyway, he dropped us off at the hotel near Trou aux Biches and we asked if we could rent snorkel equipment and they said no, the only option was to buy it from the store down the road.  We knew that was probably false so we went to the beach and figured we’d look there.  We kept walking until we found something that looked sort of civilization like, which wasn’t far, and there was a guy with a boat who said he’d take us all snorkeling for 2000Rs between the ten of us (which comes out to about $6 each).  He only had six masks though, but we were like, whatever, that’s fine.  So we all hopped in and went out beyond the reef and he tied up.  I was the first to just dive in because the water looked so beautiful, and other people put on fins and masks before they took the ladder in off the little boat.

After a couple times diving in off the boat, I figured I’d take one of the masks that no one was using and got a snorkeling tube too.  It wasn’t a very lively reef, but there were a good number of fish, including a yellow/black angel fish, sergeant major, and a school of cuttlefish that I’m pretty sure were kind of starting to swarm me.  There were also some pretty cool canyons in the coral that went from like 4m to about 15m down.  But I got sort of tired because I didn’t have fins or a life vest or anything and the salt water burnt my nose a little bit, so I made my way back to the boat and chilled out at the front of it in the sun for a while.  After a while all the girls came back to the ship as well, and in the tiny French I knew I asked the guy for like ten minutes to just chill and enjoy the water, and he said sure.  In that time there was a bee on the boat that scared the crap out of everyone, but the guy killed it for us.  He also showed me that the huge wooden stick that I was leaning against was an enormous harpoon.  I asked him to show me how to use it right now but he said no, not now.

(This is longer than I expected but exactly as lame as I thought.  Sorry)

After that we went back to the beach and some just laid out to chill, but I wanted a little bit to eat.  Kelly and Aleeza and I found some places with a bit of food but I just got some ice cream and they got some Samosas and I ate one of Kelly’s on the way back and it was fine.  Then I jumped in the water and Rob A from the ship was there with his kids and Jenny F’s kids and we launched them out of the water and let them stand on our heads and they pretty much had a blast.  He’s a really nice guy and the kids were really cute too.  They needed to leave and actually kind of hurried away (bus?  On duty?), and we pretty much headed out at the same time to meet our guy.

Everyone but Margalit and I just got out at the waterfront to do some quick shopping.  I had to get my computer, so we took money from everyone and paid the guy at the port.  I got on the ship, got my stuff, got in a cab with five other people and paid $2 each to get to the waterfront and said goodbye to them because they wanted to eat and I wanted to use the interwebs.  I sent a Oceanwalk to Tarik like I’d been meaning to do since like Vietnam, and downloaded some audio converters, and checked my Facebook maybe, and Huffington Post maybe and definitely NPR and I downloaded Audacity as well, and the latest episode of This American Life, and I also streamed the one with the Mike Birbiglia car crash story so I could show it to Catie.  I’ve had to keep my computer turned on or asleep ever since though – I can’t turn it off until I show it to her or else it’ll go away forever.

After that I wanted to get some stamps, so I went to the post office but it closed at 4pm and it was 4:16pm or so.  I asked some guys who worked for DHL or something who were sitting right nearby if there were any place to buy stamps, and they said to go to Sunasee, which I had never heard of, so they pointed me toward where it was and wrote it on my hand.  I went through the underground to look for it, and ran into the DHL guy again as he was walking away, and asked at a watch store where it was, then finally found it right across the street.  I asked if they had stamps, and they had collector stamps but not regular stamps that would actually function on postcard.

So I walked back to the mall where you could take the water taxi, but I realized I only had $1 left in my wallet and it wasn’t worth it to go to an ATM for more money, so I just found the people I had taken the taxi with and asked them if I could have a dollar and I’d pay them back the first time I saw them after I got on the ship.  So Ben gave me a dollar and I walked through the mall to get to the taxi.

As I went to the taxi, I saw it leaving the dock.  I tried to scream for them to wait, but they wouldn’t.  I was NOT going to wait for another half hour or whatever to get on the next water taxi, so I RAN down to the dock, but it was too late to jump from the dock to the boat.  It was still not as far away as the end of the boat next to it.  So I jumped onto the front of the boat right beside it, and sprinted to the back of the boat, got up on the side of it and jumped over to the water taxi and landed safely.  It was awesome.

We drove right under the bow of the ship when we came close to the dock.  And when I got back I just chilled out and relaxed and got ready for breakfast for dinner, which was a total letdown.

But yeah.  So that was my time in Mauritius.  It was cool.

Peace out.

BFD

//

 

OH MY GOD

 

THEY'RE HAVING BREAKFAST FOR DINNER ON WEDNESDAY

 

I CAN DIE HAPPY

 

PEACE OUT

Just to Note

//

 

We had the Sea Olympics between Vietnam and India, and we had a pull-up contest, and I got 30, which was tied for the most on the ship.

 

Just wanted to make a note of that.

 

Pretty much every other team put up some big muscle-head who hit the gym every day or more often, and so when I walked up there, a scrawny nerd in a novelty t-shirt who hadn’t been to the gym once the entire voyage, everyone was like, “Um, what’s going on here?”  And then I tied the guy from the military academy or whatever that went before me.

 

It’s kind of sad that I can’t do 42 like I used to, but then again, I haven’t worked out in like four years.  So I think that I still did pretty well, considering.

 

Peace out.

People You'd Notice

//

 

There are some pretty intense characters on the ship.  I’ll give a summary of some of them, and possibly some memories with them as well.

 

1.

 

The first person you’d notice is Toby.  His real name is Ben, but he wanted people to call him Toby, so he just told people his name was Toby, and it stuck.  He has long hair, about to his shoulder, and it’s kind of wavy and used to be partially dyed in the front, but he got it all bleached totally blond in Vietnam.  He wears really crazy clothes, including a tunic from Egypt, green pinstriped pants, totally bright white jeans, and glasses kind of like the dude from Star Trek.  It seems like it wouldn’t work but if you saw him, you’d think it was cool.

 

And he is cool.  He’s great with cameras and makes a TON of videos, some for fun, some for school, and they’re all AWESOME.  His Global Studies project is about the sustainability of friendship or something along those lines, and we watched a video of it in class the other day, and it was just awesome.  He had video of him talking to a little kid in Vietnam, two girls on a park bench, a guy playing guitar with him and a bunch of friends on the street, etc.  He did the same thing in Hawaii, but just for fun, not even for a grade.  He’s definitely inspired me to be more serious about making videos… and also to invest in a really high quality camera, now that I see how beautiful one can make things.

 

He writes crazy stories and makes crazy drawings and crazy poems and signs them as “Tobysaurusrex.”  I just read one of his stories, and in it he walks into the ship, then there’s a rabbit behind him, and then it holds up a lobster, and then his key card turns into a sandwich and he goes to bite it and it turns into a computer, and then the ship turns into his room, and there’s a robot there, and he talks to the robot.  It made negative sense.  But that’s just how Toby is.

 

2.

 

There’s a girl named Mackenzie or McKenzie, and then reason you’d notice her is because she’s literally the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen or ever will see.  It’s seriously striking, like to the point that a lot of people did double-takes the day they stepped on the ship.  And the cool part is that it’s not in a Cover Of A Magazine way and I don’t think she wears make-up…?  A picture would be best, of course, but she has a really strong/angular face with a super bright smile and she dresses a lot like Ellen DeGeneris and it just completely works.

 

I’ve only had like three interactions with her, which is kind of sad, because my friends tell me she’s cool and we don’t have a lot of time left.  Once she said something to me while I was playing Regina Spektor on piano, but I thought she was talking to my friend who was sitting beside me on the bench, and then my friend said, “Dude, why’d you ignore her?”  And then I felt like an enormous jerk and I apologized to her a day or two later.  She walked by me playing again tonight and waved and I made sure to say something back instead of just nodding.

 

3.

 

Emerson is a piece of art.  He’s from Thailand but he goes to University of Virginia.  His English is fine but he still has a strong accent.  He’s very very thin with short black and brown hair (dyed) and glasses most of the time.  He dresses pretty well but not nearly as outlandish as Toby.

 

The thing about him is that he is completely Balls To The Wall in everything he does.  He was the first one to organize a coffeehouse, and it was an incredible success.  When it was his turn, he sang My Heart Will Go On on piano with Jay playing behind him.  Before he went he said, “Okay, I’m going to sing you a song now, and I know that my voice is not very good, but I sing a lot when I am at home and I’m missing home a lot now so I’m going to do this to feel a little bit better so I hope you like it.”  And he was right, his voice wasn’t great, although he did hit some of the most important notes.  But no one cared, because the point was that he got up there saying that he wasn’t good and still just WENT FOR IT, which takes like 10x more cajones than anything that anyone else did that night.  And we all went wild for him.

 

At the Talent Show last night, he did two different performances.  The first was a dance to a song with the chorus line “Nobody nobody but you,” but I don’t know the title.  In any case, it was him and four other girls and another guy, but they were all dressed as girls.  Emerson was wearing a blonde wig and a dress.  And he just went for it, again.  And then I performed with him later, doing Paparazzi by Lady Gaga.  He had the most ridiculous outfit I’ve ever seen, with a mask and a red shawl and a black dress and a peacock feather fan and another blue headpiece… just craziness.  And Toby was dressed in a leather tuxedo dancing around with him, and they pretended to make out on stage.  I was playing piano and doing background vocals, and – at Emerson’s direction – I was wearing a long black wig, thick smokey eye make-up with a lightning bolt on my cheek, a gray see-through shawl with a leather belt wrapped around my torso, and tight black leggings that I got from a friend.  I had two “monsters” at my side, played by his friends, who wore surgical masks, black dresses and white bedsheets.

 

Hopefully I can show you a vide sometime, but it was just crazy, and ONLY Emerson would be able to get away with it.

 

//

 

There are some more characters, but some of them I don’t like, and I’m kind of tired, so I’m just going to stop writing this entry for now.

 

Peace out.

East Ghost/West Ghost

//

 

Note that I DO NOT WANT advice, sympathy, condolences, or criticism.

 

I came on this trip not really knowing if I liked travel or not.  I’d never had a “real” travel experience before – never really left America and never really left the hotel – and I wanted to find out if I actually liked it or not.  I figured if I was unsatisfied so far with my hotel experiences then I should probably do something else to try to get a feel for a place, which is to basically just try to see the best I can how people live every day.  So I’ve been doing that, trying to talk to people in coffeeshops and on the streets and stuff like that.  And I’m not particularly satisfied, and don’t really feel like I get a much better understanding of a place by being there and talking to people firsthand than I do by reading books or watching documentaries or what have you.

 

It’s not like it’s a bad trip that I’m having – it’s great, I live on a cruise ship, I don’t even have to make my own bed or do my own dishes or even take the tray to the conveyor belt – it’s just that I think I’ve discovered that I don’t particularly care for travel.  I guess I should have known before I left.  I always like it when I have my own comfortable little corner in the world, I never watch the travel channel, I’ve never really aspired to travel before, I always hated going away on breaks, and so on.

 

I also wonder how responsible travel is in general.  It seems like one of those things that you have to say in the “Interests” sections of dating websites when you’re a middle-class white person even if you don’t believe it.  It kind of feels like a way to affirm your status.  Oh yeah, so you have enough money to have gone where?  And what resort did you stay at?  And what pretty things did you see when you were there?  It’s like it’s not good enough to be rich in our own country, so we have to go be rich in other places, too, and then come back and brag about it.

 

When I ask people what makes them happy in all these countries, literally not a single person has said “Travelling.”  Actually, not a single person has said anything that involved something outside of the place where they lived.  I think that’s interesting.

 

But yeah.  Maybe I’m missing something.  I don’t know.  Fifty days left.

 

I don’t really have a best friend on the boat, and I feel like it’s a different and sort of difficult path here to actually make a best friend.  There’s a lot of social schizophrenia about “meeting new people” through the whole trip, and so even when you’ve found someone that you really click with, both of you still sort of feel a draw to “meet new people” instead of just form a really meaningful relationship.  I guess there’s value in meeting new people, but I think I value strong relationships a lot more personally.  And it’s rough because it’s really nigh on impossible to say to someone, “Stop hanging out with new people and cultivate your connection with me instead.  Okay great thanks!”

 

There are some girls on the ship that I could definitely enjoy being in a relationship with, but they all live very far away and I’m graduating soon and I don’t know what I’m going to do afterward and I don’t really want to drag them along for the ride and the whole situation is just kind of confusing and annoying.  I kind of just want to go up to the girls I’m thinking of and be like, “Hey I think you’re really great and normally I’d pursue you and maybe ask you out, but circumstances suck on my end so it’ll never work out.  But yeah, you’re really great!”  Maybe that’d go over okay.

 

I’m excited for when I get home again.  I have a whole list of things I’ve never done before that I want to do, and in my head I’m building a little list of awesome things from home that I want to do (enjoy a lightning storm, eat a Genuardi’s doughnut, bake cookies, screamsing in my car, listen to NPR, etc…)

 

It’s hard to get one-on-one time with people on the ship, especially when you don’t have a single and everyone goes to bed early and when they’re up, everyone hangs out in groups.  I miss that more than almost anything.

 

I play guitar outside late at night, and I would have done so tonight if it weren’t raining.

 

I performed in the talent show the other day.  First I did a thing with the bagpipes girl, which was pretty cool.  Then I was up all by myself.  Rob, one of the LLCs, introduced me.  He’s really cool.  He said that was playing and singing a song I wrote, Difference, then what it was about, and then my fun fact.  I had given it to him the other day, so he said, “He doesn’t believe in god, but he does believe in Jenny Finn.”  It was half-way meant to get a rise from the crowd, but more importantly, it was half-way because it’s true.  Sometime I’ll tell ya’ll about Jenny Finn.  She’s amazing.

 

I started playing, and for the first time, even though I was probably playing to roughly 850 people, I really wasn’t nervous.  I just pretended I was playing alone in the Union like I always did.  Except I had a microphone in front of me, I guess that’s the only difference.

 

In the middle of the song, where usually it’s just music, I talked instead.  It was something like this:

 

“So, I get scared of really ridiculous things.  Like when I’m in the basement at the bottom of the steps, and I turn all the lights off, I run up the stairs as fast as I can, because I’m afraid that something will drag me down and kill me.  And I really hate doing dishes in the sink at night when it’s dark, because there’s a big window right in front of my sink at home, and I feel incredibly vulnerable to sniper attacks.  …This has nothing to do with the song.  I just thought I’d share.”

 

And then I hit the huge downbeat for the next section of heavy music, and everybody applauded, and I was glad.  I had agonized over what to say in that section since I knew there was going to be a talent show.  And I only came up with what I had said that day.  All my best speeches seem to be written the day they’re performed.

 

Jenny Finn said it brought tears to her eyes when I mentioned her in the beginning.  My friend Jenn said that she actually liked the song for really, and even mentioned the line that made her start really paying attention (second verse, third and fourth line).  A lot of other people said I did a great job, but even more people talked to me about being afraid of dark basements and black windows at night too and they liked that I talked about it up there.

 

There are a few other really serious musicians on the ship, but I was the only one that performed totally solo last night, and that was kind of upsetting to me.

 

I’m confused about photography sort of at the moment.  Toby, like I said, did inspire me to get a better camera and make more videos and stuff, but I don’t know how I feel about taking pictures on this trip, which is weird considering my graduation speech.  I realized that I only took 260 pictures in all of India, which is seriously nothing.  I think I noticed it after Vietnam and Cambodia when I saw those two scenes on the streets at night, and it turns out that the most beautiful things you’ll ever see around the world are totally impossible to take pictures of, and it sort of makes all the pictures that you take instead feel like empty substitutes, and it makes me way less interested in taking them.  But I still take some pictures, just in case.

 

HI MOM AND DAD.

 

Okay it’s 1AM and I don’t think I feel like writing much else.

 

There are 32 sunsets left from the ship.

 

Peace out.

The Ship

//

 

So yeah, I realize I haven't updated about the ship or life here in a while.  Sorry about that.  Been too busy with a LOT of really big and really interesting ports, as well as some school work and other stuff.  For a super quick update, I have some Pakistan reading to do today, followed by a Global Studies test, and there was a talent show last night that I spent a lot of time preparing for.  There is also drama involving pianos and broken strings. 

 

More in the near future, I hope.

 

Peace out.

WHAOMG INDIA

//

 

Okay, so I think this time around, I’m only going to post the stories I most want to remember and talk about to this place to make life a little easier for ya’ll.  The rest I’ll just keep to myself and have pictures of and crap like that.

 

As for the culture of India…

 

The first thing you notice – unfortunately – is how incredibly dirty the place is.  There’s just trash everywhere that you look, and the more people there are, of course, the more trash there is.  Walking around a city street isn’t too bad, but if you look to your left, just over that four foot fence beside you, you’ll just see a heap of trash with chickens and dogs rummaging through it.

 

Bathrooms are pretty shocking.  First of all, public urination is totally the norm for dudes.  I mean, people will literally get off their motorbikes on the sidewalk, walk two feet to the grass, and go for it.  Otherwise, a lot of people just hang over bridges or riverbanks for anything else.  If you go into a bathroom, there’s just a hole in the ground with a rock over it, and you slide it away and do your thang.  There’s no toilet paper, so you have to use your hand and then just wash your hand.  This really is why it’s offensive to do anything with your left hand in India.

 

You eat with your right hand and ONLY with your right hand.

 

Tons and tons of people have the third eye adorned on their forehead at all times.  It’s not like some dress-up thing that America latched on to and distorted.  They really do it, almost every day, especially Hindus.

 

Everyone speaks at least a little bit of English, and many are quite good.

 

There’s a direct link between how much English you speak and how much money you make.

 

There’s a direct link between how much money you’re born with and how much money you die with.

 

The contrast you can see in a single image is pretty unbeatable.  On a single city block, you can find a double-doctorate household with two kids going through private universities and two cars that they own, and then two lots down you find a dirt floor thatched roof village that houses ten families in the same amount of space.

 

Water is incredibly unsafe and dealing with it is a big part of Indian life.  Thankfully bottled water is pretty damn cheap – two liters of bottled water goes for roughly $.40.

 

Upper middle class families have a maid.  Rich families have five maids.

 

Parents will do ANYTHING for their children until they’re age like 30 or so.  Basically until the kid is old enough and in position to take care of his parents instead.  I mean, if a kid wants to go to a university and the parents don’t have enough money, they’ll sell the house and the car and take a loan to make it possible with no questions asked.

 

The clothes they wear are seriously beautiful and always provide a stark contrast to the ugly city settings, or a nice complement to the incredibly gorgeous countryside.

 

There’s somewhere between 25 and 35 major languages in India, but Hindi is the main native link language, although English is possibly the most powerful language.

 

First is mom, second is god.

 

Third is cricket.  There’s a guy named Sachin who’s like 5’4” tall and he’s the country’s hero.  He’s the best cricket player that’s ever lived.  When he plays within India, everyone hates him except for his own team (Mumbai?).  When he plays for India in international competitions, he’s a god, and people literally cry when he finishes batting.

 

You hear roughly 99% Indian music in daily life.  It’s pretty cool.  Lots of neat instrumentation and thumping beats.

 

The poverty is CRUSHING, man, holy crap.  I thought I’d seen poor people in America.  But no.  I’m willing to say that even the single poorest person in the USA is better off than a significant percentage of India’s poor.  Why?  Because they have water.  Just for example.

 

It’s a safe place.  Murder is extremely rare unless it’s religiously or politically motivated.  Other violent crimes are pretty rare as well.

 

Most people think America is pretty great.  I guess that kind of makes sense.  America’s definitely more comfortable than India in a number of ways, but we’re also much less sustainable and if everyone lived like America, we’d all be in a heap of trouble.  They also seem under the impression that all Americans carry large bills on them at all times and have huge houses and huge cars.  I guess that makes sense considering the kind of Americans that can afford to come to India.

 

There are a LOT of beggars.  It’s impossible to tell if they’re legitimate though, or if they’re run by Indian mafia groups (which is a significant number of them).  In generally, it’s basically just better to give to aid organizations and let them take care of it, so I didn’t give to any beggars.

 

In general, everything is incredibly incredibly cheap.  A three-course meal at a perfectly nice restaurant will run you something like $2.  A four-hour bus ride costs about $.60 and a three-hour taxi ride costs $20.  $20 may sound like a lot compared to those other two, but think, How far would $20 get me in a taxi in New York?

 

Politics is cool, dude.  There are like 7,000,000 different newspapers and 3,000,000 languages and perspectives and people read them ALL.

 

People are always way older than they look.  Find someone that looks 21?  He’s 28.  Indians also think Americans look incredibly old for their age.  See a that kid that looks like a typical American 20 year old?  Indians would guess he’s 25 or 26.

 

//

 

Okay, I think that’s about all of that I can do.  But that was like 900 words so that’s not bad, right?  That’s like four pages double-spaced.

 

Peace out.

Dr. Asshole

//

 

I know mom and dad are going to love that title, but Spencer and I referred to the clerk at the train station as Dr. Asshole for the entire week, so I have to put it out there.

 

When we first went to the train station to buy our pass, there was a very nice lady and she was trying her best to help us, but she said she had lost her “specs,” and she wouldn’t be able to do the paperwork without them, so she told us to come back at 2:15PM, after their break time.

 

So we came back at 2:15PM, and no one was there.  Some crazy dude came and talked to us and asked where we were from, and we said America and he said, “I know that.”  He was from America too.  He lived there for like 45 years.  He basically said that Kodaikanal was a stupid place to go and if we wanted to see India we had to go to Varanasai.  We thanked him for the unwelcome criticism and tried to ignore him.

 

There was also some deal with we had to pay in American currency, which was a huge issue.

 

Anyway, we made it to the station around 5pm and it closed at 6pm.  The guy at the counter was like 50 and had a balding head that was very shiny and it looked like he was taking a long time with everyone.  Finally it got to us, and we told him that we wanted rail passes.

 

AND THEN THE FIGHT STARTED.

 

Well it wasn’t really that exciting, but seriously he opposed us just about every step of the way.  At first he didn’t seem to even know what we were talking about, but we KNEW that the rail passes existed and we knew the lady earlier in the day was going to get one for us, so we finally convinced him they were real, pretty much.  He asked us why we wanted them, and we said so we could ride trains without reservations.  And he said no, that was impossible.  And we said no, it wasn’t.  And he said it was impossible, and we said it wasn’t.

 

Anyway, we convinced him to let us give him money, so we whipped out our American money - $160 total – to buy the passes.  He said he didn’t want it.  We were astounded.  We had $160 US just like they asked, and he said he didn’t want it.  He said it was too much to count and insisted we got a hundred dollar bill.  That was a totally ridiculous request, so I sat there and counted it out for him.  He then proceeded to count it out like three more times, getting to $160 each time, and still said no.  We asked why, and he said it was too many bills.  Direct quotes:

 

Spencer:  So you’re not going to take our money because it’s difficult?

Dr. Asshole:  Yes.

 

Anyway, we eventually convinced him to take our money.  He then proceeded to write down the serial number of every bill except for the $1 bills while we waited, as if it were impossible to do it later, or let someone else do it.

 

Then we said that we wanted to get on a train to Kodaikanal for the night, and he said it was impossible.  We said no, it wasn’t, but he said yes, it’s impossible.  We said it doesn’t matter, just give us the pass for today.  That way we can use it today if we want to.

 

And when he took out the passes, he wrote the date for tomorrow, so that even if we wanted to use it that night, we couldn’t.

 

We hated that man.  We hated that man.  And thus we spent the next day in Chennai, thanks to Dr. Asshole.

 

Keep in mind that almost no part of this whole system was computerized, except for the time he actually punched in a reservation for a train, which we hardly needed but whatever.  When he took down the serial numbers, it was by hand.  When he took down our passport and visa information, it was by hand.  When he wrote down the numbers of the passes, it was by hand.  And it was just these HUGE ledger books that he would plop open and flip around in for a while.  It was kind of ridiculous.  And one time the next day the power went out, and the reservation system went offline for like a half an hour or so.  Power goes out from time to time with no warning because they just don’t make enough at the plants.