Ship Tease

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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.