ein Hund für die Catherine

My daughter Catherine is a linguaphile living in Germany, so this post is for her.

In America, it's quite rare that foreign words or phrases turn up on signs.  I can think of a few exceptions, but by and large we are a country that does not bother to learn other languages.  It's remarkable to me how much English there is on the streets of Tokyo.

In America, use of a foreign phrase usually signals an appeal to a more educated, sophisticated (read, rich) crowd. That's true here, too.  Last night I saw a store called "Classics The Small Luxury" which sold nothing but handkerchiefs, starting at $25 apiece.  But today I saw "SALE! 30-50% off" on a discount store, too.

Japanese products are famous for their idiosyncratic use of English, like the "Fruity salad" juice I've been drinking for breakfast and the "Everyer girl" body lotion in the bathroom.  But give them credit for getting it right more often than wrong.

Here's a sign I saw in a camera store.  No corresponding warnings in English or Japanese, as far as I could tell.

Maybe it's a German shepherd?

(Loosely translated:  Beware of the loose dog.  If the dog jumps, you're on your own--lots of luck!)

A cemetery for KK

My daughter-in-law Kristina studies bones, and funerary customs, and grave goods.  When she travels, she seeks out cemeteries.  Here's one I stumbled on in Tokyo.

I can't read the inscriptions, of course, so I have no idea whether these monuments represent one person or a whole clan.  What struck me is how densely populated the place is.  It's also completely paved over.  There's no lawn to tend, nothing to tidy up.

Each monument has a couple of vases, and some have flowers.  In the corner, I found a tap and a group of charming wooden pails with dippers for watering the flowers.

Oh, man: omen.

The instructions are clear.  After you get your fortune, you are to TAKE IT HOME.  Why they tell you this, I don't know, because there are racks all over that people tie their fortunes to.  The instructions also tell you it costs 100 Yen (about a buck) to get a fortune, but I didn't see anyone but me following that instruction either.

Here's how it works.  You "politely shake" the container to jostle the sticks inside, and then let one stick come through the hole.  Each stick has a number, and you match it to a drawer.  (This is much simpler to do if you know Japanese, because the numbers are in Japanese characters.)  Inside the drawer is your fortune.

They are not fooling around here.  I got a terrible fortune!  Not "life is full of challenges" or any of the vaguely bad news you might imagine.  Request not granted, won't get better, bad for marriage, trips, job--a total sad sack life, not one ray of hope here.

Not on my birthday, you don't.  I opened another box at random and pulled out a second fortune.  Mostly for comparison--I couldn't believe how harsh #70 Bad fortune was--but also because I believe you can choose to change your life, so why not your fortune?

I like this one a lot better, happier like a ship sails before the wind.

I also find the parallels interesting.  Do they all talk about getting well and tearing down houses?  And waiting for people?

I also see it as significant that the good fortune is more nuanced.  Still won't find the lost or heal the sick, still waiting for that person.

Now I want to go back and get a few more, just to see what variety there is.  But that might be pushing it.  Rules are rules.

Tokyo Time

A day that starts with an earthquake and ends with a birthday party:  stay flexible and enjoy what comes your way!

I slept through the earthquake, and so did Yoshiko, but it woke Kaji up.  According to the earthquake tracker, it was a 5.1 magnitude quake north of here.  Welcome to the Pacific Rim.  

My first night, Yoshiko planned a schedule for each of my days here, in each case sticking to one subway or train line so that I can use a one-day pass for unlimited travel.  Tokyo has lots of lines which connect, but you have to pay separately for each.  Residents have the equivalent of the US EZ Pass, which lets them swipe their way through the gates.  The single day pass works much the same way.

Today was my Hibiya day.  Parks, shopping, temples and lots of walking.  Armed with a tourist booklet, Yoshiko's game plan, and a map of the system, I set off.  First stop, Tsujiki.  The plan was for the fish market, but I stopped off at a Buddhist temple on the way.  This incarnation of it was built in the 1930s, after the original was lost to fire and the replacement to earthquake.  It looks like the land , which was reclaimed from the sea, has now been reclaimed as a parking lot.  There were several tour buses there, but not enough people to fill them.

At the fish market, I wandered through the general market area for quite a while, finding out later that I had missed the fish market entirely.  By the time I figured out where it was, everyone was packing up for the day.  I couldn't figure out what was samples and what was food for bulk purchase, and did not see people helping themselves to samples, so much of the food remains a mystery to me.  One helpful vendor saw me looking at light brown, dried tablets and told me what they were, but I heard "scarabs" instead of "scallops."  I was ready to believe either one, but they were pretty clearly scallops.

I am very challenged in my sense of direction, the wrong way when I leave a store, so I had a happy time wandering the alleyways with only a vague idea of where I was.  Fortunately, Tokyo has a lot of city maps in the areas tourists frequent, so you can readjust and find a subway fairly easily.

After the fish market, I made stops by Hibiya Park, the government buildings, the Imperial Palace, the Tokyo Sky Tower, and a high end shopping mall/residence area.  I ran into three different groups from Semester at Sea, so I guess I was hitting the high points of Tokyo.

I found this statue in Hibiya Park, which is Tokyo's first "western style" park.  I guess that's why Romulus and Remus are making an appearance.

It looked like a lotto game to me.

My challenge for the day was getting some food.  Yoshiko left so much for breakfast that I wound up eating some of it for lunch, but I was determined to eat dinner out.  Yoshiko recommended Ueno, so I took the subway there.  Lots of restaurants have picture menus, and some even have plastic models of the food.  It is still pretty hard to tell what you're getting, but I am not a fussy eater.  So I picked out a restaurant and I picked out a dish, but I failed to notice that you have to first buy a ticket for your meal.  There's a vending machine at the front of the restaurant, where you choose and pay for your food.  Then you give your ticket to the proprietor, and he brings your food.  The table has hot stuff and hotter stuff on it, as well as water.  (Pickled ginger--it looked like carrots, but it was labeled ginger--and something that just had a skull and crossbones on the label.  I think the ginger was the hotter of the two.)

What I ate

I came home around 7, and the subway was packed with people.  I shoved myself in and spent the whole ride wedged between the crowd and the door.  I don't know how anyone could have gotten through the crowd to get off, and I don't think anyone did until the major transfer point.  Even then, the local was standing room only.

After you are about 6, it's bad form to tell people it's your birthday, so I wouldn't have mentioned it to Yoshiko and Kaji.  But when Kaji made my reservation for the bus, he had to give my age, so the word was out.  Because of this, Yoshiko arranged a party for my birthday eve.  She found a birthday hat with candles, and the bought a cake.  She and Kaji sang happy birthday and gave me a present of a wallet for my travels.  It was lovely to be remembered!  Then Kaji posted the pictures to my Facebook page, so all my friends back home had ample warning to send their hood wishes as well.  Happy birthday to me, my first one celebrated outside of the US.

This is why we sail from Mexico

The northern crossing is a shorter one, and the ship used to sail from Vancouver.  But the storm of 2005 resulted in a reassessment of the route.  (Had I seen this video before I traveled, it might have resulted in a reassessment, too!)

All week long, people were talking about this video, so I was very curious to get to a good wireless connection in order to see it.  No way to watch it on the ship!

The weather channel story is an amazing documentation, with footage shot on the ship.  In addition to the "wreckage" footage of chairs and people sliding, there's footage from the bridge and the engine room that must have come mostly from the communications team aboard the ship.  Knowing what I do about how flaky our internet is now (and it's better than it was then) and generally about how systems work on the ship, I'm very impressed by the reporting.  None of the passengers even know where the engine room IS, and half couldn't find the bridge.  That kind of access at such a critical time is quite extraordinary.

(One small note, the ship has 4 engines.  The story reports that 2 were knocked out, and the implication is strong that those were all the ship has.  But unless they've outfitted the ship was extra engines since that voyage, that's a bit of drama inserted into a story that really didn't need any.)

Both videos make me tear up a bit, for different reasons.  The MV Explorer really feels like home to me.

Thanks, Captain Jeremy, for dodging as many storms as you did last week.  I never felt in danger (never even felt seasick).  But oh, Mother Nature, you do get angry at times.

Updated to add: I later learned that the Captain for this leg of the Spring, 2005 voyage was replaced in Honolulu by Captain Jeremy, who's been one of the captains since. (By contract, two captains each sail half the year. No vacation during the term of duty.) Just a couple weeks after the Pacific storm, there was a storm in the Mediterranean which tossed around the MV Explorer's sister ship, the Voyager. Coincidentally or not, Captain Jeremy was the captain brought in after each of those incidents. 

Terrified of toilets

We arrived in Yokohama (the port nearest Tokyo) Sunday morning, storm tossed and grateful for the small things, like sitting in chairs and knowing they are not going to throw you to the ground, or lying in bed and being sure the TV will not hurtle across the room at you.

Yes, it was a wild and crazy night.  I have a movie which ends quite abruptly as the chair I am in tosses me into the lap of the woman I am sitting next to.  My TV stayed bolted in place, but about 10 of them (including the Executive Dean's) broke free.  Dressers, tired of throwing their drawers open and closed, also broke the pieces of wood bolting them to the walls.  The ship's maintenance people have their work cut out for them as we visit Japan these next few days.

We were greeted at the dock by a band, in full marching uniform, with flag team.  There was also a reception area set up in the port, with very helpful people planning subway routes and making suggestions about things to see.  Tokyo and Yokohama have many intersecting subway lines, and the signs are in English half the time, but not on the maps in the stations.  It's very easy if you have a guide.  It's moderately easy if you throw yourself on the mercy of a Japanese family.  One very cute baby told me "bye bye" repeatedly from her stroller as we all waited for the train.  With their generous help, I was able to navigate three different changes.

It took until 1:30 to clear the ship, and I was one of the last ones to leave.  One of my jobs is to document where everyone is going from the overnight travel registrations that come in (always at the last minute), so we can chase people down if they don't turn up when we're about to leave.  The internet had been down all night, so we had few entries, but an informal signup sheet that I just gave up on.  We let all the people with field trips off first, so I settled in to wait.  By the time I got off, the money exchange people were out of cash.  I found an ATM easily, but it had no options for English, and I just hope I did not leave my account open for the next person to take out wads of cash!  I had about $40 in yen, so I knew I could at least get to my room for the night.

I am staying with Yokoshiko and Kaji, a room I found on airbnb.  I chose it because, who wouldn't?  Cozy cute room with view of Mt. Fuji, looks like something out of a Sanrio commercial.  All the reviews said Yoshiko was very helpful in planning an itinerary, so I turned myself over to her.  Very good decision.  Kaji booked me a seat on the overnight bus to Kobe and Yoshiko planned about 10 days' worth of trips for the 3 days I will stay here.  We went out after dinner and she walked me through buying a day pass for the subway system, got cash at the ATM, and then helped me change the 10,000 yen bill it dispensed (about $91).

She did not, however, leave instructions for the toilet.  By the time I got back from the used book store (Japanese books for my granddaughters!), my hosts were in bed.  I tiptoed to the toire (they have another word for it as well, but this one is easiest to remember, as the r and l in Japanese meet somewhere in the middle) and found a hightech wonder.  Uh, oh.

Knowing that these toilets can set jets a-swirling, I closed the lid before trying any of the buttons.  Stubborn silence.  Less conspicuous is the traditional handle on the right side, which does the job.  It also, however, launches a fountain at the top, presumably for washing ones public parts, as the toire is exactly the size you see it here.  Cozy room without view.  The fountain continues for a long enough period that I started to panic about how to turn it off.  Fiddling with the flusher sets off another cycle.

Having mastered the toire, I am set for a morning's adventure.  Here's the morning view:  snow-covered Mt. Fuji appears as the white triangle on the right.

And here's the street view.  Life is, as the store in the middle proclaims, Sweet.

[Honestly, how do people blog?  I could spend the whole morning telling about the last day.  With five days in Japan and only two of spotty internet on the ship before China, I am never going to catch up.]

Ubuntu

This morning, Archbishop Tutu spoke to the Global Management Class, and everyone was invited to go listen. The class presented a few questions to him.  I was not able to attend, but someone has already posted a quick transcript of Arch’s remarks.  They may not be an exact quote, but they are worth passing on to you.

 

Question:  How did winning the Nobel Peace Prize impact you?

 

Answer:  [Hahaha] Well, we were with a group of 3000 young people in Bali, and one of them asked me what does it take to get a Nobel peace prize. And I said, “it’s quite easy really, you need only three things. You need to have an easy name like ‘Tutu.’

 

At  the time, we were out in the open and it was quite warm and I showed off my legs and said,

“you have to have sexy legs, too.” All I was trying to say  Is that Nobel laureates don’t drop down from heavens, they’re people like you.

 

If you are up early in the morning, you might see Arch out for a walk, pumping his arms and really moving.  He is pretty much always showing off those legs—I don’t think I’ve ever seen him with long pants on.  He laughs easily and often, and we laugh along with him.  And when he shifts, as he does, into serious mode, he has your full attention.

 

He went on to say, “There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be, from among you here, future Nobel laureates.”  And he answered the original question:  The big difference is that people started paying attention to him. His message didn’t change, but his audience did.  Now the President (Reagan) was calling him.  And it was important to the morale of people whose fight for freedom was now validated worldwide.

 

He talked about environmentalism (I’m 82, but I’m not sure how many of you are going to make it to 82 if things don’t change drastically) and he used the concept Ubuntu to talk about how we are all responsible for each other.  Difficult to put into words in our languages, he said, but it means “I am because we are.”  A person is a person because there are other people.  We learn to be human by imitating other humans, and we care for each other and our world because, really, what is the alternative?

 

He did not say what the third quality required for winning a Nobel prize is, but it doesn’t matter.  I’ve got the easy name (“Heath, like the candy”), but am defeated in the sexy legs department.   I’ll just keep watching and reporting.

Hungry for details of my shipboard life?

Last night was not a picture taking activity (although I posed for one, so this belief was not unanimous).  Today, however, words will fail to do justice to the incredible spread the dining crew put on for a select group of Charlottesville faculty, staff, and partners.

Charlottesville always contributes a relatively large number of voyagers, because everyone in Charlottesville knows about Semester at Sea and because UVA has a very generous approach to faculty leave and salary for those aboard.  (Not so for staff.  I will be using all my accumulated vacation and taking personal leave.)  Our academic dean is from Charlottesville this semester, and she kindly invited all of us to dine in Classroom 9, which is set up for "special dining" for dinner. 

Special dining is a chance for our talented chefs to shine and a grand place to celebrate a birthday or other event.  It's also a way to wine and dine the VIPs, so the mere working stiffs are usually not invited to rub elbows on the table with ship

It is, however, a steal.  This surprises me.  Other things on the ship are wildly expensive, like a $2.00 can of Coke.  But you can order a jumbo shrimp for 20% of what it costs at a hotel affair.  Tonight we had a pre-port appetizer night, a plate of Japanese appetizers for $5, and a theme drink for $3.50.  Special dining is available to anyone for a mere $29.95, just make a reservation and they will happily charge it.

Our everyday ship food feeds 1000 people and is just fine.  We're 10 days from Hilo and the lettuce is still crunchy.  With grated carrots and cucumbers, it's passable as salad.   There's fresh fruit at every meal.   (Underripe pears, nectarines, and plums, but also oranges and today grapes.  The bananas made a grand exit with chilled banana soup.)  Quite a variety of soups, often last night's vegetables cut smaller and put into stock of some kind.  Vegetables in and out of a sauce.  In addition to carrots, tomatoes, and broccoli, there's cauliflower, a variety of beans, eggplant, pumpkin, and other squashes.  There's always naked pasta and a sauce, roasted potatoes with a rotating set of names, and usually rice with tiny amounts of something that allow it to be named something new.  Stir fry, paella, pilaf, risotto…  I see students eating lunches that consist of pasta, potatoes, and rice, no sauce. 

Always, peanut butter and jelly.  Morning, noon, and night.  Great big trays of it.  I read 40 pounds of peanut butter a day.  That's more than half an ounce a person, which means a whole lot of people are eating it every day.  I do wonder what these folks are going to eat when they go onland to, say, Burma.  Taco night is a highlight for them, but I found it the least appealing of our dinners so far.  I much prefer the ethnic dishes like dhal and curry.

When you cook for a thousand people, the logistics alone are daunting.  The ship's kitchen also provides vegetarian meals, labels all dishes for gluten, dairy, garlic, and meat, and prepares individual meals for passengers with allergies. 

And then there is the special dining experience.  We started with hors d'oeuvres, including hardboiled eggs with salmon roses instead of yokes.  Then waiters came to place our napkins in our laps and give us menus.  Choice of shrimp cocktail or crepes filled with stir-fry vegetables, soup, Greek salad, choice of chicken breast or salmon, choice of banana split or ganache frosted chocolate cake. The presentation was art.  The shrimp were butterflied into poses.  The Greek salad was a circle of cucumber slices, each with a perfect cube of feta, and a center of pepper, onion, and slivers of cucumber—a little flower of a salad. The meat was tender, the side dishes hot.

I came on this voyage figuring I would either gain or lose 20 pounds.  It's pretty clear which direction I am heading.

Rock and Roll is here to stay

Remember how much fun it was to ride roller coasters and how you said you never wanted to stop?  (Yeah, me neither.)  And how you wanted your dad to go really fast so the speedboat left the water momentarily and went slapping down hard on the surface? (Hated that, too.) 

Or the absolute thrills of the prop plane ride from Charlottesville to Dulles where the plane creaks and shudders and you’re pretty sure it won’t fall apart because, actually, what choice do you have?  Meanwhile, the plane goes one way and your stomach goes the other.

Yes, it is remarkable how much sailing feels like that plane ride today.  Only there are no “fasten seat belts” signs and we are going about our business as usual.  We went through a rough patch last night and I got out the seasickness pills just in case.  So far, so good—I’m one of the lucky ones.

Lots of people sporting The Patch as a fashion accessory this morning and the occasional shriek as we take a nose dive or there’s a particularly loud CRAAAACK.   The sea doesn’t look rough—it’s a beautiful sunny day and the swells don’t look bad—but we are moving unpredictably through all three dimensions.

There was a karaoke night in the faculty lounge a few days ago.  Perhaps next we should try mechanical bull riding?  That is, if anyone is venturing up to Deck 7.  The higher you go in the ship, the more pronounced the changes are.   We have nightly seminars in the Union (on Deck 6) and it’s a distinct challenge for the faculty members who teach them.  And I’ve been told running on the treadmills (also Deck 6) is an art form unto itself. 

By all reports, worse weather is on the way.  Should be entertaining!

How I spent the extra hour

Yesterday, the Purser's Desk had a surprise for us.  Everyone on ship had to pick up a package of immigration papers for all the countries we are visiting and fill them out, using a powerpoint presentation they had loaded to our public drive.

That's 1000 people accessing the same file, due in two days.  Entry and exit papers for Japan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, India, Mauritius, Ghana.  Apparently not required for South Africa, Morocco and Spain (or in my fog, I missed them).

1000 people accessing our iffy, spotty, slow network to use a powerpoint that does not have a back button and controls the speed at which you can move forward.

I took a picture, but if you really, really want to, you can see my passport number and other ID info on the forms, so you'll just have to imagine eleven forms full of my best printing, no erasures, no deviations from strict protocol.

However, as we say, "No complaints!  We're on a trip around the world!"

I turned them in at 1 or 2 AM. Can't remember whether it was new time or old.  Cheryl, the lady at the purser's desk, said, "Miss Lynn, what are you doing still up?"  (Cheryl, what are you doing still on duty??)  These folks work awfully hard.

Yesterday, the ship had a safety drill of some kind.  It did not involve passengers, but everyone on the crew not involved with actually guiding the ship through the waters was called to station.  For at least half an hour, crew members in life jackets stood pretty much at attention, many of them in the public area outside my office.  I could see people from dining and housekeeping staff.  Then they were all moved to the lifeboat stations for a while.

This is a very disciplined group.  In many respects, it is the first foreign community we encounter, since the culture is so different from our own.  We are honored guests, but we must toe the line as well.  Very polite people encourage us to wash our hands before meals and random cabin searches keep us from taking even an empty cup for tea from the dining room.

However, there was a small mutiny in the administrative office yesterday.  I changed the letterhead of our daily publication from Deans Memo to Deans' Memo.  The grammar police do not answer to the ship's officers.

So this is New Zealand (standard time)

We are chugging along, about halfway between Hawaii and Japan, still on a westward course, which keeps us in the warm (77 degrees F) water and air.  Here's the (almost) first sunrise in the eastern hemisphere. 

Since we are traveling directly west, the only spots to see the sunrise are very public, so appropriate clothing is required.  I took this shot from the dining room.  It looks like there was an abbreviated sunrise before the sun disappeared behind the clouds.

In preparation for the date change, Jim (my boss) did one of his famous riffs, explaining how a line was stretched across the ocean in 1925 to mark the exact spot.  Although he tries hard to make these announcements as ridiculous as possible while keeping a straight face, several students mentioned they were eagerly anticipating this passage.  (Yes, really.) 

As for me, I woke up to a new day, a new hemisphere, and a day's worth of vitamins to remind me I haven't quite adjusted to the date change either.



Somewhere, far to the south, lies New Zealand.  This is the first time my brother and I have been in the same time zone since 1983.

Unreasonably Optimistic

We are traveling with Unreasonable at Sea, an offshoot of the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, CO.  Thirty-one entrepreneurs and a rotating set of mentors are working on 11 companies that have the potential to change the world. 

[More on the Unreasonable Institute here. Their name comes from a quote from George Bernard Shaw, which says all change comes from the unreasonable man.  It’s a good quote, but I’m not sure it makes a good name.  Too much time spent explaining it.]

It’s never been entirely clear to me what UI is doing for these companies.  They are bringing in big names for short stints, rotating them in at every port.  Last week the superstar was Time Magazine’s Hero of the Planet (for 2000), Hunter Lovins.  Now we have two Nike execs and a Microsoft Xbox exec who will hold two hours of career counseling open to the other 800 of us aboard ship.  The founder of UI, an alumnus of Semester at Sea, is with us for the whole voyage.  We’ve been promised a Saudi prince. They have a staff (for 31 entrepreneurs) that’s roughly the size of the SAS staff, (for 650 students) minus our residency life folks.  They are holed up in one of our classrooms, and they periodically emerge to hold “Fireside Chats.” Thursday night we got to listen to the first pitches by the entrepreneurs.

It feels a little like reality TV.  Eleven companies!  One ship!!  Mystery guests!!! Who will prevail?  The pitches were thrown together in 4 hours, which I gather was a design constraint imposed on them.  Or it could just be they had no one to chat with (which matches the lack of an actual fire to sit beside).

Snarkiness aside, this is a remarkably international group of people.  I sat through half a dozen of the pitches and listened to companies with founders and/or projects in Spain, Mali, Tibet, Morocco, India, Botswana, Haiti, Darfur, and Nepal.  The projects ranged from brilliant to impenetrable, and the presentations from clunky to impossible. 

One company has a process for purifying water using plants and has been operating for some time.  Another is building cleaner, more efficient charcoal stoves, which competes with the one building better solar ovens.  There’s a guy who makes hearing aid battery rechargers that work with solar power.  One tinkerer developed an endoscopic device from stuff he had around the house.  Another is using a remote control sailboat to clean up the ocean.  My favorite gee-whiz goes to a company that makes nano-somethings from carbon emissions.  (More polished summaries at the UI site.)  This is pretty cool stuff.

The original request for proposals from UI called for companies that had already generated income, companies with a product to sell.  The UI promise was to develop marketing strategies, find audiences, and hone presentations (as well as provide the trip around the world) in exchange for a piece of the company.  UI came with a (comparatively) huge crew of AV/PR and administrative people to do this, along with the star mentors.

I hope it works.  The products are amazing and the entrepreneurs are brilliant.  In 5 years, I want to be able to say, “I sailed with the people who brought clean water to Mali, who reversed global warming…”   Is that unreasonable to ask?

Ed Sobey, Bird Whisperer

I found another dazed storm petrel today, in the same place.  At first, it looked like a little lump of feathers, but as I watched, it stirred itself and tried to fly.  Clearly, it was not ready to take off.

 

The ship is a small community, so it didn’t take me long to find Ed Sobey, our oceanologist.  Ed and his wife Barb sailed across the Pacific in a sailboat, which has all of us in awe.  He travels around the world teaching science and is a great source of information about whales. wind, water, weather—and now birds.

 

Ed has one of the cabins with a private balcony, and he took our first petrel there for R&R.  It’s a little hard to tell the critters apart, but he says there have been at least three now.  His guess is they get caught up in an unfamiliar wind pattern when they get near the ship and are pulled in, crashing into the side and stunning/injuring themselves. 

 

Outside of Ed’s cabin are nautical charts and plots of the waves from day to day.  He posts interesting notes to the public files nearly every day.

 

He doesn’t usually look like a pirate.  Today we caught him up by the weights, ready for a workout.  Still, it’s a good look for him, don’t you think?

 

One small point in time

Semester at Sea is divided into “sea days” and “port days.”  On sea days, I’m working, and there’s no such thing as a weekend.  The nine days to Japan is going to feel long, but it’s the longest stretch I have.

Working means at my desk in the office I share with Jim, the assistant executive dean.  Our desks form an L, and together they are approximately the same size as my desk at UVA in Charlottesville.  Fortunately, Jim is both near and dear to me. 

My work space is cozy.  Half the space on my desk is taken up by computer and fax.  When the ship is rocking (and it always is) I can reach the paper supply and the copier without getting up from my chair, if I’m a little bit patient.

My commute takes me about a minute.  Going out to eat takes me about a minute.  So does going to the gym (theoretical), the library, the computer center, and the bridge.  It’s a pretty small ship. 

By comparison, my room is gigantic.  It has ten drawers, three closets, a desk and a table, each with a chair, and two beds.  I still have empty shelves and drawers.  And it seems to be fairly soundproof.  I hear engine noises, but no sounds from actual people.  My next-door neighbor says he did not hear my incessant coughing, so I think we’re good. 

My room is on the port side, on the fourth deck.  I look directly out onto the ocean (not onto a deck), which I love.  The one down side is that they wash the windows every night, around three or four in the morning, and they wash them for at least an hour.  At first I thought it was rain, then spray from the seas below.  But there are actual spigots above the window, and water streams out from them.  Like a car wash for the ship.  Cleanliness is legendary on cruise ships, but this still seems a bit over the top.

If you want to know where the ship itself is, one of my neighbors is plotting it daily on his blog, http://johngirard.net/sas/

Sometime very soon, we cross over the International Date Line, and I switch from being 7 hours behind to 17 hours ahead of my “home” time zone.  In all, we have 23 time changes on this trip, including three where we set our clocks ahead.  Two different times, we’ll set them back ½ hour, as we pass through/by countries that have those “between” time zones.  We love the 25 hour days, but the 23 hour days are tough.

Aloha, Honolulu

Honolulu is not shown on my itinerary, but we’ve made a stop here for supplies and fuel.  Some of the crew gets shore leave (not the waiters or housekeeping staff), but the Semester at Sea folk stay on board.  A few people are unhappy, like the student whose grandfather lives here and wants to go to dinner (or is that a ruse?), but most are content to have the bonus time to chat with friends back east.  I also see fat packages of mail that will be distributed.  Why this is unannounced and unexplained, I do not know.

Fueling took hours.  No official word on amounts, but when someone asked how many gallons, Jim (my boss, the assistant executive dean) said, “It’s measured in tons, not gallons.  Sort of like the peso:  just not a meaningful number anymore.

At least three times during the bunkering, a very polite crew member came on to remind us that no smoking was allowed. I’m assuming this is their way of letting us know that somebody just got caught. No wiggle room here, folks!  I know it was over five hours, but that’s a lot of fuel.

From Deck 6, I had watched the barge pull up, a delicate parallel parking maneuver using tugs to push it sideways towards us.  Objects this large take a great deal of energy to move, but also to stop moving.  Still, it was something of a surprise to find myself up close and personal when I returned to my room.  This photo was taken looking out my stateroom window.  The object next to the barge’s crew member is my hat, on the glass table behind my bed.  

Breakfast with the Golden Arch

We’re docked in Hilo, waiting to clear customs.  Everyone has to file by, pick up a passport, show the passport to two different customs inspectors, and then give the passport (if US) back to the ship’s purser.  Kind of a pain, since we just came from San Diego, and the only reason we stopped in Mexico was to circumvent protectionist trade laws.  But, it gives us all a chance to enjoy the swell views from the dock (warehouses, natch), get our land legs back, and chill while waiting for everyone to clear.  Immigration clears the whole ship—or not.

It was very exciting to wake up and see the lights that signal LAND!  

I’ve loved being at sea, but it’s been a hard slog of long days at work (no weekends on the ship; every day is a class day).  As dawn broke (clouds again) and the lights went off, the land disappeared for a bit and I went back to my cabin to get dressed and have breakfast.  The outside eating area was very crowded, and I was later than usual, having stopped at the office to print out the dozens of “off ship overnight” forms of people visiting family, going to other places in Hawaii, and finding hotel rooms to sleep off the drinking they’ll do today.  (How sad to go around the world and spend your shore time passed out drunk.) 

As I was getting ready to leave the dining room, I saw Desmond Tutu sitting down—and an empty seat beside him.  Detour!  He’s on the ship till Cape Town, but he is not an early riser, so I usually see him coming in as I’m heading to work.  So I grabbed the chance to find out what it was like to be in the presence of a man who has seen history—who IS history. 

Our conversation was a blend of awkward small talk (what are your plans for Hawaii?), politics (he drinks Coke rather than Pepsi because of the two companies’ roles in overturning apartheid), gossip (no, I’m not telling), and lots of jokes.  Like me, Arch enjoys a good joke.  Like me, he enjoys his own jokes tremendously. 

Probably the similarity ends there!  He can switch from a joke to a serious point in a flash.  We moved from talking about kids and grandkids to the role that American college students played in moving the Congress to pass an anti-apartheid bill over Reagan’s veto. 

Like every great minister, he engages with his audience, finding them where they are and getting them to think, finding the sweet spot between guilt and responsibility to inspire action. 

Then, we were called to go up to the immigration face to face.  I was waiting, with the other faculty and staff on the stairs up to Deck 7, when the Archbishop came up behind us, saying, “Are we not supposed to go upstairs?  Like Moses!”  With that, the sea of humanity parted and he walked up the stairs.

I tell ya, folks, the Arch OWNS this boat.

Fellow travelers

We've been traveling about four days, day and night, with nothing around us but blue, blue ocean.  Every day we get a noon report from the captain.  It tells us our position, the depth of the ocean, the temperature of the water and air, how fast we're going and how far we've come.  It also tells us how far we are from the nearest land.  In the last 24 hours, we've passed the half-way point:  we are now closer to Hawaii than to North America.  In two more days, we'll land in Hilo.

Closer, of course, is a relative thing.  We're a good 800 miles away, moving along at 16 or 17 knots average speed.  For now, we're in the middle of the ocean, with water and sky and not much else to see.  It's been cloudy for days, so we haven't even seen the stars.  I did see a bird while I was up on the bridge Friday.  We're skating on the edge of the great Pacific garbage patch, so we've been promised the occasional styrofoam cup.

It's soothing, with the gentle rocking of the ship and the throbbing of the engines.  I've been sleeping like a baby.  The seas are pretty gentle right now, but we're still lurching around, pulling ourselves uphill and racing downhill.  The officer on our bridge tour said the swells are 10 meters, and the ship has its stabilizing fins out to minimize the rocking.  There are still some people who aren't eating, but I am enjoying three full meals a day.

Last night, we had an unexpected visitor.  I stepped out onto the deck and found a bird had come on board.  It was very still at first, then it tried to walk and fly.  It stumbled around in circles and bumped into the ship a few times.  There was a student out on deck, too, and he went over to the reception desk to get a crew member.  The crew member had no solutions, so I went in search of one of the many science professors we have on board.  The first ones I saw were a couple from Hawaii who are vulcanologists, but I had just heard them speak about the flora and fauna of Hawaii, and any port in a storm, right?

This morning we got an update on the bird.  Our oceanologist identified it as a storm petrel, a bird which spends all of its life at sea except to mate.  He is one of the privileged few who has a stateroom with a private balcony, so he took the bird up there to recuperate in private.  This morning, it was gone.

Semester at Sea has a reputation for changing lives.  In this case, it may have bought some extra time for a wind-tossed bird.

Curious: George

My office is in the center of things, in every way.  Midship on the center deck, it sits across from the ship’s reception desk.  It’s next to the student activities desk.  It’s the open door where people drop in with “just a quick question” all day long.  Outside, there’s a poster with all of the student photos where people gather.  It’s generally a madhouse, but I do meet a lot of people.

Today, Vaughn stopped by.  I’ve seen him a couple of times, and he’s always carrying this monkey.  Figuring an adult carrying a large monkey is fair game for the obvious question, I plunged right in.

He’s been carrying George for five years, everywhere he goes.  He’s a little vague on how they came to be together.  Says, “He’s the only person I can afford to travel with.”  Plans to buy him an outfit in every port.  (The sailor suit is a Carter’s 9-12 months.)  Thinking about having a bespoke suit made in Vietnam.  Tried an infant carrier, but it didn’t quite work out.  Had to make emergency repairs once and cannibalized a stuffed bunny to do them. 

Vaughn is a polite and friendly young man who carries a huge monkey everywhere he goes.  Happy to talk about it, happy to pose for pictures.  Nothing to see here folks, let’s move on.

When 25 hours isn't enough

My job should be a piece of cake, right?  A little copying, a little pasting, smile and answer some questions.  Nothing I haven’t been doing for years.  Even doing it onboard ship in heavy seas shouldn’t make it impossible.  And yet…

There is no copier.  The printer has to be tricked into making double-sided copies, and the odds and ends of paper are different sizes.  Not like American size and not-American size:  there are about 4 different sizes.  There are piles of paper which will never go through a copier successfully and a lifetime supply of scrap paper. The whole office looks like a dumping ground, full of stuff I can't use and lacking basic necessities.

And I know no answers.  Not how you can get a room with a window (find someone who wants a room without one) or where the smoking deck is (take the opportunity to give up smoking) or what you should do about two classes scheduled at the same time (pick one).  Certainly not where Tom or Jim or Joe or Mike is.  I’ve figured out how to make them disappear (ask for something), but not how to make them come back.

There are no computer archives of work done last year, just bits and fragments.  One folder marked “Specific country info” has a single document--on tourism in Costa Rich, a country we will not visit.  I have outdated instructions in a form I cannot update.  I have no rosters telling me who does what and no list of birthdays, although I am supposed to announce them.  The one thing I did find, quotes about sailing and the sea, is organized alphabetically.  Fortunately, an A quote neatly captured our rocking, rolling sea today.

The only thing that saves me from feeling like a complete dummy is that a lot of my questions don’t have answers, even when I find people in the know.  It’s not terribly reassuring to hear “this has never come up,” or “maybe the folks in Charlottesville can tell us,” but we sail on.

The challenges of getting 800 or so people sailing smoothly are massive.  Charlottesville sends a host of people to the embarkation point and a few have stayed on through Hilo.  Even though many of us have sailed before, each voyage brings new challenges, on top of the obvious issues of orientation to the boat, adds and drops, and ...

My instructions for the daily Dean’s Memo say it has to go out by 5 PM.  I finished it before then, but it took another 45 minutes for the IT director from Charlottesville to get it to print as a pdf. After changing fonts, tinkering with settings at all levels, and moving it to another computer, he found that some areas of the word document—although showing up in black on the screen—were printing in white.  Not all.  Just the important stuff.  Just the stuff I put into the template.  And that hard and fast 5 PM deadline?  It’s because that’s when the workday is supposed to be over! 

Meal times are not flexible, and without snacks, I am hungry when they come.  So I do take meal breaks.  I finished pinning the Dean’s Memo to the bulletin boards at 8:30. 

Tomorrow, they tell me, I’ll REALLY get slammed.  Lucky for me it's a 25-hour day.

...and not a drop to drink

The vastness of the ocean is not a cliché.  The Captain’s noon report put us at 200 miles from the nearest land (Isla Guadalupe), which means 8-10 hours of sailing to get us there.  We’re moving along at a nice clip, 20-30 miles an hour, but we have a long way to go. 

I thought when we started moving I’d easily be able to tell which side is port and which starboard, but you don’t sense the forward motion on a ship any more than you do on a plane. 

Reflected in my mirror:  the ocean travels up and down about 2/3 of the neight

The ship rolls side to side constantly, but unpredictably.  Walking becomes a challenge and I look even more uncoordinated than usual.  We are all lurching through the halls, hanging onto railings and throwing ourselves at each other. (I’m pretty sure it’s all unintentional.) Mealtimes are particularly hilarious as we struggle to carry our plates along with coffee or soup.  I’ve been eating outside at every meal so the soup is important!

There are barf bags conveniently placed everywhere, and some folks look a little green.  I took a seasickness pill before leaving port and another yesterday morning, but I haven’t had any problems, so I’m skipping this morning’s.  I can feel myself developing new muscles in my legs as I shift weight to keep my balance.

If you are outside, you can see the water going by, but inside, the corridors look the same. It’s easy to run into dead ends (areas off limits for one reason or another) or to turn the wrong way.  There’s no deck where you can walk a loop, so some people walk back and forth.  I find the vertical traffic makes up for the horizontal:  everything I’m headed for is on a different floor. 

Coffee and tea are available 24/7 on 6.  Snacks are also available 24/7 and it’s a lonely post for the crew member on the overnight shift.  He told me yesterday morning he can read and play games, but he was practically standing at attention when I wandered by.

We used an average of 45 gallons of water per person yesterday.  Feeling very far behind, I took a shower this morning as we passed through a fierce rainstorm.  It’s surprisingly hard to keep balance on a wet floor with your eyes closed, even in a tiny shower stall.

Last night, I overheard one of the crew confirming that the water in the bathroom is not potable.  This puzzles me, since it the bathrooms are helpfully equipped with water glasses.  I guess I’ll run up to 6 to get some water to brush my teeth.

Two Lottery Winners

First the bullet, for those of you who are not on vacation and have actual work to do:  I'm fine and I'm (again) scheduled to sail tomorrow, this time from Ensenada.  The SAS students join the ship two days later than the staff, so I had that window to get diagnosed and cleared for travel.  With many people working on the project, that has all come together and I am scheduled for arrival early tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.  As a result of everyone else's hard work, I got to do a practice run as a tourist in a country where I speak the language reasonably well.  (It turned up some serious issues I will have to address, but we will cover that in another post.)

My eye problem, as hypothesized earlier, turned out to be a vitreous detachment, which is common, heals pretty quickly without treatment, and--if you are lucky--heals in a way that actually protects against the more serious retinal detachment.  The eye doctor I saw Tuesday morning said he was comfortable supporting either option (go around the world or stay where I had easy access to medical facilities).  There is some risk of complication, but being a week from shore does not compromise treatment.  I chose door number one (or gangplank number one).

I have also gotten word that I am welcome back, which is essentially a second opinion that the risk is low enough to warrant the gamble.  Health and safety are the number one priorities for this voyage (and have been all along; my new boss told me this at my initial interview), and I will do my very best to be the poster child for the good outcome for the challenging situation.

Who is the other lottery winner?  The taxi driver who took me to the doctor's office this morning.

I struck up a conversation with the driver today, learning that he was from Ethiopia (one of the few African countries I can still place on the map).  I'm not going anywhere near there, of course, but asked him how he had come to this country.  He had won the chance to come in a "diversity lottery," after trying for 8 years.  He, his wife, and three children were all able to come, and the US government provides up to four years of help for the settlement process.  It's a side of immigration that we don't often see.

It was good to hear a success story.  He got his family self-sufficient after two years, and he has Ethiopian buddies in town.  Everyone likes it here, at least two of the kids are doing fine (his assessment).  Living the American dream.  Say what you might about our immigration policies, this man is a success story.  Our conversation started me off feeling happy, and I stayed that way all day.

Taking your world with you

This morning brought a lessening of symptoms and an encouraging word from my hometown eye specialist, who happens to be a friend.  Who goes to bed early and gets up early.

She says my symptoms are consistent with a much more benign condition, and we're going with that for this morning, since she's the only eye specialist to have actually weighed in.  From afar.  Based on a panicky email.  But the only eye specialist to render an observation.

Having spent this bonus connectivity time blogging and reading blog stats (new obsession), I also report a page view from South Korea, making my readership now up to four continents.  I know who my Malawi and Tunisia readers are, but South Korea stumps me.

Off to see the doctor.

Mercy me!

(I am having some trouble posting from my phone, so there is some weird overlap in posts coming through late.  Here's part II of my mini-emergency.)

Parents who are considering Semester at Sea, I can state with great confidence that the staff are flexible,  caring, and careful.  I would have told you this at the reception last night for parents of voyagers, but I was waiting in my cabin for them to decide what was the best course of action.

So I missed the parent reception, and I missed the lifeboat drill, and I missed seeing the lights of San Diego recede as we sailed into the open waters of the Pacific.  My "once in a lifetime" adventure has been postponed.  Fortunately, due to an arcane protectionist trade rule, the ship leaves from Ensenada on Wednesday.  I am cautiously hopeful I will be on it.

When my eye started to do weird things, I was hesitant to say anything.  Bodies do weird things, and usually they resolve, right?  But the timing really forced me to seek medical advice.  As expensive and upsetting as going to the ER and spending the night in a swanky hotel is when you were planning to be on the water, it is way more disruptive to be seeking medical attention when you are hundreds of miles off shore.

So the decision was made to send me off with the nurse practitioner, but then it turned out that a nurse practitioner from a former voyage was on board for the farewell reception and she gave up her whole evening to take me to the hospital.  This was hugely helpful, because stranding two of us (and half of the medical team) would have left the ship understaffed.

At the hospital, I was barely able to see the big E at the top of the eye chart.  I can see shapes (some of which aren't actually there), but everything looks like it's covered with Vaseline.  Sometimes it's a bit better, sometimes worse.

I see an ophthalmologist in a few hours.  The ER docs seemed to think I could rejoin the ship before it leaves Ensenada.  (This means leaving SD no later than 10 AM Wednesday.)  I hope the team on board ship is similarly amenable to the idea.