Party like it's ... Fes

Our incredible homestay host, Kaoutar, made our last night in Fes a memory worth its own blog post.

The home we stayed in is in the Medina of Fes, the old city.  The whole Medina is walled in, no traffic.  You couldn't fit a car on those streets, anyway.  Some of them can barely fit a donkey cart.  This means, of course, that when you buy a refrigerator, it is wheeled to you on a pushcart, pulled either by a donkey or a man.  We did see donkeys trotting around with all kinds of things, including tanks of propane for stoves.  Interestingly, they wear rubber shoes for better traction on the cobblestones, which get slippery when they get wet.  Since you can't hear them coming, the most important word in the Medina is "Ballach!" (bahLOCK), which means "get out of the way!"

The stores in the Medina are mostly open stalls.  The residential sections have massive wooden doors, with two separate sections.  A high doorknob for people coming on horseback, a low one for the rest of us.  There are tiny windows high in the walls, but most of the light and air comes from the courtyard, which is open to the sky.  A ritzy house has a screen over the courtyard, but many are completely open to the sky.  They have drains in the floor and the whole courtyard is a step lower than the other rooms.  Rain comes in, rain goes out.  Moroccan homes don't tend to have a lot of furniture.  The tables and chairs are iron frames and ceramic tile tops, so they are indoor/outdoor, just like the living rooms.

Will the real Moroccan please stand up?

[From left:  Meg, Michaela, me, Kaoutar, Kaitlyn, Phyllis, and Brooke.  We let the men back in to take photos after the dancing was over.]

Kaoutar's mother bought her house to use as a B&B about 15 years ago.  But she ran into licensing issues, because she could only outfit four rooms with separate baths.  She works with a homestay program now that has a lower barrier.  We stayed in three of the rooms, and our tour guide stayed in the fourth.  We did not meet the mother, who may have been staying in one of the other rooms that does not open onto the main courtyard.  The house is at least four stories high (three very tall stories, but also doors opening up midway up the flights of stairs).

All through the house, there is wonderful ceramic tile and iron work typical of every place in Fes, no matter how modest.  The bathroom may have no hot water (this is not really a hypothetical; the sink only has one tap and the shower ran cold from both taps), but the cold water falls onto gorgeous tiles.

On our second night with her, Kaoutar had a surprise for us.  At our request, she had bought the ingredients for pastissa, which is sort of a crèpe-wrapped pie, with chicken, almonds, onions, and loads of sugar.  Dessert for dinner.  It's a party dish, so she made a party for us.  She borrowed party clothes for each of us, color-coordinated ensembles with dress, overdress, belt, and head scarf, and then she dressed each of us.  And then we danced.

And we looked at her wedding pictures, and we talked about the baby she will have in December, and promised to send all our friends to Morocco to stay with her.

I haven't had so much fun dancing since Jefferson and Megan's wedding two years ago today.  Happy anniversary, you two, and I can hardly wait to see you in a few days.  xoxoxo

C'est Maroc

As predicted, it did not take me long to get lost in the medina.  Armed with google maps on my phone, Sherrie and I set off from the port entrance.  She wanted to exchange rupees for dirhams, so we went in search of a bank.  We were so late setting out that we saw friends coming back and they steered us to a bank a block or so along the way.  No luck with the rupee exchange, but we were able to use the ATM to get some cash.

While I was waiting, I tried to orient myself on google maps.  For some reason, the GPS still thinks I'm in Burma.  While I was in Burma, it was sure I was still in Hong Kong.  It has not been a useful locating device. This makes it difficult to use a map.  You have to have some kind of landmark starting out, like a street sign or a unique intersection, or knowing where the ship is berthed.

Or, you can ask someone to look at the phone and tell you where you are.  I asked the bank guard, who looked perplexed and sent me to the teller.  The teller tapped his finger on the phone, moving the map, and pointed to the area behind him, saying that was where the medina was.  The answer to all tourist questions is apparently the shopping center.  It's a reasonable answer for someone who's just gotten money, I suppose, but it was not the answer to my question.

So we wandered into the medina, which looks like a tangle of brain tissue on the map.  The streets laid out by the French are orthogonal and diagonal, and the medina streets curve around and fold in on themselves.  We picked randomly at the intersections, figuring we would untangle ourselves eventually.    Sherrie bought a lovely tunic and pants and some bras.  She tried on the former, but the latter was pretty much on spec.

The threat level in the port is 2, which we understand has to do with our being a big group of Americans rather than any particular political situation in the country.  At our diplomatic briefing, the consular officer told us that we were targets for theft not because we were American tourists, but because of our financial status.  What that really means is, take the same kinds of precautions you would in any big city.  Poor people rob rich people.

The harassment level seems to be a 3.  Everyone invites you into their shop, but they don't seem desperate.  The lady in the dress shop seemed quite intent on selling Sherrie more than one outfit--and quite intent on ignoring both our English and our French (how do you say polyester in French?), but most of the merchants let us walk on by.

One man struck up a conversation with me.  He wanted to tell me all the places he's been in the US, and it was a lot.  He's lived in Texas, New York, and Florida, and he's visited several other states, including Virginia.  He told me his sister in Boston frequents a Dunkin Donuts right at the site of the bombing every day, but was not at work that day.  (Not surprising.  The Boston Marathon is held on Patriot's Day, which is a state holiday in Massachusetts.  I can't speak for the Dunkin Donuts location, but I do know that.)

Meandering through my life, curving in on itself like the streets of the medina, I mention here that my Runner Boss had crossed the finish line in Boston shortly before the bombs exploded.  Sailing into Casablanca last night, sitting at my desk on board, I watched him on the local news, in an interview filmed only a few feet from my desk on land.  Because the internet connection spit out the film in fits and starts, I got to see every detail.  I've seen those photos, that clutter on his desk.  I know what's hiding just out of sight.

I was hungry for those details.  I am ready to be home.

But in the meantime, I am not, and I'm enjoying my last few days.  While Sherrie shopped for underwear, I talked to the Moroccan vendor, who told me his name, Said, means happy.  He told me this because he loves to go gambling and always wins.  He also told me pashmina is cotton and silk, very fine quality.  (Pashmina is goat hair, actually, and only from rather specific goats and rather specific areas of their bodies.  The best pashmina wool was traditionally collected from bushes the goats rubbed up against.  But perhaps the Moroccan goats rub up against cotton plants and silk cocoons?)

He had some very pretty scarves, and I was very tempted to add them to the family of scarves I have been amassing.  Although traveling in a westward direction has had clear advantages in terms of having so many 25-hour days, traveling in the opposite direction would have made for better scarves.

But we wandered on.  We wandered into a residential area, and I took this snapshot.  Beautiful tile fountain, it evidently serves as the community's water source and laundromat.

Eventually, we found our way out to a main road and oriented ourselves.  We ate in a French seafood restaurant (good, not great).  Sherrie learned her French from the concierge at a French whorehouse in the 70s, but apparently they are gastronomes.  She was able to translate the items not covered in Mme. Colignon's French class.  Which is proving quite useful here.

Left behind

In Ghana, particularly in the northern portion of the country, it is considered extremely rude to use your left hand.  You accept packages only with your right hand, you present money only with your right hand, and most especially, you eat only with your right hand.  

This presents some problems for a left-handed person. 

I am a left-handed person.  I am a stubbornly, impossibly left-handed person.  I am left handed, left footed, left eared and left eyed.  I am unthinkingly, instinctively, intractably left handed. 

I found eating right handed slightly easier than eating with chopsticks.  I mention this because we had rice at every meal.  (Except breakfast, when we had beans.)  Fried rice, jollof rice, plain rice, saffron rice, vegetable fried rice.  Rice with palava sauce, rice with tomato sauce.  All of it delicious, and all of it, as it turns out, rice that slides easily off the awkwardly held right-hand-held fork of a left-handed person. 

Eating with my right hand felt like trying to maneuver a crane.  So much room for failure between plate and mouth.  Some meals, I just went native and ate with my fingers.  Then, the challenge was optimal use of the one tiny napkin that comes with the meal.  All good practice for Morocco, where I will be staying with an actual Moroccan family, eating out of a common bowl.  I believe my multicolored print shirts will find their way into my overnight bag.

Ghana presented many challenges to the Western mind and body, right handers as well as left.  I stayed four nights, in three different hotels.  Here’s a catalog of hotels:

Nights one and two:  no hot water.  No water at all coming from the hot tap.  TV does not turn on.  Ceiling fan rattles and buzzes and apparently shorts out overhead light.  Air conditioner out of reach and cannot be adjusted.

No one takes your word for anything.  First remedy for “no water” is “you have to turn on the hot water switch.”  Second remedy is “we fixed it.”  Third remedy is the man turns on the emergency cut off behind your back and shows you the water is working (and now, in fact, it is), making you look both cranky AND stupid.  Then he tells you that the reason it’s turned off is there’s a leak and they don’t want you to use it. 

This hotel has a dining patio overlooking the beach, a lovely place to spend a few hours waiting for your food to arrive.  We are a table of 8, and our dinners straggle in over a period of three hours, in no particular order.  We joke that they have to go and catch the fish, butcher the chicken.  It might be true. 

View from the hotel restaurant

On day two, I order fruit with ice cream instead of dinner.  It comes promptly.  Ice cream in one dish, fruit in the other.  Mostly watermelon.  I have had watermelon on easily 90% of the days of this voyage.  It is a staple for breakfast on the ship, it is dessert at every meal in China as well as at Chinese restaurants in Vietnam, Burma, and India.  The ports we have visited run on watermelon and rice.

Completely non-ironic hotel art at Hotel 1

Night three:  Room is nicely equipped with a brand new, energy star refrigerator and two bedside lamps.  One of the lamps has no bulb.  The other lamp has a plug that does not fit into the African socket.  The bulb in it does not work in the lamp with the African plug.  The fridge is not plugged in.  It and the TV share a single socket.  That’s okay, though, because the fridge plug is also a Euro plug, incompatible with the African socket.  VERY energy efficient this way.  Air conditioning is off, does not respond to the remote control.  (Oh, THIS is how you adjust the air conditioner you cannot reach!)  AC is also not plugged in.  Once plugged in, AC works, but remote does not.

We have had a long day, mostly in the bus.  I find that people are ordering food to be delivered to their rooms.  Looks like I will be dining solo.  On my way back to my room, I see a computer room. Three monitors, three keyboards.  One computer.  The internet doesn’t work. 

I take a refreshing shower and wait for my meal.  For two hours.  At ten, I try to call the restaurant.  The phone does not work.  Unlike the lamps, it is plugged in.  And dead.  I get dressed and walk down two flights to the restaurant, which is empty and closed. 

The next morning, even the Ghanians are complaining there is no breakfast.  Breakfast is a piece of toast, a spoonful of beans (canned pork&beans with a few raw carrot shreds) and some raw cabbage.  There is evidence there was also pineapple and eggs.  I take the last fork, but the beans are not worth the struggle.

Day 4:  No fake lamps.  No lamps at all.  No fridge.  No expectations to be dashed.  No shower, buckets in tub.  No towels.  I call for towels.  Someone comes to check.  No hidden towels, no towels I somehow missed, really, there are no towels.  A man brings me towels, towels such as you would have grabbed off someone else’s towel rack.  As in, not folded, slightly damp.  Possibly taken from a clothes line somewhere, but I would not bet on that.  I debate the relative merits of a bucket bath followed by air drying vs sleeping in dried sweat/sunblock/DEET and fall asleep.  Sometime in the night, I hear a crash, as the light in the hallway outside crashes to the ground. 

2D camera does not capture creepy 3D JC.

At 5:45, I get a helpful call from the desk:  your bus is here.  The early risers are taking a morning bike ride, the rest of us are leaving at 7:30.  It’s not my bus.  The desk argues that it is.  “I’m not getting on it,” I say and hang up.  The guy across the hall, the one with the loud voice who has not shut up even for one minute in the last four days, is going on the bike ride.  I know this because the room has cross ventilation and the windows do not close.  There are open windows into the hallway and I know my neighbors quite intimately.

I think, well, there’s plenty of time to air dry now that I am wide awake.  However, there’s no water.  None at all.  No hot, no cold.  Not in the sink, or tub, or toilet.  I call the desk.  “I will come.”  Ghanian English for, <shrug>.  No one comes.  This also has the benefit of keeping them from discovering the dark hallway full of glass.

I walk outside to enjoy the relative cool of the morning.  Ghana’s daylight is from 6 to 6, year round.  I go back in to get my things for the day.  More lights are out in the hallway.  I find there are four steps, not three, down to my room.  It is not a pleasant revelation.  Still no water. 

Hotel 3 walkway

After breakfast (hotdogs and cabbage, eggs, dinner rolls), the non-bikers go to the craft market.  When we get back, the water is running, but the lights are now strobing.  It’s too late for a bath, but there’s no hot water anyway.  There’s a water tank, the shutoff valve is open, but there’s no hot water to the room.

To be fair, there were also many enjoyable things about Ghana, and I will write about them, too.  So that I do not sound entirely like a cranky American tourist who expects four stars in her hotels, let me say that I have no problems with cold water, or lengthy waits, or adapting to the culture, or carrying my own potable water.  What I object to is being told there are amenities that do not exist.  I can sleep without air conditioning in Africa, but if I pay for air conditioning, I do expect that it will be functioning.  I believe that a hotel that includes breakfast should have it for all the guests, not just for the first half.  I brought my own shampoo and soap, but thought towels were part of the deal. 

And, for the record, I accepted the “bush stop” bathroom cheerfully, if not with the enthusiasm of the 5 little boys who conducted scientific experiments to see which kinds of contact caused the “touch-me-not” plants to close up.  I have discovered the ideal volume of drinking water to minimize both dehydration and need for facilities.

Restaurant of Hotel 3 has stunning view

Stop thinking about that movie, right now!

A couple of the hotels had some stunning local art.  Hotel 1 had beautiful wood carvings--whales and crocodiles 8 feet long and elephants 4 feet high.  It also, inexplicably, boasted the horse with sunglasses.  Hotel 3 had a sculpture garden which included the woman holding her baby aloft (something you aren't likely to see, as they are securely wrapped on their mothers' behinds until they are old enough to be looked after by a sibling).  It also had freakishly large Obama eyeing the Chrysler Building at the front desk and creepy 3D Jesus on the job in the bedroom.

Obama, another leftie.  He has visited several of the countries on our itinerary and left a host of images, on local goods as well as tourist goods.  It is quite impossible to think of his predecessor memorialized on a calendar or a keychain.

Happy birthday today to my left-hand buddy, currently serving as my right-hand gal.  You exceed any expectations I could possibly have.

Smells like fogey spirit

While we’re on funerary customs, here’s a post left over from Viet Nam. 

On our way out to the Mekong Delta, we passed many fields with small monuments in them, and our guide confirmed that they were gravesites.  Usually there are just a couple, but a few had half a dozen.  Families want to keep their ancestors close to home, our guide told us. 

I couldn’t get any pictures from the bus—too bumpy, too fast, and too far—but here are some from the islands in the Delta.  These were taken from the pony cart, I think.  An even bumpier ride, but much slower.

The small number of monuments tells us that it is a family plot.  A friend who traveled to Hanoi shed some light on how everyone fits.

The newly deceased is buried in a large coffin, and stays there for three years.  Then, the coffin is opened and the bones are cleaned of the clothing and flesh that remains.  It is considered an honor to be able to perform this service for your loved one, and there is a great ritual aspect to it.

There is also a certain unpleasantness, to put it delicately, and this part is not performed by the family.  As part of the mortuary services, the original casket is dug up and aired out for a week before the family claims the remains.

In this way, the family member’s job is more of an honor and less of an onerous chore.

Thank you for sharing

Travel shakes up your sense of what's right and what's wrong.  If you're even minimally open to reflection, you are confronted again and again with the assumptions you make about the universality of just about everything.

Kerala, the Indian state we are docked in, is a small sliver of land between the sea and the mountains.  It has a literacy rate of nearly 100%, and an almost even split among Christians, Hindus, and Moslems (40-30-30).  Judaism remains only in signs and historical sites.  Wikipedia tells us there is one Jewish woman of childbearing age left in Kochi.

The Wikipedia entry also diverges considerably from the version I heard aboard ship, which included a great deal more rescue of a persecuted people.

Jewtown remains as a street full of shops run by Indians who are not Jewish.  It is a tourist attraction which has no shops other than those catering to tourists.  This also means it is cleaner and more expensive than other areas of the city.  It sits at the end of the ferry, which costs 2 rupees (4 cents US).

The "God's own country" signs are everywhere.  It is the motto of Kerala, referring to the natural beauty of the area.

Our guide on the Agra trip, Arvind, is very proud of Indian diversity, and very concerned about income disparity.  He told us more Swiss bank accounts belong to Indians than to nationals of any other country.  I present this as unverified, since my understanding of Swiss accounts is they are numbered in order to be untraceable.

I wonder if God, who evidently resides in Kerala, has one of those Swiss bank accounts.

Road to Mandalay

Living in a city where it takes about 15 minutes to get anywhere, whether you travel by car or by bike, I've found it a challenge to visit cities that make New York City seem downright puny.  Add temperatures of 100 degrees, pollution, and crazy traffic, and it really zaps your energy.  So it was particularly nice to visit Pyin Oo Lwin for a few days.  Getting there was an interesting story in itself.

Traffic around Rangoon is terrible, and it took a full two hours to go the 20 miles to the airport.  Our schedule had allowed three, and our plane was delayed an hour, so we spent a couple of hours at the Rangoon airport, waiting for a flight to Mandalay. 

Sadly, the roads are too bumpy to allow for decent pictures out the bus window.  I would have liked to capture the trucks and buses jammed full of commuters and the interesting shops along the way.  I particularly liked the sign at the airport:

Travelers Warmly Welcome
Drug dealing may punishable by death

The sign at security, "Respect all, suspect all," was a warning with no teeth.  Our tour guide issued us stickers, and boarding passes that assigned seats but had no names on them.  No one ever looked at our passports (we were in the domestic terminal).  Our luggage did go through scanners, but I went through the scanner with random stuff in my pockets and a purse around my neck. 

This may have been because we had a professional handler.  Win traveled with us for three days, starting and ending at the ship, arranging for every detail and making changes on the fly.

The airport in Rangoon has two terminals, international and domestic.  The domestic terminal has two gates, which is to say there are two different doors out to the buses that take passengers out to the planes you can see waiting a couple of football fields away.  Our plane had stairs that folded out from the back of the plane, although there were stairs that could be rolled up to the plane, and one jetway to nowhere. 

A bit like Charlottesville, actually, although it serves a city the size of New York.

There were no ticket agents, although there are counters for several airlines.  There are at least 100 seats in the ticketing area, and at some signal, everyone on your flight goes through security.  The departure area looked pretty much the same, but more crowded.  There is a VIP lounge and a second floor with a restaurant (empty), and a couple of stands selling drinks, food, and newspapers. 

Although we waited for two hours, only one plane took off before ours.  While it was boarding, an employee walked through the waiting area carrying a "Ready for boarding" sign with the flight number.  Outside the terminal, I could see that ear protection for the airline personnel was sticking their fingers in their ears.

Our plane was an old prop plane, which meant actual legroom.  And food service, just like the good old days.

Mandalay International Airport makes Rangoon look like the JKF it is.  I guess it's Dulles in the days when everyone was still flying out of national:  ready, but empty.  Win told us it has four international flights per day.  One in, one out, to each of two cities.  I don't remember which countries, maybe Thailand and India?  The day we flew back to Rangoon, there were four flights leaving for Rangoon, none to anywhere else.

From Mandalay, we took a bus to Pyin Oo Lwin.  Win treated us to a recording of Frank Sinatra singing "Road to Mandalay."  Whoever wrote that song had clearly never been to Mandalay.

The highway starts out wide and smooth, a superhighway without an obvious destination.  Mandalay had an airport in town, but the runways were too short and couldn't be lengthened, so the new one was built.  (A familiar story.)

Along the way, you see piles of sand and gravel.  Sometimes you see work stations, but nothing like the construction areas you might see on an American highway.  It is being built by hand, with shovels.  You never see road grading equipment or even trucks.  I saw a couple of places that were brick manufacturing sites. 

There's a large quarry along the way, and you see trucks carrying stone of various sizes down the mountain.  Many of them have workers atop the stone, and large baskets for carrying smaller loads to and from the truck.  In Burma, everything is still done by hand.

We were told the quarrying is done by prisoners, but I saw small children in the complex and free passage in and out, so there is plenty of work for everyone.  What I did not see was any kind of construction site with heavy equipment, anywhere along the road.

All along the way, there are places where vendors have set up roadside stands with water and snacks.  As it gets steeper and narrower, you see hoses stretching for miles along the side of the road for cooling off the brakes.  The road looks barely wide enough for one truck, but it is two-way traffic.  We climbed up through a series of switchbacks to a high plain.  Pyin Oo Lwin sits at 3500 feet above Rangoon.

Pyin Oo Lwin (formerly Maymyo) is a former British Hill Station, a place the Brits came to escape the heat.  Now it's a place for Burmese to come to escape the heat.  It's in the mountains, about two hours' drive from Mandalay, on the road to China.  So there are also a lot of Chinese traders there.  It's now a small city, about 40,000 permanent residents and another 40,000 students.  Pretty much your standard college town, Burmese style.  Lots of buildings left from the British colonial days, and lots of empty lots, teardowns waiting for a Burmese McMansion.  More on Pyin Oo Lwin in another post.

The Chinese are building pipelines for oil and gas and a railroad for other goods.  This will allow them to go overland instead of around the Malay Peninsula, significantly shortening the trip to market.  We saw the deep scars in the earth where the pipeline is going.

This plan depends on development of the deep water port where we docked, an area that is also undergoing rapid development.  It is not clear that these changes will improve the economic situation of the average Burmese, however.  The government has already relocated people from 6 of 7 villages that were in the economic development area.  The poor people get pushed further from their jobs, with no compensation for their houses. 

Off the main road, there are dozens of brand new roads leading away from the highway.  In the distance, we could see gated communities with American size (or larger) houses.  Or huge industrial buildings.  Pyin Oo Lwin has quite a few schools, colleges, and training centers for the military and for civil service.  (Initially, the Burmese knew so little about bureaucracy and red tape that they imported Indians to be their civil servants!)

Burma is struggling to open up to the rest of the world.  During the years of sanctions, they manufactured Adidas shoes, shipped them into China, and paid off the Chinese to wink at the "made in China" labels.  They are rich in natural resources, and eager to sell their products to the highest bidder.  But I am worried that their eagerness to join the developed world will make the old ways impossible without providing any new ways to take their place. 

Quiet reflection

There are not a lot of quiet moments on a ship with 630 undergraduate students, and there are not a lot of times when the community comes together.  Our largest room only holds half of us, so mandatory events like Logistical Preport are televised and people see them in the classrooms or in the cabins.  Last night, we came together in silence to say goodbye to a faculty member who died in Shanghai.

Like everything on board, the memorial service brought special challenges and was changed by the unique community in which we are living.  He died three weeks ago, and the ship sailed the next day, leaving his widow and one of our staff members behind to deal with the logistics of death in a foreign country.  Our psychologist rejoined us in Hong Kong as the wife (also a faculty member), flew home to the US for some time with her family.  With her brother, she rejoined us in Singapore, and we all came together to say goodbye to our colleague last night.

One of our local tour guides found us 800 perfect roses to cast upon the waters.  Two children of another faculty member provided piano and sax music and a student arranged some haunting melodies to play on her violin.  The Archbishop officiated in flowing white robes. 

(It's amazing what people bring with them.  But I guess if you're the Archbishop, you don't leave home without clerical robes.)

Wherever Arch goes, there is magic, and some of us are happy to listen to him order lunch, just to experience his presence.  There was absolute silence in the Union as we wait to hear what would he say on this occasion.  He is not an orator--he talks as if he is having a conversation--so we had to strain to hear.

"The minister was in the bedroom with his wife," Arch started, "and the wife said [falsetto voice], 'I can't sleep tonight, my dear.  Would you please tell me one of your sermons?'"

Should we be laughing at a memorial service?  Well, it's clearly a joke, right?  Is it ruder to laugh at a memorial service or to not laugh at a little joke?

It was classic Arch to knock us off balance a little.  It's a little hard to pull of self-deprecating when you're a Nobel Prize winner, but it's his way of saying, under these fabulous white bishop's vestments, I may or may not have pants I pull on one leg at a time.  This is not about me, folks, it's about us.

He went on to talk about how the ship becomes your home, and the people your family.  He talked about how shipboard life forces us to slow down and pay attention.  He talked about how we take care of each other, how we'd learned to take care of each other.

It was a good message for a group of young people who have little experience with death. My day to that point had been so hectic I needed the reminder—as well as the forced time to slow down and pay attention.  There was nothing groundbreaking about this.  It's probably Memorial Service 101.  Still, I love to see Arch in action.

I saw people putting their arms around each other and people clearly wrestling with grief.  A memorial service is a chance to take a breath and consider the losses in your own life, beyond the person being remembered.  I talked with several people who were revisiting their losses, on into the next day.

At the end of the service, we filed silently from fore to aft, then down to Deck 4, a deck that's off limits under normal circumstances.  The ship started a long, slow figure eight, a symbol for time stretching on infinitely.  Because we could see nothing but sea, the only evidence was the wake, a graceful arc from the stern, fading out of sight.

One by one, we threw roses into the ocean, which swallowed them up immediately.  The widow and her brother stood, greeting each of us and graciously receiving our inadequate condolences.

Our procession down the stairs was marred by a shout from the dining room.  Someone called for a doctor who is a passenger on board.  He ran up the stairs, followed by his wife, who is a nurse.  She looked stricken.  They had been on the scene when our colleague died, and were also longtime friends of his from Charlottesville.  Both had tried to resuscitate him in Shanghai, performing CPR until the ambulance arrived.  It seemed especially cruel to call on him again. 

My mind went immediately to the direst scenario.  Could this be happening again?  How could this be happening again?  The staff captain called a "Code Blue" medical emergency over the intercom.

As it turned out, it was not a life-threatening emergency.  A student had fallen and hit his head, probably fainting from dehydration.  There were three doctors in the dining room at the time.  (There is currently a delegation on board of residents and med students from Charlottesville, along with two board-certified docs, in addition to the two full time docs on the ship, so it's not unusual to have a doctor nearby.)

The community gathered on Decks 5 and 6

I ate dinner with the new widow on her first day back on ship.  Her husband had no history of heart disease, and he appeared fine right up until he wasn't.  He is in some of my pictures from that morning in Shanghai, just part of the crowd around the temple we were visiting.  Then suddenly gone. I was following him as he boarded the bus and collapsed that day, and now I was returning some things left behind in their hurried exit from the bus.

It's hard for me to accept that reality; I don't know how my friend is making it through the day.  She said to me she knows what she's doing.  Being on the ship keeps her from being at home.  I guess it's a more manageable hole in her life, to not-see her husband where he was for only a few short weeks instead of missing all the small things of their lives together.  She said the experience has given her some insight into caring for others, as she has seen how she has been cared for.

I've been struggling with this death since Shanghai.  It was a private moment on a crowded street in Shanghai, not my story, but important to me.  Thoughts of death triggering thoughts about life.  Thoughts about privacy and responsibility. 

I have now visited (we were told at preport) more countries than 95% of the people on earth will ever see.  In most of them, I have taken pictures and told stories, treating other people's faces and stories as if they were my own.  Watching death on a Shanghai street brought the participant and the observer together in a new way.  When the dying man is a friend, the details become intimate, and the responsibility becomes great.

In my "back home" life, I am privileged to have extraordinary people in my life.  I said to one of them, "I don't want to make this about me.  It shouldn't be about me," and I got the gentle response, "It's always about you."  Gentle, not to point out self-centeredness (which I have in abundance), but to say, "If you didn't make that connection to you, there would be nothing there." 

I hope those reading this will be equally generous in judging my telling of my connection to this story.  

Spontaneous parade

Searching for pictures for the last post, I discovered this one, taken on a side street in Ho Chi Minh City.  Four kids having a spontaneous dragon parade in honor of the new year.  Some pretty impressive drumming, too.

Hand work

With this voyage comes many opportunities for self-discovery and to try new things.  New food, new behaviors.  New constraints and disciplines on board, with limited resources.  New opportunities on land.

In Viet Nam, I got a manicure, my first ever.  My fat, stubby fingers with the ragged nails are not something I've been interested in pampering, but why not?  For three bucks (four with polish, evidently,  five with a generous tip), why not indeed.

I think you need to go with a friend, for a spa date.  The Saigon Spa is up two flights of stairs, and was deserted except for me.  They post a woman downstairs to reel in customers, and they call someone from a back room to do the manicure.  She did not speak a word of English.  Background music of American tunes from the 60's played on Vietnamese instruments.  The song I slow-danced to on my first date with the high school boyfriend who would become my husband (and later not my husband).  Music from the years of American escalation in Viet Nam, music that took me from innocence to outrage in my years from high school to graduate school.

There is a lot of solitary time in a manicure, soaking and drying.  There is a fine line between relaxing and depression when you are half way around the world, alone in the company of a thousand, in a country which tugs at your conscience and memory.  Who knew a manicure could be so powerful a thing?

On to Singapore, where I found a street artist offering henna tattoos.  "Trust me," he said.  "I am the best.  I do all these free hand!"  I have had bad experiences with "Trust me."  His photo album was impressive, but he makes no money from the lookers, only from the ones who do, ultimately, trust him. We negotiated a little on the size and style and he did a beautiful job.

Trusting was the easy part.  Keeping my left wrist from bending, and my arm from being bumped in the crowds of Chinatown was a challenge.  Using only my right hand the rest of the afternoon was a challenge.  I found some bargains worth pulling out my stash of USD for, which meant going into the bottom of my pack and going into the hidden zippered places of my wallet.  I found pictures worth taking one handed.  I found a 7-11 with Slurpees!  (Asia is full of 7-11s, but this is the only one I saw with Slurpees.

Back on the ship, I put the hem on my new skirt.  I sewed every stitch by hand, including overcasting the (6) seams so they won't fray.  No pattern.  There's a pocket inside to hold my passport.  I used my "graduate" scissors from the office.  Ideal for moms.  We don't let Jim use them.  He has to use the boy scissors.

Handwork score card

Manicure:  won't bother.  Just calls more attention to the dirt under my nails, and I'm not comfortable with having someone working on me.

Henna:  I discovered a common thinking pose is chin in my left hand, elbow on the desk.  Turns out this is ideal for showing off the tat as well.  Fun as long as it is temporary.  An Indian friend tells me it may darken in the days to come.  (The picture is of day 1, before the dye chipped off.  It's not that dark now.)

Skirt:  I like the skirt.  A pattern would have helped, as would a measuring tape, room to lay out the fabric, and an iron. Although it goes with all the t-shirts I brought, I reserve the right to cut it up for a shirt once I get home to my seven sewing machines.  Trying new things doesn't mean I can't go back to the old me.

Figuring out Singapore

The hop-on, hop-off bus:  it hits all the major tourist spots, it comes with a smattering of information about the city you're visiting and you can make unlimited stops.  Such a deal!  (And for just a little bit more, the promise of additional routes, or tickets to attractions.)

The map of Singapore given to us on landing was an advertisement for City Tours, and I succumbed. The ticket is good for 24 hours, which took me from 1 PM Wednesday to 1 PM Thursday.  It was only a few bucks more than a one-day pass on the subway, so I plotted a route and hopped on.

Snake-eye view of Singapore from the hop-on bus

Here are some interesting facts I learned about Singapore.

85% of Singaporeans live in public housing.  Unlike public housing in the US, this housing is comparable to private housing, and only about 30% cheaper.  A "four-room flat" in public housing can cost $250,000, and prices start around $75,000.  I don't know if that four rooms is a 2-bedroom apartment or whether the designation is four bedrooms.

25% of the land in Singapore is reclaimed from the surrounding ocean.

30% of shipping, worldwide, goes through Singapore.  They had better watch where they're reclaiming land from the ocean, because that strait is pretty narrow to begin with.  Beach Road is now downtown.  (So much for owning beachfront property!)

It is very expensive to own a car in Singapore, which is a traffic control strategy.  When you initially buy the car, you pay a tax in excess of 100% of the value of the car.  Then, you have to bid for the privilege of owning it, something that can add another $10,000 dollars.  That permit is granted for only ten years, then you have to bid for another one.  The permits are not transferable, so most people elect to buy a new car rather than reupping for ten more years with the old one.  Singapore exports most of its old cars to Japan, a reasonably close country where the steering wheel is on the right side of the car.  (What's the deal, island countries??  Is there an advantage to driving on the left?)

Another traffic control strategy in place in Singapore is the ERP, an automatic toll system that charges you as you go through checkpoints.  Essentially it's an EZ Pass, but specifically created to discourage people from owning cars, not to improve traffic flow.

Public transportation is cheap and efficient, although the toll structure discourages casual use.  Even on the buses, the fare depends on how far you are going, on whether the bus is air conditioned, on your age (for seniors) and height (for children).  Regular passengers swipe in and out to deduct the proper fare, but paying customers have to know what fare to pay.  The bus drivers do not enforce the zone system, however.  You can also get on at the rear door without paying, even when the bus is not crowded.  A couple of our students told me they had just learned you had to pay for the bus.  Even on the tour bus, I was discouraged from showing my ticket.  

The tour covered neighborhoods for four ethnic groups, the Chinese, Indians, Malaysians, and Arabs.  Historically, Singapore was laid out with neighborhoods assigned to ethnic groups, and these enclaves still serve as centers of the community, although there's no restriction on where people live.  

Civilian War Memorial

Singaporean society is deliberately multi-cultural, with four official languages (English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil).  The CivilianWar Memorial in the center of town (nicknamed the chopsticks), has pillars for Chinese, Indians, Mayalsians, and Minorities. (It's in memory of the people who died under Japanese occupation, which was brutal.)  

Unemployment is virtually nil in Singapore, and about one-quarter of the population is foreign, many of them guest workers. There is a controversial plan to bring in immigrants to have babies, since the birthrate in Singapore is too low to fund the social programs in place.  

The unemployment rate is officially 2%, but that includes people who are self-employed, so it's artificially inflated.  (Curious way to calculate it, I think.)

Finally, the Singapore Sling was invented at the Raffles Hotel, a beautiful and pricey property in the "civic" quarter of town.  My boss, Jim reports that it costs $28 now.  (Singapore dollars are $1.10 to $1.30 per American dollar, so it's definitely a pricey drink.)  I also did not try the classic chili crab in Singapore, since that costs around $30.  

End of lesson.  Next stop on the tour:  Burma.

War and Viet Nam

On my last day in Viet Nam, I went to the Mekong Delta on a trip organized by Semester at Sea.  Our guide, in his early 40s, talked a bit about how the war (they call it “the American War” ) affected his family.

His father was a South Vietnamese Army intelligence officer, working closely with the US government.  He was even brought to the US for training.  This worked out well for a while, but after Saigon fell in 1975, Hau’s father was sent to a re-education camp for 5 years.  Then the whole family was made to go work in the jungle for several more years.  The family’s house was seized as well.  It was a very hard time, and Hau remembers foraging for food.

When Hau came of age, his father advised him to avoid military service by running away, but Hau decided to fulfill his obligation.  He says the whole family would have faced prison if he hadn’t.  But his father was so upset by the decision that he disowned his son.

Hau finished his term of service and asked the government to give his father back his house.  He said, “I am a good man.  I have served my country, and this is all I ask.”  He pursued this for about five years until the government finally gave the house back.  Because of this, Hau was able to reconcile with his father.

I find this story very moving—and astonishing.  Hau’s persistence and his success amaze me equally.  Because of his father’s work for the US, three generations of his family are denied membership in the Communist Party, a huge impediment to economic success. 

The Vietnamese approach to the war seems to be, “it’s over, move on.” Certainly there are war museums, and the old news footage they show has a strong anti-American slant, but in the present, there’s no animosity towards Americans.  As Hau said, “Viet Nam is a small country.  We can’t exist on our own.  We have to get along with everybody.”

I was talking about this with one of our professors, who made this observation:  for me, there’s nothing between the Viet Nam war and my trip to Viet Nam.  Those are my only two points of connection to the country.  But for Viet Nam, the American War, destructive as it was, was only one of many wars.  Not their first, not their last.  Since then, they’ve invaded and they’ve been invaded.  There’s also a big element of civil war in that conflict.  The Americans spent a lot of time and money intervening, but we did not divide the country into two.  The South had benefitted from capitalism and many in that area worked willingly with the US.

Earlier in the week, I visited the Reunification Palace, which was the South’s government headquarters before and during the war.  It’s four floors plus a basement.  The top floor is a rooftop garden.  The three floors under that are largely ceremonial.  It reminded me of the Shogun’s Palace in Kobe (someday, perhaps I will write about that, too), with rooms for presenting credentials, and waiting, and being received by the President, the Vice President, or the First Lady.  A cinema, a room for gambling.  Several dining rooms and conference rooms.  A private apartment and a library/classroom.  In all three floors, there are only two for conducting what looks like business.  The President had an office (with a secret passage to the basement for a quick escape), and there’s a map room.

In contrast, the basement is a hive of radios and phones and teletype machines.  And maps.  While the President was in his chair on a raised platform receiving guests who sat in chairs with varying heights indicative of relative power, the Americans were in the basement, running the war.

It’s a jumble of images, not easy for me to sort out.