Algú m'estima

I've been away from the trip and from the blog for over a month now.  My loyal Russian friends, whoever they are, are still checking in from time to time.  In any month's time, there are 16 hits from Russia, which leads me to believe it's an automated blog visit, only showing up because my real-person audience is overwhelmingly from the USA.  (German fans, the Russians are giving you a run for pride of second.)

I was pretty disciplined about writing on the ship (although I never quite caught up after leaving Japan).  But at home, there are many more distractors.  Try putting your work, family, social lives on hold for four months, and then add deferring all health and home maintenance issues.  Why, there's hardly enough time to catch up on bad American teevee!  And there are still billions of Sudoku puzzles I have not completed.

Which is to say that I totally mistook "limited internet" for discipline.  All those good habits I had on the ship have disappeared.  With the force of a slingshot pulled waaaay back.  I only gained a couple of pounds on the ship, but access to American restaurant portions, snack foods, and choice in general have undone all those flights of stairs climbed.  (Except for trips carrying my luggage to be weighed, I never used the elevators on the ship.)

I have also replaced blog writing with actual conversation.

Ohmigod, you're back!  When did you get back?
What was your favorite port?
Was it worth it?

But it's always been my intention to tell the rest of the story, post some more pictures, and maybe even transition the blog into the third half on land.  While lots of you have told me you couldn't keep up with the blog, some folks have flattered me with assurances they read every post.

So stay tuned.

The heart pillow/quilt I schlepped around the world meets my Barcelona bedding.

Code Blue in Casablanca

We are in Casablanca.  Except for the container cars, it looks as black and white as the movie.  The fog clouds everything, like Vaseline on a lens. 

If I’ve learned one thing from my travels, it’s get out of the port city.  In every port, we dock at a big, industrial port, just like the freighters full of refrigerators.  There’s no grass, no trees, just a mile of warehouses and security and gates.

Casablanca is Morocco’s biggest city, and its most Westernized.  I just finished reading The Caliph’s House, an ex-pat memoir by an Afghan-Scot immigrant to Casablanca.  Same as many other stories, the burned out refugee from the 20^th century decamps to some exotic vacation land and then tries to remake it to the standards he enjoyed in his home country, all the while complaining about how expensive it is to do a renovation with the horrid people who do the work for him.  Our Academic Dean recommended it to me as a good introduction to the culture.  I generally find this sort of memoir discourages me from going to visit, but here I am.

Thanks to my reading, I am prepared for a country where the population cannot be trusted, is superstitious, and has to be tricked into working.  Thanks to the diplomatic briefing, I now have a more objective vantage point.   Now I know that the drivers are crazy, the taxis are insane.  No one follows the traffic laws.  Also, there are demonstrations, terrorist plots, thefts at ATMS, and harassment of women waiting for me.

As Captain Louis Renault asks, “What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?

Despite all of this, I am looking forward to visiting Morocco.  I have only one day in Casablanca and once we get through immigration, Sherrie and I are off.  It looks like we can walk to the medina and some of the main streets, to get a feel for the French Colonial architecture and the local crafts. 

Tomorrow I’m off to Fes, leading an SAS home-stay trip.  I had originally decided to travel with SAS because I thought Morocco played to the weakest of my travel skills, navigation.  My instincts are almost always wrong, and I’ve gotten turned around in every market I’ve been to on this trip.  My work buddy Chris had given me a hilarious but cautionary tale about getting lost in a souk, and I didn’t want to repeat it, especially not as a single woman.  So here I am, leading the group—I just hope I can stay out of trouble long enough to get the group back to home base.

Home base for one more week.  In just a week, we go through our last shipboard immigration, our last long lines to pick up our passport and get it stamped by bored people who would rather be enjoying the pastries our ship provides for them. 

Today’s wait was long enough that my computer finished downloading all the files I wanted from the public drive.  The lines stretched down a couple of flights of stairs, made longer by people who were sneaking in at the landings.  They listened in preport to the cultural information.  Moroccans don't wait in line, they push their way through.

Midway up the last flight, we saw our medical team in action.  "Code blue, code blue, code blue.  Deck 7"  The medical team came racing up the steps, along with several crew members.  Two for the stretcher, two with life preservers to use as pillows.  The passenger is okay, and left the scene in a wheelchair.  This is the team putting away the gear.  You can see two cooks (checked pants and hats), along with a maintenance guy (blue jumpsuit), several officers and members of the ship's medical crew.  Our SAS doc is already in the elevator with the patient.  (I have some decency.)

Faculty/staff are the first group to get off the ship after the Caribbean Sea, who won that honor as champs of the Sea Olympics.  With any luck, I should clear before lunch.  And that will give me a vantage point from which to take pictures of people struggling down the gangway with their carry-on luggage.

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.

Taking Time for the Taj

Say what you will, the Taj is just a big tomb.

Stunningly beautiful big tomb, of course, but it serves no other purpose.  Or at least it served no other purpose when it was built.  Now, it brings millions of visitors to Agra, and they bring millions of dollars, which brings out what seem to be millions of street vendors and millions of beggars.

Our ship is docked in Kochi (also known as Cochin), on the western side of the southern tip of India.  So going from Kochi to Agra is like pulling into New York City and deciding you need to see the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.  But only if you had to fly into Chicago and then take a train to St. Louis. 

We’re in India for 6 days, and I spent 4 days going to see the Taj Mahal.  The only way I can really justify that is that I didn’t fly from Washington, D.C. to do it.  By comparison, Kochi is just around the corner.

Our landing was scheduled for 8 AM and our flight for 2 PM, which doesn’t sound like a difficult connection to make, but nothing is simple when you’re dealing with immigration.  Because we live on the ship, it can be easy to forget that we are coming into a foreign country as fare-paying passengers and the security is as stringent as your average airport.  One thousand people have to pick up our passports, show them to customs officials, get stamps, and officially enter the country.  Then we each have to go through ship security and port security to leave the area where we are docked.  The airport is 90 minutes away, and there’s a whole set of security measures there, too.

I was in the first group of people to get off the ship because of my flight schedule, and things went very smoothly, so we made it to the airport in plenty of time.  Leaving the ship around 9:30, we got to our hotel in New Delhi around 8:30. 

The next morning, we were up by 4 to take a train to Agra, arriving there are around 8:30.  After touring the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, we drove back to Delhi via a bear rescue center.  We got to our hotel around 7:30.  We had one full day in Delhi and then back to the airport (leave the hotel at 7) to return to the ship.  In all, two and a half days of travel to see the Taj.

Also:  ship, bus, airport shuttle, airplane, bus, bus, train, bus, electric bus, Taj, electric bus, bus, plane, bus.  Add tuk tuk and ferry for yesterday’s travel around Kochi.  Have not gone anywhere by rickshaw, motorbike, or elephant.

The Taj is definitely worth going to once.  It’s big and it’s beautiful, and being a “high value woman” I got to go inside.  You go through separate lines for security—yes, there’s airport type security here, too—and there are signs pointing the way, but in fact I didn’t even have a ticket.  Our tickets were good for both the Taj and the Red Fort, so our tour guide kept them until we were done with both.  Perhaps the assumption is that every Western face belongs to a high value ticket?

You can’t take pictures inside and there’s nothing spectacular about the inside, so touring the grounds is actually quite sufficient.  (A hint for those who might find themselves in the vicinity some day soon.  Also, closed on Fridays.  You’re welcome.)

The Taj Mahal is in the middle of two smaller, identical buildings.  One is a mosque.  The other is not; it was built for symmetry.  (Being symmetrical with the mosque, it is facing away from Mecca.)  It was built, as you probably know, as a memorial to the favorite wife of one of the Moghul kings, and it took over 20 years to finish.  A 2-mile ramp was built to haul stone to the top.  It was never intended to be a public monument, just a private expression of his grief.  It was the British, our guide told us, who “romanticized it” and put it on people’s must-see lists.  The king planned to build a black marble replica for himself across the river, but he wound up imprisoned by an ungrateful third son (who also assassinated his two older brothers, suggesting that first-born ascension to the throne is not a universally appreciated custom), so now both the king and his wife are buried together. 

In modern India, people are cremated rather than buried, and their ashes are taken to the Ganges for interment.  Some people whose families cannot afford cremation just dump the bodies into the Ganges.  This makes the Ganges a very holy and very polluted river.

On our way to the airport the final day, we happened upon a funeral procession.  Four men carrying a wrapped body on their shoulders.  We zipped past it too quickly for me to get a picture.  Our guide told us that in India, whether the deceased is male or female, only the men go to accompany it for cremation.  The women stay home and mourn (for 13 days). 

A happy birthday today to the wife of my own first born; here is your “funerary customs in India” post.  

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.  

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.