Finally an SAS Wrap-up!!!

9. Japan
Arriving in Japan was a lot like coming home to the US. Japan was the first country where we have had to disembark and physically go through customs (metal detector, passport inspection, x-ray machines, etc.). More often, on arrival in a port, customs officials have boarded the ship and either gone through our passports and stamped them without ever seeing us, or have required us to stumble briefly out of bed for a procession of two-second face-to-face inspections. So Japan was something of a reentry into a more familiar world but you have to imagine that that more familiar world had gone through a time warp and become super-modern. Actually a good example of this is the fact that they took our “temperatures” with heat sensing radar guns… Turns out I’m healthy. Our first port was Kobe and Ali and I got off the ship and immediately went in search of sushi and adventure along with our friends Colin, Molly, and Heather. We mostly just wandered around and did some shopping, mostly in shoe stores full of super cool, super hyphy Nikes and Adidas. We sampled the local cuisine, enjoying burning hot fresh waffles in the shape of fishies and full of either custard or chocolate. My favorite part of the day was our exploration of one of the many buzzing arcades that are all over most of the streets. There are all sorts of these arcades. Most of them look like casinos or something but I don’t know if they have anything to do with gambling. Some of them are more like places people go to play fantasy computer games and some of them are full of whacky Asian photobooths. ALL of them absolutely buzz. They are so loud. They sound like the sound effect on a video game when your character picks up an ultra-magic coin but if that were magnified by infinity and if each magnification were rhythmically slightly offset from every other one. And that might describe what actually goes on in these rooms, for all I know. Ali and I opted for the Japanese photobooth experience. We entered a sizeable room (in between the size of a small bathroom and a large closet…) in which all of the walls were bright green as was a small bench in the middle of the room. You may have guessed that the function of this room was the “green screen” function where the camera automatically would superimpose the images of Ali and I and a giant teddy bear, or a bathtub, or a rocket ship, or outer space… IT WAS THE BEST. So we posed against several computer-generated backdrops and then went next door to another small (smaller, in fact) booth where we used computer pens to “draw” all over the images. We added flowers and sparkles and bubbles and hats and tiaras and, oddly, a dead cat… Not sure why that was an option… So that’s PRETTY much Kobe. We had an EXTREMELY expensive sushi dinner that night. It was one of our first experiences ordering off of a menu that had zero English translations and sparse pictures of the food. Colin got all excited to be all Anthony Bourdain and order something having no idea what it was. The hope, I think, was that it would arrive and be, basically, something that he might not have had the courage to order with full knowledge of what it was… He was hoping for the most exotic thing on the menu. Colin’s meal arrived in a small bamboo box- we all got our hopes up. The little box was steaming… and the waiter took off the lid to REVEAL: the simplest of the bland. Pork potstickers. Apparently they were good but he was a little bummed. This seems like a good place to add an update to a previous post, however. Some of you avid readers may recall the occasion in Shanghai when we ordered the crock pots and Colin requested the “Bovine Pizzle” pot. Robbie informed me recently (and I can guarantee that NONE of us knew this at the time, in Shanghai) that “Pizzle” means male genitalia… Did you know that? Perhaps some of you did. But he basically got what he had been hoping for in Kobe that night: the retrospective knowledge that he had, in fact, eaten something VERY exotic by taking a chance on a dish with an odd name…
We spent the next Japan day in Kyoto. Actually, I SAY that we spent the day there but, really, we were there for about three hours. Really poor planning that day. I actually really don’t know where exactly the time went, to be honest. But basically we arrived and met up with my friend Michael Thompson from Pomona (the ONE person who really believed me when I broke my big toe sophomore year). Michael was spending the entire year in Kyoto so I hadn’t seen him since the previous spring. We managed a really beautiful (if brief) impression of the Imperial Palace grounds, where we sat beneath the cherry blossoms and had a picnic with some of Michael’s friends from his program. I really hope I can go back to Japan some day and see more of Kyoto because it was really kind of a travesty that we missed out on so much that day.
After Kyoto, Ali and I spent a day on the ship as it traveled from Kobe to Yokohama. This day was spent quite as lazily and luxuriously as our time on the ship between stops in China.
The day that the ship docked in Yokohama, Ali and I set off immediately for Tokyo with our friends from Seattle, Kevin and Kyle. Actually Kevin and Kyle weren’t really friends of ours at that point and it was a coincidence rather than a plan that we all took the same train to Tokyo. But we ended up getting to know them much better and ultimately had a really fun day in Tokyo with them. I hate to point fingers but… it is TOTALLY Kevin and Kyle’s fault that our day kind of deteriorated from an enthusiastic plan to track down the Hello Kitty factory to a less-motivated romp. I loved the romp though. I’ll say that. We started off with some really quality sushi. At a fairly classy restaurant I ordered what our waiter-turned-translator called a “lunchbox” and miso soup. The lunchbox contained a sampling of a number of Japanese foods… I’m not sure how to name all of them but there was a spicy tuna sushi roll, some noodles, and there was a lot of sweetly pickled stuff, some of it meat and some of it vegetables. After lunch, however, is when the deterioration began. Basically we got a little silly after sampling grapefruit-flavored malt liquor. It tasted like Fresca. So. Before I knew it I was silly. No worse than that. But definitely a little silly. We ended up having a pretty decent tour of downtown Japan though. We took a train downtown to the business district. We found a neat park with beautiful cherry trees and a really cool, placid fountain. And then we headed back to the more touristy “Shibuya” area where we had started off. We ended up talking to two young Japanese men on a corner for probably about an hour… We (I) taught them how to “pound it and explode it” and they taught us how to do a Japanese “cheers.” They didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Japanese but we had a pretty good time. The only mishap of the entire day was that we ALMOST missed the last train back to Yokohama (where the ship was). But we didn't! So Tokyo was a success, by and large.
On our last day in Japan, Ali and I went on a looooooong walk through, ironically, Yokohama’s China Town. We saw all sorts of crazy stuff that we had NOT seen in China. There was so much Panda paraphernalia. So much. It was really fun. We mostly just walked and talked and window-shopped. We did find a really cool little vintage store but we were both feeling (rightly) pretty broke so we didn’t buy anything until later that day when we discovered a woman selling partial kimonos for $10. Then, before we really even knew it, it was time to leave Japan.

10. Hawaii
Hawaii was brief and so will I be. We stayed on Oahu in Honolulu for two days (one night) and spent most of our time in Waikiki Beach. Waikiki was pretty touristy and expensive but I had a really good time anyway. The first day, I went to the aquarium with my friend Tim to fulfill a requirement for my Marine Bio class. Then (and beforehand, as well, actually) we went swimming in the WARM, WARM bathtub of an ocean. It was marvelous. I was in the ocean a LOT in those two days. Including after midnight that night. Basically we loaded up on Taco Bell (we also ate at a classier Mexican restaurant as well) and Ali and I went surfing and swimming a ton. That’s all there really is to say. Everyone was in a weird, mournful mood as we began to realize that the trip was going to be over before we knew it… but I, personally, still had a pretty great time.

11. LAST PORT: GUATEMALA!!!!!!!
I had several really wonderful experiences in Guatemala. In fact, Guatemala was pretty magical all around. Charmed, even. I decided kind of at the last minute to go on a Semester at Sea trip to a coffee farm outside of Antigua. It was a GREAT decision. I learned all about the different stages that coffee goes through before we consume it (cherry stage, parchment stage, silverskin stage, and then roastable bean….) and they served us just the most wonderful coffee along with guacamole, bean dip, and mango cake, all in the most lush, beautiful farm setting. That night I went to the bar at the port with Alex, Molly, and a few other friends and we danced and danced our butts off to the live band and ate even more guacamole. SO much guacamole.
The next day, I decided to head to Antigua with my friends Molly and Lia. We ended up having a really fabulous day. Molly and Lia and I got along reeeeally well and had a great time. In retrospect, I’ve realized truly how much my memories of each port are shaped by the people I traveled with… but I digress. When we got there we were pretty immediately struck by the beauty of the architecture. Antigua is a really charming city with old stone buildings painted pretty light colors and cobblestone streets. The volcanic backdrop of the city also adds to the idyllic feel it has. Molly and Lia and I started the day off with ice cream (duh) and then headed to the markets to buy last minute trinkets for people like (in my case) Robbie and Elliott BOTH of whom were the lucky recipients of SWEET Guatemalan slippers. The markets were really fun. I have a kind of love/hate relationship with haggling (it had been a fairly long time since I’d really gotten down to it with a salesperson). I think haggling is good for me in that I have to really want something to enter into that tricky process. So it prevents me from buying a lot of extra stuff. It’s also fun. I love when I KNOW someone’s trying to rip me off and I can pretty much prove it (for example, when someone else has already bought a similar item at a low price). But it can really really suck horribly too, under the wrong circumstances. There were a few times when I felt like I should buy something for my mom or someone and just did NOT feel like haggling over it. Like I bought chopsticks for my family and for Robbie’s family in Vietnam. I had been planning on getting the two families chopsticks pretty much all along and would have loved to just swing by a store and pick some up for super cheap. Instead, with heavy heart, I went up to a stall and began looking at the chopstick selection sort of disinterestedly and waited for the woman to say, “You like? How much? How much?” to which I would respond “Oh I don’t know… I don’t really neeeeed chopsticks…” etc. Anyway, haggling once again, in Guatemala, kind of woke up my brain. Yes things were cheap, unlike in Japan, but ALSO unlike Japan, there was no such thing buying something on a whim.
Lia and Molly and I had a really fabulous late lunch of nachos (with guacamole!) and these potato/onion pancakes with tomato paste. Y Cervezas of course. Afterward, we ran into Ali and Colin SORT of coincidentally and ended up smoking hookah in this sweet tented place while we waited for them to eat lunch. During our hookah session there was a really cool thunderstorm with some of the craziest lightning I’d ever seen. It started pouring just as we left the hookah place. We had taken so long sitting and chatting at lunch and then smoking the hookah that we ended up at dinner not long after that. We had mas cervezas y mas nachos for dinner with Ali and Colin at a restaurant where we continued to observe the storm. At one point, I happened to go downstairs and saw that our friend Meryl whose 21st BIRTHDAY was that day was downstairs celebrating! So we hung out with her for a bit before heading back to the ship (taking a 2 hour cab ride through the STORM) so we could go to bed in order to get up early the next morning and hike El Volcan Pacaya.
The third (and last!) day in Guatemala was one of the most incredible days of my life. When I look back on Semester at Sea, this day (let’s call it el dia del fuego from now on), along with the day I hugged an elephant and the day(s) I rode the train to Bangalore, ranks among the best days of the entire trip. I’ll start out by saying that I took a geology course sophomore year which I really really loved. It was one of those classes that applied to the world around me in a really concrete way (no pun intended…) and I still move around the planet checking out rock formations and trying to figure them out. The most memorable thing from that class, however, was the least directly applicable: volcanism. It’s true that I live not far from Mount St. Helen’s which exploded in the 80s, and I have visited it’s crater (well before taking my geology class, however), but it had just about never occurred to me that I would ever be on top of an active (as in literally spurting lava) volcano ever ever in my entire life ever. And that is precisely where I found myself, after a really lovely hike, on this dia del fuego in Guatemala. Near Antigua, there are several active volcanoes: Volcan Agua, Volcan Fuego, and Volcan Pacaya. It is Pacaya that has particularly visible and cool magma (on a clear day) so it was Pacaya that we climbed. We drove towards Antigua from Puerto Quetzal where our ship was docked, but veered off before the city to head to the tallest and most beautiful of the volcanoes. Our little van pulled up in a small little mountain village that I couldn’t help but notice was on the edge of the volcano itself. Stepping off, we were immediately bombarded by men on horseback offering us a “taxi” to the top (by “taxi” they meant an old, underfed, rickety horse) and children offering us walking sticks. A few people bought walking sticks but we were all here to hike AND the horses did not seem to be treated very well so we opted out of the taxis. The hike was gorgeous. We passed lush views of the other volcanoes in the distance and we walked, at first, on the greenest paths. Gradually, however, the path we were on, which could easily have been in any deciduous forests in the Northwest, turned from green to black. The foliage faded out as we moved forward and up and, suddenly, the bare peak of the mountain, complete with a billowing ribbon of smoke above it, came into view. The intensity of the moment was broken when our guide gestured to this steep, sandy (black sand of course) hill and told us we could run down it. It was a little more dangerous than the sand dunes I had run down in Morocco and in Namibia. Several people got bloody knees and elbows, but I had a great time. Each leap made us feel weightless for a moment and it made our coming encounter with our planet feel even more alien and surreal. After that run, not only could we see the peak and it’s smoke, but it became clear that there was a glowing, orangey-red stream of lava making its way down the cone as well. Seeing the lava, even from fairly far away, was the moment I went from feeling sleepy to feeling a huge adrenaline rush of excitement. After that moment, I was pretty much giddy the entire remainder of the time. We moved towards the stream and eventually were climbing on rock that weighed no more than Styrofoam but which was made up of tiny crystals that were actually classifiable as glass. Needless to say these heaps of shifty, seemingly insubstantial rock were incredibly sharp and we suffered a few more knee casualties as we continued on. We made it over the hazardous stuff to a covered canal of lava rock. We stood at a place where the top of the canal opened up to reveal a river of hot, flowing lava. I was literally a yard away from it (aka, as close as I could get). I stood, posing for my picture to be taken by my friends. from behind me, where the lava was, I could feel what felt like a sunburn spread across the backs of my unprotected legs. From in front of me, however, the cool mountain breeze was blowing. I’ve never felt two such different temperatures at once. It was so much more intense than standing in front of an oven or a campfire. The heat was a wall behind me and the cool air whipped into it where it could. I was pretty much ecstatic. I could see an area down hill where a recent, more powerful lava flow had created almost a helicopter-landing area in the forest below. We roasted marshmallows over the lava… I actually don’t know what else to say about it, except that it was the most intense moment of illumination. I had never before faced the power of our planet. Everything I had learned about how it worked and what it was made of had been totally abstract before this. I had heard of people dying in various ways in “the elements” but had always sort of felt that I could survive anything the planet could dole out. Here was serious proof that the Earth is so much more powerful than any human being. The lava didn’t seem angry or scary, just incredible and powerful.

12. Reflections.
I think that my experience on the volcano is a really good way to explain my experience on Semester at Sea in general. The four months I spent on and off that ship were about experiencing things that I had previously only read about. It was about personally confirming and validating what had once been an abstract paragraph in a textbook. Everyone knows India has an immense population. But you could go through life and never leave Portland, Oregon (or wherever you’re from) and those millions of people could all be basically theoretical. In India, I was overwhelmed as we drove down crowded streets in our rickshaw. When I was little I used to think about how incredible it was that everyone I passed in my car (on the way to school or the zoo or wherever) was living an entirely unique experience. At that moment, as I passed them, they were feeling totally unique emotions and working toward goals and living a life in which they featured as the main character. Just like me. Semester at Sea brought my awe in that to a global level. It brought everything to a global level. Semester at Sea revealed to me things about people, about our history, about animals, about the Earth itself I had never thought about.
Sitting now at my kitchen counter in Portland, taking advantage of this weekend away from the sweet babies I nanny for and away from my internship, I’m finishing up this blog in a very different frame of mind than I began it with. Already, the experiences I had seem more and more dreamlike and distant. And I'm not just trying to be poetic in saying that. Last semester feels very isolated and time-warpy. I left in January and half expected, after four months gone, to come back to the same month. It’s weird that time passes when you’re gone. I visited Robbie in the Bay Area last week and seeing him (which was WONDERFUL) did kind of take me back to pre-Semester at Sea. When we picked up where we had left off (almost as if it was still January) Semester at Sea literally began to feel like a dream. But I’m left with my new friends (Ali lives just down the street from me and we’ve been having so much fun together in Portland and Colin, Alex, Nate, Kendyll, and Carly may all visit this summer), my pictures, my videos, and the distinct feeling that I’ve changed and grown to remind me that it really happened. I was talking to my dad the other day about how scary it is that such incredible experiences can sort of fade away to foggy memories super quickly and he said: it’s just a part of life. You have to make up for it by focusing on your next adventure. SO. I don’t know what my next adventure will be (does senior year at Pomona count?) but I can say that I feel like I need to explore the US more. I’ve never even been to Washington D.C.! So… I guess I’ll conclude by saying stay tuned….?