Bet you didn't think you were ever getting another post out of me again, huh? Well it's a short one; here are some pictures from Cuba!
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Las Fotos
Bet you didn't think you were ever getting another post out of me again, huh? Well it's a short one; here are some pictures from Cuba!
Monday, December 9, 2013
The Posts Just Get Shorter and Shorter!
That's right, everyone––I'm in Havana, Cuba! How often in a person's life do they get to say that? Anyhow it's late and I'm tired, so I've just posted a few pictures from Brazil and am going to call it a night (I'll post pictures of Cuba in the next few days; I know everyone's curious!)
Thursday, November 21, 2013
How Small Can You Post?
Hey, long time no post. As you can see, I am in Rio de Janeiro now! Once again I don't have time for one of my nice long detailed posts, but I thought it might be better to post something small rather than the continual nothing at all.
I do have a few bits of news though: firstly, it was announced at our last logistical preport that we will be making a surprise stop in the Bahamas! As in, we'll get to actually get off the ship in the Bahamas! Initially the ship was just stopping there for a while to refuel while we all sit around gaze longingly at the shore (we did that at the Canary Islands after Morocco and Namibia before South Africa) but the staff on the ship have been advocating our case back to ISE headquarters back in Virginia for a while now, and they finally gave us the go ahead! Yes, the entire ship is very excited. I believe we're going to be there only one day, but I'm not sure exactly when (sometime in the four days after Cub and before Fort Lauderdale.) Anyone have suggestions for what I should do there?
Anyhow, second bit of news: I am leaving tomorrow morning for one of my most anticipated excursions of SAS––the Amazon rainforest! I will be traveling via riverboat (equipped with hammocks for us to sleep in) up the Rio Negro and into the Amazon River for the next four days, so I should have some awesome pictures for you after that! As it is here are a few pictures from Argentina and my two days in Rio to tide you over. Enjoy!
Thursday, November 7, 2013
The Denizens of Kruger National Park
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Mpumalanga!
Location: Westbound in the Atlantic
Hey, it's me again! I am now on day 4 of the 12-day Atlantic Ocean crossing (which is the longest stretch that we will be at sea during the voyage.) Everyone is bemoaning 12 days straight of ship food, but I'm enjoying having some R&R before we get to Buenos Aires. There's an effort to make sure that we all don't get too bored (a ship full of bored college students can be a scary thing!) which includes nightly Union Seminars on all sorts of topics, and a couple of special events:
One of the biggest events we have on the ship is called the Sea Olympics, during which the ship's 7 "Seas" compete against each other at a variety of different activities, including lip-synching, synchronized swimming (I think we're all a bit curious on how those folks are going to manage in our little tiny pool on deck 7), trivia, dodgeball, and scrabble (I signed up for that, but then I realized that I'm actually very bad at scrabble. Oops.) I think I mentioned a while back that we are assigned to a particular "Sea" depending on which deck/hall our cabin located, and I am in the Caribbean Sea. For some strange reason the color that they assigned us was gray (nobody can figure out why they would make the Caribbean gray––we should be a nice aquamarine or something. The Yellow Sea got to be yellow!), and since we all must wear our sea's color while participating in the events, I am now decked out head-to-toe in gray (the Olympics start tonight!)
But why head-to-toe, you might ask? Well that is a result of the other attempt to ensure that we don't get too bored over the next 8 days––we are having a shipwide game of Assassins! Okay, so I'm going to assume that most if not all of you have never heard of this game (I hadn't, and apparently it's a thing with my generation. Who knew?) Anyhow, in the version of Assassins that we are playing everyone is assigned another player as a "target," and the object of the game is to eliminate your target by getting them alone and marking them with a washable marker while proclaiming "Assassins!" Then that person must tell you who their target was going to be, and that becomes your new target. This continues until there are just one person left, and that person is the winner. Of course you don't know which person has been assigned to assassinate you, so the best defenses are to either travel around in groups of at least three, or to make sure you have as little skin showing as possible for people to mark (you're not allowed to mark people's clothing or faces.) Since the ship is a bit cold and I tend to bundle up when I go out anyway, I think I'm going with the latter strategy.
Either way it's going to be interesting trying to get people completely alone to "assassinate" them while stuck on a ship of 800ish people! There are 258 of us are signed up to play, and the game starts this evening, so it should be really fun. I think I'm more excited about it than the Sea Olympics, but don't tell my Sea that! I've already been informed who my target will be, and I'm already trying to devise a way to get him/her alone.... hmm...
*Ahem* So, who wants to hear about the first of my five days in South Africa?
––––––– Cape Town & Johannesburg, South Africa: 10/26 –––––––
The evening before we pull into a port we always have a Logistical Preport meeting in the Union to discuss, well, the logistics of the upcoming port. This is where we find out more than anyone would ever want to know about all the terrible dangers and nasty diseases which could befall us in the country, as well as some of the more fun/interesting things that we may want to know about the place we will be staying. In this particular Preport, we were informed that of all the ports we would be docking at, Cape Town is one of the most beautiful to get up and watch the ship pull into. We were due to arrive between 7 and 7:30am, and sunrise was at about 6am, so it was recommended that we wake up early to catch the sunrise and then watch as the ship arrived at Cape Town.
Okay, so I'm not really a morning person (at all), and I tend to find it a bit hard to get to sleep the night before we're due to arrive at a port. But I set my alarm for 5:30, figuring that I would be up on deck by about 5:45 to catch the latter part of the sunrise and hopefully not have to wait too long before we arrived at the port. From what I gathered, my plan was shared by most of the shipboard community.
Which is why, when the ship rumbled to a stop in the harbor at about 5:40am, and we all rushed upstairs only to see the last of the pink fading from the large cloud swirling over the top of Table Mountain, there was a considerable amount of grumbling among the shipboard community. I myself was a little bit irked, but it's hard to stay that way when you realize that you have just arrived in Cape Town, South Africa.
For some reason the South African immigration people decided that we should be put through the wringer before they cleared the ship (every country has it's own fun little process for that), so we had also been informed at Logistical Preport that we would all have to get up and be ready to leave the ship at 8am, because every single person on the ship (including the crew) would have to go through the off-ship immigration building in order for the ship to be cleared, and that it would not be possible to get back on the ship until the whole process was finished several hours later.
I had just finished circling the ship to try to find a better vantage point to photograph the fading sunrise (there was a big white building blocking the best of the view from deck 6), when I heard Rita's voice come over the loudspeaker: "Would Deans Nick, Eddie, and Kathy please come to the purser's desk" ....Well, that never bodes well.
As it turned out the process had now been changed so that everyone would be called (by their Sea) to go off the ship, through the immigration process, and then back on the ship again. Then when the ship cleared we would all be allowed to actually disembark. This was announced at 6am; the process would be starting immediately. Now all the people who hadn't gotten up early to go watch the sunrise were mad too, because they suddenly had to be up at 6am instead of 8am.
All in all it was a very entertaining morning! We did eventually get everything figured out, and got off the ship at a reasonable time.
Through a series of circumstances, I had wound up with only about half of that first day in Cape Town (out of all 5 days) to have free time to explore, and as I had already decided that I did not have time to go south to Boulder Beach and see the penguin colony living there (yes, there are penguins in South Africa!) I decided that I wanted to spend it taking the cable car up to the top of Table Mountain. The only problem was, once again, finding a group that would do this with me. A large number of people were on field labs with their classes that day, still others were doing SAS field programs, and for some odd reason the rest seemed to be planning to go to the mall on the V&A waterfront. Most everyone felt that they would have time for Table Mountain at some other point in the five days that we would be in Cape Town.
I didn't actually find a group to travel with until about an hour before the ship cleared, but I did manage it! The three of us then headed out to find a taxi to take us to the cable car at the foot of the mountain (it was a bit far to walk––especially considering that I had to be back to the ship at 1:45 to meet Kenzie, who would be my traveling buddy that evening.)
The cable car station is actually situated part of the way up the mountain, and there is a nice view of Cape Town from there––which is good, because the cable car itself was closed that morning due to high winds, and we mostly hung around the base of the station and took pictures. Then we went back to town and wandered around for a little while, finally ending up in a little street market. At this point I knew I only had a little bit of time before I would need to get a taxi back to the ship, so I split off from the group and speed-walked through the market (which is actually very hard to do, because every time you try to stop and briefly look at something, the person in charge of the booth would strike up a conversation from which it is inevitably difficult to extricate yourself.) It was about 1:35 by the time I made it back to the ship, whereby I hurriedly donned my backpack and went to meet Kenzie.
Some of you are doubtlessly wondering at this point what I am up to, so I will give a brief explanation (haha, like I am capable of brevity!):
This summer, before I embarked on SAS, I was glued to the Fall 2013 facebook page (which for me is highly unusual, since I generally rarely use facebook), and I saw that a number of students were already planning independent trips in some of the countries. Many of these mimicked the SAS trips, but at a much cheaper cost (often, for example, substituting hotel for hostel accommodations.) One such trip was for a safari in South Africa's Kruger Park.
I had already looked through the pages of safaris that SAS offered, and had found myself somewhat disappointed. For one thing, most were very expensive. But more importantly, they struck me as inauthentic. Nearly all of them were to take place at private game reserves where the animals were bought and brought to the reserve for tourists to observe. Of course, the lions and other carnivores would be kept separate from herbivores like zebras and impalas (otherwise this whole circle of life thing could start to get expensive pretty fast!) Many boasted lavish-looking accommodations with swimming pools and guaranteed that visitors would get to see all of the "Big 5" (elephants, rhinos, lions, water buffalo, leopards.) All this within a couple hours drive from Cape Town!
It basically sounded like a larger version of Oregon's Wildlife Safari. I didn't want to be guaranteed to see all of the Big 5 (where's the fun in that?), and I certainly didn't want to stay in some ritzy "luxury hut" with a swimming pool. Because of this, I had pretty much decided not do any of the safaris, which was also disappointing.
Anyhow, back to the Fall 2013 facebook page. Lo and behold, someone was organizing an independent trip all the way to Kruger National Park! Kruger is South Africa's first national park, and covers about 7500 square miles on the far eastern side of the country. It is also the place to go if you want to do an actual safari in South Africa. This was the most major thing that I had planned ahead of time for my SAS trip; needless to say, I was pretty excited.
South Africa isn't exactly a small country (yes, now would be the time to go check google maps––go ahead, I'll wait.) In order to get to Kruger Park Kenzie and I would be taking a two hour plane to Johannesburg, spending the night at a hostel there with the rest of our group, and then getting picked up by a bus which would take us five hours east to the province of Mpumalanga, where we would stay at a place called Marc's Treehouse lodge and then be taken by our guide in open air jeeps to Kruger Park.
But because this post has once again become absurdly long and I'm starting to get hungry, I'm going to save the rest of that tale for another day. Cheers!
Hey, it's me again! I am now on day 4 of the 12-day Atlantic Ocean crossing (which is the longest stretch that we will be at sea during the voyage.) Everyone is bemoaning 12 days straight of ship food, but I'm enjoying having some R&R before we get to Buenos Aires. There's an effort to make sure that we all don't get too bored (a ship full of bored college students can be a scary thing!) which includes nightly Union Seminars on all sorts of topics, and a couple of special events:
One of the biggest events we have on the ship is called the Sea Olympics, during which the ship's 7 "Seas" compete against each other at a variety of different activities, including lip-synching, synchronized swimming (I think we're all a bit curious on how those folks are going to manage in our little tiny pool on deck 7), trivia, dodgeball, and scrabble (I signed up for that, but then I realized that I'm actually very bad at scrabble. Oops.) I think I mentioned a while back that we are assigned to a particular "Sea" depending on which deck/hall our cabin located, and I am in the Caribbean Sea. For some strange reason the color that they assigned us was gray (nobody can figure out why they would make the Caribbean gray––we should be a nice aquamarine or something. The Yellow Sea got to be yellow!), and since we all must wear our sea's color while participating in the events, I am now decked out head-to-toe in gray (the Olympics start tonight!)
But why head-to-toe, you might ask? Well that is a result of the other attempt to ensure that we don't get too bored over the next 8 days––we are having a shipwide game of Assassins! Okay, so I'm going to assume that most if not all of you have never heard of this game (I hadn't, and apparently it's a thing with my generation. Who knew?) Anyhow, in the version of Assassins that we are playing everyone is assigned another player as a "target," and the object of the game is to eliminate your target by getting them alone and marking them with a washable marker while proclaiming "Assassins!" Then that person must tell you who their target was going to be, and that becomes your new target. This continues until there are just one person left, and that person is the winner. Of course you don't know which person has been assigned to assassinate you, so the best defenses are to either travel around in groups of at least three, or to make sure you have as little skin showing as possible for people to mark (you're not allowed to mark people's clothing or faces.) Since the ship is a bit cold and I tend to bundle up when I go out anyway, I think I'm going with the latter strategy.
Either way it's going to be interesting trying to get people completely alone to "assassinate" them while stuck on a ship of 800ish people! There are 258 of us are signed up to play, and the game starts this evening, so it should be really fun. I think I'm more excited about it than the Sea Olympics, but don't tell my Sea that! I've already been informed who my target will be, and I'm already trying to devise a way to get him/her alone.... hmm...
*Ahem* So, who wants to hear about the first of my five days in South Africa?
––––––– Cape Town & Johannesburg, South Africa: 10/26 –––––––
The evening before we pull into a port we always have a Logistical Preport meeting in the Union to discuss, well, the logistics of the upcoming port. This is where we find out more than anyone would ever want to know about all the terrible dangers and nasty diseases which could befall us in the country, as well as some of the more fun/interesting things that we may want to know about the place we will be staying. In this particular Preport, we were informed that of all the ports we would be docking at, Cape Town is one of the most beautiful to get up and watch the ship pull into. We were due to arrive between 7 and 7:30am, and sunrise was at about 6am, so it was recommended that we wake up early to catch the sunrise and then watch as the ship arrived at Cape Town.
Okay, so I'm not really a morning person (at all), and I tend to find it a bit hard to get to sleep the night before we're due to arrive at a port. But I set my alarm for 5:30, figuring that I would be up on deck by about 5:45 to catch the latter part of the sunrise and hopefully not have to wait too long before we arrived at the port. From what I gathered, my plan was shared by most of the shipboard community.
Which is why, when the ship rumbled to a stop in the harbor at about 5:40am, and we all rushed upstairs only to see the last of the pink fading from the large cloud swirling over the top of Table Mountain, there was a considerable amount of grumbling among the shipboard community. I myself was a little bit irked, but it's hard to stay that way when you realize that you have just arrived in Cape Town, South Africa.
For some reason the South African immigration people decided that we should be put through the wringer before they cleared the ship (every country has it's own fun little process for that), so we had also been informed at Logistical Preport that we would all have to get up and be ready to leave the ship at 8am, because every single person on the ship (including the crew) would have to go through the off-ship immigration building in order for the ship to be cleared, and that it would not be possible to get back on the ship until the whole process was finished several hours later.
I had just finished circling the ship to try to find a better vantage point to photograph the fading sunrise (there was a big white building blocking the best of the view from deck 6), when I heard Rita's voice come over the loudspeaker: "Would Deans Nick, Eddie, and Kathy please come to the purser's desk" ....Well, that never bodes well.
As it turned out the process had now been changed so that everyone would be called (by their Sea) to go off the ship, through the immigration process, and then back on the ship again. Then when the ship cleared we would all be allowed to actually disembark. This was announced at 6am; the process would be starting immediately. Now all the people who hadn't gotten up early to go watch the sunrise were mad too, because they suddenly had to be up at 6am instead of 8am.
All in all it was a very entertaining morning! We did eventually get everything figured out, and got off the ship at a reasonable time.
Through a series of circumstances, I had wound up with only about half of that first day in Cape Town (out of all 5 days) to have free time to explore, and as I had already decided that I did not have time to go south to Boulder Beach and see the penguin colony living there (yes, there are penguins in South Africa!) I decided that I wanted to spend it taking the cable car up to the top of Table Mountain. The only problem was, once again, finding a group that would do this with me. A large number of people were on field labs with their classes that day, still others were doing SAS field programs, and for some odd reason the rest seemed to be planning to go to the mall on the V&A waterfront. Most everyone felt that they would have time for Table Mountain at some other point in the five days that we would be in Cape Town.
I didn't actually find a group to travel with until about an hour before the ship cleared, but I did manage it! The three of us then headed out to find a taxi to take us to the cable car at the foot of the mountain (it was a bit far to walk––especially considering that I had to be back to the ship at 1:45 to meet Kenzie, who would be my traveling buddy that evening.)
The cable car station is actually situated part of the way up the mountain, and there is a nice view of Cape Town from there––which is good, because the cable car itself was closed that morning due to high winds, and we mostly hung around the base of the station and took pictures. Then we went back to town and wandered around for a little while, finally ending up in a little street market. At this point I knew I only had a little bit of time before I would need to get a taxi back to the ship, so I split off from the group and speed-walked through the market (which is actually very hard to do, because every time you try to stop and briefly look at something, the person in charge of the booth would strike up a conversation from which it is inevitably difficult to extricate yourself.) It was about 1:35 by the time I made it back to the ship, whereby I hurriedly donned my backpack and went to meet Kenzie.
Some of you are doubtlessly wondering at this point what I am up to, so I will give a brief explanation (haha, like I am capable of brevity!):
This summer, before I embarked on SAS, I was glued to the Fall 2013 facebook page (which for me is highly unusual, since I generally rarely use facebook), and I saw that a number of students were already planning independent trips in some of the countries. Many of these mimicked the SAS trips, but at a much cheaper cost (often, for example, substituting hotel for hostel accommodations.) One such trip was for a safari in South Africa's Kruger Park.
I had already looked through the pages of safaris that SAS offered, and had found myself somewhat disappointed. For one thing, most were very expensive. But more importantly, they struck me as inauthentic. Nearly all of them were to take place at private game reserves where the animals were bought and brought to the reserve for tourists to observe. Of course, the lions and other carnivores would be kept separate from herbivores like zebras and impalas (otherwise this whole circle of life thing could start to get expensive pretty fast!) Many boasted lavish-looking accommodations with swimming pools and guaranteed that visitors would get to see all of the "Big 5" (elephants, rhinos, lions, water buffalo, leopards.) All this within a couple hours drive from Cape Town!
It basically sounded like a larger version of Oregon's Wildlife Safari. I didn't want to be guaranteed to see all of the Big 5 (where's the fun in that?), and I certainly didn't want to stay in some ritzy "luxury hut" with a swimming pool. Because of this, I had pretty much decided not do any of the safaris, which was also disappointing.
Anyhow, back to the Fall 2013 facebook page. Lo and behold, someone was organizing an independent trip all the way to Kruger National Park! Kruger is South Africa's first national park, and covers about 7500 square miles on the far eastern side of the country. It is also the place to go if you want to do an actual safari in South Africa. This was the most major thing that I had planned ahead of time for my SAS trip; needless to say, I was pretty excited.
South Africa isn't exactly a small country (yes, now would be the time to go check google maps––go ahead, I'll wait.) In order to get to Kruger Park Kenzie and I would be taking a two hour plane to Johannesburg, spending the night at a hostel there with the rest of our group, and then getting picked up by a bus which would take us five hours east to the province of Mpumalanga, where we would stay at a place called Marc's Treehouse lodge and then be taken by our guide in open air jeeps to Kruger Park.
But because this post has once again become absurdly long and I'm starting to get hungry, I'm going to save the rest of that tale for another day. Cheers!
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Tro Tros, Coconuts, and Really Long Posts!
Location: Walvis Bay, Namibia
Takoradi, Ghana: 10/15-10/16 & Tema, Ghana: 10/17-10/18
For those of you who don't know, Ghana is a country in West Africa which has about the same land area as the state of Oregon. In 1957 Ghana was the first country in sub-saharan Africa to gain independence from colonial rule, and it is doing better economically and politically than many African countries (though the average yearly wage is still only $3,500.) The Prime Meridian also runs right through it (side note: the ship crossed the equator at the prime meridian, aka 0˚ latitude and 0˚ longitude! Isn't that cool?)
As you can see above, for some unknown reason, the M.V. Explorer was docking at two different ports in Ghana over the four days that we were there. It spent the first two days in Takoradi (which is supposed to have a population of about 445,000, but honestly didn't feel very big) before moving on the second evening to a port in Tema (which is about the size of Eugene, but we had a shuttle that would take us about an hour away to the much larger city of Accra.) This meant that we were allowed to either travel with the ship or find our way overland between the two ports. Of course, you must decide which option you will be choosing several days before arriving at the port, which makes sense but also makes it hard to plan (remember we have limited internet to look up bus routes or places to stay.) Many people just wing it and manage to find their way just fine, especially since these two ports were really not very far apart. Once again I decided to stay with the ship, since most of the in-country time that would be lost by the move was at night, and therefor when I would be sleeping anyway (and I might as well be sleeping in my cozy cabin on the ship than paying for a place wherever whichever group I managed to join decided to stay.)
Beyond that, I didn't have much of a plan for Ghana. The previous eight days (after I left Morocco) had just been one big blur of essays and midterm exams in all of my classes, and it had left me with remarkably little time to plan. I had signed up for a field program to visit and learn about the Morning Star School in Accra on the third day (10/17), but that left the entire time in Takoradi open. I planned to explore the city a bit on the second day (I wanted to stay close since I would have to be back to the ship before on-ship time anyway), and I was undecided whether to spend the first day going to Kakum National Park (a rainforest with a famous treetop canopy walk) or to one of the infamous castles and slave dungeons on Cape Coast (disturbing, but interesting)––while I wanted to do both, they were both an hour or so from Takoradi and I was fairly certain there wouldn't be time.
I ultimately found someone else who wanted to go to the rainforest, and so I planned to meet with her and her group that morning for breakfast while we were waiting for the ship to clear so that we could disembark. Unfortunately, they then decided to simply explore Takoradi that morning. Dang. Okay, so I needed to find a different group. One of the girls I was sitting with helpfully led me over to a table with another group planning to go to Kakum that day. I didn't know any of them, but I awkwardly invited myself along (which is basically commonplace on Semester at Sea, so they were alright with it.) But then I found out that we were now a group of 8 people. Nothing good ever comes from traveling in a group that large. So I thank them and roam off to try to find someone else to travel with (will this finally be the time that I find myself completely groupless? I hoped not!)
In the end I ran into Tanner and Yawen, two of the people I had traveled in Morocco with; it turned out that they were planning to go to Kakum and/or Cape Coast as well, and I had rather enjoyed our time in Morocco, so I happily joined them. We consulted with a local woman that was at the hospitality desk giving people tips on what to do and where to go, and she informed us that no, it was probably not a good idea to try and see both Kakum and Cape Coast in one day, and that since it was a national holiday Kakum would probably be crowded and not the best place to go. So we decided to go to the castles/dungeons of Cape Coast.
Then the announcement came over the loudspeaker that the ship had cleared, and we were off! We disembarked the ship and went straight to the shuttle that would take us to the port gate, bypassing the little makeshift market that had sprung up alongside the ship, trying to tempt students with vibrant clothes, colorful canvas paintings, and little bracelets with your name on them which were woven on the spot. We would all be very tired of those merchants by the time we left. Many of them followed us to Tema.
The air was warm and very humid. I sat in my seat, waiting for the bus to leave, and alternated slathering on more sunscreen and more bug repellent. I was already paranoid about getting bitten by mosquitos in Ghana. I had been taking my antimalarial medication, and I had gotten my Yellow Fever vaccination, but after listening to Doctor Dave in logistical pre-port, and Professor Boyer in his lecture the previous night, and everyone else who put in a word on the subject of tropical diseases, I was really not in the mood to risk it. From the warnings we got, I almost expected to step off the ship and be instantly swarmed with disease-carrying insects.
For the record, I did not see, hear, or feel a single mosquito the entire time I was in Ghana. Nope, not even one.
But speaking of being swarmed, the moment that our shuttle helpfully dropped us off at the port gate we encountered another kind of swarm; the less-fortunate bracelet-making people who had apparently not bribed their way into the actual port were lying in wait. The second we stepped off of the bus, they were everywhere. Taken a little aback, Tanner and Yawen and I tried to forge our way through the throng. Yawen accidentally picked up one of the bracelet guys, who heard her name and immediately started weaving her a bracelet which she would spend the next 15 minutes (he followed us unto the taxi we got) trying to convince him that she really didn't want.
The taxi took us to a bank with an ATM, which all of us needed because we had determined that the $15 service fee charged by the ship to order Cedi through them was more than we wanted to pay (Cedi is the currency in Ghana: 2 Cedi is worth about 1 USD.) We then decided to make our own way into the main market square, escaping both from Yawen's bracelet-maker and the Taxi guy, who was trying to get us to hire him to take us all the way to Cape Coast.
Dang it was hot out! And the three of us stuck out like a sore thumb as we walked down the mostly residential streets. Every taxi that passed us would honk, sometimes multiple times, as if to say "What the heck are you white people doing walking? Don't you want a taxi? Are you sure?" But we eventually made it to our destination: the central market. We knew that the bus station would be around there somewhere, and Tanner started asking locals which direction we should go. One woman helpfully pointed down the way we were walking. The next said that we should go back a little, and turn the left. After we did that a guy who looked like he knew what he was talking about shook his head and pointed back the way we had come. We were now very confused.
The market itself consisted of a very helter-skelter assortment, from people with carts full of shoes to sellers sitting on the ground by blankets or buckets piled high with all kinds of discolored fruits, and large tuberous yams (not the sweet potato kind.) Nearly all of these sellers were women, many of them walking along carrying their wares in large bowls balanced atop their heads. One woman's bowl was full of huge doomed slugs trying to make their slow escape with varying degrees of unsuccess; another woman was carrying a neatly sliced watermelon covered daintily in plastic wrap with a large, lethal-looking knife sticking right up through the center.
We eventually made it to the bus station, along with another group of about nine other SASers (that's what we call ourselves) who were also resisting the honks of the taxis. What ensued was a confusing rush. The driver of the bus to Cape Coast tried to assure us that the bus would be leaving "soon", though we had learned from a woman in our pre-port lecture who had lived in Ghana for two years that this likely translate to "when the bus is full," which could quite literally be hours. There were maybe five other people there, and the bus was pretty big. Then there were the Tro Tro drivers. A Tro Tro is like a large Taxi, and before we knew it all 12 of us were being ushered away from the still shouting bus driver over to a line of taxis and Tro Tros. There were 12 spots in the large white Tro Tro, and all 12 of us wanted to get to Cape Coast. Okay, it was a deal.
Once they realized that their quarry was taken, the other drivers hurried back to their respective vehicles, waiting for the next unsuspecting group of SASers. We all clambered into our Tro Tro, and breathed a sigh of relief. By the time we were moving at a decent speed with all of the windows down it wasn't even too hot!
The ride was relatively uneventful, and I spent most of the time watching shack after shack of make-shift mini marts pass by my window, framed by large tropical trees and bushes. The funny thing was that nearly all of these little businesses seemed to have religious names, regardless of their wares. I wish I had thought to start writing them down earlier, but as it was I saw signs for a "By His Grace Mini Mart" and "Put Your Trust in Jesus Chop Bar." Even the hairdressers were likewise christened! It was really interesting.
On the opposite side of the street stretched the ocean, and a long golden beach dotted with palm trees. Suddenly we were stopping. Were we there yet? Nope, the driver was just stopping to buy himself a coconut from a cluster of boys on the side of the road bearing a stack of the aforementioned nuts and large saber-like knives with which they would proceed to rapidly divest the coconuts of their tops (how were they not chopping their fingers off? They were wielding those huge knives like one might a potato peeler or cheese-grater!)
Being a little less inhibited than us Americans, Yawen, who is from China, proceeds to hand the driver money to get her a coconut too. Then everyone else starts digging into their pockets for money to get their own coconuts. Everyone was quite thrilled after this, and as the driver (who introduced himself as Patrick) pulled back onto the highway we were all merrily taking pictures of ourselves with our prizes. He must have thought we were all very weird.
We arrived at Cape Coast Castle, and after making arrangements for Patrick to come pick us up in a few hours, the three of us separated from the other group and made our way into the castle. Since this post is already very long and I still have to finish my Anthropology readings before tomorrow's quiz, I am not going to go into detail about the rest of the day. Our tour of the castle was informative and creepy, and by the time we made it make to Takoradi we had just enough time to get dinner (which turned out to be very spicy and therefor inedible to me) before heading back to the ship as it was almost dark.
I spent the next day with Yawen and Christina (the forth person I had traveling with in Morocco!) wandering through the center of the central market in Takoradi, which is an interesting tale for another time!
That night the ship repositioned to Tema, and the next day I went on my field program to the Morning Star School, which was interesting but really highlighted that I should not go into any career involving large groups of small children, because I am not a natural with kids (one of the first things that we did was to go and hang out with the kids during their recess. I was feeling very out of my depth until I realized that I could just hand out stickers and they would be happy.)
It was still early in the day when the field program got back to the ship, so I hopped on the next shuttle to Accra (remember that's the nearest decent-sized city, about an hour's drive from our port in Tema) and joined two girls who had also been on the Morning Star field program and were planning to find the market (they'd had field programs/labs over the last couple of days and not gotten a chance to buy any souvenirs.)
Long story still long, we found the market with the help of two local guys. In contrast to the market I had explored the previous day in Takoradi, which was clearly there for the locals, this market was clearly oriented to appeal to tourists. It was basically a larger version of the one which had yet again sprung up outside the ship. I didn't buy much, though I did manage to find a pin for my collection (I have gotten myself a pin in every country; I somehow managed to lose the one for Belgium though, which bummed me out because I rather liked Belgium.)
Anyhow, we eventually got back to the shuttle. It was dark by this point, and I had to dodge numerous painting-sellers who had gathered around the SASers trying to get onto the bus. One of them wanted my flashlight, and was trying to guilt-trip me into parting with it by telling me about his family sitting around with no light and the three little sisters he had to put through school. I felt like a complete heel not giving him my silly flashlight (probably $5 from Walmart), but seriously, I can't just give away stuff/money to all of the painting-sellers and bracelet-makers and cute little children of Ghana that I meet! Yes, I made the mistake of buying a 2 Cedi water bottle for one of the kids in Cape Town, and then had to bodily drag myself away from the others who wanted me to buy them water/food too.
I'll skip over talking about the last day, because I pretty much spent it sticking close to the ship (I wasn't even going to chance taking the shuttle to Accra, since there's only one road between the cities and an accident along that road had already delayed the morning shuttle––we were expecting about 270 SASers to return at the last minute just from field labs alone, and I was not going to stuck behind them and get dock time in Cape Town because my shuttle got delayed.) I took a taxi into Tema to find myself WiFi so that I could get some stuff squared away on the internet. I was a bit tired of Ghana at that point, so I was grateful when the taxi driver took me to a nice hotel where I could buy WiFi and not have to worry about people eyeing my laptop in a local internet cafe. I was not the only SASer there, but the place wasn't overrun (just a couple of life-long learners) which was nice.
So yah, that was Ghana! I took a taxi back to the ship and we departed for Cape Town. Obviously I skimmed over a bunch, but since it's really quite late now and this is probably the longest post of I have written I think I'll leave you with that. I don't have very great pictures from Ghana, since much of the time a camera would have been rude or out-of-place. So I'm probably not going to post any photos; you'll have to settle for my dubious narrative abilities instead!
Thanks for keeping up my adventures, and don't forget to comment!
Happy 50th, Semester at Sea!
Location: Walvis Bay, Namibia
Hey everyone! It's me again! Well, a lot has happened since my last post about Lisbon, Portugal. I have been to Spain, Morocco, Ghana, and in a few days will be arriving in Cape Town, South Africa. At the moment the ship is stopped in Namibia refueling, which pretty much just means that we can look out the windows and see city rather than ocean, but we aren't allowed to disembark, so nothing much to report there.
I'm going to change pace a bit; since I would like to no longer be behind in my blog, I am officially putting Spain and Morocco's stories under the "Stuff to ask Lindsey about when she's back in the States" category. Someday I will probably post something, but until then you will simply have to enjoy the pictures and wonder what I've been up to! I will however get around to posting about my four days Ghana very soon (maybe even tonight!) and I'm sure I will be able to find time during the 12-day crossing across the Atlantic Ocean from Cape Town to Buenos Aires, Argentina to post about South Africa, so hopefully there won't be such large gaps in my posts any more!
Also, for those of you who keep track, I am back to being 9 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.
Anyhow, yesterday was the official 50th anniversary of Semester at Sea, so tonight they will be telling stories about the voyages and giving out cake on deck 5, so I'm going to head up there and try to get myself a spot and a slice!
Hey everyone! It's me again! Well, a lot has happened since my last post about Lisbon, Portugal. I have been to Spain, Morocco, Ghana, and in a few days will be arriving in Cape Town, South Africa. At the moment the ship is stopped in Namibia refueling, which pretty much just means that we can look out the windows and see city rather than ocean, but we aren't allowed to disembark, so nothing much to report there.
I'm going to change pace a bit; since I would like to no longer be behind in my blog, I am officially putting Spain and Morocco's stories under the "Stuff to ask Lindsey about when she's back in the States" category. Someday I will probably post something, but until then you will simply have to enjoy the pictures and wonder what I've been up to! I will however get around to posting about my four days Ghana very soon (maybe even tonight!) and I'm sure I will be able to find time during the 12-day crossing across the Atlantic Ocean from Cape Town to Buenos Aires, Argentina to post about South Africa, so hopefully there won't be such large gaps in my posts any more!
Also, for those of you who keep track, I am back to being 9 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.
Anyhow, yesterday was the official 50th anniversary of Semester at Sea, so tonight they will be telling stories about the voyages and giving out cake on deck 5, so I'm going to head up there and try to get myself a spot and a slice!
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Octopus Salad and Vasco da Gama!
Location: Off the coast of West Africa
Wow, that was a bit of a leap, huh? Anyone still reading this? It has been 13 days since my last post, and I have now been to Portugal, Spain, and Morocco, as well as completed an essay, two midterms, two quizzes and approximately 150 pages combined readings for my World Literature, Medical Anthropology, and Cross-Cultural Psychology classes! So there was basically a marginal amount of time left over for sleep and no time for blogging. But since we're still a couple of days away from Ghana (and I don't have my third midterm until the day after tomorrow) I thought I'd try to catch up a bit and let you know what I've been up to since Ireland!
Lisbon, Portugal: 9/27-9/28
When we were briefed on Portugal at Logistical Pre-port, we were informed that there was a 100% chance of rain for the first day and a 71% for the second day. Sunny skies were not in the forecast––thunderstorms were. That night the ship was rolling a bit more enthusiastically than usual, and they actually closed the portholes of the folks living on the lower decks. Those whose portholes were not closed (and who actually have them; remember, I'm in an inside cabin, so no porthole) reported seeing lighting over the ocean that night.
Thus the stage is set for my first day in Lisbon, Portugal! We were only going to be there two days, and on the first day I had a field lab for my Mixed Media Visual Journal class. If you recall, field labs are day-long field trips in one of the countries which are a required component for each of our four classes. They tend to be really fun/interesting, and the cost is included in tuition so it feels like a day of everything being free. This would be my second field lab, and the last before I reach South America (yes, I have no field labs on the continent of Africa and two in Brazil alone. Not sure what's up with that.)
Looking out the windows of the ship as we waited for it to clear for disembarkation one could see a swirling and slightly foreboding mass of gray clouds hovering over the whitewashed face of Lisbon. The forecast also said that it was supposed to be in the 70s, a fact which I had trouble reconciling with the view out the window. But sure enough, when we finally stepped off the ship we were buffeted by strong, salty, and very warm winds as we made our way toward the bus.
Strangely enough, it did not rain on us at all that day. It would make up for it the next day, but more on that in a minute.
The field lab was technically supposed to be focused on tile art over Lisbon, but our first stop was actually a non-tile related one: Jerónimos Monastery! We had a quick tour around part of it, and then we each found a place to sit and draw in the main cloister. It was gorgeous, and would have been really fun, except that our teacher insisted we spend the entire time using the continuous line technique (basically after you start drawing you are not allowed to lift up your pencil, so no erasing or moving to another part of the page without drawing yourself a line to get there.) That was really frustrating. We were there for about an hour and I was already exasperated with the technique after about thirty minutes. But the place was beautiful enough to make up for it, even though I had to draw instead of taking a bunch of pictures like I wanted to.
We had boxed lunches from the ship out in front of the monastery, and then headed to a tile museum. We were toured around and then had a little free time to explore the museum on our own or sit and sketch (of course now that I'm tired of drawing we no longer have to use the silly continuous line technique!) Then we went to another museum, and to a workshop where local woodcarvers demonstrated how they craft and restore chairs, tables, desks, and other wooden objects. That was very neat to see, and the guys who did the carving were very friendly and happy to answer questions (most of them spoke English.)
After that we went into another room where we were each set up with our own tiles to paint! There was the option of either using a stencil or making our own design––I chose the latter, and I'm not sure if maybe I ought to have used a pattern, because as usual I was the last person rushing to finish.
We then took a neat, roundabout route through the Alfama district to get back to our bus, and I liked it enough that I took pictures of street signs so that I could navigate myself back there when I explored on my own the next day (I needn't have bothered, because as it turned out it was pretty close and easy to get to from the ship, but I was prepared just the same!)
After we got back to the ship I joined a small group from the class who were headed out to find dinner, and I ended up having a tasty but odd dish of Octopus Salad.
And that was my first day in Lisbon, Portugal!
On the second day I wanted to head out on my own to explore more of the Alfama district. The ship was really docked at an ideal location; it was only about a seven minute walk to get to the area I had wanted to go back to.
Incidentally, did you guys know Lisbon was actually the first port Christopher Columbus's ship returned to after he came to the Americas in 1492? Vasco da Gama also left from Lisbon on his voyage to India (he's actually buried in the monastery I went to on the first day), and while Ferdinand Magellan began his circumnavigation of the globe in Spain, he was originally from Portugal. The country was actually once a major colonial power in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it even signed the Treaty of Tordesillas with Spain in 1494 to divide up the world along an imaginary line in the Atlantic ocean, with everything to the East belonging to Portugal and everything to the West (i.e. the Americas) belonging to Spain. Either by chance or not, that line happened to go right through what is now Brazil, which is why nearly all of Central and South America is made up of Spanish-speaking countries, but Brazil is Portuguese-speaking (because the Portuguese could lay claim to the part of it that was on their side of the line.) I thought that was pretty interesting!
In any case, my second and last day in Portugal was spent exploring Lisbon! After a few hours of meandering around I stumbled upon a huge flea market, which contained an odd mixture of booths: from those that looked very similar to what one might expect to see in the US, with bags, necklaces, artwork and pottery, to a jumble of makeshift areas where people (mostly immigrants, I think) had set out blankets to display garage-sale-esque wares which included second-hand clothes, household items, and old movies. Of course about every other seller had a stack of Portuguese tiles for sale. I walked around and looked at everything for a little while, but then my perusing was interrupted when the heavens opened up and the promised downpour of the previous day was finally unleashed! I tried to huddle beneath my umbrella as I darted from booth to overhang, and eventually ended up sitting outside a little restaurant trying to Skype my mom over a very fuzzy Skype connection.
And since the ship only had two days in Portugal, that was it! I went back to ship and ate dinner out on deck to a lovely panoramic view of the city, and then we set sail for Cadiz, Spain!
Wow, that was a bit of a leap, huh? Anyone still reading this? It has been 13 days since my last post, and I have now been to Portugal, Spain, and Morocco, as well as completed an essay, two midterms, two quizzes and approximately 150 pages combined readings for my World Literature, Medical Anthropology, and Cross-Cultural Psychology classes! So there was basically a marginal amount of time left over for sleep and no time for blogging. But since we're still a couple of days away from Ghana (and I don't have my third midterm until the day after tomorrow) I thought I'd try to catch up a bit and let you know what I've been up to since Ireland!
Lisbon, Portugal: 9/27-9/28
When we were briefed on Portugal at Logistical Pre-port, we were informed that there was a 100% chance of rain for the first day and a 71% for the second day. Sunny skies were not in the forecast––thunderstorms were. That night the ship was rolling a bit more enthusiastically than usual, and they actually closed the portholes of the folks living on the lower decks. Those whose portholes were not closed (and who actually have them; remember, I'm in an inside cabin, so no porthole) reported seeing lighting over the ocean that night.
Thus the stage is set for my first day in Lisbon, Portugal! We were only going to be there two days, and on the first day I had a field lab for my Mixed Media Visual Journal class. If you recall, field labs are day-long field trips in one of the countries which are a required component for each of our four classes. They tend to be really fun/interesting, and the cost is included in tuition so it feels like a day of everything being free. This would be my second field lab, and the last before I reach South America (yes, I have no field labs on the continent of Africa and two in Brazil alone. Not sure what's up with that.)
Looking out the windows of the ship as we waited for it to clear for disembarkation one could see a swirling and slightly foreboding mass of gray clouds hovering over the whitewashed face of Lisbon. The forecast also said that it was supposed to be in the 70s, a fact which I had trouble reconciling with the view out the window. But sure enough, when we finally stepped off the ship we were buffeted by strong, salty, and very warm winds as we made our way toward the bus.
Strangely enough, it did not rain on us at all that day. It would make up for it the next day, but more on that in a minute.
The field lab was technically supposed to be focused on tile art over Lisbon, but our first stop was actually a non-tile related one: Jerónimos Monastery! We had a quick tour around part of it, and then we each found a place to sit and draw in the main cloister. It was gorgeous, and would have been really fun, except that our teacher insisted we spend the entire time using the continuous line technique (basically after you start drawing you are not allowed to lift up your pencil, so no erasing or moving to another part of the page without drawing yourself a line to get there.) That was really frustrating. We were there for about an hour and I was already exasperated with the technique after about thirty minutes. But the place was beautiful enough to make up for it, even though I had to draw instead of taking a bunch of pictures like I wanted to.
We had boxed lunches from the ship out in front of the monastery, and then headed to a tile museum. We were toured around and then had a little free time to explore the museum on our own or sit and sketch (of course now that I'm tired of drawing we no longer have to use the silly continuous line technique!) Then we went to another museum, and to a workshop where local woodcarvers demonstrated how they craft and restore chairs, tables, desks, and other wooden objects. That was very neat to see, and the guys who did the carving were very friendly and happy to answer questions (most of them spoke English.)
After that we went into another room where we were each set up with our own tiles to paint! There was the option of either using a stencil or making our own design––I chose the latter, and I'm not sure if maybe I ought to have used a pattern, because as usual I was the last person rushing to finish.
We then took a neat, roundabout route through the Alfama district to get back to our bus, and I liked it enough that I took pictures of street signs so that I could navigate myself back there when I explored on my own the next day (I needn't have bothered, because as it turned out it was pretty close and easy to get to from the ship, but I was prepared just the same!)
After we got back to the ship I joined a small group from the class who were headed out to find dinner, and I ended up having a tasty but odd dish of Octopus Salad.
And that was my first day in Lisbon, Portugal!
On the second day I wanted to head out on my own to explore more of the Alfama district. The ship was really docked at an ideal location; it was only about a seven minute walk to get to the area I had wanted to go back to.
Incidentally, did you guys know Lisbon was actually the first port Christopher Columbus's ship returned to after he came to the Americas in 1492? Vasco da Gama also left from Lisbon on his voyage to India (he's actually buried in the monastery I went to on the first day), and while Ferdinand Magellan began his circumnavigation of the globe in Spain, he was originally from Portugal. The country was actually once a major colonial power in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it even signed the Treaty of Tordesillas with Spain in 1494 to divide up the world along an imaginary line in the Atlantic ocean, with everything to the East belonging to Portugal and everything to the West (i.e. the Americas) belonging to Spain. Either by chance or not, that line happened to go right through what is now Brazil, which is why nearly all of Central and South America is made up of Spanish-speaking countries, but Brazil is Portuguese-speaking (because the Portuguese could lay claim to the part of it that was on their side of the line.) I thought that was pretty interesting!
In any case, my second and last day in Portugal was spent exploring Lisbon! After a few hours of meandering around I stumbled upon a huge flea market, which contained an odd mixture of booths: from those that looked very similar to what one might expect to see in the US, with bags, necklaces, artwork and pottery, to a jumble of makeshift areas where people (mostly immigrants, I think) had set out blankets to display garage-sale-esque wares which included second-hand clothes, household items, and old movies. Of course about every other seller had a stack of Portuguese tiles for sale. I walked around and looked at everything for a little while, but then my perusing was interrupted when the heavens opened up and the promised downpour of the previous day was finally unleashed! I tried to huddle beneath my umbrella as I darted from booth to overhang, and eventually ended up sitting outside a little restaurant trying to Skype my mom over a very fuzzy Skype connection.
And since the ship only had two days in Portugal, that was it! I went back to ship and ate dinner out on deck to a lovely panoramic view of the city, and then we set sail for Cadiz, Spain!
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Pubs and Libraries
Location: still headed toward Cadiz, Spain!
Ireland, Day 3 (9/22/13):
I had to head back to Dublin on the 5:30pm bus, and I had already seen the lake, so I decided to dedicated my second day in Glendalough to visiting the round tower and the ruins of the monastic settlement in the ancient graveyard. I asked around town for the best place to have breakfast (which at some hostels is included, but at the Glendalough hostel is not) and was told to head to the Wickalow Heather Restaurant, which was about a mile down the road. I wasn't in a hurry, so I decided to walk there and then come back and view the ruins afterward.
Aside from an impressive number of wasps which eventually drove me inside, the restaurant was nice––I decided to forgo the traditional Irish breakfast on account of its similarity to the traditional English breakfast (seriously, beans are not a breakfast food!) and instead got poached eggs which came with two pieces of toast. Then they brought out another six pieces of toast! Who on earth needs that much toast? I ended up eating most of the toast and then making a butter and jelly sandwich with some more so that I could have it for lunch later.
And then I spent the rest of the day ambling around Glendalough, sketching the monastic ruins and graveyard, and finding a quiet place to sit in the forest and draw while listening to songs from the Lord of the Rings. When it was time to catch the bus back to Dublin I felt very refreshed, and was looking forward to going on the city's famous Literary Pub Crawl, which I had booked a spot on that evening.
There were already a lot of people waiting for the bus, and by the time it arrived the crowd was large enough that I was pretty sure not everyone was going to fit. I quickly established myself toward the front-middle of the line, at which point the driver announced that those with return tickets could get to the front of the queue. Fortunately that is what I had from the day before, so I was able to get on. I knew that the bus was going to be full, so I looked around for someone I'd like to sit next to for the next hour. Then I noticed a girl who I recognized from Semester at Sea, though I hadn't actually spoken to her before, sitting near the front of the bus.
Her name was Kira, and while I was trying to think how I knew her I remembered that it was because she was our student-presenter for Russia––she goes to school in Moscow, but is originally from St. Petersburg. Kira had actually come to Glendalough on the 11:30am bus, done the really long hike up the mountain and all the way around the lake, and then come back to the bus to leave at 5:30pm the same day. She was understandably a bit tired. But when I mentioned that I was doing the Literary Pub Crawl she decided to come with (you can also buy tickets at the door), so after the bus dropped us off in Dublin we headed to the Duke Pub, which is where the Pub Crawl begins from.
So what exactly is a Literary Pub Crawl? Well this particular one is famous because it is led be professional act ors who act out pieces from the works of famous authors from Ireland, and they lead you around to the different pubs that those authors used to frequent. Kira and I arrived a little early, so we went and sat in a side room to wait until we could purchase her ticket and claim mine.
We ended up sitting next to Fernando, a guy interning in Wales who is from Argentina and was visiting Ireland. So the three of us hung together while the Pub Crawl group moved between four pubs and a handful of other notable locations at which one of our guides would fire off a string of facts a mile long which I remember few of now but were really interesting to listen to at the time. In between we would have fifteen minutes or so at each of the pubs for people to hang out and get drinks. Kira and I hadn't had dinner yet and were not really in the mood to drink anything (I don't particularly like alcohol anyhow) and Fernando doesn't like the taste of beer, so our little company consisting of a non-drinking American, Russian, and Argentino made just about the most unlikely group possible to be on a pub crawl in Ireland.
And that is pretty much the gist of my third day in Ireland!
Ireland, Day 4 (9/23/13):
Which brings us to (dun dun dun)... my last and final day! I had one big goal for day four: go to Trinity College and see the old library and the book of Kells. The consensus seemed to be that to get the full experience one should sign up for a walking tour of the college, which includes the entrance to see the book of Kells and is only a couple Euros more.
So after wandering around Dublin for a while in search of breakfast, that is what I did! Our guide told us all sorts of things about the college (he was actually about to graduate and go to Oxford, so he said to forgive him if he got a bit nostalgic) and about the Book of Kells, which is considered one of the world's finest illuminated manuscripts and a national treasure of Ireland. There is a several-room informational display about the book's history and construction before you actually see it, so by the time I had gotten breakfast, did the college tour, and read all of the information the day was getting pretty far along (remember I have to be back on the boat before on-ship time at 18:00!)
The book itself was neat, but there were so many people crowded around that you couldn't really just stand and look at it for very long, so I think I actually enjoyed learning about it beforehand the most. For example, the Book of Kells actually contains the four New Testament Gospels, but the Celtic monks who created it were much less concerned with the content than with the style and beauty with which that content was presented, which meant that parts of it are hard to read because the monks would skip or forget bits and then add them later completely out of sequence, or they would abridge and abbreviate other parts.
We weren't allowed to take picture in the exhibit, but if you want to see what the Book of Kells looks like I would highly recommend googling it (or using the handy Wikipedia search bar that I put on the right-hand side of the page just for you guys!)
I then entered the Trinity College Library, which consists of one large and very impressive room with shelves of ancient books spanning multiple levels. Apparently it was mostly built to just be impressive, because at the time (according to our walking tour guide) there were only enough books to fill about 1/3 of it. The books were also organized in a most peculiar way: by size, with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on top, because it looked good. No idea how anyone ever actually found the book they were looking for with that system.
I cruised around the gift shop for a little while, before looking at the time, and realizing that while on-ship time is at 18:00, the last shuttle to get back to the ship leaves at 16:30. It was 16:15, and I still had to go and get postcards and a pin (I'm collecting them from each country.) Oops! Fortunately I knew exactly where I was going to get the postcards and the pin (then why hadn't I gotten them earlier? You've got to wonder...), but unfortunately they were in the opposite direction from the shuttle. So I'm speed-walking through the streets, getting everything that I was going to get, and arriving at the place the shuttle is supposed to be at 16:27––––but there's no shuttle. Great. They must have gotten full and already left. I had never actually had to walk back to the ship before, and although there was still technically an hour and a half until on-ship time I was still a bit nervous. I could see the ship waaay in the distance, so I spent the next half an hour speed walking there. Then I spent about ten minutes being lost in the harbor before finally finding and boarding the ship with almost 40 minutes to spare. Whew.
And that was Ireland! Stay tuned for when I get around to Portugal (no idea when that will be), and as always comments are very much appreciated!
Ireland, Day 3 (9/22/13):
I had to head back to Dublin on the 5:30pm bus, and I had already seen the lake, so I decided to dedicated my second day in Glendalough to visiting the round tower and the ruins of the monastic settlement in the ancient graveyard. I asked around town for the best place to have breakfast (which at some hostels is included, but at the Glendalough hostel is not) and was told to head to the Wickalow Heather Restaurant, which was about a mile down the road. I wasn't in a hurry, so I decided to walk there and then come back and view the ruins afterward.
Aside from an impressive number of wasps which eventually drove me inside, the restaurant was nice––I decided to forgo the traditional Irish breakfast on account of its similarity to the traditional English breakfast (seriously, beans are not a breakfast food!) and instead got poached eggs which came with two pieces of toast. Then they brought out another six pieces of toast! Who on earth needs that much toast? I ended up eating most of the toast and then making a butter and jelly sandwich with some more so that I could have it for lunch later.
And then I spent the rest of the day ambling around Glendalough, sketching the monastic ruins and graveyard, and finding a quiet place to sit in the forest and draw while listening to songs from the Lord of the Rings. When it was time to catch the bus back to Dublin I felt very refreshed, and was looking forward to going on the city's famous Literary Pub Crawl, which I had booked a spot on that evening.
There were already a lot of people waiting for the bus, and by the time it arrived the crowd was large enough that I was pretty sure not everyone was going to fit. I quickly established myself toward the front-middle of the line, at which point the driver announced that those with return tickets could get to the front of the queue. Fortunately that is what I had from the day before, so I was able to get on. I knew that the bus was going to be full, so I looked around for someone I'd like to sit next to for the next hour. Then I noticed a girl who I recognized from Semester at Sea, though I hadn't actually spoken to her before, sitting near the front of the bus.
Her name was Kira, and while I was trying to think how I knew her I remembered that it was because she was our student-presenter for Russia––she goes to school in Moscow, but is originally from St. Petersburg. Kira had actually come to Glendalough on the 11:30am bus, done the really long hike up the mountain and all the way around the lake, and then come back to the bus to leave at 5:30pm the same day. She was understandably a bit tired. But when I mentioned that I was doing the Literary Pub Crawl she decided to come with (you can also buy tickets at the door), so after the bus dropped us off in Dublin we headed to the Duke Pub, which is where the Pub Crawl begins from.
So what exactly is a Literary Pub Crawl? Well this particular one is famous because it is led be professional act ors who act out pieces from the works of famous authors from Ireland, and they lead you around to the different pubs that those authors used to frequent. Kira and I arrived a little early, so we went and sat in a side room to wait until we could purchase her ticket and claim mine.
We ended up sitting next to Fernando, a guy interning in Wales who is from Argentina and was visiting Ireland. So the three of us hung together while the Pub Crawl group moved between four pubs and a handful of other notable locations at which one of our guides would fire off a string of facts a mile long which I remember few of now but were really interesting to listen to at the time. In between we would have fifteen minutes or so at each of the pubs for people to hang out and get drinks. Kira and I hadn't had dinner yet and were not really in the mood to drink anything (I don't particularly like alcohol anyhow) and Fernando doesn't like the taste of beer, so our little company consisting of a non-drinking American, Russian, and Argentino made just about the most unlikely group possible to be on a pub crawl in Ireland.
And that is pretty much the gist of my third day in Ireland!
Ireland, Day 4 (9/23/13):
Which brings us to (dun dun dun)... my last and final day! I had one big goal for day four: go to Trinity College and see the old library and the book of Kells. The consensus seemed to be that to get the full experience one should sign up for a walking tour of the college, which includes the entrance to see the book of Kells and is only a couple Euros more.
So after wandering around Dublin for a while in search of breakfast, that is what I did! Our guide told us all sorts of things about the college (he was actually about to graduate and go to Oxford, so he said to forgive him if he got a bit nostalgic) and about the Book of Kells, which is considered one of the world's finest illuminated manuscripts and a national treasure of Ireland. There is a several-room informational display about the book's history and construction before you actually see it, so by the time I had gotten breakfast, did the college tour, and read all of the information the day was getting pretty far along (remember I have to be back on the boat before on-ship time at 18:00!)
The book itself was neat, but there were so many people crowded around that you couldn't really just stand and look at it for very long, so I think I actually enjoyed learning about it beforehand the most. For example, the Book of Kells actually contains the four New Testament Gospels, but the Celtic monks who created it were much less concerned with the content than with the style and beauty with which that content was presented, which meant that parts of it are hard to read because the monks would skip or forget bits and then add them later completely out of sequence, or they would abridge and abbreviate other parts.
We weren't allowed to take picture in the exhibit, but if you want to see what the Book of Kells looks like I would highly recommend googling it (or using the handy Wikipedia search bar that I put on the right-hand side of the page just for you guys!)
I then entered the Trinity College Library, which consists of one large and very impressive room with shelves of ancient books spanning multiple levels. Apparently it was mostly built to just be impressive, because at the time (according to our walking tour guide) there were only enough books to fill about 1/3 of it. The books were also organized in a most peculiar way: by size, with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on top, because it looked good. No idea how anyone ever actually found the book they were looking for with that system.
I cruised around the gift shop for a little while, before looking at the time, and realizing that while on-ship time is at 18:00, the last shuttle to get back to the ship leaves at 16:30. It was 16:15, and I still had to go and get postcards and a pin (I'm collecting them from each country.) Oops! Fortunately I knew exactly where I was going to get the postcards and the pin (then why hadn't I gotten them earlier? You've got to wonder...), but unfortunately they were in the opposite direction from the shuttle. So I'm speed-walking through the streets, getting everything that I was going to get, and arriving at the place the shuttle is supposed to be at 16:27––––but there's no shuttle. Great. They must have gotten full and already left. I had never actually had to walk back to the ship before, and although there was still technically an hour and a half until on-ship time I was still a bit nervous. I could see the ship waaay in the distance, so I spent the next half an hour speed walking there. Then I spent about ten minutes being lost in the harbor before finally finding and boarding the ship with almost 40 minutes to spare. Whew.
And that was Ireland! Stay tuned for when I get around to Portugal (no idea when that will be), and as always comments are very much appreciated!
Glendalough
Location: Southbound from Lisbon, Portugal
Yes, I made it to Lisbon!... and the ship actually left again today to head to Cadiz, Spain. That was fast. Anyhow, I decided to stay with the ship instead of traveling overland from Lisbon to Cadiz––remember how I did that from Antwerp, Belgium to Le Havre, France? Well there was the option to do it again here because the ports are so close together, but I decided not to because it seemed expensive and I had a hard time figuring out train/bus routes that would actually take me where I wanted to go. Over half the students on the ship decided to go overland, so it's pretty quiet here for once, which is nice. Hopefully this means that I can finally get caught up with the present on my blog!
Ireland, Day 2 (9/21):
After spending so much time in cities over the past couple of weeks I was itching to head to the countryside. And where better to do so than in Ireland? So I decided to go to Glendalough (glen-duh-lock), a little former monastic settlement founded in the 6th century by St. Kevin, which is located about an hour south of Dublin in the county Wicklow. There aren't around any public buses or trains to Glendalough, but there is a private bus similar to the Diamond Express (not nearly as cute though) which goes to Glendalough and back twice a day. It leaves Dublin at 11:30am, so on the morning of the 21st I packed a couple of bags, spent a little time exploring the area of Dublin around the bus stop, and then was on my way!
I had actually found out all of the information that I would need ahead of time, during my last day at Le Havre, so I was fairly confident that I knew where I was going and what I was doing. The one snag in this plan was that I wanted to spend two days in Glendalough, and this necessitated some kind of lodging. There is a youth hostel in Glendalough; it is a well-reviewed and generally pleasant-sounding place. It also does not accept debit card reservations online. So having been unable to secure a place to spend the night ahead of time, I boarded the bus with a feeling my mild trepidation. Would the hostel be full when I arrived? Hopefully not, because then I would either need to find the least-expensive B&B I could or go head back to the ship on the 5:30 bus that evening, which would be no fun.
So the bus pulls into Glendalough and drops us all off right in front of the visitor center. Convenient! I get myself a map and ask the woman at the desk where the hostel is located. She instructs me to go back to the main road, turn left, and just keep walking until I find it (apparently you can't miss it.)
It is a beautiful day; the sun is shining, and I have finally left the city! With a spring in my step I meander down the road, past a few stone buildings, over a little bridge, and past a small cluster of food/souvenir stalls. There isn't much room on the side of the road to walk, and I hug the edges as I climb a small hill and find myself passing an area of alternating fields and trees, leaving behind the small patch of civilization in the valley. The iconic round tower of Glendalough and the ancient graveyard at its feet rise up on the other side of a field to my left, and I snap a few pictures before hurrying on, anxious to see whether I will have a place to stay for the night.
My description makes it sound like I was walking for a while, but it really only a few minutes (like I said, the place isn't very big) before I rounded a corner and found myself facing a large and cheery yellow building with the sign, "Glendalough International Hostel" painted in flowing blue script on the sign out front. I had arrived!
The interior of the hostel is very nice; there is a large lounge area with a wall full of DVDs for rent, and down a side corridor is a several-room dining area. I approach the reception desk hopefully. The lady behind the front desk says that yes, there are beds still available (spiffy!), but that check-in is not for another few hours. I could leave my stuff in the side room and take a walk if I wanted, and she would put my name down for when I return. With a feeling of triumph, I march into the side room she is indicating. There are no lockers, and the room itself is not locked/watched like the places that Jazlin and I had left our backpacks while traveling in England had been. Huh. That doesn't seem particularly secure.
There are two other people in the room, and a whole pile of backpacks sitting on a fold-out table in the far corner. I ask the people if that is where one leaves ones stuff. Yes, apparently so. Now I look at the little fold-up backpack I had brought with me, which isn't very heavy but I would still rather not have to wear it for the next few hours, and decide that if anyone is really dying to steal its contents then they can go for it (I believe it contained some clothes and a sketchpad.) I transferred everything of actual value to the medium-sized blue satchel I had purchased in England and now carry everywhere with me.
Then I deposited my bag beside the heap of backpacks and set out to explore Glendalough!
I'm not sure my every move is worth recounting from here (if it ever was) so I'll just say that I got some food from one of the street stalls that I had passed earlier, found a the trail leading to the upper lake, and followed it through the forest. As it turns out, Glendalough is a very popular tourist/day-trip destination, so although the town itself isn't very big, there are tourists everywhere––especially during the peak times of day (like at that moment) when you would be hard pressed to take a picture along the path and not have people dotted all along it. Which was fine with me, because they were a generally freindly bunch, and there were a large number of Spanish-speakers to try and eavesdrop on (not that I do that!)
At one point I saw another path diverging in the wood, which everyone else was walking past (yes, I had a Robert Frost moment there, thanks for noticing.) It was mossy and pleasant-looking, so I ambled down the hill and started along it. After about a minute, the path was much less noticable. After a couple minutes, it was almost gone entirely. I kept going for a little while after that, relishing the thick green moss beneath my feet and the feeling of being able to look in every direction and not see any people. This lasted for only a few minutes, before I saw that another small group had also discovered the trail some distance back, and I headed back to the main path and continued toward the lake.
I spend a while exploring the area and sketching the lake before heading back into town. The lady at the hostel had informed me that the hotel in town had free WiFi (you have to pay for it at the hostel), and I was itching to try to call family members who I hadn't spoken to in weeks, so I took out my iPod and the headphone/microphone set that I had borrowed from someone on the ship and spent a very enjoyable couple of hours talking with my Dad and my grandmother in Minnesota via Skype.
By the time I got off the phone it was getting dark, and I still needed to get dinner. The food stalls were now closed, as was the barbecuing that I seen from a distance earlier. Fortunately the bar attached to the hotel was open, so I ordered a bowl of smoked salmon and seafood chowder, which was very tasty and contained what I thought to be a very liberal amount of fish for the price.
By the time I finished that it actually was dark out, and I pulled out my flashlight and I made my way back to the hostel, enjoying the quiet and the feel of the night air (while mentally acknowledging that traveling at night is right up there with traveling alone in terms of the number of warnings we have received in our pre-port lectures. So traveling alone and at night would definitely be admonishment-worthy. Heh.)
So of course I made it back to the hostel. Yes, by stuff was still there, sitting all by itself in the corner of the side room. I had to interrupt the reception lady during her dinner, but she was nice and I got keys and borrowed a plug adaptor to recharge my iPod (yes, I felt very silly for forgetting my adaptor on the ship.) I also figured out the machines to get a couple of internet cards. You see, the reason that I had actually borrowed the headphone/microphone on the ship and was now making sure that I had internet and that my iPod was charged was because the 21st was my grandpa's birthday and I was planning on surprising him with a call at dinner. Of course, Ireland is 8 hours ahead of the Pacific Northwest, so dinner time for them would be about 2am for me. But I was a woman on a mission! So I headed for my room (an 8-bed female dorm to which none of the other three occupants had returned yet), set my alarm to 2am, and went to bed early (well, early for me.)
That is technically the end of the 21st, but I will mention that I did indeed manage to wake up, find a place where my 2am phone call hopefully wouldn't disturb anyone, and say happy birthday to my grandpa––surprising people is always fun, and it was nice talking with my grandparents again.
Goodness––I know I always say this, but I've got to curb the descriptive rambling on my next posts, or I'm never going to get to Portugal!
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Taxidermy and Hippopotamuses!
Location: Southbound in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the westernmost coast of Spain
Yes, we have officially left the shallow seas and entered the Atlantic Ocean! According to one of our marine biologists the approximately 300-foot deep waters of the continental shelf that we were traveling along gave way yesterday to waters that are now over two and a half miles deep. People have been seeing dolphins and whales all day (I missed them though) and everyone is really stoked for our arrival sometime tomorrow in Lisbon, Portugal (though we won't actually get to disembark until Friday.)
Anyhow, who wants to hear about Ireland?
Ireland, Day 1 (9/20/13):
I awoke on Friday morning with the sole plan of spending the day exploring our port of call: Dublin, Ireland. Known for its rainy weather, multitude of pubs, famous writers who once frequented those pubs, and Trinity College, home of the magnificent Book of Kells, I think that the city of Dublin is one of the more interesting ports at which we have stopped. It is also the first port in which a small fleet of shuttle buses were requisitioned on our behalf, so that instead of having to walk for about 40 minutes from the docks to the city center we only had to walk about 5 minutes there from where the shuttle dropped us off along George's Quay. It wasn't until the last day that I fully appreciated this service, but that is a story for a later post.
I actually do not have that much to say about my first day in Dublin. This may be due to a lack of interesting occurrences (impossible!) or simply that it has been too long and none of them are coming to mind at the moment. In any case, I disembarked the shuttle and set out on my own (armed with a map of Dublin that I picked up from the field program desk on the ship), though my group of one quickly became a group of two which then later picked up a third member. We spent the day walking all around Dublin; we went to Dublinia, Christ Church Cathedral, the Temple Bar area, Trinity College, and Dublin Castle.
We also walked through the Museum of Natural and Cultural History. From the name, one might expect to find an ordinary museum filled with informational displays about, say, the natural and cultural history of Ireland. Well, not exactly. The museum actually consisted of two rooms, one on the ground floor and another upstairs, which were packed full of... taxidermied animals! (Spell-check is telling me that "taxidermied" isn't actually a word––you get what I'm saying though, right?) Apparently there were over two million animals, all arranged in little exhibits showcasing their behavior in their natural habitats. In the first room there were cases of birds, mammals, marine animals, and insects all native to Ireland, including huge skeletal Irish Elk to waiting to greet you as you enter. Then upstairs there were animals from all over the world: kangaroos, giraffes, lions, elephants–––did you know that hippopotamuses are really huge? The one on display was almost twice as big as the Buffalo!
Anyhow, that was an odd but interesting experience. The museum was actually open later than usual because the 20th happened to be culture day in Dublin, which is characterized by all sorts of neat things that I didn't end up taking advantage of because due to the lack of internet I didn't get the schedule until halfway through the day and didn't have time to adequately plan anything. Oh well.
After leaving the museum the three of us spent almost an hour bumbling around trying to find some good, inexpensive Irish food (don't laugh, it was actually really hard!) None of us wanted to go to one of the Temple Bar pubs and spend upwards of $20 on a meal that didn't even include a beverage, and our only other options seemed to be foreign food (eating Spanish food in Ireland just felt wrong) or a convenience store. We did eventually get dinner though, and we made it back to George's Quay well before the shuttles stopped running (around 23:30 every night) so everything was good.
...and speaking of everything being good, I'm actually procrastinating on finishing an essay for my Cross-Cultural Psychology class right now by writing this blog post. So I should really go do that now.
Don't forget to comment!
Yes, we have officially left the shallow seas and entered the Atlantic Ocean! According to one of our marine biologists the approximately 300-foot deep waters of the continental shelf that we were traveling along gave way yesterday to waters that are now over two and a half miles deep. People have been seeing dolphins and whales all day (I missed them though) and everyone is really stoked for our arrival sometime tomorrow in Lisbon, Portugal (though we won't actually get to disembark until Friday.)
Anyhow, who wants to hear about Ireland?
Ireland, Day 1 (9/20/13):
I awoke on Friday morning with the sole plan of spending the day exploring our port of call: Dublin, Ireland. Known for its rainy weather, multitude of pubs, famous writers who once frequented those pubs, and Trinity College, home of the magnificent Book of Kells, I think that the city of Dublin is one of the more interesting ports at which we have stopped. It is also the first port in which a small fleet of shuttle buses were requisitioned on our behalf, so that instead of having to walk for about 40 minutes from the docks to the city center we only had to walk about 5 minutes there from where the shuttle dropped us off along George's Quay. It wasn't until the last day that I fully appreciated this service, but that is a story for a later post.
I actually do not have that much to say about my first day in Dublin. This may be due to a lack of interesting occurrences (impossible!) or simply that it has been too long and none of them are coming to mind at the moment. In any case, I disembarked the shuttle and set out on my own (armed with a map of Dublin that I picked up from the field program desk on the ship), though my group of one quickly became a group of two which then later picked up a third member. We spent the day walking all around Dublin; we went to Dublinia, Christ Church Cathedral, the Temple Bar area, Trinity College, and Dublin Castle.
We also walked through the Museum of Natural and Cultural History. From the name, one might expect to find an ordinary museum filled with informational displays about, say, the natural and cultural history of Ireland. Well, not exactly. The museum actually consisted of two rooms, one on the ground floor and another upstairs, which were packed full of... taxidermied animals! (Spell-check is telling me that "taxidermied" isn't actually a word––you get what I'm saying though, right?) Apparently there were over two million animals, all arranged in little exhibits showcasing their behavior in their natural habitats. In the first room there were cases of birds, mammals, marine animals, and insects all native to Ireland, including huge skeletal Irish Elk to waiting to greet you as you enter. Then upstairs there were animals from all over the world: kangaroos, giraffes, lions, elephants–––did you know that hippopotamuses are really huge? The one on display was almost twice as big as the Buffalo!
Anyhow, that was an odd but interesting experience. The museum was actually open later than usual because the 20th happened to be culture day in Dublin, which is characterized by all sorts of neat things that I didn't end up taking advantage of because due to the lack of internet I didn't get the schedule until halfway through the day and didn't have time to adequately plan anything. Oh well.
After leaving the museum the three of us spent almost an hour bumbling around trying to find some good, inexpensive Irish food (don't laugh, it was actually really hard!) None of us wanted to go to one of the Temple Bar pubs and spend upwards of $20 on a meal that didn't even include a beverage, and our only other options seemed to be foreign food (eating Spanish food in Ireland just felt wrong) or a convenience store. We did eventually get dinner though, and we made it back to George's Quay well before the shuttles stopped running (around 23:30 every night) so everything was good.
...and speaking of everything being good, I'm actually procrastinating on finishing an essay for my Cross-Cultural Psychology class right now by writing this blog post. So I should really go do that now.
Don't forget to comment!
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Pictures from Paris
The Clock Ticks, Yet No Clever Titles Occur!
Location: Leaving Dublin, Ireland
Why look––it's me again! I'm not sure how often people check this blog, but I imagine at least some of you were wondering at my five-day absence. Well, first I had another paper due in my World Literature class, so I was up half of the night last Wednesday finishing that. And then through some fluke the ship's internet apparently doesn't work around the port in Dublin. No idea why that area would be a problem, but within two hours of the ship embarking the internet was back and I could use my email again. We were in Ireland for four days, during which time I explored both Dublin and a little town/region to the south called Glendalough (glen-dah-lock.) I will now endeavor to finish off my posts for France (can't believe I'm so far behind!) and then later move on to the last four days in Ireland.
Before I do that though, I would like to once again thank everyone who has been following along with the blog––seriously, I love knowing that you're out there (and I had no idea how many of you there are!)
France, 9/15 & 9/16: Paris to Le Havre
I awoke on the morning of the 15th to my ever-pesky alarm clock, and to the quirky little room of my hostel in Paris, France. The sun was streaming though the windows, and all but one of my roommates were already down at breakfast. The Aloha hostel is one in which breakfast is included in the price, so not wanting to miss out on that I scuttled down the staircase and into a cozy basement room packed with tables and benches (and people more awake than I seated on those benches chatting animatedly over their breakfasts.) After finishing a satisfying meal of jellied pastry, cereal, and tea, I grabbed a Paris map from reception and set off into Paris!
The way I figured it, there were two options for my partial-day in Paris: #1) I could take the metro and spend the day whizzing around below the city, popping up from time to time at some attraction and then descending back down into the depths to jet on off to another. #2) I could start walking, resign myself that it really isn't possible to see everything in a single day, and just enjoy the scenery (in the sunlight!)
Guess which one I went with?
So during my leisurely stroll through the less-touristy part of Paris on my way toward the Eiffel Tower (which was apparently only a 15-minute walk from the hostel), I passed many shops with flowers, pastries, fruits, and assorted meats before stumbling upon a decently-sized street market under a bridge. It was in this market that I witnessed the first stage of the price mark-up process: it was a basket at one of the first booths, full of relatively cheap little Eiffel Tower trinkets in a variety of colors. They were 4 for 1 Euro.
After snapping a few pictures (and purchasing a few pastries!) I kept making my way toward where the map said that the Eiffel Tower was located. Then I turned a corner and I could see it! Part of the street was sectioned-off and crowds of onlookers were cheering at a steady stream of pink-shirted runners who were raising money for a cause of some sort (never figured out what exactly––everything is in French, remember) and through the trees, rising up in the distance, was the Eiffel Tower framed against the horizon.
I pass a small booth perched on the side of the road, selling souvenirs, and I am met with the second stage of the price mark-up process: more of the little Eiffel Towers, and this time they are 1 for 1 Euro. The cost is four times higher now that the Tower itself is in view. Hmm...
So I finally make it to the base of one of the Tower's legs and look up at the enormous structure indecisively. Do I pay and take the time to climb up into it, or am I happy taking pictures from the ground? After all, it's not like you can see the tower itself while you are inside it (well, you know what I mean––you see parts of it up close, but not really in a photo-op kind of way.) On the other hand, which kind of person comes all the way to Paris and doesn't go up in the Eiffel Tower?
I sit and munch on pastries at a bench in the nearby park while pondering this. A ragtag group of very desperate pigeons nearby are chased by a gleeful grade-schooler. They then set their sights on my pastries, and one of the huddle actually doesn't notice when I reach out to touch it. Definitely feeling a bit pet-depived: I'm starting to turn to pigeons. Okay, okay, back to the Eiffel Tower!
So I made up my mind, got up, plunged back into the swarms of tourists milling about at the base of the tower (did I mention that there were tons of tourists around? Because there were!) and parked myself decisively waaay at the back of one of the lines. Then I waited. It really didn't take that long, and I amused myself by trying to eavesdrop on the Spanish-speaking family in front of me (I understood some of what they were saying!) I had decided that I would take the lift up to the second floor, because I wanted to do more than just walk to the first floor, and the top floor was closed (and I didn't really want to pay to go all the way up there anyway.)
There is actually a little security check point that you have to go through before they let you up into the tower. I nervously scanned the list of prohibited items, knowing that I really had no way locking up anything that I couldn't bring with me into the Tower. Fortunately the only thing relevant was no glass bottles, and mine was metal. I did run into a bit of a problem when the security officer tried to clarify something and I had no idea what he was saying (he didn't speak any English and I didn't speak any French.) He waved me on though––I guess I don't exactly scream "big threat to monument security."
The view was neat from the second floor, and I probably took more cityscape pictures than was strictly necessary. I also become the unofficial Eiffel Tower photographer when I offered to take pictures for a couple of people (you know how it is when you go someplace with only one other person and you both want to be in the picture, but instead you each take turns getting a photo of the other person? Well I tend to take pity on people I see in that situation) and then a small queue of others jumped at the chance to have me take theirs as well. One of these individuals was a middle-aged Asian man with his wife, and he handed me an ancient film camera which I had to struggle for a moment to figure out how to work. Another was a couple from China who had just gotten married and were there on their honeymoon; they wanted pictures with me in it too. I probably interacted with more tourists than actual French people, but I guess that is inevitable with how little time I got to spend in France, and how much of it was in tourist areas.
Anyhow, I realized that I should probably move on if I wanted to have time to do anything else before catching my train, and as I stepped down out of one of the legs of the Tower I encountered the third and final stage of the infamous price mark-up process: right at the base of the Tower was yet another souvenir stand, and sure enough, sitting in an identical basket were the miniature Eiffel Towers... now 1 for 2.5 Euro! That is a whopping 10x more expensive than the first ones that I had seen. Obviously this makes sense, and isn't a particularly new concept to anyone––I just had never seen it laid out in such tidy steps before, so I had to share.
After separating myself from the throng of tourists at the foot of the Tower, I set off to go see the Louvre! This involved quite a bit of walking (I was still stubbornly avoiding the subway), especially since the Tower is a decent distance away from many of the other attractions in Paris.
But I made it there! You know how often times you see a lot of awesome pictures of someplace you are about to visit and then when you actually get there you think "This is it?" Well, I was expecting to feel that way (especially since I knew I didn't have time to actually go inside the Louvre to look at anything, and would be mostly taking pictures of the outside), but I am pleased to note that I was surprised at the area around the museum and how nice of a walk it was to get there. I was sort of expecting it to just parked in the middle of the city somewhere (hey, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg was!), but it actually has its own area right next to the "Jardin des Tuileries," which I entered from the west side and walked along all the way to the museum itself. I did stop briefly to pick up the least expensive food that I could find at one of the park's outdoor restaurants (butter and powdered sugar crepe, yum!) and to sketch some of the expansive gardens out front. Then, all of a sudden, I walk up some steps and there it was!
I realize that it's a bit silly to say I went to the Louvre, when all I really did was stand outside and take some pictures of it and the glass pyramid in front. But I figured that it would be better not to wait in line, pay for a ticket, and then be there for like 20 minutes before having to leave. I would rather come back some day and actually have time to walk around. (Plus, don't tell anyone, but I'm starting to get a bit tired of museums.)
Speaking of time, I was almost out of it! As it so happens, Paris is pretty big (no, really?) and walking around the city takes a while. I did wish that I had gotten to see the Notre Dame and Sainte Chapelle, but I didn't regret not spending the day rushing around on the subway. I toyed with the idea of spending another night and then catching the train to Le Havre the following morning, but quickly nixed that plan––one really shouldn't mess with on-ship time, and I wanted to make sure that I was in Le Havre staying close to the ship on the last day rather than having to worry about a train getting delayed and the ship leaving without me (I don't even want to think about how that would play out!)
So I caught a bus to the train station (which took a bit of doing, because I wasn't sure how to pronounce it to the bus driver), waited in the ticket line because the automatic machines did not want to cooperate, and managed to get myself a train ticket from a helpful lady who spoke a little English (I pointed to the word "Le Havre" this time, instead of trying to pronounce it, which I think helped that process.) After a bit of a wait I was on a train bound for the coastal town of Le Havre, where hopefully I would find the M.V. Explorer waiting for me!
The ride took a while, and the girl I was sitting across from was non-communicative, so I mostly slept on the way there. It was dark when I arrived, and as I stepped off of the platform I realized that French railway stations are not nearly so liberal with maps of the surrounding city as Belgian ones are. Which posed a problem, as I had absolutely no idea where I was or where the ship was (well, I did have a name and a direction, and I maintain that I could have found it on my own eventually!) Fortunately, almost as soon as I got off the train I encountered a massive group of about 15 other SASers who, like me, had come overland and just arrived in Le Havre on another part of the same train.
So we all set off the direction we thought the ship was, huddling in our jackets against the crazy coastal winds which buffeted us on our way through the dark and empty streets of Le Havre. Then we saw it––the little string of lights atop the M.V. Explorer glimmering way in the distance. By the time we actually made it there I was so happy to see the ship; I think that was the first moment it really felt like coming home.
This has become yet another very long post, but I did promise at the top that I would be providing an overview of day five as well as four, so I'll just say that on day five I felt I'd had enough adventure in my life, and decided to just stay in Le Havre and hang out in a cafe with internet. So that is what I did! I had another crepe and some tea while planning what I would do in Ireland and Skyping my mom. Then I grabbed some groceries from a small store nearby and made it back to the ship about an hour before on-ship time.
Okay, next post: Ireland! I can catch up before we reach Portugal!
Why look––it's me again! I'm not sure how often people check this blog, but I imagine at least some of you were wondering at my five-day absence. Well, first I had another paper due in my World Literature class, so I was up half of the night last Wednesday finishing that. And then through some fluke the ship's internet apparently doesn't work around the port in Dublin. No idea why that area would be a problem, but within two hours of the ship embarking the internet was back and I could use my email again. We were in Ireland for four days, during which time I explored both Dublin and a little town/region to the south called Glendalough (glen-dah-lock.) I will now endeavor to finish off my posts for France (can't believe I'm so far behind!) and then later move on to the last four days in Ireland.
Before I do that though, I would like to once again thank everyone who has been following along with the blog––seriously, I love knowing that you're out there (and I had no idea how many of you there are!)
France, 9/15 & 9/16: Paris to Le Havre
I awoke on the morning of the 15th to my ever-pesky alarm clock, and to the quirky little room of my hostel in Paris, France. The sun was streaming though the windows, and all but one of my roommates were already down at breakfast. The Aloha hostel is one in which breakfast is included in the price, so not wanting to miss out on that I scuttled down the staircase and into a cozy basement room packed with tables and benches (and people more awake than I seated on those benches chatting animatedly over their breakfasts.) After finishing a satisfying meal of jellied pastry, cereal, and tea, I grabbed a Paris map from reception and set off into Paris!
The way I figured it, there were two options for my partial-day in Paris: #1) I could take the metro and spend the day whizzing around below the city, popping up from time to time at some attraction and then descending back down into the depths to jet on off to another. #2) I could start walking, resign myself that it really isn't possible to see everything in a single day, and just enjoy the scenery (in the sunlight!)
Guess which one I went with?
So during my leisurely stroll through the less-touristy part of Paris on my way toward the Eiffel Tower (which was apparently only a 15-minute walk from the hostel), I passed many shops with flowers, pastries, fruits, and assorted meats before stumbling upon a decently-sized street market under a bridge. It was in this market that I witnessed the first stage of the price mark-up process: it was a basket at one of the first booths, full of relatively cheap little Eiffel Tower trinkets in a variety of colors. They were 4 for 1 Euro.
After snapping a few pictures (and purchasing a few pastries!) I kept making my way toward where the map said that the Eiffel Tower was located. Then I turned a corner and I could see it! Part of the street was sectioned-off and crowds of onlookers were cheering at a steady stream of pink-shirted runners who were raising money for a cause of some sort (never figured out what exactly––everything is in French, remember) and through the trees, rising up in the distance, was the Eiffel Tower framed against the horizon.
I pass a small booth perched on the side of the road, selling souvenirs, and I am met with the second stage of the price mark-up process: more of the little Eiffel Towers, and this time they are 1 for 1 Euro. The cost is four times higher now that the Tower itself is in view. Hmm...
So I finally make it to the base of one of the Tower's legs and look up at the enormous structure indecisively. Do I pay and take the time to climb up into it, or am I happy taking pictures from the ground? After all, it's not like you can see the tower itself while you are inside it (well, you know what I mean––you see parts of it up close, but not really in a photo-op kind of way.) On the other hand, which kind of person comes all the way to Paris and doesn't go up in the Eiffel Tower?
I sit and munch on pastries at a bench in the nearby park while pondering this. A ragtag group of very desperate pigeons nearby are chased by a gleeful grade-schooler. They then set their sights on my pastries, and one of the huddle actually doesn't notice when I reach out to touch it. Definitely feeling a bit pet-depived: I'm starting to turn to pigeons. Okay, okay, back to the Eiffel Tower!
So I made up my mind, got up, plunged back into the swarms of tourists milling about at the base of the tower (did I mention that there were tons of tourists around? Because there were!) and parked myself decisively waaay at the back of one of the lines. Then I waited. It really didn't take that long, and I amused myself by trying to eavesdrop on the Spanish-speaking family in front of me (I understood some of what they were saying!) I had decided that I would take the lift up to the second floor, because I wanted to do more than just walk to the first floor, and the top floor was closed (and I didn't really want to pay to go all the way up there anyway.)
There is actually a little security check point that you have to go through before they let you up into the tower. I nervously scanned the list of prohibited items, knowing that I really had no way locking up anything that I couldn't bring with me into the Tower. Fortunately the only thing relevant was no glass bottles, and mine was metal. I did run into a bit of a problem when the security officer tried to clarify something and I had no idea what he was saying (he didn't speak any English and I didn't speak any French.) He waved me on though––I guess I don't exactly scream "big threat to monument security."
The view was neat from the second floor, and I probably took more cityscape pictures than was strictly necessary. I also become the unofficial Eiffel Tower photographer when I offered to take pictures for a couple of people (you know how it is when you go someplace with only one other person and you both want to be in the picture, but instead you each take turns getting a photo of the other person? Well I tend to take pity on people I see in that situation) and then a small queue of others jumped at the chance to have me take theirs as well. One of these individuals was a middle-aged Asian man with his wife, and he handed me an ancient film camera which I had to struggle for a moment to figure out how to work. Another was a couple from China who had just gotten married and were there on their honeymoon; they wanted pictures with me in it too. I probably interacted with more tourists than actual French people, but I guess that is inevitable with how little time I got to spend in France, and how much of it was in tourist areas.
Anyhow, I realized that I should probably move on if I wanted to have time to do anything else before catching my train, and as I stepped down out of one of the legs of the Tower I encountered the third and final stage of the infamous price mark-up process: right at the base of the Tower was yet another souvenir stand, and sure enough, sitting in an identical basket were the miniature Eiffel Towers... now 1 for 2.5 Euro! That is a whopping 10x more expensive than the first ones that I had seen. Obviously this makes sense, and isn't a particularly new concept to anyone––I just had never seen it laid out in such tidy steps before, so I had to share.
After separating myself from the throng of tourists at the foot of the Tower, I set off to go see the Louvre! This involved quite a bit of walking (I was still stubbornly avoiding the subway), especially since the Tower is a decent distance away from many of the other attractions in Paris.
But I made it there! You know how often times you see a lot of awesome pictures of someplace you are about to visit and then when you actually get there you think "This is it?" Well, I was expecting to feel that way (especially since I knew I didn't have time to actually go inside the Louvre to look at anything, and would be mostly taking pictures of the outside), but I am pleased to note that I was surprised at the area around the museum and how nice of a walk it was to get there. I was sort of expecting it to just parked in the middle of the city somewhere (hey, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg was!), but it actually has its own area right next to the "Jardin des Tuileries," which I entered from the west side and walked along all the way to the museum itself. I did stop briefly to pick up the least expensive food that I could find at one of the park's outdoor restaurants (butter and powdered sugar crepe, yum!) and to sketch some of the expansive gardens out front. Then, all of a sudden, I walk up some steps and there it was!
I realize that it's a bit silly to say I went to the Louvre, when all I really did was stand outside and take some pictures of it and the glass pyramid in front. But I figured that it would be better not to wait in line, pay for a ticket, and then be there for like 20 minutes before having to leave. I would rather come back some day and actually have time to walk around. (Plus, don't tell anyone, but I'm starting to get a bit tired of museums.)
Speaking of time, I was almost out of it! As it so happens, Paris is pretty big (no, really?) and walking around the city takes a while. I did wish that I had gotten to see the Notre Dame and Sainte Chapelle, but I didn't regret not spending the day rushing around on the subway. I toyed with the idea of spending another night and then catching the train to Le Havre the following morning, but quickly nixed that plan––one really shouldn't mess with on-ship time, and I wanted to make sure that I was in Le Havre staying close to the ship on the last day rather than having to worry about a train getting delayed and the ship leaving without me (I don't even want to think about how that would play out!)
So I caught a bus to the train station (which took a bit of doing, because I wasn't sure how to pronounce it to the bus driver), waited in the ticket line because the automatic machines did not want to cooperate, and managed to get myself a train ticket from a helpful lady who spoke a little English (I pointed to the word "Le Havre" this time, instead of trying to pronounce it, which I think helped that process.) After a bit of a wait I was on a train bound for the coastal town of Le Havre, where hopefully I would find the M.V. Explorer waiting for me!
The ride took a while, and the girl I was sitting across from was non-communicative, so I mostly slept on the way there. It was dark when I arrived, and as I stepped off of the platform I realized that French railway stations are not nearly so liberal with maps of the surrounding city as Belgian ones are. Which posed a problem, as I had absolutely no idea where I was or where the ship was (well, I did have a name and a direction, and I maintain that I could have found it on my own eventually!) Fortunately, almost as soon as I got off the train I encountered a massive group of about 15 other SASers who, like me, had come overland and just arrived in Le Havre on another part of the same train.
So we all set off the direction we thought the ship was, huddling in our jackets against the crazy coastal winds which buffeted us on our way through the dark and empty streets of Le Havre. Then we saw it––the little string of lights atop the M.V. Explorer glimmering way in the distance. By the time we actually made it there I was so happy to see the ship; I think that was the first moment it really felt like coming home.
This has become yet another very long post, but I did promise at the top that I would be providing an overview of day five as well as four, so I'll just say that on day five I felt I'd had enough adventure in my life, and decided to just stay in Le Havre and hang out in a cafe with internet. So that is what I did! I had another crepe and some tea while planning what I would do in Ireland and Skyping my mom. Then I grabbed some groceries from a small store nearby and made it back to the ship about an hour before on-ship time.
Okay, next post: Ireland! I can catch up before we reach Portugal!
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