Dream Fall

A person might suggest that the majority of things to be noticed between countries are the differences between them. I am not that person. The main things that I noticed that really called out to me were the similarities between the countries that I have visited on this voyage. Two universal concepts that I've seen examples of are poverty and forgiveness.

Poverty is not always what people think it is. Before this trip, I would have said that poverty meant that there was a population of poor people who didn't have many resources. That's just economic poverty- even if someone wins the lottery, they could still be less happy than someone that is rich in love or happiness, but not in wealth. Like a professor said this morning at Global Studies, a class that explains globalization, "The opposite of poverty is not wealth, it's community, and if we are happy and we surround ourselves with positive people that we care about, we as a community will not have a poverty of love."

Poverty was probably the biggest concept that I saw which all of the countries we've visited shared. The surprising thing about the levels of poverty in each country was that there were only three countries that had real, hardcore, economic poverty. These countries were Ghana, Morocco, and India. I found, as a whole, Ghana was poorer than Morocco, but there was less poverty in Ghana because there wasn't such a huge gap between the rich and the poor, which I saw the opposite of in Morocco. India was the country in which (ask anyone and they would give you the same answer) there was the most poverty. I noticed economic poverty, poverty of resources, and poverty of personal space. Like I have mentioned before, even if you are poor economically, it doesn't mean you will be the most unhappy person. India was the perfect example of that. Even though there were some sad people, as a whole, they were much happier than the people in Morocco, where I found there to be an enormous amount of poverty of joy, along with poverty of contentment and a poverty of personal space. In all of the countries with the exception of Morocco, they were happy despite of their poverty, which I think is amazing.

I think that forgiveness is very important for a person or a community, because people need to be able to reconcile disputes or pardon an action that a person or a group of people took. In the past, there have been many circumstances in which a person or a group of people were not forgiven for their actions by the other side of the conflict. South Africa had an amazing story of forgiveness involving an American girl named Amy Beihl, who was helping to fight off the apartheid laws on the side of the South Africans.

Amy Beihl was killed in a mob of south Africans who were protesting and "thought she was the enemy." Amy had just offered to drive her friend to the airport so that she could go visit family, when she was dragged from her car, stabbed, kicked, punched and hit with rocks, or whatever the four men out of the large mob could find. The reason why this is a story of forgiveness is because of Amy Beihl's parents, who forgave two of the four men for their actions, so they were let out of prison. These two men are Easy and Themba, and they are now the athletics coordinator and academics coordinator for the Amy Beihl Foundation, a foundation started by Amy's parents, who kind of took Easy and Themba in as one of their own. It is hard to believe that the two men that I met are the same two men that brutally killed Amy Beihl. They truly are some of the nicest people I've ever met. There were many other places in which they had the decency to forgive even though I don't think I would've in their situation. The people in Ghana were taken by Americans for the slave trade, and they love us now. The people in Japan kind of put our bombing them behind them. If we all just learned to forgive like Amy Beihl's parents or like the people in Ghana or Japan did like so many other people in all of the countries I have spent time in, we could stop telling everyone to "imagine how big of a change, or how much of a better place our world could be," because we would be that change.

This trip has been a fantastic experience for me, and I will hopefully do another Semester at Sea in the future. It would be nice to see how the countries have changed in both positive and negative ways. It would also be interesting to see the levels of poverty in each of these countries and how much they have changed, along with seeing if there have been more circumstances in which one side of the conflict was forgiven by the other side. Though I would like to go on another voyage, I am glad to be going home after four months at sea on board the MV Explorer.

Japan has one of the coolest and most unique cultures in the places that I’ve been. For example, Sumo-Wrestling is amazingly cool, and I don’t know about you, but I also like Judo, Tai-Kwan-do, and Karate, which are all Japanese. The people in Japan are the second nicest that we’ve met, right behind Ghanaian people. Japanese people are definitely the most polite people I have ever met. They bow in thanks a billion times, and you don’t now when to stop, because they are still bowing and saying, “arigato, arigato, arigato, arigato,” which means thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” They are so overly polite that its kind of scary in a way.
During our sail to Kobe from Yokohama, Gabi got really sick. He had a high fever, and was coughing a lot as well as sneezing. Well, as you know, we are all sharing a room, and if one person gets sick, so do the other two. To prove my point, Gabi is still sick (four days later) and Cy just got sick with a fever today, so I am the only one at school today, and probably tomorrow too. Anyway, we found out that we weren’t going to a sumo-wrestling match, and instead, we were going to a home visit, just like what we did in Morocco, except this would be a longer stay. On the first day in Kobe, Japan, we went to Himeji, one of the largest and most populated cities in Japan, that also is home to a huge castle that no enemy had ever gotten inside of, because of its amazing security involving men behind looking-holes throwing or shooting anything they could find. We also had ice cream and other food because Japan was the first country that we could eat everything, so we did just that. The second day, and our last day in any foreign country, we went on an SAS trip, which would also be our last. I felt like I was in the Adirondack Mountains after it was taken over by some ruler who planted a Japanese pagoda in the middle of the fall leaves. On the way back from the pagoda, our guide, who is the happiest guide we’ve ever had on this trip, taught us how to make origami cranes and Chinese warrior helmets. We sadly got back on the ship and said goodbye to our last foreign country, although Hawaii will feel like a foreign country.
I really liked Japan. In the beginning it was ok, but towards the end, it really got to be one of my favorites.
Here are my favorite countries in order:
1. China .965
2. South Africa .932
3. Vietnam/Cambodia .910
4. India tied with Mauritius .906
5. Japan .854
6. Spain .845
7. Ghana .812
8. Morocco .579
9. Canada .600 ( I can’t put it ahead of Morocco because it wasn’t a cultural experience, and Morocco was)

China was ruled by about 24 different dynasties, and it really shows by the diversity of art, education, economy, languages and many other things during these times. The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) is the most well known dynasty in China, mostly because that was the dynasty in which the Great Wall of China was rebuilt along with the establishment of China Cash and the Forbidden City. There were also other very well known dynasties such as the Yuan dynasty, when they built the Great Wall of China, and gave china a higher literacy rate along with bringing Chinese opera, which is just started to lose its popularity in China. China is now my favorite country as I had expected it was going to be in the beginning of the trip.
On the first day in Hong Kong, we went hiking up Queen Victoria’s peak, an old, dormant volcano that had the best view of the entire city, although the third highest building in the world that we zoomed up in the fastest elevator I have ever ridden to the 54 floor out of eighty something, had a pretty nice view as well. We also went to a zoo. Inside, we saw a few people from the ship that told us the best things to go to. Thank God they did, because we went to the coolest things. We first went to a fountain and just sat there for ten minutes before getting up and going to the monkeys. The monkeys were ridiculous! They did all of these crazy swinging things, especially the one that we were watching forever before going to the loudest monkeys I have ever heard or seen. These monkeys looked like a cross between a bullfrog, a very strange monkey, and an animal from a Dr. Seuss book. We also saw the fattest raccoon possible. It seriously needed a diet, even if it was only one minute every year.
The second day was the day that we would leave on our trip to Beijing that Caroline was leading. We left at 9:30, and got transferred by Edna Mode from the Incredibles, or some Chinese lady that looked, sounded and acted exactly like her. Sadly, she wasn’t going to come with us and be our tour guide for four days. After landing, we hopped on a bus that took us to our hotel. We would later go out in a fleet of rickshaws (there were over fifty of us, and each rickshaw only took two people) to a dinner with a local family where we had amazing food and learned to make dumplings. The next day, we would go to Tiananman Square, the Forbidden City, a Worker’s Migrant School, an acrobat show, and an amazing dinner. In Square, Cy, Gabi and I bought Chinese communist hats that we were very proud of. The Forbidden City was very colorful and beautiful and I was reminded of different parts in the movie called The Last Emperor that we watched this summer at our beach house because we knew we were going to go there. At the Worker’s Migrant school, we heard the children there sing a couple of songs, and we sang some back. When we sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to the kids, they went crazy, and they were clapping to make a beat. We then ran outside with the 1,000 students and their 34 teachers to play basketball and ping-pong. After we sadly said goodbye to the kids, we drove to an acrobat show after shopping, and the things that they did were so scary, and I’m sure that they made everyone’s heart skip a beat or even 100. The acrobat show was my favorite part of the day because they were ridiculously crazy.

Note: This paragraph is for Hannah, my sister.
Ray was right!! In restaurants in China, they bring the ducks out cooked, feathers already plucked, but the head is still on, which means that they have either a diseased duck that just died, they shot the duck, or they cooked it alive. I really hope it wasn’t any of those. They put the chicken on a platter in front of you, and they either ask the kids at the table to cut off the head because they thought that it would be fun, or they just chop it off in front of you.

The following day, we would go to the Great Wall after going to a Kung Fu school/competition and show! The show was amazing! People were breaking things with different parts of their body including two fingers, their leg, arm, fist, head, and one guy wrapped a thick metal bar around his neck only using his neck muscles. The same guy later drank kerosene and ate fire as well as blowing fire. The people were doing the things that I had always imagined a ninja doing. After our jaw fell off for the second time on this excursion, we found ourselves on the bus to the Great Wall of China! We were going to the Mutianyu part of the Great Wall. As I said before, Caroline and I realized that the really great thing to see at the Great Wall wasn’t what you’d think; it was really the beautiful mountain range that surrounds the Great Wall. We climbed to the highest part of the Great Wall, which was so steep, but it was definitely worth it just for bragging rights. We climbed to the highest point in our communist hats, and sadly had to go back down to shop and go to the bus to say goodbye, which we would do to Beijing, but would say hello to Shanghai the next day after going to the Temple of Heaven. When we got to the ship, we realized how many skyscrapers were in Shanghai, which is supposed to have the most skyscrapers in it, including the tallest building in the world, which was very close to the ship, and you could see it well. The next day, we went to a museum with some of the coolest, oldest things I have ever seen, where I bought a “Learn Chinese” book, and now I can say weird things in Chinese. We walked back to the ship and said goodbye to Shanghai and to China, which is, and will remain, my favorite country other than the US.

China was really great. I hope I go back someday, because it was SO fun! I’m also looking forward to Japan and I hope we go to a Sumo-Wrestling match, because it would be hilarious and fun.

Japan is not yet in my top favorite countries, although after our homestay tomorrow in Kobe, I think it will be a lot higher. I thought the food there was really good, but I'm positive that Cy would say otherwise. The parks in Yokohama are nice and fun to play football in, because they have tons of space. They love Hideki Matsui, the pitcher on the Orioles that I forget the name of, and the Japanese especially love Ichiro Suzuki. There are signs with them on it everywhere, even on fashion magazines.
We pulled into Yokohama at 8:00 am and saw Mt. Fuji from the windows and outside, on the deck at breakfast.On the first day in Yokohama, we went to Sankei-en Garden, which is a huge garden (175,000 square meters) that was opened in 1906 and has a small pagoda in it, along with 10 houses with no furniture in them. There were many leaves on the ground which made it feel like we ran backwards from China to Japan because it was winter in China, and fall in Japan. A large fish pond was the main attraction to the kids there, so we decided to see what they were gawking at. when we got over there, we noticed how astonishingly big the mouths of the fish were. So did one of the weirdest people I've ever met, a college student on board named Daniel. He kneeled down and started making weird faces at the fish and making weird noises. We immediately got up and watched the strange man do whatever the heck he was doing to the poor fish, who couldn't help how ugly and gross they were. After a while longer of playing with the fish and almost getting slapped in the face by one's tail, we walked to the center of town, where the Yokohama Bay Stars baseball field is. We took out a football after finding out that we couldn't go inside, and played a game. Cy and I killed Jo-Jo and Gabi, 63-14. I had four interceptions and five touchdowns including an interception on the last play for a touchdown accompanied by two other interception touchdowns and two receiving touchdowns. Cy had three receiving touchdowns and on rushing touchdown, and a billion recieving yards. I think i was the only one keeping track because it was so sad. Anyway, after a walloping win, we went back ship. ( "Lets go back ship," is a phrase that is becoming more popular among us, started by Gabi, who is sick at the moment, again. It is used instead of "Lets go back home," because Gabi doesn't want to recognize that the ship is his home, because he says he isn't liking this trip, even though I know he does.)
The following day, we got off the ship with Doctor dave, Megan, her mom Cathy and us, the Rody-_______ to go see a million temples, including Engakuji, Tokeiji, and Kenchoji, which are the most famous temples of the ones we saw. In Engakuji, they say that they have one of the teeth of the buddha which is contained inside of an enormous shrine. Inside, at the top, you could see a ghostlike floating image of Mount Fuji, which was reallty beautiful. Tokeiji is a nunnery famous for sheltering abused women or nuns, but is now a large graveyard where they buried the nuns. Tokeiji is especially famous for its ume (Japanese plum). Kenchoji was built in 1253 by a Japanese monk, and has a meditation center, where we saw one lady meditating. It also has Junipers, an old kind of huge tree that were planted 700 years ago and are still very strong.
I can't wait until Kobe!

The Vietnamese inter-port students were right: Vietnam was amazing! In my rankings of favorite countries, Vietnam/Cambodia was in second, just a little bit ahead of India, and a tiny bit behind South Africa. I didn’t really know anything about Vietnam or Cambodia except for the Vietnam War, which is the same with most of the other people on the ship. The reason why I really liked India and Vietnam/Cambodia, is that they were really unexpectedly amazing, especially Vietnam/Cambodia, because I didn’t know much about it. It’s usually better knowing what to expect, but I have found that my favorite countries so far, have been the ones that I didn’t really know much about, or just that they surprised me in a good way, and that they were better than I had expected.

We walked off the ship at around ten to take the city tour of Ho Chi Minh City, which was a city with some of the best food ever, and that’s a fact, not an opinion. You could argue, but you would lose in a landslide. Anyhoo, we went to the National Museum that had a water puppet show theatre in it where we watched a water puppet show, and we got tormented and splashed by the puppets because the puppeteers were evil, and they saw that kids were in the crowd, so they splashed us a billion times, and it was like we were part of the show without being told so. We went to an amazing restaurant, just before driving back to the ship.

We woke up at 4:30 to make a 6:00 bus to take a three day-two night trip to Cambodia, which would be one of my favorite countries so far. We would see 22 temples on this trip, and all of them were really cool, even though I thought that we really didn’t need to see 22 of them out of the 300!!! The first temple we saw was called Ta Prohm, which turned out to be my favorite one in the end. The archaeologists left this temple unchanged, so people could see what temples looked like before people dug them up. It was built by king Jayavarman Ⅶ, but enlarged by king IndravarmanⅡ. There were trees growing on the top of the buildings, and the roots of them seemed to drip down the sides of the buildings and just froze like that. We had lunch and then found ourselves staring into the mouth of Angkor Wat, the most famous temple in Cambodia. It is the world’s largest religious monument, and was built between 1113 and 1150 by King Jayavaraman VII. The moat around it represents the ocean, and the towers in it represent the mountains surrounding it. Meru, the home of the gods, and the temple itself represents heaven. Inside of the temple there are many hallways that are covered from one end to the other with carvings on the walls of scenes made from stone (called reliefs). After a long time at Angkor Wat, we went to a buffet at a restaurant that had people performing cultural dances.

The next day we had a choice of waking up at 4:45 to go to Angkor Wat to see it during the sunrise or not. As you probably guessed, we didn’t go, but Jo-Jo went. This day we were going to see many more temples. If you really wanted to know we were going to see TWENTY more temples today (grumble). It really turned out to be not that bad and we went on an elephant ride around this temple called Bayon. It was amazing! Before I tell you about the elephant ride, I would like you to note that Gabi, Cy, and I were in an elephant with six elephants ahead of us. we had a brilliant idea: we decided to turn this into an elephant drag race with Gabi and I as the announcers. In the beginning, our elephant was in 7th place, but after about ten minutes, we were first! Our elephant was amazing! I would also like to add that our elephant stole a bunch of grapes from this musician and we started elephanting away pretty quickly for elephanting.

The next day we would go to zero temples!! ZERO! Instead, we went to one of the coolest things I have ever seen: the floating homes and village area. It was a bunch of people living on boats, rafts or houses on stilts. It was so weird! There was a catholic church just floating out there in the middle of nowhere along with a grocery store on a boat. People would just swim or ride on small boats to each others houses or the stores and things like that. It was like a mini poulation that was cut off from the rest of the world and didn’t have to go anywhere at any certain time. It was just a life of ease. After taking a million pictures of this we drove to the airport where we thanked our guide, Khet, who was really nice and really smart, and flew back to Ho Chi Minh Cit (formerly known as Saigon).

The final day, Jo-Jo, Caroline, Cy, Gabi, and I went to a Buddhist pagoda that was still in use called the Jade Emperor Pagoda. It looked like two people that were Hindu and Buddhist decided to join forces and make a Buddhist/Hindu pagoda. This is because of the many figures that resembled Shiva, the destroyer in Hindu. It was a Buddhist pagoda though, and many different Buddhist figures resembled that. We went to the hottest and most humid market in history, and then went back to the ship, which would leave the next morning at 6am.

Vietnam/Cambodia was my second favorite country so far, and the list goes something like this:
1. South Africa
2. Vietnam/Cambodia
3. India
4. Mauritius tied with
4. Spain
5. Ghana
6. Morocco
7. Nova Scotia, Canada
I loved Vietnam and Cambodia, and I liked how they forgave Americans about the war even though the Vietnam War is still like an open cut to the Americans. I am looking forward to China, and I have been since the beginning, because it is the port that I am looking forward to the most.