I’m sorry to say I don’t have much to say about coffee in China. The more industrialized and modernized the countries I visited became, the less “local” coffee I could find. I did have a latte in the Forbidden City though. I wish that I had learned more about China before I went there. It’s such an old country with so much history, but it is still a major player in the world today. I think it is important to understand its history because events that happened in China have influenced so many world events in recent history like the Vietnam War and other countries’ failure to assist in the conflicts surrounding Tibet and Darfur. That’s why it took me such a long time to write this post. I didn’t feel right writing about China and all of the historic sites I visited without really understanding the significance of each and why they are considered historic sites. I’ve been waiting to get some free time to do some research (it’s been hard… I’ve been busy trying to catch up on all of the homework I neglected from India to Japan, and now it is finals week! Sometimes I feel like my education is getting in the way of my education). Finally I had some time to sit down and do some reading, and while I know I still have a long way to go in understanding China and how it got to where it is today, I can at least do it a little bit of justice. I’ll try not to give you a history lecture, though. I know that’s not why you read my blog, after all.
My flight from Hong Kong to Beijing left early in the morning (I got myself a café vanilla latte to wake me up, of course). As soon as we landed in Beijing we boarded a bus and were taken to the Beijing National Stadium (or the Bird’s Nest, as you probably know it) and the Beijing National Aquatics Center (the Water Cube) where the 2008 Summer Olympic Games were held. We didn’t get to go inside either one—our time was limited—but we got to walk around the Stadium for a while. The grounds surrounding the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube are huge! I know they need to be to accommodate so many people, but you really have no idea until you get there. The place was swarming with tourists, foreign and Chinese alike but mostly Chinese. The Chinese tourists kept taking pictures of us—three even came up to me and asked if they could take a picture with me! This was a common occurrence the whole time I was in China. It was actually kind of cool—in every country leading up to China I have been so fascinated with the people and here they were just as fascinated with me! After leaving the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube we were taken to the Peking University campus where we would be staying for the next three nights. Peking University is described as China’s Harvard. They have their own hotel on campus for visitors like us. After checking in we had some free time before dinner. My roommate and I wandered around the campus to find an ATM and a convenient store. It was really strange being back on a college campus, watching students walk by or ride by on bikes, backpacks on their backs and books in their hands. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it was like almost any other college campus I have been on—big homogenous dorm buildings, academic halls made of brick, fenced in tennis courts, a campus store, dining halls… it was even cold in Beijing, so the trees were bare and everyone was in sweatshirts and jackets, much like it would be back in Nebraska, minus the snow. After getting some Yuan (and some Pringles) it was time for dinner. We were taken to a restaurant on Peking University’s campus. In every restaurant I ate at in China they served about eight people at a round table. Each person is provided with a small plate, a bowl, a small cup, and chopsticks. On the table is this giant glass lazy Susan, if you know what that is. It’s basically a rotating surface. The servers bring dish after dish of soups, vegetables, seafood, meat, and rice and place it on the lazy Susan. You serve yourself a little bit and then turn the table so the next person can serve themselves. It’s a lot more efficient than passing food around. And of course, there is always as much tea as you can drink. I have to admit, I think I like Americanized Chinese food more than authentic Chinese food, but I also think we were brought to more upscale restaurants and weren’t served everyday food that the average Chinese person would eat. In fact, we were eating with some Peking students later and even they didn’t recognize some of what we were being served. Anyway, after dinner we were introduced to our student hosts and split off into groups to spend some time getting to know them. The student I was paired with was YaJing. YaJing is a freshman studying history and has lived in Beijing her whole life. We walked around the campus for a while and wandered around some stores before YaJing went back to her dorm to study and I went back to the hotel to sleep.
The next day was the visit to the Great Wall! We had a few stops beforehand though, of course. That morning we got up and had breakfast at a campus dining hall. Chinese breakfast is nothing like American breakfast—they eat dumplings filled with meat, egg drop soup, rice, pickled vegetables, these greasy fried flat breads… it was good, but so different. We visited a cloisonné factory—a Chinese art where they take copper posts, use copper wire to make designs on the outside, and then fill in the designs with colored fired clay—before reaching the Ming Tombs. The Ming Tombs are the burial sites for 13 emperors of the Ming Dynasty, dating back to the 15th century. Only one of the tombs—the Ding Ling tomb—has been excavated, but no others have been excavated since. Excavation of the tomb was started in 1956. Inside was found thousands of articles of silk, wood, textiles, and porcelain, and the entombed bodies of the Wanli Emperor and his two empresses. Unfortunately, because of the lack of proper technology and the political pressure to finish the excavation quickly, the articles were not documented and stored properly. Most were thrown into storage and were ruined by wind and water leakage. Then the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. The Cultural Revolution was a movement started by Mao Zedong, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China. Basically Mao had young students called Red Guards purge China of any western influence, from western books to western trained doctors and scholars from the years of 1966 to about 1976. One of the major leaders of the excavation was targeted by the Red Guards and thrown in jail, halting all further excavation. Then, the Red Guards invaded the Ding Ling museum and stole the bodies of the emperor and empresses and burned them along with other artifacts. What remains today is an empty tomb. Any artifacts inside are replicas of the originals. It was less than impressive while I was there, but now that I know the history behind it, it means so much more.
Finally it was time to go to the Great Wall! After visiting so many countries and encountering so many cultures, I had kind of started to lose that giddy feeling in my gut I get when I travel. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely still get excited for each new port, but by the time we reached China such a state of exhaustion had set in that it was hard to muster up so much anticipation for each new place. But not for the Great Wall. The portion of the Great Wall we visited was about two hours outside of Beijing. I kept staring out the window the whole time, hoping to catch a glimpse of it. The landscape started getting more mountainous and the road was starting to wind more and more until suddenly we rounded a corner and there it was! The Great Wall is one of those places where I always wanted to go, but never actually thought I would. It always seemed far too exotic and mythical to actually be a reality, but there it was. We were given two hours at the Great Wall to climb and explore. You know all those nice pictures of the Wall with its long, flat stretches? Those were nowhere in sight. It was all stairs. Uneven, steep stairs. And it was cold. But I didn’t even care! My adrenaline was enough to keep me going, and after a while I was so hot from climbing I had to take my jacket off. There were some beautiful views of the mountains, faint grey lines skimming the tops where the Wall continued off into the distance, but visiting the Great Wall was less about the views and the climbing than it was about actually being there. After the drive back to Beijing we ate dinner and met back up with our student hosts. They had a party planned for us where we played various games like the limbo and the human knot. After the party a bunch of us went out to karaoke with Robert, one of the students, and a few of his friends for a few hours before heading back to the hotel.
The third day was spent in downtown Beijing near Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. When we first reached Tiananmen Square we were given a couple hours of free time to explore. That was another surreal experience for me. I had seen many pictures of Tiananmen Square with the large portrait of Mao looking down on everything below, so it was so strange to be seeing it in reality. I also knew vaguely about the history surrounding the Square and the massacre that had happened there, and had I known exactly what had happened, I think I would have been even more struck. The massacre at Tiananmen Square happened when I was born, in 1989. Tens of thousands of college students staged a prodemocracy demonstration in the Square. It lasted for weeks until the Chinese Communist Party, afraid of loss of control, injured thousands and killed hundreds of the students. Hundreds more were systematically hunted down and brought to trial for sedition and spreading counterrevolution propaganda. The most shocking thing about all of this is that most Chinese people either don’t know what happened that day or deny that it happened. I didn’t know to ask about it at the time, but a few of my friends on different tours asked their guides about the massacre and all of the guides basically said that it was all rumors or that they had never heard of it before. Nothing about the protest or the massacre was mentioned on my tour. Interesting fact: Mao’s body is preserved and is on display in a building on Tiananmen Square. I didn’t get to see it—again, long lines and time constraints—but it’s there. Instead I walked a few blocks away from Tiananmen Square to see the new National Centre for the Performing Arts. It is an opera house opened in 2007 more commonly called “The Egg” because of its shape. It is dome-shaped and surrounded by pools of water, so when viewed with its reflection, it looks like a giant metallic egg. Once again, I couldn’t go inside, this time because a concert was being performed. But it was still cool. After seeing The Egg I met back up with the group and went inside the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is named as such because it was where the emperors lived and commoners were never allowed inside. It is a beautiful series of temples and living quarters, all ornately decorated and painted in red or gilded in gold. There were giant white marble staircases leading up to each building, each one carved into dragons and clouds. I also liked the gardens toward the back of the Forbidden City. There were beautiful pagodas, crazy coral-like rock formations, and flowering trees. After leaving the Forbidden City out the back gate we went across the street to Jingshan Park, a tall hill that offers a beautiful view of the Forbidden City and the rest of downtown Beijing. After eating dinner we went to the Chaoyang Theatre to see an acrobatic show. It was amazing! Things I thought were impossible were being done onstage right in front of me. There were balancing acts, contortionists holding themselves up in the air by their teeth, up to 20 people on one bicycle, two men jumping rope in giant rotating hamster wheels… so crazy. After the show we headed back to the Peking campus to sleep.
Our last day in Beijing was pretty jam packed. We had our last breakfast and checked out of the hotel before boarding the bus to go to the Summer Palace. While the Forbidden City was where the emperor lived and conducted official business, the Summer Palace was like his vacation home (kind of like Martha’s Vineyard to the White House… kind of). It was so beautiful! There is a giant man-made pond with islands in the middle. The pond is circled by the famed “Long Corridor,” a long covered walkway covered in paintings and murals. There are various temples and lots of trees. It’s all very tranquil. Or at least it would be without all of the tourists. After the Summer Palace we had lunch and finally got to eat the famous Beijing roast duck! We ate it wrapped in a very thin rice pancake with cucumber and onion and a sort of thick, sweet soy sauce. Beijing roast duck is one dish of Chinese food that I did like. After lunch we went to the Temple of Heaven, a Taoist temple from the 15th century constructed by the same emperor who built the Forbidden City and the Ming Tombs. To be completely honest, I was really tired and a little templed out by this point so a few friends and I spent most of our time taking pictures near a cherry blossom tree. Four Chinese people about our age started taking pictures there too, and soon we were all taking pictures together. We even sat in the tree until a security guard came and asked us to get down. Oops! He was really nice about it though and let us finish taking our picture first. After some shopping and one last meal we headed to the airport to fly to Shanghai. The plane had a personal television and movie selection for everyone and a complimentary meal… I actually wish the flight had been longer! We reached Shanghai about midnight.
My one day in Shanghai was split between shopping and eating for the most part. Shanghai is sort of a cross between Hong Kong and Beijing. It is more modernized than Beijing, but not as much as Hong Kong. At the indoor market where we were shopping they have these kind of personal shoppers that follow you around. They’re really there just to take you to their shop, but on the way they help you bargain and find what you’re looking for. At first I found our girl a little annoying—they don’t leave your side, no matter how many times you insist you don’t need help!—but after a while it was nice to have her there. She spoke pretty good English that she learned entirely from working with tourists and helped translate and bargain. She is just 19 and when we asked if she was in school she said no, absolutely not, she is done with school and is just working at this market now. I wonder if that was her choice or if she just couldn’t afford anything else. As far as eating goes… I have to admit, I got a cheeseburger. At McDonald’s. And it tasted exactly like a McDonald’s cheeseburger. I don’t even like McDonald’s in the States, but it was wonderful. Then it was back to the ship and on to Japan.
I don’t think I entirely achieved my goal of not giving you a history lesson, but I think it is impossible to talk about China without mentioning its history, past and present. And I did cut back a lot on what was originally in the post. Anyway, congratulations on making it to the end of this post if you did! I know it was a long one. I’ll try to make Japan’s shorter.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Hong Kong
You all would be so disappointed in me. I had Starbucks in Hong Kong. I know, I know! But really, Hong Kong is such a modern city that every other store was an American or a global brand. I really hadn’t given much thought to Hong Kong before we arrived. I was only going to be spending a day there before flying to Beijing and I didn’t know what I was going to see or do. Hong Kong is so clean and modern, it feels like the United States. In the port area where we were there was a giant shopping mall, even nicer than the V and A Waterfront in Cape Town, full of designer stores and plenty of Starbucks. That was the first thing I saw when I walked off the ship—we had to walk through the mall just to get to the pier! Once outside, the Hong Kong Island skyline is all you see. Giant skyscrapers with logos for Samsung, AIG, and LG flashing at their peaks line the shore, mountains rising up behind them. It’s not like Cape Town, though, where there are a few skyscrapers and low-lying buildings running up to the foot of the mountain. In Hong Kong, all there is is skyscrapers! They cover the ground up to the mountains, and a few even climb up the mountain, towering over the thick foliage below. It’s unlike any city I have ever seen before.
When we got off the ship a few of my friends and I found the subway and took it to Sham Shui Po, a local market. While the area near the port looks like the United States, Sham Shui Po is a whole different world. It is a maze of streets between tall buildings, lines of shops on either side, and two more lines of shops set up on the street! Any space not taken up by a shop was full of people. I’ve never seen so many people in such a small space before. Each street sold something different too. There was a street dedicated to video games, a street for computers, cell phones, toys, food, bags and clothing… It was very neatly organized chaos. We shopped for a while and put our well-practiced bargaining skills to good use before eating at a restaurant called Eat Together, a small, crowded place down one of the streets that I would probably never step foot into in the United States. But it turned out to be so good! One long table runs down the center of the restaurant and everyone, strangers and friends alike, do just as the name says—eat together. We were the only tourists there as far as I could see. After eating some delicious rice, ham, and eggs (weird combination, I know, but you should try it) we left the Sham Shui Po market for Hong Kong Island. We took the subway back to the port, the ferry to the island, and then a taxi to a place called Stanley Market. It was closing, but by the time we got there, I didn’t even care. The drive there was worth the taxi money alone! The roads wind precariously around the mountain and below we could see beaches next to huge resorts. There is so much natural beauty—tons of trees and really green—but modern buildings and apartment complexes still perch intermittently on the sides of the mountain. If you ever go to Hong Kong, I highly recommend taking a trip over to the south side of Hong Kong Island. I wish I had had more time there. We stayed at Stanley Market for a while before catching the double-decker bus back to the ferry. I had always wanted to ride a double-decker! We sat on the top, of course. Once back at the pier we were so hungry and craving pizza—so we gave in and ate at the California Pizza Kitchen in the mall. Between the four of us we took out three whole pizzas and an appetizer! Clearly we had been craving some familiar food. Asian food is amazing, but when you haven’t had pizza in two months, it’s hard to resist. That night I packed for my flight to Beijing—and the Great Wall!—the next day.
Molly
When we got off the ship a few of my friends and I found the subway and took it to Sham Shui Po, a local market. While the area near the port looks like the United States, Sham Shui Po is a whole different world. It is a maze of streets between tall buildings, lines of shops on either side, and two more lines of shops set up on the street! Any space not taken up by a shop was full of people. I’ve never seen so many people in such a small space before. Each street sold something different too. There was a street dedicated to video games, a street for computers, cell phones, toys, food, bags and clothing… It was very neatly organized chaos. We shopped for a while and put our well-practiced bargaining skills to good use before eating at a restaurant called Eat Together, a small, crowded place down one of the streets that I would probably never step foot into in the United States. But it turned out to be so good! One long table runs down the center of the restaurant and everyone, strangers and friends alike, do just as the name says—eat together. We were the only tourists there as far as I could see. After eating some delicious rice, ham, and eggs (weird combination, I know, but you should try it) we left the Sham Shui Po market for Hong Kong Island. We took the subway back to the port, the ferry to the island, and then a taxi to a place called Stanley Market. It was closing, but by the time we got there, I didn’t even care. The drive there was worth the taxi money alone! The roads wind precariously around the mountain and below we could see beaches next to huge resorts. There is so much natural beauty—tons of trees and really green—but modern buildings and apartment complexes still perch intermittently on the sides of the mountain. If you ever go to Hong Kong, I highly recommend taking a trip over to the south side of Hong Kong Island. I wish I had had more time there. We stayed at Stanley Market for a while before catching the double-decker bus back to the ferry. I had always wanted to ride a double-decker! We sat on the top, of course. Once back at the pier we were so hungry and craving pizza—so we gave in and ate at the California Pizza Kitchen in the mall. Between the four of us we took out three whole pizzas and an appetizer! Clearly we had been craving some familiar food. Asian food is amazing, but when you haven’t had pizza in two months, it’s hard to resist. That night I packed for my flight to Beijing—and the Great Wall!—the next day.
Molly
Vietnam
On my last day in Vietnam I went to a coffee shop called Gloria Jean’s. I felt like I was at home—the shop was small and crowded with tables surrounded by comfy mismatched chairs, there was “coffee shop” music playing over the quiet din of conversation, people were reading the newspaper over a coffee and a scone before work—except when I looked through the windowed front of the shop, there was Vietnam. Across the street was the seamstress where I had my dress made, down the block was the Rex Hotel (a popular hangout for military officials and war correspondents during the Vietnam War, and home of the MACV daily press conference The Five O’Clock Funnies), and a five minute bus ride would take me back to the port and the Explorer. Still, it was nice to sit there by myself for a few hours and read and write like I normally would back home. After my time in Vietnam, I needed some time to sit back and relax. I had done a lot and learned a lot and needed to decide what to do with it all.
Saigon (technically Ho Chi Minh City now, but most people there still call it Saigon) is exactly like what you see in the movies, but at the same time so different from what I was expecting. Everything is green and thick with foliage, but the city is still modern, new, and clean. Well, parts of it. There are more motor bikes than I thought was possible and the weather is even hotter than I imagined. The low on any one day was 78 degrees! And the humidity is amazing. It’s like breathing water. I say Vietnam is different from what I was expecting, but I really didn’t know what to expect. Vietnam, despite the importance it has with regards to American history, is a country that I knew next to nothing about and even with the brief history we were presented with on the ship, I don’t feel like I was prepared enough for it all. Of course, I am mainly talking about the Vietnam War. Since I didn’t know anything about the Vietnam War, I won’t expect all of you to know, so here’s a very simplified explanation. The Vietnam War was fought between communist North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam from 1955-1975. The United States supported South Vietnam and got involved in order to stop the spread of communism. There was a lot of controversy over whether the United States should have been in Vietnam at all and over certain war tactics or weapons that were used, such as Agent Orange. South Vietnam lost the war and a communist government was established.
On my first day in Vietnam I had the opportunity to meet with a former UPI (United Press International) photographer. His name is Hoang Van Cuong and he is Vietnamese but took pictures for the United States during the Vietnam War. We met him at his house. When we got there he showed us the memorial he built for the over 200 journalists that were killed in the war. We got to sit down and ask him questions for a while and I think he had some interesting things to say. One question asked was why he chose to be a war photographer. He answered that none of us should ever be a photographer! It is too crazy of a job. He only did it so the rest of the world could see the suffering that was happening in his country. Someone else asked if he ever felt bad for just taking pictures instead of helping. I really liked what he said; “Sometimes history happens in a second, and I had to capture it to let the world know what really happened.” Finally, someone asked how he could ever forgive Americans for what we did to his country. He said that Americans are lovely people. They were just doing their duty, their job. American policy was bad, but not Americans. I wish I had known more about the war then. I would ask him so many more questions now, like what he thinks we should learn from the war. Next we went to the War Remnants Museum, formally called the Museum of American War Crimes. The museum is full of pictures and artifacts describing the atrocities that were committed during the Vietnam War. One photo I saw was an American soldier holding up the charred, shredded remains of a Vietnamese soldier—and smiling. There were also many photos of the deformities caused by Agent Orange, a chemical used by the United States to eliminate the foliage that hid Vietnamese soldiers from sight. Agent Orange, however, also caused horrible deformities in people and the effects are still being seen in babies born today. There were even fetuses on display, preserved in a case, showing babies with multiple heads. I understand that the museum is controlled by a communist government and is probably one-sided—the North did some terrible things to the South and Americans too—but just because the information offered isn’t complete, that doesn’t make it untrue. It was hard to see what my country had done to innocent people, but it was harder to walk into that museum completely ignorant of it all until that point. I couldn’t believe that I had never learned about this in school, and after talking to a lot of other students I found out that no one had learned about it. In fact, later in the day I asked my tour guide how Vietnamese people my age feel about the war today, and he said that most of them don’t even know about it! That shocked me. The war only ended 34 years ago. Their parents and grandparents would have lived through it, and the effects of the war—namely Agent Orange—are still being seen today. I think it is great that Vietnam can forgive the United States so quickly, but not if they are forgiving by forgetting. I don’t understand how we are expected to learn from history if we just gloss over the messy parts. It is the messy parts that we need to learn from. Later that night a few of my friends and I met up with a group of Vietnamese students through a tour group called Saigon Hot Pot. This group is led completely by student volunteers who want to show tourists their country. We were taken to one of the students’ home and taught how to cook Vietnamese food. Our tour turned out to be a little bit special—the whole time we were being filmed and interviewed, and will be on Vietnamese television! It is just a plug for Saigon Hot Pot, but it’s still cool. After eating dinner—and mastering chopsticks!—we went to a café for coffee before heading back to the ship and crashing. It had been a long, exhausting day.
The next day I spent walking around Saigon, shopping, eating, drinking coffee, people watching, and motor bike dodging. I bought a Vietnamese coffee filter and some coffee. Vietnam has amazing coffee, unlike anything I’ve had before! It almost tastes like liquid dark chocolate—very dark and bitter, but thick and flavorful. That evening a few friends and I went to the Drink and Talk café. This place works with the Saigon Hot Pot tours to provide a place for Vietnamese students to practice speaking English with English speaking tourists. When we got there, we sat down with a man from Romania, a Filipino man, and four or five Vietnamese students and just talked! We stayed for a couple hours. The owner brought us a complimentary fruit plate and came in to personally welcome us, as well as see us off when we had to leave. After Drink and Talk we went out for karaoke with some of the students we met the night before.
On my third day in Vietnam I went on a Semester at Sea tour to a Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels. There are many Cao Dai temples but the one we visited is the main one in Tay Ninh. It’s like the Vatican of the Cao Dai faith. Cao Dai is a religion that developed in the 20th century as a result of so much conflict between religions. In order to minimize conflict, Cao Dai accepts and combines many religions and belief systems like Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, etc. We were allowed to go inside the temple during one of the four daily masses and watch from a balcony above. The service consisted mostly of atonal music and chanting and bells with all of the people neatly arranged in rows and columns on the floor, bowing similarly to how Muslims bow and pray facing Mecca five times a day. Then we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels. The Cu Chi Tunnels were used during the war by the Vietcong (the communist forces based in the South). There are miles upon miles of these tunnels and the people just lived underground for years! The tunnels are tiny, too. We got to go through one and I, at 5’4”, barely fit through the tunnels that were enlarged by 40 percent for tourists! It was an incredibly sophisticated system, so much so that the American soldiers never could beat them. The Americans tried flooding the tunnels, pouring gasoline in them to light them on fire, gassing them with tear gas, sending special forces of men under 100lbs down called Tunnel Rats—but nothing worked. The Cu Chis also used a variety of what were originally tiger traps to catch unsuspecting enemies. These traps would be pits in the ground hidden by brush and leaves. When the victim stepped on top of the trap, he would fall to his death, impaled by bamboo spikes. It was sobering to go to the War Remnants Museum one day, and then to the battlefield the next.
The fourth day I went to the Mekong Delta. The delta was so much bigger than I expected! The water is brown, but from silt, not pollution. The land surrounding is thick with heavy greenery and fruit and coconut trees. The sky that day was blue with big, white, marshmallow clouds… it was beautiful! We took a boat to an island in the delta and, after a trek through the jungle, were given fruit and tea. Then we boarded small four person rowboats, the kind that the Vietnamese used to use to navigate the small canals dug in the islands. We had two Vietnamese women rowing, pulling us through the mud when the water was too low, and dodging the tons of other boats on the canal. Later we were given lunch. It was about 2PM and I hadn’t had breakfast, and I was starving! They start bringing out the food—and it was a giant, whole, fried fish! Head, tail, scales, and all. But then a server came and showed us how to wrap some of the fish with some greens and noodles into rice paper and dip it in a sweet sauce. It was so good! Another four or five courses followed and I was so full! That night I just relaxed on the ship, though I did go out to dinner—and got french fries! They were so good, I don’t even feel bad.
The last day was the day I went to Gloria Jean’s and just wandered around the city by myself for a while. That night we had a barbeque on the ship with burgers and hot dogs (they treat us every once in a while!) and left Vietnam for Hong Kong.
Molly
Saigon (technically Ho Chi Minh City now, but most people there still call it Saigon) is exactly like what you see in the movies, but at the same time so different from what I was expecting. Everything is green and thick with foliage, but the city is still modern, new, and clean. Well, parts of it. There are more motor bikes than I thought was possible and the weather is even hotter than I imagined. The low on any one day was 78 degrees! And the humidity is amazing. It’s like breathing water. I say Vietnam is different from what I was expecting, but I really didn’t know what to expect. Vietnam, despite the importance it has with regards to American history, is a country that I knew next to nothing about and even with the brief history we were presented with on the ship, I don’t feel like I was prepared enough for it all. Of course, I am mainly talking about the Vietnam War. Since I didn’t know anything about the Vietnam War, I won’t expect all of you to know, so here’s a very simplified explanation. The Vietnam War was fought between communist North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam from 1955-1975. The United States supported South Vietnam and got involved in order to stop the spread of communism. There was a lot of controversy over whether the United States should have been in Vietnam at all and over certain war tactics or weapons that were used, such as Agent Orange. South Vietnam lost the war and a communist government was established.
On my first day in Vietnam I had the opportunity to meet with a former UPI (United Press International) photographer. His name is Hoang Van Cuong and he is Vietnamese but took pictures for the United States during the Vietnam War. We met him at his house. When we got there he showed us the memorial he built for the over 200 journalists that were killed in the war. We got to sit down and ask him questions for a while and I think he had some interesting things to say. One question asked was why he chose to be a war photographer. He answered that none of us should ever be a photographer! It is too crazy of a job. He only did it so the rest of the world could see the suffering that was happening in his country. Someone else asked if he ever felt bad for just taking pictures instead of helping. I really liked what he said; “Sometimes history happens in a second, and I had to capture it to let the world know what really happened.” Finally, someone asked how he could ever forgive Americans for what we did to his country. He said that Americans are lovely people. They were just doing their duty, their job. American policy was bad, but not Americans. I wish I had known more about the war then. I would ask him so many more questions now, like what he thinks we should learn from the war. Next we went to the War Remnants Museum, formally called the Museum of American War Crimes. The museum is full of pictures and artifacts describing the atrocities that were committed during the Vietnam War. One photo I saw was an American soldier holding up the charred, shredded remains of a Vietnamese soldier—and smiling. There were also many photos of the deformities caused by Agent Orange, a chemical used by the United States to eliminate the foliage that hid Vietnamese soldiers from sight. Agent Orange, however, also caused horrible deformities in people and the effects are still being seen in babies born today. There were even fetuses on display, preserved in a case, showing babies with multiple heads. I understand that the museum is controlled by a communist government and is probably one-sided—the North did some terrible things to the South and Americans too—but just because the information offered isn’t complete, that doesn’t make it untrue. It was hard to see what my country had done to innocent people, but it was harder to walk into that museum completely ignorant of it all until that point. I couldn’t believe that I had never learned about this in school, and after talking to a lot of other students I found out that no one had learned about it. In fact, later in the day I asked my tour guide how Vietnamese people my age feel about the war today, and he said that most of them don’t even know about it! That shocked me. The war only ended 34 years ago. Their parents and grandparents would have lived through it, and the effects of the war—namely Agent Orange—are still being seen today. I think it is great that Vietnam can forgive the United States so quickly, but not if they are forgiving by forgetting. I don’t understand how we are expected to learn from history if we just gloss over the messy parts. It is the messy parts that we need to learn from. Later that night a few of my friends and I met up with a group of Vietnamese students through a tour group called Saigon Hot Pot. This group is led completely by student volunteers who want to show tourists their country. We were taken to one of the students’ home and taught how to cook Vietnamese food. Our tour turned out to be a little bit special—the whole time we were being filmed and interviewed, and will be on Vietnamese television! It is just a plug for Saigon Hot Pot, but it’s still cool. After eating dinner—and mastering chopsticks!—we went to a café for coffee before heading back to the ship and crashing. It had been a long, exhausting day.
The next day I spent walking around Saigon, shopping, eating, drinking coffee, people watching, and motor bike dodging. I bought a Vietnamese coffee filter and some coffee. Vietnam has amazing coffee, unlike anything I’ve had before! It almost tastes like liquid dark chocolate—very dark and bitter, but thick and flavorful. That evening a few friends and I went to the Drink and Talk café. This place works with the Saigon Hot Pot tours to provide a place for Vietnamese students to practice speaking English with English speaking tourists. When we got there, we sat down with a man from Romania, a Filipino man, and four or five Vietnamese students and just talked! We stayed for a couple hours. The owner brought us a complimentary fruit plate and came in to personally welcome us, as well as see us off when we had to leave. After Drink and Talk we went out for karaoke with some of the students we met the night before.
On my third day in Vietnam I went on a Semester at Sea tour to a Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels. There are many Cao Dai temples but the one we visited is the main one in Tay Ninh. It’s like the Vatican of the Cao Dai faith. Cao Dai is a religion that developed in the 20th century as a result of so much conflict between religions. In order to minimize conflict, Cao Dai accepts and combines many religions and belief systems like Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, etc. We were allowed to go inside the temple during one of the four daily masses and watch from a balcony above. The service consisted mostly of atonal music and chanting and bells with all of the people neatly arranged in rows and columns on the floor, bowing similarly to how Muslims bow and pray facing Mecca five times a day. Then we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels. The Cu Chi Tunnels were used during the war by the Vietcong (the communist forces based in the South). There are miles upon miles of these tunnels and the people just lived underground for years! The tunnels are tiny, too. We got to go through one and I, at 5’4”, barely fit through the tunnels that were enlarged by 40 percent for tourists! It was an incredibly sophisticated system, so much so that the American soldiers never could beat them. The Americans tried flooding the tunnels, pouring gasoline in them to light them on fire, gassing them with tear gas, sending special forces of men under 100lbs down called Tunnel Rats—but nothing worked. The Cu Chis also used a variety of what were originally tiger traps to catch unsuspecting enemies. These traps would be pits in the ground hidden by brush and leaves. When the victim stepped on top of the trap, he would fall to his death, impaled by bamboo spikes. It was sobering to go to the War Remnants Museum one day, and then to the battlefield the next.
The fourth day I went to the Mekong Delta. The delta was so much bigger than I expected! The water is brown, but from silt, not pollution. The land surrounding is thick with heavy greenery and fruit and coconut trees. The sky that day was blue with big, white, marshmallow clouds… it was beautiful! We took a boat to an island in the delta and, after a trek through the jungle, were given fruit and tea. Then we boarded small four person rowboats, the kind that the Vietnamese used to use to navigate the small canals dug in the islands. We had two Vietnamese women rowing, pulling us through the mud when the water was too low, and dodging the tons of other boats on the canal. Later we were given lunch. It was about 2PM and I hadn’t had breakfast, and I was starving! They start bringing out the food—and it was a giant, whole, fried fish! Head, tail, scales, and all. But then a server came and showed us how to wrap some of the fish with some greens and noodles into rice paper and dip it in a sweet sauce. It was so good! Another four or five courses followed and I was so full! That night I just relaxed on the ship, though I did go out to dinner—and got french fries! They were so good, I don’t even feel bad.
The last day was the day I went to Gloria Jean’s and just wandered around the city by myself for a while. That night we had a barbeque on the ship with burgers and hot dogs (they treat us every once in a while!) and left Vietnam for Hong Kong.
Molly
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Thailand
I don’t know when I made the decision to start every one of my blog posts by talking about coffee, and I don’t have much to say about coffee in Thailand, but in keeping with tradition I will say one thing. Thailand is the first country since Spain to have a Starbucks. In fact, Thailand doesn’t have just one, but many. I made a vow to myself before I left on Semester at Sea that I was only going to get coffee at local places, and while I did experience some major cravings, I managed to stay away from the tall white chocolate mocha that was calling my name. So hard though! I’m getting to the point in the voyage where I wouldn’t say that I am homesick, but I am starting to really miss some simple comforts of home like the ability to curl up on a couch and watch a movie, to drive a car, to order a pizza, or to drink a tall white chocolate mocha at a Starbucks with a friend.
All that being said, Thailand felt much more like home than India. It was much cleaner, traffic laws were actually acknowledged (for the most part), and chain stores and shopping malls were common, as opposed to the little street-side stands that make up nearly all of India’s shops. Our ship was docked at the Laem Chabang port, a port city that is just that—a port city. There is nothing there except for a shopping mall, and even that is a 10 minute cab ride away. Nothing is within walking distance. Pattaya, a town that is just a 30 minute cab ride from Laem Chabang, is where I spent the majority of my time. I spent my first day in Thailand there at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo. That was a bittersweet experience. While I was there I got to feed a baby tiger while holding him in my lap and was picked up by an elephant with his trunk! But we also watched a tiger show, a crocodile show, and an elephant show. The tricks these animals performed were amazing—did you know elephants can walk on tight ropes and hula hoop? I didn’t—but I couldn’t enjoy them because it felt wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I saw no evidence that any of the animals were being mistreated, but you could tell the tigers didn’t want to dance across the stage on their hind legs. They were only doing it because of the whips that were in the trainers’ hands (I never saw them used) or the raw meat being dangled in front of them. The elephant show was more enjoyable because the elephants just looked like they were having fun. I spent a lot of time around elephants while in Thailand and am convinced that they actually like doing the tricks and playing the games. After the Tiger Zoo I visited Mini Siam, a park full of miniature replicas of major monuments throughout Thailand and around the world. It sounds lame, but it’s actually pretty cool! It was fun to see the miniatures of monuments I have seen before like the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triumph, Big Ben, and the London Bridge. They had a replica of the Statue of Liberty, so now I’ve seen her in France and Thailand, but still not in the United States! Probably the best part was when I saw Mount Rushmore. People may have no idea where South Dakota even is, but we’re still leaving our mark around the world! That evening I got dinner with a few friends at an authentic Thai restaurant and ordered a soup. The menu said it was spicy and I like spicy, but I’ve never had anything like this before! My eyes watered, my sinuses completely cleared, and my whole mouth and lips were tingling. It was actually really good though, and I had been battling a cold so it was nice to be able to breathe for a while! After dinner we wandered around Pattaya and saw the Hard Rock Hotel and a strip of shops, restaurants, bars, and clubs called Walking Street. Thailand, or more specifically Bangkok, is known for its nightlife so I can’t write a blog post about Thailand without mentioning it. It was actually more sad than fun for me, walking down Walking Street and seeing all of the prostitution, strip clubs, and children trying to sell roses and other trinkets. It’s not pretty, but if you ever go to Thailand, it has become such a part of the culture that I think it is important to see.
The next day I took a day trip to Bangkok to visit the major monuments there. After a two hour bus ride there we were ushered onto a boat for a river cruise. I was expecting Bangkok to look similar to Venice because I had heard that it was a canal city, but it doesn’t at all. It looks like most big cities with a few rivers running through it. The primary mode of transportation is still by vehicle on a road, as opposed to Venice where there are literally no cars. It is all canals and boats. Anyway, we sailed down the Mae Nam Chao Phraya canal (the River of Kings) and saw the Grand Palace and Wat Arun, both monuments we would tour later, from the water. Our first stop was the Wat Arun temple. Wat Arun translates into the “Temple of Dawn” and is a steep tower representing Mt. Meru, the center of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. It is incredibly ornate and covered in mosaics made from actual broken china fragments from China. After an amazing lunch at a riverside restaurant we visited Wat Pho and the famous reclining Buddha. I couldn’t hear my guide because there were too many people in the group, so when I walked into the shelter that houses the Buddha I was completely unprepared for what I was about to see. This Buddha is 46 meters long and completely gilded in gold leaf! I can tell you it is huge, but I don’t think you will understand how impressive it is unless you go see it. Our final stop was the Grand Palace, the capital of Thailand in 1782 consisting of the royal residence and various throne halls and government offices. I won’t bore you with a bunch of historical information, but you should look up photos of the Grand Palace. I can’t describe it. There is too much gold, it’s too ornate… I won’t do it justice. If you are really interested, you should look up the story of the Emerald Buddha. It’s pretty cool.
The third day I spent back in Pattaya. I visited the Pattaya Orphanage and School for the Deaf. There really isn’t much to say about what we did there—we were given a short orientation and a tour of the facility before being shown the baby room and getting to play with the babies—but this may have been the highlight of my time in Thailand. There are over 170 children at the orphanage ranging from babies to university students. The orphanage is not government run or funded, so it relies on a small staff and many volunteers to keep it running. I think I might return as a volunteer there someday.
I spent the fourth day at the Pattaya Elephant Village. The elephant is the national animal, so it makes sense that I saw so many during my stay in Thailand. At the elephant village we learned about elephant masters, the work that elephants used to do, the differences between Asian and African elephants… probably more than you thought there was to know about elephants. Then we got to ride them! First bare-backed, then on a seat. There was another elephant show but this was less about tricks as it was about showing the intelligence of elephants. After the elephant village I stayed in Pattaya for shopping and dinner before going back to the ship.
My final day in Thailand was spent at the Nong Nooch Cultural Village. We saw a beautiful garden of orchids, a show of traditional dances and costumes of Thailand including a boxing match and a battle scene showing how elephants used to be used in battle, and then yet another elephant show. I know, this is getting a little ridiculous. By this point I wasn’t really paying attention. I had seen all the tricks. Instead, a little girl who was selling bananas to feed to the elephants sat down next to me and, once I told her I had no money to buy bananas, introduced herself as Zin Maroo. She was 12. I wanted to ask why she was working so young and how she felt about it, but she didn’t understand much English and I didn’t know if it would be appropriate to do so. Anyway, she just sat and chatted with me for about ten minutes before going back to work. She is one of the few Thai people I sat down and had a conversation with, and I regret not talking to more people. Visiting monuments, riding elephants, and feeding tigers is fine, but the people I meet will be what I remember years from now about Thailand, India, South Africa… wherever I go.
From this point until I leave Japan I will be almost constantly in port. We have five to six days in each country with only two days at sea between them. It’s going by so fast! I’ve already been to Vietnam. If every country is as physically draining as Thailand (I got so tired there!) or emotionally draining as Vietnam, all I’ll be able to do between Japan and Hawaii is sleep!
Molly
All that being said, Thailand felt much more like home than India. It was much cleaner, traffic laws were actually acknowledged (for the most part), and chain stores and shopping malls were common, as opposed to the little street-side stands that make up nearly all of India’s shops. Our ship was docked at the Laem Chabang port, a port city that is just that—a port city. There is nothing there except for a shopping mall, and even that is a 10 minute cab ride away. Nothing is within walking distance. Pattaya, a town that is just a 30 minute cab ride from Laem Chabang, is where I spent the majority of my time. I spent my first day in Thailand there at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo. That was a bittersweet experience. While I was there I got to feed a baby tiger while holding him in my lap and was picked up by an elephant with his trunk! But we also watched a tiger show, a crocodile show, and an elephant show. The tricks these animals performed were amazing—did you know elephants can walk on tight ropes and hula hoop? I didn’t—but I couldn’t enjoy them because it felt wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I saw no evidence that any of the animals were being mistreated, but you could tell the tigers didn’t want to dance across the stage on their hind legs. They were only doing it because of the whips that were in the trainers’ hands (I never saw them used) or the raw meat being dangled in front of them. The elephant show was more enjoyable because the elephants just looked like they were having fun. I spent a lot of time around elephants while in Thailand and am convinced that they actually like doing the tricks and playing the games. After the Tiger Zoo I visited Mini Siam, a park full of miniature replicas of major monuments throughout Thailand and around the world. It sounds lame, but it’s actually pretty cool! It was fun to see the miniatures of monuments I have seen before like the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triumph, Big Ben, and the London Bridge. They had a replica of the Statue of Liberty, so now I’ve seen her in France and Thailand, but still not in the United States! Probably the best part was when I saw Mount Rushmore. People may have no idea where South Dakota even is, but we’re still leaving our mark around the world! That evening I got dinner with a few friends at an authentic Thai restaurant and ordered a soup. The menu said it was spicy and I like spicy, but I’ve never had anything like this before! My eyes watered, my sinuses completely cleared, and my whole mouth and lips were tingling. It was actually really good though, and I had been battling a cold so it was nice to be able to breathe for a while! After dinner we wandered around Pattaya and saw the Hard Rock Hotel and a strip of shops, restaurants, bars, and clubs called Walking Street. Thailand, or more specifically Bangkok, is known for its nightlife so I can’t write a blog post about Thailand without mentioning it. It was actually more sad than fun for me, walking down Walking Street and seeing all of the prostitution, strip clubs, and children trying to sell roses and other trinkets. It’s not pretty, but if you ever go to Thailand, it has become such a part of the culture that I think it is important to see.
The next day I took a day trip to Bangkok to visit the major monuments there. After a two hour bus ride there we were ushered onto a boat for a river cruise. I was expecting Bangkok to look similar to Venice because I had heard that it was a canal city, but it doesn’t at all. It looks like most big cities with a few rivers running through it. The primary mode of transportation is still by vehicle on a road, as opposed to Venice where there are literally no cars. It is all canals and boats. Anyway, we sailed down the Mae Nam Chao Phraya canal (the River of Kings) and saw the Grand Palace and Wat Arun, both monuments we would tour later, from the water. Our first stop was the Wat Arun temple. Wat Arun translates into the “Temple of Dawn” and is a steep tower representing Mt. Meru, the center of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. It is incredibly ornate and covered in mosaics made from actual broken china fragments from China. After an amazing lunch at a riverside restaurant we visited Wat Pho and the famous reclining Buddha. I couldn’t hear my guide because there were too many people in the group, so when I walked into the shelter that houses the Buddha I was completely unprepared for what I was about to see. This Buddha is 46 meters long and completely gilded in gold leaf! I can tell you it is huge, but I don’t think you will understand how impressive it is unless you go see it. Our final stop was the Grand Palace, the capital of Thailand in 1782 consisting of the royal residence and various throne halls and government offices. I won’t bore you with a bunch of historical information, but you should look up photos of the Grand Palace. I can’t describe it. There is too much gold, it’s too ornate… I won’t do it justice. If you are really interested, you should look up the story of the Emerald Buddha. It’s pretty cool.
The third day I spent back in Pattaya. I visited the Pattaya Orphanage and School for the Deaf. There really isn’t much to say about what we did there—we were given a short orientation and a tour of the facility before being shown the baby room and getting to play with the babies—but this may have been the highlight of my time in Thailand. There are over 170 children at the orphanage ranging from babies to university students. The orphanage is not government run or funded, so it relies on a small staff and many volunteers to keep it running. I think I might return as a volunteer there someday.
I spent the fourth day at the Pattaya Elephant Village. The elephant is the national animal, so it makes sense that I saw so many during my stay in Thailand. At the elephant village we learned about elephant masters, the work that elephants used to do, the differences between Asian and African elephants… probably more than you thought there was to know about elephants. Then we got to ride them! First bare-backed, then on a seat. There was another elephant show but this was less about tricks as it was about showing the intelligence of elephants. After the elephant village I stayed in Pattaya for shopping and dinner before going back to the ship.
My final day in Thailand was spent at the Nong Nooch Cultural Village. We saw a beautiful garden of orchids, a show of traditional dances and costumes of Thailand including a boxing match and a battle scene showing how elephants used to be used in battle, and then yet another elephant show. I know, this is getting a little ridiculous. By this point I wasn’t really paying attention. I had seen all the tricks. Instead, a little girl who was selling bananas to feed to the elephants sat down next to me and, once I told her I had no money to buy bananas, introduced herself as Zin Maroo. She was 12. I wanted to ask why she was working so young and how she felt about it, but she didn’t understand much English and I didn’t know if it would be appropriate to do so. Anyway, she just sat and chatted with me for about ten minutes before going back to work. She is one of the few Thai people I sat down and had a conversation with, and I regret not talking to more people. Visiting monuments, riding elephants, and feeding tigers is fine, but the people I meet will be what I remember years from now about Thailand, India, South Africa… wherever I go.
From this point until I leave Japan I will be almost constantly in port. We have five to six days in each country with only two days at sea between them. It’s going by so fast! I’ve already been to Vietnam. If every country is as physically draining as Thailand (I got so tired there!) or emotionally draining as Vietnam, all I’ll be able to do between Japan and Hawaii is sleep!
Molly
Saturday, March 14, 2009
India
On my first day in India I was walking through an outdoor vegetable market. The streets were narrow and full of people, cars, rickshaws (three-wheeled oversized moped type vehicles used as taxis), motorcycles, and even the occasional cow or human-drawn cart. It was dirty—dust and cow dung everywhere, flies covering the fruits on display, piles of rubble, deteriorating concrete buildings without windows or doors, fraying posters covering any flat surface—but I couldn’t help but think it was beautiful! There were fruits and vegetables of every color—green, yellow, purple—laid out on tarps or cloths or spilling out of carts. The women wore brightly colored saris covered in intricate designs and accented by gold jewelry. Even the rickshaws and trucks were all bright yellow with unique designs and phrases painted on each one, like “save rain water,” “drive slow,” and “avoid AIDs.” The market was loud, full of honking horns, the constant din of conversation, motorcycles roaring by, and the occasional snippet of music fighting its way through the noise of the street. Through all of this chaos I suddenly smelled coffee. I looked around and, sure enough, about a block away, there was a tiny hole-in-the-wall (quite literally) shop with a couple of men holding the famed Madras filter coffee standing outside. I walked over and asked for a coffee and paid just 5 rupees—10 cents—for a cup. Madras filter coffee is just coffee and steamed milk with lots of sugar and some foam on top, just like a latte, but somehow buying it from a tiny shop in an Indian market makes it taste better. The man I bought the coffee from didn’t speak any English and seemed a little shocked to see me there—I don’t think many tourists come by his shop—but his coffee was the best I had in India. And believe me, that is a tough call to make. When I was asking around to find out what coffee I should get in India, everyone told me to just get tea. I’m so glad I didn’t listen to them! Of course I did get tea too, but India has some wonderful coffee. Another great coffee I had was at a coffee shop called Mocha. Their menu listed coffees from all around the world accompanied by a description of each roast. There were two Indian coffees available, and I ordered the Monsoon Malabar. It gets its name because long ago the coffee beans would be exposed to trade winds during transport to Europe, giving the coffee a distinctive flavor. Today the coffee beans are laid out during monsoon season to be exposed to trade winds in a process called “monsooning.” But enough about coffee.
I spent most of my first day in India at the Mylapore Food Market, but not until after my three hour long rickshaw ride. The rickshaws in India do not work exactly like a taxi should. Most of the drivers have deals with all the shopkeepers that allow them to receive a commission if they bring customers to their shops, so instead of taking you right to your destination, rickshaw drivers will stop at a number of these shops first. After a couple of friends and I negotiated for a ride to Spencer’s, a local mall, our rickshaw driver informed us that Spencer’s would not open for another two hours—which we later found out was not true—and that he would be happy to show us around Chennai for a while for no extra charge until the mall opened. Of course, we agreed and were taken from one overpriced shop to another for the next three hours. We never did get to Spencer’s and were charged extra at the end. It was frustrating, but I soon learned how to avoid that situation. So, a word of advice; if you ever find yourself in India catching a ride on a rickshaw, do not let the driver tell you your destination is closed and be sure to specify that you want to be taken straight to your destination with no stops. Once they know you won’t play their game, they usually won’t try to pull any tricks. Anyway, that night a few friends and I went out to dinner and, after noticing the theater across the street, decided to see a movie as well. One tour guide I had told me that 500 movies are made per year in Chennai alone! The film industry is huge. The movie we saw was all in Tamil (the local language along with Hindi and English) and was a very strange combination of action and comedy. It was really cool to see how easy it was to follow the storyline despite the language barrier, though.
The next day I took a Semester at Sea tour to the towns of Kancheepuram and Mamallapuram to visit various Hindu temples. Most of the temples in the state of Tamil Nadu—the state of India that Chennai is located in—are dedicated to the god Shiva, the god of destruction. Every temple I visited was a Shiva temple. The temples are beautiful and consist, roughly, of an outer wall surrounding a courtyard with a smaller enclosed temple in the middle of the courtyard. Every single surface was intricately carved into scenes depicting stories from Shiva’s life. There were also many statues of cows or bulls because each Hindu god has an animal that is called their vehicle of transportation, or their vahana. Shiva’s vahana is Nandi, the bull. In Mamallapuram we were near the coast visiting a temple but I don’t remember what it was called or who it was for because a class of Indian schoolchildren was on a field trip there. As we walked up to the site they swarmed us, shaking our hands, asking our names, asking for pictures, just crawling over one another to get in pictures, crawling on us... I loved it! They were so happy to see us and I think we were equally happy if not more happy to see them. I know I was supposed to be there to learn about Hindu temples, but I think meeting the kids was the most valuable thing I took away from that trip.
The next day was the day I discovered Mocha and got that Monsoon Malabar. I spent the rest of the day around Chennai, shopping and seeing the city.
I left Chennai again on the fourth day for another Semester at Sea organized trip to see rural India. Our trip started at a small town about two hours outside of Chennai. It was a lot less crowded and a lot cleaner than Chennai. Cows, goats, and even monkeys roam freely along the streets! We stopped at a rice paddy and it was kind of surreal for me. Looking across the fields, rural India doesn’t look much different from the South Dakota countryside. We went into an even smaller town where the people get around on bicycles or carts drawn by cows. I saw just one motorcycle while I was there. The village was so clean and bright with houses painted bright green, yellow, and orange. We were given an indoor tour of a typical home there. It consisted of one main room, a bedroom, a room for worship and prayer, and an outdoor kitchen. We watched a woman make a rangoli (designs traced with rice flour each morning in front of houses) before riding a cow-drawn cart around the town to the coconut groves. There we were given coconut milk to sip on while watching a coconut harvester climb a coconut tree—with nothing but his bare hands! We got back on our carts and waved goodbye before heading off to our next destination—the Dakshina Chitra Heritage Village. This place is dedicated to providing a picture of how cultures differ in Southern India. They have houses from each southern state and offer demonstrations of pottery making, silk weaving, henna tattoos, and even parrots reading tarot cards!
My last day was spent at the Sri Sayee Vivekananda Vidyalaya Matriculation Higher Secondary School, a school housing 694 students of all ages. When we first got there we were greeted by the school band and were given roses. Then the students had their morning assembly. It was amazing! All 700 students sang their national anthem together and recited various prayers. They also had a reading of the day’s current events including a story about Barack Obama. After the assembly we were split into pairs and sent into classrooms. I am not really that good with kids and was not prepared to entertain a whole class of third graders—but it soon became clear that that was exactly what I was supposed to do! I was a little bit terrified but ended up teaching the kids how to play hokey pokey. Then they wanted to learn a dance, so I taught them some line dances! Now a bunch of Indian schoolchildren are doing the electric slide. I was shown some games, yoga, and karate in return before being dragged off to another classroom by a mob of children. They sang their national anthem for me so I had to reciprocate, of course. I asked them to show me one of their games, and they started teaching me how to play their version of Duck Duck Goose! It was cool to see the same games I grew up on being played on the other side of the world. Before we left the students put on a show for us of traditional dances and karate. I was so amazed by their talent! The visit to this school was probably the best experience I had in India.
If you asked me, like so many people have, “how was India?” I would have absolutely no answer for you. I won’t lie to you—I found it very frustrating at times, and I am kind of ashamed of that. It felt like no one wanted to talk to me unless there was a chance they could get some money from me. The rickshaw drivers pulled every trick in the book to earn a buck and salesmen on the street would follow you for blocks, completely ignoring any polite refusals. I am ashamed because I know why these people are that way. The poverty in India is… terrible. The townships in South Africa are in better condition than the whole city of Chennai. It’s hard to write about because I don’t know how to process all I saw, I don’t know how to describe it, and I definitely don’t know what I can do that would improve it. Before we reached India our executive dean Les MaCabe said, “You don’t happen to India—India happens to you.” I believe that to be true in my case, but I guess I still am unsure exactly how India has affected me. All I know is that it has.
Molly
I spent most of my first day in India at the Mylapore Food Market, but not until after my three hour long rickshaw ride. The rickshaws in India do not work exactly like a taxi should. Most of the drivers have deals with all the shopkeepers that allow them to receive a commission if they bring customers to their shops, so instead of taking you right to your destination, rickshaw drivers will stop at a number of these shops first. After a couple of friends and I negotiated for a ride to Spencer’s, a local mall, our rickshaw driver informed us that Spencer’s would not open for another two hours—which we later found out was not true—and that he would be happy to show us around Chennai for a while for no extra charge until the mall opened. Of course, we agreed and were taken from one overpriced shop to another for the next three hours. We never did get to Spencer’s and were charged extra at the end. It was frustrating, but I soon learned how to avoid that situation. So, a word of advice; if you ever find yourself in India catching a ride on a rickshaw, do not let the driver tell you your destination is closed and be sure to specify that you want to be taken straight to your destination with no stops. Once they know you won’t play their game, they usually won’t try to pull any tricks. Anyway, that night a few friends and I went out to dinner and, after noticing the theater across the street, decided to see a movie as well. One tour guide I had told me that 500 movies are made per year in Chennai alone! The film industry is huge. The movie we saw was all in Tamil (the local language along with Hindi and English) and was a very strange combination of action and comedy. It was really cool to see how easy it was to follow the storyline despite the language barrier, though.
The next day I took a Semester at Sea tour to the towns of Kancheepuram and Mamallapuram to visit various Hindu temples. Most of the temples in the state of Tamil Nadu—the state of India that Chennai is located in—are dedicated to the god Shiva, the god of destruction. Every temple I visited was a Shiva temple. The temples are beautiful and consist, roughly, of an outer wall surrounding a courtyard with a smaller enclosed temple in the middle of the courtyard. Every single surface was intricately carved into scenes depicting stories from Shiva’s life. There were also many statues of cows or bulls because each Hindu god has an animal that is called their vehicle of transportation, or their vahana. Shiva’s vahana is Nandi, the bull. In Mamallapuram we were near the coast visiting a temple but I don’t remember what it was called or who it was for because a class of Indian schoolchildren was on a field trip there. As we walked up to the site they swarmed us, shaking our hands, asking our names, asking for pictures, just crawling over one another to get in pictures, crawling on us... I loved it! They were so happy to see us and I think we were equally happy if not more happy to see them. I know I was supposed to be there to learn about Hindu temples, but I think meeting the kids was the most valuable thing I took away from that trip.
The next day was the day I discovered Mocha and got that Monsoon Malabar. I spent the rest of the day around Chennai, shopping and seeing the city.
I left Chennai again on the fourth day for another Semester at Sea organized trip to see rural India. Our trip started at a small town about two hours outside of Chennai. It was a lot less crowded and a lot cleaner than Chennai. Cows, goats, and even monkeys roam freely along the streets! We stopped at a rice paddy and it was kind of surreal for me. Looking across the fields, rural India doesn’t look much different from the South Dakota countryside. We went into an even smaller town where the people get around on bicycles or carts drawn by cows. I saw just one motorcycle while I was there. The village was so clean and bright with houses painted bright green, yellow, and orange. We were given an indoor tour of a typical home there. It consisted of one main room, a bedroom, a room for worship and prayer, and an outdoor kitchen. We watched a woman make a rangoli (designs traced with rice flour each morning in front of houses) before riding a cow-drawn cart around the town to the coconut groves. There we were given coconut milk to sip on while watching a coconut harvester climb a coconut tree—with nothing but his bare hands! We got back on our carts and waved goodbye before heading off to our next destination—the Dakshina Chitra Heritage Village. This place is dedicated to providing a picture of how cultures differ in Southern India. They have houses from each southern state and offer demonstrations of pottery making, silk weaving, henna tattoos, and even parrots reading tarot cards!
My last day was spent at the Sri Sayee Vivekananda Vidyalaya Matriculation Higher Secondary School, a school housing 694 students of all ages. When we first got there we were greeted by the school band and were given roses. Then the students had their morning assembly. It was amazing! All 700 students sang their national anthem together and recited various prayers. They also had a reading of the day’s current events including a story about Barack Obama. After the assembly we were split into pairs and sent into classrooms. I am not really that good with kids and was not prepared to entertain a whole class of third graders—but it soon became clear that that was exactly what I was supposed to do! I was a little bit terrified but ended up teaching the kids how to play hokey pokey. Then they wanted to learn a dance, so I taught them some line dances! Now a bunch of Indian schoolchildren are doing the electric slide. I was shown some games, yoga, and karate in return before being dragged off to another classroom by a mob of children. They sang their national anthem for me so I had to reciprocate, of course. I asked them to show me one of their games, and they started teaching me how to play their version of Duck Duck Goose! It was cool to see the same games I grew up on being played on the other side of the world. Before we left the students put on a show for us of traditional dances and karate. I was so amazed by their talent! The visit to this school was probably the best experience I had in India.
If you asked me, like so many people have, “how was India?” I would have absolutely no answer for you. I won’t lie to you—I found it very frustrating at times, and I am kind of ashamed of that. It felt like no one wanted to talk to me unless there was a chance they could get some money from me. The rickshaw drivers pulled every trick in the book to earn a buck and salesmen on the street would follow you for blocks, completely ignoring any polite refusals. I am ashamed because I know why these people are that way. The poverty in India is… terrible. The townships in South Africa are in better condition than the whole city of Chennai. It’s hard to write about because I don’t know how to process all I saw, I don’t know how to describe it, and I definitely don’t know what I can do that would improve it. Before we reached India our executive dean Les MaCabe said, “You don’t happen to India—India happens to you.” I believe that to be true in my case, but I guess I still am unsure exactly how India has affected me. All I know is that it has.
Molly
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Mauritius
We only stopped in Mauritius for a few hours, but I still managed to get my coffee. I just got an espresso shot—I was still fighting off the exhaustion from South Africa! I got it at a café on the beach along with a marlin sandwich right before spending the rest of the afternoon soaking up the sun. Mauritius was described to me by someone in South Africa as Africa’s Hawaii, but Mauritius looks nothing like Africa or Hawaii. The majority of the population in Mauritius is Indian and after being to India, I would say Mauritius looks more like a milder version of India. In the city, the streets are narrow, crowded, and lined with shops selling all kinds of fabric, clothing, spices, and fruits and vegetables I have never seen before. When we got off the ship we had to take a water taxi to get to the shore. My first impressions of Mauritius weren’t so great—the port water was littered with plastic bottles and smelled terrible and I was bombarded by street salesmen and taxi drivers the second I got off the boat. While walking to find a bank we passed shop after shop selling cheap souvenirs of dodo birds with “Mauritius” printed across them (Mauritius is where the dodo bird lived before it became extinct and convinced the world that it is possible for a species to be wiped out). But the further into the island we got, the less touristy the shops became and I could start to see some of the culture of the island. It is a really unique blend of many different cultures. This is especially evident in the music of the island. Sega—a fusion of traditional African music and European dance music—is one popular genre while seggae—a blend of reggae and sega—is also prominent. I personally really like the seggae. It was really cool to see so many cultures living together, too. Just walking down the street you can see African faces next to Indian faces next to Asian faces… Port Louis even has its own Chinatown. After wandering the streets of Port Louis for a while we decided to take a cab to the beach to spend the afternoon. We flagged down a cab and asked to be taken to the Grande Bay. After talking to the driver for a while we learned that he wasn’t actually a cab driver. He was a merchant who travels to India and China for products and sells them at his shop in Mauritius and was just borrowing his brother’s car. When we told him we were only in Mauritius for the day he gave us a bit of a driving tour around the island and even took us to a better beach—for no extra charge. It was really nice to meet someone who wasn’t just trying to get as much money out of me as possible for once. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the beach. It was perfect—the water was clear and just as warm as the air. We had a really great cab driver on the way back to the port too. He charged us a little more, but offered to give us a free ride the rest of the way to the ship later on if we needed it. I gave in and finally bought myself a pizza before boarding the water taxi back to the MV Explorer and leaving Mauritius.
Our stop in Mauritius was really short, but it was a nice break from schoolwork—midterms!—and a great way to ease us into what was to come. India was enough of a shock even with the tiny glimpse I got in Mauritius.
Molly
Our stop in Mauritius was really short, but it was a nice break from schoolwork—midterms!—and a great way to ease us into what was to come. India was enough of a shock even with the tiny glimpse I got in Mauritius.
Molly
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
South Africa
My best cup of coffee in South Africa was similar to my experience in Namibia. I was in Mfuleni, a township outside of Cape Town, sipping a cup of instant coffee while sitting on the front stoop of a house there, talking to a man named Rasta about South African politics and economics. It was my birthday, and we were taking a break from putting up roof tiles on a house across the road. I also had coffee a couple of times at a place called Melissa’s—first a cappuccino, then a black coffee, both made from Kenyan beans—but that first one was by far the best. South Africa is a place of contrast. There are skyscrapers and 17th century fortresses, shopping malls and shanties, the kindest hospitality and the most critical crime rate of all the countries I have visited so far. It was amazing.
The first day I went on a Semester at Sea City Orientation. We first stopped at the Castle of Good Hope, a fortress built by the Dutch when they first came to South Africa. The Dutch settled in Cape Town in order to provide vegetables to passing ships, and this fortress is where they lived and grew some of their crops. I spent most of my time walking around the fortress on top of the walls surrounding it, looking out over Cape Town. Cape Town is so beautiful. It sits in the cradle of a U-shaped bay with Table Mountain—a huge, completely flat-topped mountain—flanked by Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head Peak as its backdrop. After the Castle of Good Hope we visited the botanical gardens and had rooibos tea, a staple in every South African home, and biscuits with jelly and fresh cream. Our last stop was the Iziko Museum, a natural history and rock painting museum. There was an exhibit of nature photos taken all over the world that I spent the majority of my time looking at. That night some friends and I went out to a restaurant called Rafiki’s to hear some live reggae. They had amazing calamari! We got it fried, but it was so good we ordered another batch, this time grilled. If you ever go to South Africa, go to Rafiki’s and get the calamari. Not. Kidding.
The next day was a big one for me. I went on a Semester at Sea tour called Cape Town, Apartheid, and Robben Island. This tour basically took us around Cape Town to all of the most important places having to do with the apartheid era. We started at a museum dedicated to District Six. Apartheid—basically extreme segregation—split the South African people into three groups: black, colored, and white (it is not considered politically incorrect to refer to people in South Africa as black, colored, or white). District Six was a neighborhood inhabited by mostly black and colored people. It was a poor neighborhood, but the people had a really cohesive, colorful community. They may have been poor, but they were relatively happy. Then the government decided they wanted District Six to be a white neighborhood. They forcibly removed thousands of people from their homes and relocated them to the outskirts of the city. Then the whites decided they didn't want to live in District Six, so they just demolished everything. The museum is dedicated not to rebuilding District Six, but to preserving its memory and its culture. We drove through District Six, and today it is just this massive expanse of nothingness and rubble. All of this happened in the recent past, in the 1970s. The saddest part is that every single city and town in South Africa has a “District Six.”
The next step on our tour was the townships. The townships are... huge. Townships are impoverished, make-shift homes and communities. The "houses" are built out of scrap wood and scrap... whatever they can find. The lucky ones get running water and electricity. Fires are common in the townships during the dry season, often devastating entire towns in a matter of days because the houses are so close to one another they are impossible to stop. And the townships, at least what I saw, cover a land area larger than the city of Cape Town, and Cape Town is not small. It's nicknamed the "Mother City" in South Africa, partly because of its prominence and partly because it takes about 9 months for anything to get done there. We were driving on the interstate for about an hour and the townships stretched out on either side of the street for as far as I could see the entire time. The townships they leave you speechless and hopeless and depressed, until you get in there and meet the people. They have such a strong sense of community, they are educated, and they love to talk about their country. We visited a prospering bed and breakfast in the middle of a destitute township started by a woman, Vicky, who lived there and just had a vision for her life and wanted to spread the knowledge of township life. We visited an organization started by a local business owner that teaches residents of the townships how to make pottery and other crafts so that they can start their own businesses and support themselves. We ate lunch at a restaurant that was a woman's dining room. Her name is Sheila and she just loves to cook for people. And she's good at it! Sheila has lived in her home since 1960, so she lived through and survived the apartheid era. She also helped launch a marimba band's career by letting them play at her restaurant and raise money to make a CD. They performed for us while we ate and played a mixture of traditional South African songs and Bob Marley.
Our last stop was Robben Island. Robben Island is an island off the coast of Cape Town. It used to be where they would put all the people with leprosy in order to quarantine them before they learned that leprosy could be cured. It's a sad story... for years they just sent the lepers there without doing any research on how to cure the disease. Robben Island is better known as the prison where they sent political rebels during the apartheid era, namely Nelson Mandela who ended up spending 27 years in jail but still initiated a peaceful transition from apartheid to freedom. He also became the president in 1994, the year of liberation. Robben Island was a pretty brutal place where they used both physical and mental torture, kept prisoners in solitude, and would bring prisoners as close to death as possible without actually letting them die. If any were to die, because they were such prominent political leaders, the white wardens feared revolts and revolution back on the main land. So they imprisoned them and tortured them but kept them alive. We were given a tour of the island by a former prisoner. Former prisoners and former wardens alike work on the island together. Someone asked my guide how he feels about working with the former wardens, and he gave a surprising answer. He said that although the wardens tortured the prisoners, he could forgive them because it was their job. They were brought up to believe in the apartheid system and thought they were just helping to keep order. They are still decent, moral people.
That night I spent along the VA Waterfront, a strip of five star hotels, shopping malls, and restaurants, not different from some places in the United States. It was strange to be there after seeing all I had seen that day.
The third day was my birthday, and it was the best birthday I think I have ever had. I mean, how many people get to spend their birthday—their golden birthday—in South Africa? This is when I went to the Mfuleni township to build a house with Habitat for Humanity. The walls were already standing, so our goal for the day was to build the roof, patch up the holes in the walls with cement, and paint. Some highlights of the day were when Rasta, my site manager, had some girls from the township sing happy birthday to me in Afrikaans when he found out it was my birthday. The woman across the street, the one who gave us the coffee and some sandwiches also, had a cake for us, so I even got a “birthday” cake! Aside from talking to Rasta about the standard of living in the townships, how best to improve the poverty problem, and illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe, I also had a great conversation with a man named Pless. Pless lives in Mfuleni and has a beautiful voice. He sings opera with an orchestra in Cape Town. He told me that, if he had the means, he would love to get out of South Africa so he would actually have the opportunity to make it somewhere. He said he wishes he also had the means to learn to play an instrument. It about broke my heart, because in the United States we take the opportunity to learn to play an instrument so lightly. In fact, most people don’t even like taking music lessons. He didn’t ask me for money or help, but only asked that I remember him. So I will.
I’ve already written a few examples of South African hospitality, and on my fourth day in South Africa I received the best hospitality of my life. South African people are so open, kind, and giving, and Mark and Belinda Lindhorst are no exception. A friend of mine on the ship has a roommate back home whose father, Mark Lindhorst, owns a vineyard in Paarl, South Africa. We went to visit his vineyard and were taken on a tour of the entire facility, from the fields to the tasting room. We saw the wine making process in action, the cellars filled with rows of barrels stacked to the ceiling, and Mark’s own personal wine collection. We even donned sarongs and—get this—stomped grapes with our bare feet! Mark filled two huge blue buckets with freshly picked grapes and we just climbed in and started stomping. All I could think of was I Love Lucy the whole time. The process takes quite a while, because once you stomp the grapes you have to pick out all of the stems. We tasted the grape juice (I know, gross, but you would have done it too), and it was seriously the best grape juice I’ve ever had. Must have been the toe jam. After we were all cleaned off, Belinda, Mark’s wife, made dinner for us all. We had a braai, or barbeque, of lamb and garlic bread covered in this amazing sauce called sweet chilli sauce. I don’t know if we have sweet chilli sauce in the United States, but if we do, you need to go out and buy some now. It is so good. I learned so much that day about wine, but I learned even more about South African hospitality.
I spent the last day in South Africa around the waterfront. I had so much to think about and to process, I just wanted to relax. I grabbed some coffee at Melissa’s and did some souvenir shopping before getting back on the ship. I could write about South Africa forever. This post is only the tip of the iceberg of everything I did, saw, and learned while in Cape Town! If you ever get the chance to come to South Africa, take it. It is beyond worth it. I truly hope I get to return someday. And if you want to know more about South Africa, ask me about it! I’d love to tell you so much more!
I know I am quite a bit behind on my blogs… I have been to Mauritius by now too, and am docking in India in just a few short hours! But I hope to be caught up soon. I hear India is even more life changing than South Africa, so I am bracing myself for quite an experience.
I also wanted to let you know my email address onboard the ship. Initially I thought I wouldn’t have enough time to answer emails from everyone so I only let a few people have it, but I love getting news from home and receiving emails! I still don’t really have time to answer all of them, but I make time.
mkkeen@semesteratsea.net
Tomorrow, India.
Molly
The first day I went on a Semester at Sea City Orientation. We first stopped at the Castle of Good Hope, a fortress built by the Dutch when they first came to South Africa. The Dutch settled in Cape Town in order to provide vegetables to passing ships, and this fortress is where they lived and grew some of their crops. I spent most of my time walking around the fortress on top of the walls surrounding it, looking out over Cape Town. Cape Town is so beautiful. It sits in the cradle of a U-shaped bay with Table Mountain—a huge, completely flat-topped mountain—flanked by Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head Peak as its backdrop. After the Castle of Good Hope we visited the botanical gardens and had rooibos tea, a staple in every South African home, and biscuits with jelly and fresh cream. Our last stop was the Iziko Museum, a natural history and rock painting museum. There was an exhibit of nature photos taken all over the world that I spent the majority of my time looking at. That night some friends and I went out to a restaurant called Rafiki’s to hear some live reggae. They had amazing calamari! We got it fried, but it was so good we ordered another batch, this time grilled. If you ever go to South Africa, go to Rafiki’s and get the calamari. Not. Kidding.
The next day was a big one for me. I went on a Semester at Sea tour called Cape Town, Apartheid, and Robben Island. This tour basically took us around Cape Town to all of the most important places having to do with the apartheid era. We started at a museum dedicated to District Six. Apartheid—basically extreme segregation—split the South African people into three groups: black, colored, and white (it is not considered politically incorrect to refer to people in South Africa as black, colored, or white). District Six was a neighborhood inhabited by mostly black and colored people. It was a poor neighborhood, but the people had a really cohesive, colorful community. They may have been poor, but they were relatively happy. Then the government decided they wanted District Six to be a white neighborhood. They forcibly removed thousands of people from their homes and relocated them to the outskirts of the city. Then the whites decided they didn't want to live in District Six, so they just demolished everything. The museum is dedicated not to rebuilding District Six, but to preserving its memory and its culture. We drove through District Six, and today it is just this massive expanse of nothingness and rubble. All of this happened in the recent past, in the 1970s. The saddest part is that every single city and town in South Africa has a “District Six.”
The next step on our tour was the townships. The townships are... huge. Townships are impoverished, make-shift homes and communities. The "houses" are built out of scrap wood and scrap... whatever they can find. The lucky ones get running water and electricity. Fires are common in the townships during the dry season, often devastating entire towns in a matter of days because the houses are so close to one another they are impossible to stop. And the townships, at least what I saw, cover a land area larger than the city of Cape Town, and Cape Town is not small. It's nicknamed the "Mother City" in South Africa, partly because of its prominence and partly because it takes about 9 months for anything to get done there. We were driving on the interstate for about an hour and the townships stretched out on either side of the street for as far as I could see the entire time. The townships they leave you speechless and hopeless and depressed, until you get in there and meet the people. They have such a strong sense of community, they are educated, and they love to talk about their country. We visited a prospering bed and breakfast in the middle of a destitute township started by a woman, Vicky, who lived there and just had a vision for her life and wanted to spread the knowledge of township life. We visited an organization started by a local business owner that teaches residents of the townships how to make pottery and other crafts so that they can start their own businesses and support themselves. We ate lunch at a restaurant that was a woman's dining room. Her name is Sheila and she just loves to cook for people. And she's good at it! Sheila has lived in her home since 1960, so she lived through and survived the apartheid era. She also helped launch a marimba band's career by letting them play at her restaurant and raise money to make a CD. They performed for us while we ate and played a mixture of traditional South African songs and Bob Marley.
Our last stop was Robben Island. Robben Island is an island off the coast of Cape Town. It used to be where they would put all the people with leprosy in order to quarantine them before they learned that leprosy could be cured. It's a sad story... for years they just sent the lepers there without doing any research on how to cure the disease. Robben Island is better known as the prison where they sent political rebels during the apartheid era, namely Nelson Mandela who ended up spending 27 years in jail but still initiated a peaceful transition from apartheid to freedom. He also became the president in 1994, the year of liberation. Robben Island was a pretty brutal place where they used both physical and mental torture, kept prisoners in solitude, and would bring prisoners as close to death as possible without actually letting them die. If any were to die, because they were such prominent political leaders, the white wardens feared revolts and revolution back on the main land. So they imprisoned them and tortured them but kept them alive. We were given a tour of the island by a former prisoner. Former prisoners and former wardens alike work on the island together. Someone asked my guide how he feels about working with the former wardens, and he gave a surprising answer. He said that although the wardens tortured the prisoners, he could forgive them because it was their job. They were brought up to believe in the apartheid system and thought they were just helping to keep order. They are still decent, moral people.
That night I spent along the VA Waterfront, a strip of five star hotels, shopping malls, and restaurants, not different from some places in the United States. It was strange to be there after seeing all I had seen that day.
The third day was my birthday, and it was the best birthday I think I have ever had. I mean, how many people get to spend their birthday—their golden birthday—in South Africa? This is when I went to the Mfuleni township to build a house with Habitat for Humanity. The walls were already standing, so our goal for the day was to build the roof, patch up the holes in the walls with cement, and paint. Some highlights of the day were when Rasta, my site manager, had some girls from the township sing happy birthday to me in Afrikaans when he found out it was my birthday. The woman across the street, the one who gave us the coffee and some sandwiches also, had a cake for us, so I even got a “birthday” cake! Aside from talking to Rasta about the standard of living in the townships, how best to improve the poverty problem, and illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe, I also had a great conversation with a man named Pless. Pless lives in Mfuleni and has a beautiful voice. He sings opera with an orchestra in Cape Town. He told me that, if he had the means, he would love to get out of South Africa so he would actually have the opportunity to make it somewhere. He said he wishes he also had the means to learn to play an instrument. It about broke my heart, because in the United States we take the opportunity to learn to play an instrument so lightly. In fact, most people don’t even like taking music lessons. He didn’t ask me for money or help, but only asked that I remember him. So I will.
I’ve already written a few examples of South African hospitality, and on my fourth day in South Africa I received the best hospitality of my life. South African people are so open, kind, and giving, and Mark and Belinda Lindhorst are no exception. A friend of mine on the ship has a roommate back home whose father, Mark Lindhorst, owns a vineyard in Paarl, South Africa. We went to visit his vineyard and were taken on a tour of the entire facility, from the fields to the tasting room. We saw the wine making process in action, the cellars filled with rows of barrels stacked to the ceiling, and Mark’s own personal wine collection. We even donned sarongs and—get this—stomped grapes with our bare feet! Mark filled two huge blue buckets with freshly picked grapes and we just climbed in and started stomping. All I could think of was I Love Lucy the whole time. The process takes quite a while, because once you stomp the grapes you have to pick out all of the stems. We tasted the grape juice (I know, gross, but you would have done it too), and it was seriously the best grape juice I’ve ever had. Must have been the toe jam. After we were all cleaned off, Belinda, Mark’s wife, made dinner for us all. We had a braai, or barbeque, of lamb and garlic bread covered in this amazing sauce called sweet chilli sauce. I don’t know if we have sweet chilli sauce in the United States, but if we do, you need to go out and buy some now. It is so good. I learned so much that day about wine, but I learned even more about South African hospitality.
I spent the last day in South Africa around the waterfront. I had so much to think about and to process, I just wanted to relax. I grabbed some coffee at Melissa’s and did some souvenir shopping before getting back on the ship. I could write about South Africa forever. This post is only the tip of the iceberg of everything I did, saw, and learned while in Cape Town! If you ever get the chance to come to South Africa, take it. It is beyond worth it. I truly hope I get to return someday. And if you want to know more about South Africa, ask me about it! I’d love to tell you so much more!
I know I am quite a bit behind on my blogs… I have been to Mauritius by now too, and am docking in India in just a few short hours! But I hope to be caught up soon. I hear India is even more life changing than South Africa, so I am bracing myself for quite an experience.
I also wanted to let you know my email address onboard the ship. Initially I thought I wouldn’t have enough time to answer emails from everyone so I only let a few people have it, but I love getting news from home and receiving emails! I still don’t really have time to answer all of them, but I make time.
mkkeen@semesteratsea.net
Tomorrow, India.
Molly
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