The Road Not Taken

 

"A dragonfly flitted in front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when…"

 

Day 1:

Hiroshima is now a city of peace. It's a little less than 2 hours by bullet train from Kobe, where the ship was docked. My friend Julie and I made the trip on the first day in port in Japan. Thankfully she had done her research, because I would have had absolutely no idea which train to take, much less how to even get to the bullet train station in the first place. The Japanese rail system is incredible. You can get almost everywhere in the country by public transportation. And at fast speeds too.

 

We arrived in Hiroshima around 2 or 3, just when restaurants were closing up after lunch. This was a problem, because we were both so hungry. We trekked out aimlessly from the station trying to locate a restaurant that was open. We traveled down alleyways and sidestreets looking. On one of the remote side streets we found a marble block sticking out from the sidewalk. Walking closer we saw that there was a plaque on the face of the marble with what looked like paper streamers hung from it. It was literally in a lifeless street, so we thought it was quite strange and out of place. We came to face to face with the strange block, and read the inscription on it's face:

 

"Hypocenter…the first atomic bomb used in the history of human kind exploded approximately 580 meters above this spot."

 

After finishing, both Julie and I just slowly turned our heads to look 580 meters above in the sky where it happened. Hello Hiroshima.

 

An atomic bomb was dropped on the city at 8:15AM August 6^th, 1945, initially killing about 80,000. Radiation lingered on, and is still attributed for many deaths. Outside the museum there is a stone chest that has a list of names of all of the departed inside. Every year the chest is opened and names are added to the list. There is a pond bordering the chest, and on the other side is the flame of peace, a continuously burning fire that will not be extinguished until there are no more atomic bombs in the world. But the aim of all the monuments and the surrounding area is to educate on the horrors of war, not to hold those accountable who dropped the bomb in the first place. The city of Hiroshima is past the blame and shame, and now they long for harmony. At the atomic bomb museum there is very little mention of World War 2, it is clear they're not faulting anyone here. I remember in Viet Nam at the War Remnants Museum there was a whole different tone; that place wanted everyone to know that America painted its walls with Vietnamese blood. But not in Hiroshima. Sure, there was blood on the walls there too, but there was no fingers pointed. It was almost startling. The closest thing I could find to accountability was one plaque that said that Little Boy was dropped by the Enola Gay. Not the United States. Obviously the Enola Gay was a US war plane, but that's beside the point. War and peace are universal, with no one to blame for either except all of us.

 

Day 2:

There was a big journey planned out for Japan. Todd, Dan, and I were heading out on the second day in port for our excursion to Yokohama, where the ship was meeting back with us. Karina ended up tagging along too. We saw her in the terminal as we were leaving with packed bags, but without a place to go. So we invited her to come along, knowing that we were breaking our "only travel with guys" rule. It's a great rule. It has never lead us to frustration, and we have it for a good reason. But travelling with Karina ended up working really well.

 

From the port terminal we had to take a maze of connections on the Japanese transit system. Port Liner from the port terminal to the mono rail. Mono rail to the subway station. Subway to Shin-Kobe, the bullet train station. From there, an hour and a half bullet train ride to Nagoya, where we would be staying that night. We didn't leave the port in Kobe until about 7pm in the evening, so it was getting late by the time we arrived at Nagoya. I had booked a two person room in Nagoya for the four of us that night. Once we got off the bullet train in Nagoya, we had to take a different train to get to the section of the city where the hotel was. You get the point: all those transitions are very confusing. When we arrived at Nagoya, the train station we got off at was completely empty. The streets outside of it were empty too. We walked to the hotel from the train station without seeing a single other person.

 

It was about a 15 minute walk to our hotel, and when we got there Dan and Todd hid outside while Karina and I went inside to the front desk to get the room key. We went in to what we thought was the main lobby and were instructed to take our shoes off. Strange, but okay, it's Japan. The lobby was a nicely furnished two story open room with bright carpets and cozy furniture. We noticed that everyone in the place was walking around in matching robes. Even little children were scurrying across the floors in matching robes. Baby blue for boys and pink for girls. Stranger. I walked to the counter and showed the women working my reservation receipt with my confirmation information. She said a couple things in Japanese I didn't understand, pointed in a couple directions, and then upon seeing our very confused faces went in the back to retrieve someone who knew a little English. The interpreter came out and examined my paper before telling us that this place was not actually the hotel. The hotel was next door. This funky place with the matching robes and bare feet was the spa attached to hotel. And because we were hotel guests, the spa's services were free for us that night. Having traveled for hours with our big bags a free spa sounded like music to our ears. But we still needed to eat, so we eagerly asked what time the spa closed, hoping that it was at least late enough for us to eat and come back to enjoy it in time. "8 o'clock" we were told. Weird, we thought, it was already past 8 and the place was still fully operational by the looks of it. "8 AM," the interpreter clarified. Sweet.

 

Karina and I then crossed the parking lot to the real hotel lobby next door, pulling the same hiding routine with Todd and Dan. We checked in okay, gathered the troops, and were directed to a local Japanese spot for dinner, one of the only two that were still open at that time (the food was amazing). But what we were all really giddy about was to get back to the hotel and check out this spa. After all, from our brief glance in the front room, the place looked amazing. We came back to our room after dinner to find robes for the spa laying on the bed. They weren't the same matching robes I had seen in the spa before, but I think the different pattern was an indicator that we were guests from the hotel rather than members of the spa. Karina and I decided to check out the spa and report back to Dan and Todd on our findings. The spa was connected to the hotel via bridge walkway on the second floor. There was no one on the walkway except for us when we were crossing. A shoe rack and sign prompted us to remove our shoes and go on with bare feet. With a little apprehension, we continued down the walkway, and opened the door to the spa.

 

What we saw was amazing. Talk about culture shock, this was something completely unexpected. The first thing we saw were several Japanese men sprawled out across the floor, out cold in a deep slumber. No pillows or blankets, just robes, in the middle of the walk way, passed out. The lights weren't even dimmed, it would be as if you walked into a supermarket and saw people sleeping in the middle of the dairy aisle. It was that strange. We investigated further into the spa, and found that it's actually a pretty large 2 storey complex with a couple restaurants, massage parlors, salons, arcades, game rooms, and other things. But it wasn't like a mall. It was like play time for adults, with robes as pajamas. They gave you these little arm bands with barcodes on it and you could swipe the barcode at any restaurant, salon, or vending machine and it would automatically charge it to your room. They had vending machines that dispensed beer and hamburgers (with fries). They had entire rooms full of over a hundred personal massage chairs with attached plasmas TVs occupied by passed out Japanese men and women. They had ping pong and a comic book library (you check out a cubby, grab a comic book, and they'll bring you drinks). But the best part was the spa itself. There were dozens of different types of saunas and jacuzzis. One had yellow water that was like aroma therapy, one was literally a whirlpool that you just spun around in, and then there was a whole outdoor section. There were hot saunas, steam saunas, and even an ice sauna (exactly the opposite of a hot sauna). They all had flat screen TVs in them too. It was the most wild thing I had ever seen. And the Japanese there were all about it. Karina and I ran back to collect Todd and Dan to tell them of the wondrous things we had seen. We spent our entire night hanging out and using the facilities at this place. We were up until 4 AM doing everything we could. We didn't even get to it all either.

 

We woke up pretty early the next day, we had big things ahead of us. We took trains and buses to this small remote town called Magome. It is a rustic little place that hasn't been modernized yet and features all traditional Japanese architecture on every building. There is an old post route from Magome to another similarly out of the way town called Tsumago. The route is about 7k long and has small villages, bungalows, creeks, and waterfalls along the way. We came to Magome to hike this post route to Tsumago, and then take a bus to the next major train station and make it to Tokyo by the day's end. We had all of our large camping back packs with us, but conveniently there is a service where you can check your bags off and have them driven to Tsumago for a couple dollars. I was prepared to carry my bag the whole way because I didn't know this service was available until we got there, but because it was so handy we dropped our bags off to pick them up once we were done hiking. Both towns are in the forefront of breathtaking mountains. The spotty cloud cover made the mountains even more beautiful, and because it was fall all of the leaves on the foliage were dazzling red, orange and yellows. The sights were transfixing, we literally stopped for 20 minutes and gawked at some of the scenes as we passed through. The waterfall and creek dazzled, and I just could not get over how vibrant the path was with the fall colors. There were fruit trees along the way we ate from, and a mom teaching her cute son how to use wooden stilts at one of the bungalows. We savored the moment, took our time, and took it in. It wasn't the destination that we were heading for, it was the journey that was paramount.

 

We enjoyed ourselves so much that it was actually getting quite dark on the tail end of our hike. Karina and I lost the path a couple times and made our own. By the time we actually got to Tsumago it was completely dark out. Tsumago is tiny and quaint just like Magome, so the sun setting meant that lights were out, literally. Karina and I had gotten there around 6ish, we fell behind Todd and Dan about 2 hours into the hike. We slid our way into town, and not a single house or store had lights on inside. We found a map of the town posted on a board, and we hurried to the place where we were supposed to pick up our luggage, becoming worried that the luggage people may be gone, just like everyone else there. We got to the tourist building and Todd and Dan were sitting on the steps, the place was closed. But they had made it just in the nick of time, they caught the workers just after they closed and got them to open back up to get our bags. If they had been one minute later we would have been without our things or any idea what to do about that. So step 1 was retrieving our belongings, and we barely made that. Step 2 was finding our way to a train station. As expected, there were no more busses running at that hour. We found a pay phone and called a taxi. Taxis in Japan are just as expensive as they are in the US, so this was absolutely our last resort. The taxi took us to a train station. Step 2: accomplished. Step 3 was to take a train to Tokyo.

 

Something about Japan that no one really realizes until they're in the country is that there are virtually no ATMs that work with US and European debit cards. They have some other sort of banking system that isn't aggregated with our Citis, BofAs, and WaMus. There was one ATM in Kobe that I had grabbed some dough from, but it was nearly gone by the time I needed it to get to Tokyo. Especially after the taxi ride. The same was true for all of us. And we still had a very long trip ahead of us, from Tsumago to Tokyo is about 300 kilometers. And it was getting later by the hour. The closest train station to Tsumago that the taxi took us to was not a big train station, so we had to take the slow train all the way back to Nagoya in order to get on a bullet train to Tokyo. The problem was that we really didn't have all the much money left. So this is when we started free riding. There are two ways to do it. First way is to draft really close behind some random person as they go through the ticket machine so you can try to fit two people by using only fare. This is tricky, but it's not that bad when you get the hang of it. You look a little strange doing it, but if you have no money on you then sillyness doesn't factor into the equation. The second way to do it is more moral. You have a couple options when you buy your train tickets from the machines. You can buy a regular adult pass, or for half off, you can buy a child's pass. The thing is that there is no one checking what kind of ticket you have, so it's totally based on the honor system that you buy the pass designated for your age. We dabbled around Japan using a combination of these methods. We would draft until we felt to immoral about cheating the system so easily, and then buy a child pass for the next couple trains. I think I was able to travel all throughout the Japan for about $12.50. It may be wrong, but I'm not sure what else we were supposed to do. Plus it was fun. Big points. Anyways, because we had to backtrack back to Nagoya before we could get on the bullet train, our journey to Tokyo ended up taking about 3 hours, but exhaustion had us drifting in and out of dreams so we didn't really mind. We arrived at Tokyo around 12ish, took a subway a subway (child's ticket, you can't draft at night because there are no people to draft behind) to the hostel, and retired for the night.

 

(note: the rest of this entry isn't edited because I was racing against the clock to publish it before the cut off our internet, hopefully it makes sense)

 

The next day Karina decided she want to go off shopping on her own so the guys and I had a boys day out. We traveled around Tokyo, hitting up various spots around the city, taking the trains to destinations x, y, and z. Eventually we made it to a section of the city called Shibuya, which was like the downtown. Shibuya has the busiest intersection for foot traffic in the area. I'm sure you've seen it on TV or in the movies, it's that one junction where you just see hundreds and hundreds of Japanese people walking in every direction at once crossing the street. The best part about it is that it happens like clockwork- the light will be green to let the cars go through and then once the lights turn red in all direction the intersection just explodes with movement. Every time, all night and day long. I don't know where the people kept on coming from to make each cross as busy as the last, but sure enough, every time there would be hundreds of people crossing, no matter what. We played in the intersection for about an hour or so and then went to a conveyer belt sushi restaurant (where there are chefs in the middle of an island bar constantly making sushi and they put the dishes the make on a conveyer belt that runs by all the tables and when you see something you like you just grab it and eat) I'm not a huge sushi person, but it was some of the best sushi I've ever had. The fish was all so tasty, and that's a pretty big deal for me because I don't even like fish (unless it has a shell).

 

That night we had two options. The trains from Shibuya to our hostel stop running around midnight. We knew we were going to be out later than that so we resolved to either taking a taxi back to the hostel (about $40USD) or staying out all night until 5AM when the trains start running again. You know where this is going… We started the night thinking that we'd stay out until 1 or 2 and then fork over the cash for a taxi. We cruised around downtown, trying to find a good Karaoke bar or something. We found a lot of Karaoke spots, but they were all just private rooms and were pretty expensive. We didn't want to Karaoke with only the 3 of us, that isn't fun, so we didn't want to pay for a private room. We stopped by some small local pubs, and around 12ish we found some of our fellow SASers walking around aimlessly just like us. We invited them to go Karaoke with us, but again, all we could find were places offering private rooms. Even though our group was bigger by this time, we just wanted to sing and hang around with locals, even though this didn't seem possible.

 

We were about to give up when we went in to one last place. I had a plan in mind. While my whole group stopped at the front desk to talk to the person working about room rates, I walked right past to where all the private rooms were. Following music had never let me down before, so I decided to let the music guide me now. I heard beats coming from the stairwell so I walked towards it. The sound was flooding down the steps. I ascended to the third floor of the building, where the noise factory was. I walked down to the end of the hall and there was a door that was exploding with sound. There was something awesome going on in there. I crept the door open, still by myself at this point, and poked my head in. About 10 Japanese teenagers looked awkwardly my way, just a little more confused than I was. The music from the Karaoke machine beat on, but there was a silence by the blank stares. Then one of them motions me to come in. I give them the "wait just one moment" signal with my hand, and ran back down to the first floor where my friends were (we had about 10 people ourselves) I told them about what I had found, and took them up to the third floor, and to the room with the sound, and the Japanese teenagers cheered as we all entered. We all meshed well, all of our Japanese friends spoke English so we didn't have any trouble communicating. We spent the rest of the night singing both Japanese and American karaoke songs. The time flew by because we were having so much fun, we had that room packed with about 10 more people than it was meant for. Way better than having a private room with just the three of us. It was 5:30 AM before we knew it, and we all left the karaoke place. We took some pictures with our new friends and some other shenanigans went on before we parted ways. The subway was running again by that time, and we took it to our hostel, which was actually further away than I had previously thought. It was about a 30 minute subway ride. We stopped at the 24 hr McDonalds (gross gross gross) next to the subway station we got off at before returning to our hostel for a few hours sleep. This was probably one of, if not the best, night on Semester at Sea for me.

 

We were up by 11 for our check out the next morning. We didn't get that much sleep, but I wasn't that exhausted. It was our last day in Japan. Yokohama is where we ultimately had to be because that is where we had to meet back up with the ship (it had sailed from Kobe to Yokohama while we were traveling Japan). Yokohama is about a 30 minute train ride from Tokyo, so we weren't that rushed or anything like that. We arrived in Yokohama around mid day and spent the rest of the day browsing the city on foot. We stayed close to port, which was a really nice section of the city, reminded me a lot of Los Gatos or something with all the trees lining the sidewalks and such. It was a great easy going day. I watched the sun set at the port terminal before heading back on the ship for the long journey across the pacific.

 

In Japan I did everything I had wanted to do, and it is perhaps one of the only countries where I don't feel like I could have done it any better if I was able to have a second run through. Even getting lost and having no money for the trains was something I ended up enjoying in the end. Best of all, what I did was off the beaten path. I didn't just go to Tokyo and party for 3 nights straight. I spent my one night raging in Tokyo, but each of my other nights were spent in other places, seeing things that everyone stuck in Tokyo didn't get to see. And that's what I realized makes this trip into a journey- breaking from the masses and getting away from structure. Not knowing what's going to happen next is the greatest thing about travelling around the world. It's a big complicated place, so you'd be constraining yourself by trying to always stay in control.

 

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

• Robert Frost
  

 

 

 

Spenser

Always Move Fast

A Semester at Sea student went out the first night in Hong Kong but didn't come back, ever.

I was in Beijing when the call came, on a SAS orchestrated trip. It was about 3:00 AM. I was rooming with Neil, a SAS staff member, because our last names started with the same letter of the alphabet. We were fast asleep.

We had left for Beijing earlier that day. About a 3 hour flight from Hong Kong, and then a bus ride to Tsingua University, where we were staying. One girl on our trip lost her passport at the airport, so there was a small delay from that, but we were moving along well. The hotel was a sort of tucked away place on the outskirts of campus, the type of place that taxi drivers will shrug out of confusion if you ask to go there because no one has ever heard of it. We ate dinner at the hotel, and by the time we were settling into our rooms it was dark out. My friends and I went out exploring, trying to find a grocery store to get the necessary items to make the night a good one. We find it after being lost for about an hour, and start collecting the things we need. Our goal was to make that university a college for the night, but apparently red SOLO cups aren't that popular in China. I was playing charades trying to explain to the clerks what I wanted before I started drawing pictures of disposable cups. They directed me to an aisle of non disposable cups, but they were so cheap we bought about 20 of them anyway. Ping pong is the national sport in China so balls were a lot easier to find, as was the rest of our supplies.

The walk to the grocery store and then running around shopping for supplies took a lot of energy out of us. The fun started when we tried hailing a taxi to take us back to the hotel so we didn't have to walk back. We stopped 3 taxis who had no idea the place we needed to get to even existed, much less how to get to it. None of the taxi drivers in China actually speak English, so we had the Chinese characters for our hotel written down on a piece of paper that we were showing to the drivers. A fourth driver we showed the paper to looked at it once, and then turned the sheet upside down and examined the characters from the wrong way with a confused face before telling us to get in. That's how we knew it was going to be a good ride. The taxi driver took us all through campus searching for this place. Giving up on the roads, the driver kicked the car up on the side walk and we start heading down some pedestrian paths. We crossed a pedestrian foot bridge and then get to a point on the walkway where huge cement blocks were laying on the blacktop to prevent anything larger than a bike (you know, like a taxi) from going down the path. But no mere creation of man could stop us; our rambunctious driver slid it into park, got out, and started pushing the very large block out of the way. Inside the taxi we were all laughing hysterically at what we were witnessing, and after a minute of no progress with the pushing, I got out and started to help our driver. The block screeched across the blacktop and probably made some irremovable scratch marks on both the ground and the block before we moved it about 5 inches out of the way, a suitable distance for our driver. We got back in the car and squeezed through the little gap we had created. I still have no idea how we managed not to scratch the sides of a car, it was incredibly tight between the cement block on one side and a tree on the other. But we eventually made it back to the hotel, and the group of us had our festivities in Cory's room until about 2AM, after which we all headed back to our own rooms. I tip toed around my room once I got back so I wouldn't wake Neil, who was already sleeping. I hit the pillow like a rock and was in dreamland in no time. And then the phone in our room rang.

Neil woke up to answer it.

"I'm calling you because I knew you'd be up this late," said Cindy, the Dean of Students on the other side. But I didn't know that until the next night when Neil talked about it. I actually had no idea what was going on at the time of the call, I was quite disoriented, and I was sure that the call happened at 6AM instead of 3AM, and was probably about the girl who lost her passport or something. But it was at 3 and was about something else. I fell back asleep without thinking twice.

I woke up the next morning normally, too late for breakfast, and started to get ready for the day. Neil was already out, probably at breakfast. I met up at my bus at 8AM; we were going to the Great Wall that day. We had a group of about 70 students, so there were two buses. Each bus had a SAS bus leader. John, a psychology teacher on the ship, was the leader of my bus, and Neil was the leader to the other bus. That morning Neil boarded my bus, but since I had been rooming with him and was seeing him so much I didn't stop to realize that he shouldn't have been on our bus because he wasn't our bus leader. He stood at the front of the bus, full of 35 students or so, and looked down the aisle.

"I'm sorry, but we have a pretty full itinerary today, so we won't be able to postpone our schedule or anything," he choked out. No one knew what he was talking about. "Here is an e-mail from the Executive Dean, Jack Van de Water." And then he read it:

"Dear Shipboard Community, I am very sorry to inform you that one of our students, Kurt Leswing, was struck by a vehicle early Friday morning in Hong Kong, was fatally injured and died immediately."

He kept on talking but I stopped hearing the words coming out. Before coming on this trip I had heard of students dying on Semester at Sea. When we went to India we were warned about the traffic, which had taken another student some years ago. Again in Viet Nam for the same reason. But I never imagined that something like that would happen on our voyage. During the pre port to Hong Kong, I remember the topic of traffic being brought up. "After surviving Viet Nam traffic, I don't think you have much to worry about," was what the on board physicians said during their presentation.

Neil finished reading with tears in his eyes. "Okay, I'm gonna go tell the other bus," he said before exiting. Everyone on my bus glanced through the windows to the students on the other bus, who had no idea what they were about to be told. It was hard to watch knowing what was going to happen. Everyone on my bus was still quiet, afraid to talk. It was still quite early, and frigidly cold. I gazed aimlessly out the window, not quite knowing to think or feel. The engines started up, the heat was turned on, and we drove off for the Great Wall.

The landscape on the ride to the Great Wall was surreal, but it was hard to tell if we were thinking or even seeing straight at that time. We got off the bus and the temperature couldn't have been much higher than freezing. I was a little unprepared for such coldness so the first thing I did was head to the gift shop in pursuit of warm things. 50 Yuan for a pair of gloves and a fuzzy communist hat. I was then prepared to ascend the wall. The section of the wall we went to was a tremendously steep climb. Series after series of upward stairs going up a hill with watch towers littered here and there. At some points the top of the hill seemed out of reach, but amazing views along the way provided the necessary motivation to reach the successively higher points. On the way up we met quite a bit of Chinese soldiers, who were also climbing the wall that day for some sort of team building exercise. Upon seeing my commie hat, many of them would chuckle and then ask for a picture, which I gladly granted as long as I could get one with my camera as well. The highest lookout point offered a breathtaking sight- rolling hills wrapped by an endless snake that was the wall. It looked as if the wall was sort of just placed on top of the mountains like a string rather than something that was built on top of the mountains. Wherever the mountains went, up or down, so did the wall. In other words, there was no noticeable excavation. The wall zigs and zags as far as the smog will let you see. It's really something worth seeing sometime throughout your life because pictures do not do it justice.

We walked back down the wall, taking a different path than we took up. Along the way we met a French man who was traveling alone. We got to talking a little bit, and upon finding that we were American he congratulated us. He didn't specify, but I instantly knew what he was talking about. And it was at that moment that I realized how proud I was to say I was an American.

The next day was Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square was in the early morning, and it was also quite cold. We couldn't get a peep out of our tour guides about the history of the place because there are guidelines on what the Chinese can say about their government. The square has great political significance. It was the sight for the declaration of the PCR in 1949 and as well as the location for a number of political protests. Perhaps the most prominent was the 1989 protests that ended in the massacre of many pro-democratic demonstrators. At the head of the square is Mao's Mausoleum, decorated with grand portrait of the chairman himself and all his former glory. Even though China today is pretty different from how it was under Mao, he is still a huge icon for nationalism. And hence, his face is everywhere. Street vendors will try to sell you Chairman Mao quote books (very entertaining) and Mao watches that have Mao's arm oscillating as the ticker (even more entertaining). But our tour guides were completely tight lipped the entire time. Apparently there are secret police in the area that are hired to eavesdrop on tour groups to make sure the guides don't say anything treasonous about the country. Who knows if that's true or not.

The Forbidden City is an ancient palace adjacent to Tiananmen Square. It was completed in 1420 and was used as the Chinese Imperial Palace from the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty. It is quite expansive and has the traditional architecture that you always envision in your mind when you think of ancient Chinese buildings. All the structures look almost exactly the same, except they carry in size. The place goes on forever, and I could only see so much of it before I felt like I was seeing the same thing over and over again. But just being in these historical sites is a little mesmerizing at times, especially since the theme of our entire voyage has been about the rise of China. In the core global studies course that everyone on the ship has to take we talked about several of these sights and places, so actually being there was like taking a walk back through time.

When the Chinese Emperor was tired of seeing the same square red buildings with yellow rooks in the Forbidden City he would hitch it up to his lake house, the Summer Palace. We visited there the next day. I thought of it as like the Walker Ranch for the Chinese Bush. It is built up a mountain and has a grand lake waterfront. The history is about the same of Forbidden City, maybe with one more hostile takeover at one point or another in history. Unlike the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace has diverse building structures and has lakes and waterways running through it. I would rather spend my time there than the Forbidden City too. AND it's the sight for some hilarious Chinese recreational activities. People come to the Palace to do their line dancing classes, their singing rehearsals, play cards, sing, etc. We definitely joined in a couple dance classes and watched some singing comedy acts before we left for the Beijing Zoo to see the Pandas and other great sights.

This last August I devoted about a month of my life watching the Olympics. I watched the more obscure events all day long and was glued to my couch for the prime time events at night. I don't know why, but I just think the idea of a global meeting to showcase the best of the best athletes (except for baseball) is so fascinating. So actually going to the Olympic stadiums in Beijing was a pretty big deal for me, especially since they all seemed so far away at the time I was watching them on TV.

The area where the Olympic Green is probably the most landscaped area of the city, but the pollution is horrendous. Before the Olympics, the Chinese shut down nearly every coal fired power plant in the area and kicked half of the cars off the road in efforts to clean the air. Locals I talked to said the air that August was noticeably cleaner, but that there was a different story goin' on while I was there. Straight above the sky was blue but the horizon would stay a permanent and daunting shade of gray. Anytime after 2 o clock the sun was at that angle that made it look as if the sun was setting even though it was just early afternoon. Anyhow, despite the smog, I was very excited as my bus parked in the lot of the National Indoor Stadium (where the gymnastics events where held). Across the street was the Water Cube and just next to that, as you all know, was the Bird's Nest. As we were arriving there were window washers repelling down the sides of the water cube cleaning its bubbly walls. It was the oddest sight, because their feet weren't stopped by walls of the building, rather the bubbles squished in as the washers rested against them. I always thought that even though the building looked like it was made out of rubber, it was actually still firm. But this was clearly not the case, as I saw some clear indentation action happening. Squishy walls. Awesome.

We went into the water cube first. Inside was pretty much how you'd expect- a very ethereal and aquatic vibe. Water fell from the walls of the main plaza, most of which was consumed with a fairly large fountain covering the ground. The main pool stadium is smaller than it looks on TV, but most things are. The lap pool where Phelps and others swam was drained for some reason but the diving pool that bordered it was full, with all diving platforms intact. Just outside the main stadium was a hallway with glass walls that looked down onto the warm-up pool, which was full, and actually seemed a lot bigger than the main pool. Throughout the whole building natural lighting came in through the bubble walls, it all felt like I was in some sort of futuristic space building. The Bird's Nest was similarly impressive, and was quite monstrous compared to any baseball or football stadium I've been to in the US. As you walk up to the building the elaborate steel weaving engulfs your vision. The structure is massive. Inside you can walk through the rows of seating and down onto the field and track where all the events took place. There was some type of costume showcase activity going down on the field, but I had no idea what was really happening. Being in the center of the field just turning around and looking at all the stands was mesmerizing. I took my time before walking back up through the bleachers and to the bus. This was our 4^th and last day in Beijing. The bus took us to the airport, and our feet took us to the plane, which took us to Shanghai, where our floating home was to meet up with us.

A thought that I've mulled over for quite some time while on this trip has been the idea of home and where that is for me. As long as I've known, the only place I've ever considered warm enough to call home is that blue house in Aptos. San Diego was never home for me. It probably never will be. It never felt like it, something was always slightly off. I knew my apartment on campus was just a place I stayed temporarily until I could get back home when school broke. But I don't feel the same way about the MV Explorer. When I return from a 4 day trip in any of these countries and turn the corner to see the ship I become elated. I know I have a room aboard where I can unwind and process everything I've just seen. And that's what I've come to realize a home is: a place where everything is safe again, a place that calms your stresses and senses. One of the best things about going on these multi day trips is coming back and feeling like I'm home again, because it's usually a feeling I only get about 4 times a year since I've started college. And here I get it every 2 weeks. And I love it. I have found another place where my heart is. I wonder what the withdraws will be like.

The first couple of days on the ship after port was very emotional for everybody. There was just a feeling in the air where you knew something just wasn't right, that something that was once there is now gone. I did not know Kurt that well, but the accident had touched everyone on board. What's more is that his death brought back a lot of the things I was feeling when Rachel died a little more than a year ago. I saw Kurt's closest friends on the ship going through some of the same things that my friends and I went through when Rachel had her accident. Seeing that is probably what hit closest to home for me. No one on this ship knows everyone else, but everyone's friend networks overlap to the point where everyone is connected. So even though a good portion of the ship, myself included, didn't know Kurt that well, we were all brought together by his death. Traveling the world like this and coming into poverty stricken countries as the rich westerners sometimes has you feeling invincible. The feeling that somehow all the afflictions of the world that impinge on all the people we've seen so far somehow don't extend to you. And then something like this happens, and for better or for worse, it brings us all back down to earth. The fragility of life is a paramount realization. It's something we should all be aware of. That's not to say that you should limit yourself. But that we should be aware. Informed decisions are better than ignorant ones. So we should all keep that in mind while we still can.

Love the ones you love.

Spenser