Bonus Edition: Griping About Weather

Singapore is also the hottest place we've been yet. Well, not hottest, but most uncomfortable. I sweat through my shirt in a matter of minutes here while it was overcast. I can't even imagine what its like when the sun's out. It's pretty awful outdoors. It's like 1 degree above the equator so its hot and humid every day with a slight chance of rain. It drizzled a few times for a few minutes, but it didn't cool it down as much as make it more humid.

India was hot and humid in Chennai, and just hot in Delihi-Agra-Jaipur. Northern India was much more bearable than Southern. Southern India at its worst is about how Singapore was when I was there (well I'm still there now but you know).

Mauritius was paradise. Nothing else to say.

South Africa was almost chilly in Cape Town. They sometimes get blasted by wind straight from Antarctica there. Johannesburg and the Pilanesburg Game Reserve were hot during the day and cold at night, especially out in the country. Early morning game drives at Pilanesberg definitely required a jacket. Oh yeah I haven't told you about South Africa yet. Well nobody's asked, either, so hmph!

Ghana was cool but humid. Much more bearable than Singapore and Chennai [wah].

Morocco was extremely hot but extremely dry.

Spain was the same as Morocco, but not QUITE as hot. Also there was no dust, which is basically like fog that gets stuck in your clothes. My Marrakech t-shirt that I wore while hiking in the sand STILL has dust stains on it, after like 5 washes.

Okay, bedtime. Tomorrow is probably a visit to the Thai neighborhood of Singapore for more Thai finery, then we leave at 5pm. Singapore is 12 hours ahead of the East Coast, which makes figuring out what time it is at home super easy.

From the future,

Stephen

Today's Discussion Question: What does Singapore Mean to YOU?

Singapore:
-Has nice things... REALLY nice things
-Is kinda fake seeming... like Disney World with Asian people instead of Disney stuff. It's not creepy though, just kind of odd. I guess its a good thing. Certainly a welcome change from India.
-Is so safe I walked around alone and was totally fine. Nobody waving hello, nobody offering taxi rides (more on this later), nobody selling fistfulls of trinkets in my face. Everybody ignored me, which is what we're used to in cities in the US, which meant it was a very comfortable environment for me.
-is one giant shopping mall... LITERALLY! For example, to cross one street I had to take an underpass under the street. I shit bricks when I went down the stairs to what looked like a subway station under the street that was actually level 4 of 5 of a massive underground shopping mall that connected several other shopping malls inside the tall buildings at the street intersection. There was another area where an open-air outdoor mall in the Chinatown connected via pedestrian overpass to another mall, which was a tram stop down the street from a massive mall. They're Asian-style shopping malls too, where they don't really have wide open spaces like ours, but are pretty cramped inside.
-Is weird since in those Asian style malls, literally every other place (maybe even more than that) was a foot massage/reflexology parlor. Penn and Teller's Bullshit would put this entire city out of business.
-Is the place where I got a Thai massage (not what you're thinking of... it was an actual massage, although they DID have places for the other kind if you wanted that.) It was BRUTAL. They did all this stuff where they iron the knots out of your lower back with their knees while ironing the knots out of your upper back with their elbows, which means all of the chick's weight is on your back. It actually hurt quite a bit but felt great afterwards. I told them about my Thai boxing experience and they were all like oooh cool and had actually heard of the master at the school in Pittsburgh I trained at. He's famous in Cambodia because he beat Eh Phutong, who is like the Cambodian version of  Mike Tyson. At the end of the massage they did all this crazy spine-flexibility stuff and it was nuts. It's hard to describe, but like google image search for some Thai massage stuff and you'll see basically what I mean.
-A horrible place to travel by cab... they can only pick up passengers at cab stands, and the lines are unbelievable. It takes forever, but the fares are low (to apologize?) I went 8km for 7 dollars. One plus is that they actually use meters, which is nice after 2 months of negotiated cab fares and all of their associated headaches.
-A horrible place to celebrate Halloween... since its Sunday, all the places closed early. For example, its only 11pm and I'm back here writing emails already. I did buy some cool stuff though.
-The place where I bought a shirt that says "Singapore is a Fine City" and has a little picture of all the things you'd get fined for doing.
-Is full of Chinese stuff, so I was hesitant to buy any of it since I'm going to real live China later. Tomorrow I'll go to "Little Thailand" and buy some Thai stuff since we're not actually going there.
-Had a couple of awesome Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, and Sikh temples that I stumbled upon while wandering around alone. I wandered around alone because I could... it was the first place since Cadiz and Sevilla where I felt safe enough to really just traipse around the whole city alone.
-I saw Singaporeans spitting, jaywalking, and littering! With these two eyes! They were BREAKING THEIR LAWS!!!

Indian Travel Guide by Me

An excerpt from an email to my parents and sister will serve as a stand-in for a post about India. Sorry I STILL haven't gotten around to South Africa and Mauritius. South Africa is a work in progress, and Mauritius shouldn't take too long, but in the next month I'll hardly have any time on the ship to write blog posts so don't get your hopes up too much. If you wanna know about them, ask me on facebook or chat or in person!

-I had a blast on the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur trip, and there's still tomorrow in Chennai.
-Beggars and hawkers swarm you everywhere touristy. Beggars make you feel like shit and your money doesn't help them so its better not to give them anything (they don't even thank you anyway.) The hawkers are annoying and follow you for miles sometimes but they're also an opportunity. I tried to sell my hat to one of them and he almost bought it but then I ran away without selling it (I like my hat!). I realize they're poor and a bit desperate to make a sale, but after 3 days of it you've got no sympathy for them (or the beggars for that matter).
-Jaipur is really cool and I had a few hours "on the ground" there. I have video of some of the most ridiculous traffic ever, and my friend Joe has a video of us crossing the street. I survived! I will never fear crossing the street in the US again, because WOW compared to them our craziest highway is like a funerary procession
-I rode an elephant up a mountain into a 17th century raja's palace. This event was also documented with video. And my new friend Ali took some pretty good photos of me too. He said "Ali takes the best photos!" and then I bought a set of 4 of the prints (he made them while we were touring and then sold them as we left) for 100 rupees, or a bit over 2 bucks. He wanted 200 rupees but then I pointed out "if I don't buy them, who else will?" and he was like "ok 100 then!" Basically I got a few things I bought for super cheap, which made up for other things being somewhat overpriced... bargaining works out like that. I bought a bronze cast statue of a seated meditating Buddha (for the garden!) that the guy originally wanted 1800 rupees for, but I haggled it down to 900 by asking for a student discount. I was a complete asshole too. He had to go to another room to get a card reader for me to pay with my Visa debit, and at that point the price was 1000 and he said "ok 1000 rupees" and I said "wait I thought we had said 900!" and he said "no no you said 1000!" and I started to be like "oh well never mind then!" and he relented and went down to 900... I love playing these mind games, especially after getting ripped off a few times. India owes me! and to be fair I DID give a few handouts to beggars. I had some extra food at one of the lunch buffets and I took it with me in a napkin and gave it to a genuinely grateful mother and child, and then when another mother nearby saw I gave her 100 rupees (then ran onto the bus and hid before everyone else could come over).
-Saw the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort. They were also ridiculous. I tried to take lots of "off the beaten path" photos of the Taj Mahal besides the usual facade view, and I'm satisfied
-I took a lot of photos in general. Sometimes Indian people wanted to be photographed, sometimes they also wanted money... but I got some good photos of people, still life, and architecture.
-The trip was more fun than my safari because it wasn't full of spoiled rich morons.
-India has an astonishing range of truck horns. Some of them actually play little songs. You can hear some of them in my Jaipur video, but they were really crazy on our bus rides on the highway. Indian drivers blow the horn all the time; to signal that they're passing mostly, but also if someone's going slow, going fast, if there's a wide ox cart, if there's something to look at off on the side of the road, if there's a cow in the way, etc.
-Yes there are cows wandering around. They are completely unphased by everything, because they know traffic will avoid them as much as possible. One dog I saw, however, was not so lucky... ewwww
-On the way from Agra to Jaipur we had to take a detour on the bus cuz of some riots. There were tons of cops... and the cops in India all pack some SERIOUS heat. They've all got AK-74s on their backs, even the port guards.
-Delhi is massive and spread out and has that artificial and planned look to it. But mostly massive. It also had the highest density of hilarious and awkwardly-worded shop names. I've got photos of them too.
-I rode and survived a train ride from Delhi to Jaipur. The entire way there, the train passed a massive never-ending shantytown along the railroad tracks.
-Public urination is the ONLY kind of urination in India. I saw an ABSURD number of people peeing on walls and in gutters. I tried to count them but literally lost track in the 40s, and this was just in the first day in Delhi. At any given time there's probably more people peeing in public in India than there are people in the US.
-when we took that detour to avoid the riots the bus took a country road through rural Uttar Pradesh state on the way to Rajasthan, where Jaipur is. Since it was a bit off the beaten path, the people in the villages we passed through weren't used to seeing tourists, and therefore were overjoyed to see a bus of foreigners in their town. This is the only time I saw genuine non money-related friendliness in India. Everyone came out to stare (Indians stare... after a while it doesn't offend you anymore) and a few people had cameras. I took some great photos of the people since they were so excited to be photographed.
-All buses and trucks in India are decorated with flowers and images of Hindu deities. They were reminiscent of the Beatles' bus from Magical Mystery Tour.
-A lot of places require shoes to be removed, such as the mosque to the side of the Taj Mahal. This keeps the floor extremely clean but makes your shoes smell horrible. I dunno if they'll ever be the same. Also India has some pretty unholy smells of its own. Urban areas smell like urine and gasoline all the time, with other exciting aromas mixed in based on whats nearby (human shit, elephant shit, cow shit, welding torches, vegetable markets, fish markets, spicy foods, spicy food shits, etc.)
-One thing I saw on TV was a commercial for skin-whitening cream. White people try to tan to get darker, and Indians use sketchy cosmetics to look whiter... what a world.
-Speaking of white people, you'd be hard pressed to find dark-skinned Indians on TV or in advertisements. They're extremely rare. Everyone is either an extremely fair-skinned Indian or an actual white person. Not really sure why, but its kind of messed up, since most Indians are pretty dark, even in the north.
-With liberal use of Pepto Bismol, Delhi Belly was kept relatively under control. Only 1 relatively minor incident was resolved quickly. No injuries or deaths to report. I do have quite a few mosquito bites though. We'll see how THAT plays out...
-I totally know what that professor meant when he said said this before we got to India: "When you're there, all you can think of is 'GET ME THE HELL OUTTA HERE!' but then when you've left you already want to go back.

Who wants a vuvuzela in South Africa?

They're stupidly cheap. Well? Anyone? Send an email to sgchastain@semesteratsea.net

Ghana Part 2

"The British were the most powerful so they got the best parts of Africa, which is why they were here!" -tour guide

After the tour of the house and a meeting with her parents, Juliana, her friend Nancy, and my homestay buddy Angela and I all went on a walk around the village. Nancy came over to join us during the mancala-ish game. She was a bit younger than Juliana and didn’t speak any English, but was quite a character. She was picking on Juliana trying to embarrass her all the time, and they were argue lightheartedly with each other in Twi the whole time. We saw their school and about 50,000 kids all playing soccer.  We walked past their church and a group of kids practicing marching. Juliana said that for Ghanaian independence day all of the schools practice parading and marching and compete nationally.

After a jaunt around the village we headed out to their soccer field, which was very well kept. Soccer seems to be just about the only thing for kids to do here, and they do it a lot, just like Morocco and probably most of the world. But here we met with another group of homestayers and played a game that was like 4-on-4 keepaway. We got pretty into it. It was during this game that the sun came out for the first time all day (the naming ceremony had actually been interrupted briefly for the daily rainy season downpour.) But the sun. Oh man. Equatorial sun feels like somebody sitting on you. It wasn’t even high in the sky and it was ridiculously intense. The game eventually got broken up cuz some of the older kids from the village wanted to use the field, so Juliana took us through their crop fields. They grew tons of cassava but also mangoes, tomatoes, pawpaw (or however you spell it), and pineapples. During this tour Nancy borrowed my camera (remember, Ghanaians love cameras) and took about 70 pictures for me. Some of them are surprisingly artsy. Maybe she’s got a future. I’ll post them on the blog once I get a chance. She took pictures of the plants, some houses in the village, a few warehouses out in the fields that they were building, and once we got back into the village, some of the children hanging around the schoolyard area. She also took a few self-portraits and quite a few pictures of my butt (I was walking in front of her unaware of this).

                Once we got back to Juliana’s house, there was a bit of time before dinner so we sat down to watch a Nigerian movie that she said was one of her favorites. All of their movies were on these bizarre 28-in-1 DVDs of dubious origin. They’d each be sorted by category and have some famous American or Nigerian movies on them and then have some strange knockoffs listed too. My favorite was “Jurassic Park” and then after it was “Prehistoric Park” which showed a guy who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger about to take a railgun to a T-rex.

                After that we went to the community center and had a catered dinner. There’d been some kind of miscommunication about who was eating dinner with whom, so we didn’t actually get to have dinner with the families. I was bummed about missing out on eating with them, but it’s probably just as well since our systems can’t handle their food. By this I mean not only would we get diarrhea from bugs in the water (even if it’s clean for them there’s stuff in it we’re just not immune to) but also its SPICY! I made the biggest culinary mistake of my life during this catered dinner by liberally applying the green hot sauce to my jerk chicken. This is when we can only drink bottled water and had to pay for any additional drinks that we got and I had no Ghanaian cash (I’m pretty sure they didn’t take Visa either). I was eating food spicy enough that I’d have easily worked my way through an entire gallon of milk in a single meal just to extinguish the fire, but all I had was a half-liter of water. It went fast, and then I suffered. The acrobats performed again during this meal and did some firebreathing tricks. I could empathize.

                After dinner I was invited into the village “club.” This was built onto a house and consisted of a thatched roof over an open area with two or three tables and an open area for dancing next to what was actually a pretty nice sound system. Once we were there I was sat down by an older man who was well-dressed. He busted out a bottle of some NICE scotch, saying he reserved it for guests. I remembered what they told us about Ghanaian hospitality (it’s very rude to refuse if you’re offered anything) so I took my share (tough decision right?). We had an interesting discussion about what Ghanaians think of visitors to their country. He had worked as a chef on a cruise liner in Germany, but came back home when he lost that job, and now works as a chef in Ghana. He said he liked white people because they’d come to Ghana more often to take action against poverty. He also threw a total curveball by saying he didn’t like African-Americans who came to Ghana on heritage tours because they usually just stayed in a resort and then left again. He called African-Americans “rough” people who swore a lot. I’d have to say his opinions were shaped pretty substantially by media perceptions, since most of what people in Ghana know of America they’ve seen through TV and movies. More and more villagers showed up at the club to talk with us SASers. I met a guy named Emmanuel who ‘s my age and is going to the University of Elmina to become an architect. Got his email address and the snail-mail address for the village and his school. After that, I went back and passed out. The room I was given was Juliana’s older brother’s, since he was away at university (good for these guys! Everybody’s in school!)

                The next morning we had breakfast at the house. It was bread that Juliana had made herself earlier that morning, with jam and coffee. I took a chance with the bananas too, and never felt the ill effects the doctors warned about. Then we had to go. The goodbyes were surprisingly hard for people we had only known for a day and a half, but hopefully we’ll keep in touch. As I write this, Emmanuel has already replied to my first email, so there’s a good start.

                That afternoon back in Takoradi, I decided to go into town and buy some souvenirs and explore. I withdrew my 50 cedis from Barclay’s Bank and headed into the market circle. The market in Takoradi is built inside a giant roundabout in the center of town- the entire city is actually planned around a grid of big streets that intersect in roundabouts. 50 cedis got me very far, thanks to how awesome people in Ghana are. I bought 2 keychains (typical tourist stuff), a CD of local hip-hop, the “Ghana” and personalized “Stephen” wristbands (you’re kind of forced to buy them) and a pair of “Team Ghana” national soccer team socks (this was because I couldn’t find any t-shirts.) I took a cab back to port and along the way had a nice chat with the driver, named Eric. Once I got to the port gate, I was accosted by all the salesmen that wait out there- they knew we were coming and willing to spend money on stupid stuff. One guy was an artist though, and his paintings definitely weren’t stupid. He laid them all out on the ground and showed me each one and then when I asked for a price (I wasn’t too interested) he named 65. I only had about 25 cedis left and I said so, and to my shock he actually said he’d sell it for 22. It was a real acrylic on canvas painting too, not like one of those mass-produced ones that lots of places that see tourists sell everywhere. He had signed it and left his email and phone number on the back. He explained it was a spiritual thing for him to sell paintings to people who were leaving Ghana, since it sent his message and part of his soul abroad, hoping that we’d remember him later. I certainly will since he was so cool, so mission accomplished.

                The next day I went on a hike in Ankasa National Park, the last undisturbed rainforest in Ghana. The bus left Takoradi and this time headed west. Western Region is actually the poorest in Ghana as it turns out, but I didn’t know this at the time. The bus made good time over the typically pothole-filled road, and then at the entrance to the rainforest it hit a dirt driveway for the park building. The bus got stuck in mud 3 times on this driveway, and we had to help push it out. Some villagers also helped by chopping up trees and bamboo with machetes to put under the wheels of the bus. I hope they got paid somehow cuz otherwise we’d’ve been stuck. The hike itself was interesting; it was cut short because of the heavy rain. They call it the rain forest for a reason. I got good use out of my poncho, and since it was red and we had a few overzealous “Ranger Ricks” on our tour, I helped people get themselves un-lost. We didn’t see much wildlife but the guide did point out a few plants unique to the area which was pretty cool. I don’t have any pictures cuz my camera isn’t waterproof, but as we came out of the forest after about an hour it stopped raining. Right on cue, a giant millipede wandered across the bus parking lot. This guy was about half an inch in diameter and maybe 8 inches long. Since they’re harmless* I held him in my hand, and all the little feet felt kind of like a brush.

They’re not entirely harmless though. The biology professor (I think that’s what he does) that was on the trip with us said that they give off slight amounts of cyanide gas as self-defense, so I was advised to wash my hands before touching my eyes. Crises were averted. On the way back out the park driveway, we walked next to the bus to avoid any more mud shenanigans.

                The lunch was at a beach-side resort, which felt good this time since we weren’t really trying to get immersed in any local culture. The chefs were all German, and the food was typical Ghanaian stuff. Big pieces of spicy chicken, fried fish, fried rice, and a salad. Very good overall. I also got about 15 minutes on the beach which was useful mostly for drying my socks out. My hiking boots were waterproof but it rained so much that rain soaked the insides of my shoes and socks by running down my leg into the inside.

                But after all that, my Ghana excursions were over when the bus returned to the ship in Takoradi and I took a much-needed shower. I did mention I got covered in mud from pushing the bus out of it, right? That night as the ship departed, all the salesmen that had set up camp at the port’s duty-free shop danced and drummed and sang to us as the ship pulled away from the dock, which was a great note to end on in Ghana. These salesmen were even happier than normal Ghanaians since they had made a killing selling souvenirs to us. Once the ship cleared the harbor, the moon came out and poked through the rainy-season clouds (remember it gets dark by 6pm there.)

 

Ghana Part 1

                Quick update: As of Sept 29, the internet decided to stop working in my room. It didn’t gradually get that way; late the night of Sept 28^th it was working totally fine, and the 29^th it doesn’t work at all. That’s my excuse for why this is almost a week late. I had to type it and then take it all the way up to the computer lab on a flash drive to post it! Woe is me!

 

Ghana! Oh shit! I’m gonna get malaria and dengue fever and dysentery and bubonic plague and yadda yadda yadda. The best way for Ghana to be fun is to just say “yeah whatever” about all the tropical diseases and filth and poverty that you see and just kind of dive in like you would any other country. Since I’m a chicken I didn’t really do this and went on SAS sponsored trips instead. But I’d say I still had as big a blast or more than anyone else.

                The first day I had to complete a required visit to the Elmina and Cape Coast castles for my class on globalization. My first impressions of Ghana were mostly surprise at how welcoming everyone was. As the bus drove from Takoradi east along the coast to Elmina, crowds of schoolchildren in their uniforms would run out of the building or stop their soccer games to wave as we went by. They were overjoyed to see foreigners, no mistake. It seemed fake at first, like they were putting on a show, but we all began to realize that they actually were THAT happy we were there. More on this later. The cities and towns in Ghana are a mixture of relatively nice private houses, short bunkhouse-type public housing apartments, and the ubiquitous Ghanaian house with cinderblock walls and a corrugated metal roof. Some areas looked better than parts of Pittsburgh I’ve seen, others looked like... the third world I guess. It was interesting to see that even in the bad-looking areas the houses did all have electricity and tons of TV antennae and satellite dishes. Their drains are all in the streets and run along next to the road. The water in them smells... interesting. It’s the kind of water that if you accidentally stepped in it you’d want to burn your shoes and buy a new pair instead of try to clean them.

                Everyone in Ghana has a shop. They sell anything and everything and it seems like they sit outside at the storefront all day. All this stuff must come from China and places like that, since most of it seemed kind of secondhand. Same with the clothes. Lots of donated clothes come from old sports teams or the losers of superbowls. I saw a surprising number of US sports t-shirts. One man I saw today (Friday) was wearing a very new-looking Ovechkin jersey t-shirt. I asked him where he got it and he said “here in Takoradi.” He didn’t know who Ovechkin was, and I told him he was an ice hockey player from Russia and he was amazed. It was really interesting to see how our stuff ends up in countries like Ghana. Who knows how the guy that sold it to him got that shirt. It wasn’t an old secondhand; it was brand new. Then we talked about Washington and sports and our respective cities. Like literally every Ghanaan I talked to, he loved the USA and hoped to visit New York City and DC at some point in the future. The Cab driver who drove me back to the port from the market in Takoradi wanted to take his international driver’s license to the USA and work as a driver there and send money back to Ghana to get his family a nice house. I gave him 5 cedis for a 2 cedi ride and wished him all the best. Anyway a bit of a tangent there... back to the tours, which were on Wednesday.  

                  Both of the castles had been built by Europeans for use first as trading posts but then as slave dungeons and loading ports. Elmina was constructed by the Portuguese in the 1480s (old!) and Cape Coast was built by the Dutch, Swedish, and British in the 17^th century. Both of them had roughly the same kinds of slave quarters but Cape Coast seemed to be a big bigger. Both of them had also changed hands between various European nations at various points in their history.

                They’re pretty much interchangeable. Both of them had huge dungeons with no light whatsoever for the slaves in them. All of the dungeons were gender segregated and had drains built into the floor where the slaves were expected to use the bathroom, but in actuality it just piled up. In the Cape Coast male dungeon there was an easily visible line on the wall where the archaeologists stopped digging through gravel and started digging through solidified human shit. It was knee-high. And it was like this while the slaves spent months inside with very little light and only enough food and water to survive. Some slaves refused food and water and instead chose to die there. They packed about 200 slaves into a space the size of a large classroom, and they were always shackled together. It was gut-wrenching to be in the same room where that kind of thing had happened.

                In between the two castle visits we stopped for lunch at an all-inclusive resort type place right on the coast. The tour guide said it was Ghanaian-owned and operated, but it still felt a little bit awkward, exclusivist, and “fake.” In the midst of country shacks and banana plantations, there was this place with a golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts, and “beach cabins” where we ate a catered lunch outdoors on the beach and watched a performance by some drummers and acrobats. These guys were good. They did a lot of traditional dancing and then some fire eating and breathing and balancing big bowls on sticks which they held on top of their heads and hands and, creatively, in their pants. The whole mood of the performance was light-hearted, and they pantomimed a few off-color jokes. I couldn’t tell if it was all meant to tell a single story, but the performance was entertaining anyway. On the way back to the bus they told me they were from a cultural society in Elmina that usually performs for donations but had been hired by the SAS trip.

                As I said, the Cape Coast castle, which we visited next after lunch was very similar to the Elmina castle which we had visited before lunch. It was slightly newer however and wasn’t quite as Portuguese-looking. Its dungeons were larger and it had a more complete museum about the history of European-African contact and the slave trade in the early modern period. There was some guy walking around saying you had to pay a cedi to take pictures, but I think they threw him out after the tour guides realized he didn’t actually work for the museum. I hid some other SASer’s cameras in my bag so he wouldn’t come harass them about it. After that tour we drove back to Takoradi the same way. I took note of all the schools we passed. It’s good that they have so many of them built; it seems like Ghana is really on its way towards better things.

                The second day in Ghana was the first day of the cultural immersion trip. The bus bounced, pitched, and lurched its way across the paved and sort-of-paved roads to a village north of Elmina. There are no superhighways in Ghana, just mid-range roads with houses on them that happen to go further than other roads. They’re paved but are more potholes than paving so sometimes it seems like it’d actually be easier to just drive offroad.

                Once we got to the village we were greeted by some drummers. Hey these guys look familiar! Its the guys from lunch yesterday! I’d learn later they’re called the Elmina Culture Group (or something like that... forgot the name, sorry.) After that, there was the African naming ceremony, where we all received a name in Twi, the local language. In Ghana you have a name based on the day of the week of your birth. Mine was Saturday, so I’m named Kwame (like their first president Kwame Nkrumah).  My last name was Mensah, which was the last name of the family I would be staying with.

                Before the naming ceremony began, there was the pouring of a libation to ensure that the friendship between SAS and the village was proper in the eyes of the supreme deity, whichever one you might happen to believe in. This involved the village chief linguist, who speaks for the chief. The chief does not have to speak to anyone, although he was a pretty nice guy and as I’d find out the next day actually have some cool stories- he’s been to a Nationals game in Washington DC! Anyway, the linguist poured a bottle of schnapps on the ground and recited a long prayer as he did so. A very long prayer. In Twi. I had no idea what he was saying but it went on for about 10 minutes.

  Once that was all finished (the naming ceremony took a while since it was done one at a time for every SAS student) we were taken to lunch at another all-inclusive resort which was a bit awkward, but then came back to the village to meet our families. I found my host sister, the only member of her family who spoke English, named Juliana. She was a 15 year old girl who had just graduated from the 3^rd level of post-grammar school. Ghanaian kids go to about 5 levels of school from what I understand. Grammar school is like 1^st thru 4^th grade, and then the levels afterwards are about 3 years each, with the 5^th level being university. Juliana was very nice to show us around her house. The house itself was actually a series of smaller rooms that all shared a common courtyard. In this courtyard I met about 15 young children, since several families shared it. The kitchen was under a roof but behind a half-wall, which was pretty interesting. Inside the house they had good furnishings: comfortable mattresses, couches, TVs, a computer, rugs, etc, but at the same time they cooked with a wood fire. Ghana is strange like that. In some of the shantytowns we passed, the houses looked like they were barely standing, the gutters outside of them brimming with filth, and yet every single house had electricity and a TV antenna or dish. Every single one. But back on topic here... after the tour around the house we sat down and played a board game I’d never seen before. The name escapes me, but its played with the same board and stones as mancala, the Egyptian game. It’s a bit hard to explain the rules (especially when there’s a language barrier... imagine how it was for us!) but its easy enough to figure out after playing a little bit. The Ghana post will continue in part 2....

Ghana Fact Sheet

Republic of Ghana

President: Barack Obama

Folk Hero: Barack Obama

Population: So happy to see you!

Climate: Wait I thought it was supposed to be hot here...

National Smell: wood fires, smoked fish

National Mood: extreme happiness

Currency: Hard to obtain, but goes a long way

Religion: "We are all Brothers"

National Disease: infectious cheerfulness

Internet Code: "Just give me your email address and I'll tell you. I want to chat!"

Education: thousands upon thousands of schoolchildren who want to climb all over you and use your camera

Healthcare: Doxycycline, lots of "not the tap water oh god no!!!!"

History: Depressing and conveniently disregarded in favor of optimism

Location of port: A 2 dollar cab ride away

...Real, non-half-assed blog entry is forthcoming. But here's the lowdown: Its only day 3 of 4 and I would say that its my favorite country so far, but its so hard to compare it to the others that I'm gonna just say I like it a LOT.

Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains Part 3- Conclusion

Still Day 3- So basically I suck at soccer. I’ll be the first to admit it. So I stuck myself as the goalie since I felt more confident there than anywhere else. I made a few big stops here, let in the odd goal or two there; I played average. The villagers had awesome teamwork and would always manage to rush the goal somehow and have 3 guys standing right in front of me. I guess it’s pretty much the only thing they have to do for fun besides watching satellite TV.
        About midway through the game, someone lifted the ball a little too high and in just the wrong direction and sent it sailing off a cliff. I mean about a 2,000 foot cliff here. Not a sheer cliff, but a very steep downhill to a river valley very far below the town, which was built along the road as it passed by their terraced farmland. Unphased, however, a boy from the village bounded down the hill after the ball. From my vantage point it looked as if he had just dropped off the face of the Earth. About 10 minutes later, to applause from all, he brought the ball back up. Play was resumed but the Moroccans were awarded possession for all that work to get it back. I subbed out a little later since I was getting a lot of dust in my eyes and was thirsty.
        Anyway, after a game of Mafia with the SaS’ers and a fairly average dinner (chicken, salad, bread, tea, and melon again), and a spirited discussion with both Muhammads and Hassan about Berber family planning practices, it was off to bed. I went back to my gite and remembered that I still had all 3 of those pins I had brought with the US and Moroccan flags on them. I found the old man who owned the gite and who knew absolutely no English and clumsily asked him in French if I could give gifts to his grandchildren. He smiled and nodded, went into a back room, and brought out 3 toddlers: a girl and 2 boys. I pinned a pin onto each of their collars and they were absolutely stunned by them. Their grandfather told them to thank me and they did so in that way that little kids do when they have to be reminded. The grandfather was very grateful for the gift and I could see that it had made the kids’ days. They were showing the pins off to each other and their older siblings for the rest of the night. Up on the roof, I looked down into the courtyard and the two boys were wrestling each other. Their mother yelled at them to stop, but instead I took two flashlights and started twirling them around rave-style. The boys were fascinated and immediately stopped fighting to watch. Their mother laughed and thanked me for calming them down and took them to bed.
        After that I took myself to bed, but as I was about to go to sleep I heard music. I went back down the street to the first gite where a few men from the village were playing a Berber version of a banjo and singing some folk songs. I recorded a video which is pretty much pitch-blackness (there were no streetlights) but the sound came out great. I hope I can post it sometime before the end of the trip. I returned to the roof of my gite and fell asleep to the sound of restless donkeys tied up nearby and the music down the street.

Day 4
        We were up early and it was only a short hike back to the buses on a paved road on the other side of the river valley. The bus ride along this one-lane road with no guardrail might’ve been a bit nerve-wracking if I hadn’t’ve just spent two days on all kinds of narrow ledges and paths so it wasn’t too bad. The buses took us back to Marrakech by way of that same town we stopped in on the way over, and we caught a nice first-class, on-time train back to Casablanca. It felt great to take a real shower and eat some protein for a change, but I definitely consider this trip to have been one of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve ever had.
Souvenirs: Marrakech t-shirt, small brass ward against the evil eye, cedarwood box, lots of dust in my lungs and on my clothes, and a small rock I picked up on which Muhammad wrote in Arabic “Morocco rocks”

Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains Part 2- The Actual Mountains

Day 2
        Breakfast at the hotel. Moroccan breakfasts are all carbs. There are 3 different types of bread and spreads of either jam or butter. To drink there’s orange juice, coffee, or tea. Anyway, I ate all of this and we got on our minibuses to head out to the mountains. As we left Marrakech on the Muhammad VI expressway (there’s that name again!) we slowly made our way out to the desert. The outskirts of Marrakech are a bizarre mixture of huge open spaces, extremely well-maintained highway medians with gardens and pavilions, country houses for the poor, suburban compounds for the wealthy, and half-finished construction projects miles away from the highway. It seemed like back before the global economy went to shit, they were expecting Marrakech to be growing very fast. But anyway, as we drove, the mountains slowly came into view, and the ground got sandier and rockier. Up until this point, the Moroccan countryside had looked a lot like Andalucia: dry but still farms and vegetation. Out here though, there were lots of rocks and not much of anything else. We stopped briefly at a very lucky town where 60 people all patronized the roadside general stores for bottled water for the hike later in the day. We drove and drove onto increasingly narrower roads until we met up with some porters and their donkeys. They would be carrying our stuff. Or other people’s anyway. Mine wasn’t too heavy so I just wore my backpack the whole way. You couldn’t get to your bag once it was on the donkeys unless we had stopped for lunch. Anyway we were off after about 15 minutes of prep. The beginning of the hike was along a dry riverbed that gradually went uphill into some shallow rolling hills. There were small houses and farms around, and the occasional shepherd. These people were not Arabs, but were Berbers like our guides. They’re the aboriginal inhabitants of North Africa who are Muslim like the Arabs but have their own language and are a separate ethnic group.
        Berbers, as we’d find out, are an extremely hospitable people. They are also friendly to strangers. Children would run excitedly across their fields when they saw the hiking group and wave to us as we walked by. They didn’t have what I’ve come to call the “income gap stare” that poor people in the cities of Morocco (and probably every country we’ll visit) look at you with. If you’ve ever travelled to places with REALLY poor people, you know what I mean. It’s very awkward, judgmental eye contact. It says “you shouldn’t be here.” But the Berbers meet your gaze with nothing but excitement to see strangers and a very genuine friendliness.
        And this friendliness, as I’ve said, comes with a very high degree of hospitality. Our lunch was provided to us partially by food carried by the porters from Marrakech, and partially from food from the farm houses near where we stopped to eat. It was a salad of olives, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and probably some other stuff. There was also some canned spiced tuna, rice and chutney, and lots of tea. Berbers love their tea. At every meal there is plenty of tea to drink. Some of it is minty, some of it isn’t.
        Anyway after lunch we continued on to our first village homestay. This was at a gite, or basically a Berber bed and breakfast. Everyone unpacked their mattress pads off the donkeys and set them up on the roof where we’d sleep. I passed the time chatting with other tripgoers. The boys from the village came running to see us very excitedly and we were exchanging gifts with them. I taught some of them all of the Muay Thai that I know in about 15 minutes, and they had a lot of fun challenging me to boxing matches.
        Then I went back on the roof to put on more sunscreen, and I heard drumming. Down below me through the open-roofed courtyard I could see that our porters had spontaneously started drumming and singing some Berber folk music along with the villagers. The men of the village were playing some drums they had, and the porters were hammering on the empty water jugs for the donkeys with spoons. Many of the SaS tripgoers and villagers and children were dancing together. One of the village kids about 8 years old had a sort of Bon Jovi haircut going on and was an incredibly good dancer. We called him Justin Berber. Shaved Head Muhammad explained to me that Berber men meet their wives when multiple villages gather for dances like that.
        Dinner was more chicken of some variety or another. It was very tender but I couldn’t really recall what it was supposed to be cooked in. It was alright I guess. As with all meals there was also bread, tea, a salad of some variety, usually with olives or figs, and then melon for desert.
        After dinner I realized how bad I smelled, and remembered that it was now the men’s turn in the hammam. The hammam is an Arabic and Turkish bathhouse which is basically a sauna room that also has a cold water tap. The water was heated by a fire under the floor that the villagers kept stoked with bamboo and cardboard boxes. Anyway, it was incredibly relaxing and probably was a big factor in me not being too sore to walk the next day. Afterwards, even without soap, I felt as clean as if I had taken a shower. Good stuff. Speaking of plumbing, Moroccans are apparently opposed to operable toilets. They had a couple of the infamous squatty potties that are all the rage everywhere in the world except the US, and their sole western-style toilet had no button to flush it. They had a bucket of water that you filled from a tap in the wall that you were (I guess) supposed to pour on top of your filth and it sort of made it fall through the drain and not stink. Also, we couldn’t drink their tap water (or at least were advised not to by the doctor) so I had to brush my teeth with some of my precious bottled water. Fortunately the old man who ran the gite was selling additional 2 liter bottles of cold water for 10 dirhams each.
        As the sun set we played some cards and chatted with the guides a bit (on our way to discovering just how cool they were), and lay out to sleep on the roof. It was incredibly dark since we were essentially in THE middle of nowhere. It was only the second time I’d been under skies dark enough to see the Milky Way and so many stars. Since I didn’t do too much sleeping (it was cold and windy and the donkeys made so much noise!) I could sort of keep track of what time it was by where the star Vega was in the sky. It was almost fun to not get any sleep.
        Well the next morning after sleeping about 15 minutes I awoke to roosters, which I was fairly sure only happened in those animal sounds books you read when you were 4. We had another quick all-carbs breakfast and were on our way in 3 separate groups based on hiking speed. The next leg of the hike took us up 300m total higher in altitude over the course of 5 hours, from 900m at the first gite to 1200m at the second. That doesn’t sound too bad but we actually went up to about a mile altitude (1600m for those that never ran track) and down and up a few times. It was a pretty challenging hike and I’m fairly sure my mom would freak out if she saw the kinds of ledges we had to scramble along. The scenery more than made up for this though, and we would always encounter shepherds with their flocks or other Berber villagers riding donkeys up and down the roads. I kept having to remind myself that this wasn’t another mountain national park, but was actually a place where people lived. As we hiked, I had a nice long conversation with Shaved Head Muhummad, who told us all about the kinds of music and sports that are popular in Morocco (French rap, American pop, Moroccan bands), where he grew up and where he lives now (a rural valley about 200km south of where we were hiking, and Marrakech respectively), and a lot of other insights into Morocco. I asked him about the king, and he said he was a great guy who really cared about the poor and helped to bring electricity to places in the country like his family’s home- and our villages.
        The landscape was surprising. In the morning it was very foggy and humid as we ascended into the mountains by way of a dry river valley. It looked like it’d been dry forever but Muhammad said it’d actually been very stormy in the mountains just a few weeks ago. The valley itself was very green and leafy next to the riverbed, but about 50m above the river it got very dry and rocky. The soil was dark red and looked a lot like Mars. As we reached the summit of the first mountain (the highest one) we actually walked through a pine forest. Can’t say I was expecting that in Morocco. It could easily have been in the Appalachians except down below in the valley to the north and east, back toward Marrakech, there was desert and small towns with minarets.
        We had lunch in a pine forest too. On the way there, there was a small village where the path through it had to first cross a gate made entirely out of cacti. The Berbers use cacti as fences for their fields. Low maintenance, I guess. Anyway I avoided getting stabbed by any cactus needles but it slowed us down a little bit since the donkeys wouldn’t fit and their handlers had to find another way up. Lunch food was the same as the day before, except now there were canned anchovies as well.
        After another hour and a half or so we finally got to the second village and its two gites. I stayed in the smaller of the two and set up my mattress on the roof. Then I went down to join in a little game of Semester at Sea vs. Berbers soccer, which includes the most memorable reason for a delay of game ever. You can read all about it in the next part.

Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains Part 1- Marrakech

Oh man this is going to be so frustrating to type out without being able to upload photos or videos yet! Basically, I went on the SAS sponsored trip called “Berber Villages of the High Atlas Mountains.” It began on Friday (the 10th of September) and I am writing this entry now that I’ve gotten back on Monday the 13th. Okay here goes, hope I’m not forgetting anything.
Exchange rate: When I withdrew my Moroccan cash, it was 8.7 dirhams to the dollar; by the end of this trip people were getting about 8.5 DH to the dollar. Apparently the dirham is notorious for fluctuating wildly against the dollar.
        Day 1
        We departed Casablanca to head to Marrakech. On this first day the group of about 60 total was just in Marrakech, not in the Atlas Mountains yet.  Anyway, we met our guides Hassan, Muhammad (who always wore an orange hat), Muhammad (shaved head), and Hussein at the Casablanca train station, and then we waited for an hour and a half because the train was late. Awesome. But eventually it showed up and we boarded. I was in a cabin with 3 other tripgoers and 2 men from Kuwait. One of them spoke English and he said they come to Marrakech basically for discount shopping. It was pretty cool to talk with them. He said Kuwaitis love America, which is pretty nice to hear after the diplomat said that only 16% of Moroccans would say they approve of the US.
        Anyway the train pulled into the Muhammad VI train station in Marrakech and it was about 110 degrees there. Casablanca is pretty mild by comparison, but its downfall is that its big, dirty, unsafe, and ugly. In Marrakech we left the Muhammad VI train station and walked along Muhammad VI avenue (fun trivia: guess whose face is on all the money?) to the Hotel Oudaya, supposedly the nicest one in Marrakech. It was about 2 once everybody had finally gotten into their rooms and stuff, and then we had until 7 to wander around the city on our own. This is the point at which everything became extremely unfamiliar and extremely Moroccan.
        To get to the medina, the city center with the famous bazaar, you had to take a cab. The guides told us this should cost about 30 dirhams, or a little more than 3 dollars. But it doesn’t always because this is Morocco and there are very few fixed prices, especially in Marrakech. Anyway, myself and 3 others managed to talk the driver into 40 dirhams to get to the Souk (marketplace) but it wasn’t a big deal to have paid a little more since 10 minute cab rides in the states are like 25 dollars instead of 4.
        10 minute cab rides in the US can be scary, but Moroccan driving is an absolute free-for-all. For some reason I wasn’t actually that afraid during our numerous brushes with death and dismemberment; I just drank it all in as part of the experience. First thing you should know is most people are riding mopeds, bikes, donkeys, power wheelchairs, etc. Only about half of the vehicles on the road are actually cars, and I only saw one bike in all of Marrakech that was an actual motorcycle. Moroccans treat the dotted lines in multilane roads less as rules and more as suggestions. It’s much more common for everyone to just drive right down the middle of the road. And if the cabbie wanted to pass someone who was going slow in the left lane (this happened a lot), he’d go all the way across the double yellow line to do it. At one point our driver crossed the double line, passed in an intersection, ran a red light, and was speeding all at once, which would get him about the GDP of Morocco itself in tickets if he did it in the US. Anyway all this doesn’t quite create a picture of just how absolutely nuts traffic is here, especially inside the old medina, which I’ll get to later.
        So then a few friends and I went into the souk. I was immediately accosted by some snake charmers who were SO sure that I wanted to pose for a picture with their cobras that they put a smaller snake around my neck, led me to a box to sit on, took my camera, and snapped a photo of me with the snakes. What service! I didn’t even have to ask! This wasn’t going to be free of course. They demanded 200 dirhams, and I haggled it down to 100. My trump card was saying that posed photos like that were free in the United States, even though they probably wouldn’t be. I guess that’s an okay price for a compulsory photo though. They did have snakes after all, so I didn’t want to get them too angry. I heard later from other people that they’d throw the snakes at your face if you didn’t pay enough. Other people had to end up paying 200.
        After that I wandered around the market. Some places were outdoors and others were in a covered street. This was very welcome since if you’ll recall it was 110 at 2pm. Anyway the salesmen were very pushy by American standards and would always want you to come and look in their shop if you so much as glanced inside or made passing eye contact with them. I really began to realize that salesmanship is like an art form for them, especially in touristy areas like Marrakech. Besides giving you a good price, they have to work fairly hard to make you choose their store since so many of them sell basically the same bunch of Moroccan crafts and tourist souvenirs with only very minor variations. I bought a white Marrakech t-shirt for 120 dirham (asking price was 180). I also tried the legendary fresh orange juice out in the open part of the market. This was some of the best orange juice I’ve ever had and it was only 4 dirhams for a large glass.
        The next purchase I made was a cedarwood box with brass decorations that the shopkeeper had handmade. Or so he claimed. He showed me some of the big decorative mirrors he was working on carving as well as his toolkit. I have only his word, but it’s still a pretty nice box and he was very pleasant to talk to. He was also a pretty stubborn bargainer since he was in fact the only guy making boxes like these around (the standard move if you want the price to go lower is to say “well I’ll just go see if I can get this cheaper at some other shop.”) He asked for 250, I started at 150, and we met at 210; I only got it to 210 from 220 because it was the Eid al Fitr (basically Muslim Christmas) and he gave me a “holiday discount” on top of my “student discount.”  But anyway 24 dollars or so isn’t a bad price for it and I’m fairly certain it was genuine since unlike most of the crafts and clothes I saw, they weren’t for sale in literally every other store. This was one of the 2 souvenirs I wanted most from Morocco: a genuine locally made handicraft and a big box of mint tea. Would I find the tea as well? You’d better read this entire massive post to find out. (That’s me trying to create suspense so you’ll keep reading. Did it work?)
        As the evening approached, the souk began to get extremely crowded as food stalls were being set up in the open areas. I would have tried some food at a cleaner-looking one, but we had a dinner engagement at 7. It was supposed to be a dinner as if for Moroccan nobility with a belly dancer show at the end. Where was it? We had no idea. Somewhere in Marrakech. We hopped on the bus and it took us into the medina.
        Oh man... the medina. Imagine an ants nest with countless ants all swarming around everywhere that its too fast to see any individual ant. Now make all those ants people, make half of them cars, and put them in streets so narrow that our tour bus had to stop eventually because it didn’t fit. But minivans, compact cars, motorbikes, and donkeys still fit. The medina of an Arabic city on a Friday night is the most chaotic place I have ever been in my entire life no contest. And these narrow streets are not straight or in a grid but are actually so confused and chaotic that its as if you’re meant to get lost in there. We stumbled from the bus through side street upon side street, past all kinds of shops, bars, restaurants, bicycle repair places, homes, intersections where a stopped mule was holding up a bunch of kids on motorbikes, and just about every other thing that you can possibly imagine. Finally we arrived at the restaurant.
        Dinner was rolls and wine (food was paid for already but wine was on us... not an issue since it was low prices for high quality) followed by Moroccan salad, which is basically an assortment of all kinds of “I don’t know what this is but it’s really good” types of vegetables on little plates that everyone shares. Then came the main course. The desert is as hot as the medina is crowded as Moroccan lemon chicken is the absolute #1 best chicken I have ever eaten or will ever eat. There might’ve been better chicken in the past but I don’t remember it and if I don’t still remember it now then it wasn’t better. If you’ve never eaten Moroccan lemon chicken, go find the recipe right now. Its okay, I’ll wait. If you have had it then you might know what I’m talking about when I say it was divinely tender and tangy and I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it.
        About a dinner and a full bottle and a half of wine later (girls at the table couldn’t finish theirs themselves...) the meal ended and the belly dancers showed up. It was audience participation. They’d come and find guys sitting on the outside of the tables (where I was) and dance with them for a few minutes. Some of our professors got chosen and they were surprisingly good. Thankfully I wasn’t one of the guys that had to dance solo with them while everyone watched.
        After everything had ended I went back to the hotel and passed out fairly quickly (it might’ve been wine-related.) This is part 1 of the big Morocco post since I have a data limit on emails that I send to update the blog. Part 2 coming right up...

Moroccan tourism promotion slogans: "Open for business [except restaurants]", "Pardon our dust"

Okay so today was the first day of our visit to Morocco, where we'll be until Tuesday. Its also, coincidentially, the last day of Ramadan (or maybe the 2nd-last... it depends what the imams say). This meant that no restaurants were open. Except McDonalds. I took a nap during the on-ship lunchtime (we weren't allowed off until about 2pm) so that was my excuse for eating at a McDonald's in Casablanca. They had some good steak fries actually.

Tomorrow (or Saturday) is the Eid al Fitr. This means that EVERYTHING is closed except in touristy areas. What a great coincidence, since I'll be spending my only day in Marrakech tomorrow. Oh well. Hopefully there will be a few stores open. I want to get some mint tea and maybe a shirt or something.

The first things I noticed in the port of Casablanca was the smell and all the construction. There is a massive sulphite plant on the way into the industrial port and I was advised by someone who had visited here before with SAS not to go outside until we were past it. Didn't have to tell me twice.

Also, the US diplomats that came on board and spoke to us said that the king of Morocco is investing huge amounts of money in improving infrastructure and the economy. It certainly showed since for every building I saw in Casablanca there were 18 under construction. They were also building a tramway and new ports. This is just what I saw from a brief walk around the port area.

Fun times in the bazaar:
-Two of my friends wanted to get henna tattoos. They found several stands with women who would draw them. The first stand charged 30 dirhams (8.6 dirhams to the dollar today... it actually fluctuates against the $ a ton.) The second stand which seemed less sketchy charged 50 dirhams. This is how the conversation went: "This costs 30." "Really? The other stand was charging only 30!" "Oh okay we'll do for 30 then!"...... WOW! Bargaining is awesome.

-I bought a pair of pants. I did this because I didn't have good pants for hiking around tomorrow until Monday, and shorts are not okay, especially outside of cities. When I tried the pants on, I went inside the market stall and the salesman was very friendly and knew a lot of English. But then came the time for me to try them on. Where was the fitting room? He answered by taking a large mirror and putting it behind the counter and saying "here try and see here!" So basically I dropped the pants I was wearing and tried on a pair of Moroccan pants (made in Italy... they're actually really nice) in the middle of what I would consider "public." Interesting experience. As I wandered around the bazaar more, I saw many Moroccans try on clothes this way, except stores with women's clothes do have a special changing room. Best part of the experience? A quality pair of pants for 260 dirham.

-There are traffic lights but no crossing signals in Casablanca. There are crosswalks. This makes crossing the road slighlty less terrifying, although your first reaction upon seeing a bigger street here is "holy shit I am not going within 15 feet of that or I will be hit by 18 cars before I can even realize whats happening." But drivers do stop for people in the crosswalks. I saw a man try to get on a city bus just after the doors had been closed, and the driver waved his hands to say "sorry can't stop again." So this guy takes off across the street full speed THROUGH TRAFFIC so that he can catch the bus at the next stop. Seriously... brass balls.

-Moroccans touch you while talking to you all the time, even total strangers. I guess you just have to get used to it. We Americans with our 15 mile personal space bubble understandably get sketched out. And then there was that kid that begged for money, my sunglasses, and my camera for about 15 minutes. He asked in broken English, French, Spanish, and German, and I answered him in each. I guess he thought I'd be like "you know now that you mention it, I don't need this digital camera. Here, take it for free."

-The bazaar area was surrounded by streets that smelled like a combination of barbecued meat and piss. I don't want to know.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be in Marrakech. They have a famous, huge outdoor market where you can buy stuff from haggling. I look forward to getting some small crafts there with my remaining about 300 dirhams. Then after Marrakech I'm getting bused out to the middle of nowhere in the Atlas Mountains to hike around and visit Berber villages and stay at their wayfarers houses. They're famous for their hospitality so I've brought some postcards of Washington DC and pins with the US and Moroccan flags on them to reciprocate what I'm assuming will be their generosity.

Next update will probably be on Tuesday. A man told us that the internet cafes are closed until the end of the Eid which lasts about two days, so no updates from Marrakech, sorry.

Time to eat and sleep to get ready for some trekking.

All of Spain at Once (slightly anachronistic but it covers everything)

9/4/10
                Hey so here’s the update on the first day of Cadiz! I am writing this just after my tours at around 6 in the evening so I haven’t done Flamenco night yet and can’t upload pictures so I’ll post this whenever I can do that (sorry if this makes it end up being a little late, as in a few days!)
Later Edit: Pictures! Finally!Now I can upload them! Oh wait, the public wifi in Cadiz is horrible. Sorry guyz. I tried real hard. Twice. For a grand total of 2 hours. It never worked.
                It was awesome to wake up this morning and see land out the window. I had only slept for 5 hours but it was exciting enough to get me out of bed instantly.
Cadiz is a beautiful small city. Its very old-fashioned and in a pretty small area at the tip of a peninsula. The streets are all very narrow and lined with shops and the buildings above all have decorative balconies, as future photos will hopefully show. Every other building is a church (its Spain after all) so there were plenty of pretty old buildings to photograph.
The weather here is crazy. Not a single cloud all day and the sun is brutal. I’m shocked my sunburn isn’t that bad.
While I was wandering around the city with some friends we stumbled onto this old Spanish coastal fort which had been turned into a monastery which was free to tour. It was absolutely silent inside, which was crazy since it was so loud just outside of it. There were some good views out the cannon portholes.
During the walking tour SAS trip we also went to the archaeological museum. It had artifacts from the prehistoric inhabitants, who drew Phoenician ships on the walls of caves (kinda crazy) and a bunch of Phoenician, Hellenic, and Roman artifacts. Cadiz is actually home to the only two known Phoenician sarcophagi in Europe. Sadly, I couldn’t figure out how to turn the flash off of my camera until we got to the 2nd floor of the museum, where they had fine arts. I did manage to get photos of an interesting collection of marionettes from children’s puppet shows set in Cadiz during the 19th century.
After that I had a badly-needed lunch (around 4pm) at the Cafeteria Andalucia which was really expensive for how good it was (average). After that I went on a trip to the Carrafour grocery store (basically Spanish Safeway) to get some mouthwash. As I was waiting in the checkout line, two guys outside started a fistfight. These two kids came running into the store and told their mom something or other excitedly, and she told the cashier who started screaming something about Policia. Thats about when I figured it out. Outside one guy had his shirt off and was dancing around this other guy who was bleeding in the face. A big burly supermarket worker in an intimidating red apron went outside and broke them up and hauled the bleeding guy into the store. The cops showed up after that and calm returned to the streets of Cadiz.

UPDATE
Just got back from flamenco night! It was incredible! We went to this old-fashioned country restaurant near the town of Chiclana and they just kept giving us these drinks and we didn’t know if they were alcoholic or not (they were). Then a traditional Andalusian flamenco dancing ensemble performed. Words cannot do justice to the sheer athleticism these three gals and one guy had. It was absolutely mind-numbingly good. Then afterwards there was some audience-participation dancing.
Another edit from later: I am enlightened now and know that the pomegranate, orange, apple, and sherry combination is Sangria. Its awesome. I can drink it forever. It was probably my favorite part of Spain, to just get a giant pitcher of it with dinner to share with everyone. Anyway, after flamenco night I went out with some friends into Cadiz to get some tapas and cervezas, and it was all in all a great time.
9/5/10
Today was the hike in Grazalema Natural Park. It covers several picturesque mountains in southern Andalucia. The highest of them is about a mile high and you can see all the way to Morocco from the top. Unfortunately we didn't summit this one, but it was still a very fun 7 km hike at about 1200m altitude. The scenery, once again, was too beautiful for words to describe. Blah blah blah needs pictures I know I know. I'd post thousands of them if I could.
One thing I noticed on the way to the park from Cadiz is that there are thousands of windmills. USA needs to get it together about this kind of stuff. The tour guide said that half of all the power in Andalucia comes from wind and solar. That’s ridiculous. Anyway, after hearing that I dozed off on the bus and missed a lot of scenery but I was pretty sleep-deprived.
After the hike I took a short siesta (what an incredibly good idea the siesta is) and went out for dinner. I met up with some SASers who had found a restaurant with a really cool waitress the night before. We had tapas and fried fish and at the end we all got a free shot of Sobieski. I don't know what it is, but I'd guess its either mead or caramel vodka. Delicious. It tastes like happiness.
Sevilla on day 3! My friends and I got a train that left EXACTLY ON TIME (not used to this in the states) and got to Sevilla EXACTLY ON TIME. When we were finished shitting bricks, we found a hostel at a great price that had such luxuries as potable water and electricity, and was in a great location. Then we toured the city all day and saw the Cathedral, the Alcazar, and the Torre del Oro. All of them beautiful. Sevilla has so much history and its probably my new favorite European city (its beating Rome, Paris, and Athens.) I feel like I'm wasting my time posting only text and not pictures since the place is so photogenic. While I'm writing this I"ve managed to upload a token few photos, so hopefully you can go see them on facebook.

Another edit: Okay time to finally write about Sevilla.
We got lost a few times in the city (on purpose). This is the best way to find back-alley places with authentic handicrafts and other souvenirs that are worth buying. I found a carved ceramic wall hanging that was Moorish (Arabic) in design and said Sevilla (I assume) in Arabic on it. I’d take a picture but I forgot, and now its all wrapped up in bubble wrap until I get home. Its about the size of a piece of paper (slightly bigger) and was only 22 euros. For hand-crafted and painted ceramic? I was prepared to pay twice as much. This was definitely my favorite purchase in Spain. Of course its only competition is a coffee mug, a gold-toned keychain (it has the coat of arms on it! It looks cool! Shut up!) and a t-shirt with a cartoon angry bull that says “Sevilla” and was made in Bangladesh. Bangladesh? Shit. Oh well its funny.
On the last day in Sevilla we got lost on purpose again and wandered through the streets. I could seriously do that for weeks until I’d seen the entire old section of the city. The new section not so much, mainly because looking at it from the train some parts seem pretty ghetto. But in the old town with its pedetrian-only streets and whatnot I felt very safe the whole time. I suppose this is a luxury that’s gone now until Japan, or maybe Hong Kong.
Day 5 was uneventful for the most part. I woke up, drank some nice strong delicious Spanish coffee, did a little shopping to get rid of my Euros and bought a Spain-themed mug and had a great but filling lunch with my friend Sara. We made friends with an adorable little Spanish girl who was maybe 2 years old. She waved to us and got sad when we had to leave. I could tell she'll be pretty when she's older (like every single Spanish woman pretty much). But then I was reminded she was a toddler because she smiled and dropped a mouthful of food onto her bib.
Anyway, after that all my euros were gone and I came back onto the ship early (4pm when the deadline to arrive was 6). I took advantage of the ship sitting in port to run on the treadmill and do some bench press, both of which are somewhat precarious while its moving.
There’s not really much else specific that I can think of saying, so if you want to know more you can ask questions on facebook or by emailing me at sgchastain@semesteratsea.net. I’m definitely forgetting stuff but I’m also really tired. As I’m writing this we’re booking it towards Morocco, which makes the ship rock more, which makes me tired. Goodnight!

Just one more... this is important!!! (still not about Spain, sorry)

Okay, I just had a moment. While writing about Spain I have my ipod on all songs shuffle. The Maple Leaf Rag came on (when did that get on there? oh well). I haven't even been away from America that long, but this song is VERY American, and it made me miss America a little bit. This is huge, because up to this point in Spain I'd spent all my time choking back vomit that would suddenly collect in the back of my throat whenever I saw the official Hannah Montana store of Cadiz.

A city with history that goes back so long there were cave paintings of Phonecian galleys found under a new hotel they started building last year has to import Hannah Montana to keep itself culturally aware? America SUCKS! I was embarassed, really. That, and listening to the typical group of former SAS'ers on their way to the club shouting full volume at each other as they sat at the same table at an outdoor cafe, as older Cadiz residents turned away in disgust to find another restaurant.

But Joplin, you have saved me from this tiresome guilt/shame. America HAS contributed some genuinely original things to the world, and not just in the name of consumerist conquests. Maybe in 3,000 years they'll dig up some art from 1901 under the foundations for the space elevator in New York City.

A few quick one-liner type thoughts to post while I compose a giant entry about Spain

-Spain is 2 hours ahead of Morocco. Don't ask why, just roll with it. It just went from 23:59 to 22:00. More time to write, same amount of sleep!

-This is a welcome addition, because Spain is not conducive to nighttime sleep. They siesta for the express purpose of partying until 6am. I shit you not. I can't even keep up with them.

-I did take a siesta as a cultural experience. It was incredibly refreshing and I woke up relaxed. Ate dinner at 9pm with everyone else.

Oh wait these are all about Spain. Don't wanna steal thunder from the big post.

-Seriously Morocco? You want me to wear long pants when its 110 degrees and sunny all day?

-I'll be hiking the Atlas Mountains, a new kind of "middle of nowhere." If there are no Moroccans around, how about zipoffs, eh? Can we negotiate this no shorts rule? I'll change 'em back to long pants for mosques and houses.

-...I need to buy long pants and/or zipoffs. Zipoffs are all backpacker-ey, right guyz? I brought a pair of jeans and have bought a pair of slightly girly semester at sea sweatpants. I am NOT wearing sweatpants in the desert.

-Where the hell are we supposed to buy this bottled water that we're supposed to take along with us? The ship's campus store closes in port cuz of some customs regulations type stuff.

-I AM GOING TO DIE IN THE DESERT I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH. One nalgene of water will not cut it for a 4 day trek. I can/should only bring my backpack, and I can barely fit enough clothes in there, let alone sunscreen, bug spray, and additional water. DEATH AWAITS IN THE NORTHERN REACHES OF THE SAHARA.

-Marrakech sounds like a fun place though! A bit touristy, but then again everyone needs the coffee mug with a tacky mosque design on it. It'll go along with the Cadiz-themed one I already got for 2,50E

Okay guys, you caught me. This whole thing is just an elaborate procrastination exercise. I'll write about Spain now. There's a ton of stuff to say, thats why I can't get around to it.

-

España Mañana!!!

It feels like I've been on the ship for about a year but its actually only been a week. Anyway, We're arriving in Cadiz, Andalusia tomorrow. I'm scheduled to go on a walking tour of the city and its archaeological museum and then go to a flamenco dancing night and have some tapas and cocktails. The following day (Sunday) I'll be taking a hike in the Grazalema national park. Hopefully I won't be too wiped out from the late night Saturday. After that I'll be travelling independently with some friends to Sevilla and possibly Cordoba by train or bus to stay at a hostel, see a bullfight, the cathedral in Sevilla, and all of the architecture.

I wish we were staying in Spain longer. And that I had unlimited money. You basically can't throw a stick in Spain without it hitting something awesome. I already wanna go back in the future and haven't even gotten there yet. After all I'll have to miss Barcelona, Madrid, Pamplona, Bilbao, and Toledo entirely.

I'll try to post pictures whenever possible! My best guess is I can get to an internet cafe Sunday night or while I'm in Sevilla. That'll also be the first chance for me to actually read the comments on here.

On a closing note, my bucket list included getting a fist bump from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Note the past tense.

Desmond Tutu

So I met Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his wife Leah after lunch just now. It was only for a few minutes though. I hope to get a picture with him and an autograph in my copy of his book at some point. He's a really funny, down-to-earth kinda guy. A lot of fun to be around.

Another fast update... also send me some Emails!

The address is sgchastain@semesteratsea.net

Spain is coming up on Saturday. I'm pretty stoked. Can't wait to see Cadiz and environs. Hopefully I'll also be able to bus up to Seville or Grenada for cheap. Those are supposed to be mindblowing. Anyway, the classes are looking to be pretty low-stress so far, but other people are getting writing assignments after only 1 of each. Mine'll get like that soon enough. I'm getting about a chapter in each textbook for each class a day, so they've found a way to keep us busy. I'm not looking forward to having to do a bunch of journal updates while travelling in port countries. In my experience you are a brand new kind of exhausted at the end of each day of traveling like I will be and I won't feel like writing a big entry while it's fresh in my mind. Oh well we'll see how that goes. Can't wait to try to write it by flashlight in Ghana or Morocco while I'm homestaying!

But yeah. There's tons more to say already but there'll be tons more more stuff to say after we finally get to a port. If you wanna talk about it right away send an email. If you wanna wait until Saturday or Sunday but get a more detailed answer then comment on the post. I can't read these without using up internet minutes which are absurdly expensive.

PS: Second day of classes at Pitt today, I hear. Have fun kids.

Fast Update

So as of today I've attended all of my classes once. There's only 4 of them but they're all actual school with textbooks to read and journals to keep, although I can do the reading for them on the back of a cruise ship (or rather a voyage ship... they don't let us say cruise). Anyway the weather's been nice yesterday and today. Its the calmest sea yet today, although now that I've said that we're going to go through a tropical depression tonight. The ship grazed the outer edge of Hurricane Danielle 2 nights ago and nobody slept cuz of all the rocking and pitching. The pitching is especially bad in the bow, where the student union is. I had global studies (the required course) in there yesterday morning when it was still choppy and there was a steady stream of kids going to puke. It was pretty horrible.

Anyway, 4 days until España.

Days 1 and 2

              So I would’ve done this update last night but I was too exhausted from all the stuff we had to do on the first day. I woke up in The Westin Nova Scotian in Halifax around 6:30, ate breakfast, and boarded the ship at the port terminal which was right across the street. I win, because some people  got hotels by the Halifax airport and had to drive 40 minutes or so to get there.

                Anyway, after a bunch of security stuff I finally got on board and found my cabin in room 2030. It’s on the second-lowest level of the ship (below us is crew quarters and a bunch of ship type stuff that you as a passenger don’t need to worry about.) So throughout the day it was unstructured as everybody boarded at different times. I wandered around the ship with a few people I met along the way. At 4 we had a lifeboat safety drill, where everyone had to put on their life jackets and warm clothing to go stand in 3 ranks by the lifeboats while Svetlana the crewmember called roll for everybody assigned to that boat. It took about 40 minutes.

                The ship departed Halifax at 5 and everyone waved to their parents and it was all sad and whatever blah blah. One bunch of parents had gotten a custom made banner for their kid which everyone got a big kick out of. But after that the ship pulled out of the harbor slowly and then hit the gas once it was far enough away. The weather was great so I took a bunch of photos of the sun setting off the stern of the ship while I ate dinner with the people who were around me in line for food. The food is ok but I can see why it’ll get boring after a while.

                After dinner was an excruciatingly long “meet the faculty and staff” meeting in the student union. The student union is very close to the ship, so it goes up and down a lot in addition to rolling. Seasickness hasn’t bothered me too much. I feel dizzy and loopey, but not sick to my stomach. Apparently the Atlantic Ocean crossing is the worst, so its good we’re getting that over with first. By the way there’s also a category 2 hurricane south of us coming this direction. Oh well, what’s life without a little excitement right? Our venerable Croatian captain Roman Krstanovic, assures us there is no danger involved, but a big stack of barf bags has turned up at every trashcan in the public areas of the ship.

                The last organized thing yesterday was our deck meetings where they promised to keep it brief and then had all 60 of us say our name, home school, and cabin number. I could hardly keep my eyes open at this point.

                By the way, the ocean is big. Stupidly big. I bitched the whole way to Halifax about how big Canada was while I was driving through two of its smallest provinces, but while I’m writing this (about noon eastern time on Saturday) we’re already further from Halifax than I drove in Canada. We’re about one Newfoundland-length south of Newfoundland.

                Anyway, today is orientation day. We heard all about the UVA honor code for about the 18^th time this morning, followed by a small group discussion of the “summer reading” assignment. We were supposed to follow this discussion up with a 1-page reaction to the book, but then they said it isn’t due until next week, virtually guaranteeing I’ll forget to do it. Right now I’m about to have to go to the “faculty meet and greet” and the captain discussing safety, health, and behavior issues. Endless fun abounds on the high seas!

                Hopefully I’ll get more sleep tonight (and for the majority of the voyage).

Moseying Our Way Up to Halifax- an update on the way

So we all know the ship leaves from Halifax, NS on the 27th of August. That's this Friday. But I left home on Saturday so my parents and I could visit a few places on the way up and make a road trip out of it. Here's an itinerary and my all-important opinions:

Saturday: left from Fairfax County, VA. Drove through Baltimore. Kept doors locked. Took the Jersey Turnpike. Kept the windows closed and oxygen masks fully deployed. Got to Rockaway, New Jersey (west of NYC) a short 6 hours later and met up with my aunt and uncle. We had some great Thai food for dinner and stayed at a hotel. Thanks again for the food, guys!
 Also tried to watch the Redskins preseason game but could only get the Steelers beating the Giants. So I decided to text someone back home about the game.

So how 'bout those Redskins, guys?!

Why do I even bother asking anymore?

New Jersey rating: 5/5 fun times, family, and good food.

Sunday: Breakfast with aunt and uncle at a diner and then we headed off to our next stop at Mystic Seaport, Connecticut. I had never been further east in the US than New York City, so this is officially "here be dragons" territory now. Mystic Seaport is a 'typical' old fishing town that has a touristy trappish area in it where you learn about ships and whatnot. It was a relatively interesting insight in to how much less shitty ocean travel has gotten in the past century. They pooped in holes off the side of the boat and the sailors slept in cots hardly wide enough for a decent laptop downwind from where they cut up and burn whale blubber.

Connecticut rating: 3.5/5 The state is extremely boring to drive through. The Merritt Parkway in the western part of it is hacked out of a forest and you can't see anything. Then 95 is just as boring except you get to go through the smelly ports of New Haven and New London. There might be other things to do in Connecticut but I'm not going to let fact-finding delay my knee-jerk judgment of this place. Also, it was raining the entire time we were there. Yes, that's your fault, Connecticut.

Monday: Woke up early, which is good I guess since I have an early class on the ship. The rain storm, according to the weather website, will be following us at least until Maine. Fantastic. Anyway, 95 took us through Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire (home of tax-free liquor stores! I guess, like Delaware, they needed a gimmick), and finally Maine. Maine is bigger than it looks on maps. We drove and drove and it actually cleared up and stopped raining after two hours. You know the weather's messed up when you have to go to Bangor to get some clear skies. Anyway I'm updating the blog now after a very good seafood dinner at Bar Harbor, our overnighting destination. Hopefully tomorrow will be a good day for hiking, cuz we're going hiking regardless (that's just what you do here).

Maine scenery now that it finally stopped raining. I'll upload more in Halifax because there is no way their Wifi could possibly be slower than the stuff here.

Rhode Island: 4.5/5 Rainy but a good Dunkin Donuts stop; got it over with quickly.
Massachusetts: 4/5 There is no way its that big. It took like 2 hours to drive through it.
New Hampshire: 0/5 The highway is in your state for barely 30 miles and you charge a toll?
Maine: 5/5 Scenic, which makes up for it being huge. I'll be able to say more about it next update but so far so good. I shouted for you Henri, did you hear?

Ribboncutting

So here's my travel blog, for Semester at Sea for Fall of 2010. I don't leave for Halifax to depart until the 21st, and then the ship doesn't leave until the 27th. The parents and I will be making a road trip out of the way up there.

Quick credit to my buddy Andrew for inspiring the URL name of the blog.

Chances are if you're reading this you already know me, but if you don't I'll introduce myself and what this is all about real quick.

I'm Stephen and I go to the University of Pittsburgh. I was born and raised in Northern Virginia and live there when I'm not at school too. I haven't declared majors yet, but its looking a lot like Anthropology and Environmental studies. Semester at Sea is the first of the study abroad programs I hope to be doing during undergrad, and its going to be epic. You get on a ship, you sail around the world, and you stop in a ton of countries along the way. Below is their info page for this voyage because I'm too lazy to type out the entire itinerary.

http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyages/upcoming-voyages/fall-2010.php

 This is my personal blog so I'll try to be recording personal thoughts in here. I'll have at least 1 other blog I'm obligated to do during the trip for Vicarious Voyage. That's a program where I send photos and updates back to an elementary school in the US, which just happens to be the school where my mom works as a librarian. More info on this (and a link) when that gets sorted out. No rush yet!