While the cat's away...

While Jesse travels through China with his mother and her friend, Marilyn, you will have to endure Gabby’s story telling for at least one post. I will apologize in advance for I am not as witty, funny, or verbose as my husband, however I will do a great job of providing lots of facts in the writing style of a telegram.

I am sitting in the faculty lounge watching the fading lights of Shanghai slowly disappear from view while the stinging in my throat and eyes from the pollution level still remains. Today’s air quality level in Shanghai was 243. In the United States alert levels are: 50 – 100 “Moderate (today in NY it was 70) Air quality is acceptable; however, for some pollutants there might be a moderate health risk.”  In the United States 201-300 is considered “Very Unhealthy: health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is likely to be effected.” As you will see in my pictures, it looks foggy. That is all smog. My original goal of running outside in every country was quickly squashed as soon as I took a breath outside.There is a layer of dust in the air and covering almost everything. The ship had a great view from where it was docked, but regardless I was really excited to be leaving that night. 

I will try to be diplomatic when describing Shanghai. I will just start by saying it was definitely not my favorite. Before we arrived we were warned that you would either love China or hate it for the same reason “no one in China acts like they give a shit.” Remember manners, not in Shanghai (go ahead and push everyone out of your way). Remember traffic signals, mere suggestions (we saw multiple cars run right through red lights and you were taking your life into your own hands every time you crossed the street as mopeds sped from both directions down the right hand side of the street). Want to spit up that phlegm in your mouth, please do and then spit it right in front of the person walking by (the streets are filled with the sound of someone hocking up spit).  Want to wait in line? Then you are in the wrong place, please proceed with pushing everyone who is also waiting for dumplings out of the way so you can get yours first.

Ok, did you catch the word dumplings in there? There is one very very redeeming factor of China and that is dumplings. Specifically soup dumplings in Shanghai. I will go ahead and quote Anthony Bourdain directly (obviously we went to the restaurant that he recommended in Shanghai), "As [the xiaolongbao] steamed, the delicious delicious fat renders into a soup of the Gods, which then, if you're not careful, causes maximum facial damage — as it changes your life forever."

 Other food that we enjoyed was a great meal at a place that Time Magazine translated to be “Jishi restaurant” however when we showed up it was in fact called “Jesse restaurant,” what are the chances?!?! We did not try the turtle that were in bowls outside of the restaurants, however when we asked our tour guides what turtle tasted like, he said “bull frog.” Well that clears that right up…

Other activities in Shanghai included going to a fishing village, that was marketed as the “Venice of Shanghai.” The town was adorable and we rode in a gondola. We also attended an acrobat show which was fabulous and I have a feeling Jesse will explain in much more detail. The highlight was either the person juggling fire while standing on top (on the outside) of a moving Ferris Wheel or the 9 women balancing at once on a moving bicycle.

I will try to put up a post that includes pictures over the next two days. Jesse, Rochelle, and her friend Marilyn will be traveling overland in Shanghai and Hong Kong and we will meet in Hong Kong soon. I will spend the next two days relaxing, sleeping in, watching the Wire, getting a massage, and “being on call” (there are only 100 people on the ship but one of the psychologists needs to remain on board while in transit). I feel like I chose the better option, but that’s just me.

Land, I see land!

Land, I see land!

Ok, it was still dark outside, but LIGHTS, I see LIGHTS!!  We’ve decided to make it a thing, that no matter how early, or how cold it is outside, we were going to wake up before sunrise and see the ship sail into each port.  (Although I completely skipped over it, sailing into Hawaii was actually spectacular.  It was the first time we had seen land in over a week, the air was warm, humid, and salty, and as the sun began to rise behind us, the light hit the volcanic mountains of the Big Island revealing what minutes earlier had been darkness, but now the welcoming sight of beautiful lush U.S. soil.  As the sun continued to rise, whales, like 6 or 7 of them, started to breach the surface all around the ship. It was incredible).  Sailing into Japan was not so warm, humid, or salty, but spectacular nonetheless.  Despite the cute nickname, the land of the rising sun, no sunrise was to be had, as the intense fog (probably smog, but lets go with fog) blocked it out.  We had done it.  We had crossed the pacific. The north pacific. In winter. Some may not have admitted it, but I’m pretty sure every single person on board let out a little sigh of relief when they first saw land in Japan.  This was the end of our long, long time at sea.  Never again on this voyage would we be as far from land as we had been for the last 10 days.  Now, on the other side of this passing, I can invite you to google ‘semester at sea, the wave’, and you‘ll better understand my sigh of relief.  Actually, on second thought, if our journey makes you even a little skittish for our wellbeing, don’t google it.  Ok, I warned you, you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube.  We’re safe, that was 10 years ago, we made it across the pacific.     

Japan was amazing.  We were on land for 5 days, only three nights away from the ship but I felt like we were gone for a lifetime!  We did amazing things, ate amazing food, and experienced the single most Japanese thing I could ever imagine.   I hate saying words cant describe the experience, but they can’t, I’ve tried, so: google ‘robot restaurant Tokyo’ and watch a video, (I wanted to insert a link here, but we don’t really have internet service, so telling you to look it up, and putting this sentence in blue text is about the best I can do).  We kareoke’d until the sun came up.  ( ok, the sun wasn’t coming up, but after going to bed before 10 every night for the last thee weeks, being awake until 2:30 a.m. felt like the sun should have been coming up),  and got super lost on crazy fast trains.

I’ll better describe Japan in a post soon, but were quickly approaching China, where the internet is censored (THE INTERNET IS CENSORED!!!!!!), and google/blogger is blocked, so I wanted to get something up before big brother told me I couldn’t.

For now, Sianara, or however you say it in Chinese I guess.  

And then there were Seas…

 As I mentioned earlier, soon after the students embarked, the sea sickness medication they so graciously rejected become less of a courtesy and more of necessity.  On day three of the voyage we were told we would experience our first day of rolling seas.  I had no idea what this meant.  Even if I knew what this meant, I don’t think I would have understood it, or how amazing the body’s ability to adapt to it really is.  Imagine you just got a new sports car.   You take it out for a spin on your first day to that perfect country road with tight turns, and rolling hills.  You zig through the turns, then, as you see the rolling hills approach you push the pedal to the floor, accelerating as fast as you can over the first bump, wahoooooooo, stomach up, stomach down, second hill, wahoooooooooo, stomach up, stomach down, third hill wahooooooooo, you get the picture.  That’s exactly what it felt like.  Constantly, going over rolling hills, in a fully accelerating car, over and over and over again, for 48 hours! You look out the windows of the ship and all you see is water, then all you see is sky, then all water, then all sky.  Its absolutely crazy. Its fun in a car, but try going to work with that going on, then, the fun part, try going to sleep!  When asked how bad of a day this was ‘motion’ wise on a scale of 1-10, one crew member responded probably a 2, ehh, maybe a 3, no, a 2.” Honestly when he said that I was scared.  My first thought was:  How can I do this for 16 more days through japan, then god knows how many days after that for the rest of the voyage.  My second thought was: are these crewmembers sick in the head? How can they live their lives like this, go to work like this every day, and above anything else, feel this damn discombobulated all the time?  A lot of people on board revisited what they had eaten for lunch that day. 

10 days later, when we hit real seas, I understood it.  Somehow, the body adapts.  Don’t get me wrong, it still feels a little funny, and watching people slamming into each other while walking down the hall never gets old, but your body just stops feeling it.  You look out the window and all you see is water, then all you see is sky, then all you see is water, then all you see is sky, but you just don’t feel it.   Nothing anyone could have said would have prepared me for the motion on this ship.  Because its far far smaller than any cruise ship I’d been on, it moves, and moves a lot!

After leaving Hawaii we were forced to divert almost 500 miles south to avoid a giant storm system sitting directly over our plotted course.  The captain made the decision to divert as far south as we possibly could, avoiding the center of the storm, cutting north as late as possible without running out of fuel before reaching Japan, sending us through the outer edge of the storm.  Day three of the voyage, our first day of rolling seas, there were 9-12 foot swells, while cutting through the edge of the storm we encountered 15-20 foot swells, at the heart of the storm, right on our plotted course, there were 55-60 foot swells! Thank you captain, something tells me, no matter how sturdy my sea legs, I would have felt that.      

Back to the Future...

Back to the Future…

We cast off from Ensenada Mexico on the evening of January 7^th .  That much we know for sure.  According to my watch, it is now 10:52 in the morning on Sunday January 25^th.  Although that sounds like a very specific time, we must look a little deeper to figure out exactly where, and oddly ‘when’ exactly I am.  Since leaving the safety of Central Standard time (which can be a bit confusing in it’s own right) on January 4^th we have experienced 9 time changes, and one bold leap across the international dateline (We had a cruise ship time machine/ future party to honor the leap into the future), jumping us a ahead a full 24 hours.  I can confidently say that here, 655 miles off the coast of Japan it is 10:52 in the morning on Sunday January 25^th.  I can also confidently say that I have absolutely no idea what time it is, or even what day it is where you are.    It would take math, like a lot of math to figure it out.  And I’m not just talking simple math like : the west coast is 3 hours behind the east coast, 2 hours behind Chicago, and 1 or 2 hours behind the ever stubborn Arizona depending on the time year.  I’m talking - 1 hour - 1 hour - 1 hour -1 hour -1 hour + 24 hours + 1 hour + 1 hour +1 hour +1 hour = whatever the F%&K time it is where you are.  Yah, I don’t get it either.  We were getting further and further away from east coast time, and then, one night, because they said so, we started getting closer and closer.  And so, to summarize, where I am, 10:52 Sunday morning, the 25^th of January, the ground beneath me is constantly moving (and I mean MOVING, I’ll discuss later) and time is a made up fluid thing.  This is confusing….

Now That I have sort of explained where we are, I thought it might be interesting to explain what exactly we have been doing for the last 20 days at sea (20 days at sea!!). 

In Chicago my weekdays consisted of the following:

-          Snoozing 4 times each morning, knowing that this was about as good as it was ganna get during the day

-          Getting up at the very last minute, or well, about 10 minutes after the very last minute I needed to make it to work on time.

-          Zombie walking through my morning ritual of stumbling down the stairs, turning on the light of my aquarium, wondering into the shower, trying to remember if I had already shampooed my hair, hastily putting on my (insert day of the week) work outfit, sort of pack some breakfast and lunch, check to make sure my hat and gloves are in the pocket of my jacket, and finally stumbling out the door into the often cold and dark world.

-          My work day consisted of, well, ill leave this part blank for the sake that I will need to find a job when I get home. So lets just say: My workday was productive! Super productive! World saving productive!

-          Come 5:30 I would spend about 15 minutes trying to sync up leaving my office at just the right second so I could walk right onto a train, but not the first train, cause that one would be too crowded, so I’d wait for 2 perfectly aligned trains coming within 6 minutes of each other so I wouldn’t have to deal with the awful reality that is an incredibly packed train in the middle of winter at rush hour in Chicago.  Exhausting, isn’t it??

-           Arrive at home between 5:57 and 6:03

-          Begin to heat up whatever it was we made for dinner for the week.

-          Eat dinner when Gabby got home (often considerably later than me)

-          Watch three hours of reality T.V.

-          Go to bed between 11:07 and 11:34

-          Wake up repeat

 Gabby’s schedule at home was:

-          get up at 5 am

-          drive 40 minutes in the dark to get to the gym before morning traffic

-          gym from 7 am – 8 am

-          work from 8:30 am until 6:30 pm

-          drive an hour and a half home in evening traffic

-          eat dinner with Jesse

-          watch one or two hours of TV and then go to bed

Now imagine the opposite:

-          Gabby wakes up at 6:30

-          Walks up one flight of stairs to attend a rotating 6:45 work out class taught by a professor or a student (kickboxing, zumba, yoga, or circuit training) out on the main deck, or run on the treadmill (holding on to the railing for dear life to cope with the intense rocking of the ship.  Try running on treadmill with your eyes closed, yah, it’s like that.)

-          Gabby will then leisurely sit at breakfast for about 45 minutes. Not because she is laboriously concocting a makeshift breakfast from the materials currently available after 19 days at sea, but because our breakfast table is perched outside, on the back of ship, overlooking the mouthwash blue wake with the sun shining in our eyes.

-          I join Gabby at some point throughout this leisurely breakfast, making sure to pop in before the hard 8:30 ‘no more food, you slept through breakfast, enjoy your granola bar until lunch time’ time.

-          We return to our cabin to don our work clothes, Gabby: leggings, a sweater and Toms.  Me:  Jeans and a hoodie, on a fancy day.  Shorts and a hoodie on an ‘I’m kinda tired and didn’t feel like showering before work day.

-           Gabby walks down two flights of stairs (her commute is an hour and a half shorter than at home!!) to her office, the happiness dungeon we call it, and I have to labor all the way up one flight upstairs to mine.

-          After a hard morning’s work, we rendezvous around 11:30 in the cafeteria to partake in what is in actuality a stupidly long lunch break, but in the realm of ship-life, a visual, sensory overloading, and culinary extravaganza of people flowing in and out of the dining hall, friends sitting and chatting in the sun, and students, faculty and staff casually grazing on all the mediocre food you could ever ask for. 

-          Gabby goes back to her office if she has clients or meetings scheduled.  If not, she sits out on the deck in a lounge chair reading all the books that she has been telling clients for years are great, but had never actually read.

-          I have an afternoon activity with the ship kids, snack time, open gym, and time for some administrative planning.

-          If the kids haven’t tuckered me out, I go to the gym around 4 and try my best to meet Gabby each night for the sunset. (I say try my best, because while on a ship I understand that this sounds simply like going outside at a certain time each day, but as we have crossed the pacific, and entered god knows how many time zones, the sunset has set at 4:50, 7:25, and just about every time in between.  It’s a true test of your astrophysialogical knowledge to determine when the sun will actually go down each day) 

-           We then start dinner with friends or with our extended family (we are the proud stand in parents for 5 college students, whom we regularly have dinners with and impart the vast wisdom we have acquired in the many a (1) decade since we were their age.

-          Dinner manages to last at least an hour and a half every night.  Some blame the size of the plates for our multiple trips to the buffet each meal, I say its the fact that we are there for so long that we are pretty much eating two separate meals.

-          In the evening not much goes on.  There are lectures some night that we’ve attended, but really by 9:30 p.m. half of the adults(I use the term adults only to separate us and our friends from the students, and the kids I work with, not because I actually identify as a full blown adult) on board have gone to bed.  Mind you that nearly half of the nights we spent at sea, we gained an hour, so this 9:30 p.m. bedtime is really 8:30 p.m.  No one’s quite sure if it’s the gentle rocking of the ship, the sea sickness meds that we are popping like skittles, our bodies constant need to adjustment to the ever moving world around us, or something they put in the endless supply of potatoes, but its something.   

-          From time to time we have activities starting at 9:30, and sadly, we all drink coffee at dinner just to make it…

-          On those night we do drink coffee at dinner, lateish night dance parties tend to break out in the staff bar (which used to be the nightclub onboard before it was converted to a floating university, so, there’s a smoke machine and ridiculous club/ Bar Mitzvah lighting effects).

Wake up and repeat ^¹⁹ .  

-          Sadly, there are no weekends, every day we are sailing is a workday, but well, as you can see, workdays aren’t too bad. 

And that’s what we’ve been up to.  So far the future has been pretty great.

Soon, we’ll see land (we hope).   

p.s. We stopped in Hawaii for 8 hours a few days ago.  It was nice to step off the ship, but we were literally on land for about 4 hours.  Nothing too fun to report.  It’s Hawaii.  It was pretty, we saw bright colored fish, ate some great poki, and got back on the ship.  Something tells me everywhere we stop from now on will be a bit more exciting!