4/29/2007- Reflections from Hiroshima (Hiroshima, Japan)

I’ve been away from home for over three months now. I’m physically and mentally exhausted, ready to keel over at any moment and give up on this entire voyage. I am run into the ground with emotions and work and experiences and expectations. In a day here I wake up and roll over not knowing where in the world I am or what I’m doing, how long my hair is, or if the vivid dreams I’m having are real or not. Sometimes I’m not even sure what reality is—how can one determine if dreams or life is real, when your dreams seem more real than your everyday life? Last night, or instance, I dreamed that I was home, heading off to school in Rhode Island with long hair and many dreams. Then I woke up to a country on the other side of the world, about to get on a 200 mile per hour train in order to go to the spot where the first atomic bomb was dropped and over 140,000 people died less than seventy years ago. Tell me, which seems more real to you?

I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe I’m doing these things, I’ve done what I’ve done and I’ve changed like I’ve changed. It’s as though the old world I once loved is a thousand years ago on a world far from here; a world with no suffering and pain and death. A world which housed worries such as who had the better car and who had the hotter boyfriend is dead to me now, replaced by a world in which less money than I spend on snacks in a week can feed and house a child in Mauritius for an entire year. There are times in which I have wanted desperately to go back to being ignorant of these things, but moments later I realize that there is no going back and that it is better that way. I am a different person than I was back then, and it is all for the better.

On the ride to Hiroshima these thoughts haunted me. As I watched unfamiliar landscapes become familiar, I thought of all I had both lost and gained on this voyage. I didn’t understand a single word that was being said around me, but strangely enough, it didn’t matter. I felt as though I understood these people more than I understood the people from my own country simply because I can make up conversations they are having. To the best of my knowledge they are talking about how to help those starving and being murdered, though inside I know that they are probably talking about the same things my classmates are talking about back at the bars. As I said before, ignorance is bliss.

I chose to experience Hiroshima alone because I knew it was the final large trip of this voyage for me. I needed to try and sort out some things because it was the last chance I had—on the ship there is no time or place to be alone and reflect, and that was all there was left before being thrown into the lion’s den back at home. “What was your favorite port,” they’ll ask. “-and what did you learn? Did you have fun? Was it worth it? Did you see anything crazy?”

“What was your favorite port?”—there wasn’t one. All but a few touched my heart in ways that are unexplainable in words. “What did you learn?”—I learned that everything I’ve lived for has been a lie and a joke. That all the things I’ve held dear to me have no value. That everything I’ve ever known is nothing at all. “Did you have fun?”—yes. No. Maybe. God, how can you answer this question? I loved this voyage with every fiber of my heart while hating it at the exact same time. There were days when I couldn’t stop laughing and days when I couldn’t stop crying. Fun? That wasn’t part of the description of Semester at Sea. It isn’t about fun, although I’ll admit to having some of it. No, this wasn’t about fun. It was about torture. It was about the way in which you torture yourself by growing more than a normal person does in a lifetime or more in the course of three months.

“Did you see anything crazy?” No, I saw nothing crazy. I only saw people sleeping in puddles of mud and missing limbs and carrying their near-dead babies and sobbing and praying to God or Allah or Shiva or whatever they may or may not believe in. I only saw babies deformed and parents gone and AIDS ripping the world apart, but the people still thankful for every damned breath they took. I saw nothing crazy at all in this time. After all, the majority of people I saw were actually happy to be living in these conditions. How can it be something crazy when people are actually smiling when they are dying? It isn’t crazy that people are so thankful simply being alive that they can live in these conditions day after day and still be thankful to be alive.

Hiroshima. Reality. Where I was, rather than where I’d been. As everything else on this voyage, it was something out of a dream. The dome in front of me, the paper crane memorial to the side, Japanese children running all around as though there were no worries in the world—this is what I saw. It’s hard to imagine that this was one of the last wars that we were in; in what seems like no time ago, these people were our enemies and our targets. Now here I am, helping the children practice their English as they gleefully laugh at my accent when I say my name. I can’t help but wonder, though, if this is what life will be like for us in fifty or sixty years. I’m watching the children laugh and play on the monuments as their elders look on with sad eyes as they see their friend’s faces reflected in the shimmer of the sky—will I be these elders in time, watching as the children of the former Taliban take pictures of Ground Zero while my own grandchildren chat with them and laugh? Will I see Andrew and Candace’s faces crying and begging for her plane to stop and his body to be caught from his fall as I watch the children of our country swing on the replicas of the twin towers, not knowing what it was like to experience both watching that day and losing friends? Is that how these people feel, remembering the sudden heat and the crying voices and those they left behind?

I don’t know what will happen when I get home. I don’t know what will happen when I grow old. I don’t know what will happen when the years pass by and the world changes once again, leaving my generation for forgotten and what once mattered in the dust. I don’t know if any of this matters at all in the long run; but looking at the Peace Park and the Townships and the Dalit villages and the indigenous people from all around the world, I know for absolute sure that everything will be alright. As long as there is life, everything will be alright.

4/20/2007- China's Paradox (Beijing, China)

China is the biggest paradox that I have ever experienced.

You hear about their great and long history dating back to before written time before hearing that it is expected to be the world’s greatest hope for a technological future. You eat food that is from the most basic of supplies, only to taste the some of the greatest flavors you have can imagine in your life. You see these temples and palaces where less than a hundred years ago only royalty was permitted, only to be shoved by the twenty thousand tourists on their phones and yelling to one another.

Unfortunately, this last aspect is the one which I will take with me in my stories of this voyage. When reflecting on Beijing, there are no memories of feeling as though I was a part of something much as I did in each of the other ports. Here I felt as though I was one of the masses, forced into the lemming-like state of crowding. The creations that rose out of the world which should have been the most amazing sights of my life were nothing more than walkways filled with unappreciating bodies alongside spots of newly painted color and plaques with cheesy metal figures. It was hard for me to see this, and even harder to discuss it with a faulty member upon returning to the ship. “It’s my thought that in the years to come, China will burst with population. They will spill over to the other countries, but in the meantime, they are so used to being crowded that their monuments will be torn apart by misuse.”

In truth, to some extent this bothers me far more than does the hunger and poverty we’ve seen. Strides have been made in the world to eradicate such disasters and help the victims, however there are no efforts to aid the much quicker destruction of the history of China. Some of the people in danger in other parts of the world such as South Africa and India are known about and cared for as aid and cures are being worked on. By the time that the destruction of the monuments in China is realized by the government, it will be too late. Unlike the populations, however, history cannot be recreated or revitalized. You simply cannot bring back the throne of the first emperor or books written by the ancient historians after they have been destroyed by the people who take nothing but a photograph away from these relics.

Perhaps more disturbing to me was the amount of importance there was on revenue on these historical sites. We had a lecture the night before our sight seeing began in the city, and rather than speak about the historical impacts of the Forbidden City, our PhD lecturer spoke about the Starbucks hidden in the city and challenged us to wander around and find it. This simply encouraged the students to spend the time we had in this centuries old monument searching for a shop that can be found in any city on the globe, only to buy their products and shirts proudly emblazoning the words ‘Starbucks in the Forbidden City!’ for all to see. Hawkers and stalls lined the way, some more pushy than the people in India and Vietnam. They bought their way into the monuments with stolen goods and stood in the way of our reading the run down plaques to sell knock-off Olympic t-shirts and Mao watches. You could not get two feet (which was a hassle anyhow with the crowds in every space available) without having goods shoved in your face, only to cover your ears when the police blew into their whistles and chased the hawkers around in circles.

As terrible as this sounds, the hawkers were the highlight of my time in Beijing. At one point outside Tiananmen Square, the seventy Semester at Sea students on our tour were gathered waiting for the busses to arrive and take us to lunch. Within moments of realizing that there were more blondes than there were anywhere else in the city gathered in the same spot, around thirty sellers surrounded us and took their wares out in hilarious fashions—some opened briefcases or messenger bags, tilting them so that only the person they were harassing was able to see the merchandise. The most amusing of all were the Mao watch sellers who had their supplies tied inside their trench coats, exposing himself much as a flasher would in a run-by nude show. As we bargained and argued with them, yells suddenly filled the sidewalk. Within moments there were twenty policemen in full uniform, chasing the hawkers as they scattered like ants from their hill. One of the men caught turned to his capturer and shoved numerous toys and bags into his arms, paying the uniformed officer to walk away. Somehow, it worked—the man turned his back as the hawker ran in the other direction.

After a few minutes when the police had wandered off to catch more sellers in action, some of them returned to us. They were far more cautious this time, passing money and supplies only when they were inches away from us and looking over our shoulders the entire time. The man who had paid the cop off grinned weakly towards us, pointing to the police in the distance and making gestures that clearly showed a decapitation had he been caught. Not sure what to make of the entire situation and excited over the sudden drop in price due to the need to dump their supplies, we got onto our busses and exchanged stories of what we had seen in and out of the gates. These men, it seemed, were the perfect reflection of what we had seen in Beijing—willing to take any risks of loss in order to make a quick dollar.

4/14/2007- Snake's Beating Heart (Hanoi, Vietnam)

“Snake palace next,” Doan said firmly. “Look at book, Americans like!” He pulled out the tattered leather book from his jacket and shoved it into my hands, opening to a signature from a man from Arizona a few years back. It was nearly indecipherable due to age and untidy scrawl, but this didn’t bother our motorcycle drivers. “We go there now. You like. Promise.”

Ana went white as she saw the cobra out of the corner of her eye. It hissed and fought as though it knew what was coming next, attempting in vain to kill the both the man holding her and the people watching in horror. The snake’s skull crunched like a walnut under the pressure of his handler’s foot. Its body went limp quickly, and I had a profound sense of dread. We are taught to value life in every form, yet here in front of us this life had been ended with a sudden step. I wanted nothing more than to apologize to the being, although inside I knew that I was more than excited about what was to come. In my classes and my frequent travel channel viewings I had come across this practice; and although Ana had no idea what was about to happen, I was sure I was prepared.

Three men came from the side of the room to each grab a section of the cobra, their hands moving with the sort of expertise that comes with years of practice. I watched from behind the lens of my camcorder as they made a small slice about a third of the way down the animal, taking the heart out and draining the blood into a glass below containing alcohol. Once the two glasses were filled with blood, they moved down a foot to another section and named to us something that we either consciously or unconsciously didn’t understand. Taking the body with some care down the stairs to the side they ushered us to a table and sat us down, gesturing to the glasses with blood and alcohol with huge grins on their faces. Doan had the biggest grin of all.

The taste of snake blood and alcohol is like nothing you can imagine unless you have had it before. It isn’t as much the effect it has on your taste buds, but rather the effect it has on your mind. As the warm liquid slid down my throat all I could envision was the live cobra that had been in front of us only moments before. Although in actuality it tasted like a strong Bacardi mix, when the mind got involved it didn’t matter much the actual taste. All that mattered was the fact that it had been supporting the life of one of my most feared animals seconds before.

Then came the part that, for the first time in my life, made me want nothing more than for my stomach to empty itself right then and there. With a satisfying plop and laugh from the men around the table, Doan dropped the still-beating heart into my refilled glass of snake blood and alcohol.

I am by no means a virgin when it comes to exotic foods. I have eaten crocodile, rabbit, octopus and many other dishes that most Americans would find revolting. I have never in my life shied away from a dish offered to me; however when I looked at the sloshing blood in my glass I felt a wave of nausea pass over me. White as a ghost and shivering, I closed my eyes and tilted the glass back. Unfortunately, my throat was tense from the fear, and chose to become a bit to small for the heart to pass through. The waiters must have been used to this reaction because all of them ran for cover as Doan began to yell for me to calm down. I put my head in my hands and willed myself to just swallow the throbbing mass stuck halfway down my throat and not instead pass it up.

By the time that I had recovered and drank more water than I had consumed in the past month, the men returned with an odd looking dish. The other driver, the same evil grin on his face, pointed at a menu translated into English—‘grilled snake meat’, it read boldly. Before we could look at one another and make a move, another dish was placed before us; this time rice cooked in snake fat. To top it off, they brought out two more glasses of alcohol and happily cut open the unknown appendage and mixed the green liquid into them. Although Ana didn’t look too happy, I figured it couldn’t be worse than the beating heart of doom I’d consumed earlier, so I downed the drink in one swallow in order to get it out of sight. Bad idea—I later found out it was bile, and it tasted about as good as it sounds. I never though that I would be trying to get a taste out of my mouth with cobra liver wrapped in omelets, but I found myself doing it after quite possibly the most interesting drink of my life.

In all the owners managed to make our snake into twelve dishes and two drinks, some innovative (snake skin fried in butter and bone crushed with rice cakes to make pancakes) and others more conventional (fried snake meat and cobra soup). We passed on the cooked snake *appendages* (and no, I am not kidding) and happily paid our $40 USD. I wasn’t terribly anxious to get back on a motorcycle in the traffic of Hanoi, especially with my stomach waging war on a full cobra, so we looked around the so-called kitchen and cages where they kept both the cobras and the other animals that they cooked up. Although I was curious about the porcupine (are they even indigenous to Asia?) and the mongoose, the cobra gave a nasty lurch inside my stomach and I decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to feed it. So we hoped on our rides and left Snake Palace and our money behind, heading for a day filled with adventures that we knew couldn’t top what we had just experienced.

3/20/2007- Dreams (Indian Ocean)

It’s funny because all my friends are asking about the ‘cruise’ and the ‘lack of work’, but the truth is that we don’t have a single day off this entire semester. We don’t have weekends here, and the days off class are all either events of the ship or when we are in port where we get even less sleep hen when we are onboard the ship. I’ve never been so emotionally And physically drained as I am after leaving port. You can’t imagine the effect this is having on people; we literally don’t have a moment to look back and say ‘wow’ because you are either in class, studying, or running around the next part of the world. Sometimes I’ll try and step back before bed and think about where I am, but it seems so surreal. Like now, I’ve always wanted to go to the Indian Ocean after hearing about it as a kid. I’ve always wanted to step on all seven continents. Well, I’m staring at the Indian Ocean right now and I’ve hit two continents in the last three weeks alone, with the third coming up in five days.

It’s like we’re living a dream and in a dream you never realize that it’s a dream, you just keep watching and learning and remembering until you wake up; but by then it’s over and you can’t go back. Everything that’s happened, the things that are happening to me right this minute, are things that I will remember for the rest of my life. I remember when I looked at the stars in Brazil and thought to myself ‘well, this is a moment in my life that I will remember until the day I die’, but it was just another memory, the impact not hitting me until I had a moment to step back later. I’m realizing these things, realizing I’m seeing the universe in pain, suffering, life, death, and hope; but it’s so hard to make them seem real.

3/15/2007- Scents (Port Louis, Mauritius)

The Mauritian air was heavy with the scent of molasses.

That was the first thing that any of us noted about the new world we had just embarked upon. It’s funny, because each place that we entered had a distinct scent to it—whether it was the pungent scent of urine and sweat in Brazil, the scent that can only be called ‘Caribbean Paradise’ in Puerto Rico or the old smells of Cape Town, you knew how far you were away from home not by the sights or sounds, but by the amazing smells that you never noticed before. It makes me wonder whether or not I will notice one upon my return to the United States—perhaps there was something there all along that only getting away will ever show you. I am eager to leave the ship in San Diego in two months time and see the changes that I notice in the place I once called home.

3/10/2007- Interlude in the Form of a Letter Home (Indian Ocean)

But these things, in all honesty, have blended together in my mind. I experienced so much that it’s impossible to put down in words what any of it was like or what it means. For the first time I understand what the alumni truly mean when they say that you simply know how to talk to the people at home, as much as you miss them. It’s as though there are two separate lives that we have the chance to experience—there’s the us at home that misses our friends, our cars, our families and our foods. Yet there’s also the person on our voyage, who travels—the person who, in a little less than a month, has undergone the biggest change in our life. One of the comedians the other night put it best:

“How do you call home and talk to your mother? She’ll ask what you did that day and how do you respond? ‘Well, I woke up to see the sunrise over the open ocean, ate breakfast with the Archbishop of South Africa, took my morning class with one of the top professors in the United States, had lunch while sunbathing under the equator, spent the afternoon by the poolside while drinking smoothies in my bikini while reading a few pages for homework, had dinner with my friends from Hawaii and China and Taiwan before going to the comedy show and pub night.’ Or even better, when we’re in port. ‘Well today we got up, hiked the tallest peak in all of Africa with the old mayor of Cape Town, went sky diving in the country with the longest freefall, ate dinner in a township restaurant and then found a neat hotel that was cheap in the winelands so we could spend all evening tasting the finest wines of all Africa and not worry about coming back to the ship afterwards’. That’s not fair to your mother, or anyone else. What do they respond back, ‘Yeah, well, um, Jim came over today...’”

This isn’t meant as a slight or as boasting at all. I just want you to understand why I’m not talking about the experiences I’ve had. I still haven’t digested at all what happened in Brazil, so how can someone so detached from this reality even hope to comprehend? I feel bad writing these letters as I feel that they often seem as though I’m taking this for granted or am showing off. I’m really not trying to, I promise, it’s just impossible to put on paper all that happens in our minds; so I have to try and put down a shadow of how we are living.

3/9/2007- Racial Divide & Hope (Cape Town, South Africa)

How can you describe a moment in time that changes your life?

How about an hour in time, or a few days? Does that make it easier to put into words? Or how about writing a realization, gathered over a short time? Can you even tell someone, over the phone or instant messaging them, what it’s like to be a completely different person than you were when you left only a few weeks before?

When speaking with my parents on the final day docked in South Africa, I ran into this problem. I wanted them to understand me, to feel the same I did, to cry like I cried—but they didn’t. They didn’t even show much emotion other than to be proud when I told them how I’d managed to climb Table Mountain and swim with the Great White Sharks. But then again, how do you explain to someone something that you can’t even explain yourself? I can’t even tell my diary how much emotion I felt while speaking with our colored cab driver, listening to him tell of how he had been beaten and gassed and discriminated against, only to learn to love the people who did it to him in the end. I can’t write about how the kids in the townships had hope written in their eyes, a glimmer that we rarely see even in our own privileged children. I can’t say how I personally felt while I watched the land disappear on the horizon, knowing that if I ever returned to this place which changed my life, it won’t be for years and years.

Coming into port was like something out of a dream. In the freezing pre-sunrise air of the Atlantic I stood with my friends watching as these mountains, the likes of which I have never seen in my life, grew larger and larger with all the colors in the universe dancing behind them. We had been told numerous times that Africa is where all of us originated from, but for the first time I understood what was being said. My first thoughts were that if every single person died in this world, I knew that the sun would keep rising just like that and everything would be alright. Even just seeing the horizon was comforting in a way that can only be described as a homecoming of sorts—although I am by no means a world traveler, I can say with blunt honesty that the sunrise over the mountains in Cape Town was the single most beautiful and comforting sunrise in the entire world. I pity the fact that only six ships a year carrying passengers experience coming into this city in the manner that we did; the few thousand that have the experience we were lucky enough to have are too few and far between.

Tearing my gaze from the skyline for a moment, the next evident thing were the hundreds of tiny boats near us, all fishing in the early morning light. Unlike Brazil, in which the people would point and stare as they spoke in rapid Portuguese behind our backs, the people on the boats began to wave and cheer. Like I had been conditioned to do in the prior port and my experience living out of the country this summer I began to think of these people as mocking; prepared to begin calling us all ‘Bush-lovers’ and ‘American scum’ as soon as the ship moved past. As we went through the preparations to enter the country, I mentally prepared myself for more of these attacks. Moving out into the new yet old land a few hours later with a township tour group, I braced myself.

What I experienced over the next week, however, shattered my vain illusions. As a craft seller from Kenya told us when we stopped for an hour to speak with him after closing, how can they mock us for things that they are working to overcome themselves? How can they insult us for discrimination and racism when they only just ended it and are working to reverse the lasting effects? Sure, none of them care for Bush or the war in Iraq. But unlike in Brazil and Spain, they knew that the citizens were not Bush. They realized that we were just as unhappy with the situation as a whole, but change does not come quickly. He told us how they loved Americans in South Africa because the few that they got were the ones who wanted to venture out of their comfort zone, not indulge their luxuries. We were accepting of the differences and willing to lend a hand, not afraid to venture into a country many have left for dead.

Why else would the children in the townships, born into a world in which their parents were discriminated against and thrown aside, hug us and follow us as though we were movie stars? Why else would families stop on the side of the road to wave and talk with us, despite their other engagements? Why else would we feel so comfortable and so at home in a place that is like nothing we had ever seen before? I’ll be the first to admit that I had never felt as relaxed as I did in the townships. After all the warnings not to venture into them I had been expecting something reminiscent of Bronx or Harlem, not a community of people who lived in such poverty yet never had a smile leave their faces?

Later in the week, I joined in with some people who I met heading down to Boulder Beach. We hailed a cab and loaded in, not sure how long the drive was or if our driver would be kind enough to show us the sights as many others did. At first he put on a DVD of reggae music, swaying gently to the rhythm. It was only when we passed a small colored neighborhood that he turned it off and asked what we knew about South Africa. Feeling on the spot we explained what we had learned in Global Studies, citing the Archbishop’s words. What happened next caught all of our attentions—he scoffed. He told us about how, although what Father Tutu had done was admirable, he didn’t understand what it was like to live as a colored person in this day and age. Over the hour drive he took detours, pointing out to us where he had lost his friends to gunfire, been beaten near death by the police and been tear gassed while in class. He told us how he had lost forty of his fifty classmates and friends to the struggle before apartheid ended, how he had been beaten for entering white areas and how he had not been able to hold a job other than a sign holder on the hot pavement.

As one of the members of our group was black (by our standards—he was surprised to learn that he would be considered colored for his stringy hair in South Africa), the driver was shocked to see how we interacted. We told him how at home we had friends who were black that we consistently went out with, and how one of the girls even had a black boyfriend. He laughed and told us that we would be dead, without question or thought, if we were in South Africa behaving in this manner, even today. His passion for teaching us about the truth was evident by his slamming on the wheel and yelling at times, making us feel lost and selfish for having homes and safety.

There was a bumper sticker that I saw on my last day in South Africa on a beaten car heading into ‘Kill Me Quick Town’, or Lavender Hills. ‘For Everything, Give Thanks’, it read. For me this was the most inspiring moment of the entire stay. Despite having nothing at all, these people were happy to simply be free. It doesn’t matter to them if they have the newest videogame or the latest issue of Cosmo. It doesn’t matter if they have a mansion or a boat or a convertible. To them, freedom is the greatest gift of all.

That is how I will tell my friends and family about this journey. Not by my own words, but by those of a peeling sticker in the back of a forgotten car.

3/8/2007- Inches from Shark Week (Cape Town, South Africa)

On my last day in South Africa I went cage diving with the Great White sharks. The cage looked as though it had been thrown over a cliff fifty or sixty times—there were bars broken and bent everywhere. Yet, without care or thought, we slipped into wetsuits, donned snorkels that we ended up throwing back on the deck and jumped into the cage. Like the biggest idiot of them all I went in first and was pinned in the corner of this tiny cage, crammed in with three other people. You don’t have to be claustrophobic to feel as though you are facing death at this moment. The waves periodically splashed over the top of the bars giving us no air to breathe all the while people were kicking and being thrown about into one another due to the strong currents. I couldn’t move at all, was braced by holding onto these bars on the top, could only breath periodically when the waves went down, and on top of it all the water felt about the temperature of the Antarctic. So whenever they would say to dive down to look at a shark, we would be plunging our faces into a bucket of ice.

Fortunately, you don’t much care about the cold when National Geographic is an inch in front of your face in much more vivid colors than even an HDTV can provide.

The first time our guide said ‘dive’, I pulled myself under—and was face to face with Jaws. Great White Shark, king of the oceans, oldest killer in the world... these things all cross your mind. And since there was a bit of chum which had floated next to my face, he was staring at me like I was a seal and thus a shark burger at his local McDonalds.

They really do have sharp teeth, by the way.

So the second time a shark comes by, the captain manages to have him ram straight into the cage, literally inches from us. Oh fun, the killer of the world running into us while the bars look ready to give any minute and there are two other sharks perusing the area! It is just like you see on National Geographic during Shark Week—literally because it’s the same sharks. This was the bay that they do the filming on since there are something like a thousand Great Whites on the bottom of this 100-foot deep bay. The water isn’t nearly as clear as you’d think though; the sharks have to be right there to see them. That’s why all of them on the TV are close up.

In total I think I saw four sharks in the cage, and a few more from the ship—maybe fifteen total, including possible multiple sightings of the same sharks. The most amusing moment, however, came when a baby shark bit the chum straight off the line and the captain pulled it in while muttering ‘well, this has never happened before...'. Something you never should hear the captain of a cage diving tour say out loud.

3/2/2007- World's Sunrise (Cape Town, South Africa)

Coming into port in Cape Town was like something out of a dream. In the freezing pre-sunrise air of the Atlantic I stood with my friends watching as these mountains, the likes of which I have never seen in my life, grew larger and larger with all the colors in the universe dancing behind them.

We had been told numerous times that Africa is where all of us originated from, but for the first time I understood what was being said. My first thoughts were that if every single person died in this world, I knew that the sun would keep rising just like that and everything would be alright. Even just seeing the horizon was comforting in a way that can only be described as a homecoming of sorts—although I am by no means a world traveler, I can say with blunt honesty that the sunrise over the mountains in Cape Town was the single most beautiful and comforting sunrise in the entire world.

2/19/2007- When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer (Amazon, Brazil)

I wish I could put into words how amazing it is to look up at the sky right now. I know I am good with words, but no writer cold do this night sky justice. There’s one poem that does to an extent; one that I will keep in my heart after tonight. “The Learn’d Astronomer”, I believe. He talks about an astronomy lecture and how uneasy it makes him due to the majesty of the stars outside—some things science can’t explain, and these stars are one of them.

Being in pitch black in the middle of the Amazon is, simply put since flourishing words cannot remotely grasp their majesty, the most amazing sight possible. I was getting changed on the back of our deck when I looked up—half naked, I was looking into Heaven itself. I’ve never seen so many or such bright stars as I looked at from my behind my hammock in that moment. For the first time I could see the color difference in each of the galexies and constelations, lines through the sky outlining different worlds and lives. There is no light from cities effecting the natural sights, the stars simply fade to the black of the trees, mixing sight in with the sounds of drums and singing from a village hidden among the dark smudges of horizon.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

-Walt Whitman