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.

3/10/2007- 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.