Home

John: We're home--back in the US, and, as I write, back in our house in Charlottesville. The Explorer arrived in San Diego at about eight am on Wednesday morning, May 2, greeted by hundreds of parents lining the pier on both sides of the cruise terminal.  For the parents who had been waiting since an early hour, it must have been an exciting thing to see the ship, which they last glimpsed departing the Bahamas, coming over the horizon, having gone more than 25,000 miles since January. For us, it was a morning of mixed emotions: we're excited to be home but it's also sad to be leaving a ship that has come to feel like another home over the last three and a half months, and also all the people we have come to know in that time. In a lot of ways, Semester at Sea is a crazy thing--why in the world would anyone think it was a good idea to put 600 college students on a cruise ship and send them around the world? But it's also an incredibly intense experience, unlike anything we have ever done before. Every place we have seen has been interesting and incredible in its own way, and we've gone to places that we would never have imagined seeing; I suppose it is conceivable that we might have gone to Japan, China, or South Africa, but the odds of our ever visiting Accra, Saigon, Mauritius, or Cochin are long indeed, and we're deeply grateful for the chance to have gone to these places. And the business of doing it on a ship with a whole community that's been assembled for the purpose is comparable to nothing else I can think of, and you kind of have to have gone through it to understand it fully. Which is something that you come to realize in the final days, and that makes even the annoying people on board (of which there were not too many, actually) gain a sheen of sentimental association, since you have shared a unique experience with them. Aidan has made good friends here, and Maeve was called by more than one person the "star' of the voyage--she has  gained a lot of new fans.

So there were lot of teary faces as we got off the ship in something of a mad rush once the ship was cleared to let passengers disembark.  Various sectors of the shipboard community were called in sequence; we hugged the line up of deans and residence advisors assembled at the gangway; we assembled all our luggage--an enormous pile, but smaller than some others (we've generally come to realize that we can live without a lot of the stuff we have gotten used to having)--and piled into cabs to go to our downtown hotel. We decided to stay in San Diego for a couple of days before making the full re-entry home. 

Surely the highlight of our time in San Diego was going to Legoland, which is kind of wonderful and bizarre. What's nice is that unlike other amusement parks, it doesn't have scary thrill rides; it sort of builds rides out of the various categories of Legos that have become a big part of our lives the last few years.  And it has hands-down the best food of any theme park I've ever visited; fresh pints of strawberries on offer, for example, which we ate up greedily, having not seen a berry of any kind since January.

Aidan in Lego car; Maeve at Lego New York

And so Semester at Sea is over. It has been a great and rich experience, one that we will be chewing on for a long time. We can readily see why some people have gotten a little addicted to it and have done it over and over again; Bob Viera, the executive dean on this voyage, has now done the round-the-world trip five times, and many other people on this voyage were repeaters as well. For the moment, we're staying put, and hope not to bore people too much with our stories. If anyone is interested in doing SaS, we'd be glad to fill in the gaps, and it's worth noting that there are lots of people going on the voyage who are neither students nor teaching faculty. The program in effect creates an entire small college every semester, and for that, they need residence life directors, librarians, people to staff the field office (which puts together the off-ship trips), administrative staff--even a communications person, a videographer, and a photographer. Children travel at an incredibly cheap rate (because she did not turn three until five days after the end of the voyage, Maeve traveled for free). Maybe we, too, will have to do this again.

And with the end of the voyage, so too the end of this blog. It's been interesting, and fun!  I won't miss trying to upload pictures on the incredibly slow and frustrating internet connection on the ship, but I'm happy for the chance to document the voyage this way. The blog got close to 2500 hits in the last three and a half months, and while I know that some of those were accidental (we were getting hits from Russia for a while--I'm guessing from an automated site of some kind that was probably up to no good), I'm gratified by the attention.  Many thanks to all the readers, and commenters, wherever you are.

Hawai'i

John: We arrived in Hawai'i on the 24th for an unusual two day stay. Unusual because the Explorer was docked in two different ports in that time--Honololu, on the island of Oahu, and Hilo, on Hawai'i, known as the big island. Unusual, too, in that we were not allowed off the ship when we were docked in Honolulu--it was strictly a refueling and resupply stop, even though we were there for most of the day. The reasons for this were never made clear to anyone on board (why not let us off in Honolulu? why not refuel in Hilo?), but we figure that one way or another, it came down to money, and it was simply necessary to do this to stay within our voyage's budget. The cost of fuel alone for this voyage must be astronomical and rising by the day, and it's not surprising that corners need to be cut somewhere. So what I can tell you about Honolulu is that it looks great from the vantage point of a cruise ship in the harbor, but I have no idea of anything about it beyond that.

Honolulu, early morning as the ship approached the dock. Too bad we couldn't get off to see more of it.

But, look, it's Hawai'i, which is pretty exotic and interesting! We've gotten used to the exoticism of foreign ports, but this is a part of the United States that we've never been to before, and that we didn't have plausible plans to visit in any other way. And, because it is part of the United States, we're also home in some important ways. We went through US immigration on the ship on our morning in Honolulu, which means that we don't have to do that when we arrive in San Diego (though we do have to go through customs). And we can stop the mental exercise of translating local currency into dollars (an exercise that is particularly tricky when you're on your third or fourth local currency this month). And, happily, our cell phones work again; it was satisfying to see the familiar letters ATT in the upper left hand corner of my phone.  All morning long, the ship was filled with people walking about with their phones clapped to their ears. That's become a familiar sight, I realize, on most college campuses, but not here until now since we have long been out of range of US cellular service, and trying to make calls abroad is astronomically expensive.

So our time in Hawai'i really was limited to one day, a day docked in Hilo on the big island. The island of Hawai'i is actually not all that big--you could drive around the whole thing in a day. We rented a car and set out for the Volcano National Park, which seemed to be a good thing to do for people who only had one day. And it was! Kilauea, which is the largest active volcano in the world, is amazing--vast, really, with areas of relatively recent lava flow all over the place. You come to realize that basically the whole island is an enormous volcano, with a couple of main openings where gas and lava are still coming out but with tremendous amounts of activity going on under the surface. It's active now, but you can't get close to where lava is present unless you're a professional, and the park service also monitors the presence of sulfur dioxide gas.  Occasionally on the road while in the park, we'd see signs instructing us to close our car windows because the air had high levels of that gas. There's no danger of a big eruption right now, but the volcano really is very active, with lava slowly oozing out of several places--places that the likes of us are kept at a safe distance from.

What you can see is steam, which is rising in great quantities in the large caldera, the innermost crater:

Maeve is standing in front of the innermost of a series of concentric craters that marks what used to be the sides of a mountain that is much taller than it is now; about five hundred years ago, the top of the mountain collapsed into itself (that must have been an exciting day!), and the crater has slowly been filling up with lava ever since. 

There are old lava flows everywhere, with signs on them marking when they occurred.  This one that Aidan is climbing on dates to 1974:

A vast, recent lava flow. Aidan is the red dot in the background.

The whole thing looks like an unearthly, science-fiction landscape-it's unearthly, or at least unfamiliar to our usual ideas of what earth looks like.

Ater hiking across lava flows and through lava tunnels (way too dark for pictures), we made our way to the coast, where we saw some very old petroglyphs, symbolic carvings in some very old dried lava:

This site is considered sacred by the native Hawai'ians, who brought the umbilical cords of their children here to place in the round holes. It's a pretty stark landscape, all old lava flows with volcanic cliffs rising a couple of miles away and the winds off the ocean being very strong. The ocean front is beautiful, but there's no development or settlement in site, probably because the area is too imperiled by the possibility of lava flows that no one would ever want to build on it. The area is in fact also now the end of the line for the road we took, which beyond this point was covered over in lava a few years ago. 

With more time, we would love to see more of the island; others on the ship went snorkeling and took surfing lessons. That's for another day. As we boarded the ship, lots of the students were taking pictures  of themselves and their friends at the gangway--it's our last time boarding the Explorer before we disembark for good in San Diego on May 2. We're back on the seas, headed to the mainland. Our cell phones once again get a rest.

April 20/20

John: And so we continue our long trudge across the Pacific Ocean back to the United States. We've been at sea for what seems like forever and a week or so since we left Japan, but we still have a long way to go until we reach Hawaii, much less San Diego, where we get off the ship for the last time. It did not help that the first few days after we left Yokohama were marked by some very rough seas, and then by chilly and rainy weather. We basically spent an entire day sailing through fog, with visibility reduced to maybe a couple of hundred feet in any direction. I don't envy the bridge crew trying to navigate the ship under those conditions; on our tour of the bridge a few weeks ago, Aidan, Maeve and I learned that the ship has every electronic device there is to pinpoint our position and locate other ships and underwater hazards--sonar, radar, GPS, etc--but still, it's got to be easier to be able to see where you're going. We had been so accustomed to the tropical temperatures we have largely been traveling in that the chilly weather came as a surprise--we're not used to it, and do not really have a lot in the way of warm clothing. Also adding to the length of the crossing is the fact that we are crossing the international Date Line from west to east, which means that we are going through April 20 two times, once on each side of the line.  Weird!  The analogy to the movie Groundhog Day  was reinforced when the loudspeakers on the ship started playing "I Got You Babe" (the song that Bill Murray wakes up to in that movie) at alarmingly early hour on the first April 20.  It also means that we go from being seventeen hours ahead of the east coast of the United States to seven hours behind, which hardly seems fair (I have to think that there must be a way of gaming the stock market or picking horses in moving in effect from the future to the past, but can't quite figure out how to do it). It's a little boring.

But the weather has cleared and warmed up in the last two days, which helps a great deal. And, by a happy coincidence, the day we cross the International Date Line happened to be April 20, which is Aidan's birthday! Which means that he gets to celebrate it twice, a fact that has led to a number of questions in the course of the voyage.  I thus offer a list of frequently asked questions:

Q: Does this mean two birthday parties?  A. Yes: one small party with family and closest friends on the first April 20, then, on the second April 20, a larger party for all the children on board during the afternoon kid's program.

Q: Does this mean double the number of presents?  A. Not really, though there were two present-opening ceremonies, one on each April 20 morning. We had neither the foresight in January nor the space in our luggage to bring presents with us, but Vicki was able to shop for toys at the Toys 'R Us in Hong Kong, and I got him an interesting chess set carved of stone in Saigon.

Q: Is Aidan now two years older, since he had two birthdays?  A: No; he simply turned eight twice.

Contemplating his wish.

As a grand finale to the two-day-having-a-birthday-while-crossing-the-internatonal-date-line celebration, we hosted the kids on board for a showing of WALL-E in one of the classrooms. This was Aidan's choice, and it could hardly be more perfect for our situation. It's about the degradation of the environment, which has been a theme of the Global Studies class on the voyage, and much of it is set on a ship that is on an interminable cruise. Everyone had a great time. Aidan's birthday as a whole was a joyous way to get us over the hump of our long voyage home.

Yokohama

John: The port of Yokohama is not far from where Commodore Perry showed up in 1853 with a fleet of American gunboats and demanded that Japan open itself up to the world. Our ship, also filled with Americans, arrived more peaceably. But we were also determined to trade; I bought this reproduction of a nineteenth century Japanese wood block print showing an American vessel in Yokohama harbor, sometime in the 1870s or so:

Yokohama is now a very large port; odds are that everyone reading this blog owns something that was once on the docks of the port of Yokohama. And it's a big, interesting city--more modern and lively in many ways than either Kobe or Kyoto, though I can't say that I'm basing this on vast experience, since we were only in these places for a couple of days. But like a lot of people on the ship, we found Japan surprisingly difficult to navigate in some basic ways. ATMs, for example, are very hard to find. And they frequently don't work with American debit or credit cards. Many businesses don't take credit cards of any kind--it's a very cash-oriented society. It's hard to find restaurants that aren't either noodle shops or American chains (as is often the case around the world, the chain you come across the most frequently is KFC). Nothing against noodle shops--we enjoyed several--but we hoped for more variety. it was in some ways easier to navigate in Ghana, where debit and credit cards are accepted in places you wouldn't expect, and where ATMs can be seen in distant villages.

We made several stops: to a craft market, an amusement park (in Asia, these are typically right in the middle of the city, which is nice), and to the Landmark building, which does indeed stand out in the skyline and is the tallest building in Japan:

Yokohama, as seen from the ship as we approached. The Landmark building is the tall one in the middle.

It's built with that wide base in the hopes of surviving the major earthquake that is sure to hit here sometime. The Semester at Sea voyage last spring was diverted to Taiwan because of the earthquake and tsunami then, and while there was no evidence of destruction anywhere that we went, I did see a couple of signs in English urging people to remember the victims of the earthquake. We didn't feel any tremblers while we were in Japan, but there are sure to be more of them in the future.

The Landmark building has an observation deck on the 69th floor that is reached by the world's fastest elevator; it goes up to 750 meters a second. It's very cool, and features some great views in all directions.

On a clear day, you can see to Mount Fuji, the signs said.  But it was not a particularly clear day, and it began to rain in the evening. Then in rained all the next day, heavily at times, canceling the baseball game that I was planning to attend, and generally putting a bit of a damper on what was our last day in a foreign country. We cannot complain, though--we've had remarkably good weather for the entire voyage, and have already seen and done so much that we've been into the bonus round for a while now, as it were. 

Our main outing of the day was to the International Doll Museum. It turns out that the exchange of dolls was a very big thing early in the twentieth century, and there were regular clubs and conferences where Japanese and American people shipped or gave each other dolls as gestures of friendship and peace. That wasn't enough to stop WWII, but the legacy here apparently is that there were a lot of dolls from all over the world that formed the basis of a very nice and well-curated museum. Maeve discovered an affinity:

Maeve really does look like a kewpie doll

Impressed by dolls, filled with noodles, drenched in rain, we headed back to the ship, which pulled out that night to begin our long journey back to the U.S. The Pacific Ocean is big! bigger by far than the Atlantic, and it will take us eleven days just to get to Hawaii, where we stop for a single day before heading to San Diego, where we disembark to make our way to Charlottesville on our own. We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go to get home. 

Cherry Blossoms

Aidan:  I went to Japan when the cherry blossoms look best. In Japan you see cherry blossoms everywhere. The tree itself is huge but the blossoms are very small. The blossoms were white and light pink as colors. The blossoms were beautiful and I would like to see them again.

Japan: Kobe to Kyoto

John:  Japan is our last stop before heading home to the US; after here, we head across the Pacific to San Diego, stopping only for a day in Hawaii to refuel. So there is some melancholy attached to this port, a sense of a good thing approaching the end. And there is some fatigue as well; if Japan were our first stop rather than our last, we would surely be more excited and prepared with plans for what to see and do. As it is, after being in Singapore, Vietnam, and three different cities in China all in the course of the last two weeks, we are a little wiped out and need to dig deep to summon the energy we need to explore this new place.

Still, Japan! A place that we have never been, never realistically expected to visit, and that has much to explore than we could possibly accomplish in a year, much less a week. That is more than enough to overcome our tiredness. And, too, we are arriving right at the peak of cherry-blossom season, which is a special time of year here. The Explorer is set to dock in two ports, Kobe and Yokohama. We arrived in Kobe on Tuesday morning to some fanfare: the city sent out a fire boat, and we were greeted by a brass band:

Arrival in Kobe, 7 am. That's the fireboat ahead, its plumes of water leading us into the dock. 

We ended up not seeing much of Kobe, though, in the two days that the ship was docked here. And that's too bad; it's a nice city, a port city with a dramatic backdrop of mountains, and it has completely recovered from a very powerful earthquake that leveled a big part of the city and killed thousands of people about fifteen years ago. But the kind of historical monuments that we wanted to see were more in Kyoto, which is not far. So we booked a hotel in Kyoto (about which more later) and took the train there. Not a bullet train this time--such a thing does not run between Kobe and Kyoto--but a regular fast train, which is still a lot faster and more efficient than anything we are used to in the US. We crowded in between the commuters, many of them men in what seems to be the business uniform of dark suit, white shirt, tie; clearly business dress here is pretty conservative. Overall, people dressed here a lot like Americans, although occasionally we saw women in beautiful traditional kimonos.

(Editorial warning: yet another history lesson ahead.) Kyoto was the capital of Japan for centuries until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Japan was forcibly opened to foreign trade (by American gunboats), the shogunate fell, and the capital was moved to Tokyo. The city was never bombed in WWII, so there are still some older structures here, though most of them are on the perimeter of the city; the center of Kyoto is often fairly drab, cherry blossoms notwithstanding. But it's all laid out on a grid, so it's navigable, and in fact we had very little trouble traveling around the city by bus; Kyoto has a good and efficient bus system, and, crucially for us, the best bus maps I've ever seen.  Every stop is announced in Japanese, English, and Chinese, making the bus, for once, a better choice than the taxi cabs we have often been taking.

We headed out to the Kiyomizu-dera temple complex, a Buddhist temple dating to the eighth century that enjoys a stunning situation on hills over the city, and right now is decorated beautifully with cherry trees in full bloom:

The "hondo" or main building at the Kiyomizu-dera temple. This was built in 1633, and apparently it's considered a remarkable example of this kind of construction.

Aidan purifying his hands before entering the temple.

We walked from there as it started to get dark to the Gion neighborhood, which has shopping and nightlife, including Kyoto's geisha district, which is one of the last of these in Japan. And we saw a geisha! She was being led to a black car by an older businessman, and there was a row of similar black cars with drivers outside a building that we took to be a geisha house, a premise confirmed by a check with Wikipedia; there were tourists outside waiting for other geishas to come out with other rich guys. Mostly, the street consists of older buildings that are now restaurants with eye-popping prices. We found a delicious and more affordable dinner a couple of blocks away.

Our hotel in Kyoto was billed as a traditional Japanese-style hotel, which was sort of true; rather than Western-style beds, it had futon mattresses laid out on tatami mats. The clientele, though, was Western backpacker-types attracted by the (for Japan) cheap prices and proximity to the train station. We all uncurled our mattresses and went to sleep together:

Our room in the Sparkling Dolphin Inn, so called, we realized when we turned out the lights, because of the glow-in-the-dark dolphins and stars on the ceiling.

The next day, we went to the Golden Pavilion, another famous temple on the periphery of town. And gold here is not a metaphor--the Pavilion is covered in gold leaf:

The Golden Pavilion.

From there, we went to the Nijo Castle at the center of town. This was the home base of the shogun, who really had the power in Japan. There are no pictures allowed of the interior, and it was pouring rain, so we could not get good pictures of the exterior, but it's a remarkably beautiful and serene building inside. It's easy to see here why and how modernist architects drew inspiration from traditional Japanese buildings--the spaces are somehow impressive without being showy, and the use of natural materials--wood, bamboo, matting--creates a sense of warmth.

On to Yokohama!

Maeve and the Paparazzi

Maeve: People in China and Japan are constantly taking my picture! Every time I stop and sit down, there are a bunch of people standing around with cameras. Sometimes they ask my mommy or daddy if it's OK, but a lot of times, they just take my picture. Most of the time, I'm pretty happy with it. But it's really strange. It's as if they don't see too many little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes like me.

Maeve and the paparazzi in Hanzhou, China.

Shanghai

John: We went to Shanghai from Hangzhou in a way that is unavailable at home: bullet train! 300 kilometers per hour, smooth as glass, cool and comfortable. Also relatively cheap. This is something we need in the US.

Shanghai is enormous; there are something between 15 and 23 million people here, depending on how you draw the perimeter and how the government decides to do the counting (there are apparently a lot of people living here illegally, and the government is not eager to have them as part of the official count.) Enormous tall apartment buildings go on for miles. There's a brand-new metro system, with three new lines opening this year alone. For a long time, it has been one of the most Western-oriented of the cities of China; in the early twentieth century, much of the city was divided up between foreign powers that had sovereignty over their own areas; the area known as the Bund is where the Western banks and businesses were headquartered then, and the architecture in that area, dating to the 1920s and 30s, feels a lot like Chicago. The neighborhood once known as the French Concession is now filled with pricey condos, nice restaurants, and stores with familiar high-end brands: Prada, Apple, Jaguar. There's a whole lot of capitalist consuming going on around there in the city that was once the headquarters for the Gang of Four.

We got to town in the evening, and went immediately started doing some consuming ourselves, going to dinner (of course!) at a fantastic dim sum restaurant, one that had pictures of people like Jackie Chan and Mel Gibson eating there on the walls. All I can say is that you haven't lived until you've had dumplings made with chicken and truffle. 

With (as always) limited time in the city, we went the next day to the Yu Gardens Market, a cluster of old buildings in the center of town. It's packed with shops selling all sorts of things; we got Aidan a beautiful Chinese suit with a dragon on the front, and also a marble stamp with his name engraved on it in Chinese characters. It's a crowded and interesting, with temples and gardens intermixed with shops in narrow alleys:

One of the alleys in the labyrinth of Yu Gardens Market.

The central square of the market; note the Starbucks in the lower right.

We went to the temple of the city gods, which was unimpressive compared to the Linyin temple in Hangzhou, perhaps because it looks very much like the statues are recent and not very artistic recreations of older statues; maybe the originals were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution--that happened in a lot of places. (We learned in Hangzhou that the temples were largely spared there because Chou En-Lai was a resident, and he prevented the kind of destruction that was common elsewhere.) The streets around are filled with markets selling odder bric-a-brac: kites and fans, but also things like Cultural Revolution playing cards and statues of Mao, which read in context more as kitsch than anything else. Or at least that is how it seemed to me; we didn't get into any conversations about how people feel about Mao these days. Nor could we if we wanted to, since the language barrier was pretty profound much of the time even in so modern and outward-looking a city as Shanghai. We traveled from the ship to town by taxi, and had to do with slips of paper that the travel agent who came on the ship (as they usually do in port) wrote out for us with destinations in Chinese characters.

In front of the Shanghai Museum, a very nice museum of Chinese art.

And we wandered--to a couple of very nice parks, each of which had some amusement-park style rides (including some bumper cars that decidedly did not meet US standards of safety), to the Shanghai Museum, to various areas, on and off the beaten paths for tourists. We know that we barely scratched the surface here--it's a huge and exciting city.  Stuff is happening here--there are new building projects everywhere, and there's a lot of energy around the place. The Pudong area, which we did not enter, is the city's business and financial district. It's across the river from the Bund, on land that until 1989, was farmland and a chemical factory.  Here it is now:

That is, everything behind us here was build in the last 20 years or so. It will be interesting to return here; I hope we get the chance.

Hangzhou

John:  I had never heard of Hangzhou until a couple of months ago, and in that I'm probably like most Americans. Which mostly reveals my and our ignorance, because Hangzhou is enormous, with something like seven or eight million people--that is, it is as big as New York. It's an old city, with a long history; it was once the capital of China, and for a while in what Europeans think of as the Middle Ages it may have been the most populous city on earth. Marco Polo visited here, and thought it was the most impressive city he had ever seen.

It's also a city that is beloved by Chinese people, who flock here in droves as tourists: more than 63 million Chinese tourists came to Hangzhou last year. That's three times as many people who visit Venice, for example. The Chinese think of it as a beautiful city, and even have a proverbial expression to the effect of "there's one heaven above, but on earth we have Hangzhou and Suzhou" (the second being another garden city, one tp which Vicki is in fact leading a student trip). That may be an exaggeration, but it's still the case that Hangzhou occupies a pretty big place in the Chinese imagination, so it is well touristed. And we happened to arrive during the annual three-day holiday where people in China are supposed to clean their ancestors' graves. Or, if you no longer live near your ancestors' graves, you can go to Hong Kong Disneyland maybe, or perhaps Hangzhou. The sites were pretty crowded, which was interesting in itself, though it meant that traffic was thick and getting around was sometimes a little tricky.

We came here from Hong Kong in part so as to get off the ship, which was going to be in transit for two days between Hong Kong and Shanghai. We've spent enough time on the ship, and with the long Pacific crossing looming ahead of us, we are eager not to have to be at sea for any longer than is necessary. A lot of people on the voyage went to Beijing, for the obvious reasons.  But that seemed like a long trip to us, and one that Maeve in particular might find to be a challenge.  Hengzhou, though, is conveniently between Hong Kong and Shanghai. And, too it's a place that is off the beaten path for Western tourists, which Beijing is not. Which led to some challenges; not too many people in Hangzhou speak any English at all, and even the staff at the hotel we booked, one that is designed to cater to Western business people who are in Hangzhou on business, had limited English skills. (But of course even their English is way better than our Chinese, which largely consists of saying "Thank you" and "I'm sorry"--that at least covers two of the more important bases of conversation.) 

As I say, Hangzhou has a reputation in China of being a place of great beauty. The urban areas of the city itself are not remarkably beautiful; it does not have a lovely skyline or architecturally interesting public spaces. But it has West Lake, which is quite lovely. It's a large lake in the middle of the city that over the centuries has been tended and manicured; there are gardens, plantings, tea-houses, causeways, bridges--it's all sort of an enormous garden with appealing vistas at every turn.

Aidan at West Lake, Hangzhou. The willows are budding--it's really very pretty

The other attraction in Hengzhou is the Lingyin temple. It's one of the largest and most important Buddhist temples in China, which was established in  326. The buildings themselves--and there are a number of them, one more impressive than the next--are much newer, since the temple has been destroyed and rebuilt something like fifteen times over the centuries, but the place is incredible--amazingly serene, with beautiful carvings and statuary. 

Maybe the most impressive part of the complex is outside, though, in the form of rock carvings into the hillside adjacent to the temple. There are over 300 of them, many of them of different incarnations of the Buddha. Everyone's favorite is surely the laughing Buddha:

The Laughing Buddha--it's an amazing sight, right in the all of the mountain.

The temple complex and the stone carvings were were the trip. We're really glad that we got to see Hangzhou.

We love Hong Kong

An incomplete version of this post went up last night by accident; this is a full version. Access to this blog, which is supported by Google, was blocked in China, so we'll be catching up over the next couple of days. As I write, we're on the way to Japan.


John: We do. It's an exciting, interesting city, one that feels like a combination of some of the most interesting parts of San Francisco, New York, and London, while of course being very much itself at the same time. It's both modern, with skyscrapers and a fantastic metro system, and also sort of quant in spots--the crewmen on the Star Ferry, which goes between the mainland and Hong Kong island, wear what look like British sailor suits, circa 1930. It's a very international place, with many expatriates living and working here; it was easy to feel at home pretty quickly.

Maeve and Aidan  on the top deck of the ship with Hong Kong Island behind them. As is usual with a  new port, we arrived in Hong Kong first thing in the morning; it's always exciting to wake up arriving in a new city.

It will not surprise any reader of this blog that we have spent a fair amount of time at children's parks and the zoo. We're now experts in Asian zoos, and can report that the Hong Kong zoo is not all that elaborate compared to the Singapore Zoo, and it's smaller than the Saigon Zoo as well. But it's free, centrally located, and very pleasant, with lots of monkeys. And also a raccoon, which here is an exotic animal, but of course is a pest around our garbage cans.

Maeve got tired of walking at the Hong Kong Zoo.

Our biggest excursion was to Hong Kong Disneyland. Yes, there is a Hong Kong Disneyland:

Aidan with the Hong Kong Disneyland castle.

And it's kind of like every other Disneyland, though smaller than the ones in the US. There is a castle, depicted above, a Space Mountain, a jungle boat ride, a small world ride, and so on. It also has some of the features I've tended to suppress from memories of visits to the Disney parks in the US, like big crowds and long lines for everything (Maeve fell asleep in my arms as we were waiting to get on a Buzz Lightyear ride.) After being at the Buddhist amusement park in Saigon a few days ago, Disneyland looked newly strange, I think, and it's a puzzle to me why people in Hong Kong would be interested in visiting such an artificial version of America.

In the evening, Vicki and I went out to a great Japanese restaurant to celebrate my birthday. That was good, grown-up fun.

Pardon the interruption

John: We're sorry not to have kept up with new posts, but 1) we've been busy in China and 2) it's been mysteriously difficult to log on to Google blogs here in the People's Republic. Facebook, too. Hmmm.  We'll be catching up with posts about Hong Kong, Hangzhou, and Shanghai (which is where I'm writing from).

Saigon for kids

ohn:  With Vicki gone to Hanoi for a couple of days--she left at 4 am on our second morning here in Saigon--the agenda turned to chlldren-friendly activities. Of which there are a fair number in Saigon, fortunately. We had read that Vietnamese people love children, and that seems to be true; Aidan and Maeve get a good deal of attention when we are out and about, and it seems like we cannot go into a store for more than a minute before they have candy in their hands (one place, surprisingly, had Lindt truffles--how about some for me?). At the same time, I've also been a little terrified to see children standing in the front of a motorbike hurtling into the traffic--the anxiety over children's safety that is so much a part of our experience with carseats and bicycle helmets is completely absent here.

First stop, the Saigon Zoo. It's fine, though even if we had not been so impressed with the Singapore Zoo just a few days ago, I think we'd sense its limits quickly (though I appreciate its cheapness--admission was about 40 cents apiece, and Maeve was free). It's an old-fashioned zoo, originally laid out by the French in the nineteenth century, with most of the animals in fairly spartan enclosures. I don't get the sense that they're neglected, and they have space, but the environments don't make much effort to replicate their natural habitats. The grounds, though, are nice, functioning as a quiet botanical garden, with specimen trees from all over Asia.

Aidan and Maeve mostly enjoyed the children's playground, which had kiddie rides, a bouncy castle, and one of those enclosures filled with plastic balls:

So yes, we have travelled about 18,000 miles by now to play in plastic balls.

The next, Tuesday, was a case of plans frustrated leading to something surprising and amazing that we could never have anticipated. The plan was to go to a children's amusement park located on the outskirts of Saigon that we had read good things about in the Lonely Planet guide. Our friends Victor, Elizabeth, and their son Josiah were going, too, so we hired a cab and squeezed in. But when we got there, the amusement park was closed; I'm not sure, but it seems as though someone was telling our driver that all of the parks in town were closed on Tuesday. The driver suggested that he take us to another place, the Suoi Tien amusement park, which he said was much better. (All of this sounds a good deal more transparent and fast than it was in reality, since our driver spoke almost precisely no English, and we no precisely no Vietnamese. What he died was write "Soui Tien" on a piece of paper, drew a map, and pantomimed that it would be a place the children would like.) We went all in, and he took us to the Soui Tien park, about an hour's drive outside of town.

Here, in no particular order, are things that are at the Soui Tien amusement park, which is probably about the size of Disneyland:

• a giant roller coaster

• a Ferris wheel

• enormous statues of dragons

• a gorgeous, and active Buddhist temple

• a snow palace (more on this below)

• bumper boats

• Hindu statuary

• a place where you can dip your feet in the water and have fish eat the dead skin off

• a paint ball center

• a water park with slides

• an artificial lake filled with real crocodiles.

And lots more stuff, too. Soui Tien is a Buddhist amusement  park, a genre that none of us had ever imagined before. It's kind of great, but of course deeply weird to our eyes. Since it was a weekday, it was not crowded at all--apparently it is very busy on the weekend. But this is clearly not a place designed for the likes of us--unlike central Saigon, which has a lot of foreign tourists and expatriates, this place is designed for local interests and tastes. The juxtaposition of a Buddhist temple, one in use, with people praying and lighting incense, with amusement park rides, stands selling t-shirts and ice cream, etc., is more strange than anything I could ever come up with on my own. 

Inside one of the many Buddhist temples at the Suoi Tien Amusement Park

Maeve at the entrance to the Suoi Tien amusement park. She was amused quickly.

Surely the moment of greatest surprise, hilarity, and absurdity was the snow palace. We had gotten a tram to take us around, since it was hot and we figured that with limited time, we wouldn't get to see much otherwise. When the tram driver stopped there and gestured that we might like to go in, we figured that it might be interesting.  What would it be? A winter-themed funhouse? a "matterhorn" style ride? We were led to a place where we were given orange coats, white boots, and cloth gloves, and then taken to the heart of the thing--an enormous room, maybe 50' by 50' that was filled with several inches of snow.  Essentially, we were in a giant freezer compartment, minus the frozen food. They had built up a hill, decorated it with plastic snowmen and penguins, and provided tubes for sliding purposes:

Aidan playing in the snow in Saigon. Note the plastic snowmen.

This may be the single strangest thing we have see on this entire trip. But of course it makes sense: Vietnam is tropical, and never sees snow--what could be more fun for Vietnamese children than to get to play in the snow for once? I can't say, though, that this is anything we would ever have expected to see.

Today (Wednesday) we went to the Jade Emperor pagoda, a Taoist temple located north of downtown. It's a cute little temple, with a nice quiet courtyard that is a good respite from the busy commercial neighborhood around it, and a charming statue of the happy Jade Emperor, a key Taoist deity. It was built in 1909 by Cantonese immigrants

The key feature of the temple, though, and the drawing card for us, were the turtles. Turtles are considered to bring good luck in Vietnamese culture, and this temple gives you the chance to "liberate" turtles into a turtle pond. You buy the turtles from a seller at the gate and set it free, after having painted your name on it:

Aidan named our turtle "Castor." We released him into the turtle pond, where we hope that he is set to enjoy a happy life, tended by the temple monks.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

John: For the first time on our voyage, we're splitting up for a good part of the week we are spending in a port. Vicki is leading a Semester-at-Sea trip to Hanoi in the middle three days while John and the kids are staying here in Ho chi Minh City.  Or Saigon, which is what people still call it except when they're being official about it. Being in Saigon and Hanoi is remarkable enough to us, who still have vivid memories of the time when Vietnam figured in the news as a place of seemingly-constant and intractable warfare. That we are here as students and tourists  amazes, even though we know that this is not at all unusual now; Vietnam has opened itself up to the world in the last twenty years, and it has become a regular stop for the hectic Asian swing of Semester at Sea; a good number of the faculty and administrative staff have been here a couple of times before. Still, of all the places we are visiting, the very fact of being here boggles the imagination most.

So, what's it like? Modern Saigon was largely laid out by the French, and it still shows in the broad boulevards, wide sidewalks, roundabouts, and a number of nineteenth-century monumental buildings that would look at home in Paris. And that makes it very navigable in some ways; the central part of the city, where most of the landmark buildings are, is fairly easily to negotiate, though the city sprawls out in all directions for miles. There's construction everywhere, as modern hotels and office buildings replace older structures; there's a lot of outside money coming into the city as multinational corporations set up shop. There are plenty of symbols here that remind you that the Communists won and are in power here--flags, posters, party buildings, guards in uniform--but there's also a lot of capital coming in from outside and local entrepreneurship; most businesses, a guide told us, are privately owned, but I'm not quite sure that that means the same thing here as in the US. In fact, I really have no idea about how all this works and where the lines of pressure are between the government, business, citizens, etc. Much less do I know how the division between North and South works; this place feels very Westernized in some ways, surely because the decades of French and American influence, but the North has got to be different.

Most of all, Saigon is very busy and active, a fast-moving place. The streets are thronged with motorbikes, the drivers of which seem to be trying to make some kind of massive illustration of quantum mechanics; surely they have some direction, but it feels pretty random. Which makes crossing the street a thrill, and not in the good sense; there are not a lot of traffic lights, and marked crosswalks are treated casually by the motorbikers. You sort of plunge in and expect them to be able to navigate around you, but it's scary.

On the first day, we took a city orientation tour that introduced us to some of the major landmarks in town, like the Notre Dame Cathedral and, interestingly, the Post Office, which has both an enormous painting of Ho Chi Minh and a counter for the US Postal Service. The most interesting of these sites, surely, was the building now known as Reunification Hall. Before the north defeated the south in 1975, it was the presidential palace. It's a beautiful example of modern architecture, but its modernity owes a lot to the instability of the South Vietnamese regime: it was built i 1962 to replace the previous palace, which was bombed by the South Vietnamese air force in its attempt to kill President Diem.  Who survived the attack but didn't live to see this building completed, since he was assassinated for good the next year.

Reunification Hall, the former Presidential Palace for the South Vietnamese President. Tanks famously crashed through this fence in 1975, ending the war.

Perhaps the highlight of the day was going to a restaurant that is staffed by former orphans and street children; the goal is to teach them both English and how to run a restaurant.  They fell in love with Maeve, and basically took her over, passing her from person to person. 

Maeve makes some new friends.

They gave her a manicure, and then finally let us have her back so that we could leave. And the food was good, too.

More posts to come. 

Saigon

Tired after a day in Saigon.

Singapore

John: We had only one day in Singapore, not nearly enough to do more than scratch the surface. Which is sort of liberating in a way; when you know in advance that you can't get all that far, you might as well pick something that looks like fun and just enjoy. So we decided to go to the zoo, which is widely billed as the finest in Asia, and one of the best in the world. After some frustration trying to figure out the mass-transit system (the system itself is very efficient; the ticket offices much less so), we finally made it out there via a combination of metro and bus, helped enormously by a local gentleman who showed us how to get from one to the other--we'd still be looking for the bus stop if were left on our own. 

The Singapore Zoo lives up to its billing--it's great! The animals are close, and in large habitats stocked with natural flora. Highlights included lemurs, gibbons, orangutans, white rhinos, and pygmy hippos. For my money, the real standout was a trio of white tigers:

Aidan and a white tiger over his shoulder, as if it happens every day.

The white tigers are not a separate species; they're a sport of nature, all descended from a unique white tiger born in 1951. They're beautiful, and they roam very close to the spectators. Usually when I've seen tigers in zoos, they're resting or just sleeping, but two of the three tigers in this group were exploring their lair energetically, and you could really get a sense of their size, beauty, and strength

It's too bad we can't be here at night; the Zoo has a night safari, where you travel through the Zoo in the dark on trams; since you can't see the low walls and moats that separate you from the animals, it's apparently a little scary to be that close, and many of the animals are more active at night as well. From the point of view of parents, perhaps the Singapore Zoo's signal innovation is that it rents Flexible Flyer wagons out so that you can wheel kids from place to place. This was a big hit, and spared lots of the kinds of cranky walking that ultimately leads to carrying, something that was particularly likely to happen in the hot and humid temperatures here. We'll have to put this idea in the suggestion box at other zoos.

We went next to Chinatown. (Warning: brief history lesson to follow.) Singapore was sort of invented by a guy named Stamford Raffles, who was an employee of the British East India Company, charged to find a place that could serve as a trading spot for the British in this region (in particular, a place strategically located to counter the Dutch, who had a lot of influence in nearby Indonesia.) This island, off the southern tip of what is now Malaysia, was perfectly positioned, with a big harbor and a wide river, and not much developed or populated (there were, though, apparently a lot of tigers; the three in the zoo are the only tigers on the island now). So (making a long story short) Raffles made a deal with the local sultan and the Company took over the place, and then started moving in a labor force of Chinese, Malays, Indians, and British administrators. Raffles sat down with a map and laid out the city's neighborhoods by function and ethnicity: warehouses and export businesses in this place, Chinese over here, Indians over there, colonials housed down here. And while Raffles wouldn't recognize a lot of modern Singapore, the plan he drew up is still more or less how Singapore is laid out; there's Chinatown, Little India, an area of older colonial buildings, and the big business district, now dominated by one skyscraper after another. We picked Chinatown not quite at random; there were some temples that we wanted to see there, and we figured that the food would be good, too, but we could just as easily have spent time in other parts of the city and gotten a very different kind of experience.

The first temple we saw in Chinatown was actually a Hindu temple, built originally in 1827. It's very ornately decorated:

Interestingly, there's a modern building nearby that seems to be emulating the shape of the temple's facade:

While we were there, a thunderstorm struck, so we took cover in the nearby Maxwell Food Market. It's a covered area filled with what are known here as hawker stalls--small shops selling Singaporean fast food. We had mango and kiwi smoothies:

And then the local specialty, chicken with rice, which really depends on the variety of the hot sauces that you have with it.  Delicious--and cheap, about the equivalent of $3.50US.

The final sight was the Buddha's Tooth temple, which is amazing. I don't think that there's an actual Buddha's Tooth there, though.

Finally, some wandering around the streets of Chinatown. This is one of the few places left in Singapore with old buildings; the government has torn down many blocks of older buildings to make way for modern construction. These shophouses, with shops on the ground floor and housing above, date from the early colonial period, and are still in use as shops for clothes, toys, electronics; not sure if anyone still lives upstairs, though. Then back to the cruise center to dispense our remaining Singapore dollars (they've thoughtfully provided shops designed for that very purpose), then back on the ship, trying to beat the on-ship time of 8:30; there's always a frenzy of people getting through immigration and security at the last moment, since the penalties for being on the ship late are pretty $evere. We pulled out around 11:00 pm, on our way to Ho Chi Minh City, a/k/a Saigon, where we arrive on Sunday.

It would have been great to spend more time in Singapore. Unlike many places we've been, though, a lot of Singapore is very familiar--many modern buildings, with ethnic enclaves with older structures, freeways, tourists. It's a very cosmopolitan place, with people from all over the world working or visiting here. The international brands are also ubiquitous; within ten minutes of getting off the ship this morning, a fair number of students had outfitted themselves with Starbucks frappaccinos (thereby ending a long drought), and the Zoo has not one, but two Ben and Jerry's shops (we checked one of them out). The place feels sort of like a cleaner, more humid Los Angeles.