December 12 2010 / MV Explorer

Well, I guess here we are.  The end of an awesome, phenomenal journey, filled with more sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings than my body has room for.  It’s going to take months, if not years, to process it all.  I know and can feel it somewhere in my heart that I’ve been changed, but how?  Hopefully for the better, but who knows?  How long will it take before the journey starts to slip away from me as I sink into Privileged American Life, doing Privileged American Things?  Then again, who says the journey has to end here?  My journey is continuing, and it’s going to keep going for much more time to come, I hope. 

As for these magical countries I’ve visited:  Spain, Morocco, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Japan… all of these places have taught me magical things I’ve never known before.  You see poverty as statistics until you see the widespread shantytowns of Ghana.  Genocides are a thing of the past before Cambodia.  True wildlife, a thing that doesn’t exist until the plains of South Africa.  Quiet refinement mixed with loneliness never has been prominent before Japan.  More than anything I’ve learned, I’ve come to understand so much more about the human spirit in the face of adversary, that no matter what—whether poverty, racism, oppression, or violence—the human spirit can persevere.  Together, we can lift each other up.  The earth is not as large as we tend to think, and we are all connected.  We need to achieve peace, prosperity, and preservation in our world.  With our common humanity, I know we can hold our hands out to each other and to the world and save each other.  We can do this, but we must do it together. 

I am so grateful for my parents for giving me this incredible opportunity, as well as all my friends at home for reading my blog and leaving comments or sending me emails.  You have no idea how much they meant to me.  I’m grateful for all the incredible friends I’ve made here, especially Julie, Jared, Ellie, Martha, and Lorelei.  You guys are the best and I love you and wish you the biggest happiness ever in life.  I won’t say goodbye because I know I’m destined to see you all again, and soon! 

THANKS FOR GIVING ME THE WORLD!  I feel as though I’ve learned, most importantly, how to take care of it.  :)

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
     -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

December 10 2010 / MV Explorer

Well, I guess that’s it, then.  Today was our last final in Global Studies.  It was complete and utter pwnage all across the board, from what I heard, though the subject of it was the source of much entertainment for me all morning long (“dude, only squares pass.  Don’t even go!”).  But now I’m all finished!  Exams in WIHC and CSI went okay, about as well as expected but I feel as though I did better on both of those than the midterms, so I guess we’ll have to see.  Anthropology of Tourism was a cinch.  Not sure how my poems went… I’m going to go with Martha to see Cushman tomorrow.  I’m really nervous about it for some reason.  I don’t even want an A for the GPA, I want an A because it means that Cushman thought I was awesome.  Anything less will be pretty disappointing, because I worked intensely for that class.  I hope it shows in my poetry… I guess we’ll see. 

Martha, Lorelei and I got ready for the Ambassador’s Ball tonight together.  We were all sitting at the same table with Jared and Julie.  DINNER WAS DELICIOUS.  Broccoli and cheese soup, caesar salad, bruschetta, filet mignon… om nom nom.  Dean Sue gave a really cute toast (we got champagne in real glasses! :o), and I thoroughly enjoyed eating much of Martha and Jared’s bruschetta, soup, and champagne—gotta love those picky eaters.   I want to eat nothing but bruschetta and caprese when I return home. 

There was then a little dance type deal on deck 7 and in the Union, which we attacked for a little while.  Then I headed back to my room and took a shower—Julie, Lorelei and Martha are going to come over and we’re going to have a sleeeeeepover!  Usually I’m not one for sleepovers but I feel as though this shall be a most epic sleepover.  We are going to watch some sort of romantic comedy movie, which hopefully does not make me depressed because I have not watched a romantic movie of any kind for about two years or so.  :O

For some reason I am more anxious about this coming home business than I was about my finals.  I definitely do this every year, going back home from Chapman or, from here, from… the entire world.  I don’t know why I feel so strange.  REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK LAWL.  I’m sure I will feel so much better when I just give my dad a hug and see all my friends again at Chapman and then come back home… hmm.  I guess I must just feel listless.  There’s nothing that I’m planning for, I suppose.  We’ll see! 

Packing is going to be so intense soon…

December 3 4 2010 / Honolulu, Hawaii

HAWAIIIIII yes indeed, back in the United States of Murica.  I already miss Japan but being on the ship for ten days was a little too much crappy ship food for me, so I was happy when we pulled into Honolulu, Hawaii.  Unfortunately for me,  we’ve been changing time zones so quickly I’d only gotten on hour of sleep the night before until I had to get up to do face to face immigration, and as you guys probably know me, I don’t really function very well when I get no sleep.  The same had happened to Julie, so after breakfast we went back to sleep for a while. 

When we did get up, we commandeered Jared and Steven and set out to find lunch (yes, we really did sleep that long) and found this sketchy place called Tiki Café.  I had spaghetti, which for some reason seemed like a good idea at the time, and BOBA TEA!  I love boba tea and it was most delicious.  We then decided to just kind of amble aimlessly around, because we were just happy to be outside in fresh air on beautiful land.  I didn’t really realize how impoverished Hawaii was the first time I visited here with my family.  Everywhere I went there were people sleeping on the ground and in hammocks.  It was pretty bad, especially considering that we hadn’t seen anything like that in Japan. 

Anyway we explored Chinatown and I shot tapioca balls from my boba at pigeons.  It was delightful.  We ate dinner at a restaurant and I had a Benadryl at like eleven oclock at night so that I could sleep well and wake up for TODAY WHICH WAS AMAZING yeah I’m sorry, we didn’t do much in Honolulu the first day.  I was pretty okay with that though, being as that I had been stressed out about school projects for the last week.  I needed the bumming around happily. 

ANYWAY SO TODAY WE WOKE UP BEFORE SEVEN AM TO GO

SKYDIVING

SKYDIVING YOU GUYS IT WAS MAGICAL

Anyways so we got up and went out to the pier around 7:30am, where we were picked up by a van and set off on our adventure.  I am just going to skip right on ahead to the fun part, is that okay guys, I can tell this story well in person but I’m just too exhausted and excited about how epic this is to really rev up and give tons of descriptions

SO ANYWAY I was strapped in with this guy George, a dude who had skydove like 21000 jumps before (he has apparently spent two weeks of his life in freefall. EPIC).  We had a Very Sturdy Harness on that made me feel very safe, and went up in a propeller plane up 14000 feet.  At first we hit some turbulence and I was just like D: until I realized that I have probably never been in a safer situation before.  If anything were to go wrong, I had a parachute for goodness sake.  But we climbed higher and higher for like ten minutes or so, and then they opened the big plastic sheet that was the diving wall kind of thing.  Wind was whipping by with gusto and it was outrageously loud.  Lander and his person were first, and they leapt out and were ripped away like a ragdoll, spinning out in the wind.  That was when I thought, “my god, what have I done?”  I’d been feeling fairly muted until that point, but my diver was already telling me to get up and head over.  I grasped the bar above my head and looked down to the tiny island below, dwarfed in the massive ocean.  Well, if something went wrong, there sure would be a lot of time for error. 

“One!” shouted George, “two! Arch!”  I arched backwards, like he told me, grabbing the straps on my harness, and fell into the sky.

It was.  It was amazing.  It was probably one of the most single amazing experiences I’ve ever had in my life.  I wasn’t prepared for how loud it was.  The wind was literally being torn apart as you fell through it.  And some point I felt George wallop my shoulder—the sign to relax my arms.  I did and just let the wind carry them upwards.  My mouth was pulled open by the rush—going 130mph can do that sometimes.  I didn’t scream, though I might have let out a whoohoo at some point.  It felt so surreal.  I couldn’t stop staring at the ground and wondering at how funny it was that I simply could not wrap my head around the fact that I was falling towards the earth. 

And then the parachute snapped open, and yanked me upwards.  Abruptly the wind roar stopped, and there was silence.  George pointed out Pearl Harbor, sparkling off in the distance on the other side of the island.  I was too utterly shocked and awed to say much of anything.  I just couldn’t stop looking at everything.  aslkfj I know I’m not describing it well, it’s hard to communicate in text form.  Ask me about it and  I will be happy to tell you.  Hitting the ground was not as terrifying as I thought it would be, but then again, I definitely did not land on my feet and sort of fell over onto the ground.  Probably the most terrifying part of this jump was Bryan swooping in behind me and almost landing on me.  :O

The rest of the day I felt, quite literally, high (ho ho ho, what a pun!).  Bryan and I just stared out the window at the clouds on the drive back, and I felt exhausted—adrenaline takes a lot out of you! 

We went and got lunch at yet another sketchy café.  “California Girls” was playing in the café, and being as that I haven’t heard that song in four months I wanted to punch someone in the face.  But the BLT was delicious, so I was okay with that.  Then we went off to the beach.  I saw the hotel I’d stayed at years ago, because we were in the Waikiki area!  Pretty neat stuff.  I tried to teach Lorelei how to surf, mostly unsuccessfully.  She will just have to go to the more glorious beaches in California. 

That’s really pretty much all I did in Hawaii.  I’m sorry this is such a crap blog post after I haven’t written in so long.  I’ve literally been exhausted all the time after doing so much work for prepping for the exams and having time changes happening all the time.  Hilo tomorrow!