Peri Does Stuff

Sometimes I watch Netflix for days and sometimes I do cool things like travel.

[peridoesstuff]

Adventure in a Chinese Bathroom

Coming back from the Great Wall I had to use the bathroom VERY badly and we ended up in traffic for hours. I say this because when we finally stopped I was so desperate to use the bathroom all standards went out the window. 

The bathroom I ended up using was five squat toilets arranged in a semicircle, no doors no walls, not even the larger room had a door on it from the outside world.

I was confused what the etiquette was in this situation. Do I face towards the middle or put my butt towards the middle? Do I acknowledge other people? 

I had to pee too badly to properly assess the situation. But I ended up peeing inches away all out in the open to some of my other ship mates. Now that’s a way to bond!

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The Great Wall

Cindy is one of my most favorite of humans and she organized a bus to take us from Beijing to the Great Wall early in the morning. 

Unfortunately, Bryan ate too much duck blood the night before and ended up getting food poisoning. It was also blistering cold and windy. So Aishwarya and I kept poor sick Bryan company and we took the Great Wall very easily. 

Later that afternoon we took a bullet train to Cindy’s home town, ZhengZhou.

It topped some crazy speeds which I was later assured actually wasn’t safe and they tend to push the technology further than it often should go for the sake of saying it is the fastest...

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Beijing

The morning of day two we flew into Beijing and everything just wasn’t going our way. Thanks to the insane amounts of traffic, we just barely missed every closing of things we wanted to see. 

We were in full sprint trying to get to the Forbidden City but missed the gates closing by 5mins. Instead we hiked up a hill next to it and experienced the Forbidden City from Above.

At Tiananmen Square there was some sort of flag ceremony at sunset so we braved the cold in hopes of catching one thing. And it was REALLY cold. 

We cut our losses and ended the day with some Hot Pot.

Note: There was some really weird things being thrown into the hot pot like duck blood jelly and other things I have blocked out of my memory.

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Shanghai

Boston University, my home institution, has an exchange program with Fudan University in Shanghai. One of my friends, Krishna, just so happened to be studying at Fudan while I was in Shanghai, so we met up and he showed me as much of the city as a day allowed. 

The first challenge was getting to Fudan. After probably a half an hour of trying to hail a cab one finally stopped for me (I was later told that cab drivers will often ignore foreigners looking for a cab). The ride was terrifying! Not only were all rules of the road completely ignored but the roads themselves were designed in a way to make it even more unsafe; for example, the left turn lane was all the way on the right, so when it came time to turn left, you had to cross all of the forward-moving traffic. Very scary.

But I made it to Fudan in one piece and I found Krishna and all was okay. He and his friend were to start their internships later that week and wanted to figure out where the building was so we wondered around the financial district for a while. While there we went to the top of the bottle opener tower, not sure of its actual name, but it has a great view of the city.

And probably one of the most scenic toilets in the world:

After we wandered around the Bund.

Krishna made me go inside of a Walmart we happened to pass. It was a literal zoo! So big, so loud, sensory overload!

The subway also has digital tvs where the screens move with the train. Its hard to describe but was kind of amazing. 

Thanks for showing me around Krishna!

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China

After Japan, we docked in China, Shanghai to be exact.

One of the first people I met on my voyage was a girl named Cindy. She was one of the SASers that came to Vegas, where I live, for New Years. We became friends and remained friends throughout the voyage. 

Cindy is from China and invited a few people to go home with her during the port and I was one of those lucky people.

China was an overland port which means that the ship moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong but we didn’t have to go with it since it was the same country and could meet the ship in Hong Kong after the week was up.

The first day I spent in Shanghai then we few to Beijing, next we took a train to Zhengzhou (where Cindy lives), and finally flew to Hong Kong to meet the ship.

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Japan Final Thoughts

Food: delicious

People: so so nice

Toilets: heated and they sing to you

Japan has things figured out.

Well not completely...it is still a very homogeneous society that is not quick to accept outsiders, there are still a lot of gender issues, and expectations of people are so high that suicide is a popular choice...

But it started the voyage off on a great note!

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Matsumoto Castle

Somewhere on our journey, we took a little detour to see Matsumoto Castle and Im glad we did.

Of course, its beautiful, build in 1504 and famous for its black exterior.

But the best part was seeing rural Japan, well at least more rural. It seemed like everywhere we went was just one big metro area. But Matsumoto was a quiet town. It was walkable and known for its apples. 

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Hiroshima 

I felt this overwhelming need to go to Hiroshima and participate in a piece of shared history. I didn’t expect it to but it really shook me. Mostly it was all the paper cranes. In second grade my teacher read us ‘Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes’, a book about a child who had Leukemia and was told that if she made 1000 paper cranes, she would live. She was never able to reach her goal. But Sadako’s story spread as a representative for the thousands of children effected as a result of the bombs; people started making paper cranes not only for Sadako but in memory of all of the other children as shown by the monuments.

In second grade I wasn’t old enough to grasp the history and tragedy of the story I was being read but It all came to me walking through the museum and the monuments at Hiroshima.

The bombs caused an unimaginable amount of damage to the city and to the people, the effects of which are still being felt today. I met a Japanese lady who is third generation feeling the effects of the bombs to her health. 

With all of the destruction, I thought there would be a lot of hate. But there was none. No where in the museum did it point fingers or even really mentioned the US or President Harry Truman, who gave the orders to drop, or J. Robert Oppenheimer, who designed the bomb. And the lady I spoke to, knowing I was American, showed me no anger. 

Its sad that this lack of anger for the past was surprising to me but in most situations I have experienced, most of them against me, the past often leaves wounds that take generations and generations to heal.

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Nara

On the way to Nara, we had a little bit of a detour. As previously mentioned, Jordan confused Nara and Nagano and directed us onto the wrong train. I never let him lead us again. So we had a brief stop-over in Nagano:

Thanks to our detour, we got to Nara really late and had to full sprint to make it to Todai-ji before closing. We narrowly made it and I am incredibly happy we did. It was like nothing else. When you entered the building, there sat a 50ft all Buddha. 

Outside of the temple, deer run a muck. They were incredibly friendly (see selfie) and we quickly bonded. We spent hours playing with them.

Some may say they were too comfortable with humans...

*Sorry all the photos are blurry. Iphone 4 problems...

[peridoesstuff]

Kyoto

We had one day in Kyoto and had to make the most of it.

First stop, Kinkaku-ji, home to the famous Golden Pavilion: 

Then the Fushimi Inari-taisha which is a shrine to Inari, the fox god. Its incredible, winding all the way up the mountain are orange arches leading you to the main shine. It was a bit of a hike but it was gorgeous and the view from the top was incredible. 

A short walk from the bamboo forrest is a Macaque park. As you walk in there are signs everywhere saying not to make eye contact with the animals. I learned the hard way that is imperative. 

At the park you could feed the macaques so I obviously did. Unfortunately I ended up causing a rift in the monkey community by feeding the little guys that were being bullied by the big ones. This sparked a fight about 30 macaques deep. I never meant to cause such turmoil. 

We rounded out the day back in the city with a walk through Geisha District. It wasn’t anything particularly risqué but it had a lot of interesting history.

Kyoto has so much to offer and I certainly didn’t have enough time.

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ありがとう

Shout out to the Japanese people who were so nice and so welcoming and went horribly out of their way to help us.

We were a bit lost in Kyoto trying to find the place we were staying, and a lovely Japanese man saw us foreigners with maps, and speaking no English, tried his best to help us. 

We gave him the address and he didn’t know where it was, so he mapped it on his phone and walked us in the right direction. 

But this was not an isolated event, anytime we even looked vaguely confused or did something wrong, there was always someone so ready to help us.

People of Japan, thank you for being you.

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Trains, Trains, Trains

As a personality flaw, I often find myself more attached to forms of public transport than I do to people. 

Japan expanded my love. 

All of the stations also make cute noises, noises which I was later told by a local are distinct to each station so a computer can recognize their station by its sound. 

Their transportation was flawlessly efficient, with varieties of trains, and speeds, and directness; but all organized into a system that isn’t difficult to figure out, even for someone who speaks zero Japanese.

Well all except for that one time Jordan confused all the cities that start with an N and we ended up in Nagano instead or Nara. Classic Jordan face:

[peridoesstuff]

Beauty Ideals

While in Harajuku, we came across an arcade.

In the arcade there were rows and rows of photo booths that would take pictures and allow you to whiten the skin, and make the eyes bigger, and add make up. 

We had a lot of fun with it. But aside from the fun, these machines are built off of ideals of beauty that happen to differ from how Japanese people look and is focused on the western advertisements people see with models with larger eyes and flawless porcelain skin.

It opened my eyes to differing perceptions of beauty and I kept them open for the remainder of the voyage spotting other countries ideals. For example, in many Asian countries, skin lighteners were on sale.

Just goes to show, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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Tokyo

I thought Yokohama was big, I was wrong.

Japanese cities have gotten so large that they’ve run into each other and have become one huge metro area. 

With only one day in Tokyo, we hit all the obvious spots:

The Shibuya crossing

Harajuku

And this temple we randomly happened upon in the middle of the city

That night, we wandered the streets near Tokyo tower and found a tiny place to eat. 

[peridoesstuff]

First Stop: Yokohama

To get ourselves oriented, the first stop was a panorama view of the city. 

On the ground, Yokohama didn’t seem small but it seemed approachable. From above, it really hit you how densely populated Japanese cities are. The city continued for as far as we could see.

As a college student in Yokohama, the obvious stop was the Cup Noodles Museum. There we got to decorate and make our own Cup Noodles.

It was actually really interesting to see how it was invented and how it grew over time. I eat so many Cup Noodles, because its so cheap, but I’d never given much thought to the behind the scenes work.

The Museum also presented a lot of art inspired by Cup Noodles. My favorite being this one: 

Where the inventor of Cup Noodles is put among great geniuses and inventors such as Einstein, the Wright brothers, and Marie Curie.

This day provided a bit of a shake in my reality, I had always called Cup Noodles, Cup of Noodles. I’d been wrong all along.

We rounded out our day in Yokohama by visiting an art museum. I try to visit art museums in every country I visit to get a sense of local art and history. This one was quite beautiful.

This is actually a Dali paining and not Japanese but semantics.

Now, off to Tokyo!

[peridoesstuff]

Japan

After another 8 days at sea and some really rough waters, circling a typhoon, we made it to Japan, our first international port. As we pulled up to the port in Yokohama, there were people playing Tyco drums to welcome us; an amazing start to an amazing port. 

I don’t even know how to put to words my positive feelings and experiences in Japan. 

So rather than one very long, and confusing post, I’m going to do multiple short posts about Japan...

[peridoesstuff]

Hilo, Hawaii

After leaving port in Ensenada, Mexico and spending 7 days at sea, we arrived in Hilo. 

Each class on Semester at Sea has a field lab in one of the ports that corresponds to what we are learning in the classroom. My Geohazards class had its field lab in Hilo, visiting Kilauae crater and hiking the Kilauea Iki trail.

At the cater, we visited the Volcanology lab and got a lecture from a Volcanologist who works there.

It was painfully hot and humid and the hike was a bit rough, but so beautiful. Also both soles of our guide’s Nikes from the 80s fell off and had to be taped back on for the remainder of the hike. That was probably the highlight. Or maybe it was the Thai food after the hike; both were golden.

We only got one day in Hawaii for reasons...namely past Semester at Sea students couldn’t handle themselves and made a mess of the island, so now we’re not allowed to stay overnight. This will become a theme of the voyage.