Reflections on my 100 day trip around the world

Semester at Sea … The world is our Campus

"Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living." – Miriam Beard

When I think back on my experiences and how to sum up this voyage, it seems so indescribable. There are so many aspects of the trip, and each one played a significant role in the way I remember the amazing memories. It was one extraordinary event after another. I think the trip had an effect on me in a lot of ways, and will continue to teach me things the rest of my life.

I walked on 4 of the 7 continents … it was 100 days, 2,400 hours, 144,000 minutes, and 8,640,000 seconds full of an adventure of a lifetime! I visited 10 countries, close to 25 cities, and took a combination of ships, planes, trains, cars, buses, motorcycles, rickshaws, bullock carts, water taxis … almost every mode of transportation you can think of! I walked around the world and shook people’s hand from so many different backgrounds and cultures.

I feel so lucky to have been given this opportunity- how many people can say they circumnavigated the globe at 20 miles an hour in college? I have learned so much from each of the cultures, people, sites, sounds, and I don’t think I will ever look at a map the same way again! The countries on the map are not just a name- but they now remind me of stories …of memories … and of tons of pictures!

So if you had asked me before this trip if I would have loved every minute of this trip, I would have told you that I was nervous and really not sure if it was going to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I was scared to death to leave everything from home, to take time away from an incredible college that has amazing friends and activities that I love, to leave the ability to see and call my family whenever I wanted, and to recount every part of my day with them … that is what I was scared to death to do … and really I was very unsure of my ability to handle what I was getting myself into … traveling the world on a ship with people I had never met before! But now I have realized that I survived and succeeded! I went 100 days around the world- I don’t have a single regret- it was the best 100 days of my life and it will be hard to ever compare anything with this experience … suddenly I see why this means so much to me … it will be an experience that will be hard to recreate and explain fully to anyone.

My family has always had a desire to travel. We save our pennies during the year and plan for a big trip somewhere around the world each summer. It is something we have always looked forward to as a family, and something that I have appreciated more and more the older I get. Each place we travel to has something to offer and learn from. I think this trip has taught me to appreciate the value of traveling even more … the fact that my parents instilled in me a desire to travel, to see the world, and learn about other cultures is something that I will always be grateful for. It has made me a well-rounded person and given me an understanding of what the world has to share. I am very fascinated by people of different cultures and hope to continue the passion I have for traveling for the rest of my life.

This was definitely one of my best semesters of college! My parents helped me to prepare for the trip (and believe me I was prepared- I had done a lot of research on the countries and read message boards and past blogs) but I was not prepared to see what I have seen and experience what I have experienced. This trip was eye-opening in so many ways. I learned so much from my teachers and it was so special having a different kind of relationship with them. It was not unusual to talk with them at dinner, see them in their pjs in the morning, or be on the top deck sunbathing with them! Plus I learned so much from the other people on this ship … most of them are not conservative, not from the south, and see things completely differently than I do. That was a culture shock in itself, so I feel lucky to have been able to make friends and find people I had things in common with. That is always something that can be hard to do and I was so blessed to make some close friends on the trip … we all came from different backgrounds and all had different reasons for coming on the trip, but we all shared the experiences together, and it is something that I can always remember sharing with them.

My roommate always said, “What did I not learn?” This trip reminds you not to be so quick to judge people and their background … we all see things so differently and I think that is what makes the voyage unique. All the things I have seen and the conversations I had with people in so many countries remind me again how lucky we were to be born at the right time and in the right country. We are so blessed. This trip really demonstrates so many reasons why I am proud to be an American and to grow up at this time and to have the freedoms and opportunities that I have. Many of the people in the countries I have traveled to can only dream of having a fraction of what we have …… let alone have the opportunity to travel around the world.

We were outside of the sphere of American influence for several months, and we were challenged not to get caught up in the way we were at home before the trip. The trip definitely opened my eyes to my blind spots about the problems of the world. Ignorance is no excuse, and we learned it is alright to be intimidated by problems of the world. It is our job to have the passion to persuade and convince others to learn about the world. Plus it is important to not to ignore our responsibility to better the world.

There are some things I will not miss. First, is the fact that we had to use military time. By the end of the trip I finally got the hang of the 24 hour clock, but I still prefer our way of telling time. It will not be hard to go back to our clock! But I will also not miss the clock changes! I usually go to bed late and then additionally when we would lose an hour of sleep every other night … that did not help me the next morning! On the ship, time meant nothing to anyone … at home I can not go one day without looking at my planner … knowing what day it is and writing out my to-list for the following day … but I feel like I have gone 3 months without knowing the day of the week or month of the year … let alone what time it is!

I will not miss the potatoes, pasta, or rice! The food was not terrible but it certainly got old like any other cafeteria food! We got almost all our food for the entire voyage in the Bahamas, so most of the food had to be thawed throughout the voyage … that made for some interesting meals! I will be happy to go home to some meals that do not include potatoes, pasta, or rice!

I will not miss the water on the ship- filtered water from the sea … I now have an appreciation for good drinking water! I will not miss using hand sanitizer at every possible second and remembering to take my malaria medicine and pepto before I ate each meal! I will not miss the fact that we were isolated from influences of America- no news, no movies or TV shows, no advertisements … it was several months of separation from so many things that define our culture. I will not miss the 13 min. phone calls that cost an arm and a leg and trying to squeeze in everything I wanted to say before the time ran out. I will not miss the phone cards and trying to figure out how to use a different one in each port!

However, I will miss the 12th port, or the community on the ship … we all lived in very close proximity and formed a close bond together. All the way from the 9 month old to the lady who was 92, we were traveling around the world together and experiencing ports that many of us had never seen before. I will miss the connection I had with those people on my voyage, and the memories we shared together. I miss the 2 minute walk to class. I could roll out of bed and be in class in a matter of seconds! I will miss the wake up calls from the professors … whenever we had a time change, our global studies teacher would make an announcement that class was going to start in a matter minutes, just in case you forgot to change your clock! It was always a great way to start your morning!

I will miss our TV with 3 stations of movies and documentaries. I will miss the ship channel that I found myself watching to see where we were on the map or at what speed we were going! I will miss waking up next to the ocean and watching the sunsets off the back deck as we are ate dinner. I will miss the continuous rocking of the ship and how often it would rock me to sleep. I will miss the gorgeous weather and the view of the ocean for miles around me.

I will miss traveling somewhere new every five days, and looking forward to the excitement when we got off the ship for the first time in a port. I will miss my cabin steward and how spoiled I became when he cleaned our room and made my bed every single morning. I will miss the rest of the crew and their jokes and laughs as we got to know them throughout the voyage.

I will miss the silly moments with my friends and the late nights in our room and the fact that we saw each other nearly 24 hours a day! I will miss comparing events and memories of each port! One of my favorite times on the ship was the night that we got back on the ship after port. We would all gather in our room and pull out our favorite souvenirs to show each other … share pictures, and laugh at each other’s stories … it was a wonderful way to learn even more about each country and get an idea of what my friends’ experiences were and how it differed from mine. I loved that! Those nights were some of my favorite memories on the ship. I will miss my roommate and all the memories we shared over the past 100 days. I was so proud of her because she had never left the country before and was bold enough to travel around the world. I think we each gained a lot from one another.

I will miss getting mail set on my door after each port … mail day was big deal and something we all looked forward to! I will miss the daily announcements from “The Voice,” when we got our latitude and longitude and distance to the next port, plus all the daily activities. I will miss all of the activities when at sea … cutting off Jen’s hair at Neptune Day, and jumping into the pool with fish guts, movie nights, pre-ports, dances, barbecues (where we all ate enough for the week!), meal time, the Sea Olympics- cheering for the Mediterranean Sea, an Easter service from Desmond Tutu and hearing him talk in Global Studies, spending time with my “adopted family” on the ship, the snack bar, the pool deck, yoga on the back deck, the Ambassadors Ball and changing attire several times, waving hello and good-bye to all the ports!

We were challenged every day academically, emotionally, mentality, physically … to the point that you wondered if you would be able to handle another country in a few days with a completely new culture, language, expectations, and sites to see, things to learn, and try to remember every detail that you learned from the experiences … sometimes that was hard, but overall it just made all the memories even better … you were forced to wake-up every morning with a smile on your face and thankful to be on this trip and wonder what the day would have in store. Trust me- I made the most of everyday!

The ship had become my home for the last three months and it felt strange to leave the bubble of the ship … all the people looked familiar and we all went through the same experience … the night I saw the ship pull into the Bahamas I knew I was in for the trip of a lifetime … we would call it our home … it was always a sigh of relief to see fellow students when we were in the port- and I was always glad to be back on the ship after leaving a port … it was a safe haven and a place full of amazing people.… We learned there is enormous disintegration of community in our own country. So community was something that was stressed on the ship, and we learned how to expand our sense of community on the ship, which helped us to expand our sense of the world as its own community.

From the trip I think I gained a more critical eye when looking at the countries and questioning why things are the way they are. I learned so much about family traditions and how families make decisions based on the values they have been raised with. My family professor always said we were looking at the world with different lenses and we were learning how to observe from different points of view. In Brazil, family means more than anything, and in India families are huge and steeped in traditions. There are enormous weddings and large extended families. We studied the Asian cultures and learned how close people are to their families and the importance of children in their culture. We looked at the one-child policy in China, and studied how intense pressure is placed on Japanese students by their families to succeed in school. I have loved learning so much from my classes … because we had to write observations and journals each time we came back from a port, I think it is a different way to see the world … and I hope to continue that when I get home. It has a given me a new appreciation for learning from my environment.

I also learned from Desmond Tutu by listening to his personal stories from South Africa. It taught me a lot about dedication and how much passion it takes to achieve life goals like he has. I think he was a great attribute to the trip. He always reminded us that we have to be more aware of our surroundings and the problems that exist in the world today.

One of the other things we talked about on the ship was universal happiness. It is amazing to think about the fact that a smile and a wave can be universally read the same way around the world. I loved “smiling” at people in each port and getting almost the same reaction. It teaches you to have an understanding that we are more alike than we think.

I also learned about all the educational systems around the world and how I can apply some of those ideas in my classroom someday. And how lucky we are to grow up with the education we are given in the United States. So many countries we visited barely had enough resources to educate half of their students. Or that so many families are struggling in poverty that families cannot afford for children to go to school and children must work on the street. Or in the Asian cultures there are intense tests that determine the rest of their future. The competition is high and they have little choice in what happens after the test results.

My music class was also very interesting. It was easy to find music to listen to or cultural performances in each country because I enjoy those kinds of things. I learned a lot about how music truly defines a culture and is very representative of the people and events in the countries. I would recognize instruments or hear parts of the music that sounded familiar in class. It was such neat way to see the countries because I was focusing in or concentrating on a certain area … plus my friends and I would share what they were studying in each country and soon I had well-rounded view of the countries.

When I go home I will be back in a completely different reality … there will be my cell phone, which just recently I had a hard time remembering the number, remembering how to drive again … having to wear a seat belt in cars … being able to watch TV and go to a movie theater … being able to surf the internet and check email without it being an hour proposition …… drinking fresh water that is not salty ….. knowing that none of my stuff will suddenly shift around my room in the middle of the night …… forget that there is no bargaining allowed when I go shopping and not have to do quick conversions in my head when buying something! Just as soon as I was able to remember the exchange rate for a country, it was time to leave and learn a new one! I am happy to go back to US dollars.

So don’t ask me what my favorite country was or my favorite memory because I would have no idea how to explain … only that the entire trip was incredible!!! I know that many of you will be bored by my stories and not want to see all of my pictures and videos but you can just smile and nod. I learned that the average person only listens for about seven minutes before their eyes start to glaze over! That would amount to about one story from one of the many countries I traveled to. So I will just need to pick a few to share!

The trip definitely had a lot of “firsts” for me! Puerto Rico started the trip off with a bang! I saw Carnival in Brazil- the biggest party in the world! I met Mom in South Africa and we sat on ostriches, fed elephants and went on a safari! I had never heard of the country Mauritius before, and now I can find it on a map and say I toured the whole island! India was unbelievable and I took a boat ride on the Ganges River and stood in awe at the Taj Mahal! Malaysia was different than I expected and I got to go to Kuala Lumpur with my two closest friends! Vietnam was amazing because I did so many things I thought I would never experience- motorcycle rides, crawling through small Viet Kong tunnels, and visiting the Mekong Delta! Hong Kong was fascinating because it was so modern and fast paced! China was incredible because I got to climb the Great Wall again, as well as enjoy the sights of Beijing, like the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City. Plus I made a connection with a wonderful Chinese University student! Japan will always be one of my favorite countries- there is something about the culture that impresses me every time. I visited Hiroshima again and saw the ancient city of Kyoto! Plus I met a close friend, Hiromi, in our port city of Kobe! How can I compare any of these countries? Each one brings so many memories and stories that make each country unique!

On the trip someone gave us this quote, that “The real voyage of discovery does not consist of seeing new places, but of having new eyes.” It truly was a voyage of discovery. There were important life lessons learned and the way we defined ourselves became very visible during the journey. I think many of us surprised ourselves and found ways to gain independence and confidence from the trip. I know that I can take care of myself- I can walk into a foreign country and see the sites. I feel like I was separated from everything I knew and was familiar with, and I survived a trip around the world! Sometimes trying to make sense of all the things I learned can be overwhelming. What a crazy idea- take a bunch of college students- put them on a ship- and sail around the world! It is amazing what they can learn!

One of our professors told us that we would be walking off the ship with the world in our hands. I love that analogy because I think it expresses so very well one of the fundamental themes of the trip. In reality, the world is very small. It is important in today’s day and age to be mindful of that, and remember to keep an open mind. We are all connected in so many ways, and yet sometimes it takes a trip around the world to see that, where you are thrown into varied lands and cultures. Only then can you begin to see the similarities and understand that we all truly want the same things in life. It was a “Times Ten Experience” and holds memories I will carry with me the rest of my life!

“I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
-- Susan Sontag