Where to begin…
We’ve traveled through Indonesia, China, Japan and South
Korea since I last wrote. My favorite
place in Indonesia was Bali. The monkey
forest there was amazing and worth the trip, it’s also where I rode an elephant
the first time we passed through. The
rest of Indonesia was interesting but uncomfortable. The other places we visited were mostly
Muslim which meant in order to explore I had to make sure I was mostly
covered. We did not have to have head
coverings, but no shorts or short sleeved shirts were allowed. For those of you who know me well, I’m sure
you will not be surprised to hear that this caused a feminist fire to stir
within me. I had to restrain myself from
both ripping the head-scarf off of any passing woman and from staring down all
of the men. I generally think of myself
as religiously tolerant, so I am not proud of the way I reacted. On the other hand, why pick one of the
hottest climates to live in and then demand that the women have to be covered
in wool?! If I for some strange reason
ever had to cover myself that way, I would demand that we move to the arctic so
at least I could be in an atmosphere conducive to such clothing.
Japan was amazing.
Tokyo especially was very impressive.
Everything was exceptionally clean and everyone was incredibly
polite. Unfortunately, in Japan I
sampled Indian food, Chinese food and McDonalds because none of the Japanese
restaurants we went to had English translations or pictures. It also turns out that the Muscle Park we
were planning on visiting was shut down and the next closest was too far
away. Muscle Park has obstacles from
Ninja Warrior (if you don’t know the show, look it up, it is awesome.) and I
was looking forward to failing miserably at all of them. The ship also took us to Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. I found both places to be very
eerie. There were excursions to memorial
domes and museums, but I did not go as huge disasters freak me out.
South Korea was surprisingly beautiful. We spent most of our time in a photo booth
taking pictures that we could edit by making our eyes giant and adding colors
and doodles to the photos. I would post
some of them, but of course my computer has stopped reading my photo card. It
was a lot of fun. There were tons of
fish markets, but I couldn’t talk anyone into getting the giant flat jerked
squid and eating it.
I don’t have much to write about China as we do not have our
Chinese visas that we did not know we needed, so cannot get off of the ship and
onto the mainland. For this stretch
through China, we are currently on our second day of not being able to leave
the ship for twelve days.
The Yellow Sea…it ruined my life for a complete 24
hours. I hate being sea-sick.
I miss everybody!
