Where to begin...

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!