Sit for Luck

It is imperative to "sit for luck" before each trip you take. it will ensure safe travels.

my highs are high, my lows are low, and i dont know which way to go.

shuffling to brunch the morning after the alumni ball,
i see my friends
at our usual table
with our usual view of the ocean waves
with our usual pasta and potatoes
with our usual dining room attendant.
in two days i will never have access to this experience again.
i remember our extravaganza from last night,
our majestic titanic performance
of evening gowns and fancy lighting
of shrimp and filet mignon
of cards and dancing.
i remember the scarf that i clung to so tightly
as it billowed in the wind
when we ducked out of the crowd for a bit
for when we danced just us on the back deck,
racing across the pacific ocean.
i remember “home is whenever i’m with you”
i remember how my home for the last 103 days was the most engaging environment
that i’ve ever lived in,
and how it was never, ever, in the same coordinates.
i remember the silly extravagance
and the backpacker’s chic that was rocked
as we forgot what makeup and accessories were
and we started examining our minds over our bodies.
i remember the way i used to look before this.
i remember how i felt on that first day,
stepping on board this enormous ship knowing not a soul.
i remember the first time waves hit my porthole.
the first time i met my best friends
the first time i realized that we had something special:
that night in the bathroom of a hotel in south africa.
i remember crying and i remember laughter.
i remember serious and i remember silly.
these potatoes could use a little spice,
but to me they will never taste better than this.

Any guesses to how many doxycycline pills I neglected to take? Fingers crossed I don’t have malaria, eh?

Any guesses to how many doxycycline pills I neglected to take? Fingers crossed I don’t have malaria, eh?

Looking it all over,

The only thing I regret not buying was that set of golden nail clippers in Beijing.

I ended up having a good time with some random SAS kids. The following day we woke up to go for brunch at Harajuku. I had already explored the place, so I recommended my companions a street to wander down and we found a breakfast cafe. They gave me some ideas of where to head to later, and after borrowing a peek in a Japan guide book I said farewell and headed off to the Meiji Shrine.

Meiji was an emperor who revolutionized the Japanese state after the Tokugawa period, meaning he ended the term of isolation from the world and had an active insight and care into the opinions of his people. His shrine was a huge forest right behind Harajuku with oversized trees and paths. I wandered through until I found the shrine itself. It’s a shinto shrine, so I washed my hands and mouth out before I entered and sat down for a while to reflect and observe more Japanese behavior.

The overnight bus was not as magically comfortable as in Harry Potter. In fact it was remarkably uncomfortable, with Japanese portioned seats and little room to recline. I got an aisle seat next to a woman who brought her own pillow and blanket, and I dozed for 10 minutes at a time on that long chilly ride. When you’re given a small and awkward space to sleep for 8 hours, you begin to memorize its exact dimensions and your neck takes a beating. The bus stopped at a rest stop around 1. Unsure about how long it would be there for but seeing other passengers get off and head inside, I sprinted inside to pee then ran back to the bus so I wouldn’t miss it. It wasn’t until around 5 that I realized that there was a bathroom on the bus.

The bus arrived in Tokyo after a sleepless night at 7:30 AM. I first headed to a Starbucks to get internet and see if I could find a hostel in the area. The travel agency didn’t open until 10:30, so I tried and failed relentlessly for internet until two of my acquaintances from Semester at Sea wandered in and sat down with me. We all decided that we needed to go searching for a place to put our heavy bags down, so we began the process of finding directions to some of the back-up addresses that I had written down from travel books before we got to Japan. It took forever. The first one we figured out how to get there on the subway after asking 3 information officers, then when we finally got off walked a mile in the wrong direction to a police station to ask for directions. The woman at the front desk looked at me quizzically and started pointing out lines on a map that I was not about to understand. She got all the ladies working reception at the station to come and try to help us, but unfortunately none of them could speak or read English. Finally a higher officer was called and gave us instructions to go back into the direction from which we just came and then to go another kilometer past that.

When we finally found Tokyo International Youth Hostel, we learned that they had a 23:00 curfew and there were only communal showers from 9-10. We found that a bit too strange and asked for directions to another hostel on my list, Ace Inn. After stopping for some sushi and figuring out directions once again, we finally stumbled in. My companions took one look at the place and left immediately (“there’s nowhere to lock my bag! there’s no privacy! you have to pay to shower!”). At this point, I was fine with just about anything and let them go their way, satisfied and content with the cheapest place in the city. It was clean and friendly and had a pleasant location, and they assigned lockers for valuables. My original plan was to change hostels every night, but I liked this one so much that I stayed all 3 nights. It was a capsule hotel, so I was on floor 6 with 27 roommates sharing that small room. My capsule was comfortable and spacious enough for me, and it drew close with a curtain. They gave me a pillow, blanket, and towel. Shoes were against the rules so everyone had to wear slippers in the building, and I can’t complain about that.

After dropping my stuff off, I decided not to take a nap as bad as I wanted to and head out into the world. I went to Harajuku first. The subway system in Tokyo is complicated because all the different trains are owned by different companies, so you have to buy several tickets just to get from Akeboneboshi to Harajuku which is only 3 stops away.

Harajuku is a really fashionable district in Tokyo, which is debatably the most fashionable city in the world. I wandered the streets and window shopped before sitting down for a coffee on the street to people watch. I was so happy that afternoon, sitting finally in Tokyo, a big and exciting city with something crazier around every corner. It felt like an out of body experience, like I could observe this place around me which is so different from anywhere I’ve ever been before but not see myself in it. Like I was watching a movie. It was a surreal moment.

When I headed back to the hostel to take a shower, I decided to stop at Shinjuku, a transfer station. From there I wandered around the high rise financial district and found the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. I remembered reading somewhere that you could go to the 45th floor for free and see a view of all Tokyo. Which, of course, I did. The view was breath-taking. I could not believe how expansive the city is. Remember that scene from Lost in Translation? That was me. Actually, there were a lot of scenes from that movie that I did inadvertently.


At the bottom of the Metropolitan building I found a big park that I first noticed from the view upstairs. It was much like Central Park, but filled with cherry blossom trees and a really random huge manmade waterfall. It was also surprisingly empty, compared to the busy streets. I stumbled upon a majestic playground that was completely abandoned. I sat down and swang on some swings and watched a father play with his son, a young boy. Although I didn’t understand the words they used to communicate, it was the closest I felt to anybody in a long time because I understood the body language as they played on the monkey bars and slides. This interaction was almost identical to what you might see back in the US, and it was warming to experience.

I then wandered some more and found myself in a Burger King, my first fast food in months. I wondered why I was there. Did I feel alone and scared to go out and try different food by myself? It would be much more expensive and difficult to go out and try to get a meal at another restaurant, and I was weary so I wanted something comforting. Regardless, I regret that hamburger and wish I found some other alternative. The lights in the city starting turning on one by one as I walked back to my hostel, and I decided to refresh with a shower and see what the night brought me.

In the common room of the hostel, I met Usaj, a kid my age who is from the United Kingdom. He offered to show me where the nearest 100 yen store was, and we became friends.

I basically lived off of convenient store food. They have 100 yen stores, which are like dollar stores, and I bought all of my noodles and fruit there. Which is basically all I ate in Japan besides the times I bought myself sushi or went out for ramen.

Anyway, after eating some food Usaj and I decided to go to Roppongi to see what was out there as it was both of our first days in Tokyo. We sat down in a noodle bar and had some good conversations about Japan as he had been there for a month longer than me, which I briefly explained in my global studies essay (below). When we returned to the hostel, I was bummed to see a slew of Semester at Sea kids. I had almost forgotten I was with the program, as the day had been endlessly free of it. Not that it was a bad thing, but it was just nice to feel like I was out on my own and life itself would go where I chose at every exact moment. The reminder that we would be getting back on the ship and returning to the US soon was a reality check, is all. After hanging out in the common room with everyone, I headed to bed to get a good nights sleep to begin the rest of my adventures in Tokyo.

Contemplating Development and Education in Polar Economies

Below is my global studies essay, which is absurdly simply written and shallow due to the restraints of the assignment. We were supposed to find two significant instances in different ports, describe them with attentive detail, and then make some sort of analysis and connection back to our coursework in Global Studies. The absolute maximum length was 3 pages, which was much too short in my opinion. Regardless, here is what I came up with, and I think it gives some insight into my experiences in Japan before I launch in to blogging about them. Currently I am thinking of expanding this topic into a book that I might begin to write about the education system in the United States and the inherent flaws of different types of systems. Feedback or ideas would be greatly appreciated, and I will begin my interview process shortly.

Contemplating Development and Education in Polar Economies
I visited the City of Refuge in Ghana, which is a living and learning community for Ghanaian children rescued from various child labor systems or destitute conditions across the country. This school was a meager cinderblock structure with little to no resources to supplement learning. As I padded across the grounds in the dripping African heat, I quickly realized how difficult it must be to focus and thrive in a setting like this: hot, dusty, and remarkably bare. It wasn’t until we prepared 600 meals of egg and white rice and distributed them in a local village that I realized how poor the society was as a whole. I will never forget the human wall that I had to form with my peers to make it easier for others to hand out the meals to shouting and pushing African children. They grabbed my hands and looked into my eyes with a stare so genuinely desperate that I could not help but leak a tear when I realized that after 15 minutes we were out of meals and yet there were still hundreds of people crowding around us hoping to get fed.
Crossing the street at Shibuya crossing, I felt like dead weight falling through an ocean. After wandering aimlessly around this section of downtown Tokyo, visually assaulted by lights and sounds and fashionable people hurrying here and there, I had never felt so alone in one of the biggest crowds I had ever been a part of. This crossing is known as one of the busiest in the world, which only gave me a feeling of drowning on this overly stimulating corner. When I finally found my friend Usaj from Britain who was in Japan to teach English for a few months, we sat down for a meal in a tucked away restaurant.
We learned in Global Studies that there is an extremely high social pressure to do well in school in Japan; they emphasize competition, memorization, and a pass/fail ideology involved in passing exams and getting jobs. This current model is reminiscent of traditional Confucian values of society which stress rational thought, hence the Japanese emphasis on science and math in their education plans. Usaj explained to me that this pressure, along with the high amounts of technology and respect for privacy in Japanese society in general, usually leads to high stress and sometimes hikikomori, or acute social withdrawal. This is a phenomenon of young adult Japanese who seek to completely withdraw from social life.
I slurped my noodles as he quietly told me about the Akihabara massacre, an event purportedly related to hikikomori. In 2008, at an intersection a few subway stops from here, there was a mass murder where someone drove their truck into a big crowd, then got out and stabbed people with a knife, killing seven and injuring eight. This event, along with the fact that trains were delayed on the day I was returning to Yokohama because of a suicide in the Tokyo train station, elicited a sobering perspective on the strict standards of Japanese performance.
I found it fascinating to learn in Global Studies that despite the incredible success of the Japanese, they are still looking to more Western models of education to revamp their system to make it easier on their students psyches, folding in more English and art classes to stimulate creativity and release stress. This makes me question for the first time the importance and value of art and stress release as part of school curriculum.
The experiences combined were certainly powerful in helping me realize the extreme disparity and inequality of wealth around the world. While the Japanese have debatably too high of a pressure to do well in schools, Ghanaians feel profoundly blessed to have the opportunity to get to study at all. The students behind desks at City of Refuge had personal histories of child slavery, and this place was a haven to give them a chance at reinventing themselves. It was provoking to ruminate on the impacts of slavery, as the legacy of the slave trade seems to be one of the lasting causes for impeded development in Western Africa.
The only similarity I can think of between the Japanese and Ghanaian school systems were the use of uniforms for the students, a superfluous detail that only exaggerates the stark contrast between the two. While the Japanese stress competition and performance, Ghanaians value teamwork and community although their resources limit their capacity for growth. Upon reflection of my experiences sailing around the world, the two most strikingly different countries that I’ve seen in environment and human interaction would have to be Ghana and Japan, which are also the two most dramatically different economies. While resources and opportunities differ in all parts of the world, nowhere is perfect and a balance must be found to integrate the physical capacity to learn and the mental sanity to perform.

The Soundtrack

Type in the word “home” into iTunes and the best playlist is made.

Wading through ideas:

We need to make our intellectual lives real again.
School and work are not just tedious activities to get through.
Dinnertime conversations need good vibrations.
Our lives should not have escape doors.
The desire to grow is what drives us.
Passion is beauty.

James Russell Lowell

“There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.”

In the week preceding Japan, I endured a lot of inner turmoil and anxiety about what was to come. On the ship, I spend almost all of my time with my 3 best friends: Liz, Megan, and Annamarie. For weeks we had been planning or speculating on our epic trip in Japan, which we would independently organize. I was really excited to finally be doing exactly what I wanted, with who I wanted, when I wanted.