A Closing Word . . .

I've abandoned my intention to leave my blog as it was, but circumstances have forced me to come back to it (explanation below), so I thought I would tell you about the advantages and disadvantages of the so-called "real world."

Advantages

• I don't have to share Zoë and the Kid with others
• Zoë's cooking!
• Our coffee!
• Our bed
• Privacy
• Peace & Quiet
  
• Seeing friends and family

Disadvantages

• No ocean
• Loneliness
• Missing friends
• Too much quiet
  
• Work looming
• Lots of meetings in the offing

If it weren't for the "friends & family" part under "advantages," I think we'd all rather be on the ship. Hopefully, in a few years, that will be the case.

In the meantime, I have to print out my blog. Yes, dear readers, you read correctly. I have just spoken with my Dad's widow, a beloved member of our family and its most computer-phobic member. She has not read a word of any of this, or of Zoë's blog, so I am going to print out both and send them to her by snail mail. Who would have thought it would end this way?

But I also want to say thanks to those of you who did read, and who posted, both here and on Zoë's blog. It was wonderful sharing our incredible summer with you all. Keep in touch, and all the best!

The Discourse of Disembarkation

Dear Readers –

I am loathe to inform you that our journey is drawing to a close. It’s 1am, August 21st on the MV Explorer, and in seven hours we will be alongside in San Diego. I am blogging out of sleeplessness, rooted in the desire to make this experience last. Zoë is asleep, and a number of students are upstairs in the computer lab talking. Some have chosen to sleep on the decks outside, despite the chill and the dew.

I won’t blog about Guatemala, not because I didn’t love it, but because my mind is already elsewhere. Suffice to say that Chichicastenango continues to be one of the most captivating places I’ve ever seen, and that Tikal continues to hold all the mystery it held 13 years ago when I proposed to Zoë there.

My mind is on the end of the journey, as it has been all day. Today I finished up my grades, spoke at our graduation/end of voyage ceremony, packed, and went to a party in the faculty lounge. Spending an entire day in the faculty lounge grading was itself an experience. I had a chance to listen to some of the conversations of the "Amiable Retirees" who hang out there all day. They're with S@S through a program called the "Lifelong Learners." This particular groups is perhaps better referred to as the "Lifelong Yakkers." They yak and play cards all day. Among the conversations overheard:

• "I went to Home Depot to get a shovel. I found the shovel section, but I was overwhelmed by the selection. What kind of shovel do you have?" (30 minute conversation ensues about shovels.)
• "I couldn't change money in Puerto Quetzal. I heard so-and-so had trouble changing money Antigua. Oh, you were in Lake Atitlán? Could you change money there? I'm not sure you can change money in Guatemala …

The mood on the ship was bittersweet. A lot of us are looking forward to being home, but we’re also sad that the experience has come to an end. And what a remarkable experience it’s been. I offered the following speech at the ceremony:

They say Semester at Sea changes your way of seeing the world. I’m sure this voyage has done that for many of us, probably in different ways, so by way of bringing our voyage to a close, I would like to tell you something about how I’ve come to understand the world as a result of my own personal voyage. I offer you a brief final lecture, of sorts, about the world as it looks to me from the deck of the MV Explorer.

The world is made up of eight ports and a ship that sails among them. The ship carries a closely-knit community of professors and students, families and friends, adults and children, men and women, passengers and crew, dedicated to visiting those ports so as to study their history, their literature, their economics, their music, their society, their art, their business practices, their dominant language. These ports are arranged in a line that extends from north to south across the equator. Each of these ports has a hinterland that can be visited by various means of transportation, including airplane, taxi, train, and oxcart. Now, some among us have speculated that these hinterlands are connected among themselves into a sort of “continent” that extends continuously along our route. In fact, our library is stocked with maps that portray this hypothesis as if it were fact. But the voyages of the Explorer to date have provided no empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. I suggest to you, instead, that these hinterlands are in fact a series of islands – volcanic islands – accessible only by sea. Yes, you will hear rumors of people who have traveled by air from one island to the other. It is well known that our very own Dean David mysteriously disappeared in one of the ports, only to reappear in another with bizarre tales of travel by air to a place called “France,” a place so preposterous that we can only conclude it was the product of his own delirium. In the absence of any sort of scientific corroboration of his strange tale, I urge you to give it no more credence than you would to stories of alien abduction.

Sadly, despite the rigor of our academic program, other such rumors and unsubstantiated legends abound upon our ship, and even pass for incontrovertible fact. The most nefarious of these rumors entertain the notion that the world has not always been as I have described it, that the ship is an artefact of human manufacture, and that therefore the shipboard community has not always existed. And if one interrogates these crackpot assertions, one discovers that they are only the tip of an iceberg of lies. The rumormongers speak of a putative ninth port named “San Diego,” on the shores of a ninth island that does not appear on any map worth referring to. These people want us to believe, moreover, that the shipboard community has its origins in the prehistoric migration of its members from dozens of locations on that ninth island and even beyond. They go so far as to give these locations names – all of them obviously fictitious – like “Collaraedo,” “Charllote-is-vile” and “Pittsburgh.” They litter the ship with bogus documents meant to shore up the dubious credibility of their “theory.” As if all this weren’t enough, these false prophets speak of an impending apocalypse, an even they refer to as the “disembarkation,” the imminent undoing of the shipboard community upon its arrival at the ninth port, its inevitable dispersal through the reverse reenactment of the migration that gave it birth.

My friends, I speak as your professor and your friend to give you reason and hope in the face of these dark and unwarranted speculations, this ideologically distorted “Discourse of Disembarkation.” I bring to your attention an obvious fact: the supply of iceberg lettuce and chocolate croissants in the ship’s cafeteria has never failed us. It seems to be without end, in fact, and therefore, most likely, without beginning. I myself have eaten a chocolate croissant every single morning I have been on board, sometimes two, and have no reason to believe that this has not always been the case, nor that it will one day come to an end. This has lead me to the reassuring conclusion that we will not have to say farewell to each other anytime soon, that there is no “San Diego,” that we will keep sailing forever, that there will always be a port to look forward to, something to teach or to learn, a meal to share, a friendship to forge, announcements to ignore, synchronized swimming to perform, bad coffee to drink, and so forth and so on, forever and ever, until the world is undone, amen.

The Lion and the Lamb

We’re on the ship now, after our time in Guatemala, and I’m enjoying the calm before the grading storm. I thought I’d take advantage of the time to tell you about Nicaragua. Guatemala will come later.

After two days on the ship grading and playing Trivial Pursuit (it turns out that Tom, the Assistant Dean, and I are a killer team), I went off to the city of León to meet with Sergio Ramírez, the writer who had graciously offered to show us around the city, the setting for the novel of his that we had read in class. There were about 20 of us, including almost all of my students, the Gieses and the UVA grad students. We arrived in León at 10:30am, after an hour-long bus trip on which we read some Rubén Darío poetry, talked about modernismo, the poetic movement he spearheaded, and discussed his importance to Nicaraguan and Latin American literature. After a cup of coffee, we met with Sergio in front of the León Cathedral.

Sergio, a member of the original Sandinista junta, a former vice-president of Nicaragua, and one of the country’s leading answering our questions about Margarita está linda la mar. We saw Darío’s tomb in the cathedral, where the poet lies under a statue of a weeping lion. Sergio was clearly a celebrity. Everyone in town seemed to know who he was, and we got to bask in the glow. After the writers, took us around the cathedral and the city, showing us the places where the novel was set, telling us about the importance of the city in Nicaragua’s cultural and political history, and tour, he and his wife took us to a restaurant in an indigenous neighborhood, where we ate fish, listened to music, drank very cold beer, and enjoyed each other’s company. The day ended at the Rubén Darío museum, with some conversation, a brief reading, and a reception. Sergio patiently autographed all of our books before leaving for his home in Managua.

One of my students, Lindsay, later made the observation that León had not been what she had expected it to be. Knowing that the city was the scene of not only one but several of Sergio’s novels, and that it had historically served as the center of Nicaragua’s intellectual life and the incubator of its most progressive political figures, she had expected León to be obviously monumental, lively, and attractive. She was disappointed that it was none of these things, at least not visibly so, to visitors who were there only a brief while. She wrote about the disconnect between the León she had seen and the city she had imagined while reading. There was a lesson here about the relationship between reading and traveling, about the role of literature in forging collective memory, about what a place means to insiders and how hard it can be for outsiders to perceive that place in the same way. I’m hoping that my students, in their final papers, can get at some of these issues.

Once the day with Sergio was over, most of the students headed back to the ship, while I took off for the city of Granada with David and Janna Gies. After a few hours in a car, we pulled into the Hotel Darío in Granada. The lights went out shortly afterwards. Nicaragua is rationing electricity, and Granada has no power from 8-11pm or so. We walked the streets in darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight, looking for a restaurant that ended up seeming uninteresting. Back at the hotel, we ate lobster and drank Chilean wine before turning in, right after the power came back and the air-conditioning kicked back on.

The next day we spent the morning frenetically seeing all we could of Granada, which is known primarily for its charming central plaza. We helped a student celebrate her birthday by smacking the crap out of a piñata in her hostel with her friends, and did some shopping. Granada, it turns out, is home to some of the worst religious art I have ever seen in Latin America. The city was burnt to the ground by William Walker, the American who attempted to make himself ruler of Central America during the 19th century, and the city lost almost all of its colonial treasures in the fire. The granadinos have compensated for the loss by surrounding many of their most revered religious images with Christmas tree lights, which were unfortunately turned off during our visit. My favorite piece, however, was a statue in the church of La Merced, graced by – I kid you not – a stuffed lambie donated by one of the parish children.

Of course, my post about Nicaragua cannot compare with Zoë’s tale of eco-tourism a lo folclórico, but lest you think that I did not share in their suffering, I will have you know that my lobster was a bit over-cooked and my air-conditioning altogether too chilly.

From Over-Rated to Under-Developed

Zoë has already shared with you everything there is to say about Costa Rica, a country that I find looms a bit too large on the horizon of US tourists. Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, the people are wonderfully welcoming. Yes, the infrastructure of Costa Rican tourism, particularly that of ecotourism, is impressively well-developed. Yes, it’s a country that you have to admire for abolishing its military and dedicating those resources to education and health care. But I don’t know if it’s as interesting as some other countries in Latin America, or even in Central America (my apologies, Michael G!). It’s not more beautiful than other places in Central America, and it doesn’t have the rich indigenous culture of Guatemala. Nonetheless, it provided a much-needed break from the hectic pace established by Peru and our Peru-to-Costa-Rica run. Getting to Machu Picchu and back was exhausting for all involved, and instead of rest, we were all met with three intensive days of academic work which included the 2nd of two papers for the controversial core course.

Now we’re docked in Corinto, Nicaragua, and people are heading out for various adventures. I’m very happy we’ve come here, precisely because Nicaragua is nowhere near as well-developed for tourism as is Costa Rica, and is therefore little-visited. Electricity is not reliable. Many roads are unpaved. Buses are rickety and dangerous. Streets in most towns are unnamed, and houses unnumbered. Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista party (FSLN) is president and is engaging in controversial reforms. Some students are setting off for beaches and surfing trips, utterly wasting, in my mind, the opportunity they have here, but many have plans to see Nicaragua’s two colonial cities, León and Granada, and should come away with some insight into Central American life outside the tourist bubble.

My novel course is headed to Leon in two days to meet Sergio Ramírez, a former vice-president of Nicaragua (under the Sandinista regime of the 80’s) and author of a novel we’ve just read, Margarita está linda la mar. The novel deals with the fame and death of Rubén Darío and the assassination of Tacho Somoza. A good book, but one that’s turned out to be beyond the level of even my best students. Nonetheless, everyone is looking forward to the visit with Sergio. We’ll be seeing León through his eyes, then having lunch at a restaurant in an indigenous neighborhood.

We’re spending today on the ship, and perhaps in the port, a town of only 20,000 people. I have grading to do, and Zoë did not want to do anything too involved before she and the Kid set off tomorrow for a three-day trip to the Domitilia Wildlife Refuge and the city of Granada. I’ll be on my own tomorrow and on the 9th, the day after the visit with the novelist, and am unsure of what I’ll do. Whatever it is, it’ll probably be quiet, removed from the S@S crowd, and, hopefully, immersed in something quintessentially Nicaraguan. I don’t think that “something” will be Flor the Caña rum, but I’ve promised my mother a bottle, so a shopping trip will definitely be in order.

Loyal respondents:

• Kassia, glad to see your priorities are in order!
• Marcela, have you tried Charlie Vergo's Rendevous? Best ribs on earth.
• Leslie, I don't mean my prior comment to imply an opinion about KC BBQ, which I have never tried. Sorry to hear about the navel ring! My watch, btw, is at the bottom of a river in CR. I'm down a pair of glasses (Peru), a watch (CR), and a pocketknife (Ecuador).
  
• Mami - ¡Que disfrutes de NJ!
• Susan - He takes after his dad ;-)

Oh, an addendum. I can't believe I forgot the following Boat Person:

• The Extra-Blonde Blonde: Are we supposed to believe they're real?!!?
  

The Boat People

I’m sitting here in David Gies’s office (I kept my key after my stint as interim Dean, and am availing myself of this space as the sole perk and/or payment for the job), with a stack of papers in front of me. I have 5 left to go before I finish with one class and can start with the other. So, of course, I’m blogging.

I wanted to tell you about the boat people, that is, my fellow voyagers. My post is prompted by last night’s auction. This was a charitable event in which donated goods and services were auctioned to raise money for various charities in the ports we are visiting. The Kid, for example, auctioned off two Spanish lessons. Others donated their time-share week. There was a dress, and a nautical chart signed by the officers, as well as breakfast in bed served by the deans. This morning, Zoë, the Kid, some of the UVA grad students, and I sat around marveling at the prices that were paid. $1600 for a weekend in a Manhattan brownstone. $300 for the right to steer the ship for 15 minutes. $75 for the Kid’s Spanish lessons. Of course, it was all for charity, so you had to be happy that so much money was being raised, but we couldn’t help but be astonished by how much money there was to be spent. And these were not just the grownups bidding: the students were right in there. One student dropped over $2000 on two items.

So, when people tell you that S@S attracts a lot of rich kids, they’re right. There are students on here with apparently endless supplies of parental cash. There are also students who are on financial aid, or who have taken out loans, or are on work study. Often, these are the students that have the most interesting experiences. Since they can’t afford to fly off to Machu Picchu or San Pedro de Atacama, they have to make do with what’s in the port, or what’s nearby, and so they’re the ones who end up visiting poor neighborhoods, going on service visits, volunteering in orphanages, checking out local schools. Theirs is not a tourist trip, but an educational one. I wonder what would happen to the educational value of S@S if the program put a cap on how much students could spend in port?

But lest everyone believe that the S@S population can be understood purely in terms of a hierarchy of available wealth, I offer the following catalog of shipboard types, which I’ve collected over the course of the summer. The types are not always mutually exclusive, and I am painfully aware that my list is nowhere near exhaustive. Here it is:

• The Ingénue – Has never left the US. Began the trip absolutely innocent about what it might mean to travel abroad. Earnest, eager blank slate. “Quito”? What’s “Quito”? Happy to learn the answer to this and other questions.
• The Sophomoric Traveler – Already knows everything there is to know about travel and about the countries to be visited. Will gladly list the number of countries he/or she has visited, and will recount anecdotes at the drop of a hat. Anecdotes reveal little insight or wisdom.
• The Proud S@S Veteran – Begins every conversation about shipboard life with the phrase, “On my previous voyage…” and proceeds to speak in detail about what things were like then. These details are interesting to no one but the speaker.
• The Bonehead – Dude, I got so wasted in Guayaquil! Can’t wait to go skiing in Chile! What, you mean there’s a paper due today?! Bummer . . .
• The Earnest Youth – Like the ingénue, but much better informed. Extremely respectful of other cultures, almost to a fault. Getting his or her Peace Corp application ready to be mailed upon docking in San Diego.
• The Underpaid Staff Member – 350 copies by tomorrow? How much are you paying me to do this? I thought I was going on a free trip!
• The Glorified Tourist – Immune to real learning. Eager to add jewels to his or her crown of touristic glory. Has forked over cash for Galapagós, Easter Island, Machu Picchu, and Tikal. Doesn’t care that this means not seeing much of Ecuador, Chile, Peru, or Guatemala.
• The Ship Kid – Let’s play hide-and-go-seek in the Union! When are they going to fill the pool again? Machu Picchu was awesome!
• The Ship Baby – Gurgle. Smile. Sleep. Gurgle some more.
• The Young Scholar – Speaks intelligently about his or her class work. Finds the much-debated core course valuable, and understands the connection between it and the port visits. Does the reading. Writes good papers. There are more of these than you might suspect.
• The Self-Righteous American – Can’t stand the leftist bias of the professors. Believes that laws in foreign countries are only suggestions from which he is exempted when convenient.
• The Faculty/Staff Spouse – What do you mean I don’t have unlimited internet access? And is it really my turn to watch the kids again?
• The Sensitive American – I can’t believe my country has done such horrible things to these poor people! Oh! Look at those lovely ponchos . . . How much?
• The Amiable Retiree – Retirement home? I’d rather play dominoes on the MV Explorer. Wake me up when we get to port.
• The Debutante – Well, if the only way to get to Machu Picchu is on the super-first-class Hiram Bingham train for $500 round-trip, then I guess that’s what I’ll have to pay. Know any good hotels in Acapulco?
• The Hippie – Yes, they’re on the ship as well! They have not seemed to notice the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner in their cabin bathroom.
• The Frazzled Professor – No weekend? When am I supposed to grade all these freakin’ papers? Who assigned them?!?! Oh, yeah … I guess I’ll just throw up my hands and blog …

Pre-Columbian Stair Master

First of all, thanks to all the lurkers who have come out of hiding to post on the blog. To all of you who posted since last time:

• Kassia, are you married now? Is that why you’re in Massachusetts? Please remember that being away on your honeymoon is no excuse for not keeping up with the blog.
• Fred, no HP spoilers, please! We are reading avidly, but only at the rate of one or two chapters a night. Our efforts to see the HP movie in Lima were frustrated by the plans of our ship’s captain to depart this evening. The matinee hours featured only dubbed versions: one had to wait until the evening for subtitled ones, and we had to be on the ship at 9pm. We chose to postpone our HP movie plans rather than sit through an afternoon of Harry and Co. hablando en español.
• Mami, it’s not a typo. “Turkey jam” is “Turkey ham” if you pronounce it in Spanish. Which reminds me that Zoë and I have failed to report about another favorite English usage, a brochure found at our hotel in Chile which explained that the woven items available from local handicraft merchants were made from “camelidos and sheep woolies.”
• Speaking of camilidos, Katy, your vicuña is snoozing quite comfortably under the bed. We’ve named him “Sparky.” Could you elaborate about the weird priest and the toothpick farm? I had no idea that toothpicks grew on farms.
• José, no we didn’t visit Tadeo Torres because we didn’t know the name of the orphanage. We very much wanted Santiago to see it. We will have restaurant recommendations for you when you go. Cuenca was gorgeous!
• Leslie, we are indeed, as you suggest, laying down the boogie. As long as you mean “going to sleep early and cursing the alarm clock in the morning.”
• Chris, say hello to your mom! Glad to hear you were hippie-free.

Speaking of hippies … Machu Picchu draws them like a magnet. Forget the pictures you’ve seen of the place. Not a single one does them justice. And make your plans to go now. It’s on my short list of truly exceptional places in the world, along with the Sistine Chapel, the Alhambra, and the Yosemite Valley, places that you don’t want to leave because you know the real world is a poorer place. Part of the magic is the ruins themselves, and part of it is the setting. The mountains there are impossibly steep and covered in mist. Not even Stephen Spielberg could have made them more mysterious or enchanting.

We got to them on our third day in Peru, after a day in Lima and a day of travel from Lima to Aguascalientes, the town closest to MP, by way of a place called Ollatantaymbo. Thanks to Ross for talking up Olla with us. It’s called the “last living Inca village” because there are houses there that were built in Inca times and have been continuously inhabited by indigenous people since. Some very cool ruins, too. Lima is not so cool. It’s big, it’s crowded, it’s crime ridden. But it does have some neat things to see, including an impressive cathedral and Franciscan monastery, as well as the oldest house in the Americas, the so-called “Casa Aliaga,” built by one of Francisco Pizarro’s cronies and continuously inhabited by his descendants ever since. Needless to say, the house is quite luxe.

The cathedral in Lima, however, pales by comparison with the one in Cusco. There, the gold and silver abound, as do the masterworks of the colonial “Cusco School” of painting. Everyone’s favorite, including ours, is a massive painting of the Last Supper which features an Andean delicacy, cuy (guinea pig) as the main dish. Many of the folks on S@S, by the way, have sampled cuy, but not us! The Kid has adamantly insisted that none of us should be eating anything as cute as that.

But lets get back to the hippies. Ross, co-author of The Moon Handbook to Peru, which I highly recommend to any and all of you planning a trip to these parts, calls Cusco “the mecca of the Gringo Trail.” And indeed it is. As charming as Cusco is, with its colonial streets, its Spanish buildings piled on top of Inca foundations, its lovely central square, it too is crawling with hippies. They are less noticeable here than in San Pedro de Atacama. Cusco is much bigger, so there are locals to contend with. Many of them were marching around in uniforms of all kinds, celebrating Peruvian Independence Day, an extendo-celebration that begins long before the day itself (today, the 28th) and shows no sign of ending afterwards. There are also plenty of non-hippie tourists, some of which travel to Machu Picchu in style, even on helicopters ($1200 a person). But the hippies are well represented, and can be spotted at Machu Picchu hugging the rocks.

Yes, you read that correctly, “hugging” the rocks. These are not standard hippies, but New Age hippies who come to MP because of its magical power. Unlike me, they do not use the word “magical” in a figurative way. They press up against the rocks, particularly the sacred ones, to absorb their cosmic forces. I overheard one of them saying to another, “Can you feel that feminine energy?”

The primary force experienced by Zoë, the Kid and me was gravity. This is the force that one has to fight to get up the many hills and the endless staircases that make up the lost city of the Incas. Up you go to the guardhouse. Down you go to the gate. Up you go to the pyramid. Down you go to the secret initiation cave. For eight hours (including a break for a fabulously over-priced but delicious buffet lunch) the three of us traipsed around MP, dodging hippies, getting away from Argentinians screaming on their cell phones (¿Lolita? Oye, Lolita, estamos ahora en las ruinas. Sí, están espectaculares. ¿Qué tal si nos encontramos para la cena? ¿En el restaurantcito de la esquina, donde fuimos para el cumpleaños de Estefan? Sí, claro que me acuerdo. ¡Qué bien que lo pasamos! etc.), eavesdropping on New Agers, reading aloud from our guide to MP, avoiding the tour groups, and pinching ourselves to see if we were indeed, actually where we were. Our legs were sore from the climbing, our feet ached, and we kept going. Every time we stopped a new perspective opened up, a new detail revealed itself. We saw eagles. We saw vizcachas (an Andean rabbit that has a squirrel’s tail and that hops like a kangaroo). We watched the mists roll over the city and its mountains, and then clear away, only to return later. We arrived at our crumby over-priced hotel that night exhausted and aching, ready to collapse into our hard beds, incredulous that we had been where we had been, that we had seen what we had seen.

(P.S. I’ve just read this to Zoë, and she tells me she will tell you more about the hotels.)

The Age of Aquarius

OK. Chile. But, first things first. My last post elicited comments from two former lurkers, Katy and Kassia. As a reward for their comments, I offer the following pictures of the synchronized swimming routine in which I participated as part of the ship’s Sea Olympics:

John, the Executive Dean, and I, preparing to enter the frigid water of the pool for our synchronized swim. Note the stylish shower caps. Despite our proximity to the equator at this point, the outside temperature was in the 60's, at best. The routine was designed to delay our entrance into the water as long as possible. Musical accompaniment: "Play that Funky Music White Boy."



Here we are in the water. Note the clockwork synchronicity of our routine. Oddly, we didn’t even place!

Note, other lurkers, that commenting is rewarded! Post your thoughts, your reactions, or your just your hellos!




Now, Chile. As usual, Zoë has beaten me to the punch with the pictures and the blow-by-blow of our memorable trip to San Pedro de Atacama, so I will limit myself, as usual, to editorializing. Her post should vividly demonstrate how spectacular are the landscapes near San Pedro, the salt flats, the Valley of the Moon, the Tatio geysers, the altiplano. “Beauty” is not the right word for it, since it suggests something attractive, hospitable, perhaps even inhabitable. This landscape, by contrast, was shockingly desolate and hostile, even exhausting. The sky is big, and the horizon far. Mountains that are over 150 kilometers away are the only thing there to arrest your line of sight, and there comes a point when such expansive views become overwhelming. This happened for me when we emerged from the salt cave in the Valley of the Moon, and all of a sudden found our eyes traveling many kilometers rather than mere meters. That afternoon, we spent some time in the hotel lounge reading, and in town shopping. In part it was just because we were tired and needed downtime, but I also think we felt this need for enclosure, for shelter. Very strange. The Kid and I bought San Pedro t-shirts, while Zoë picked up some great copper earrings.

Now, what I had expected were the hippies. San Pedro is one of a series of towns scattered around Latin America – San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, Panajachel, Guatemala, Baños de Tungurahua, Ecuador, are some others – that are linked together by a route of backpacker tourism known as “the gringo trail.” I find these places delightful. In these towns, tourists seem to outnumber locals, and even the “locals” are often transplants from other parts of the country. The draw of such places, for both foreigners and domestics alike, is not just the surrounding scenery, but the relaxed lifestyle that unfolds in these towns underneath the protective umbrella of patchouli and marijuana smoke. In San Pedro, it’s hallucinogenic substances, the ones used by atacameño shamans over the 14,000 years that the place has been continually inhabited by human beings. First the atacameños, then the Inca, then the Spanish, and now the hippies. French hippies. US hippies. German hippies. Spanish hippies. Argentinian hippies. Chilean hippies. They rode around on bikes in tie-dye and seemed completely unfamiliar with a product called “shampoo,” but they seemed harmless and were often quite friendly. Many of them have day jobs at little restaurants with impressively slow service, shoddy roofs (who needs a roof in a place where it never rains?) and dining-room fireplaces. One of them, Beth, included a lovely translation for “jamón de pavo.” Rather than “turkey ham,” it called it “turkey jam.” The Kid later made up a commercial jingle for “turkey jam.” We sought out neither hallucinogenic drugs nor meat-based preserves, but we were willing to wait quite a long time in a chilly San Pedro restaurant for some dulce de leche crêpes. They were almost as other-worldly as the Valley of the Moon itself.

Our long return voyage to Valparaiso culminated in a delicious dinner at a place called the Café Turri, a somewhat touristy but delicious restaurant that overlooks the bay in this charming, bohemian city. It was nice to be in a restaurant where we didn’t have to keep our coats on. Unfortunately, our flight back from San Pedro was delayed, so we didn’t get to see much more of the place, and completely missed Pablo Neruda’s house in town. Another time, I’m sure.

Now, on the eve of our arrival in Peru, Pablo Neruda is all the rage. The field trip to his home on Isla Negra, Chile, was a huge hit. Apparently, all involved read and discussed his poetry on the bus on the way there, and then saw things in the house that resonated with the imagery. (I wasn’t on it, since it conflicted with our trip to the Atacama.) Brian has put an English translation of selections from Neruda’s The Heights of Machu Picchu, for everyone to print out and take with them to the ruins. In the computer lab, people are printing out the pages, and folding them up to take with them. I plan to take a copy myself …

Tomorrow, though, it’s Lima, and our S@S excursion, “Colonial Lima Through a Historian’s Eyes.” No one can tell me who the historian will be. It’s not Brian, or any of the S@S faculty. I hope that by “historian” they don’t mean a regular old tour guide who did well in Peruvian history while in high school … In any case, we plan to dump the tour somewhere in downtown Lima so we can eat out, and perhaps even catch the new Harry Potter movie. Not very Peruvian, but vastly important, particularly to the Kid. Post if you’ve seen it, and tell us what you thought of it. OK?

Mutiny!

I am writing from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, where we have just spent a few glorious days exploring the desert, and where I am now struggling with a Spanish keyboard, so forgive me.

Chile will have to wait until the next post. First I have to tell you about my ill-fated tenure as Interim Academic Dean. I had agreed to serve as such on the first week of the voyage, when David Gies asked me to take his place while he went off to the meeting of the International Association of Hispanists in Paris. He left from Ecuador, and I was to be in charge until he rejoined us in Chile. "Dont worry," he assured me, "you just have to go to a meeting every morning with the other dean types." Since David is a good friend, I agreed instantly.

Well, it turns out that every voyage has what one repeat faculty member calls the "mid-voyage crisis," and our crisis hit during the Ecuador - Chile leg, on my watch. It was triggered, I think, by the workload. This leg was the one when many faculty gave midterms, or assigned papers, and the students found themselves stressed out. Many of them had signed up believing that this voyage would be like other SAS voyages, light on the homework, only to find themselves on the business end of UVAs attempt to infuse the program with rigor. They rebelled, and their rebellion turned on the content of the one course required of everyone, variously called "Latin America Today" or "Latin America Between the Local and the Global." Some students circulated a petition complaining about the historical structure of the course, saying that too much time was being spent on the colonial period, and not enough on current-day affairs that students needed to master in order to approach their port stays intelligently. They wanted a change in the content. 180-plus signatures.

I remember now that one of the folks in the study abroad office back home had warned me that strange things happen on ships. Rumors circulate quickly. Emotions become contagious. Discontent soon turns into anger and frustration. And you cannot get away from any of it. For two days or so, it seemed that all anyone would talk to me about was Latin America Today, blah, blah, blah. We called a meeting for the whole community to discuss the intellectual rationale for the course, and to remind everyone that there were days scheduled into the syllabus designed to provide the sort of current-day info that they wanted. Throughout, no one ever thought to ask why we were studying the colonial period, so I thought I would volunteer it. I had thought out what I wanted to say, about the way the past weighs heavily in Latin America, the way nothing can be understood without understanding the colonial period. My speech brought me to tears, and I had to leave the room. Brian made a similar speech, I am told, and was also visibly moved. Both of us are still trying to figure out why or how all of this brought us in touch with the emotional and personal basis of what we did.

The meeting was good, though. The students felt that they had been heard, and not a few seem to have learned from our little outbursts. That night, I drank caiperinhas in the faculty lounge and danced to bad 80s music. The next day, at Sea Olympics, everyone got to unwind. This was a whole day of silly competition in which, among other things, the Executive Dean and I performed a stunning synchronized swimming routine, and the students put on the best lip synch show ever. Lip-synching to the Eric Cartman version of "Come Sail Away" was sheer genius.

Two days later, we were in Valaparaiso. Spirits were once again high, and David was back on the ship. I had never been so happy to see him in my entire life.

Is that the sky falling on me?

Thanks to the guilt trip inspired by Leslie, et. al., I am returning to my long-neglected blog to report about our adventures. We’re sailing south along the coast of Peru, on our way to Chile, where wintry weather awaits. As you may have seen on Zoë’s blog, Panama was a pleasant surprise. The Canal was much more interesting than we’d expected, and the food was very good. If you’re in Panama City, try the restaurant Casuale in the Casco Antiguo.

After two frenetic days of class, we pulled into Guayaquil. After getting off the boat, we headed for Guyaquil’s shiny new Malecón, and its not so shiny iguana park. The park is actually one of the traditional squares in the city, but it’s called the iguana park because of all the – you guessed it! – iguanas that live there. I discovered the hard way that one should not stand too long beneath a tree crawling with iguanas, since all of them eventually have to relieve themselves, even if it might be on the head of a hapless Spanish professor.

The afternoon got us on a flight to Cuenca (barely), the small city in the mountains where we had decided to spend a few days. I went under duress, remembering the rather dull time we’d had in Cuenca 15 years ago (Rather dull? We actually considered taking Benadryl to sleep through the rest of our stay . . . Another story), and was surprised to found out how fabulous the place was. Cuenca has none of the monumental grandeur of Quito. Not one of its churches, museums or mountain peaks stands out as a spectacular “must-see,” world class attraction. But the whole city just drips with charm, making it the perfect place to walk around and make small discoveries.

The real surprise in our visit, however, was the day we spent with the Community Tourism program at the Centro Cultural Mama Kinua. “Community Tourism” is the name given to a nation-wide effort to bring tourists into direct contact with indigenous groups. Indigenous communities throughout the whole country invite visitors into their lives, and the money the tourist pays goes to support the community by financing things like health centers and schools. (My cousin Patricia, it turns out, is going on a visit of several days to the Hoarani in the Ecuadorian Amazon later this month. Imagine blow guns, huts in the rain forest, and no indoor plumbing for miles around. Go, Patricia!!!) The CCMK took us out to a local Cañari community, where Don Alfonso, a Cañari man, fed us, played music for us, lead us on a hike through an old growth forest to teach us about local medicinal plants, and generally told us everything we wanted to know about Cañari culture and about being indigenous in contemporary Ecuador. After years of traveling to Ecuador and seeing indigenous life from the outside, I was thrilled by the opportunity to spend the day with an indigenous person and have him tell us about his life from inside. Zoë and the Kid loved it too. There was a hint of sadness to it all, though, when you realized that Don Alfonso was doing his best to shore up a beleagured culture, one threatened by globalization and American influence. I was left wondering if his cute young grandkids would still speak Quichua when they were his age.

Now I’m writing from the ship, where I’ve agreed to serve as interim Academic Dean while David Gies goes off to Paris to attend the meeting of the International Association of Hispanists. The job is keeping me busier than I had expected, since it’s midterm season on the ship, and the students are stressed out, anxious, and frustrated with their workloads. It reminds me of UVA at finals time, when the Starbucks on the Corner becomes the seventh circle of Hell. I hope our attempts to make the program more rigorous haven’t gone over the top . . .

It’s incredibly hard to get work done on the ship, since the whole thing is designed for relaxing and socializing, not for study. I was up until 2am preparing a lecture on the invention of America. To some extent this was because PowerPoint is a hideous trap designed to consume time extravagantly (Did I pick the right animation? How can I get it to zoom in on that detail from the map?), and in part because the culture of chit-chat, as I like to call it, sucks time like you wouldn’t believe.

In any case, a lot of the chit-chat last night took the form of reports from friends returning from Quito, Cuenca, the Amazon, and Galapagós, full of enthusiasm for Ecuador and plans to return. There was less enthusiasm from those who had chosen to spend the whole time in Guayaquil. Guess the iguanas got to them as well.

(For pictures, see Zoë's blog. The 'net is too slow for me to post any right now.)

Rock the Boat!

We’re off Balboa, Panama, unable to get off the ship. For reasons that I don’t quite understand, the ship is not pulling up alongside the dock here. Instead, we’re anchored offshore, and have to get to the port by means of “tenders.” A “tender” is basically a lifeboat used as a sort of shuttle that takes people back and forth between the ship and the dock. We’re supposed to be tendering throughout our stay in Panama, making this a logistically complicated port. Right now, the sea is too rough to get people from the ship to the tenders safely, so everyone is sitting around waiting for the swells to calm down and the tendering process to begin.

In a way, it’s a blessing. We all have much-needed downtime after four intense days at sea. I could not be more pleased with my classes. My students are doing the reading, are engaging with it, are bringing up good questions for discussion. They’re doing a lot less reading than I would have assigned back home (there’s simply not enough time in the day for my usual reading loads), but the payoff is that we’re spending more class time on each individual text that we read. Now, though, no one is working, because we’re all waiting. Some are watching movies. Some are chatting. Some are napping.

Zoë, the Kid and I have several things planned for our stay in Panama. This afternoon, we’re supposed to be going hiking through the nearby Gamboa rainforest. Tomorrow we’re going to visit the “Casco Antiguo,” the old colonial part of Panama City, in the company of a Panamanian student and some of the students from one of my classes. Sunday is free, and Monday we have an all day excursion to visit the Spanish forts on the Caribbean side, and the nearby Canal locks. We’ll be coming back by means of the recently restored Panama Railroad. I can’t wait.

Other people are going to musical events, meeting with Panamanian politicians, going to indigenous villages. Many are getting hotel rooms in Panama City to avoid the tendering hassle, and, I believe, to facilitate late-night partying. We’ll probably spend a night or two in town ourselves, but not partying.

Damnit, Zoë, we forgot to pack the time machine!

Our last dinner in Acapulco was spent at the restaurant of the Hotel Flamingos, a storied establishment on one of the big bluffs on the east end of the city. It was once owned by Johnny Weismuller, of Tarzan fame, and was frequented by Hollywood stars who came down from Los Angeles by boat in the company of Weismuller and John Wayne. We ate fish and shrimp on a terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and watching the sun set. The only problem was with the year: it was 2007, not 1967.

You see, Acapulco’s glory days are long over. The spectacular setting of the Bahía Santa Lucía is now marred by an overabundance of hotels and condos, many of them long past their prime. International tourism now goes to the Carribean resorts, like Cancún, and the domestic tourism that still favors Acapulco is not enough to keep the place shiny and vibrant. The tour guides, somewhat pathetically, still try to milk the old Hollywood cow, pointing out the places where Elizabeth Taylor got married and the like. As you can imagine, this makes little impression on our students, who have to have explained to them who these people were.

Now, you might ask why I would know about tour guides. Well, S@S organizes tours for the voyagers to take, some of them frankly recreational, and others supposedly educational. We’ve been on two. One was a fun thing, a tour of the Acapulco Botanical Gardens, along with a bird-watching trip on a little boat. The other was one of my FDP’s (Faculty-Directed Practicum), an excursion organized specifically to complement one of my classes. Zoë already wrote about it, the trip to the little villages outside of Acapulco. There’s not doubt that the students benefited from it. None had ever been to Latin America (except for Cancún, which doesn’t count), and so this was their first time seeing the rural and village life of a Latin American country. But the trip had been billed as “The Historical Route of the Nation.” The “historical” part consisted of a constant dribble of factoids issuing from the mouth of an ever-chattering tour guide. I found out later that, because this was my FDP, I could have arranged things to do the historical talk myself. I wish I had!

At least the guide was honest. He sugar-coated nothing, talking about governmental corruption, the drug trade, poverty, the flight of rural people to the city, unemployment, labor politics. Clearly relieved to get out of the touristy circuit, he seemed eager to tell us everything he knew and opined about his country, but that he normally doesn’t get to share with tourists. Back in the city, however, the schtick came back like a bad rash. Eva Gardner this, Frank Sinatra that. At least I’d heard the names … I don’t think they were any more familiar to the students than the names of Aztec gods.

Back at the Hotel Flamingo, the rooms seemed empty and the paint was peeling. We are the only diners in a restaurant that has clearly seen better days. As I write this on board the ship, somewhere off the coast of Central America, a lingering stomach ache leads me to revisit my meal there, wondering what it was that made me sick. I wonder if Johnny Weismuller’s piña coladas were made from purified water? I don’t think mine was. Next time I’m in Acapulco, I’m bringing my time machine so that he can make it for me himself.

Arriving in Acapulco

Zoë has already beaten me to the punch, giving you the blow-by-blow on our first couple of days here in Acapulco. So, I’ll just touch on some personal highlights.

My personal Acapulco adventure began at 4:30am on the morning of our arrival. The ship was stopped out in the Pacific, killing time so that we wouldn’t pull into port before our dock time. There was a storm to the north producing big swells, so the ship was rolling much more than usual. I was awoken by a phone call, from a rather worried Kid who thought we were going down. We should never have taken him to that museum exhibit about the Titanic! I went to his room, and found that what had woken him was not the motion, but the banging of the door of his little safe, which was unsecured. We locked it, I tucked him back in, and tried to go back to sleep.

No luck. What do you do on a ship at 4:30am? Why, email, of course! But there was no internet access . . . Perhaps the faculty lounge? It turned out that the faculty lounge, with is on the top deck and forward, was the perfect place from which to watch our arrival into port. It was still dark, although occasionally the distant lightning would illuminate the sea around us. I went out onto the deck, onto the closest thing I had encountered to a scene from Melville. The ship was moving now, and it was leaning to starboard (notice my increasing competence with nautical terms – look for a future post entirely in pirate language), with a strong wind cutting across the deck. A ribbon of lights across our horizon gave away our destination. A few groggy RA’s were there, taking pictures and drinking the ship’s regrettable coffee. None of us spoke. The wind, the darkness, the lightning, the waves, the distant port became for each of us a private sea adventure.

I thought about the Manila Galleon, about which I’d lectured the day before. This was the solitary ship that connected Acapulco with Manila, bringing Chinese luxury wares to colonial New Spain. The trip took three months or more, and death rates were as high as 50%. Thirst, starvation, and scurvy took their toll. I guess their buffet wasn’t as good as ours.

As the day dawned and the port approached, more people turned up on deck. A student came up to me, and told me she had been thinking of the Manila Galleon as well. Cameras flashed, and Acapulco slowly took shape. Lights became buildings. Dark shapes became mountains. We pulled into port just as the sun began to peek over the mountains that ring the port of Acapulco.

The ship docked, we went straight to the fort, and found out just how hot Acapulco really was. After days in the chill of the ship’s air-conditioning, none of us were ready for 90+ humid degrees. The museum at the fort (built 1615) was fascinating, and the ice cream at Sanborn’s shortly afterwards equally so. The Kid, I’m sure, would rave most about the waterpark later that day, though he might have a good word or two for Restaurant La Chilupeña, where we feasted on exquisite tacos, enchiladas, and pozole.

OK. That’s all for now. Next time I’ll write more about the S@S trips we’re taking here in town. One yesterday, the other tomorrow.

When the Whip Comes Down

[I wrote this post a few days ago, just before internet access from the ship went down. We're on our third day in Acapulco now. I'll try to post about all that soon.]

Finally, a chance to write a post. It turns out that life is quite intense here on the Explorer. Happily, my schedule is no longer crowded with pointless meetings (although I have one this afternoon that has potential), but with conversation and classes. Brian, our friendly neighborhood Latin American historian, is in charge of a course called “Latin America Today,” which is required of everyone on the voyage, not just the students, but the faculty too. Brian has done an admirable job of designing an intensive introduction to Latin American studies which is supposed to pull together everyone’s experiences in individual courses and in shore visits. His first lecture set the tone: inquiry, engagement, and intellectual seriousness were to be the order of the day. Today, he modeled it for everyone when he displaced the planned lecture with a debate between him and Ray, our colonial art historian. Ray had disagreed with the treatment Brian had given of the United States and its hegemonic culture in his opening lecture, and Brian suggested that instead of talking it out privately, they do so in public.

What emerged, in effect, was a discussion of the continued viability of the nation-state as a category of understanding (Not in so many words: this is my interpretation of the conversation). Ray emphasized the internal differences of American, and of Mexican, society, their multicultural character, and the porosity of their borders. He contended that Brian had said things about American hegemony that failed to give due consideration to these important aspects of American life in his lecture, that he had presented the United States as a culturally monolithic entity. Brian defended the usefulness of the nation-state as a category of understanding, and the reality of its impact in our lives, by pointing out the ways in which marginalized groups within the US conceived of themselves and their objectives in specifically American ways. US Latinos, for example, advocate for themselves without necessarily conceiving their advocacy as a facet of a larger, global picture. For them, as for Anglos, the US is an island: the outside world is not taken into account.

The students were listening, and they responded. All around the room, faces looked attentive, and hands shot up when the official colloquy was over. The whip has come down, and it seems that a considerable number of students have responded by engaging, by participating, by reading, and by thinking. Today at the pool, everyone I saw was reading a book assigned for a class. Sure, there are boneheads out there who are here for the party, but, for now, they don’t seem to be all that much in evidence . . . We’ll see what happens in Acapulco tomorrow.

I’m delighted with my classes. I’ve pared down the novel course, and reorganized the 1492 course. Both have small enrollments by S@S standards (11 and 17, respectively), which means, I think, that I have students who are interested, and willing to do the work. Today, most if not all students arrived prepared, with books full of underlining and marginal remarks. In the novel course, we ended up fastening on the gender dynamics in the portrayal of 2 male characters in Los de abajo (Gustavo, you have been very much on my mind!), and in the 1492 course, we talked about the cultural and ideological dimensions of “discovery.” I also popped into Ray’s art history course and learned about Asian-Novohispanic transculturation in colonial art. Not a bad day, huh?

Tonight is our “logistical preport,” the big meeting where they give us all the nitty gritty we need to know for our arrival in Acapulco tomorrow. Until then, there’s time to unwind, and have some dinner. Zoë is very relaxed, having spent almost the entire afternoon at the pool with the Kid, and the Kid is tanning nicely. She’s at Spanish class now, and he’s playing with Leggo’s in a friend’s cabin. Life is good.

Treasure among the Tat

An announcement yesterday over the ship’s PA:

“The good news is that we will be pulling into port at 1700. The bad news is that it’s Ensenada”

Insensitive? Tasteless? Pejorative of our neighbor south of the Border? No! Frighteningly accurate. Ensenada is not as bad as Tijuana, but it’s close. Tijuana-by-the-Sea, one might call it. It’s economy is centered around tequila. Not it’s production, but it’s consumption, and in large quantities. It’s soul has found embodiment in a vehicle christened by one of the Kid’s young friends as “The Hootchie-Mama Bus.” This is a vehicle that was parading up and down the main drag of Ensenada, featuring of a group of young women in tube tops and wedge heels dancing to very loud music blaring from large speakers.

Last night, Zoë, the Kid and I ventured out into Ensenada. It was not our first sojourn, since the night before we had dined there on seafood that was almost as over-cooked as it was over-priced. Something drew us out though. Maybe it was the seductive glow of the neon tequila signs, or the enchanting melodies belched by the discotheque speakers, or the signs advertising Viagra with clever drawings that we hoped the Kid would not ask about. Or maybe it was the chance to get of the damn ship one more time before it sailed, even if it did mean taking a family stroll down Main Street, Sodom and Gamorrah. In any case, off we went, never imagining what we would find.

On the main drag, among the Corona signs and the shop windows featuring a lovely tshirt with the words “I f#&k on the first date” was an artsy coffee shop owned and operated by a man clearly obsessed with Remedios Varo. For those of you who a little rusty on your mid-twentieth-century Latin American surrealist painting, Varo was a Spaniard who lived and worked in Mexico after her exile from Spain following the Civil War. This guy had a friend who made reproductions of Varo’s paintings, and he had one whole wall of the shop covered with them. We were all drawn in, and the owner soon started telling us about her and her work. The Kid was fascinating, asking questions about different paintings, hearing about the stories they told and the visual jokes they were built upon. Zoë and I bought two of the repros for the house, and the Kid, after some doubt and debate, bought one of his own.

For the first time, a work of art had spoken to him, for reasons all his own, that had nothing to do with his parent’s tastes and preferences, and, for the first time, he had bought it so that he could enjoy it himself. It’s propped up on the desk in his cabin, where he can see it from his bed. The very first thing he’s ever purchased that he is not likely to outgrow. That's it up there.


Who would have thought . . . In Ensenada?!?!? As for me, I bought a bottle of Cuban rum.

Early morning ramblings

6:40am, Saturday. But the day of the week hardly matters, since the schedule here has nothing to do with weekdays/weekends. We’ve had two days on the Explorer, and so far, so good. Zoë and the Kid have had fun. She’s been reading, when she’s not engaged in full-contact parenting, and he’s been cavorting with the cabal of children who are slowly converting the ship into their own personal playground. There have been losses. Two soccer balls have gone overboard, despite the nets designed to keep them on. More will be bought: all are doomed. Thanks to the wonders of globalization, Chinese-manufactured soccer balls will be available in Wal-Marts here in Mexico. Perhaps the currents of the Pacific will carry them back to the land of their manufacture?

In the meantime, I have been attending meetings, followed by more meetings, interspersed with meetings, and culminating in yet more meetings. Some of these meetings have been informative, while others have wasted time in magnificent fashion. My favorite was the meeting where someone talked for 30 minutes, and the only thing we learned was that there would be another meeting the next day to handle the issues that were supposed to be addressed at that meeting. A meta-meeting of sorts. A Borgesian meeting.

One thing has emerged with clear and utter clarity from these meetings. I need to redesign my syllabus for the novels course. (Erin Nicole, take note!) What in the world was I thinking?? I’ve told some of you, I believe, that every professor is really 2 professors, summer (i.e. planning) guy, and semester guy. Summer guy designs syllabi full of books he hasn’t read. He sends away abstracts to conferences he’d like to attend. He agrees to committee assignments and accepts invitations to review books. Summer guy doesn’t care about how much work is being taken on, because it will all be done by someone else, semester guy. Semester guy has to do all the things that summer guy plans, and spends most of his days cursing his name.

Now, I’m up for reading 8 novels this summer. In fact, I had designed the course with the hope of reading 8 novels, but I realize now that there will be no time! As it turns out, these students will have other obligations and interests besides doing work for me. Imagine that!! They’ll have 2 other courses, not to mention a series of lectures meant to prepare them for the ports. And I think they may want to do other things as well, which I will leave unmentioned for now on this very public venue. There’s a very competent-seeming residence staff on board to keep them from doing some of those things.

Some nitty gritty: The cabins are nice. I’m writing next to a huge window overlooking the Pacific and the coast of Mexico. We have a comfy bed, and a sofa. The ship is equally nice throughout. Food is quite adequate. Good enough to eat without complaining, but not so good that you want to have seconds. Lots of fruits and vegetables. The coffee is appalling. Zoë got some instant coffee in town, and we are now having café con leche instead of the stuff they serve.

More to come soon. Thanks to all of you who have posted! I’ll invite everyone to do so, particularly now that the blog is configured so that you don’t have to sign up to post. Post! Fame awaits!!

Boxfans and Boats

Years ago, when a friend of ours was moving from Boston to Florida (you know who you are!), she became obsessed with cleaning her box fans. Instead of packing, arranging for a mover, seeing friends, she spent a day disassembling these fans and cleaning the dust of their blades and grills. You see, a big move is a life-altering event which often feels out of our control. We leave what we know, and take a dive into the unfamiliar and the uncertain. Why face the challenges brought up by such a frightening prospect? It's much more rewarding to take on a discrete problem, one that can be solved in an afternoon with some diligence and elbow grease. It's much more satisfying to clean the box fans than to face the unknown.

Going on S@S is something akin to this, it seems. The last few days, Zoë and I have been waking up with a distinct "Oh my God! What have we gotten ourselves into?!" panic. We'd never seen the ship, nor did we have any real idea what this would be like. The Kid and I are box fan cleaners. My "To Do" list below could in fact be thought of precisely as the list of box fans I have been cleaning for the past six weeks. The Kid, too, has had his share of figurative box fan cleaning. Today, after my mother dropped us off at the airport, he became obsessed with the fact that he did not know the proper order in which to view his new DVD's of superhero cartoons. There we were, at the gate, waiting for a plane that would take us away for a summer-long trip, and he was almost in tears from the fear that the various episodes of X-Men cartoons he had watched in the car had been viewed out of sequence. Luckily, Uncle Fred, comic book enthusiast, was answering his cell phone, and was sitting in front of his computer. He looked it up online, and quickly settled the matter. The Kid was immediately transformed, back to his smiley, cheerful self.

You see, cleaning box fans works. As soon as they are cleaned, order is restored, a sense of authority and control is regained.

Or, that scary unknown can become real in exciting ways. For example, you can arrive in San Diego and realize that the hotel you're staying in is right across the street from the ship you will be boarding the next day. I saw it from the air, in fact, as the plane descended into airport, giving us a clear view of San Diego's harbor area. Or, rather, I thought I'd seen it from the plane. The ship I saw looked like the one in the picture, but it was too big, too fancy looking . . . .that couldn't be it. That same ship began to loom large as the hotel shuttle approached the place where we were staying. "No, that can't be it," Zoë said, "that's some big fancy cruise ship." Well, it was it. I am typing this not more than a few hundred yards from the MV Explorer, docked right across the street from us. The picture above is from tonight.

There is no anxiety in the room, no panic. After a thrilling visit to the ship (as close as we could get to it), the Kid is sound asleep, and Zoë and I are ready to turn in. No one is obsessing about box fans anymore.

It all got done!

Incredibly, everything on my To Do list below actually got done. I finished reading that dissertation chapter at 12:30am this morning!

I'm at my mother's house now, outside of Washington, DC, and I'm updating largely because Zoë just scolded me for neglecting my blog. We're having dinner with my mom, sister-in-law and soon-to-be-brother-in-law tonight, then heading off to San Diego tomorrow. The Kid is at a comic book store with his grandmother, and Zoë and I are sitting here as still as possible, because it seems that my mother has not realized that many people like to turn the heat off during the summer. Perhaps she's training us for Panama?

To Do List

To be done before leaving for San Diego on June 12:

• Read 2 book manuscripts
• Read a dissertation
• Read a dissertation chapter (another student)
• Finish writing journal article
• Begin work on another journal article
• Attend committee meetings
  
• Email
• Syllabus for fall course
• Read Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador for S@S
• Go to son's piano recital
• Farewell dinner at UVA
• Farewell dinner with various family
• Get car serviced
  
• Sleep, as time allows

Luckily, the packing is done. We shipped our stuff out last weekend! I'm wearing sandals to committee meetings because I shipped my professor shoes out.

OK, can it all be done?! You tell me!

Lunatic Teaching

It's late at night and I'm reviewing the syllabi I created for the two courses I'm teaching on S@S. I can't help but wonder what I was thinking! We had to submit these things a few months ago, to get UVA approval. As Director of Undergraduate Programs in Spanish, I found myself in the curious position of being asked to approve the courses that I myself had proposed. I should have been harder on myself! I should have pointed out that it may very well be humanly impossible to read two novels in Spanish in four days, while taking two other classes and doing things like sleeping and eating. But, then again, what else is there to do on a boat? Personally, the thought of reading by the pool, and being able to say this is my job sounds quite appealing.

Take a look at my course syllabi through the links there on the left, and let me know what you think. Care to read along with us? The novels should be particularly fun, and most of them are available in English translation.

Jealous?

Don't be! You don't have to be UVA faculty to teach on Semester at Sea. In fact, most of the people teaching this summer are from other institutions. All you need is a PhD and 3+ years of teaching experience. So, apply! Or, better yet, see how this blog goes . . . and then apply (or not).

Song stuck in your head?

Welcome to my blog. If the title doesn't get a particular TV theme song stuck in your head, then please click here.