Ever Since Hawaii

Chennai India

Withing fifty feet of the ship, my shoes are black. Men in brown wool suits with orange and black automatic rifles hanging across their backs stair me down until I smile for lack of anything better to do, and then they grin back through tired eyes and inspect my landing card. From here I have been strictly instructed to walk between the warehouses, left to the gate, and then RIGHT! Not left... earlier in the week their had been a demonstration to the right, and the guards at that gate insisted that everybody pay a re-entry fee, which was by no means “official”. Outside the coal dust covered gates of port seven, a line of yellow “auto rickshaws” await. The drivers approach me, each dripping his own unique brand of insanity, “Sir, I take you down town, come, come with me now sir” “Brotha, come with me, I'll show you to a nice pipe” “Jonny, come with Jonny, I know where you want to go, no problem”. I kept expecting one to insist on taking me downtown to see a “ping pong show” or meet with “a happy lady”, but I had to remember that I wasn't in Bangkok anymore.
This is an average day for the rickshaw drivers. In fact, the American diplomat whom spoke to us while our ship was being cleared by customs, told us how as early as seven that morning the drivers were waiting for students to begin filing off the ship. When driving by them she had yelled out the window “Don't worry! They are coming, I promise!” to which she received a resounding cheer. Earlier that week a navy cruiser had been in port, and the Rickshaw drivers were able to make a nice profit, I later found out, that the average day for a rickshaw driver includes zooming in and out of buses and motorcycles on roads where the painted lanes could hardly be thought of as even suggestions. I lost count of all the motorcycles we cut off after three blocks, I did however keep track of all the buses that we were almost underneath until five blocks from the port, after that I was then occupied for the rest of the trip with talking the driver out of making a side stop at his friends shops. In Vietnam and Thailand, that last thing we wanted to do was be taken down a side alley for often the worst of things await tourists there, and the same in India could also be true.
Our driver had perhaps three teeth, a maniacal laugh, and the most awesome bed head I have ever seen. After he was kind enough to wait while we ate lunch, we accepted his request to take us to his friends shop on the way back to the ship. He was very grateful and informed us that if we were to buy anything, the shop would give him a percentage, and his four children needed some clothes. He didn't mention until we were stuck in a time-share style high pressure sales situation, that the store only sold 400$ antique swords and very intricate hand made rugs. But we knew just the people for a gift of these sorts, and all things worked out quite nicely.
While flying among green buses with people hanging two feet out of every opening, and darting in between 1950's style embassy cars (complete with hood flags), the truth of something an Indian woman had said to me two nights before proved evident “Whatever is true about india, the opposite is also true”. And indeed it was, I saw families tucking babies into burlap bags behind the dumpsters of five star restaurants with very trim and healthy parking attendants busily parking black Escalades. It was fairly common for us to be followed by three people at once. One asking for money with a solitary hand stretched out and a horrible look in their eyes, another trying to sell me sandalwood beads or trade a little stone statue for my watch, and yet another pawing at my hair with an amazed look on her face.

Life with the Semester at Sea program is absolutely insane. It contains all of the usual college life stresses interspaced with week long forays into unknown lands of unique beauty and profoundness... coming back to college life, and the urgency of college work, compacted onto a ship after these is adventures is to say the least deviding. When the rare chance comes along, and I have time to consider my existance... I am bombareded an overwhelming array of amazements and astonishing truths combined with hundreds of new faces and details about the world... I truly will, never be the same.

Blow is a little clip of me and tucker up in the mountains of Thailands ablsolutly stunning Patong beach on Phuket island.