Japanese are not Germans after all

“Japan, land of samurais, Mt Fuji, geishas, sumo and sake. Am I missing any cliché Japanese thing here? Oh yeah, Jesus Christ! SUSHI! Right, land of sushi too. Well land of sushi, without the “too” cause it makes it sound weird, kinda like jujitsu, and… oh crap that too. Why do they have to be so well known and yet still manage to be so exotic. Stupid Japanese, well incredibly great Japanese, people that have permeated every inch of world culture, while adopting shinkansen speed modernity without betraying their colorful uniqueness. Ugg… sometimes I overdose on travel guides and their exoticist generalizing ways, my apologies.” Me – who else?

To me the Japanese have always seemed a little bit German. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but think about it, come on, comply with me. They are extremely organized, efficient and orderly, everything is on time and accurately working. They are very serious people too, who also happen to harvest an incredible internationally known affection for beer. See how I’m not completely delusional? Doesn’t it all sound suspiciously German to you, if not German, at least, I don’t know: Germanish? So yeah they are not tall, white and blond, with women whose plentiful bosoms scream of meaty wurst. On the contrary they are short, oriental (which by some reason excludes them out of White Kingdom) and traditionally, black haired. Their women, with their tiny bones structures definitely speak more of itsy bitsy bites of low caloric foods like fish, than greasy sausages.
Still, with regards to people we (we the international community, we the tourists, etcetera, etcetera) have always associated both countries’ populations with two powerful and sometimes tenebrous words: purity and homogeneity; two words not really foreign to Japanese and Germans. Bingo, you got it, don’t you? purity, German, NAZI!!! Easy cake. If you can’t figure out that sequence I don’t know where you’ve been the last couple of years; Africa probably, or in Machu Pichu feeding llamas. But back to purity, the German association was easy, yet the Japanese are not so far away in terms of associating population and purity. It is well known that they have an incredibly homogeneous population (99% ethnic Japanese if you need the facts) and that’s the way they like it, thank-you-very-much. The less Koreans and Chinese coming to stay the better, and if invasion is possible: “weepee yey yey!” Which bring us to the sad stories of World War Two and failed aspirations of constructing continental empires: “Asia for the Asians”, but not really, just the Japanese; and “Europe of the pretty people”, but not really just no non-Arians aloud no matter what. Cute. Not.
However, this passed bunches of years ago, not even MTV had been born, so I don’t know why I bother with it. Both nations have been “rehabilitated” and suffered more than enough, some would say as direct consequence of their actions, needless to speak of atomic bombs or walls, right? Thus both nations have surpassed their militaristic tendencies and the subsequent catastrophes, to become highly popular well regarded nations, with successful economies and a decent amount of political power, even if still treated as possibly unpredictable adolescent states. In conclusion we’ve got in common: personality, population ideals, imperialistic tendencies and well known postwar catastrophes. Check, check, check… and check! Huh, don’t I feel satisfied.
I’m sure now you get the Japanese-German equation and you can’t help but marvel and gawk at my amazing brilliantness, but hey, don’t feel sad if you had never though of this before, I wasn’t born enlightened with this knowledge. Actually, if I really ought to be honest I wasn’t even slightly aware of it until I knew for sure that I was going to Japan, which more or less coincided with the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Berlin. That’s where my reveries of countries started being simultaneous, I wanted so bad to be in Berlin, to see those games live; and at the same time I couldn’t help thinking of what Japan would be like, being the first country in Asia I would ever visit. I guess that at some point along the way the reveries got all mixed together and I started putting Germans in kimonos and Japanese in blond braids.
Still, however wacky, inaccurate and subjective these cross cultural mutations and subsequent pseudo analysis may be, it did give me a basis from where to understand Japan. It was there to guide me, for example, in focusing more on learning the language than memorizing the maps, ‘cause again, they are very organized so they probably would have maps and signs everywhere. Maps that I knew I couldn’t dream to understand without some basic idea of Japanese.
So I made sure I had my “ohio gozaimas, ‘fill in blank’ doko deska?” memorized and I headed to Sannomiya Station in downtown Kobe. The trip from the port terminal where my current home took some deserved beauty rest was relatively uneventful; some Japanese people silently waiting for their stations and a bunch of SAS students being way louder than everybody. My German picture felt reassured. Yes they are orderly and very much for following rules and codes with an efficiency and respect unexpected of USA culture much less Latin. Yet they seemed particularly use to tourists’ informality; the kimono and wooden sandal wearing man beside me was looking as he had already resigned to foreign incompetence in the cultural playground.
Sannomiya station, like most big stations, was crowded, vibrant and full of hallways and stairs, forming a perverse 3-D version of Chutes and Ladders for those initiated in its labyrinth ways. But in no way could I dare call it chaotic, there were maps everywhere, along with color coded signs politely translating to English some of its information. It didn’t take a lot of time to find that banner saying Osaka, Nara and (yes!) Kyoto. Up the stairs I went and the famous bullet trains, also known as Shinkansen, in Japanese, or shynkaynseen by Jill (my travel buddy), solemnly appeared in front of us. They came and went with a precision that kind of scared me. If a train was schedule for 13:41, at 13:39 it arrived and you could bet your life that at 13:41 it would leave. I knew they were Germanish, but not that German. I stood transfixed by this parade of punctuality, impossible in Porto Rico’s unwritten one hour late policy, until finally Jill woke me up with an arigaytow that thanked the policemen who so nicely indicated the train we should take.
Up the Hikari train we go and into our comfortable blue seats with expressionless yellow mustard lines. At 13:55 sharp the train departs and the voice of a Japanese lady sounds through the train’s radio politely saying information which to my non-japanese understanding ears sounds something like yadayadayada Kyoto, arigato-gozaimas, which is the polite way of saying thank you and one of the few world I know. But no worries, the color coded maps and diagrams were there fulfilling the effectiveness expected of them and I knew we were on the right train. First stop: yadayadayada Kobe station, arigato gozaimas; second stop: yadayadayada Nara, arigato gozaimas; third stop: yadayadayada yadayada yada yadayadayada Nihon-ni-shima, yadayada (this sounds weird) yadayada yadayada (what’s happening?) yadayada, arigato gozaimas. I look at Jill in search of an explanation that I know she doesn’t have. That was an unusually long announcement and we have been on this station for about two minutes already, a total waste of time considering it is a very small station and nobody is coming in. But nobody is moving, everybody stays on their sits looking bored or sleeping, never talking, which stops me from manifesting my anxiousness to Jill.
Whatever, I think, in Rome do like the Romans and in Japan like the Japanese, so I just try to look nonchalant and bored, trusting of the effectiveness of Japan Railway’s system. Yet ten minutes and one more announcement pass and people start looking a little bit less pacified, cautiously moving from one side to the other in their sits and shyly looking around, the Japanese way of restlessness I suppose. I look around me, but there’s no color coded map than can help me now. Some people get off the train, however most stay, though breaking the silent bow by consulting with whoever is near.
This change of behavior gives me the courage to scoop around for some friendly young face who may know some English with which to compliment my less-than-elemental Japanese in order to explain what’s happening. However, Jill beats me by finding and striking conversation with an American lady. Her fussy long brown hair and casual clingy clothes speak of long gone wild hippy days, and even though she doesn’t speak Japanese the mere fact of having a communication link with one more being is slightly comforting. While we are talking about what could have possibly happen to break the efficiency pattern in such a drastic way a young business man approaches us and explains that there was a car crash in one of the tracks and that’s why the train can’t go on. Thus we just have to wait for the area to be cleared and everything will go back to normal. Well, even in the best of systems some failures are bound to happen, but since we are talking about the preservation of order and traditional patterns, there are always systematic alternatives to solve the already exceptional insurgences of chaos. Wrong. We waited ten more minutes, already accounting to an incredibly inconceivable delay of 20 minutes and nothing. Five more minutes, one more announcement and people start getting out. I started following them since I thought that surely in the impossibility of clearing the tracks (that ought to be one big nasty crash) they had provided an alternate train to do the route. But people are heading in all kind of different directions and I, with Jill on my side, just stand there in the middle of the station looking totally lost, how very touristy of us. That’s when Jill gets the genius idea of stop following cliché presumptions and decides to just ask around and figure out what to do next. Luckily we spot the same English speaking Japanese business man, who briefly lets us know that we have to figure out how to get out of that little town by ourselves since the train, (can you believe this?), is just not working. We’ll probably have to get a local train, he says. Oh my, local train, make every single stop along the way. Yes, I know the little towns that we would have missed in the shinkansen now will be at our reach with the slow moving progress of our alternative transportation and that may be cute, an alternate way to discover the non iconic Japan, but oh, how so not German of them.

Crooked apple

“Apple: a firm round fruit with a central core, red, green, or yellow skin, and white or yellow flesh.”
Encarta Dictionary

I’m not sure I could call it round. It’s definitely not a sphere, and neither does it fit the Standard heart-shaped apple style. In reality, I would say that it’s the equivalent of a crooked nose in the fruit world. From one side it vainly attempts to simulate a heart shape, but it seems that along the way someone tugged it at its lower left side with his or her ex claiming its piece at the opposite corner, giving it an elongated wave like figure, quite unexpected of an apple. Being a democratic person I turn it so I can see the other face of the issue, or in this case the apple, and discover a whole new world, more accurately a new continent: Africa in apple matter. With its friendly bump on top and a slender lower point it’s easy to forget its problem ridden tugged side. Its northern tip with its relatively small but confident tip coming up, it’s obviously oblivious to the controversial formations evident across the apple’s main body. Yet Africa and Tugged Side could still be the lower end with the weird orange closely approaching deep brown, so it could be worse… nobody likes dirty looking apples and certainly not brown skinned ones. Then, as my eyes trace its contour upwards it starts getting redder, reminding you that after all this apple is one of that infamous paradise fruit descendents and passed the luscious-enough-to-sell test. Of course, there’s that aforementioned Africa bump which menaces to finish its conversion to yellow, smudging the red monopoly the moment your eyes drift away, but it’s still not too intruding and we can always see it an as exotic trait.

Comfortably fitting in my hand, it’s approximately the size of my heart, that is, if you trust those kids’ science books who say that your heart is the size of your first. Its just-out-of-the-freezer cold surface smoothly travels across the non-eloquent world of my fingers; surely its original tree is far more interesting. But alas, that’s the life of an apple… or at least this one. From tree to fabric (the apple equivalent of Venezuela’s Miss Universe training and polishing schools) where only the reddest and more American looking ones get free passage to the supermarket. Hopefully, once there someone will take it and appreciate its journey with an unapologizing bite. But wait, I have forwarded the process, there’s no point to biting my apple if I cannot appreciate its war scars; its quest shouldn’t go unnoticed. My fingers suddenly discover that, after all, the surface is not so smooth, there’s a light scrape where it may have fell or received the too enthusiastic touch of some anonymous soccer mom. Either by serendipity or some perverse quirk of fate, it’s just beside the Africa bump - who said apples were indifferent to our world?

Hawaii, the pineapple principle

As I walked from the boat to Waikiki so I could get to a bus that would get me to Hanauma Bay, I didn’t have many expectations. Well, at least not the “I can’t wait for Hawaii” types; I did have the “I can’t wait to be out of the ship” or “I can’t wait to taste some non-weird water” but then again that’s probably a general SAS ship syndrome, so I didn’t feel anything special about it. In a way, I think this lack of expectation had to do with the fact that I had way too established expectations: I imagined the colorful high buildings reaffirming that Hawaii may be in the middle of the ocean, but not in the middle of nowhere; the constant alohaing, some more genuine than others; and, of course, the aquamarine beaches dappled with a tapestry of diverse people. And I did see all of them there encarnating my conception of Hawaii, the very smiley beach paradise.
However, just after sunset, when I was about to leave, I decided to buy some snacks (yet again a symptom of the SAS syndrome). Inevitably, I went to one of the three ABC stores that were within a 5 minutes walking ratio. Once there, I was tempted to buy some Chips Ahoy! for the sake of good old times in my living room, but thought again and said: “Hey, maybe it’s better if I buy traditional stuff from Hawaii, you know, continue with the intercultural education vibe of the trip” and voila! the dry pineapples are there, colorfully screaming in plastic bags: “Hawaiian pineapple”. Immediately, I knew that I had to have them. There’s something about that phrase that seems just right, each word perfectly complements the other. We have seen Elvis Presley keenly introducing the pineapple delicatessen to foreigners in Blue Hawaii and those of more recent generations probably have encountered Johnny in the Disney Channel’s Johnny Tsunami dealing with living away from Hawaii and its pineapples. In both of them pineapples are the Thing in Hawaii; they are that incredibly fleshy fresh fruit that you could eat anywhere, but not really eaten until you get to Hawaii. So pineapples in hand I start walking towards the cashier. Yet somehow, by some weird impulse I decided to check the back of the bag to see were it actually was produced, since being from Puerto Rico I know that lots of “Porto Rican this or that” is actually made in China, and ja!, the “Hawaiian Pineapples” were not made in Hawaii, nor in China, but in Thailand. So I started looking at all things Hawaiian and found stuff from all around Asia, specially Korea, which made it feel much more like Porto Rico (that imports practically everything) than I had expected before.
I thought about Hawaii’s history and how just recently, in 1959 it became a state, just four years after Porto Rico got its current political state, defining its present relationship with the US. So I felt a personal compromise to dig into Hawaii’s intimacy even if it was only in that moment, in that chain store, via some cheap snacks. I manically scooped around all the food products determined to find something that was indeed produced in Hawaii, something whose revenue wouldn’t escape to some alternate country or even the mainland states, but stay in those islands, near those beaches I had so greedily possessed all day with my touristy activities earlier in the day. Eventually, I did find some food made in Hawaii, but they were not fruit stuff as I would have expected, but nothing more and nothing less than unassuming fried pork skins. Now allow me to translate this for you to Porto Rican because it seems almost sacrilegious to let them go by that boring English name of “fried pork skins”; I bet there’s some cool name in Hawaiian for it, but since I couldn’t find it the Porto Rican version is: CHICHARRONES... and it goes in capital letters because that’s how it feels. Because in Porto Rico chicharrones have larger than life status, well, basically anything with pork in it has larger than life status, what can I say, we are pork loving kind of people and vegetarians have a real hard time (just ask my uncle). But Chicharrones, god, it seemed like an omen or some kind of a divine sign. Especially when considering how I was determined to bring some as a gift to the Indian family I plan to stay with, but didn’t have the time to buy them before I left. I think I have never bonded so much with a country’s culinary traditions... Chicharrones. In Hawaii. Not pineapples. I got a chicharrones bag and a little something more than memories from a new land.

Intro to upcoming writtings

It has been a while, but don’t worry I’m okay, just having lots of fun and not sleeping much. I have three writing projects for you from my creative non-fiction class. The first one is the revised creative version of hawaiii and movies. The second one is called Crooked Apple and it’s the result of an exercise in class in which I struggled to describe and write about an apple in a creative and entertaining way. You know, go beyond its red, round and you give it to teachers. The last one is actually about Japan (finally), but it’s really an introduction of all I wanted to write about Japan. As things are going I don’t know if I will be able to finish it and write all I want but I certainly try. Until then you can look at it, even though it needs more polishing than the previous Hawaii, the pineapple principle.

Tifón

Para la paz mental de mi madre: ESTOY VIVA. El tifón Quen Quen (se pronuncia Chen Chen – ven, hasta clases de mandarín tienen conmigo) que se dirigía a Japón llegaba el día después de que nos tocara irnos así que lo que se hizo fue dos cosas:
1) nos fuimos lo más antes posible del puerto- 2 horas antes de lo previsto
2) se cambió la ruta del viaje y ya no vamos a ir a la costa de China sino directamente a Hong Kong.

Bien que hay un cambio de ruta, el viaje a Beijing con la Universidad de Pekín que yo tenía planificado sigue en pie, lo único que ahora serán menos días y probablemente no podré ver nada de Hong Kong porque estaré prácticamente todo el tiempo en Beijing, lo que no me hace muy feliz, pero bueno, algo es algo.

Hawaii and movies: the pineapple principle

As I walked from the ship to Waikiki so I could get to a bus that would get me to Hanauma Bay, I didn’t have much expectations that may have derived from the movies seen in class. In part, I think this had to do with the fact that I already knew in a pretty detailed way what I wanted to do in Hawaii, so my expectations were more or less set. I imagined the posh high buildings and the aquamarine beaches that I did found there. It was pretty much my conception of Hawaii, a very smiley beach paradise. Yet, late in the night when I was about to leave, there were two events which more or less relate to the movies seen in class. The first one is an expectation that I had reinforced while seeing Blue Hawaii (with Elvis Presley), even when I didn’t realized it while seeing it; this had to do with the association of Hawaii and pineapples. I say that the expectation was reinforced since I think I actually developed it with yet another “happy go lucky” movie: Johnny Tsunami, from the Disney Channel. In both of them pineapples are the Thing in Hawaii; they are that incredibly great and fresh product that you could eat anywhere, but not really eaten until you get to Hawaii. I hadn’t realized this until I got to an ABC store (they are a plague: think of Walgreens in Porto Rico) to buy some snacks and I said: “Hey, let me buy traditional stuff from Hawaii, you know, continue with the intercultural education intended for this trip” and voila! the dry pineapples are there, colorfully screaming in plastic bags: “Hawaiian pineapple”. However, by some weird impulse I decided to check the back of the bag to see were it actually was produced, since being from Puerto Rico I know that lots of “Porto Rican this or that” is actually made in China, and ja!, the “Hawaiian Pineapples” were not made in Hawaii, nor in China, but in Thailand. So I started looking at all things Hawaiian and found stuff from all around Asia, specially Korea, which made Hawaii feel much more like Porto Rico (that imports practically everything) than I had expected before. I did found some food made in Hawaii, but they were fried pork skins, let me translate this for you: CHICHARRONES!!!!... I almost die laughing, I think I have never bonded so much with a country’s culinary traditions… at least not since eating moros con cristianos in Cuba. Chicharrones. In Hawaii. Let’s just say that I bought two bags and have got the perfect snack for the rest of the trip.

The second experience relating to a movie occurred when I went to pay for my made in Hawaii food and it was the fact that the cashier spoke Japanese to all Asian looking tourists and well, all the time they were, indeed, Japanese. This brought me back to Picture Bride and the Japanese immigrants it showed. Probably without this movie I wouldn’t have expected any kind of Japanese influence in Hawaii. I knew about immigrants going to Hawaii as cheap labor because Porto Ricans were part of the group, but I had no idea about Japanese or Chinese being some of them for that matter, which shows quite a lot of ignorance from my part, since from what I could see their presence is very significant. I found it very interesting that Japanese, who started as a cheap work force, now are all around Hawaii as economically powerful tourists, so much, that lots of signs are in both English and Japanese and cashiers speak Japanese to them, making their lives easier. I don’t know much about the locals dynamics in Hawaii between its diverse population, but its interesting that people who started as poor immigrants having to accommodate to Hawaii, now are the ones for whom Hawaii has to accommodate to.

Xcountry and movies

Well, from now on you are going to be seeing a series of entries which will be titled "x country and movies" and maybe be acommpanied by some kind of subtitle. This entry are a requirement for my World Cinema class in which for each port I have to write what she has called a reaction paper, this being that we see some movies fom that country in class and then after we actually see the country we had to write about how those movies may have influnced our knowledge/expectations of the country and what other media we saw/experienced in hat country. If i think the entry may have some interesting story that this a little more personal than a typical home work i will post it here.

My classes

Tomorrow we arrive at hawaii, which is pretty much the "buy all the stuff you forgot to bring" country in my case it's just suncscreen and tons of cookies... hot chocolate is about $2 the glass so its quite expensive to buy snacks, but then again they feed us quite well so I can't complain... much. In a couple of minutes i'll have my Global Studies class, which is required for any SAS student, so I'll just post the classes I'm taking with the formal summary and a brief personal comment, which will be posted in blue.

SEMS 101 Global StudiesSubject: GeographyProfessor Richard Farkas
This interdisciplinary course focuses on the countries visited and is tailored especially to meet the global and comparative approach of Semester at Sea. It is mandatory for all students. In addition to providing basic information about the countries on the itinerary, Core also provides a meaningful framework by which to compare data, examine issues, and develop concepts. Participants learn how to understand cultural and social phenomena with which they are constantly coming into contact during the semester and to highlight both commonalities and differences from one society to another. Core equips participants with observational and analytical skills for encountering societies different from their own, and different from each other, a key factor in facilitating the integration of class work and field work for all courses. Objectives: 1) To provide basic information about the physical and cultural geography; key historical events; the current social, economic and political situation of each country visited. 2) To present regional and global issues which in various ways affect the countries on our itinerary. Examples include race relations, population, poverty, ethnic/religious conflicts, technology, and status of women, human rights, environment and globalization. 3) To emphasize the similarities and differences in the variety of human experiences and to assist students in developing the observational and analytical skills needed to draw cross-cultural comparisons. Method of evaluation based on four or five objective tests.

Now this is the class everybody has to take, the teacher is nice, he’s a good speaker but up to this moment nobody knows what the class is going to be about. Really, he keeps on talking about what kind of generation we are, supposedly we are called the Millenials. This really bothers me because he is all the time talking about “we the Americans”, “we”, “we”, “we’ and not everybody in here is American, we are a very minuscule minority but still… “we”s tends to be problematic. However I can say that I learned one thing and that is where to find, or more appropriately, see the federal express arrow. Just in case you have never seen it I’ll give you a clue: it is white. And then again since he’s giving the class to 500 hundreds students in an auditorium called the Union, it’s a great time to finish other homework while he makes silly jokes that only baby boomers could get.

SEMS 157 Writing and Reading Creative Non-FictionSubject: English WritingProfessor Tom Klein (Syllabus - 109 Kb PDF)
Variously called the new journalism or literary non-fiction, creative non-fiction is a form of writing and seeing which employs the techniques of the creative writer, the poet, the playwright and the novelist, to dramatically render a picture, a place, a person or an idea. Where standard non-fiction like explanation or exposition focuses on concepts, ideas and facts, creative non-fiction uses story, imagery, quotation, description, metaphor and the personal voice of the engaged author to bring alive an experience. We will read memoirs, journals, personal narratives and travelogues, many situated in the countries we will be visiting, by accomplished writers like Erika Warmbrunn (Where the Pavement Ends: One Woman’s Bicycle Trip), Andrew Pham (Catfish and Mandala), Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams), and Peter Hessler (River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze), examining their technique and method, and then practicing these with students’ own travel journals. Methods of evaluation include attendance, presentations, in-class exercises, occasional quizzes, and field work journals. Prerequisites: None.

This class is a little bit werid since it's given by two teachers and not any two teachers but a married couple. Up to this moment the dynamic is great and they really balance each other. Basically, although writing has always scared me a bit, I’m really exited about what I could create while taking it and anyway, for the rough times I’ll always have my Webster thesaurus near to guide me… jaja seriously I hang out with a dictionary pretty much all the time, though I haven’t used it, it gives me some kind of psychological reassurance, words are on my side kinda thing... so to each its own.

SEMS 111 Introduction to World CinemaSubject: Film StudiesProfessor Joan Mandell (Syllabus - 105 Kb PDF)
What can we learn from cinema about the countries on our itinerary? This course is an overview of aesthetic, structural and thematic aspects of films and video from each of the countries we will visit, through the study of characteristics that distinguish the cinema of these countries. Investigating the ways societies are represented on screen, students will learn about the culture of these countries and how they have influenced and been influenced by global trends in popular culture. This course will also examine productions by directors who are living in diasporic communities. Some of the topics explored in the course will be: fiction and documentary form and narrative, the ways audiences perceive meanings, broader political and social contexts for world cinema and film as medium. Students will be evaluated on their Class preparation and participation, Quizzes, A short one page response paper for each country visited, and In-depth classroom presentation on observations of the movie theater experience, and a group presentation. Suggested Pre-requisites: None.

Now this one is a great class, so much that there have been really long waiting lines of people who wanted to get in and couldn’t, but I did so JA!. We have already seen some interesting movies from Hawaii, we’ll go to a Bollywood studio in India and the teacher happens to speak Arabic fluently so she’ll be our informal guide in Egypt which is awesome. Also I happen to seat next to a girl who shares my love for anime and even though none of us speaks Japanese we are so going to see Miyozaki's newest movie on theater once we get. For those of you who have none idea of what i'm talking about, Miyozaki is like the greatest director of japanese anime continuously breaking expectation and box office records in Japan, he's has almost divine status in Japan media world. Some of his most famous movies are Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle.


SEMS 391 Great Asian Religious TraditionsSubject: History of Art and ArchitectureProfessor Larry Silver (Syllabus - 89 Kb PDF)
SAS students will encounter the two great missionary religions of Asia: first (chronologically and in sequence) Buddhism and (later) Islam. The former, which arose from a historical prophet figure (born ca. 563 BCE) in north central India, quickly spread through China and Japan, as well as the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. The latter, focused around another prophet figure (b. ca. 570 CE/AD) in the Arabian Peninsula, has grown to be most geographically far-flung of all religions, extending from the Western Mediterranean to Southeast Asia. Both competed for adherents with the indigenous religion of subcontinental India, Hinduism. We shall examine their overlaps and marked contrasts, examining the character of each religion through its art and architecture as well as the historical conflicts with the others, which still characterize their interactions today. This course will examine the principal tenets and the basic history of each religion but will also focus on the visual culture–both architecture and art–that arose to serve their communities. It will be organized both historically and geographically to encompass the wide range of diverse practices and art forms in different periods and regions. Evaluation will consist of: Two comparison papers based on shore experience and research from ship library, and a final examination of comparative essays, using basic knowledge of visual material. Suggested Pre-requisites: any course in world religions or world history.

I love this class, my love goes to such extends that I made a 2 hour line to get it, and added it even though it required me to buy 6 more books. Yet its is great it’ll be like philosophy, sociology and anthropology through art the teacher has a very interdisciplinary approach and is walking encyclopedia, i have never been so interested in Buddha and all his variations in my life. I’m pretty sure it’ll make my trips in countries far more enriching. And, he happens to take tai chi with me everymorning at 6 am on the top deck so he's really one of this cool old guys you just love to hang around.

Coommunication
To those that lost the paper I gave you, or to whom I couldn’t give the paper, here are all the postal addresses were you can write me. It costs 84cents to send me a letter and you should send it two weeks before I get to the postal address you are sending the letter. Anyway, they give you all the directions (with suggested airmail date – that is last day to send them).

http://www.semesteratsea.com/voyages/fall2006/fa2006_communicatewship.html

So you want intercultural

One big part of this experience is the meet-new-people-all-the-time ritual, you go to an orientation meeting, a class or to dinner and is more or less expected that you look out for new people and immediately introduce yourself to a total stranger just like that, or just out of the common bond of being SASers, as we are called around here. Incredible as it may seem I have participated in this activity as actively as my antisocial autistic side can handle. It can be frustrating to meet so many people whose name you’ll forget as soon as you turn your back or knowing that most of the first conversations are extremely formulaic, so feel empty of real human candor and probably nothing will develop out of it. In my very practical approach to social encounters, sometimes this poses a problem. Usually I just live my life, along the way see a couple of people that interest me, I observe and interact with them minimally for a while to see if I really want to spend time and emotions in actually getting to know them, and then the real friendship process can begin. Its kinda like a credit card, I need to check your background before anything can happen and after that you get a bigger credit as you prove yourself trustable. It a very arrogant policy because basically its all on you and I just seat there like a deluded judge but its more or less how it works out and I’m sure even the most spontaneous social person has some kind of reserve of parameter regarding how his/her identity interacts with others.
Thus the idea and practice of the standard lets-meet SAS dialog sometimes gives me trouble. Yet I suppose I can say I have actually gotten involved and accepted that a new environment requires new patterns and strategies. I have become quite good at asking questions that can drive a conversation, although in the back of my mind I still can help but feel almost caricature like out of the cliché bordering possibilities of first encounters and introductions. I have become so flexible that I’m willingly to sell my so called nationalism as my best tool for a unique touch. Willingly I tend to give predominance to an identity trait that has never been that constitutive of my persona as a whole, such as land of origin. However, the truth is that everyone wants to know where you come from, it’s always the next thing to find out/inform after saying your name. I feel weird being the Porto Rican kid around here, or at least one of the 5 Porto Rican girls, but still I do it cause there’s a perverse excitement by being the exotic object, in letting it be know loud and clear that I m not one of the hordes of Americans that constitute this American ship. I knew they would be majority, but I never expected so much of them … and so waspy looking. I never expected to create a me-them equation, it seems tribal and archaic as a social construction equation. And that’s what shocks me, I have never been much for race, either negative or positive, maybe I have lived a sheltered life, which I probably have, but I’m usually race blind in real life, I can definitely see it in media in literature and stuff like that or when something bad happens, but very rarely do I See race as in it being an issue for my everyday life activities and those around me. I know there are a lot of race and ethnic issues in Puerto Rico, I’m not completely deluded, but still I’m not used to seeing or expecting seeing whites with whites, blacks with blacks, asians with asians, etc. It just seems tribal, underdeveloped and barbaric, one things is to uphold your culture and the other is to accepts those race segregating cannons with the excuse of cultural preservation, it’s actually racist cause culture always changes, and rarely can it be considered as polluted. But hey, maybe it could be argued that I can say that because I’m in the favored group/s whatever they may be, cause they seem to change according to environment.
As part of my lets meet new people unofficial extracurricular I went to eat by myself and looked out for a table when I could seat with new people to meet. I found one right outside with a great view of the Pacific ocean and started talking with them, they were a little shy, but quite nice. They didn’t seem as impressed by my Porto Ricaness as others, but that didn’t offend me at all, so we continued eating and talking about the usual suspects (major, college, SAS trips, SAS classes) and then another girl came to seat with us. She was Chinese and that’s where the other girls became Korean and I the occidental chic. They were Asian, they spoke Korean, mandarin and Cantonese, so did much of their friends, they knew their parents language, they even jokes bout how finally some of them had found “the white people” since all of them were asian and immediately I knew I was “the white people” and had broken some silent code when seating with girls that were sitting by themselves not out of luck, but by the feeling both from within them and from without that they were different… the Great wall goes a long way. They all seemed to share a feeling of being exiled even though they were born and raised in the US and will probably marry and have 2.5 kids and a dog in a couple of years. To me they were Americans, the so called first class occidentals in globalized world theories, but for them it was quite the opposite and I was pretty soon left out, as if I couldn’t understand what it is to struggle with cultural identities, which even the waspier of wasp has to struggle with somehow. I laughed at some jokes that now I’m not so sure I had “the right” to laugh at since they involved so called asian people and behaviors. Kinda when all hell broke loose when JLO said nigger, cause heck she had been dating Diddy for a while and she really felt like niggering around, yet suddenly while dating a black man she became a racist… nice.