Cast Off

Or, All good ship rides begin with a boring bus ride. Day 1 on the ship (Jan 17): A 2.5-hour, 7- a.m. bus ride from the program’s headquarters hotel in San Diego took us to the rather seedy town of Ensenada, Mexico where the ship, the M.V. Exlorer, was docked. (M.V. stands for Motor Vessel, the acronym for ships registered in the Bahamas.) The most chilling sight on the ride was the border fence, which currently resembles what you used to see in Berlin, without the guard towers. To answer a question frequently asked us, supposedly, the ship couldn’t pick us up in San Diego because it had dropped off the previous semester’s passengers there and U.S. maritime law restricts the ability of some foreign-registered vessels to pick up and drop off passengers in the same port.

The registration process went very smoothly; we were in our room and reunited with our luggage by noon; our six bags traveled separately by bus from San Diego to the ship. Our first day was spent getting unpacked, going to orientation meetings, taking pictures and what promises to be one of the chief activities: getting to know our fellow passengers. More on that soon.

A couple of housekeeping notes here: While we have free 24-hour Internet access, that is less than it sounds. The ship has somewhat limited bandwidth, so we might be limited in the pictures we can send, at least initially until we get it worked out how much we can compress them with available software. If you can’t understand that previous sentence, tough, I don’t have the space or time to explain it further. For the same reason of limited bandwidth, these entries of text are being typed in a word processing program and then downloaded, so I can’t always see what I’ve already written and might repeat myself -- more useless pap, but it can’t be helped. At least we Lifelong Learners (paying old coots) are luckier than the students who have time limits on their Internet time before they have to start paying (No lingering over Facebook.)

Back to the people: There are about 583 students aboard, 23 Lifelong Learners, 78 faculty and staff and some of their families -- so there are some small children aboard -- and about 200 crew members. The LLs, who we have had the most interaction with at present, are a varied lot, including an 88-year-old from Salt Lake City who still kayaks, a retired dentist from Seattle, some Canadians, a 26-year-old currently unemployed who decided to do something fun while waiting out the economy, a homeopath from Denver and a psychopath from Canby (me, not Luana). One thing that seems to link them all is they are an amazingly well-traveled group, having been to about every corner of the earth collectively. We haven’t met too many students yet, although Luana met one from Western Oregon University who is good friends with a guy who played rugby with Larry in high school and is now in the Marines (6 degrees of separation). Luana also went to a literature class this morning taught by a professor from Linfield who got his doctorate from UofO. There are supposedly two UofO students and a PSU student on board, but we haven’t met them yet.

The students, too are a diverse lot, from 224 different universities, and they have an average GPA of 3.3, although many don‘t seem that smart, but that‘s probably an old coot prejudice speaking. The courses that are taught are social science, art and music courses, and all are linked in some way or another to the countries we are visiting. There are 85 different courses, and they are taught almost every day while at sea. We old folks are free to audit any of them. Luana and I both went to a class today on Chinese-American relations taught by two professors -- one from the U.S. and one from China. They offered some interesting and different perspectives that they will be elaborating on in coming weeks before we visit China.

On the first day, we heard some welcoming speeches and had a preview of the one course that all students must take, called Global Studies, that will try to provide some links to all the countries we visited. In that session, we learned the 10 most populous countries in the world. In order, they are China, India, U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia and Japan. Counting the U.S., we’ll be visiting five of those, making up about 40 percent of the world’s population of 6.8 billion people. That sounds crowded, but all I can see is water.