The Home Stretch

Well, here we are on the home stretch of our journey. We left Croatia last night at 8:30 and are now passing along the southern coast of Sicily, which you can see faintly on the horizon. I know many of you reading this are students about to embark on the fall 2008 voyage. I will be writing an entry specifically for you soon, answering all of the questions I had before I departed along with some miscellaneous advice. It should be up within a week or so. I'd love to do it sooner, but I am inundated with schoolwork over the next few days. Everyone has a global studies essay due tomorrow - I have several papers due soon and the amount of work I have to do is intimidating, but all of us are in the same boat (no pun intended).

Some professors seem to have become quite irritated that students have all "waited until the last minute," this final stretch of classes, to do their assignments. However, many of the papers I have to write are comparative analyses of the countries we visited, and although we can select any of them to compare, I didn't want to leave out any potential relevant experiences by writing prematurely before we had been to all ports. Regardless, you have to use every last bit of time wisely when in port for the few short days you are there if you want to get the most out of it, and this requires planning. The point is that when you only have a day or two to absorb everything you learned in one country and do all of the preparing for the next, there really just isn't time to do schoolwork until the last leg of the journey when the stresses of travel planning have subsided.

Several students I know felt so overwhelmed by schoolwork they spent entire days in port not even getting off the ship because they felt pressured to finish work. While I felt the pressure too - it's sort of inevitable. It is apparent that faculty and administration as a whole are still working on finding an "appropriate" amount of schoolwork for the voyages.

Moving on, I am combining the Greece and Croatia entries since I'm on a pretty strict time budget, and since both countries were quite tourist-friendly, my experiences there (although fun and interesting) were way less "intense" than those I had in countries like Russia and Egypt.

Greece was a welcome change from the scorching heat and cultural mind-boggling-ness of Egypt. We docked in Piraeus to find that it is a modern and mostly clean port city, lined with sidewalk cafes and various shops. It is as maritime as a city can get, with about half the visible businesses having to do in some way with port industry. If you were to venture further into Piraeus, which most students did not do, you would find a shopping district with stores like Burberry and Lacoste along with many local boutiques. While I'm by no means big on shopping, the American-esque streets offered a welcome familiarity, especially after coming from the foreign bartering culture of Egypt. On the first day, I did the SAS trip to Athens and the Acropolis. It was a magnificent sight, but didn't get the credit it deserved in my memory as a whole since it was dwarfed by the pyramids and Rome which I had seen all too soon beforehand. On the second day, I took the trip to Delphi. I was glad to see Derrick and some of my other friends were there as well. Aside from our tour guide, who was so overly informative that she talked the entire three hours to Delphi, it was an awesome and almost relaxing trip. At our lunch at a restaurant near the site, we were seated with a girl named Sam. Her brother, Wes, was best friends on the ship with my good friend from Cornell, Henry, on the recent spring 08 trip. What a small SAS world!!!! On the third day of Greece, which happened to be my 22nd birthday, myself, Zach and Sam went to Aegina, the closest island where we wandered around, enjoyed some beaches and talked to some locals. We had a great time and were surprised at how reasonably priced everything was. On the last day, I got up early and headed into Athens (about a 30 minute train ride) to explore some more and get some gifts for friends back home. Many students spent the entire time in Greece on the islands- while they had a blast, I'm glad that I had a good balance of fun and historical education in a country that prides itself equally on both.

Croatia was short-lived, as we were there for 3 days instead of 4, and time flew by. We had an interesting situation there as we had to use the tender boats (lifeboats) to get from the ship to the shore and back. The ship had o stay anchored in the harbor as SAS was unable to secure a berth to dock at. Scheduling plans around the tender boats, which ran every ½ hour from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. (although not always on schedule) was really a pain, but the tender boat crew was extremely efficient. The tender boats hold 90 people each and going on them was cool at first but got very old very quickly. In addition to the 20-minute ship-to-shore boat ride, the harbor was a 45 minute walk (or 15 minute bus ride) from the old down-pretty much where everything in Dubrovnik is-so getting around was a lengthy and tiring process.

Anyways, Dubrovnik was a cool little town, but painfully touristy to the point where walking around was almost unenjoyable because of the sheer volume of people there. On the first day, I went on a random adventure with Derrick, Dan, and Lisa to find a restaurant about an hour from Dubrovnik where Dan's parents had gone a while ago. It was a beautiful bus ride and I'm glad I was able to see some "off the beaten path" areas of the country- doing this, as I've tried to do in every port, has never been less than a rewarding experience.

Friday night I missed the last tender boat, and got stranded on shore until 7 a.m. the next day with at least 20 other semester at sea students- not a fun situation to be in although I guess it makes for a good story. On Satuday, I got back to the ship shortly after 7 a.m.and was able to get a few hours of sleep. That afternoon, Sam and I walked around the old city and went to a beach to swim for a while before getting dinner out (because it was our last night EVER in port L !!). Just about every SAS student went out to an amazing outdoor beach dance club called EastWest to celebrate our last night in port. I didn't stay out too late because I was determined to catch the last tender boat back to the ship. While I don't recommend staying out until 7 a.m., no voyage would be complete without living life as the locals do and interacting with them, and in Europe, this just happens to occur really, really late. Anyways, I got on one of the later tender boats back to the ship and was able to get a reasonable amount of sleep.

On the last day, yesterday, I woke up early and headed out with 13 other students- Zach, Carrie, Andrea, Ellen, Richard, Megan, Patrick, Meredith, Chris, Anna, Sam, Alissa, and another Chris-for a kayaking trip I had set up a few days beforehand. We kayaked around the old city and then around the island of Lokrum, where we stopped to swim and explore for a while. We had an amazing time. It was physically exhausting but a great way to spend the last day in port- the scenery was incredible. I was able to get a discount for the group so it was only $30 per person- a great deal for an almost 6 hour kayak trip. I'd love to write in greater detail about my time in Greece and Croatia, but my global paper and my econ paper are already fighting for my time as is. I'll write again as soon as I can with a special entry for those of you about to embark.