Day 68, 69 – Back on the ship

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

So we’re back on the ship for a short trip to Hong Kong. It’s so nice not having such a long distance between ports, this is definitely the best portion of our itinerary. The only down side to having such little time between ports is that we can’t get as prepared for the upcoming port. In these two days we only had Global Studies once, because the other day was filled with a test, and the regular two preports. So basically 3 sessions on China/Hong Kong then we’re there!

We did have enough time to find and book a hotel in Beijing, The Beijing News Plaza Hotel. It sounds like it’s a pretty nice hotel, located near Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, which exactly where we want to be. Our two preport sessions were some of the two best sessions we’ve probably had so far. We had an excellent Chinese interport student who gave us a lot of great information about Hong Kong, Beijing, and traveling throughout the country. We also have a student on the voyage who lives in China, so he gave us some additional insight. Then to top it off, we have an interport lecturer until Hawaii that has visited China 2-3 times per year for a long time, so he gave us some great information on China from a traveler prospective. I would have to say that even though we only had two days between ports, they did a great job of preparing us and giving us as much information as possible about the country.

My professor for my philosophy class was in the Vietnam war, so he took some time out of class to talk about his experience and wanted to know about our experiences while in Vietnam. To my surprise, he didn’t think that the war remnants museum was that done sided, and he wasn’t surprised by anything that he saw there because he was actually there experiencing it. He also noted to us that the guns in the shooting range at the Cu Chi tunnels were very old and didn’t really shoot straight because the barrels were corroded. So there’s a high possibility that those were the same guns that were actually used to fight against American troops during the war. I had never thought of it that way, talk about a weird feeling!