Semester at Sea Fall
2006 Voyage 
- Home Page
- My Biography
- Shipboard Interview
- Japan: They are
Japanese, not Esenapaj, you Nacirema!
- Vietnam: A War, Not a Country
- Burma: Oppressed by
Too Much Talk of Oppression
- India:
Transnationalizing Marriage
- Egypt: True Wealth
of Knowledge
- Turkey: Serendipity
in Istanbul
- Croatia: It's a Small World After
All
- Multisited Ethnography Project: It's a Small World After All
- Open Letter
100
Days to See More
By Robbieana Leung
The metal exit door
from
the
cafeteria to the deck is extremely heavy and I slam my body against it,
in
hopes that the momentum will help me loosen its grip. Once I exit, I
enter an
entire new world. My pupils immediately shrink as a full blow of white
light
pours into my eyes. My jacket sheds itself against the heat. My heart
calms at
the relaxing, melodic caving of the waves. Amidst a sea of people on
lounge
chairs, a handful tan while others look rather ridiculous as they
attempt to
read with eyes completely closed. As I continue to climb my way up the
stairs
with the worst sea legs ever, a group of three catches my eye.
The moment my head is
level with the
floor of deck seven, the girl sitting upright on her chair beams at me
and
says, “Hi Robbie! What’s up!” Ahh…my friend, and yet, my victim to this
paper.
I tell this Kele Pickler double about the interview I must conduct and
ask her
if she would like to be my interviewee. In her delicate Southern
accent, she
agrees and signs the paper. At first she allows me to use her real
name, but
being influenced by her male counterparts, sitting on either side of
her, she
adopts the name, “Seamoor Butts.”. Not only is this a sly name, but a
rather
fitting one, with respect to her major, Marine Biology…and…lets just
say, her hobbies.
Rather,
her daring and somewhat illegal hobbies. Inviting me to sit down, she
offers me
her attention, pausing her talks with her two goofball friends – one
floating
in and out of consciousness and the other having a very productive day
with the
complicated task of moving his ID card from his nose to his forehead,
to other
parts of his face every couple of seconds. Occasionally we are
interrupted by
him, to aid him with the question, “Where shall I put my ID card next?”
Seamoor
tells him in between his sunglasses.
Laughing and showing
off
her pearly
whites, Seamoor tells me of her love for marine biology, which has
warmed her
heart for twenty years. In particular, she loves dolphins because not
only are
they cute, but incredibly smart as well. She enjoys the SAS privelge of
sitting
above open ocean, which she hopes will soon reward her with the
sighting wild
dolphins. Miss. Butts tells me that she thoroughly enjoys this unique
college experience,
which she first heard about from a friend who had gone on the voyage
two years
ago. As she listened to her friend enthusiastically chatter about SAS,
she
found being deterred by her original study abroad plans in Australia,
thinking
instead “Why go to one country when you can do ten?” Seamoor, having
never left
the continental United States, marvels that in only 100 days, she will
be
traveling all over the world, and to a multitude of countrise that her
auntie
took a lifetime to go to. Moreover, she praises another advantage of
SAS –
saving financially on travel expenses, as going to each individual
country by
plane own her own would cost expontentially more.
When asked what she
thought of
While Seamoor misses
her
mother, gets
occasionally seasick and is uncertain whether she will get housing when
she
returns back to