We’re on seas rough enough so that even the folks on the faculty and staff who’ve sailed before are faltering: a number of classes and other events were cancelled or postponed yesterday, and there were a lot of empty seats at meals. I had my worst stretch on Sunday afternoon, but a prescribed patch seemed to restore me; I’ve since continued to find it hard to sit here at my computer and type, and the drowsiness that I thought of as temporarily resulting from sleep lost to the ship’s rocking and vibrating now seems to me a steady side effect of the patch. People have been good humored about it all, as far as I can tell, and some folks—ranging from very small children, to some students, to the elderly—seem utterly unaffected, aside from everyone’s having to do a more dramatic version of the weaving drunken-looking dance as we move around the ship. Global Studies, the course all the students are required to take, which meets in the big Union room, was, for the first time, broadcast to the ship’s cabins yesterday out of sympathy to students who weren’t going to get beyond those cabins. I sat there in person—the class is always interesting, thanks to our splendid instructor for it, Alex Nalbach—and so got to hear it punctuated by an enormous slap each time the front of the hull, right under the Union, slapped down hard after a big wave. The crew seem entirely unmoved and in control, and they’re nice not to snicker at us. The ship’s doctor has medicine he can prescribe, and I’m not sure anyone knows for sure, when things get better, whether we’ve found our sea legs or just found the right dose.
These inevitable challenges of life at sea follow a wonderful visit to Brazil. Some folks left for flights to Rio soon after we docked in Manaus; most of the rest of us undertook various sorts of visits to the Amazon—day trips, overnight trips, even evening trips in search of caymans—and explored the astoundingly energetic city. I’ve never seen a city that was so evidently in the process of being reclaimed by nature: the jungle surges up through streets, wrecking the sidewalk, and seems to begin displacing any building that falls even briefly into disuse. And the teeming jungle is simply astonishing. Our two days’ sailing back down its brown (or yellow, as folks in Brazil seem to say) waters was more thrilling for the fact of our all having had a closer look at what we could see more distantly from the ship. Our rocking began almost immediately upon those waters’ turning dark blue again, the sea.
We were joined in Manaus by a Ghanain musician, Sheriff Ghale, who is tasked with helping connect Brazil and West Africa for us through performance (and whose first session drew a big and happy overflow crowd into the piano lounge, but who has succumbed a bit to the common illness since), and a Ghanaian student. Our students continue to get rave reviews from faculty and staff: fewer behavior problems or late arrivals for the ship’s departure, and more attendance at and engagement with academic programs (again, prior to the rocking) than the veteran administrators recall from previous voyages. Once we get past the worst of this weather, we should be able to take advantage of the long stretch—still most of a week—prior to our arrival in Ghana so that classes can get into their rhythms (not quite established before Brazil, by which time classes had only met three times each, with even those meetings interrupted by our visit to Dominica).
I should mention that following upon the example of the Spring ’11 voyage, we had the Super Bowl telecast in the Union and on the ship’s cabins Sunday night. I watched the first half with my family in our cabin and the second half in my office. It was a little strange to see the car ads and such from on the ocean. There’s a lot that doesn’t count out here, a lot else that does.
Victor Luftig, Academic Dean, Spring 2012 Voyage of Semester at Sea
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