calm

We have had, knock on wood, calm seas for a bit now: their sunny, flat beauty is a lovely luxury.  There is, accordingly, something of a routine to our regular class days by now too—we have passed, or are passing, through midterms, and people are getting a clearer sense of where we all are, academically and otherwise.  By tomorrow the run-up to arrival in the next port will begin in earnest, but really it has already begun, because two “interport students” from India have been with us since Mauritius.  They were just here in my office to talk about their role in tomorrow’s cultural pre-port briefing (our ritual for our second night before any port), and when I asked them what they might say about how Semester at Sea has struck them, they took great delight in celebrating the openness of American students.  For just a second I was able, for one of the rare times on this voyage, to remember myself at 20 and to recall how the English and Irish students I met then would comment on our American “openness,” our splendid self-serving naïve Yankee gab. 

 

There is also, I confess, a little shadow over this sequence of the voyage, occasioned by some bad behavior during our brief stay in Mauritius.  But that is being processed in a steady, deliberate way, and there is reason to hope that it will have been only an unhappy exception.

 

The best ‘the-dog-at-my-homework’ excuse I have ever received came about 15 months ago, when I was having to pester all the faculty on our voyage to submit their syllabi for approval by the relevant UVA departments.  One among them, Rob Thomas, an astonishingly accomplished professor from Montana-Western, explained that he was about to leave for Nepal to train sherpa guides in geology; he’d be on or near Mt. Everest for some weeks and wouldn’t have an internet connection—could his syllabus be a little late?  Well, yes.  He’ll be lecturing about his experience in Nepal in the Union tonight after dinner.