Departure, Tokyo
May 2nd, 2002
At the time it looked HUGE to us, much bigger than we were expecting. A few weeks down the road we passed by
some REAL cruise ships which made ours look like a Ford Fiesta. Nonetheless, it was an impressive first
encounter with our new home.
So we streamed on and threw ribbons back at the port and had ourselves a glass of champagne. There was lots of free beer left over too, so leave it to the scroungy foreign English teachers to hang around ''til every last drop was gone.
It was a pretty mad sensation,
sailing off and knowing you were going to be on this boat for over three months, doing
a full circle of the world, and not even really knowing anyone on it yet. We'd had a couple of days of training together
and the free beer was helping us, but still you never knew. I was wary that the whole thing was going to be full of
uber-happy peace nuts singing "Where have all the flowers gone?" every night. (That song did crop up later in the cruise,
but luckily all the singers were put in an empty room and left there.)
We had a few days to adjust before the real work started, though we were told to start thinking generally about a three month curriculum for the English course. That's the kind of instruction that begs you to procrastinate, so I spent my first few days adjusting to the boat and meeting a lot of people for the first time - not even future students yet, there were quite a few other foreigners on board and we were naturally brought together in the hopes that we could be of assistance to each other.
The first new face of the first day came after lunch as I was just getting into the fruit buffet. I think I was at a long table with an Australian guy Paul (R.I.P.) who was in charge of foreign guest care. He wasn't the new face, though we'd only met once or twice before. A man with a criminal red rat's tail hanging off the back of his head (but who am I to judge) and one or two toenails painted, came over and sat with us. He was no stranger to Paul it or PeaceBoat it seems, and I was introduced to Alan, "the man who single-handedly made New Zealand a nuclear-free country." These were Paul's words, and admittedly Alan denied such a lofty claim, but he was to prove quite a "character" throughout the cruise. In fact he may have been one of the ones singing "Where have all the flowers gone" later on. Considering my first acquaintance, it's not surprising I was worried about the peace-freak/sane-person ratio on board.
Well, it's just as well that I can't remember each individual introduction after that, but I do know that the International Students were among the first of all the people that we got to know. I mentioned the International Student program in the main PeaceBoat introduction. A few students from conflict countries (or countries which had experienced conflict relatively recently) were selected to come onboard for about two months and do a lot of workshops and other activities with each other and with the rest of us passengers ignorant of the depth of any of these conflicts.
I can't say who I met first, but a few random early memories are still floating around in my mind. Yazan, an incredibly upbeat guy from Palestine, was giggling wildly while he videoed around three hundred people (99% Japanese) trying on their lifejackets in the same room and trying not to fall over as the boat rocked gently.
Next, Itay from Israel. He struck me as being exceptionally cool (meaning easygoing rather than stand-offish), maybe because I'd recently spent a month in Thailand in an Israeli-ridden resort, where the all seemed to be stuck-up macho raver-tourists on military leave. I'm really thankful he disproved my brand-new prejudice.
On the first night at sea, you couldn't miss Jonny from Northern Ireland (the Protestant representative) - either too young or uninclined to drink, yet madly falling around the deck (yes, we could sit and play outside all night, with the sea visible and audible on three sides!) bar offering peanuts to everyone. This guy was being so nice I suspected him of being another peace freak, but he turned out to be as cynical as me in that respect at least, but he was just an irrepressibly positive person. Jenny was the Catholic half of the Northern Ireland pair. She would have had her work cut out to stand out more than Jonny, but she was also a truly lovely person too. From the start it was clear that there wasn't much conflict to be resolved between those two at least. Now I was starting to wonder if they'd faked some kind of conflict involvememt to get onboard! Of course not everyone is thinking on such a low and conniving level as me, and it turns out they were completely legitimate of course.
That leaves Sonja and Sandra, a Serbian and a Bosnian respectively. (I know I may be labelling ethnicity wrongly here - even after learning an awful lot from these two and others, I still tend to use handy general labels that make sense in my head at least). I don't have an exact memory of our first meeting, but I'm sure it was at the very same Neptune Bar - the circular rear deck with the panoramic view of the sea, ahem.
PEACEBOAT HIGHLIGHTS:
37th Cruise
>DepartureShanghai, China
Danang, Vietnam
Singapore
Male, Maldives
Safaga, Egypt
Suez Canal
Port Said, Egypt
Athens, Greece
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Tripoli, Libya
Bilbao, Spain
London, England
Amsterdam, Holland
Oslo, Norway
Fjords, Norway
Belfast, N. Ireland
Azores, Portugal
Havana, Cuba
Acajutla, El Salvador
Acapulco, Mexico
Vancouver, Canada
Petropavlovsk, Russia
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