We are stuck on this boat. We were meant to arrive in port last night and be completely disembarked at 10am. It is now 3pm and we’re still 5 hours away in the middle of the sea. There is extreme fog that has stopped all boat from entering the Shanghai port. We tried twice last night and were turned away and told to float back and anchor. I heard over 700 boats were turned away…so who knows when we’ll get in. As a passenger boat we have priority, but I’m not sure what exactly that means. So I won’t be going [View Full Entry]

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January 7, 2008 23:00 Things are getting better here in the middle of the nowhere. We’ve had all of our classes now and three of them are essentially reviews of other international politics and relations courses I had at Juniata. The other class is International Political Economy and I will not enjoy a single second of it, but I know I will learn a lot and that’s what is important. Maybe I’ll even surprise myself and learn to like economics? Haha okay, who am I trying to fool…I will never enjoy economics. I’m not the only student that feels like my [View Full Entry]

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I tried to post this blog yesterday, but it was taking too long to upload the webpage. And I’ve had questions about my internet time…the 250 minutes is total for the entire trip, not per week or per leg of the voyage. So that’s just over 4 hours for 4 months. Anyway, here are my thoughts from yesterday… January 5 16:30 I woke up at 6 this morning to the sound of a helicopter. It turns out one of the crew members was sick and had to be medically evacuated to Hong Kong. They said what he had wasn’t contagious and [View Full Entry]

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We were just given our internet passwords so I’m getting on quickly and posting. As you’ll read, internet is EXPENSIVE so I won’t be on very often. If you want to contact me the best way is through email…but I won’t be able to respond for a few days because I won’t be checking it every day & when I do, I’ll just be downloading the emails and signing offline to read them. Hope everyone is well! Xo Meg January 2, 2008 23:19 It’s been a while since I’ve written. These last few days have been hectic to say the least. [View Full Entry]

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These last few days have been such a whirlwind I don’t even know where to start. I guess at the beginning is the best… My night in Dubai was miserable. I slept for probably 2 hours on the floor of the airport…not the most comfortable place in the world. I was also a little anxious because I am a 21 year old white female from America and I was in the Middle East, which is still new to me. It’s hard to be alone in any place when you’re not familiar or comfortable with their traditions or way of life, but [View Full Entry]

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Just wanted to let everyone know that I've made it half way to Hong Kong...I'm in the United Arab Emirates at the moment waiting to catch my next flight. The first 7 hours on the plane was great! They fed us a 6 course gourmet meal with ICE CREAM! We also had our selection of 500 TV shows and movies! Now if I can just find a comfortable place to sleep in this airport I will call the day a success... xo [View Full Entry]

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I have never made so many cookies in my life. I spent all of Friday baking. Now let me set the scene a little for you. Will has the smallest oven I have ever seen. It is smaller than his microwave. There is one shelf and a normal baking tray does not fit. I baked cookies on some strangely small cake pan...6 at a time. That's right folks, 16 dozen cookies, baked 6 at a time. It does in fact get better. Have you ever shopped for ingredients at a French supermarche? It is not easy. We probably spent 30 minutes [View Full Entry]

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We left early Monday morning for what should have been a 6 hour journey to Andorra’s capital, Andorra la Vella. As it turns out, online directions in Europe are just as crap as they are in America & we ended up relying on my map reading skills to get us there. Needless to say, we made some wrong turns and added a couple of hours onto our trip...The drive was lovely though. Andorra reminded me of Switzerland in that the entire trip was spent winding around snow covered mountains. We arrived in Andorra, found our hotel and grabbed some food. We [View Full Entry]

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It’s been a pretty uneventful week, as I promised. Tuesday we chopped down our poor little pathetic tree. It really is sad…it’s missing branches for about the top 2 feet of it. Will says it gives it character, so we’ll just go with that. We found a store with lots of Christmas decorations and we picked out our tinsel and beads…Will picked blue, I picked purple and we decided to throw in some silver too! We also bought some lights for around the mantle and we looked for Christmas stockings but they’re nowhere to be found. We spent the evening decorating [View Full Entry]

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It’s now Monday night in France-land and I’m curled up on the couch in front of the fire, waiting for our pork chops to be finished cooking. I’ll tell you what, this is the life. My largest responsibility in any given day is getting out of bed and showering myself. And I’m taking full advantage of it because I know in three weeks I’ll be overwhelmed with paper-writing and studying…and considering I haven’t been to a proper university in almost 2 years, I suspect it will take some getting used to! Will and I had a good weekend. Friday we ended [View Full Entry]

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