Spring 2012
The Spring 2012 Voyage Says Goodbye
This semester’s 570 students disembarked this week in San Diego, heading out towards their futures with an international and interconnected outlook on life. The 108th voyage of Semester at Sea has officially come to an end after 105 days, 12 countries, and 25,000 nautical miles around the world.
The 6th Deck Museum of Art
Semester at Sea offers students classes in nearly every discipline, including art. Using the world as a classroom, students soaked up inspiration from the Amazon River to the Singapore Zoo and brought it all back to the canvas, crafting pieces with the steady hand only an art class on a gently rocking ship can supply. [...]
Pulitzer-Prize Winning Poet Joins S12 Faculty
The Spring 2012 voyage brought together a host of incredible faculty members on-board the MV Explorer including Paul Muldoon, the distinguished poetry editor at The New Yorker and recipient of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Muldoon, currently a professor of poetry at Princeton University, is teaching multiple courses on poetry this semester, introducing his [...]
Work of the World
Travel isn’t sight-seeing. Travel is experiencing. The Spring 2012 itinerary brought students to dozens of cities on 4 different continents in order to see firsthand how life takes place around the world–where people live, what they eat, how they get around, and–most importantly–where they work. From the endless activity of Shanghai to the sleepy slopes [...]
Student Photos – Japan
Konnichiwa from Japan, the final foreign country on the Spring 2012 itinerary. Students set out to soak in as much of Japan as possible, taking the transportation of tomorrow to the temples of the past, singing karaoke in Kobe, learning the geology of Mt. Fuji, catching a baseball game in Yokohama, attending traditional tea ceremonies, [...]
Student Story: Sailing Down the Amazon
Will Haddad, a cinema major from McDaniel College, cut this video of footage from his riverboat trip on the Amazon earlier this semester. Students spent 3 days and 2 nights sailing upriver from Manaus to the Rio Negro, exploring the rainforest by day and sleeping in swaying hammocks on the riverboat each night. “I [...]
Meditation Appreciation
Students in World Prayer class visited Kamakura, a former seat of power in the Shogun Era, to spend an afternoon understanding the essentials of Zen meditation at the 676-year-old Chōju-ji Temple. The World Prayer class is actually an English class, wherein students collect prayers from around the world and comparatively analyze them from a context [...]
Student Story: Tsukiji Fish Market
Tokyo’s Tsukiji neighborhood is home to the world’s largest fish market, which pushes upwards of $5.5 billion worth of seafood each year. Jeremy Zelikovic (Chapman University), Mary Whit Danielson (University of Georgia), and Geoff Allen (University of Arizona) stopped at the Tsukiji Fish Market at 3:30am to see the famous fish auctions that kick-start every [...]
Wabi-Sabi Tea Time
The British break for tea time, Indians commune over chai, but Japan takes the simple process of drinking tea to an art form. While in Japan, students in Anthropology of Food traveled to a quiet tree-shrouded temple in Kyoto, the former imperial capitol, to see how complex tea can be.
Throughout the semester, anthropology students have [...]
Modern China
Eshley Spitzer, from Indiana Universiy – Bloomington, has been writing weekly columns about her Semester at Sea experience for her campus newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student. Read her impression of China below.
For me, China was a land of contrast.
I found myself surprised by everything from the local delicacies of bagged chicken feet, the friendly locals [...]