2/25 5PM PT
we are going up the saigon river right now to ho chi minh city, so we should be there within the hour!!! There are 3 different groups for the cambodia trip i am going on and i am in A, so we are leaving like right when we get off the boat. We will spend 2 or 3 days there and then come back to ho chi minh for the last 2 days. The china email is taking me a lot longer than expected because there is sooo much to tell!
Love
Em


From: Emily Smullin at Semester at sea
Date: February 24, 2010 3:50:42 PM PST

it is getting really warm!!! I layed out on the top deck for a little bit yesterday. It's super humid though!!! I will try to write my full report about china later today!!!

On Feb 24, 2010, at 12:43 AM, Emily Smullin at Semester at sea wrote:
About the Chinese New Year...it was really cool to be there during it!!! They did fireworks constantly allday and all night!!!! I didn't get to see the big dragons though that they walk around underneath, which i was kinda bummed about! It's hard to know how much different china is when its not the New Year because we were only there to see what it is like during it.

We just arrived back at the ship in Kobe about an hour ago. After my field trip to the gender and equality center in Yokohama, i headed to Tokyo to meet my friends. I had to take the train from Yokohama to tokyo by myself, which doesn't seem like a big deal, but when nothing is in english and no phone in case i got lost was a very nerve-racking experience!!!!! However, i ended up making it just fine, so that was a great start to the trip!!! Once i met up with everyone, my friend chris from school who has been living in Tokyo for the whole year took us out to this very traditional japanese restaurant and then to the Rappongi district to go clubbing!!!! We got up very early the next morning and went to the fish market, which was an awesome experience (definately worth getting up early for!!!!) Then my friend chris took us on a huge tour of tokyo. We went to the government building that looks over the entire city, some shrine, the central park of tokyo (cant remember the real name), all these crazy shopping areas. It was extremely nice of him to show us all around because it would have been very difficult on our own!!! He also took us to the Park Hyatt Hotel for drinks. It is like the top 8th best hotels in the world and it was where lost in translation was filmed so that was pretty cool to see!! The next morning we headed to Kyoto on the bullet train and stayed there for the night. Today in Kyoto we went to some more shrines, the golden pavilion, and some others, but you will see pictures of it because i took a ton!!! Then we took the train back to Kobe to meet the ship and that's where i am now!!! I never thought that i would be soo excited to get back on the ship, but these past 4 days have been amazing, but exhausting!!!! We don't actually depart from Kobe until tomorrow evening, so we will go out in kobe tonight and check it out more during the day tomorrow!!! We just decided that we would sleep on the ship tonight because it's convenient and saves some money!!!!!

Love
Em

Feb 2
Hey!!!
I was just going to email you!!! I am sitting outside on the top deck right now doing some reading for class tomorrow. Today is our day off from class, so it's nice to get a break. This morning we had our CU group picture, i guess they are taking pics of all the schools that are represented on the ship. Later this afternoon we are going on a bridge tour, so we get to see where the captains steer the boat and all that stuff, which should be pretty cool!!! Classes have been good, I had my first exam and it went pretty well. It was only 20 questions. The weather has been nice, but it is getting colder each day!!! Today is the first day that it has been too cold to lie out in swimsuits!!!! We did have a dance last night and we went to it!!! Everyone dressed up in crazy outfits, it was surprisingly a lot more fun than i would have expected it to be!!!! Friends are good!!! It's weird because all the Boulder kids really do stick together!!! Not to say that i haven't met tons of people, but it is nice to have close friends from your own school!!!! There is a group of six of us that always stick together especially while we travel. When we post pics you will see who they all are!!! We are going to be crossing the international date line sometime tonight i think because we are completely losing february 3rd!!!! Today is the 2nd and tomorrow will be the 4th, it's really weird how that whole thing works!!!!! Anyway, i am getting very anxious to get to Japan, but in the mean time we are finding ways to entertain ourselves on the ship!!!!

o and also we had to fill out all the immigration forms for all the countries, which was a ton of paperwork to do all at once, but at least we got it all out of the way now!!!!

Love
Em