Speeding toward Russia

Date: June 29, 2008
Location: The Baltic Sea
Lat: 57° 53.9N Long: 020° 2.65E

I suppose I have to make up for some lost time. It’s hard to motivate yourself to write about the same story each day at sea. Pretty much it’s been more of the same. The food’s been the same, some type of fish (maybe with some mangos on top as a treat), some pasta (maybe with a few carrots thrown in here and there), and salad (but what will the dressing be, ranch or maybe peppercorn ranch?). I suppose that comes off as a bit harsh. The food’s not bad, I don’t mind it too much, and at least I don’t complain about it all the time like some of my friends do.

Of course we have classes too, lots of class. However, at least those seem to be going really well. I got a quiz back which I got a 13/15 on. I guess it helped that the professor accepted German Soldier #1 as a character from a play we read when I drew a blank. All the same, I’ll take the grade. Also I took a quiz on the Russian economy; I think it went pretty well.

I suppose Russia’s not a very complicated to place to understand. All its problems are rooted in both location and geography. Russia lacks resources, for example, their best farm land doesn’t get any rain, yet their worst farmland, which is all acidic due to the decay of pine needles, gets buckets dumped on it. Plus the serfdom system served to make Russia unable to compete with the industrialization of Europe. Ironically, Russia used to be the big kid on the block, its troops had marched through Paris after beating back Napoleon, yet after the industrialization of Europe, Russia became a backward footnote. Since then, Russia has strived to make up ground with Europe, however, state initiated reforms from the autocrat or the strongman of the day weren’t able to really make up the ground necessary to compete. I suppose I could go on with this, but it’s a journal, not a paper.

Intramurals have started on the ship. I’m on both a basketball and volleyball team. Unfortunately both of my teams are 0-1. We’ll get back into it. However, we aren’t exactly playing in a palace of athletics. The ship’s motion obviously impacts the game, not to mention the wind speed moving down the deck makes sinking shots in basketball pretty tough. Also equipment problems linger, for example, the volleyball is atrociously flat, and this is compounded by the fact that the pump to fill up said balls is also flat. The basketball is a new one; unfortunately it’s a woman’s sized ball so it’s a bit different. At least the ball doesn’t have huge lumps in it like the balls the new one replaced. Either way, we lost.

We have a pretty long day of meetings tomorrow about Russia. There are a series of talks about both the language, logistics of getting off the ship in Russia, and other matters. They are usually real helpful to go see, plus Russians as a whole have always had something of a xenophobic fear of outsiders, which may complicate things for us. I’m really looking forward to getting off the boat again, at least there are no classes tomorrow!