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Yokohama, Japan


Day 82

I didn't make any plans for today, so I just decided to look in the travel book at the purser's desk and wander around on my own. I decided to find some coffee and breakfast  before hitting up the Yokohama Museum of Art

As I was wandering through the city, I stumbled upon a quaint cafe where I got a latte and a blueberry pastry. I could even watch the japanese people sketching on the street outside. I guess they like to do that here. 

After my little perk up, I jumped on the train and went a couple of stops to where the museum was. They have shops inside the train stations here, and I spent quite a while inside one picking out postcards and a die-cut model ship for uncle Mark. I had a leisurely walk around the block to the museum entrance, taking lots of pictures of the fall colors and a Christmas tree along the way. 

It was my lucky day because there was a Cézanne exhibit at the art museum. I doubt if I've been to one before. After looking at that, I walked directly into the more modern art exhibi
t. I was just innocently walking around, enjoying the strange art, when BAM! I had three huge Dalí paintings staring me in the face. I almost melted with pleasure. I adore Dalí, and I think I sat in front of those paintings for at least an hour. I guess that's when my stomach started to win the battle.

Outside, the perfect weather continued, and I walked a block or so over to what looked like a mall. Turned out that it was a mall, and there was a gigantic Hello Kitty store inside. That's where I ran into Kayla. She and one of her other friends (who was buying his ex-girlfriend several hundred dollars worth of Hello Kitty merch) were about to head to lunch as well, so I joined them.
We walked past an amusement park with a huge ferris wheel. You could see the ship docked from there, too. Our destination, where Kayla was meeting Kate, Katie (Hawaii) and others, was another mall, about a block away. It had an extensive food court. There was everything you wanted, like Super 88. I made sure to follow my meal with some mochi. I want to know why we can't find this stuff hardly anywhere in Boston.

I followed lunch with some shopping; there was no way I was going home to my bland wardrobe when they clearly had such great clothing here. 
Later that night, I was in Josie's room, catching up with her and Sara. We were watching the city shrink as the ship pulled out of the port. There were several other boats around as well, nothing unusual. All of a sudden, we see the top of a boat swaying back and forth right outside of the window! The waves were causing one of the fishing boats to run right into us. The three of us were screaming and scared that the little boat's tower would smack into and break the window at any second. Not that that kept us from pressing our faces up against it to see what was going on down below. The poor fishermen were doing everything they could to get away from us and being pounded by waves the whole time. I was sure one of them would be washed overboard. 

We were expecting to hear some kind of announcement to head to the muster stations, but when nothing happened, we raced up to the seventh deck to scope it out. No one up there even knew what was going on. I guess we were the only ones who saw it. 

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Lat:19° 47.6N Long: 069° 43.8W

Day 2 Wow. I thought it was crazy to have to get used to the motion of the train. But imagine if you were on a train 24/7–but it never stayed at a steady speed. The shifting of the boat feels like a train constantly speeding up and slowing down. We zig-zag through the hallways and rock to sleep at night. Today was a rather boring and exhausting day. We've been in orientation meetings from 9 am to 9:30 pm. I haven't seen Daniel since lunch. Oh well. I sat with Kellie and Kelly. Met a few more people. I just feel so worn-out from all the meetings. The boat's rocking makes me sleepy. I think the combination of those things makes it seem as though I've been on the MV Explorer for much longer than two days. Several people feel that way. But classes start tomorrow, so we can get into some regular kind of routine. Until Brazil that is. Speaking of which, I should check to see if Ricardo has emailed me back. That would be so fun if we could meet up. I went to sleep thi