Final Thoughts--May 25, 2010

BRADENTON, FLORIDA--Tuesday, May 25, 2010

We agreed that we should summarize our final thoughts about going around the world. We also need to ask any of you who are reading this blog to comment on our trip because our travel agent has asked us to speak to the agency's clients about the world cruise. What should we tell them?

Whenever friends and family members asked us what the trip was like, we told them that we should look in a thesaurus for all the synonyms for fantastic, wonderful, unbelievable, incredible and any other superlative that means fabulous. We would highly recommend the trip to anyone. Now, if you think that you are not destined to take a trip such as this, you should know about a man that we met early on the trip. He said that several years before he had received a brochure from Princess Cruises outlining their exotic voyages, which he promptly threw in the wastepaper basket because these trips were not for him and his wife. At 3 a.m. the next morning, he woke up realizing that these were vacations that they should take and redeemed the brochure from the trash. They went to China on a Princess cruise and then took every other trip listed in the brochure, culminating with the 2010 world cruise. Maybe you are more like him and his wife than you know.

A trip such as this was a great leveler of people. No one cared what your profession was now or before you retired. No one cared how big your bank account was, and they only commiserated with you on how much your stock accounts had plummeted. We were sure that some of our fellow travelers would be considered very wealthy but many were similar to people in your own social circles.

This trip was really something for Sara who never flew in an airplane until she was 20, never ventured off the North American continent until she was in her early 30s on her honeymoon and never traveled to Europe until she was in her 40s on a business trip. Ken had spent a semester abroad in college in London. One of Sara's most memorable trips when she was young was when her parents took her friend Peggy and her on a bus trip to the New York's World Fair in 1964. Her favorite ride was It's a Small World and that was one of the major lessons that we learned on this trip.

Wherever we went, it seemed that people were concerned about the same things. They wanted to live a good life, and they wanted their children to live a good life. They loved their children, their parents, their family members and their friends and wanted the best for them. That was even true in the ancient civilizations, and the lost cities of Petra and Pompeii. Maybe those people did not have the technological advances that we enjoy today but their lives were more similar to ours than they were different.

We also were concerned about the Ugly American image about which we had always heard. Would we be considered Ugly Americans? Judith, the speaker on the Pacific Princess whose expertise was the Middle East, taught us some valuable lessons about this, which proved to be true in the countries that we visited and were helpful in understanding who Americans are in the world and why. People in other countries did not hate us, but rather they envied us and looked to the United States for leadership. They were heartbroken that we had not lived up to our potential. In the United States, every person counted. In most other countries, human dignity was reserved for only the ruling class. While there were the elite, everyone else was desperately poor. In the United States, we have, or had, a large middle class that could make a difference. We need to use this advantage that every individual counts more in our place in the world.

As Americans, we had been warm and welcoming to individual visitors from other countries but we really did not like foreigners in general. We wanted everyone to be just like us. We do not have a choice about living in a multi-integrated world so we have to be open to a globalized culture. What we must do is accept their cultures, even if we do not approve or like them. It is in the best interest of ourselves and our country that we try to understand different ways of life.

In many countries, we saw overwhelming signs of poverty but we needed to see over them. In Rabaul, Papau New Guinea, the citizens were still recovering from the effects of the volcano eruption in 1994. We were told that the volcano only stopped spitting ash in December of last year. Until then, the residents walked around with ash all over their clothing. The people were not demanding, and their needs were simple. They did not know or seem to want what they did not have. In Mumbia, India, we saw some of the poorest people in the world in the largest slum in Asia who lived their entire lives in an assigned caste system based largely on the decisions and actions these people made in their past lives. Yet industries existed there, and the slum was one of the most productive areas in the city. The people we encountered in these places seemed genuinely happy.

In the People's Republic of China, we were amazed how our tour guides referred to the Government as almost a third parent, on an equal ranking of importance to their lives as their father and mother. While we would much rather live in a democracy, or even a monarchy, than in a communist country, our guides and the people that we met there seemed to be very content.

Seeing how women were treated in the Middle Eastern countries that practiced Islam was the disturbing. We were upset when we saw women who had their faces covered because we thought that those coverings dismissed them as human beings. However, we were assured by women tour guides in the Middle East that females could do anything and everything. We did not really know if the women were happy because we were never given the opportunity to speak to any of them alone but the men seemed to enjoy looking the foreign females up and down in our modest though distinctly Western dress (shoulders and knees covered, and no plunging necklines).

What was the most difficult thing to take was how people in other countries interpreted history differently than we did. When we visited the Hanoi Hilton, we were told by our tour guide how horribly the French had treated the Vietnamese prisoners during the war between the two countries and how graciously the Vietnamese treated the American prisoners during the Vietnam War by catering to their comfort with games, parties on the weekends and church services. We think that John McCain and other POWs would beg to differ. At the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, we were led to believe the the residents of that Japanese city were quietly minding their own business when the American aggressors bombed the city. In fact, Japan seemed to be rewriting history by stating that the United States government was mainly responsible for World War II. Does the date of December 7, 1941, mean anything? But we must remember that the lesson to be learned was that we do not have to like or accept what we saw or heard but we must try to understand it.

While trying to understand other countries and their residents, we learned another important lesson on the cruise we will try to implement in our daily lives at home. We need to be nicer to ourselves and each other. Being members of the Baby Boomer generation, we were born to parents who met and married during or after World War II and lived through the Great Depression. We were led by our parents to believe that we were not rich enough, smart enough or good enough. We always thought that someone out there was better than we were. On the cruise, our every want and need was catered to by a crew that wanted us to "escape completely," Princess Cruises tag line. For 107 days, we became a family. In our daily lives, we need to stop putting ourselves down and give ourselves the leeway that we have readily given to others.

Now we are trying to get back to what was our normal lives. We have tackled grocery shopping but still have to confront other tasks in the not-too-distant future, such as cleaning the house (thanks to the wonderful condition in which our terrific house sitters left our home, we were given a blessed reprieve), taking care of necessary repairs to our house and cars (the fan in our family room died and the hard disk on our computer crashed) and filing our income taxes for last year (we have an extension until October).

Whenever we have gone shopping in Bradenton, we have found ourselves spending a considerable amount of time just marveling at all the new, and old, products that were offered and found ourselves wanting to buy them all, whether we needed them or not. After shopping in foreign stores with limited choices, we found the variety and diversity of items offered both overwhelming and fascinating.

One of the first things Sara did after we returned home was to take the artwork we had collected to a framing store. Two of the pieces deserved special mats and frames and would be ready in a week. However, the map that the ship commissioned of our voyage, which needed only to be dry mounted and placed in an off-the-shelf frame, was ready the next day. When Sara went to pick it up, the framing specialist removed it from the brown paper wrapping to show her. As she turned it right side up for Sara to inspect, she proudly proclaimed, "Ta-da!" Sara joined her in her enthusiasm with a chorus of "Ta-da! Ta-da! Ta-da!" It was definitely a "ta-da" moment.

We all have had many bad moments in our lives in which we suffered and wallowed in self pity. But we also have had many "ta-da" moments that we may not have even realized and that we did not rejoice in. Our goal in the future is to revel in as many "ta-da" moments as possible. Our wish for you is that you find many "ta-da" moments in your lives and enjoy all of them to the maximum.

TA-DA!