China

Hong Kong
Synopsis (I wrote this part while I was there):
It’s 11:46pm (or 23:46 as we say in ship-world) on a Tuesday evening and the Causeway on Hong Kong Island is illuminated like a hazy spring afternoon. Shops and cafes still host a flow of patrons as hawkers try to book every other passerby for a 1am foot massage or candle ear wax cleaning. I am enamored by this city where the Asian East meets the European West…

More details than you ever wanted to know:
After bidding the ship farewell on 2 January at eye-level with the top deck (it had been docked at a harbor shopping mall with a rooftop car park/garage – incredible location!), I was left to reflect upon two years of my life at The Scholar Ship. It has been a long journey that has ultimately ended on an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding note. I asked myself and others several times throughout this voyage (and also since I have returned); what is fulfillment? The answers have varied and the ponderings deep, and yet the answer for me is enveloped by the pursuit of God’s will in my life in every moment of each day. The real questions then become, how does that exhibit itself, what does that mean, and how do you know His will? Just as one must look to his or her own personal journeys (and personal relationship with God aka Biggie) to essentially answer these questions, I have looked at my own. A year ago I returned from IndiaAfrica. He allowed me to go on the voyage to prepare me for interacting and serving the people of Zambia, and to teach me a new dimension of what it means to love. I came to understand that my entire life journey is to better comprehend, internalize, and embrace the various dimensions of love through each encounter, experience, and life chapter. And as God is love, I come to better know Him, and His daily will for me.

With my e-ticket confirmation in hand, a weeks stay in London ahead, and four months in Lusaka, Zambia on the horizon, I know that I am walking the path that He has intended for me, today I am fulfilled.

Shanghai
Synopsis:
Shanghai was a conglomeration of trying to understand communism as it currently exists, encountering a culture unlike any I had previously experienced, and probing how business functions in this cultural, political and historical context. Not to mention some of the most amusing bargaining I have ever engaged in (the rule was start ridiculously low – they say 600, you say 40, and settle somewhere around 130 – it was so fantastic!), a tour of the BAO steel and GM factories, and my very first massage of my life (back aromatherapy, I can see why they’re addictive!).