August 10, 2007
Last night we went up on the top deck and watched the ship (you get chastised referring to it as a "boat") slowly move out of the Corinto harbor. Evidently a local captain guides the boat, I mean ship, out through the channel, then a tug boat comes along side and the captain jumps, literally, into the tug and goes home. According to someone deckside, this is the method both coming and going, in all of the dockings on the trip. An announcement came on at about ten this morning giving our longitude and latitude and the nautical info (we were 150-some nautical miles from Nicaragua) and that the ship had so far logged some 8,000 miles going down and back up the western shores of the Americas.

Everyone loves Kathy on the ship and I get big smiles from all the students (300) and faculty. The ship is a floating city. Kathy treated me to a massage, a facial and a haircut this afternoon in the Wellness Center. Very nice.

Attended Spanish class and a class on Mayan civilization from three, count 'em, professors, one visiting the ship, from Guatamala, our next port.

By the way, tell the state department, we talked to quite a few people in Nicaragua, and all but one were quite critical of Daniel Ortega. And the one who was positive talked so fast we couldn't tell if he was hedging or what. The people of Nicaragua are quite charming and resilient and they will do fine.

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostilities."
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow