Alas, there’s not much to talk about for today, as we mostly stayed on the ship. A big chunk of the passengers were off on an all-day safari from 5:30 AM and lots of others had shorter excursions like we had yesterday. This meant that we pretty much had a very quiet ship and we took advantage of it - like heading down to the spa and soaking in that massive hot tub for awhile with nobody else in it. Nice! (photo courtesy of Viking, they obviously don’t allow cameras in the spa)

We headed down off the ship to the vendors set up on the dock to see if there might be something of interest there. Ended up each getting a hat and Rob got a shirt. The pressure sales culture here is brutal. It’s like walking the gauntlet. As you walk through the area, each vendor will put on a big smile and say, “please look at my items, very nice” and if you indicate that you’re not interested, the facial expressions change and you get a glimpse of desperation and you feel like shit for not buying something. I know that the poverty here is extreme and that makes it even harder.
That said, I also saw on several occasions yesterday that people would be going about their day, happy and smiling and whatnot, but as soon as they saw a line of tourists heading back to the bus, they were suddenly very sad and holding out their hands like Oliver.

After seeing that happen multiple times, it would’ve been easy to harden my heart and shut out my feelings, but then I’m reminded of where I am and maybe it isn’t just an act after all. How can you know?

Our guide said that there are public and private schools in Kenya. Those who can afford it send their kids to private schools because the education there is much better. He said that a private school student in grade three has roughly the same amount of school knowledge as a public school student in grade nine.

Lesson learned (pun intended). If you trash the public schools so that only those with money can get a proper education, then those without means will never be able to pull themselves out of their situation. As of this writing, the billionaire US president has just signed an executive order to abolish the US Department of Education. I hope that at some point in the future, someone might read that sentence and be doubtful that it’s true, because it’s so incredibly evil as to not be believable. And yet, here we are. Here’s a reminder of what that looks like, for the people still wearing red hats:

I briefly considered taking the shuttle into town and having a look around, but Mombasa is simply not safe unless you are in a group, so we stuck with the little tent vendors on the dock and we also poked into the Duty Free shop, where I found this:

It’s made from Kenyan ingredients by a Kenyan company in Nairobi and part of the proceeds go to Kenyan charities. Nice.
Also: hii ni ladha! (Swahili for ‘this is delicious!’)
It’s mostly tiny Ruffles-like potato chips, plus some nuts and seeds and whatnot. I’ve seen chilli-lime flavoured things before, but never chilli-lemon. Not that it matters, since I can’t taste the lemon at all, but the chilli flavour is there in spades. Rob says it’s too spicy for him, but I went back and got three more bags.

One other things I did, taking advantage of the mostly-empty ship, was to look at all the photos in all the hallways. They’re very large black/white photos from cities all over the world. I took note of the cities to see how many of them I’ve been to.

There are 38 cities represented in the photos, some of which I’d never heard of. I’ve been to 15 of them. I feel very lucky and blessed.
One of the photos, however, made me sad:

That’s a chair swing ride seen from underneath and a piece of roller coaster track, also seen from below. I looked at the nameplate and it said, “Stockholm”. Oof. Punch in the gut. Stockholm has an absolutely amazing amusement park called Gröna Lund that opened in 1883. No, that’s not a typo. It’s tiny, but they stack their rides on top of, over, under, and through each other like no other park on earth. I mean, look at this joyous mess!

Thanks to my friend Marlon for the photo. The blue coaster in that tangled mess is Jetline, instantly recognizable in the Viking photo due to the track style. That style of coaster track was only ever built by Anton Schwarzkopf, and the only Schwarzkopf coaster at Gröna Lund is Jetline. Or, more accurately was Jetline. It’s no longer there, removed last year. I really loved that coaster. That’s an understatement.

I’ve been to Gröna Lund twice. I rode the other coasters there once or twice. I rode Jetline at least 40 times. By today’s standards, it wasn’t particularly fast or steep or scary. It didn’t go upside-down. But Anton Schwarzkopf is my favourite coaster designer by far and Jetline was my favourite of the 31 Schwarzkopf coasters I’ve ridden. Le sigh.

…and yes I’m completely aware of how trivial this sounds compared to stories of abject poverty and educational barriers mentioned earlier, but loss is loss and grief hits hard regardless of the comparative frivolity of the subject matter.

Anyway.

We had dinner at the main restaurant, where I liked the Asian Beef Salad so much, I had a second one. I know that some of you will be upset if there isn’t at least one food picture in these posts, so here you go:

Then it was off to a lecture - this one about time. The presenter did a pretty good job, considering he only had an hour to work with. He brought up several concepts that could easily warrant hour-long lectures on their own, but as an overview, it was just fine. This post has gone on plenty long enough already, so I won’t share the easy-to-understand explanation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that I read in an amazing book called About Time many years ago. Maybe I’ll save that for another sea day later.

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