Hi Folks--Thanks for your cheery welcome-home messages, which have been piling up in the INbox for a month now. Reentry has been long and vexed, and complicated by distractions like a crucial missing carton and the serial collapse of basic household items during the snowstorms. A coupla weeks were consumed by long trips with Frank, driving up the East Coast, relative by relative, and finally out to spend a surreal January week in Cozad, Nebraska with the out-laws. General result: chaos, dismay, and heaps and heaps of junk. Fortunes turned this weekend, though, the mysterious arrival of the missing carton coinciding with the arrival of our magnificent new black kitty, Thord Thunderpaws, the Prince of Chaos. He's helping me type this.

Do indulge me in some last wrap-up thoughts on my Semester at Sea. Now that my clouds have lifted, I can report with a clear head that the whole experience was fabulous, with no qualifications. Simply fabulous. The new slides have helped retrieve individual memories of people and ports and classes and excursions. But for me, the best, most memorable part of the whole experience remains the sheer joy of life at sea on our sturdy old ship. As I hear from fellow participants, I find I'm not alone in missing the ship awfully, and above all the rest. Nor am I alone in wondering just what one does for an encore. It seems absurd to go around the world under such circumstances and then go back to the Same Old Thing. Have I changed, or will I? I hope so--again, it would be absurd...-- but we'd better leave that one to sort out anon. Meanwhile:

What is it about life at sea? The astonishing beauty that surrounded us every day was much of it, but not all. There was also the Daoist satisfaction of constant, subtle change and motion. Impossibly fresh, clean air, and the benign rocking of the Mothership. The wild swings between the romantic and practical, dictated by conditions (the condoms/saltines dichotomy). Loads of rules and limits, but in all, a complete lack of BS about them. The routines were clear and necessary, and their disruptions legitimate. We were living, I realized, in Plato's Republic, an authoritarian state with the captain as Philosopher King, a role he fulfilled with panache. With a thousand people thrown together in 670 feet of floating steel for most of four months, people developed their own senses of civic responsibility. There was an unspoken ban on moralizing and petty politicking, at least amongst the faculty and senior adults with whom I was most familiar. This is not a bad way to live.

With a little bit of consciousness raising (done in no small part by our "Rainbow Room," I'm proud to say), students developed an enthusiasm for the sort of idiosyncratic behavior prompted by travel. The ship became a safe zone for bagpipe geeks, for jocks in sarongs, for dykes in love, even for t'ai chi among the graceless. As the voyage got longer and the students got looser, I'd look around and think, "They're ruined for life. Wrecked! They've tasted spicy food, they've played drums in jungle longhouses. They've met lepers and untouchables and diplomats and geniuses on three continents and found them all to be human. They've learned gamelan and Balinese dance in their spare time, and seen no television in months. None of their peers in Provo, Utah will understand their stories, or even much care. And they'll never even dare mention the sarongs." For me it brought back memories of my first year abroad, as a junior at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland; how much that year changed me, how little of it I could ever bring back and share, and how no place has ever felt entirely like "home" since then. This is all positive, of course. It's from this that the Peace Corps, academia, and all the alienated arts draw their energy. Creative discontent turns the Dao.

There are a number of other topics I wish I'd written you about during the voyage, but didn't. So here are some, necessarily retrospective but perhaps a wee bit wiser for that.

Faculty. The five-day faculty orientation at Vancouver was terrifying, of course--it was like college freshman roommate anxiety times thirty. At first encounter, the faculty seemed to represent the whole academic fruitcake: the blusterers, the whiners, fiery politicos and cookie ladies, the strange hair and sensible shoes, and administrators in silly hats. I'm shy, I'm a loner, and here were people I had to live with for the next four months--Yikes! Run away! So did I mingle, meet and begin to bond? Of course not--I rented a car and hid out at Wreck Beach whenever we got a few hours free. But as it turned out (or as I slowly came to learn when I emerged from hiding),we had the most harmonious faculty in institutional memory of the program. Much credit goes to the academic dean, who claims that his secret to faculty harmony was hiring only faculty whose resumes included experience overseas--he didn't care where--and whose references specifically mentioned a sense of humor. Another contributing factor, I'm sure, was the paucity of faculty meetings. Only one meeting turned serious, but after about half an hour of miscellaneous griping and political speech-making, the faculty came to its group senses and broke off to watch the sunset. Would that all universities were run that way, with such a clear sense of the relative importance of things.

The students were a revelation. I'd been led to expect a party cruise (much anxiety at the faculty orientation over the effect of the MTV broadcasts). Wrong! These were the best students I've ever had the pleasure of teaching--funny, creative, resourceful, smart, energetic, and just awfully good sports. Much credit in fact goes to MTV for popularizing the event last year and raising our student applicant pool to record heights. Much of this is due to self-selection, of course, and much of it due to great credentials--high minimum GPA's and lots of Stanford- Dartmouth- Michigan- NYU types. A couple of you saw that CNN Semeseter at Sea special on Christmas, and remarked on the sophistication of the students. I was surprised too, and am embarrassed to say that, since several of those reporters were students in my classes. I also learned disturbing things about West Coast students, a phenomenon I was not familiar with. They had a sort of playfulness that I'd not encountered before, and at first I mistook for a lack of application. Nope, wrong again. Our Seattle/California students were distinctly a breed apart, smart and savvy and playful in a productive way I'd like to understand better. Hmmm. The eternal teacher's lament: "Next time I'll know better! Next time I'll do it right! Please let there be a next time!"

Best food: Dim sum in Hong Kong, everywhere--a whole corner of the University dining hall devoted to it. The Nonya (Straits-Chinese) food in Malaysia--so citrusy-fresh, so unexpected in its way with familiar dishes. The stews and soups of Morocco, comfort food in the raw December rains. Meze with beer and music in Istanbul's Çiçek Pasaj, of course. And absolutely everything I ate in India--even the airplane food. Worst: Well, it seems unfair to mention the ship's cafeteria. Mostly they did pretty well, in fact, considering virtually all of our food for 100 days was loaded aboard in Vancouver. But transparent tomatoes are a grim sight. There is the matter of Japanese breakfast, a horror so complete that it grew to be funny. Y'know how most of the world's cuisines seem to support the notion that most of humanity find the same flavors tasty--salt, sweet, rich, aromatic, yeasty? Well, then there's Japanese breakfast to disprove any notion of universality. Never mind, there was always the vending machines. Most surprising: that we ate well in Cambodia at all, and without apparent ill effects. I'm still puzzling over the proper stance to take towards luxury tourism in Cambodia.

Music: Oh my...The ship was filled with music, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Bob-the-music-prof. What luck to have had him aboard! Bob was a master at making things happen. How did he manage to smuggle a Balinese dance team and shadow-puppet master aboard? The ship was filled with his gamelan classes' music every afternoon. I sat in on his "Music of India and the Middle East" class throughout the voyage, where we learned, inter alia, how to sing scales in Hindi and beat time with the rest of the audience at an Indian concert. How to sing "Usküdar"--so now I know the words to that old Turkish chestnut, no mean souvenir that.We were treated to concerts by his many closest friends in India, Turkey and Morocco, on and off ship. Most memorable: The University of Madras (that's what it said on the sign; it didn't say "Chennai") music department turned out for him, and gave us a three-hour recital of South Indian classical music, in a tiny unlit classroom that overlooked the cesspool of the Ghoom River. How could they play so beautifully, in that stench and gloom? Contrasts of high and low seemed to be the rule in India, the most extraordinary beauty competing for attention with unimaginable squalor. Other music in India: The ship greeted in Madras port by an astonishingly noisy little band of double-reeded nagaswarams and drums; fabulous sitar in Benares, the home of North Indian classical music; the blasts of temple trumpets to awake Shiva to darshan in a dusty Kanchipuram temple; the many groups of Varanasi pilgrims, chanting and playing finger cymbals, on their way to the Ganges ghats at sunrise. Other notable dockside performances: the ship steaming into Kobe harbor flanked by fireboats, the students beside themselves with excitement after the long Pacific crossing, all met at the wharf by the Kobe Firemen's Band playing Sousa marches to welcome us to Japan. Drummers and koto players, and the weird Japanese court music Bob played every day at Core until people complained. My favorite gypsy music in the Çiçek Pasaj in Istanbul, and Bob's Janissary Band buddies serenading us from the dock as we slipped out of Istanbul into the night. The Oompah band at the no-holds-barred Oktoberfest that whooped along nightly next to our ship in Hong Kong: "Let's hear it for Miss Ming of Kowloon as she tries the Alpenhorn!" The sad fiddle music that surrounded Angkor Wat, that frames all my memories of the place.

Ports: I wish I'd written y'all reports on Kobe, Hong Kong, and Penang, but now it's a little late to pretend to spontaneous reactions. All were interesting, though quite varied. I didn't have high hopes for two last-minute substitutions: Penang, Malaysia (for Indonesia), and Dubrovnik, Croatia (for Israel). In retrospect, however, Malaysia has turned out to be one of the countries that got under my skin, though I didn't realize it at the time. Malay culture is a strong flavor, as is its uneasy neighbor, the more cosmopolitan culture of Straits Chinese. So here I am learning to cook Malaysian, and I'm urging Malacca slides on friends. Much credit to Frank who has been reading up on the history of the spice trade, and insisted I see Malacca for him. I'm going to be hitting his books. Cities I've seen once now, thanks, and don't need to revisit? A very short list, consisting only of Kuala Lumpur (read: Atlanta) and Marrakesh (Palm Springs with evil touts), maybe Agra. I wouldn't mind adding Saigon, Madras, and Casablanca to that list, each problematic it its own unique way. But each is an entryway to fantastic places, so with luck I will at least pass through all three again. I won't put them on my Never-Again list along side KL and Marrakesh (and Atlanta, Indianapolis, Cheyenne, Buffalo...).

I reacted variously to familiar ports. Hong Kong I enjoyed mightily, as I had once before, but I find that it may have faded the fastest in my memory, since I didn't do anything very challenging there beyond the consumption of vast amounts of food. Been there now, done that, and I'm anxious now to see other places in southern China. On the other hand, I was surprised how much Istanbul still has the capacity to blow me away, no matter how many times I've been there. It was my emotional high point on the trip, I think, much due to the fun I had as official co-host there, introducing the city looking its very best to a shipload of people I liked, who responded so positively to their experiences in Turkey. Rome hit me oddly: Rome, not Istanbul, is the old favorite city I seem to have outgrown. Istanbul is sooooo dynamic, but Rome never seems to change much. The things I love there I will always love, but the things I hate never seem to improve, and irk me more as I grow older: the pollution, the congestion, the rudeness, the impossible inefficiency. Istanbul, always gracious, is pulling ahead in such practical matters as transportation, smog control, and machines that actually work, and at my age I'm grateful for that.

So which destination hit me hardest? Well, time will tell best. I thought it might be Cambodia, and I'm certainly looking forward to plunging into all those books on that shelf. But in fact I've spent much of the last month trying to explain what I saw in India, to myself and to anyone who will sit still to hear it. My largest group of slides were from India, and they're the ones I immediately sat down to study, label, and edit. I've been reading whatever cultural history I can find at hand on India, trying to get a handle at least on the vocabulary, if not the concepts, of Hinduism and its relationship to the social order. (Forgive my naivete, but Sanskrit vocab is a real discouragement to the beginner. Sufi and Zen concepts may be difficult to grasp too, but at least they're easy to spell.) So I'm still taking India in, still wondering when it's OK to start evaluating the experience. I don't think this is leading to any major life-change--this doesn't feel like one of my wild new enthusiasms--well, at least not yet. Granted, I found the music, the textiles, the architecture and even the foods of India ravishing, but I could say similar about SE Asia, Turkey, Morocco or Japan (breakfast aside). Rather, it bugs me, what I saw there, the extremes of beauty and its many opposites. The age, depth, complexity and beauty of the culture, and the scale of my ignorance, have me anxious to make some progress here. Uh oh--this is how I got into Byzantine architecture, y'know--I was baffled by it on first exposure. I hated it but it wouldn't go away. So I went to Istanbul to see it first-hand, and the rest is the rest of my life. Would I go back to India? Yup; top of the list. Next destination: the ancient trading ports of theMalabar coast? Any takers?

So the night before Miami was the biggest full moon in years. The big question circulating the S.A.S. faculty was: Would you do it again? There was virtual unanimity that this had been an extraordinary, positive experience. But the answers were divided down the middle: "Once is enough!" and "Tomorrow!??" garnered equal votes. My answer--"In a heartbeat!"--surprised no one. The ship's mock-news program, the night before landing, reported that "Prof. Butler has been caught trying to stow away." If only they hadn't blown my cover! Unfortunately, not only do they not have a permanent teaching staff to aspire to; they don't even allow repeats on the semester program within three-to-five years. There is also a summer program that does not require the 3-to-5 year wait, but I hear that everyone who has ever sailed happily on the SS Universe Explorer has an application in for that one. So barring another miracle, I'm grounded for a while. But yes yes yes yes yes I'd do it again and encourage anyone else to give it a whirl. Lemme know and I'll put in a good word, if I can.

Folks, I've enjoyed your comments, and appreciate the encouragement. If anyone actually read this far, well gosh, thanks for caring. This concludes your torment-by-email. Watch your mailboxes for photos of Thord Cat, and of Cozad, Nebraska--probably the most exotic place I've been in a long long time. Signing off, in beautiful Deale, Maryland----larry.

World cruise ends in Cozad, Nebraska. Photo: Frank Perry