Ship Time

In the spring of 1982, my father took my family and me to visit MV Doulos. I was seven at the time, and I still remember it being quite an exciting event. I didn't know until recently that Doulos only docked in the US two times in the 30-ish years it was a traveling book ship. I was there one of those times.

 

Years later I wanted to travel on one of the book ships, but the timing never seemed right. In early October, however, some colleagues and I got to go aboard and meet some of the crew, as well as shop in the bookstore. Here she is in port.

 

Two colleagues. Andrea, my apartment mate, is on the left.

It was pretty strange being on board, because the crew is international, so English and a host of other languages were being spoken. But the backdrop was the familiar rugged scenery of the capital's harbor. I kept having "Where am I?" moments.

I'm not sure that I'll ever see the harbor from this vantage point again.

Alas, I'm not sure why I didn't think to take pictures of the bookshop. Maybe because it got crazily crowded with people of many nationalities. Expats as well as nationals were there, and there were great deals on a variety of books. There were also some neat cultural displays, with crew members available to answer questions.

After we said goodbye to the ship, we hit up Dairy Queen for an ice cream fix. It was British Paul's first time in a Dairy Queen.

And to keep this post cultural, I'd like to point out that it's a current local phenomenon that people will state where they are going, in Arabic, and follow it with the English word "time," but spelled in Arabic letters. So yeah, when I travel home to the US, I would type out "Amreeka time" in Arabic. So you see that "ship time" is a sensible way to title this post.