As time went by, with new friends made, tidbits of cranky crew or bizarre passengers, whether true or false, time to time to break the seadays' monotony gave me plentiful sources for story at least for the use of future. Horny females from Housekeeping or Spa self drunk in the crew bar, some gay officer's calculated and phony concern over his underlings, undertows of physical desire intermingled with alcohol and sensual dancing, frantically stirred up their already wobbling psychological well-being. Hailing from a relatively conservative East China village, though the concept of sexual revolution and the flamboyant Hollywood blockbusters have disintegrated the traditional sexual mores of the post-1980s generation in China, those promiscuous still looked alien through my eyes. But it would make sense if I see it from an anthropologist's view that most crew members spending half of their life alone onboard except having marriage and babies during their two-month vacation each year, the buttoned-down world values could easily snap in their mind. Well, I just quietly observed their desperate spree and recorded it.

The only experience for me to exult in the bar when a camouflage party or masquerade was held there ended up dancing wildly with a femme fatale who turned out to be a lesbian in the aftermath. Most of the time I even eschewed company in an effort to concentrate on learning in consideration of extra self-control needed to be cultivate to compensate my frail fortitude that I may be yielding to that kind of depraved jamboree, but that doesn't mean I am edgy or scrappy, actually I was bobbly before I became a seaman, and I was yet easy-going enough to have a group of cronies. Late night a small coterie of Fillipino galley utilities gathered together to cook their Southeast Asian food under the Executive chef's acquiesce, and I would certainly be invited to sample their sharpened culinary skills as we all worked till midnight.

From Greece, our ship sailed east to Turkey, then across the Black sea to Ukraine, where my tooth was pulled off and some lack-skilled seamen went to embrace the feminine bosom from rutabaga-like street whores. After one-day stopover, we turned back toward the other end the sea.

Venice, the magnificent Italian watery town, is also a remarkable point in my itinerary. In April when UK's air traffic control service announced no flights were allowed in UK airspace in fear of the staggering plumes of ash belched from the notorious Eyjafjallajokull would cause engine damage, we happened to be in Venice enjoying this unrelieved news disrupting millions people's travel plans. As the flight restrictions advanced, passengers from U.S supposed to arrive Venice to embark being stranded at home, the ship's occupancy hit unprecedented low to less than 50% in months since it came all the way from Africa last winter. For that reason ship protracted its stay in Venice to 5 days in order to wait for the passengers who in turn failed the management in the end. I hence got an additional one meal off which meant I can indulging myself for a whole afternoon to travel this fascinating canal city.

I have to unabashedly admitted that before I came here first time, I had been perplexed over the taste of the water in its canals for long time. In fact Venice is a city built on the archipelago of 121 islets among which there are move than 400 canals comprising the Venetian Lagoon which is filled with a mixture of salt water and fresh, called"brackish". Compared with the islands of Greece, the sky of venice often seems a bit of fogginess and mistiness due to the large acreage of waterspace as what I ponder. But that doesn't dismiss its enchanting beauty at all, and in return such brumous weather adds a kind of occult charm like being in the movie of Harry Port to the city especially when you see the bronze Moors striking the bell on the platform of the Clock Tower adorning the skyline of this ancient metropolis. Many people come to Venice shuddered by its drastically high population density-4826 inh./sq. Km( provided by Europe-Cities.com)-a date reflective of a undelighful fact that they are not coming here for sight-seeing, but for people-seeing while on a optimistic view, it also re-emphasizes its popularity as long as you make it to shirk the peak season to visit. As we can see the planet ever-shrinking and the population ever-dense , I even met a close-cropped Chinese in the middle age who was on a business trip from my hometown the city of Qingdao. Alas, what an exhilarating experience it was to see my fellow-townsman on a foreign land!

The Iceland volcano finally relented its fury by MayDay after it had brought the tension between the world's airline companies and UK government to boil over. Shortly it came to the news that Barcelona City Hall launched a campaign aimed at urging people to put up proper attire on the street instead of just being covered by some pathetic shreds like bikini and the corrida aficionados fiercely debated with a group of animal rights activists in its parliament which later proved to be a cruel defeat for the bull-fighting lovers that the ban was passed. Bythe time when we docked this Catalunya city, neither busty brunettes in exposing clothes nor any sign of the feat of matador did I see. Only the famous Las Ramblas Boulevard congested with jugglers, painters, performing artists even Chinese wearing ancient imperial robe hyping up tourists for photos rattled around the air of the bustling city. Oops, another mind-boggling invitation from a robust Indian crew spurred me agian- as we were about to stay there overnight, he suggested that we went out to watch the mid-night free erotic show in one of the city's scattered sex shops." Aha, it sounds pretty arresting! But I would be too tired after we finished our work, besides we have to get up early." I replied and thanked the thought.

The ship didn't get to Lisboa unitl July, but the Pope have winded up his 4 day visit to Potugal by May 14, having drawn up to 500,000 bedraggled pilgrims to attend the open air mass in front of the shrine of Fatima subsequent to the Roman Catholic Church grappled with the newest of a spate of priest paedophile scandal since 1980s in the trend of the increasing secularism.

The breakdown of the traditional codes, bursted out first from baby boomers of 1960s in America, swept up swiftly across the Atlantic to every corner of the earth, the whole gamut of the hidden desire repressed for thousand years in the numbra of human mind enraptured and took advantage of the ongoing civil rights movements. Even socialist country like China and Catholic Spain and Potugal were not immune. At worse, drug dealers, like the student-like young man I was encountered in a plaza right next to the Pacha University of Ibiza, who tried to tout me marijuana in his satchel before I rebuffed, seeps through every rift of every one's moral defense.

When China is beleaguered by the rest of the world over its human rights issues, I don't how the activists consider their world inundated with such iniquity. Yet in China, at least through my personal experience, most ordinary people are well partitioned from the forefront of those vile scene by the authority's vise-like suppression on the crime. Maybe the answer wallowed in the cliche of the cultural difference that in the West, you need to learn the kaleidoscopic society by yourself, resist all and sundry lure from everywhere because all the people enjoy supreme freedom including the malefactors, and in China quite vice versa.

Turning back from the Gibraltar, since no pirates harassment in the Mediterranean, the passengers' revelry seems never to be ended, but I have retreated back to the homefront how long my compatriots onboard can continue to profit from the difference in exchange rate as the world economic powers are bracing themselves to force yuan to rise while, at the same time, I am unemployed, uninsured but well-educated throughout the nearly six-month-journey of what I can't liken to pure purgatory, but is like a road of pilgrimage, tough and rewardable