Dr. Ihab Anwar - A Night in Barbados

Dr. Ihab Anwar

Ihab Anwar is a college student at the University of Rhode Island. He spent the entire Fall 2014 semester on board a cruise ship called the MV Explorer, as part of the Semester at Sea program.

The Semester at Sea program takes hundreds of lucky students on an around-the-world voyage intended to expose them to the complexities of the world, and prepare them for leadership roles and to be informed global citizens. The voyage lasted for 108 and visited seventeen cities in fifteen different countries.

Ihab Anwar kept a detailed diary during the trip, and is planning to use it as the basis for a paper he is obliged to write for school. The longest entries in the diary were made on his impressions of the various cities and countries he saw, such as his detailed entry about the Port of Bridgetown in Barbados, where the MV Explorer docked on November 22nd.

“A lot of Brits here,” he noted in the entry. “Barbados, or B’dos as they call it here, was a British territory up until 1966, and the UK influence is still very strong. It is the easternmost of the Caribbean island. Mr. Lodge says that vacationing Brits make up the largest number of visitors to the island every year.” Mr. Lodge is the Semester at Sea Tour Director assigned to the MV Explorer.

“The locals, who Mr. Lodge says are called Bajuns, are very friendly people,” Ihab Anwar wrote. “There is almost no crime here, and me and the other kids felt safe venturing out on our own. That is a violation of the rules, but got away with it. Jenna and I took a long walk on the beach in the afternoon, and she let me hold her hand.” Jenna is an American student he met on the MV Explorer and developed a crush on.

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