The united states of America is famous for it’s military equipments, especially in navy. CA has the largest navy base in America. To day UCEX arranged us to visit the Maritime Museum, it took us a whole morning to finish the 3 main ships, more exactly, one of them is a submarine.
The most famous one is called the Star of India, with the original name of Euterpe. She is the world’s oldest active ship. Built in 1863 on the Ilse of man. It is a rather large ship that I have ever seen. We saw the deck, the galley, anchors, cabins and many other things on the ship, because there are more than 3 floors, we had to go up and downstairs to see the whole parts.
The smell is terrible because the ship had experienced so many years. The beds are so small which can show the people several hundreds years ago didn’t have the larger size today’s people have. They didn’t have bathrooms as we have today, the only opportunity to take a bath is when it rains, the passengers went out of the ship, took off their shirts and take a shower. The restrooms are also very simple, just like the restrooms in some of the rural areas in China.
Certainly it is hard for the captain to know the correct directions that time, for there were no GPS(global positioning system ), no cable, no internet, but they managed well.
The submarine is not very large, but it’s hard for us to get in, for the gates on it are all very small round caves, we had to squat and then get into the next part of it.
The 3rd one is HMS. SURPRISE, it is a replica of an 18th century Royal Navy frigate. It was used in the movie Master and Commander: the Far Side of the world starring Russell Crowe. Because we didn’t have enough time to visit her in detail, it just took us about 5 minutes to have a very brief look.
It took the school buses about 40 minutes to get back, in the afternoon we had an exam to decide what kinds of courses we should choose according to our English level.