It wasn't hard to adjust to life on board the Queen Victoria. Between the exquisite furnishings and the attentive crew, Albert and I had an easy time living in luxury. The first-class lounge and dining area were so elegant, even a real queen would have felt at home. The itinerary for our 14 days of opulence was as thrilling as the Queen herself’s voyages to her foreign protectorates.

We set sail from Singapore and arrived first at Kuala Lumpur and then at Penang. Both are in Malaysia. The only thing we knew about Malaysia was that Anna and the King of Siam lived in Penang. An image of Anna teaching the King's children was fixed in my mind; and that's how we thought Malaysia would still be.

But we were wrong. Upon our arrival in Kuala Lumpur, which is the capital of Malaysia, we were shocked to see tall cranes and modern glass buildings. The Petronas Twin Towers stand at 1,483 feet, taller than our World Trade Center towers were at 1,368 and 1,362 feet. Both the island of Penang and Kuala Lumpur boast a cosmopolitan metropolis, but there are still traces of the old culture in the temples and mosques. The reason for Malaysia's success is foreign investors, who found a country with educated people who were politically stable and religiously tolerant. The unemployment rate is less than three percent nationally, the economy is thriving and, as in the US, the biggest problem is illegal immigration.

In contrast to the magnificence of the ship and the modernism of Malaysia, India was a cultural shock to us.

After sailing on the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal for two days and being pampered on board the Queen Victoria, we reached Madras, India. As the ship docked in the wee hours of the morning, I was awakened by what I thought was a definite smell of gas. My eyes popped open, and I lay very still waiting for alarm bells to sound and send us running before a gas explosion. They never came. Instead I realized the smell was coming from outside my cabin window. Peeking out, I understood why my nose had crinkled up. Madras looked pitiful and filthy with its broken-down docks leading to dirty streets. I saw huts made from fabricated material, and people without shoes pumping water. But if I thought Madras was malodorous, I had to come to terms with the odor and filth because we still had to travel to Cochin and Mumbai, where conditions were worse.

It was Sunday, and motorcycles carried whole families along the boulevard. Women wore saris, which are full-length dresses, and long scarves around their necks and heads; the men wore jeans. It was very hot and humid, which explained the odor. When the bus we were on came to a stop at a four-story emporium selling beautiful silks, cottons and cashmere, it surprised us to see such a great contrast between the goods being sold and how poorly the people of Madras lived.

Unlike Madras, our next port of call, Cochin, was bustling with containers and cargo ships, even though the water was filled with floating garbage. Our sightseeing started at the “Mattancherry”—the Dutch Palace. Since our mission was to understand the history of India, the first lesson was on the kings and queens who had reigned in the 18th century. Cochin's royalty lived in ornately built palaces adorned with murals, maps, trophies and weapons; the royalty of Madras lived in palaces that were built like large estates; they were barely furnished and had a chilling atmosphere.

A very important part of India's history is that of the Jewish people and their synagogues. Today, there are fewer than 5,000 Jews living in all of India, when at one time there were 50 times that number. Most of the Jewish people left in 1948 to go to Israel when it became a state. The Jews first came to India from all over Europe during the wars for religious freedom. Cochin was one of the cities they settled in, in a section known as “Jew Town.” The Cochin Jews made contributions to the land of their adoption far beyond imagination. They left behind their synagogues and schools. The Pardeshi Synagogue has stood for 400 years and is still open to the very few Jews left in Cochin. It is a reminder of one of the most colorful threads that once was worked into the rich pattern of Indian Jewry. Today the spice stores and houses of Jew Town still have mezuzahs and Jewish stars on their facades.

As our luxury liner docked in Mumbai we were greeted with a somewhat different atmosphere than that of Cochin and Madras. It was still hot, it was still dirty, and it still smelled. The difference was the congestion. The swarms of people in the street felt to us like mosquitoes flying all over and attacking us from every direction, and before we realized it we were part of the horde. Cars came at us from each intersection with horns blaring while we walked among them and the un-air-conditioned buses with people hanging off the sides.

We finally made it across the street in one piece and found ourselves gawking at a building that didn't belong in all the chaos of Mumbai. It was the Victoria Terminus Railroad Station designed in 1887 in neo-Gothic flavor with flying buttresses, friezes and stained glass. Each train entering the terminal had a capacity of 2,000 but brought between 5,000 and 6,000 people to the city each morning. Packed tight like sardine cans, the trains had no more room for more people. This presented a problem for the workers and their lunch boxes. To resolve this problem, years ago, a consortium formed a company that picked up 5,000 lunch boxes from individual houses and sent them in a special train marked “lunch boxes.” When the train arrived in the city, another group picked up the boxes and took each lunch to its rightful owner by horse-drawn cart or bicycle. When lunches were finished, the boxes retraced their steps and went home, without a glitch. This phenomenon has been going on for 200 years.

Mumbai held many surprises for us, and just as we'd finished digesting the lunch box phenomenon, we witnessed firsthand how Mumbai's vast open-air laundry is conducted. At Dhobi Ghat we observed thousands of men laboring to clean the clothes of the city dwellers by physically banging the clothes against stones (“stone-washed”). Men picked up the laundry and returned it two days later after it was washed, sun-dried, and ironed, never making a mistake about which clothes belonged to whom.

As we made our way back to the Queen Victoria for lunch, we passed people cooking their lunches on the sidewalks of Mumbai while horse- and camel-drawn carts took people where they wanted to go. After our luscious meal, we ventured out to visit the Orthodox Sephardic Magen David Synagogue of Mumbai, built by Jacob Sassoon. Today it is utilized by the descendants of the original Jews who arrived 2,000 years ago. I was captivated by the little boys who attended the day school of Magen David. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself in the schoolyard of our yeshivah instead of being a million miles away from home. The only difference between these boys and ours was that only three of them were Jewish and the rest were Muslim!

After sailing on the Queen Victoria for a total of two weeks, we didn't know what to expect when we reached our final destination, Dubai. Having witnessed firsthand how the Indians and Malaysians lived, I didn't have a clue what the conditions would be in Dubai.

My anxiety was for nothing. I felt giddy from the bright, clear, clean city as we drove toward The Jeremiah Beach Hotel. The magnificent tall buildings and all the construction were incredible. There were huge condominiums and malls that boasted ice rinks and ski slopes; and the highways had seven lanes in one direction, surpassing anything we'd seen in America. We drove past The Jeremiah, which adjoined the Burj Al Arab hotel. We drove across the causeway and marveled at the hotel built on an island in the middle of the ocean. We went down underground and went through a tunnel-like hall into an area where all kinds of fish were swimming along the inner walls. Have you ever watched the Discovery Channel special about Dubai? Everything you've seen is true. We checked into The Jeremiah Beach, and the view from our balcony of the Burj Al Arab—the beaches, pools and boats—was spectacular.

Since we were physically close to the Taj Mahal, we couldn't miss it, so we just had to go back to India. Our flight from Dubai to New Delhi was three hours. When we landed it was immediately apparent that we'd left paradise and entered somewhere far below. The sights of New Delhi were disturbing. The dirt roads were bumpy with no street names or traffic lights. We shared the road with other tourist vans, a few private cars, many Tuk Tuks (three-wheeled vehicles made to transport three people, but most had eight people crammed in), scooters, bicycles, elephants, cows, horse-drawn carts, camel-drawn flatbeds, people and children.

Watching out the window during our four-hour drive to Agra and the Taj Mahal, I saw the most atrocious living conditions imaginable; it was a primitive world with people living in the street under pieces of fabric pitched like tents and in storefront homes with no doors, using tops of tables as beds. The peasant's most valued possessions were his cow and his four-wheeled cart. I kept asking, “Where are we going to sleep in this destitute country?” Our driver kept assuring me, “Miss, not to worry.”

We made a left turn in between two gates and, oh my goodness, the Oberi Hotel stood in its glory. It was the King of Siam's palace. My eyes accepted this unimaginable place in the middle of horrific conditions, but my heart ached for the people in the streets of Agra.

Being exhausted, I slept soundly only to be awakened at 5:00 am to witness sunrise at the Taj Mahal, which has seen over 400 years of sunrises and sunsets. As the sun rose above the eastern horizon, the “Taj” awakened slowly in the glow. Each of the millions of rubies, emeralds, coral and other gems sparkled as the new day began, and slowly the entire Taj was reborn again. We sat in wonder as we witnessed this phenomenon.

So, you might ask, what impact did this trip have on us? We saw the different cultures of India and Malaysia, we saw the Taj Mahal, one of the Wonders of the Medieval World, and we saw a 22nd-century city being built in Dubai. The more we travel and see the different cultures of the world, the more we appreciate and respect our culture and heritage. This trip was great, and as with each time we travel, it's good to come home.
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Francine Dweck is a community member.