I am officially ahead of home by twelve hours and counting! I have hit the half way mark and it is the strangest feeling in the world. It is completely surreal to think that the sun that I just watched set is the same sun that you are all waking up to right now. We have a week of sailing and classes between Mauritius and India. The first two days we hit really rough seas. A lot of people were really sick and some classes were getting cancelled because even the teachers couldn’t make it. I think I probably slept completely through the first two and a half post-Mauritius days back at sea. Everybody was completely out of it, I felt like there should have been a fume leak or something funny in our water to explain why we were all such zombies. In general it seemed that if you weren’t sea sick, you were still recovering from the lack of sleep/intense sunburn/heavy partying/greasy Mauritian Chinese food. I have never seen the shipboard community so lifeless. By the third day however, I woke up to the calmest seas I have I seen in my life. The ocean literally looks like glass, it is unreal, eerie even. I feel like it looks more like an endlessly clear lake than the ocean. It has been so much better for those poor sea sick souls, and things are finally getting back to normal. We had a karaoke night a couple days ago and it was a ridiculous amount of fun. I mean, who needs a pub night when you can sing karaoke?
Sea Olympics…
Yesterday was one of the biggest events aboard the Explorer…the Sea Olympics! I knew that the Olympics would be fun, but I wasn’t expecting everyone to get as into it as they did. People went all out for their teams...there were cheers and banners and body paint and that craziness. Each sea (aka the hallway you live on) competed in a series of events scheduled all day long. Even the senior passengers formed a team and competed with us. Events ranged from limbo and board games, to big hair and chubby bunny contests. My two favorite events had to the synchronized swimming competition and the lip syncing/karaoke contest. People were so funny and so creative, I was really impressed. I was laughing until it hurt. There were no classes all day so people were able to just go from event to event, competing and cheering each other on. The winning sea will get to be the first to get off the ship in San Diego (I’ve been told that it is a long and grueling process). I live in the Arabian Sea and unfortunately we got second or third to last place in the closing ceremonies. Oh well, maybe next time. We all had a lot of fun with the whole thing and I am determined to stay on this ship as long as possible anyway. The hotel director surprised us and decided to throw us another barbeque that evening. The barbeques here are just amazing…props to the crew for making it such a special day for us all.
Now that the Olympics are over, it is back to classes and napping…and more classes and napping. My friends and I stayed up really late one night and watched Titanic. It was really strange watching Titanic sink while feeling the ship rock back and forth underneath us, seeing nothing but water outside the window. Needless to say, I’ll never be able to watch that movie the same way again. On a completely unrelated note, it has been excruciatingly hot and humid lately. I can hardly stand to even be outside (and I’m from Arizona!), which makes the ship seem all the more small. I have been told that it is going to be really hot in India, but I hope that it is not like this. We have begun the process of conserving water as we do not have clean access to any for awhile. This means that there will soon be times where the water will be shut off and laundry days will be few and far between. My sea has a laundry day tomorrow and I am pretty much washing everything I own now while I have the chance. Each day the dean’s memo has been filled with more and more facts and warnings about health issues and concerns that we need to be aware of. I feel the build-up to our next port is intensifying by the day. We have been learning a lot about India and its culture in global studies. I am getting more and more excited to get there. It is probably one of the countries that I was most excited about visiting. I have been warned that it is going to be an extremely live changing and humbling experience. I am going on my first major overnight SAS sponsored trip in India. We are going to Varanasi (the most ancient and sacred Hindu city in the world), Delhi (the capital), and Agra (to see the Taj Mahal). The global studies teachers said that he could only pick one major trip to go on during this voyage and mine was the one he chose. I just know that it is going to be amazing. I’ll post more details and my India itinerary before we port!
Today’s Quote: “The future of humankind is increasingly a race between education and catastrophe.”
Status Report:
04 degrees Latitude0
71 degrees Longitude
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