I know, I’m slower than molasses at this, but finally some updates on living on a boat!
--What the boat is made up of: Our boat has 8 decks, 2 dining halls, 9 classrooms, and 700 people. 525 of those people are students. Another 150 or so are professors, lifelong learners, or family of the two. The remaining? KIDS! The children of professors or lifelong learnes who come aboard and are homeschooled at sea…SO COOL. This voyage has 37 kids ranging from age 2 to age 17. I live on the 4th deck in an inside cabin. Inside cabins have absolutely no window, and although that didn’t sound too bad on paper, it’s really quite an adjustment. It is dark ALL the time. So waking up, no matter what time it is, absolutely sucks. We are also near the front of the boat, so we rock A LOT. The room itself is a lot bigger than I thought it would be and actually really nice. The walls and ceiling are also magnetic, which is damn freaking cool.
--Seasickness: I’m STILL seaksick. It has been 33 days and I have yet to not feel dizzy or nauseous while at sea. There have been some days where the waves were so bad that I literally couldn’t leave my room, but most of the time its just a constant state of feeling like I’m about to be really, really ill. Some people have had no problems at all, and some have been worse than me though. I’ve been using sickbands, taking seasickness medications, having sucky candies, drinking water nonstop and sitting outside looking at the ocean and nothing works. Hopefully I’ll get used to this eventually.
--Classes: Classes on Semester at Sea are NOT easy. I have more work than I have ever had in college, and this is the first time ever in my life I am not ahead on my work. In fact, I’m even a little behind but I literally do hours upon hours of work a day. It’s hard not having weekends to catch up. It’s even harder having less class periods than a typical semester at home because it just means more and more work. It’s not like I despise my classes and everything about them, though. My sociology of marriage and family class is hands down my favorite. This is my professors 4th voyage on SAS and she really knows what is up and how to keep our interests. She also comes from Cornell, and it’s so cool to be having a class taught by an Ivy-league professor. The topics are incredibly interesting and this is by far the most intriguing textbook I have ever read (I actually have to convince myself to put it down sometimes). Despite being at 8am (which is usually really 7am…see section on time changes), I really do look forward to this class. My social movement media class isn’t really what I expected and is kind of a disappointment. I don’t hate it, but it’s not the most interesting thing either. I am really exciting for he FDPs to indigenous radio stations, however. History of Modern China started out as a zombie-fest, but has gotten *slightly* better. And global studies is actually really, really enjoyable.
--Food for everyone without allergies: I’m sure I’m not the first one to say this: but the food is repetitive. The buffet line consists of iceburg lettuce, pasta, potatoes, some sort of meat, bread, peanut butter and steamed veggies virtually every lunch and dinner. Variations of this usually result in celebration and REALLY long lines. Today, for example, there were grapes! And I must have been 20 people back in line just to get some. A few days ago, we had our first taco day, a rarity but something certainly treasured, and the line was probably 25 minutes long and people were singing about tacos all down the hallways. Breakfast consists of eggs, an omlette, bacon, sausage, fruit, yogurt, French toast and danishes almost every day. The big change in breakfast is that french toast is sometimes pancakes. Nothing else has changed since day 1.
--Food for people like me: Semester at Sea is AMAZING about handling allergies. Absolutely amazing. The head waitor, Ronnie, literally makes me a special meal for both lunch and dinner every single day and brings it out to me and everyone else with allergies. My food is usually even more repetitive than even everyone else’s – but they really do take amazing care of us with allergies. Usually, I get some sort of meat, steamed veggies and some sort of potato. Sometimes, I get dessert too! They have GF cookies on the ship, as well as jello. They also have ice cream but I don’t get that because I’m lactose intolerant. Even though I eat it at home and ignore the lactose intolerant-ness, it’s on my medical records and they don’t really serve me it here. However, the food is really good and I have nothing bad to say about the way it is handled. I am so impressed with it.
There is also a piano bar on deck 6 open 24 hours a day and a snack bar on deck 7 open most of the day. The food here is for purchase, but they sell a lot of stuff to escape the repetitiveness. They sell candy bars – M&Ms, Peanut M&Ms, Reese’s, Butterfingers, Hershey Bars, Kit Kats, Skittles, Sour Skittles and Starburts, as well as some chips and granola bars. The piano bar also sells coffees and sodas while deck 7 sells smoothies, frozen yogurt, burgers and fries. It’s really good, but I’ve definitely developed a bad habit with purchasing from it.
--Navigating around a ship: This was REALLY hard for a few days, but I’ve learned my way around. But in addition to getting used to which staircase leads where, what direction is portside, what a nautical mile is compared to a land-mile the worst part is DEFINITLY the time changes. In case you haven’t guessed, we go through A LOT of time zones in the semester, and instead of just throwing us into them the moment we land, we like to adjust slowly. This makes a lot of sense, but hasn’t worked in my favor. So every other or every few days we advance an hour. So far, though, EVERY SINGLE TIME CHANGE has occurred on nights before B days. I have an 8am class on B-days (which is why I said it was really 7am above) but don’t start until 10:45 on A days, so it’s pretty aggravating that those 8am A-dayers get off so easily.
--Keeping in touch: There is a free e-mail service for students. We are given a semester at sea account and can e-mail home whenever. The file size limits are too small to send pictures, but at least we can communicate. There are also a limited number of free websites – one news site (something called Myway), a few travel sites, a few academic resources, the SAS homepage and Wikipedia (WHICH I LOVEEEEEEEE), but everything else we haven’t paid for. This may sound harsh, but you really learn to live without. In fact, I have so far used a whopping total of 0 minutes of my allotted 2 free hours.
--Facebook/Twitter/Cell Phones: I thought I would have spent 3 or 4 days in complete withdrawal, reaching for my phone for it not to be there, typing in facebook on my browser only to get a login to use my minutes page, amazed by the freedom of not having to limit my life to 140 characters, culminating in a sign of relief and liberation from being freed from addiction. But none of this has happened. I haven’t once tried to log on to faecbook. In fact, in the time in Rio when I had wifi I didn’t even use it. I didn’t care to. The only times I have missed my cell phone are when I have plans to meet someone at a certain time and can’t find them. I think to myself “I wish I could text them right now.” And that’s it. No thoughts about twitter, nothing about cell phone games. I don’t care about what new facebook notifications I might have. I don’t care about new friend requests. I don’t care about your status update. Truth is, my life is a hell of a lot more awesome than your dinner at McDonald’s with your friends. I don’t care about checking my e-mail, and I don’t care about stalking random peoples lives, mostly because mine is way more awesome. It would be a nice outlet to be able to share photographs with the people back home, but they can wait until May. The ones I really like anyway have my e-mail while on the boat. The truth is, I just live without it. I have no positive or negative feels towards being without it. It’s just not there.
--Events on the ship: I envisioned myself being so bored that I don’t know what do with myself. I pictured “I’m on a ship in the middle of the ocean and have NOTHING TO DOOOOOO.” I thought I’d read so many books, watch so many movies, even pick up a new language. In reality, I don’t have even close to enough time to do everything I want to. Homework alone takes up a whole lot of time, but there are also literally an endless amount of clubs, seminars, lectures, games, sports and classes going on that I find myself having to choose rather than have spare time. I already had to drop Salsa club due to lack of time. And I barely have time for the stuff I am participating in (which I’ll discuss below). There are also game nights, where we have had shipwide games of The Liar’s Club or Family Feud, movie nights, Jam Sessions (we currently have a Ghanaian musician on board playing each night from Brazil to Ghana), exploration seminars, language clubs and everything in between. In addition to attending various events across the ship board community, including Jam sessions, Movie Nights, Yoga, Zumba, Game Nights, Pre-ports (the two nights before docking in a country, the first one is cultural preport and is optional the one the night before is linguistal preport and is mandatory), seminars, sign making and more, I’ve joined a sign language club, a Spanish conversation group, Big Brother/Big Sister, and Extended family. For sign language, I’ve become a pro at the alphabet and some basic questions, but not much more, but even so, that could get me a long way, however slow it might take to do so. For the big brother/big sister program I have been paired with an 11 year old girl named Lindsey. Her mother is a management professor on board and I share her with her other big sister Shannon. My extended family consists of 6 students and 1 lifelong learner.
There are also random days with events at sea as well. Most recently, we celebrated Neptune Day, where we left behind the world of being polywags and became full-fledged sailors for having crossed the equator. The day consisted of being woken up by drummers walking down the hallway yelling at us to wake up, initiation ceremonies full of slime (little kid dream come true – Slime Time Live style), jumping in pools, kissing frogs, meeting King Neptune (who just happened to be our dean, who painted himself Green), and, for some (not me), shaving their heads. We also had our first global studies discussions that day, which is when the entire ship is divided into groups of around 20 to basically discuss our experiences thus far. We keep the same group the whole voyage, and met them all during orientation on day 2, so it’s a really cool way to keep a sort of constant and see how we all change together.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say at some point – but for now I have taken far too much time away from my homework than I’d like to admit.
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