The First Long Transit

After one day on the seas of the Caribbean Sea, we entered the waters of the Atlantic. A lot of people think they know where the seas are roughest (I think I’ve heard everywhere except the Indian Ocean, so I guess that place must be a sheet of glass to sail on.) The Atlantic has got a bit more of a kick to it. We started the day doing a fair bit of rolling back and forth. It was worse than the gentle stuff of the Caribbean, but by no means was it that bad. We’d been off the ship long enough to develop our land legs back, so it was another adjustment period where you feel every roll back and forth, and have difficulty concentrating on what you’re doing as a result.

The first class I had this morning was the Global Studies course, which we have everyday we’re at sea. I think this is our fourth class or something like that, and I can’t say that I’m liking it more with every day. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. It kind of gets tougher to stay awake in each class and the material really doesn’t seem to be what I’d call engaging. Granted, the information is usually about the port that we’re heading to, but that’s not a standard, and today we had a lovely stroll down Boring Lane. I can’t even remember what we did, and we have our first exam in the class the day before we arrive in Brazil.

It’s starting to sink in with us that we’re going to be at sea for a whole week, and we’re just going to have to go along with it because there’s not much else we can do but try to stay up on our classes and stay awake. And this isn’t even the middle of the ocean yet, we’re hugging the coast of South America for the most part. If something happens, we can make a right turn and arrive at land sooner rather than later. If something happens in the transit between Salvador and Cape Town, there’s nowhere to go but onward.

This was also the first time we had our classes after the first day, something that most people call the second day of classes, even if it is our third overall, it’s our first second A day – if that makes any sense at all. It makes sense to me, and if it doesn’t to you, then there’s not a whole lot that I can do about that. That’s as simple as I can make it.

When we’re at sea, the days aren’t always as eventful, so these posts at sea aren’t going to be as lengthy, thrilling, and make you as jealous as such things as when I talk about something like the Bioluminescent Bay, or when I come back and talk about my four days in the Amazon rainforest (that will be…well it hasn’t happened yet, so I don’t want to preemptively use a word that I might later find inappropriate).

The big event of the day was that we had our second batch of Sea Meetings in the evening. Ours was fifteen minutes long, which was apparently much shorter than all the others. I’m not going to complain, though, because it was so boring, and all my friends are located in other Seas, not that I’m not trying to meet people in my own sea, I am, it’s just that’s where the cards fell. It’s a long trip.

And that was Sunday. As I said, not a whole lot happened. Uneventful means that nobody fell overboard. That would slow us down on our trip because we would have to go back and pick them up.

But then the first of what will probably be twenty total tragedies struck – we had to turn our clocks forward an hour Sunday night. We’re going to have to do that twenty times this trip (four US time zones excluded) and then make up all that time with an extra day of classes April 30. We will wake up on April 30, go to classes, go to bed, then wake up again the next morning and it will still be April 30, and we will have another day of classes. That’s the international date line crossing. It kills all of us that these hours that we lose in the middle of the night are only going to come back around to haunt us in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Every time I mention the date or the day of the week, I have to look it up because I generally don’t know. It’s like some kind of time warp. Speaking of time warps, there is something wrong in my stateroom. My clock will jump ahead an average of six to ten minutes everyday. And it’s not just my alarm clock, which I’ve had for at least ten years, it’s the roommate’s alarm clock, too. They both jump ahead the same amount of time, and I don’t know when it happens. It’s not a constant jump daily either. Some days it moves faster than others. But the watch I have and the clock on the computer are keeping time fine, and they’re both in and out the room. I don’t know what’s happening, and it won’t stop, and I don’t know how to fix it. So as a result, I have to adjust the clock before I go to bed, to make sure that I don’t wake up unnecessarily early. Because who wants that?

B Days are usually better than A days because on B days I have to read for my A day classes, which is less reading than my other classes. So I have a little more time to do things like update my blog and send Emails out and use up my precious internet minutes uploading my blog and downloading my new Emails, which is always disappointing when there’s only one or two, because I don’t get one every day. That means you just have to wait longer to hear back from me.

Monday afternoon had something going on that I discovered in the previous day’s Dean’s Memo. The Dean’s Memo is the way that information about the next day or so is dispatched throughout the ship. The problem is that it’s a small stack of papers that is not nearly enough for even one-hundred people, and you can’t find them in the same spot. For some reason, they’re always in some place new, so it’s like a scavenger hunt on the ship to find out information, which to me seems wrong and unnecessary. But that’s just my opinion.

Because of the lack of advertising, which was probably done somewhat on purpose, the turnout in the cafeteria could have been much, much larger considering the ship that we are on. Archbishop Desmond Tutu made himself available for autographs and other things of a signing order. I said to myself, “Self, I have a biography of Desmond Tutu, why don’t I have him sign it?” So I did. Like always however, I jumped on line when it was at its longest, so I had to wait ten or fifteen minutes or so, but I can’t complain about that. I’m sure some people have waited much longer than that to just see Tutu.

As I’ve said before, days at sea are not always the most eventful of days, so as nothing major was planned for the evening, it was a relatively quiet night. Oh no, wait, I’m wrong, the alcoholic beverage service was in full swing. I almost forgot the people knocking on my door while I was trying to sleep. How silly of me.

Anyway, the next day, we all started to realize that there was a certain degree of monotony associated with days at sea. Also, as the days start to intermingle with one another, somehow time passes quicker and we couldn’t figure out how it was Tuesday already and we were one day closer to reaching Salvador.

Then tragedy struck again, they came over the PA and announced that we would be losing another hour in the middle of the night. After the lethargy that we experienced after one twenty-three hour day, nobody was in any mood to do it again. At least not so soon, after all, we just did it. I have no problem adjusting to the time change. If you tell me to move my clock forward or back an hour, it’s magically going to happen and I’ll still go to bed at the same time my clock says. That’s fine with me. However, after a while of losing hours, it catches up with you and you have to cope with catching naps, which is actually easier said than done, at least for me. I’m always up and about doing something.

Before I go on, a word about the PA system. It’s the same guy that comes over the announcements to give the…announcements. He does a noontime position report, which is usually closer to 1300 hours, and 5 o’clock announcements that are always after 6. That’s just one thing that bothers me. The guy that does the announcements is the Assistant Academic Dean, we think. And he loves taking odd pauses in the middle of the announcements at weird times. And nonpurposely saying things like, “Attention announcements, we have some short announcements today.” As a result, he is always referred to as ‘the voice.’

In completely unrelated news, they serve us fish with just about every meal. And most of them I’ve never heard of (who knew a wahoo was a fish?) But, I have started eating it, and most of it is pretty good, until today. We noticed that as the bananas begin to get rotten, chilled banana soup appears, and subsequently banana cake. In the same pattern as they run out of fish, and have leftovers from the fish cooking process, they make fish cakes. Most of the fish hardly has a fishy taste to it. The fish take was one big fishy taste. It was horrendous and everybody knew it. It looked tasty, but appearances can be deceiving.

Wednesday morning (this would be Valentine’s Day) brought some good news. Of the eleven trips I had signed up for earlier in the week, I secured ten of them, and the one I didn’t was the one I thought I wouldn’t get. I’ll tell you the big trips upcoming and you’ll hear about all of them as they happen. I have a day trip to Kancheepuram and Mamallapuram in India, a few days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the trip I’m second most excited about this trip (Amazon is #1) I was able to hop on the Beijing/Xi’an trip. It’s a relief to know that I’ll get to see the Great Wall and the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an. I’d been talking about that one for a while, so it was good to know I hadn’t talked myself into heartache.

Over the past few days, the voice has randomly announced that there were going to be tours of the bridge (where you drive the ship). There were already two days of tours, which consist of three tours of fifteen people each, and it is on a first come, first serve basis. The sign-up is in the Purser’s Square, and a line of twenty people had arrived there before the announcements were finished. This is a mad dash unlike anything I’ve ever seen. So, when the announcement came on in the afternoon, I quickly jumped up from my seat at the rear of the ship and raced two-thrids of the way to Purser’s Square. I was there before the announcements finished and was at least the fifteenth person on line. There was only one or two times I could do the tour, so I was hoping they wouldn’t fill up by the time I got there. They allow the lifelong learners to get a head start on signing up because otherwise they’d never see the bridge. I was the second to last spot on the first tour, and there were only four other openings in all the tours when I left. Oh, it’s intense alright.

In the evening, I had a meeting of the Ambassador’s Club. There are three parts to this club, and I’ll briefly discuss them before entering into my involvement, but not now. That will have to wait.

Thursday morning, we were greeted with an odd announcement. After just turning our clocks forward an hour, tonight, we would be able to send them back an hour because we were moving west enough to go back into the previous time zone. Which begs the question as to why we moved the clock in the first place. Supposedly in the event of an emergency and we had to head to land, we don’t want to have to switch the clocks on the way there, or something to that extent. It makes sense, so that’s what I’m going to go with. Largely because I don’t have anything better to replace that idea with.

Then I got to go on my bridge tour. The tour was scheduled to be twenty minutes, which I guess is all you need to sufficiently tour a forty foot long corridor. A crew member came down and picked us up and walked us over to the bridge. For some reason we have to go through the Student Life Office to get there, but I’m sure there’s some kind of artificial logic behind that.

The bridge looked like a bridge. It was nothing state of the art, blow my mind away type of stuff. And the officer that was giving the tour apparently nicked his face or scratched it because we was bleeding at quite a generous pace. Someone else had to keep supplying him with fresh tissues. Needless to say, it distracted me a bit from the finer points of the tour – only a little bit though. Did you know that they have a whole collection of flags up there? You’d think they would keep them somewhere else where they wouldn’t be so ‘in the way.’ I mean, you really don’t need those everyday. It would give them more space for fun things like buttons, lights, and switches.

All in all, the first part of the tour was on the boring side, until the Captain walked in. Everyone wants to talk to the Captain, largely because he’s the Captain, and he has a British accent, which, as I stated in a previous post, never actually gets tiring to hear.

After the tour, we were allowed to take photos with the Captain’s hat in the Captain’s chair, which seems to indicate to me that those are two things that are either not used very often, or not very important. Then a small line started to form next to the Captain where people were taking photos with him, apparently not entirely within his will.

Then, God bless them, two of the lifelong learners stated interrogating the Captain about the ship and his personal life. If this were any of the students, the Captain probably wouldn’t have gone into as much detail, and stood there for every single question, but, and I can see why, I think he felt like he couldn’t leave the lifelong learners. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but I’m positive that a reason exists. What was supposed to be a twenty minute tour lasted almost an hour – and it was great.

Later in the afternoon, I had a Vicarious Voyagers meeting to send off our stuff from Puerto Rico that we collected. The Vicarious Voyagers program is basically a connection back to schools back in the states. Everyone gets put into a group of two or three people and assigned a classroom from your part of the country, or near where you go to school. I partnered with Amanda from Long Island, and the school is also somewhere on Long Island, in the western part. I’ve never heard of it. She has.

So we spent the better part of an hour compiling the pamphlets, information and miscellaneous items that we collected in Puerto Rico and sealed it up with a letter to the fifth and sixth grade class that we had jus finished writing. I found it quite difficult to put my mind back into that age group and figure out what interests they have at that age. I said I like SpongeBob, and I’m going to hope that that’s still close to their age group.

Later in the evening, we had our cultural pre-port, which is a mandatory meeting occurring two days before we reach each port. It occurs the night before the cautionary logistical pre-port, which is the safety doom and gloom stuff. That’s why they get the fun cultural stuff out of the way first. I couldn’t exactly hear the entire thing because we were in one of the satellite rooms watching on a television screen. The professors clearly had something to drink with dinner because what initially looked like amateur night quickly progressed into cable access. The dean running it had a goofy hat on and the repartee between the other professors only became evident when the one sober professor came up to the podium to talk about their topic. It was bizarrely entertaining and an almost incomprehensible way.

After the cultural pre-port, the ship attempted to study. Every student has the global studies exam the following morning, and every student waited to begin preparing, as is par for the course. Something that I’ve learned very well is that any time that is devoted to group studying should be considered social time because zero studying is accomplished. Group studying is useless and it’s only imposed as a method of procrastination. I took this into account and after the 10 o’clock snack, I went down the room to review my notes for the exam. I knew that we were gaining an hour in the night, which I planned to use for sleep instead of studying because staying up for 8 am classes is difficult enough as it is for everyone on the ship already.

I felt prepared enough when I went to bed. I always have a sporadic, inconsistent first exam score because I’m unfamiliar with how the exam is going to work. Once I know that the scores go up considerably for me. I knew going into it that I’d probably be surprised here and there, which is inherent within a multiple choice exam, as it only tests what you don’t know. So, I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it.

You would think that having an extra hour of sleep that I would feel a whole hour better. That’s partially correct. I kept waking up, looking at the clock, and saying something like, “Wow, I’ve got a whole two more hours!” and then go right back to bed.

I had one class before the exam, which was pointless because while people were there in body, they were not in mind. We had other things on our mind than pirates, as interesting as a class on pirates is. Oh well.

Then the exam rolls around. This is an exam that all 702 students on board are taking, and no room can hold all those people, so they break us up into all the rooms on the ship, and then watch us like hawks. When they passed out the exam, I wasn’t too surprised to find some questions that were completely out of the blue and overly specific for testing the knowledge imparted upon us from the readings and lectures. I was done with it in a little over forty minutes, and really had no idea how well I did.

I stopped thinking about it for a while and prepped for my afternoon class out on the back deck. We’re still a handful of degrees below the equator, so the sun’s rays are direct and because it’s not the equinox, and it’s summer down here, we’re actually getting closer to being more directly under the sun. And let me tell you, it was so hot and humid that I got a little color on me from sitting in the shade. I think the UV rays reflecting off of everything was starting to burn me, so I had to go back inside after about a half hour.

I went back in and they had the exam answers posted, and I got an 84, which for a first exam for me, is respectable. It’s just about building on it later. I can be happy in Bahia now (Salvador is in the ‘state’ of Bahia).

Next time on the Blog: Salvador and The Amazon. Be warned, you won’t get another post until at least late February 21^st. Until then, here’s a small taste (a very small taste) of what’s to come: