Well, You've Got to Start Somewhere

First, a note before we get going here: I’m doing the blog in a stream of consciousness form in a Word Document. When I can get on-line, I’m posting everything I’ve done since the last post, so it’s one continuous account. Thank you.

Nassau

We arrived in Nassau after sitting on an airplane for five hours for a three hour flight, and hopped right into a cab out of the airport. What was supposed to be a twenty-five minute cab ride to the hotel, turned into forty-five, due to downtown Friday traffic. But none of this bothered me, I was in no rush to go anywhere, yet.

We stayed at the Comfort Suites, which when it comes down to it is a lovely hotel that nobody spends any time at, because we’re allowed to roam the Atlantis grounds, located adjacently next door. In the next day and a half we wandered around Atlantis in all its over-priced glory. It’s an impressively expansive piece of property. It’s very easy to get lost – very easy. Almost too easy. But after spending the morning walking around in the sun, touring the place, we decided to sit down at the pool and stay a while in the afternoon. That’s when the clouds and rain rolled in – as is par for the course for a Wuebber journey. But, you’ve got to weather the storm in good spirits.

Then the morning of the trip comes. Early. For some reason, the second half of the alphabet was due to board first, at eight in the morning. So, because we’re not staying at Atlantis and because most people are, we had to lug my two fifty pound duffelbags over to Atlantis and grab a cab with a couple other voyagers. And then it starts. From that moment on, you’re spending time with people you’ll be with for the next hundred-and-one days. Who are they? Where are they from? Is that close to Seattle? Where do they go to school? Isn’t your mascot the Fighting Wombats? And so on, and on, and on for the entire day. I have seven-hundred-and-one other people to meet, I have seven-hundred-and-one other names to remember, I have seven-hundred-and-one other majors to memorize, and it gets daunting.

This goes on for quite a while until I leave the ship to meet Mom and Dad down in downtown Nassau. I’m starving after only eating a couple of mini donuts and a half a cup of orange juice at the hotel’s continental breakfast. So we find a nice, small, local establishment (perhaps you’ve heard of it), the Hard Rock Hotel – now owned by the Native Americans. They’re taking America back one establishment at a time.

So we finish eating and try to think of what to do for about an hour until the parents can all board the ship and get the grand tour. I took pictures of dangerously overloaded boats. You’ll see those eventually. Mark your calendar and be sure to remind me if I should forget.

I drop Mom and Dad off on line, while I go to the other end of the pier to enter with my ID card and then walk all the way back to the other end of the pier and back on the boat. I don’t know where they are on line, so I ran up to the seventh deck and peered over the edge with two other girls looking for their parents. I’m up there for all of ten minutes before they come through and rapidly move through the line. Now I’ve got to rush back down to the second deck to make sure that they don’t get lost on the ship (don’t forget, it’s a ship not a boat). I do manage to make it down just as they’re passing through the metal detector and proceed to give them the tour.

Please do keep in mind that I’ve only been on board for an hour and a half longer than them, and the ship isn’t as large as a major cruise line’s, so the tour isn’t as extensive as the guided tour of the Queen Mary II that I give on the weekends. After showing my room, which is larger than the other rooms for some reason (I’ve got a cushy love seat and a large port hole!) as well as the upper three decks, we had about an hour to the captain’s presentation and nothing else to see. They were quite interested to see Archbishop Desmond Tutu sitting with his laptop in the glass-enclosed faculty lounge.

Then we sat, talked and waited for the captain to appear – and for his British accent, which does not get old – ever. It’s like a chipper, fun, nice version of Simon Cowell/(Failing to think of another British actor for comparison’s sake). So, he introduced the mostly foreign crew. I think there’s one American on the bridge.

Once those fun activities are over, it’s about time for the parents to leave so that we can actually be going on our way. And because I’ve learned in the past that a short, quick easy good-bye is best, I say my good-byes and wave Mom and Dad off the boat.

But it’s not time to leave yet! No, we’ve got to do the muster drill. So we all go back to our rooms, where mine is a mess because I had only just started unpacking, and I grab the life vest and join everyone else outside in what we were instructed to wear: closed-toe shoes, long sleeves, and long pants, and were facing the sun. It’s not like a normal cruise ship where you can stand there, follow directions and leave after ten or fifteen minutes, they need to take a roll call of every passenger on the boat. If someone is not there, we have to wait for them to be found and show up.

We stood there for forty-five minutes. Let me say that again: the muster drill took forty-five minutes. Without commercials, an entire episode of ‘Lost’ is less than that. What held us up was that the Captain came over the PA and said two girls were not at their muster station and we were waiting for them. We later learned that they were at their muster station all along, they just weren’t paying attention when their names were called.

Because the drill took so long, it ended just as we were beginning to cast off. Here’s where I become logistically confused. On the dock, directly below the boat are over a hundred parents and family members, all eagerly waiting to wish us well on our way. Mom and Dad said that they’d be at a concrete pier further down the bay. I thought after they saw all the parents on the dock, that they’d mosey on over there. That didn’t happen and I have lovely photos of where Mom and Dad might be.

(Click to enlarge them)

Then we cast off and sail away on our around-the-world voyage. Out of all the people I was talking with as we were leaving Nassau, the general consensus was that nobody could believe it was actually happening, and that they were actually here on the ship and on our way. I still can’t believe it. There’s something to be said for starting a journey of this magnitude. It’s impressive and incredibly daunting. And there is no turning back.

At-Sea Transit 1: Nassau, Bahamas to San Juan, Puerto Rico

Once we exited the bay/harbor/whatever it is, a bunch of us went down for dinner. I overheard some people say that the food was alright compared to what they have at school. Let me tell you this: the food is magnitudes better than the stuff I had at Penn State. I have to wait weeks to see a dry rack of roast beef, and I had fantastic roast beef on the first night. I am quite impressed and glad that I won’t be losing any weight because the food is crap.

Then we had a meeting in the Union, the big lecture hall-esque room that can almost hold everyone. And they introduced us to a plethora of people on the ship. The best was the chef because his hat was comically large. It was also at this point in the evening that the ship began to roll; most people call it rocking, but it’s rolling (we’ve been told we’ll know rocking when we see it). I didn’t see anyone get sick, but I know people did. And to be honest with you, it was a very gentle roll that a lot of people found relaxing. The thing about it was that it’s not something th

at land does, so there’s an adjustment period. Sea legs must be earned.

After the big meeting, we broke off into smaller meetings, into our ‘seas’. Seas are like the residence areas and comprise everyone who lives near you. I’m in the Red Sea, which is great because I neglected to bring any red clothing on the trip. I can’t imagine what the Bering Sea gets to wear. At our sea meeting, we had to individually introduce ourselves to a small group of sixty or so. Needless to say, it wasn’t an in and out meeting.

After the long day I had, getting up before seven, dragging my luggage all over the Bahamas, and waiting in line for an hour (yes, an hour – a very disorganized hour at that), getting on and off the ship, meeting well over a hundred new names, faces, schools, majors, and hometowns, I was pretty spent. And I had yet to put a dent in my unpacking. After seeing a bunch of other people say they were falling asleep and retreating to their cabins, I followed suit.

I like to be on a schedule. I always like to know what I’m doing, and how long it takes to do, so that I can plan out stuff. I thought that I’d be able to fall into the ‘bed prep’ routine that I have set up when I’m at school, and I was wrong. For some reason (I can’t imagine why…) my head wasn’t computing right. I couldn’t find anything, I forg

ot to take my vitamins, and just an all around fogginess of mind.

I was more than happy to go to bed, and wake up to face Orientation Day.

The next morning, I didn’t want to sleep in until our first meeting of the day at nine, because then I would miss the beautiful weather outside and breakfast. Breakfast is my least favorite meal of the day, largely because I don’t enjoy eggs or bacon. But I was able to gather enough at an above par breakfast to feed me. It was actually quite nice eating out on the back of the boat watching the sun rise in the sky with a couple other people. It was a nice way to start what would become another long, long day, but for very different reasons than yesterday.

We had our first meeting at nine, which was a faculty and staff introduction. It was nice to see them all, I don’t remember who anybody was, but it was nice to see everyone. Someone I’ve yet to see is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. We weren’t introduced to him, and he wasn’t even acknowledged to be on the boat. I don’t think that’s his fault, not that fault is to be handed out.

We then got what some people to believe to be an uplifting, motivational, rousing introduction to the program. Others believed it to be the opposite. I won’t tel

l you what group I belong to. You be the judge. It’s like I’m Fox News: I report, you decide.

After the two and a half hour presentations, we had an opportunity to introduce ourselves to the faculty members we were to have as professors. I couldn’t find a one of them for the longest time, but eventually I found the three that I have. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Self, that’s only three teachers! Is Jeff only taking nine credits?” The short answer: no. The long answer: There is another class on the ship that everybody is required to take. If you don’t take it, they throw you off the boat. In port, I mean. Doing that at sea would then force us to circle around and attempt a rescue, and we don’t want to be doing that. And apparently, the professor of the big, required Global Studies class is either not easy to find or antisocial.

Then we got to break for lunch. Lunch was alright. The chicken may have been cooked a few seconds too long and the rice could have been a little less sticky, but beggars can’t be choosers. I’m sure it’s better than whatever you had for lunch today (although I’m sure I’ll be wrong on a few counts, so be sure to comment at the bottom of this post and give me a piece of your mind).

In the afternoon, we had hours of more meetings. Hours and hours of more meetings. We started with our first Global Studies class, even though it

was still officially Orientation Day. Talk about putting to sleep – between the gentle rolling of the boat and the sheer thrill of talking about negative and positive peace, it was simply thrilling. And it dragged on for longer than I wanted it to.

Instead of being able to be let free, we had the best of times and the worst of times. The Captain was coming along with his great British accent, and we had to sit for thirty minutes and listen to him telling us not to sit on the outside rails, leave the hair dryer on for days at a time, and not to take the picture frames off the wall (apparently, somebody already busted one.) My favorite part of the meeting was when he told us that the cabin stewards clean the rooms, but it is our job to keep them tidy. And the best part of that was not what he said, it is how he said, ‘tidy.’ I can’t stop saying ‘tidy’ with a British accent. Try it. It’s more fun than playing with a three-foot piece of string and a sharp stick.

After that meeting, we were finally able to leave, for thirty minutes. In the brief respite, I went back to the spacious room I have. My room is bigger than the others out of luck. The faculty rooms up a number of floors have bigger rooms. To keep the

structural integrity of the ship, the rooms below the faculty rooms have to be the same size. Some people say it’s not fair, and I continue to fail to find anything wrong with it.

Then we all head back over to the Union for, you guessed it, another meeting. But this is the wacky student life meeting. Heaven forbid the student life meeting be normal. They had a row of people sitting up at the front and someone in the back talking into a microphone, mimicking their thoughts. It was funny for the first five minutes, but the remaining fifteen were found to be on the repetitive side. So that meeting was another hour of the day.

By now, everyone is quite hungry, so we decide to grab dinner before the line gets too long. And because we were able to get there early, we secured a table outside on the back of the boat, and we stayed there for two and a half hours until – well, I’ll get to that in a minute. First, we had sirloin steaks for dinner, and they were quite good. Again, still much better than Penn State. There was other stuff with dinner that I can’t recall, but it was still better. We actually had quite a good time on the back of the boat, especially watching peo

ple swarm Desmond while he was eating.

And off to another meeting we were! You didn’t think that was it, did you? But it was what I believed to be an important meeting because it was the field office meeting for all our in-port trips. To be honest, it was confusing. I don’t know where I’m supposed to meet the trips to depart. I almost feel more confused than I previously did. Almost. And people ended the session asking the most bizarre group of repetitive questions. “Do we need to search for the buses to our trips?” Yes, you must play Where’s Waldo.

Tune in next time for our arrival in San Juan!