Thursday, February 28, 2008

Ship Life: Part 2

It is not down in any map; true places never are. ~Herman Melville


LIFE OF LUXURY? The perks of living on a cruise ship: we are disgustingly pampered. All of our dining halls have waiters. They clear our tables, get you drinks, help you with your trays, etc. The second you put your fork down, someone comes right to the table and whisks it away. If you finish your orange juice, you can probably expect an offer for a new one. In our cabins, our cabin steward (mine is Hector, from the Philippines) cleans our room, makes our bed, and folds our clothes every day. It is unbelievable. The crew is amazingly nice and extremely popular with the passengers. They sing and make conversation, they are just the coolest and the nicest and a huge part of our community. They have been living on this ship for years, 8 months at a time, working 12-hours a day and still treat everyone like family. The purpose of the crew on the ship is not to do all this, however. They are also our guides in case of emergency or abandonment of ship, they are our firefighters, and they provide daily maintenance to keep an entire hotel, university and home in tip-top shape.

SHIP FOOD: The food on the ship is growing on me. It’s a lot of pasta, fish, meat and potatoes. Did I mention a lot of potatoes? And the meat is usually pork or beef, or some other non-chicken. For some reason, I used to hate it but now I’m enjoying it. The desserts are really good, and there’s always salad. The food is picked up in ports, so today I had a yogurt that was in Portuguese from Brazil. Brazilian grapes are huge and have tons of seeds. For American food, you can pay $ for pizza, burgers, ice cream, popcorn, etc on the 7th Deck Pool Deck.

BRIDGE TOUR: I had a bridge tour last week. The bridge is where the Captain drives the ship from. Unfortunately, it’s not really like that though. There is not even anyone driving this ship. It is all automatic and run by a GPS system. The 2nd Officer gave us our tour and he says it is boring and it is mostly paperwork that needs to be done, not navigating. There are always at least two officers up there though, constantly watching the water. Pirates can be a concern for SOME of the areas we are going to, but they really pose no threat. We are the fastest passenger ship in the world and no one could ever catch up to us. Not only that, but they could never climb up. We do have stabilizers. I might just have misunderstood that whole concept, but I believe there is some sort of chamber of water on the 1st deck that pushes the water either to the left or to the right to counter-balance the rocking of the ship. I am trying to think of what else I learned today on my tour—but it was really interesting.

SEA OLYMPICS: The Sea Olympics is coming up and that is a HUGE deal. Everyone has a sea (I’m the Aegean, and our color is green). This forms our “residence hall” for the entire voyage. We’re competing in a TON of different and random events. This will not surprise you.. but I am competing in teams for Synchronized Swimming and the Lip-Synch contest so that should be pretty funny. We have a good group that realizes the humor of these events and we’re kind of excited to see what we end up with. I don’t remember all the other events, but my favorites are the mashed-potato sculpting contest and the toilet paper fashion show. The Olympics were the day after Cape Town, but because the Captain anticipates rough seas that day, they are on March 8th now. We already won the pre-Olympics Challenge Pep Rally in which we had to make a cheer in 1 hour.

LIVING THE DREAM: The dream is being lived. I will have photos soon, but picture hundreds of college students laying-out in the sun on lounge chairs, sipping on smoothies, possibly by the pool and maybe with a textbook in hand. It is always nice weather; always at least 80 degrees. Between classes I can just sit and layout in the sun. Instead of going to take naps in my cabin, I can just fall asleep next to the pool with the ocean breeze blowing by. What season is Massachusetts in these days? Winter? Hah. This is what my life has become. In reality, we’ve all been doing less and less of this because classes are catching up to us.

RUMORS- Being stuck on a ship for 3.5 months generates a LOT of rumors. We all know they’re rumors because everything begins with “I heard.” No one actually has a source. The Dean started a section in his daily memo called “Rumor Ranger” and lists all the rumors. We are not being followed by a submarine for security. We do not have an extra day in Hawaii. And we have had no pirate encounters yet. In Global yesterday we hit a huge on-coming wave and the whole ship shook, so I exclaimed that we had just hit a whale. At lunch later that day, a girl sat next to me and said “I heard we hit a whale today.” AMAZING.

CABIN: My Mom is still under investigation for the placement of my cabin. I live next to the Hospital and across from the Counseling Center. Whether my mom is secretly plotting to control my mental and physical health from thousands of nautical miles away or not, I do live in the oddest part of the ship. My cabin is on the 2nd deck, so I am all the way on the bottom. The average hallway on this ship has about 200 students because they are the length of the entire ship. My hallway has 6 of us. And we have only about 60 of us on our entire floor. The rest is occupied and strictly off-limits to passengers, mostly because they cabins of the officers and other crew members. My roommate is from Florida and we get along fine. He is a nice kid and we’re it is not bad.

5th GRADE: My brother is a 5th grade teacher and his class is following me around the world this semester. I’ve had the cool opportunity to send his class letters from every port, and just recently sent them a package of currency, brochures, restaurant menus, etc from the ports so far. It is really fun to have them follow me and rumor has it they are throwing me a welcome back party. I have heard there is also a bulletin board in my honor. SAS offers a similar program where we can become pen-pals with classrooms in the US, but this one obviously is a lot more personal for me and I will have the opportunity to talk with them when I get back.

GLOBAL STUDIES UPDATE: The first 40 minutes of Global today was one of the professors running around with a cow-bell trying to hypnotize people. 40 minutes. I am in college. I think.

CLASSES: Very busy.

HEALTH: You would think I would make it a whole semester! I picked up something nasty in Brazil in the food and just finished antibiotics!

OUT OF TOUCH WITH THE WORLD MUCH: We just watched the Super Bowl today. Someone’s parents taped it and mailed it to Africa. They played it in the Union and on all the TVs on the ship. During the actual game, we had to all gather around one laptop linked to Internet-radio and we all listened to it. Even a month later, the outcome is still depressing.

**I already posted some pictures. My better pictures are coming. South Africa was amazing and you will hear about it soon.**

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know I'm highly suspect, but honestly I had no influence on your room assigment!
Good luck o the Olymics
Love,
Mom

Anonymous said...

All I can say is WOW! So glad you're having fun and taking advantage of all that is offered. Good luck on the 8th!
Aunt Jen and your fam in Cali!

Anonymous said...

Stablizers on ships are like wings on an airplane that extends out from the sides in mid-ship under water. They can rotate slightly in opposit directions to counter the rolling of the ship.

Two of Us said...

Hector is a GREAT cabin steward...we had him when we were on Seminar last Dec/Jan. Please tell him we said HI! From past voyages we had learned from students who lived in Dec 2 that they loved it because it was so quiet!

Enjoy!!

Gretchen