"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean." -Arthur C. Clarke
In our ocean seminar I found out that the size of the continents will easily fit inside the size of the Pacific Ocean. And we're traveling through it. In winter. Sounds kind of stupid when you think about it. My friend Joe says he's going to cross it in a sailboat. I think he's an idiot, but more power to him, I guess.
So today was the first day of class. We’ll-first afternoon of class for me. I didn’t start class until 2:15-that is 1415. Ship time, gotta love it. However, I did wake up at 8:30. Just in time to miss breakfast (0700-0830 everyday). I really have to get some snackage for the times I miss breakfast. The group I’m planning to travel with in Hawaii is actually writing that into our schedules-trip to Walmart. In addition to a trip to the volcanoes and this really good BBQ place Keani referred us to (the Hawaiian girl).
Erika, my roommate, and I just chilled for the first 2 hours-writing in our journals, updating blogs, sending emails, reading, etc. She’s super chill. She’s from Philly and goes to school at Michigan.
I then met up at lunch with Abby and then we went to relax on the 6th deck. We originally had planned on getting some studying done since she was already assigned a lot of homework and I know I have a lot of reading coming up; however, our efforts were in vain. All we could talk about was how lucky we were and how beautiful the ocean was. We are currently planning times to force ourselves to study though I don’t know how well it is going to work. Luckily, as long as I pass the classes, they don’t count on my GPA.
Today I had my WWII class and my Sino-American Relations class. I was worried about all the readings assigned for my WWII class, but the professor told us to just skim them and assigned a group of 3 each class day to summarize and critique the readings of the previous nights’ reading. All of the tests are going to be essays/discussions so it should be pretty easy, fun, and interesting. What is going to be REALLY interesting is my Sino-Americans Relations class considering I’m 1 of 3 out of probably 25 students that doesn’t speak Chinese. At least 15 of those are Chinese themselves and almost all of them have Chinese of Asian Studies as a major. To my credit, I was the only one who spoke Spanish outside of the guy from Peru (1 of the others who didn’t speak Chinese). The last girl who didn’t speak it has a French minor so all-in-all, we’re a pretty diverse bunch.
There wasn’t much after that except for dinner, a seminar on the ocean, and training for working at the library.
It’s nice to start to settle into a routine and it feels like I’ve been here for longer than 3 days. I’m pleasantly surprised at how many people I recognize and know by name and how I already have some jokes with a couple of them.
“Roll tide” dude-name is Phil, in my WWII class. I’ll give him crap later about saying RTR to me, even though he’s from CU (Colorado University at Boulder- a good 10% of the students here are from there, with another 10% being from University of Virginia, another 10% being from Chapman University, and the other 70% being from everywhere else). Wow, major ramble….
Oh! Something funny/ super awkward from today! When Abby (who is exactly 1 month older than me we discovered) and I were sitting at lunch,these other 2 people came up and sat with us. One of them was an Unreasonable Scholar (a new SAS program that I don’t really know what it’s about) invited us to a volunteer meeting and we didn’t really have anything else to do so we agreed. When we got there, it was just a couple of people around a table in one of the classrooms/sections of the dining hall. Apparently, it was just a meeting for the Unreasonable at Sea director (an Aussie) and some people she had hand-selected from the sign-up sheet the night before. Which the girl who invited us apparently didn’t know, considering she wasn’t even supposed to be there herself. We think the other guy (a German guy, I sat beside a British guy in my WWII class, too) had mentioned he was going to her and she thought she should go and that it was an open meeting so she invited us. SUPER awkward. Even more so when the lady started asking us about our passions and what we could do for her that would involve them. Something along those lines, we’re not really sure. I don’t know what happened at all in the meeting and now we’re avoiding the German guy which is super hard on a small ship.
The ship seems so small when you’re trying to avoid somebody, yet so big when you’re trying to find somebody, go figure.
Everyday we get an email with what's called the "Dean's Memo" that details everything happening on the ship and the logistics of where we're at, how far we've traveled, how far we have to go, etc. There is also a daily quote so I'm going to be posting those up here with possibly a thought on them.
“Once more upon the waters, yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed that knows its rider!” –Lord Byron
The waves are rolling for sure. The boat is constantly rocking. It kind of feels like an airplane that's constantly going through turbulence. Luckily I'm not seasick but I know a bunch of people who are or have been.
-Thought these posted earlier but I had the wrong email. My bad-
Day 1 & 2
So I’m on the ship (not boat) with my email finally working (hopefully) and settling into life.
Yesterday was stressful and was kind of a metal letdown. Not bad, just not what I was expecting. I guess I had it in my head that I would get on the bus for Mexico and would sit next to this awesome person who would be like my best friend for the next 4 months. Totally opposite. I originally went and sat with this girl with my huge bag. They seriously had the smallest charter busses in the world. And the oldest. I didn’t think I’d even make it to Ensenada. Anyways, my bag clearly wasn’t going to fit with the two of us so I went and sat in the empty seat behind her. I thought I’d end up getting this seat to myself but at the last minute this really old guy came and sat next to me. It would’ve been cool if he would’ve talked to me like all the other students and life-long learners were but he just sat there and slept and read this magazine on iPhones (I didn’t even know they made those but this guy had it and knew his way around his phone much better than I do). He also kept like stepping on my foot because he was like twitching or whatever. So best-friend seat buddies ruined.
However, I did end up talking to the girl in front of me. Her name is Molly and she’s from San Francisco but goes to school in Portland. She is a foster kid that was put accidently in a Spanish-speaking foster home when she knew absolutely no Spanish. She told me that they would never speak English to her so she is now fluent in Spanish. She also lives down the hall from me so that’s pretty cool.
After I boarded and went through the line, I helped out checking everybody’s yellow fever and medical cards. It was nice to finally put faces to the names I kept seeing on the Facebook group. I am surprised by how many names I was able to remember after that, though the amount is far surpassed by the names I forgot.
Lunch was interesting and like everybody has said, it will really get old soon. Pasta, potatoes, and a different meat for every meal so far. There is also a salad bar and a little dessert bar. It’s pretty good food but I’m sure I won’t be saying that in like 3 weeks, especially after the 12-day stretch between Hawaii and Japan. It’s still so surreal to say that, to talk about going to Japan like it’s nothing.
We had a lifeboat drill at 4 before we left. It was so funny because we were all just talking and socializing when “The Number 1 Rule is Quiet!” Yeah, no. They had to do role call of everybody on the ship. Everybody. Like all 800 students/faculty/life long learners. There is no way that if the ship is sinking that they are going to be able to do that. Especially because we will all be panicking. Titanic anybody? They tell you that if you hear the alarm you are supposed to go to your cabin and change into long pants, long sleeves, a hat, and close-toed shoes. So warm clothes for if we get stranded on the Pacific Ocean. Which makes sense except for 2 major problems-1) I highly doubt anybody would take the time to fight through the crowd to get to their cabin, especially if they’re on the second floor like me and that’s the first thing to go down, and 2) they say that they assigned 140 people to each life boat. 140 people are not going to fit in one of those life boats, I don’t care how hard you try. They guys were making jokes that we better watch out because they don’t know if they’d be doing a women and children thing first. So not chivalrous. They weren’t able to get all of the bags to the ship by the time that they started the drill so there was some people without pants and close-toed shoes. They sent them to the back so the captain couldn’t see them when he did the walk-through. I’m not sure why because it’s not their fault, I just happened to be wearing the right things and carried on most of my clothes.
Another failure on the day- dinner. I was like hey, I’ll randomly sit with this group and it will be awesome and we’ll click. Nope. Totally awkward.I did sit next to a girl that was from Westminster (Vietnamese, of course). After that, I went and found my roommate with this group in the Piano Lounge and we all started hanging out and talking. Finally people that were fun to hang out with! We had some shifts in people and then proceeded to run out onto the top decks at night-it was cold. And scary. The waves have gotten really choppy lately and it’s really hard to balance, but I’m not seasick at all so I’ll take it.
We ended up playing cards and then there was a faculty meeting and “sea” meeting after that. Your sea is kind of like your dorm hall and each has their own Resident Director (mine is an Auburn alum!). Woo Woo Aegean Sea! Where that is, I’m not really sure. My bad… We decided to play Assassin in our sea meeting with the object to kill your “target” with a sock. So yeah, I carried around a sock all morning which I couldn’t even really use because I got killed leaving lunch. I actually knew my target too! And where his cabin was! It was the guy the RD pointed out in the meeting and a guy I knew from the Facebook page, Sean. (The names are partly to help me remember, sorry about that.)
Taking a shower… Usually one of the most easy and relaxing things in life, right? Nope. Not on a ship. The shower is tiny. Like half a motorhome tiny. You can’t even bend over in it. Also, the water keeps swinging back and forth as the ship went over the waves. Whenever I would take a step to balance myself, I would accidently turn off the water. It’s going to take some time to get used to that.
Crash time. Orientation at 9 in the morning? So not fun.
My alarm went off at 7 am, but having an inside cabin, it was pitch black and I couldn’t tell what it is. It is so easy to lose complete track of time in my cabin, but luckily I won’t be spending much time in it.
I’m not going to go over everything that said was in orientation because it was so boring. Just safety and health and blah blah blah. I fell asleep through most of it so I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to.Though I did find out that the captain is British and the other 3 top officers are from Russia/Ukraine.
Lunch. More blah blah blah/ nap time. Then I went to get help with my email. I had it set up right but it wasn’t working for some reason. I went to the IT lab and the line was out the door and down the hall. Everybody with Macs were having a hard time getting it set up. I don’t think anybody was able to have it work right away.
In the hallway there was another group sitting on the floor that some guy was helping all at once and nobody seemed to be really waiting for so I joined them. The guy was really nice and was trying to help everybody all at once. I thought he worked in the IT department because he seemed to know what he was doing, but he’s actually a student sailing. His name is Mike and he’s a senior sailing for the 2nd time, the first being last spring. Even though he wasn’t able to figure out my computer he was so nice I just wanted to bring him cookies if I was able to.
After about two hours and my computer freezing I finally gave up and shut it off. When I got to my cabin to leave it, on a whim I decided to try one last time and what do you know? When I turned it on I got all the emails I had been trying to send all day!
I met up with one of the girls I had met earlier but bonded with waiting to try and fix our emails, Abby. She said she was going to go wait in line for dinner but when I met up with her she was in one of the main cross areas of the ship with some girls checking out field labs, Rose and Kearisten. We ended up going to dinner and a girl named Keani and Angela joined us in addition to Mike, the computer guy, and his roommate Jake. Cabin 4150! Super creepy, but we were all joking around about coming up and bothering him and I remember it. He made the mistake of telling all of us that he had sailed before and had been to all but 3 of the countries on his first voyage. He barely even got to eat dinner with us bombarding him with questions, poor guy.
So I finallyfound my travel group! I was so worried about not being able to find people who want to do close to what I wanted to do, but it ended up fine. At least for now, though I’m sure it will change a little as the voyage goes on. It’s me, Abby, Rose, Kearisten, Jordan who we met up later with in the library, Keani, who is from Hawaii, and Angela who is also from Anaheim. We had a minor-major-freak out when we realized that. She went to Western High School and graduated in 2008. She doesn’t know the other Paulsons though. It would’ve been awesome.
But so far we’ve planned Hawaii, Japan, and China tentatively. Very tentatively.
It’s harder than I would’ve thought to meet up. I’m so used to being able to text when I want to meet up or find out where someone is, but on the ship you have to plan it out before or hope that you run into them somewhere and that they’re eating in the same dining hall as you (there’s the main one on the 5th deck and the Garden Lounge on the 7th deck.)
Also, it’s so surreal that I’m actually here. I can’t believe that I’m on a ship in the middle of the ocean, living out a normal daily routine with 700 new people, and casually making plans about what we’re planning to do in China. Going back to Auburn is going to be so weird.
And since I have class tomorrow and I’m on duty in the library from 9-11pm (:/), I’m going to bed now. The ship like rocks you to sleep and you’re always tired. I’m sure I’ll add some random stuff in tomorrow as I remember it since there is just so many thoughts running through my head right now. If you have any specific questions, email me!
“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins
I was going to put a lot of different travel quotes and then I came across that one and felt all the others were irrelevant. Nothing can top that one, the truth behind it.
Why am I going on about this? This semester I am going on the journey of a lifetime. Semester at Sea. 106 days on a ship. I've never been on a ship before... 13 different countries. I've never been out of country before... Am I scared? A little, but who wouldn't be? Am I excited? There's not words to cover it.
Yes, I will be taking classes. Yes, I have a "job" while I'm on the ship. No, I don't have TV or Internet and will sadly be missing the Super Bowl this year. But have I mentioned I will be getting to travel 13 different countries? How many people can say they've done that? How many people can say they've trekked through the jungles of Vietnam, the mountains of India? How many people can say they've stayed in the home of a family from rural South Africa and impoverished Ghana? How many people can say they've talked for hours with farmers just trying to survive and camped outside around a bonfire in the middle of the Asian continent? By the time I get back I'll have experienced almost every type of food imaginable, rode an elephant, a camel, and a rickshaw, and have gotten to see a Wonder of the World in Myanmar/Burma- Shooting an Elephant, anyone? I will have seen the devastation of Hiroshima while also learning about the war that caused it.
I will have sailed across 3 oceans, 6 seas, 1 bay, and 1 gulf. And that's just what I can see on Google Maps. Most importantly, I will have met so many people. I will have gained a new family of about 1,000 students, teachers, staff, and crew. I will establish friends in different countries. Who knows? I might even make a lasting difference in a country or more likely, in at least one person's life. The sea is the limit.
