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At Sea Days to Mauritius
February 25, 2008
Half way around the world!!That is were I am right now.. very weird to say that and very weird to be here!I would never in my wildest dreams have thought that I would be in Africa, nonetheless traveling the globe, but I am and life is GREAT!!!
Well, back to SEA life, which means back to classes and back to work.If you read my last blog, you would have read that we were stuck in Cape Town last night due to fog.When I woke up this morning, I was shocked to see that we were STILL in Cape Town and that the fog was still here.OH well, I guess that is life on a ship, can't leave the port until clear conditions.So off to breakfast and to get ready for our 5 days at sea, if we ever get out of South Africa!!
So this morning, it really hit me, I LIVE ON A SHIP!!For the first month, it was just like a fun experience and just doing things.But you know what, I live on a ship and it is interesting and it is weird on how much I have adapted to it.Things that are different… yesterday was laundry day, but you know what, the only thing I needed to do was put my clothes into a bag and write a slip and then two days later they appear in my room all folded and clean, how great is that!!As far as cooking, I don't have to cook a dam thing… when I am hungry for my meals, I head to the cafeteria and get my food, and the servers take care of my plates, and cleaning up my table, how great is that!!At 9:30 am, we had our second life boat drill.No more fire drills, no more tornado drills or warnings, but life boat drills.Time to change my clothes and put on long sleeves, long pants, closed ended shoes and to get my life jacket to head to my life boat station.How great is that… things are so different now for me… from being on 24 hour time, to working all day and night and living in an extreme fishbowl, to meeting new people every day with new perspectives on life, on the port cities and their own interest in their own life.
Life on a ship still means things happen in life.A few days ago a student got a call from her parents telling her some bad news that her brother had passed away.Life is still life out here and wth 735 students, things are going to happen in these students lives that we need to take care of and help with.This student was able to get a flight out of South Africa and head home to take care of her family and be with them.She will be meeting us in Mauritius next week as she flies back from the states to there to get back on board the ship and continue with classes.Life is life… we live it, we experience it, we do things very differently and are flexible to situations and how we are actually doing our daily work.
I am heading to the desk to work today as it is my rotation day.Desk duty days to me are great.I get a lot of administrative work completed, talk too many of the students and have time to catch up on a lot of things.
One of my administrative tasks is coming along well for the ship community.I am working with a few students to build the semester at sea spring 2008 voyage website.I am happy to say that it is up and running through the main semester at sea webpage!!There are still a few coding issues with it, but majority of the pictures that students have given me are there so parents and family members can see what is going on and the students don't have to worry about sharing their R rated blogging sites if they don't want to.Now that the main tasks are done with the web page, then by each port we can just now add more pictures there.
Throughout the day many of our students have been getting sick.This is usually after a visit to a country.What happens is that the students run themselves for 5 - 6 days partaking in so many activities and they push their bodies to no extreme and when they get back to the ship, they crash down for the count!!
Rough seas have started, which was expected and that is not helping anyone out right now.
February 26, 2008
Rough seas over night and into the day has been making us tired and sick a bit.Many students are just not doing so well today, but they are hanging in there.This time we are rocking from the front of the ship to the back, rather than going to the left and the right.From being on land for 6 days, we got our land legs back and our bodies are not happy with us right now.
Tonight, we are back to more time zone changing!!Something we all get so excited about!!We advance our clocks one hour tonight, now to be 8 hours ahead of NY and 9 hoursahead of your all in central time zone.During our course to Mauritius we will only advance tonight and one more time this week, so it should not be that big of a deal on us, like our experience two weeks ago changing our clocks 5 times.
It is excited to be at sea and to receive notification from jobs that I have applied for that they want to have a phone interview.So now on top of my work, being so far ahead of you all in time, working and having fun in ports, I will now be doing phone interviews.Let's see how this job search goes after the phone interviews.
Tonight we had our monthly faculty and staff social hour.The executive dean invites all of the faculty and staff together once a month for social hour so we have time to keep getting know each other.Many of the faculty are very nice and want to learn about our roles in residence life, which is great.But believe it or not, there is still that other handful that do not understand our roles and what we actually do and think we are students.To them, I don't concentrate my efforts with them and work more with the ones that appreciate my role and how I can help them and how they can help me.I do have to say that many of the faculty are just so shocked with seeing their students behavior at night and when they are not in class.They really are getting an experience seeing and living with the students like we are used to.
February 27, 2008
Today was an interesting day.For most of the day many people, including myself, were a bit under the weather.Not sick with a cold, but just feeling run down and exhausted, and sometimes nauseated, not sure of the rocking of just being so tired and working so much.
Tonight was also my chance to have dinner with the captain and his 3 senior staff members.There were a total of 15 faculty and staff who attended the dinner and it was amazing.We had a five course dinner with all of the special treatment!!The crew did a great job on serving us and making the meals.It was nice to get away from the general cafeteria food on the ship and have a nice five course meal with all adults for a change.
After dinner, I headed off to the UNION to watch the superbowl. Yes that is right, we are watching the superbowl.One of the students had their parents tape it for them and mail it out to South Africa.So here we are finally watching the game, seeing the new commercials and enjoying our superbowla few weeks later.Believe it or not, many students are in here catching up on the best game in history and watching the Giants win the superbowl again.
February 28, 2008
Another day at sea!!Tonight is the night before our second global studies course that everyone on the ship takes.The students have been trying really hard to study and get a better grade on this test than the first one.The average on the first exam was only a 69, so they are really trying to improve this one.Nothing big happened today, besides yet another time zone change.Fun times being 9 hours ahead of you all in NY!!
I have been playing the let's try to get a phone interview scheduled while being so many hours ahead of you all.It has been difficulty, let me say that much, but I am getting them scheduled and organized the best I can.I will be doing these phone interviews late at night my time to accommodate the time of the employers.
Tonight we had another competition event to prepare for our sea Olympics for when we return from port.My two sea captains, Derek and Sara, played in the captains challenged called how well do you know your captain.They both did a fantastic job with this event and know each other very well to hold on to a second place victory for this challenge.The Baltic Sea, my community of residents, are doing great recovering from a bad win last week.It was fun to watch them play.We rehearsed and studied a lot to make sure they were ready for this challenge.
The Indian Ocean has finally calmed down.We are now back to normally sailing with very to now rocking.We are moving pretty fast though… the captain has the ship up to about 24 knots so we can make it to our next port on time, since we did leave 12 hours late from South Africa.
February 29, 2008
Happy Leap Year!!We are excited that we will be in Mauritius tomorrow morning.Everyone gets that night before port happiness and ready to explore jitters.We will be in Mauritius for four days, so enough time to do a lot or just do nothing.I on the other hand have 4 trips planned, one for everyday we are in port, so that should be fun.I am a trip leader on one of the trips, so that helps with the discount and also more experience in leading our trips for our students.
Today we were at dinner and we realized that with the leap year day, today, and with the day in April that we get to repeat a day due to crossing the international date line, that everyone on the ship would have experienced 367 days this year!!How many people can say that they have done that in their lifetime?It has been great to be a part of many new things and experiences.
Tonight is our pre-port meeting so we can get all of our information we need to travel safely in our port of call for 4 days.At this meetings we get local numbers, contact information and traveling tips for everyone to carry before we all leave bright and early tomorrow.
As our students are calling this port - Spring Break!!I am sure it is going to be a fun 4 days for everyone.I hope the students stay safe, but yet have fun at the same time.
Stay tuned to hear about the great trips and to see the pictures of beautiful Mauritius!!Hope you all are having some fun in the north, cold states.Keep in touch… some of you are really bad at staying on contact.. LOL.Oh well… let it be I guess.
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