Making our way to Hawaii…

August 31, 2006

Hello again! It’s been a few days on the boat but it feels like I’ve been here for weeks. I’ve finally figured out where everything is and I can find my way around the ship now. We started classes on Tuesday which makes this feel a little less like a cruise J The weather started to get really nice yesterday afternoon and I lounged around by the pool after class with some new friends. My classes aren’t bad. We all have “Global Studies” every morning from 9:20 to 10:35 (I’m actually writing this Blog in that class because it’s pretty painfully boring). There is one huge room called the Union that holds probably 400 people and then there are two other classrooms that have live video of the class. The professor is a nice guy but nobody really has any idea what he’s talking about. My other classes are really good: Psychology of Personality, Psychology of Death and Dying, and Sociology: Punishment in Society. The Death and Dying class seems really interesting, and I’m glad I got into it because it’s a really popular class. I love my sociology professor also, and the best part about the classes is that we relate what we do while traveling to the topics and then write papers or have assignments based on that. The classes are an hour and fifteen minutes each and we have A days and B days so they switch off, except for Global Studies, which is every morning. It’s nice to be able to run up 3 flights of stairs to class in the morning and then go back and take a nap or read by the pool. The boat is amazing but I think everyone will be really excited to see land and get to Hawaii on Saturday. It’s pretty weird to just have ocean in every direction and no land in sight.
The past two nights have been “Pub Nights” which means we can buy drink tickets for cocktail hour and after dinner. We have to stand in a really long line and wait for around an hour to get 2 drink tickets for 5-6pm and up to 4 for 9-11pm and you can choose between white or red wine, beer, or wine coolers. Then you buy them on your card for $3 each and turn them in during the hours they are serving for drinks. They write your student ID number on the back and match them up to make sure nobody is using other people’s drink tickets. It’s a pretty intense system but I guess that’s what you have to do to keep college students from getting drunk on a boat. Everyone goes out on the decks for Pub Nights and it’s a lot of fun just socializing and meeting people.
I laid out by the pool from around 1 to 6pm and got a nice tan J And I can’t wait to do that everyday after classes. There are lounge chairs around a tiny pool and it seemed like every student on the ship was out there today, it was really crowded. We also had tacos for lunch today which everyone got really excited about…they were delicious. I went to dinner with Corrine and my roommate, Stefanie and a few other people and then went to a meeting to talk about planning the “Ambassador’s Ball” which is a big dance that we have on the ship during the last week. We came up with some ideas for a theme and we’re going to meet throughout the next few weeks to put all the details together. The Ball is actually put on to raise money for a charity that we chose. The money we make from selling tickets to everyone goes toward the charity.
It’s been really hard not to go on the internet and not really being able to call home (phone cards are $20 for 12 minutes) but I hope the blog helps everyone to find out what I’m doing! I’ll write again after Hawaii and then it’s another seven straight days to Japan. I’m having an amazing time but I miss everyone!

I'll have pictures soon!