Sailing to Brazil

Saturday (early morn) 2/3/08 01:38 (10:38 pm CST)

So my computer decided to die last night. The almighty Blue Screen of Death kept on showing up when I tried booting. The error was very non-descriptive. Something along the lines of "SESSION3_INITIALIZATION" failed. Nothing on Google was very helpful either except for a reformat. Thankfully, my last backup was 3 days ago, so I've saved everything from before that. However, I've lost pictures from the last few days and my word document containing my blog posts for each day, which sucks. So I'll try to sum everything that I can remember now. I think I’ll be able to be back up to 100% once we get to Brazil and I get about an hour or so of internet. Then all I’ll be missing is Office. Which, I may just use Open Office until I get back. It would just be easier I think.

The first day back to sea after Puerto Rico we had some extremely smooth waters to go through so the ship barely rocked at all. However, they just got worse from there. Yesterday (2/1) was the first day that we've been on the ship that it rained. No storm or anything, just a nice rainfall for a few hours. It was kind of funny to watch the water go from one side of the deck to the other as we it rained and the ship rocked.

Classes have all been good. Nothing too hard yet anyway. The biggest thing they have us doing right now is just reading, which I usually just go out on one of the back decks and read. It's very relaxing, and not to mention a great view!

We have 8 days on the ship between Puerto Rico and Salvador. Every 4 days of class they give us one day off, so today we have an off day to do whatever we want pretty much. Since there was no class today last night was a big "Pub Night" where a bunch of people go up to the 7th deck and get drinks. This consists of a maximum of 4 beers or 4 five ounce classes of cheap wine. So everyone gets pretty hammered (sarcasm).

So the other day one of my friends was teaching us a game called "Oh Shit" which ended being the exact same thing as "Oh Hell" except for the fact that you start at one and work your way up, then back down the river and when you don't make your bid you lose 10 points. You also end the game with one card and no trump. Of course I dominated, only missing my bid once the whole game. After that I attempted to teach them Whist, but didn't have nearly as much luck with that. Most people around here are used to playing really easy games like UNO, BS, Old Maid, P&A (without drinks), spoons (with our id cards because we don’t have spoons), apples to apples and catchphrase just to name a few. Most of these games we can just check out from the Pursers desk on deck 5 but some people brought them as well.

With the other free time I have I usually try to go work out in our less than stellar weight room. On days when the ship is rocking a lot using free weights is hard though so we stick to the machines. However, there were barely any waves out there today so that was nice.

I've been staring to get to know 3 different groups of people pretty well over the last few days. However, of course I'm still open to meeting people when there's a lack of things to do, which is often on a ship that's only so big. It started out huge, but it's definitely shrunk over the past few days. If I'm looking for someone I usually just go from my room, through the computer lab/library, through the piano lounge, then out on deck 6 to deck 7. It's almost a guarantee that you'll find someone you know by doing that.

So, like previous people have said, the food has gotten really old/dull already. It smells the exact same every day. There's always salad with two different types of watered-down dressing, a pasta (which seems to always taste the same), some form of potatoes, a meat (usually chicken, sometimes a small steak), fish, soup, mixed vegetables, and a fruit. It doesn't sound bad at first, and I enjoyed it the first 10 days or whatever it's been. But it just doesn't sound appetizing at all anymore. I'm about to go up to deck 7 and buy a hamburger or pizza or something. I haven't bought anything from up there yet just because I’m really wanting to save my money for the countries. I may have to take out a loan from the bank or my always-loving and awesome parents :)

So the second day (I think) after Puerto Rico we passed through Martinique and saw land. This was a pleasant surprise for everyone since we didn't expect to see land again until Salvador. Some people said they saw dolphins swimming next to the boat but I missed that.

We crossed the equator today! Right around 14:00 this afternoon. USUALLY Semester at Sea does "Neptune Day" on the day that we cross the border and people shave their heads. A lot of girls do it from what I hear, which kinda freaks me out. However, they've moved it until a little before we get to South Africa. I've actually talked to a lot of girls and guys that are shaving their head. I will NOT be taking part in that. My hair is just fine the way it is. I don't see myself looking good with no hair!

As for plans in the counties thus far:

In Salvador I think we're just going to go with the flow right when we get off of the ship. We may try to buy tickets into a roped-off area but we would have to buy them from a scalper or someone on the streets because they're already sold out. Eduardo (Lopez, the foreign exchange student from Brazil our senior year of High School) suggested that we go to the voa-voa concert that night. It starts at midnight and goes until 4am, so at least David and I are going to try to get tickets for that. A lot of people are going to miss out on it because they're taking trips to the Amazon and have an early flight the next morning. After that the party continues until noon the next day so I'm sure we'll be doing a bit of recovering after that. For those of you that don't know, Carnivale is one of the biggest parties in the world. It goes on in the big cities in Brazil (Rio, Salvador, ect.) for one week. They have parades going through the streets and a ton of concerts going on all of the time. Sounds like a good time to me! After that's all done with I'm going to be going on an SaS trip to a favela in Salvador (basically the ghetto). I'm excited to see that side of the country and culture. I'm sure it's going to be a lot different from anything I've seen at least. We're also planning on going Scuba diving one morning/afternoon if we can find a good spot while we're there.

South Africa is jam packed with stuff to do. I have a flight leaving at like 10 the night we get there to go on a 3 day Kruger Safari. After that, we come back and I'm going to go to Cape Winelands for a full-day tour on Saturday. Then David and I are planning on going shark diving on Sunday before we leave.

Mauritus is basically being treated as our spring break. There's not a ton to do there and it's right around the time of regular spring break. So we've got a group together that's going to rent out a beach house for a few days. One of the dive instructors in Puerto Rico also said that they have some of the best places to go scuba diving in the world, with crystal clear water so I'm looking forward to that.

Nothing has been finalized for India yet but I really want to go to the Taj so that'll most likely happen.

When we get to Hong Kong we're not required to go back to the ship until we leave Shanghai, so we're planning on doing Hong Kong, then the Great Wall (perhaps sleeping on it), then going to Shanghai.

And Japan I plan on getting a rail pass and going to Hiroshima, Kyoto, and Tokyo if at all possible. It sounds like the rail passes are pretty awesome though.

Hawaii will be nice because I'm going to have my cell phone re-activated then! And by the time we get to Costa Rica we're going to be done with all of our classes, so you can imagine what that'll be like!

So we lost C-SPAN on our TV somewhere in the last few days. Although it's probably the most boring channel on television, it was nice to hear them talk about the debates and show some of the candidates’ speeches on the campaign trail.

Some things that I know that I'm missing in the states this week: the 2 hour season premier of LOST, without a question more stellar episodes of Rob & Big, all of The Gauntlet and Rock of Love II, numerous Gopher basketball and Hockey games. But what I'm NOT missing is the weather. It was probably around a nice high 80's to low 90's today with the breeze from the ship.

On a small side note, we left from the Bahamas to Puerto Rico going 13 knots, then left Puerto Rico going 20knots for a few days and have now slowed down to 14knots. They say that we're actually the fastest cruise ship in the world. Our max speed is like 31knots, which we'll get to see when we take the journey from Brazil to South Africa.

Thanks to all of you that have written me cards (the ones that my mom collected then gave to me. They have all been GREAT so far and I really appreciate you all taking time out of your day to do that!

That's all I can think of that I wrote earlier for now. Maybe even a little more.