Day 82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89 – Back on the ship

I’m just going to bunch all of these days at sea together since not a whole lot new and exciting happens and I’m sure you would rather read about my adventures in our ports than my adventures on our ship.



We started our journey across the Pacific with crossing the International dateline, so we had two April 15th’s back to back. At the same time I jumped from being 14 hours ahead of CST to 10 hours behind CST. It was kind of depressing knowing that we had to repeat a day, but what can ya do.

After gaining an entire day, we lost an hour each day for 5 days in a row. Let me tell you, that REALLY messes up any sleep schedule you might have had before. I can’t say I’ve really had much of a sleep schedule on this trip anyway since we’ve been constantly losing hours. The only bad part of going around the world this way is that we lose hours of sleep constantly instead of gaining them if we would have went around the world the other way. I’m not complaining though! I think our itinerary was the best of any SAS trip that I’ve seen.

I basically have all of my school work for the rest of the semester assigned to me by now so I’m going to try to get as much done ahead of time as I can. That way I can just sit back and relax for the rest of this trip. We’ll see how that goes though, studying on a ship with 700 other students isn’t exactly an easy task.

We set up a ‘Specialty Dinner’ on the second April 15th that we had to celebrate a couple people’s birthdays and just to have a good meal for once. You have to pay extra for it, but they serve you a 4 course meal and you get to pick what you want off of a menu. The food is also different than our regular dining hall food too so that’s always a plus. I never considered myself a picky eater but when they serve you the same general thing every day it’s hard not to get sick of it.

On our one day off from classes we had a Gay Pride day that started off with a BBQ on the 7th deck aft that was amazing. Probably some of the best food that I’ve had on this trip yet (besides taco day of course). The day ended with a fashion show put on by the GLBT group on board. It was pretty funny.

Nights are still filled with a variety of different games. Lately it’s been a lot of poker, but they have a lot of board games that we can rent out and I’ve learned about 10 new card games to play. To say the least, we find stuff to keep us busy.

One day over this long stretch I took a bridge tour of the control room of the ship. It was pretty cool. The bridge actually wasn’t too big but it still had a lot of stuff in it to help navigate the ship. We’re currently on some smooth open waters so the ship is on autopilot. It also has by far the best view from the front of the ship looking out into the ocean. I could sit up there all day and just watch us cut through the ocean.

We’ve had a long heated debate for pretty much the entire voyage as to whether or not there are guns on the ship. The crew tells us that there aren’t any guns on the ship and when we go through pirate infested waters we just crank up the speed because we’re faster than any pirate ship out there. We also have some powerful water hoses that we would shoot at them if they tried to come on board. Pirates typically don’t attack cruise ships either. However, if they were to come onboard (according to them) we would have no defenses against them. So I think that they do have guns somewhere on the ship and they just don’t tell us but some other people insist that they don’t have any guns anywhere on the ship. What do you all think?



Ok, on a side topic I just wanted to let you all know that I’m going to be reorganizing all of my pictures on Flickr when I get home so they’re easier to look at and navigate through. There’s special ways to customize my collections so I think I’ll spend some extra time when I return to do that. There’s also a very slim chance that I’m going to be able to upload any more pictures before I return to the states so be sure to check back for updates when I get home if you want to see pictures! I’ve got lots and lots!