Day 34: Life at Sea Part 2

By the end of the last post I had tangented to talking more about what it is like traveling in port. So lets bring it back to ship life. 

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It is a lot harder to find people on the ship then you would think. There are 575 total students on the ship; 147 of them are male and 428 of them are female. Terrible odds. I think I could recognize every guy but I keep seeing new girls. 

We are able to call between cabins, but that requires a cabin number. You can get cabin numbers from the pursers desk, but that requires a last name. You also can email people, our emails are all in the same format, but that also requires a last name. You would think that just walking around the ship and looking for people would work out but that is not true at all. I have planned to meet people on the fifth deck dining hall, not specified a side and then never found them. 

Why is it so hard to find people, it doesn't make any sense. 

We can barely use the email as it is. The internet on the ship is painful. As my travel writing professor says, it's crusty. I already can tell that when this voyage is over I am going to spend a week hibernating, sleeping and being on the internet. Getting and receiving email in our cabins is like pulling teeth. The server continuously times out and you just have to keep hitting the button. If you go sit in a public area it is a lot better.  We have a list of free sites that we can use, the one that I am on the most is Wikipedia, which is actually a very valuable. And, because it is a free site we are allowed to use it for research in our classes, woo! 

One time it took me 45 minutes to load an article on wikipedia. But that was sitting in my room. Sitting in a common room it will load in two or three minutes. We all have to be very patient when doing anything. It works out though because there is not much else for us to be doing. 

The middle of the afternoon is a very slow time of day. There are still classes going on, so nothing else is happening. I generally take naps. It seems like we all have chronic fatigue syndrome. I was talking to Lori, the nurse practitioner just last night about how rocky the ship is and how tired we all are. It's really just a combination of all of the time change that we have to go through combined with the highs and lows of port and sea and moving around all the time. 

We are literally constantly in motion, both moving forward and using side to side. The fact that we have such a short time at sea means that we keep gaining and losing our sea legs. The past two days have been incredibly rocky. Which is unnerving because the seas don't even look that rough, and it is going to get worse. 

You know it is bad when they put the sea sickness bags out at the bottom of every stairwell. When you go up and down the stairs it is really common to start walking on one side and finish walking on the other side. Walking into walls is a normal thing. 

You can get free sea sickness meds from the clinic. They just sit outside the door in a box. 

The clinic is located on the second deck and is open from 8:00 to 9:00 and 16:30 to 17:30 on sea days and 7:30 to 8:00 on port days. When you go there you either see Dr. Dave or Lori, who are both awesome. They are extremely thorough. One of the kids in my class, Byron, had a really bad stomach ache and so was taken to the hospital on Le Havre to make sure that he didn't have appendicitis. He didn't, but he had to meet back up with the ship in Dublin. I went to the clinic today actually because I have a really bad cold. Dr. Dave gave me something that I can take to clear out my nose so that I can sleep tonight. I need to get better quick. The medical team is really good about talking to us about safety in the countries when it comes to water and food as well as anything we should watch out for. They are already starting to talk to us about taking our malaria meds in preparation for Ghana. 

Actually the entire ship is pretty good at keeping us in the loop. We get Dean's memos emailed to us everyday as well as Noon and Evening announcements. The noon announcement actually happens a little after noon because there are classes that end at 12:05, the evening announcement happens around 18:00 or 6:00pm.

The announcements are preceded by a very distinct two tone sound. They are very loud, you can hear them from dock when we are in port. 

We are always told the bridge report that I have attached a few times to my blog posts. Here is today's:  

NOON BRIDGE REPORT FOR LISBON, PORTUGAL 25 Sept

Miles Made Good Since Dublin

443 nautical miles

Average Speed of Ship 11.4 knots

Sea Depth 4500 Meters / 14764 Feet

Air Temperature 19°C / 66°F

Water Temperature 18°C /  64°F

Sunset 1924      Sunrise 0607

We are also always told the water consumption for the previous day and it is compared the the matching day on last years fall voyage. We use a lot of water. We are also told all of our food waste, which I think is up to over 800 pounds  right now. 

Also included in the announcements are the activities that are happening on the ship that evening and at what time. Sometimes specific people are called to the pursers desk. The noon announcements are generally longer than the evening announcements. 

Doing laundry is not all that much fun. We are given a five gallon plastic bag that we can fill with clothes. Getting one bag washed, no matter how much is in it, is six dollars. You have to fill out a form that you leave with your bag. You have to count all of your laundry and sort it by type. A lot of people try to laundry in their showers. I have tried to do it but it takes days to dry. And it doesn't help if you leave your clothes hanging in there and then your roommate takes a shower. Oops. 

Before, laundry was not available in port, but was available to all decks on sea days. The schedule just changed when we left Ireland. Now, different decks have specific days that they can have laundry done. Our deck, deck four starboard side's laundry day was the last day in Dublin and our next one isn't until the last day of Cadiz. I hadn't done laundry since before Paris and after falling in the river I had absolutely no clothes. I then missed our laundry day so I put my laundry outside of Molly's door under her name so that I would have something to wear for Portugal. It was a little shaky there for a while though. I guess I really need to pay attention to the laundry schedule from now on. It's so nice, everything comes back all organized and folded.

We basically do nothing for ourselves. We have a cabin steward, ours is Rey! He comes in and cleans every other day. He makes our beds and will tuck in our stuffed animals. He takes my Disney blanket and spreads it out so that Mickey is in the middle. If we leave clothes on our bed he will fold them, and plug in my laptop. 

He gives us new towels every 6 days. He's pretty fantastic. I feel really bad though because he won't clean our room if we are in it and I always feel like we are here when we tries to come it. I always rush to leave so that he doesn't have to come back later.  It's the best feeling to come back from a day in port and have your bed all made. We are so spoiled. 

Another way we are spoiled is that we have a spa on the ship. I haven't used it yet but I definitely will by the end of this voyage. They do hair cuts, pedicures and manicures, massages, facials, and everything in-between. It is located in the Wellness Center on Deck Seven, which is also where the gym is. 

The gym is very small, there are only two treadmills, six ellipticals, a few stair steppers and a few bikes. The weight machines are located outside on Deck Seven Starboard. I haven't even gone near them because lifting weights while we are rocking at sea sounds like a terrible idea. Running on the treadmill isn't that hard while we are at sea, although the times that I have done it we weren't rocking all that much. I would not go near it the past few days. We are prohibited from using them or going outside if it gets too rocky or windy. I have seen the pool drained, I think they do that too when it gets really bad. 

There are elevators on the ship but I have a pact with myself that I won't use them. Taking the stairs is way more fun and I am never going more than three or four floors at a time. 

There are people of all ages on the ship. Obviously the majority of us are students and so are between 18 and 23. Faculty are able to bring their families on the ship so there are, I think 22, young kinds on the ship between the ages of 2 and 16. They have their own program during sea days and are homeschooled by their parents. That's in the morning. In the afternoon they have a study or activity time and then a physical activity time. There are basketball courts on either side of deck seven by the way. 

There are also Life Long Learners on the ship, they are adults who are over 40. They are allowed to take classes, travel in ports just like us, and they serve as mentors to students on the ship. 

On the ship we form extended families. I signed up to be in one during the activity fair on the second day but I was never contacted. It was upsetting, I was excited about having a family and watching everyone else with their families made me sad. 

But then, last night, Lori came up to Molly and I while we were studying in the dining room and offered us chocolate. When I asked her why she had chocolate she told me that she got it for her family. It was then that I told her about how I never got a family and she said that I could become part of hers! Yay! Lori is the best! 

Tangent: I am currently listening to Dr. Dave talk to us at the logistical pre-port and he just told us that some people have started taking the sea-sickness pills they give us for free and crushing them, and then snorting them. Who thinks of this?! People are stupid. As Dr. Dave said, that's just going to hurt your nose. I remember this one time that a kid in my 8th grade math class decided to crush and snort a smartie. That did not end well. 

Tangent over. 

Random fact: The plugs in our rooms are American plugs but the plugs everywhere else on the ship are German plugs. Which doesn't make any sense. Actually it does make sense, the ship was built in Germany, but it made it awful awkward to take your computer to a common area. 

We all bum it on the ship. Well, most of us. I wear sweatpants more often than I do in normal life. People kind of stop caring. At least we still shower. 

I feel like there is more I should tell you but I can't think of any. Please let me know if you have any questions or are curious about anything, I will cover them in a future post. 

We are rocking so much right now and I am sitting in the Union, which is really high up. This is not fun. 

Molly heard a rumor that when we cross from Spain to Morocco we go over a 'dip' (whatever that means) and it is so intense that they gather us all on one place. People have broken arms? I feel as though this person was just trying to freak her out but I kinda hope it is true because that sounds adventurous. Right now I am just nauseated. 

In my Travel Writing class today our professor has us all list things that we were satisfied with and dissatisfied with about the voyage. We were all complaining about the food and the internet and how fast everything is going when Byron talked about an epiphany moment he had walking through that activity fair at Trinity College in Dublin. 

"Back home there is another boring semester starting and I'm not there. Seeing the activity fair reminded me that what we are doing is not normal. We're all really weird." 

We didn't even talk about the fact that we have been to five countries, that has become normal to us. But really. We've been to five countries and will enter our sixth tomorrow. 

We are so weird.