Day 50
Day 50! WOOOOO!!!!
This isn't halfway though. That won't happen for another week. Still pretty cool. 50 days. It feels both like it has been longer and like it is going by really fast.
And if I have learned anything, I have learned how to pick out a good crab for eating. You don't want it to have a white belly because that means it just molted and the new shell has not filled with meat. You want it to have more of a rusty colored belly.
I learned that in Marine Bio today. We were talking about crustaceans. Like shrimp and crabs and lobsters and other things like that. It was interesting. I learned that barnacles have the highest penis to body length ratio out of any animal on the planet. And because they are stuck down they just kind of reach out and try to fertilize things around them, hoping that they stick it in another barnacle. And lobsters can grow to be the size of a human, but we harvest them too quickly for them to live long enough for that. Back in the day, because there were so many lobsters, they thought of them as crap food and would feed them to the prisoners.
Valuable life knowledge, that is what I am getting from that class.
The most interesting things to me are when we see things off the ship and then he tells us about them. The waters we are in have a high concentration of krill, so they are big feeding waters for a lot of mammals. And we have seen some dolphins. But we have seen even more flying fish. So today in class he talked to us about flying fish and how they fly and why. The reason is for predator evasion, if someone is chasing them they can just hop out of the water and glide a few hundred meters away. The reason we see so much of them is because the boat startles them.
I studied for a chunk of the day. Not as much as I probably should have but I felt accomplished. I have a test in my psychology class in two days and today in class another student got pretty sassy with our teacher because the only instructions he has given is to study the chapters. And there are six of them. And that isn't very specific and doesn't tell us if he wants names and dates or just concepts. We are all very frustrated. And even after she went off on him and told him that just telling us to learn the vocal words is too much work he pretty much just said 'good luck.' So that will be an interesting test.
I also have a test in Bio that same day. But he gave us a specific list of things that we need to know. So it is so much easier to prepare for. Everyone is in study mode. And you can find people everywhere around the ship with their noses in books and papers and computers. The accelerated state of our classes is making assignments interesting. Before we only had one or two classes before we would break for a country. And Portugal, Spain, and Morocco all happened without class days in-between. 10 days with no class, it was like winter break. But now we have class every other day. Which makes the pace really fast. Even with Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes at home you still will have that two day weekend break. Nope, not here.
And the professors have never taught in this environment before so we are basically helping each other figure it out.
There were some activities tonight, one of them was salsa dancing and I didn’t go. Which I regret a little, that would have been fun. Instead Molly and I watched The Butterfly Effect. Which was traumatizing. I guess we should have guessed because it was labeled a psychological thriller and was rated R. It was a good movie but it was messed up in a lot of ways. Seriously traumatizing.
It reminded me of a movie called Premonition that came out in 2007. Sandra Bullock was in it and she had knowledge of a car accident that her husband was going to be in but was living days out of order. It was also a psychological thriller. I watched it with Kellie and we were traumatized by one scene with a crow in a garbage can.
This is why I don't watch scary movies.
I really don't.
Tomorrow I will be spending the entirety of the day studying for my exams.
3 days till Ghana!
