Spring 2015 - Day 73: Sea Olympics
I woke to the sound of voices in the hallway.
I was not happy. Not happy at all.
The voices kept getting louder and louder and more obnoxious until I heard banging on our door. I was really not happy. I opened my computer to find that it said 8:45. Ok, I thought, that isn't too bad. I would've had to have gotten up in 15 minutes anyway, for the lifeboat drill.
Then Stephanie reminded me that we had gone back an hour last night and I had forgotten to change my computer. So it was really 7:45.
I was really not happy again.
I put my laptop away angrily and tried to go back to sleep.
Our lifeboat drill was ridiculous. People were talking during the entire thing. The number one rule of lifeboat drills is to be dead silent. Also, way too many people got sent back to their room because they weren't wearing appropriate clothing. Come on people, this is the third time we have done this. You are practicing to save your life, pay attention.
When we got back to our room after the lifeboat drill I was already in a bad mood and then I heard music from the hallway.
And then the music repeated again and again and again. They were playing Taylor Swifts Red over and over again on a bluetooth speaker in the hallway.
I was seething mad.
IT WAS 9:30 IN THE MORNING. SEA OLYMPICS DOESN'T EVEN START FOR ANOTHER THREE AND A HALF HOURS. WHY ARE YOU BEING SO ANNOYING.
This day was not starting off well. I was already so annoyed and so angry and wanted nothing to do with the Red Sea.
I went to lunch with Stephanie and we sat separately from the Red Sea, which partially back fired because they thought that we were where the Red Sea was sitting and so made a separate section right near us. At least they weren't too annoying. Dallas looked like he was about to play music again but I left before that happened.
When we got back to our room we decided that our bitterness and resentment towards how annoying they were being was ruining our Sea Olympics. Did we want to be angry the entire time and so not enjoy the events? No, we didn't. So we decided to put our annoyance behind us and attend the opening ceremonies with a fresh point of view.
The opening ceremonies were a lot of fun. Some of the chants that the seas put together were really impressive. I also loved a lot of the banners that people had made. The bearing sea made a shark out of the word 'bering'. It looked really cool.
Just like how Captain Roman wasn't King Neptune on Neptune Day he didn't open Sea Olympics like Captain Jeremy did. That was a bummer, but it was still a lot of fun and it got me more pumped up for the day than I was in the morning.
As soon as the games we opened and we were all filing out of the Union I ran into Tory. She was going to the activities desk to get the paperwork she needed to judge the pull-up contest. It was then that I realized I had signed up for the wrong thing. I never really wanted to be sea captain. What I wanted to do was help out with the events themselves. Help put them together and help judge them on the day of.
I asked Tory if I could come along with her and she said of course. So I decided to be neutral towards any of the seas and help out with the events themselves. As soon as I made this decision I was much happier and was excited.
Tory got the paperwork and we made our way up to deck 7 where the pull up contest would be held.
It ended up being really difficult to judge a pull up contest. Since I wasn't an official volunteer I became the scribe and Tory and the other girl who had volunteered in advance actually made all the decisions and did the counting.
The rules were fairly simple. They had to completely extend their arms when they came down, they couldn't swing their bodies to help them get up, and their chin needed to make it all the way over the bar. They had three minutes for everyone on their team to attempt pull ups but each member of the team could go only once.
The rule that ended up being challenging to judge was the arm extension. How extended is extended? How do you not count a pull up and keep track of how many they officially have when the crowd is yelling out numbers too.
But we survived it and the Baltic Sea won.
Right after the pull up contest ended the wet suit relay began. Teams of 5 had to put on one of the white crew suits and swim across the pool. The suits were ginormous so they looked hard to swim in. Mom Shelley was competing on the life long learner team and she did great!
I watched it for a bit and then wandered around trying to find something else interesting to watch. It was a struggle to watch most of the events because there would be huge crowds and so unless you got their early enough there was no possible way to have a good view.
Eventually I headed to the Union to participate in the ship wide relay, the event they had taken me off of. Stephanie was signed up for it and told me I could have her spot because she had volunteered to help judge volleyball.
It took quite a long time to get the relay started. There were 9 activities around the ship that had to be completed in order. Then, a 10th person had to carry a ping pong ball around on a spoon between the locations to prevent the teams from running.
At the last minute they eliminated an event because it was supposed to take place on the volleyball court but volleyball was still going on.
I had volunteered to do the logic puzzle, the second stop, so I made my way to classroom 9 and right when we were talking about needed writing utensils the first group came barging it.
It was a mess, they were not ready to start the puzzle and so there were pencils and papers flying everywhere.
It was a hard logic puzzle. It was something like "On Monday a worm is at the bottom of a hole. Every day he climbs out four feet and every night he slides back 2. On what day of the week will be make it out of the hole?"
The answer was Thursday, I think. Maybe.
After we were given the OK to move on our ping pong person moved quickly up to the deck 6 garden lounge, I followed closely behind. Once we left deck 6 we headed up to deck 7 port side where we thought we had to do push ups so Jake did pushups but once we had gone back down to Deck 6 we realized that we had gone out of order and shaving a balloon was supposed to come first. So we had to go back to where we just came from.
Once the balloon shaving was back on track we were back in it but we technically did pushups twice.
At one point we were going up the stairs at the back of deck 7 and the wind kocked the ping pong ball off and she had to go back into the dining room to start the passage over. Then, in the same spot the wind took it, I bumped into someone still doing the frozen t-shirt contest and knocked the ball off. Unfortunately there was a judge right there so we couldn't pretend it hadn't happened and she had to go all the way back again.
But despite all of these setbacks we still made it back to the Union for the last event second. When we got there we found that the last activity hadn't even been set up yet and so we lost out very far lead in the time it took them to figure out what to do.
Then, no one had read the last instruction, which was to have your team all yell out something. But no one had done it and the person deciding the final winner and three of the teams got in a massive argument about who finished first. I was involved in the argument for a while, saying that it wasn't fair that they didn't have the event ready for us, and then I realized that it was just a silly event in Sea Olympics and I was getting myself all worked up for nothing.
My competitive side had definitely come out at that moment. Which was strange because I hadn't really felt it since Josh, Tori, Pat, and I had game night and we played Josh's favorite game that I hate with a passion because he is far too good at it. I get so angry every time we play it because we get way too competitive.
Sorry, random sentimental flashback. So I realized the argument did not matter much and I just walked away from it. I went back to my room and just sat and had some quiet time before I went back out into the madness.
It was time to get a good seat for synchronized swimming and so I went up to the pool deck and pulled a chair up right to the edge of the pool. As the time for synchronized swimming grew closer people filled in the pool deck in front of me by standing. No one wanted to sit on the pool deck because it was wet. So I was looking at a bunch of butts for a while. But I held on to my strategic position, knowing that someone would come along eventually and tell them all to sit.
And that did happen. But no one really sat, they all squatted, and I found myself thinking back to my other sea olympics and wondering how I managed to get such a good seat when I wasn't that close to the pool.
I ended up standing to be able to see properly. The performances were pretty great. The Arabian sea had the best one. They performed to Car Wash, the version from the movie Shark Tale, sung by Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliot. At one point pulled out tiny bottles of shampoo and washed each others hair in the pool. This caused the head of security, Dirk, and the RD in charge of Sea Olympics to yell out "NO" simultaneously because soap isn't really good for the pool.
Afterwards there were lots of rumors about whether their performance got disqualified because of it. I don't think it did, I think there was enough other crap in the pool from the rest of Sea Olympics that they would've had to clean it anyway.
But no one really knows.
After swimming we had a break for dinner where I broke the rules and sat with my friends instead of sitting with the red sea.
After dinner I went with Tory again. She was in charge of judging Tug of War and I definitely wanted to help with that. We collected the rope, tape, and paperwork from the activities desk and went up to deck 7 port side.
We first made sure the exact center of the rope was correctly marked and then we marked a center point on the ground. We then used a stick that we found randomly on the deck to measure out from the center point. they would have to pull the center knot over the line on their side in order to win. Since they also started on the marked lines, pulling the knot over also caused the people from the other team to fall over the center line. So it was much clearer to judge then pull ups.
Dr. Phil Kolbe, the other official judge arrived eventually. Tory was going to start them off and professor Kolbe, who had a whistle, was going to call the winner. I was going to be the scribe again. Since it was incredible windy out we taped the bracket onto the wall so that it would be easier to write on and so that others could see who was up.
While we were still setting up Jessi found me and asked when her sea was scheduled to go. They were supposed to be in the first group going. She said that dodgeball had gone over and so all of her tug of war guys were stuck playing dodgeball. So we went reverse up the bracket to give them a chance. It turned out that this was a recurring problem among all of the teams but it some how worked out.
It also went incredible fast, each contest lasted less than a minute. In between I would yell out who was next. By the time we had started a huge crowd had formed and I became in charge of crowd control, making sure people didn't get too close to the tugging area.
Deck 7 port side is not all that big so it was challenging. I believe the red sea won but I have no idea who came in second.
We really needed to do a losers bracket as well because points are awarded based on the order team come in but with bracket style that means that everyone eliminated at one point in the bracket are all on the same level.
But by the time the three of us, Tory, Dr. Kolbe, and I, realized this everyone was already clearing out. So we just decided that those eliminated in the same group on the bracket, would receive the same amount of points.
Tory and I cleaned up and then returned the rope to the activities desk. While we were there they asked if we would be willing to judge the hula-hoop contest because the person that was scheduled to judge it was still judging the ping-pong tournament.
We said yes and so grabbed the hula-hoops, and made our way right back up to where we had come from - deck 7 port side.
The hula hoop contest was not just seeing how good someone was at hula-hooping. Instead, teams of 10 stood in a circle holding hands and had to pass a hula hoop around the circle. The team that got it around the circle the fastest one.
Since I had yelled so much during tug of war, when I tried to yell the instructions it didn't work very well. My voice was crapping out on me. It didn't help that this was my first day of being almost back to normal from my sickness. But this was happening at 7:30 at night, I had been running around all day, and I still felt pretty good.
The easiest way to judge it was to have one team go at a time and to time them.
As the teams prepared, I made sure there was 10 of them. If they had less than 10 then they were not allowed to compete. We also did not allow them to practice so that no team had an unfair advantage. They also only had one chance to do it.
Most teams took around 25 seconds to get the hoop around the circle. I can't remember who won but they all came very close to one another.
When the last team had gone I realized that I had only written down 7 times when there were 8 teams. We though for a second that I had made a mistake and hadn't recorded someones time. But no, the Adriatic Sea just didn't show up. Whoops. Zero points for them.
Once we handed in the score sheet the activities desk Tory and I went to the Union to get seats for the lip sync contest.
It was there that we found out three events were still happening, dodgeball, which seemed to never end, chess, and something else.
Before the lip sync contest the Red Sea was in second place, and that didn't include the results from dodgeball, chess, ping-pong, tug of war, and hula-hoop. All things we did really well in, except chess. Our chess player didn't even show up, so we lost all points there.
Interestingly, the Adriatic Sea was in last place. I was in the Adriatic Sea on my first voyage and we didn't do much better. We came in second to last right above the children, who had their own sea. I think the Adriatic Sea was cursed.
The lip syncing contest was pretty damn fantastic. The two best performances were the Arabian Sea and the Sea-lebrities (the faculty/staff/life long learners). The Arabian Sea was lead by Austin, who taught a bunch of the boys the dance to Anaconda from Nicki Minaj's music video. Watching 8 boys dance to Anaconda was legendary. The Sea-lebrities did a mash up of songs from the 60s up until now. Each song was performed by one or two persons and it was very elaborate. At one point Willa had water thrown on her epically and then the next person slipped in it. As always, it was the two most rehearsed performances that outshone the others.
There was a slight break while they tallied the results. There wasn't too much activity from everyone in the Union, you can tell that everyone was exhausted and was ready to go to bed. I was so sweaty and just really wanted to shower. We sat around for at least 20 minutes before the winner was announced.
The Adriatic Sea came in last. The Red Sea came in third, and the Arabian sea came in first. After both their superb synchronized swimming and lip syncing performances, I was perfectly fine with the fact that they won.
Once they announced it they said that they would be showing Ghandi: A Long Walk to Freedom in the Union. Why they decided to show a movie right after Sea Olympics is beyond me. I really wanted to watch that movie but my want to shower way over powered it.
I went back to my cabin and was sitting talking to Stephanie when Kevin came on to make an announcement. He said that the ship's water desalination system is down and so we would need to conserve water.
Starting right then we would only be able to flush the toilet and shower at 6am-7am, 11am-12am, and 5pm to 6pm. They hoped that it would be fixed in South Africa.
What.
Are you kidding me.
The one thing I wanted most in the world at that moment was to shower. This was definitely a joke. Was it April Fool's Day? No, it's only March 21st.
And who picked these times to shower? No one is going to get up at 6am just to shower, 11am is lunch time and 5 is right during dinner. These time are not conducive to my schedule. I wanted to work out at 8pm but I would have to go all sweaty afterwards.
Ugh.
The worst thing ended up being that they hadn't said anything about drinking water. It reality it was still available 24 hours a day, but since they hadn't said that everyone freaked out and ran to fill their bottles or buy all the bottles from the snack bar. Panic ensued. Which was completely unnecessary.
I went to bed very unhappy because I was sweaty and dirty and tense from not being able to shower the day off me. At least we only had three more days until South Africa.
