The students on the ship are housed on the lower decks, and each side is named for a sea. For example deck 4 port side aft might be the Adriatic Sea. Each of the seas has a LLC (Living Learning Coordinator) assigned to it. These are like resident assistants in dorms at Universities. Throughout the voyage, these groups will have activities that they do as a group. The very first activity was the customs process to get off the ship in Hawaii. Instead of everyone lining up in a random process, they were called by sea to come and present themselves. This actually made an orderly process out of chaos. I asked one of the students what they do together as a sea. "Not much," he said. They had an initial meeting. Then, we got an email that the Baltic Sea was having a mixer with faculty/staff and Life Long Learners in the Faculty Lounge. They were (overly) excited about using the inner sanctum of the lounge, but we all showed up and had a great time. I got to make several new friends.
Sheila is from near Accra Ghana where we will be visiting, and she gave us some tips on bargaining at the market. I'm definitely going to have to practice this--maybe this afternoon with the smoothie folks. On a long shot, I asked Sheila if she knew Fifi Quanseh from Accra (there are a lot of people in Accra). "Do you mean Michael Quanseh who goes to UVA?" Fifi goes by Michael in the U.S., and it turns out that Sheila knows him through a cousin of one of them. What a small world.
I'll have more on the Seas in future posts. They apparently compete in the "Sea Olympics" later on the voyage.
After this mixer ended, Nancy and I went to one of the dining halls to get internet access-the wireless doesn't quite get to our room--and I discovered that there is a snack time every night where students can get sandwiches for their late night studying. You keep discovering things on this ship. This also seemed to be card game central.
Prior to this mixer, we went to a photography seminar--one of the explorer seminars--taught by Michael Petrus who is teaching classes on the ship. It was really interesting and was aimed more at composition of shots than using cameras. Stay tuned, and I'll try to incorporate some of things I learned into future pictures. I might even include some "punctum". There is also a photography club on the ship run by the students, and they are having competitions to capture shipboard life. These will be posted from time to time on the Semester at Sea webpage.
We're still days away from Japan, but we got a huge packet of immigration forms to fill out yesterday. They are pretty daunting, and take over an hour to fill out, if you do it right.
We gained another hour last night, so it is now 6:10 am on ship and 1:10 pm back in Virginia. Our Tv set in our room has a local channel that constantly updates our location, course, ship speed and time along with a map of where we are. It keeps us "grounded" (or should that be "oceaned").
Nancy is keeping busy with a drawing class. She has always been artistic but hasn't gotten to study art, so this a good sabbatical from training horses and teaching riding lessons. With 12 inches of snow on the ground back in Virginia, she wouldn't be doing much teaching anyway.
I'm not going to give any information on the state of the waves so I don't jinx us.
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