Extended Family

The ship has a tradition (we love traditions at UVa) of providing students with "extended familes" if they want one.  Students sign up and faculty, staff and life-long learners sign up and then they get matched up somehow. To kick the introductions off, we met for a dinner at a reserved table with our new family.  The response was so great this voyage that three nights were required to get all the students together with their families. We met with our new borrowd kids last night, and they were so much fun.  This shipboard of folks has the ability to meet and bond so quickly. We all shared out Hawaii experiences and plans (or lack thereof ) for Japan. Dinner flew by, and we all had a set of new friends that we knew all about. Our family decided that we would try to have dinner about once a week, and Nancy and I offered the opportunity for conversations and hugs anytime they were needed.  One student said to Nancy as she left, "Bye proxy mom".

Since yesterday was a "no class day", there were lots of activities.  All the students got their pictures taken with groups from their schools.  Then we all assembled on the back decks to have a shipboard photo taken. I'm pretty sure I felt the bow come out of the water when we were all back there.

Then last night, we had several explorer seminars.  Nancy went to one on sustainable energy by Lee Reidinger where she learned about the huge potential of wind energy.  I went to one in the union where Don Gogniat talked about longitude and latitude and then had a competition for students to explain the International Dateline.  The presentations were  quite varied as some folks did a basic lecture, one did Haiku, there were two rap songs,  and one told a story as metaphor.   The metaphor won on the applause meter, but I'm pretty sure there is still a lot of confusion about the International Dateline.

Then, we went to a showing of "Jaws", the 1975 Seven Spielberg movie based on the novel of the same name by Peter Benchley.  Audrey Sprenger is using this book in her course on the Sociology of the Sea, and she gamely tried to have a discussion of "modernism" before the showing, but the kids were mostly interested in going ahead and getting themselves terrified by the movie.  It delivered.

Yesterday, we had to declare whether we were traveling by ship between Yokahama and Kobe Japan. We filled out the paper work to travel in country by port, and we have an ambitious plan with no concrete reservations, so this could be our first big adventure.