Day 9: 1/17 Stuck in Honolulu with a Bunch of Idiots

                As I woke up this morning we were still at sea.  My roommate made me panic though because someone told her that it only took around 3 hours to get to Honolulu, so maybe we already stopped there and left.  This worried me because I was planning on talking to Keenan one last time before we didn’t have cell service any more.  I frantically ran to the TV to check the map of our location (which is always on channel 1), and found that we hadn’t reached Honolulu yet.  After a big sigh of relief I got ready for the day.  After my class, I was still waiting to get close enough to land to get service; in the mean time I checked my email and read our sea update that our RD (resident director --- each sea has one) puts together each day with some reminders, notifications, events, and stuff like that.  At the very top it said that there was a mandatory meeting for all students tonight in the Union.  There was also an announcement telling the shipboard community about the meeting and stressing that it was mandatory.  We also learned later in the day that we were going to stay in Honolulu for the night to avoid a storm and would leave no later than 1800 the next day. 

                The mandatory meeting started and it was the Executive Dean (Tom) who was speaking.  He started off with saying, “This is not going to be a dialogue.  This will be a monologue.  I will be speaking to you and you will not have the opportunity to talk or ask questions.”  He went on to explain that there was an incident in Hilo the night between the two days we were there where a hotel was basically trashed.  He said that 200 students were staying in 32 rooms.  The lobby and many rooms were trashed, and someone puked in the elevator so they had to completely take out the carpet in the elevator and replace that.  There were hundreds of empty alcohol containers, and people were recorded on video coming in with alcohol.  There was one lady from the University of Hawaii- Hilo who was staying in the hotel and didn’t get any sleep the day before an interview because of the students; now it is rumored that the university won’t have any affiliation with SAS (don’t know if that’s true or not).  The hotel security kicked some people out, but no one was arrested by request of SAS.  He said that if it weren’t for this request that many people would have been put in jail.  He then went on to say that these people were very lucky that this didn’t happen in a different country, because if it were in some other country they could have easily been put in jail or caned or some other form of punishment and SAS couldn’t do anything about it.  I knew that there were some kids on this trip that came for a booze cruise and are just here to party, but seriously??  That is just amazing to me that people would even do that.  They really are lucky that this happened on U.S. soil and not in another country, but it shouldn’t have even happened in the first place.  Like Tom said, “At what point did you think this was okay?”  I just don’t understand.  I haven’t heard of anyone getting kicked off the voyage, but I’m sure there will be a ton of people that will have points.  If I haven’t mentioned how points work, there are a certain number of points that each action receives and the max you can have is 10. After that you get kicked off the voyage, and, no matter where we are, it is up to you to get back home.  I really hope people don’t act like this again because not only does it look bad for SAS, but it is also a danger to them.  Hopefully people wise up, or else I really do think that the consequences will be a lot more severe.