Day 6: 1/14 Fresh Air Never Felt So Nice

                Since that first night when I felt the need to get fresh air because of seasickness, I haven’t been outside.  I don’t exactly know why I haven’t had a meal or done my reading outside, but I finally got out onto the 7^th deck and did some reading (or tried to do some reading).  It is kind of difficult for me to do my reading outside though especially when there’s so much going on, and when I enjoy looking out at the ocean and all the waves I tend to get a little distracted.  Also, the warmth of the sun and a little bit of a sea breeze makes me just want to sit and enjoy rather than read a stinkin’ book.  Every once in a while when we are in the middle of the ocean it hits me how big and how amazing and beautiful the ocean actually is.  When all you can see is ocean around you, you start to feel very small compared to the water.  It’s a difficult thing to explain, but when I look out at the ocean I tend to get lost in thought about how remarkable the world is and how remarkable life is.  I hope that everyone has this feeling, and I hope I will continue to have this feeling after I am no longer surrounded by water but rather am surrounded by the more mundane life I live and love back home.

Day 5: 1/13 Missing Math

                Today was the second day of A classes, and even though I only had one class I spent the entire rest of the day reading for my classes tomorrow.  It is pretty amazing how much reading they assign for the little amount of time between classes.  I think it usually ends up being around 100 pages (give or take), and for a slow reader like me it literally takes the majority of the day to finish the reading assigned for one class.  I really am starting to hate reading for class especially when the material is either confusing beyond belief or something that bores me to death.  All of this reading really makes me miss doing math problems.  Granted, I am one of few people who enjoy doing math problems, but I think that this semester of work will make me appreciate math more than I did before.  In one of my readings they mentioned Euclid and Euclidean Geometry, and in that moment I got really giddy and excited to keep reading, but it was only that one sentence that mentioned math which made me sad.  I think the main reason why I am struggling to get all my work done is that it is different work from what I’m used to; I’m not used to having this much reading to do and it is really starting to hit me how little reading I have had to do thus far in my collegiate academic career.  I don’t know how I’m going to get through this semester.  Hopefully I’ll get used to all the reading, but at this point it seems doubtful.

Day 4: 1/12 First B Day

            Today I had three classes starting at 800 and ending at 1815. Fun, right? My first class of the day is called Myth of the Self, and is about Buddhism and Psychology and the concept of Self in both topics.  It seems very interesting so far but also messes with my head sometimes.  But these are interesting things to get my mind and thoughts lost in, so I think I’ll enjoy it.  The next class I have is my U.S. Immigration Law class.  I am kind of happy I took this class because I don’t really know too much about my own country.  At the same time, I wish I took some sort of class that dealt more with the countries I am going to see and not the one I live in, but there isn’t anything I can do about it now.  The professor for this class is kind of nutty though.  She’s funny and nice, but she’s one of those people who tend to talk to themselves aloud almost all the time.  It’s hard to explain how she acts, but it is pretty entertaining at times.  After these two classes that I have back-to-back, I have my last class, which is titled Music Cultures, at 1700 (5:00 pm).  It sounds like it’ll be a pretty cool class; we’ll be talking about the different styles of music of the countries we’ll encounter.  The weird thing is this sounded like it would be my easiest class, but after today it sounds like it may be the one with the most work to be done (especially while we’re in port), which kind of sucks.

One of the craziest things so far is how we’ve been on this ship for only 3 or 4 days, but it feels like we’ve been on here for weeks!  Maybe it’s just being with the same people every day or doing basically the same thing every day, but it feels like I’ve been on this ship for a lot longer than I have.  However, even in these few days, I have gotten so sick of the small talk introduction questions like, “Where are you from? What school do you go to?” and usually when I answer, “I’m from Colorado,” they respond with, “Oh, are you one of those Boulder kids?” because there are 57 students from the University of Colorado- Boulder on this voyage (which is just under 10% of the student population here).  The funny thing is that I have only really met two other students from CU who are on this voyage, so it’s not like everyone from Boulder knows each other.

Day 3: 1/11 First Day of Classes

        Today was the beginning of our academic lives here on the ship.  We began with an A day (which I touched on in a previous post), which meant I only had one class… yay! The only bad news is that my class is in the Union, which is located at the front of the ship, which means lots of movement.  Since my seasickness wasn’t bad yesterday I figured I’d be fine… boy was I wrong!  Within half an hour, I started to feel nauseous and at one point thought I was actually going to blow chunks in the middle of my class.  The good news is I didn’t, but the bad news is I felt so sick that I just stayed in bed for the majority of the day.  I was able to get up and get dinner with Jillian and Shelley, and after dinner I went to this “Explorer Seminar” which is kind of like a lecture that happens most nights we are at sea.  The lectures are about different things that are usually relevant to the places we will be going next.  This one was about the Ocean (specifically the Pacific Ocean) and included a part about the animals we might see while we are at sea heading to and from Hawaii.  It’s pretty fun to learn about things when you don’t have to do homework or study for a test about the topic… weird! (That was me being sarcastic). 

Day 2: 1/10 Orientation

                The first full day on the ship is designated for “Orientation” which basically means a whole day of the students sitting and listening to people talk.  This kind of made me nervous with the seasickness that I experienced the previous day, but I woke up on this day feeling a lot better and didn’t get seasick all day.  I got breakfast with Shelley, and random people joined our table.  It’s similar to how I pictured my freshman year of college to be, because that’s how my brother described his freshman year experience where people would just sit at random tables and make friends.  However, that isn’t how my freshman year went, so it was fairly new to me.  I liked it though.  Everyone on the ship seems very friendly, and I haven’t had anyone rejected my request to sit with them so far, so that’s nice.  The orientation started at 900, and it was basically going over the material covered in the Voyager’s Handbook (which we signed off that we read).  I looked over a good chunk of the handbook prior to coming on the voyage, so the whole day seemed kind of pointless to me.  From the looks of the other people around me it was pointless to them too, especially the ones that fell asleep.  I’m sure for those who didn’t actually look over the Voyager’s Handbook, there were some important points made in the presentations, but I felt like I already knew most, if not everything, that they addressed.  Other than Orientation, I feel like not much really happened today.

Day 1: 1/9 The Beginning of a New Chapter

As some of you may know I suck at this whole technology thing so my blog will most likely be lacking in content since I may not be able to access it very often.  If you are looking for updates on what I’m up to or whatever, and this blog that I have isn’t really doing it for you, then please email me because somehow I have that working even though it was a super complicated process.  Here’s an update on the first leg of the voyage.

Day 1: 1/9 The Beginning of a New Chapter

The first day of my trip was extremely bittersweet for me.  On the one hand I was about to embark on an amazing journey, but on the other hand I had to leave behind the people I care the most about in the world.  These next few months will be difficult without them by my side, but having email and being able to skype every once in a while will definitely help. 

We were all assigned times to be on a bus that would transport us from San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico.  From what I have heard around the ship we did this because the MV Explorer is a ship from the Bahamas, and it isn’t allowed to port in two different US ports consecutively, so it couldn’t have been in San Diego right before we went to Hilo, Hawaii.  Not sure how true that actually is but it’s the only explanation I have for those of you who were curious.  Anyway, my bus time was at 10:30 am which was nice because I didn’t have to wake up really early to catch the 7:00 bus and I didn’t have to wait around for the 12:00 bus.  But, as any day in which someone is leaving goes, this one slowly started becoming sad and real.  I mean that it became “real” in the sense that I had spent so much time preparing for this trip that the day that I left seemed so far away, but it creeps up on you and then all of a sudden it is right in front of your face about to smack you.  It was finally hitting me that I am about to leave on this trip for just about four months!  It was no longer a bunch of paperwork or planning or preparing.  It was actually here and became very real.  As I am saying my goodbyes to my parents and Keenan (the boyfriend), I can’t help but cry (I am my mother’s daughter).  I have never been more than 45 minutes away from my parents, and in the past semester I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Keenan almost every day.  Once again, it became real that I was not going to see them or really talk to them besides email for four months!  That’s an extremely long time for me and the people that I am saying goodbye to, so it will be one of the hardest things that I will have to deal with on this voyage.  I get on the bus and grab a seat.  As we are pulling away, I try to give my last waves goodbye to my little entourage; I’m not sure how successful I was but I gave it a shot anyway.  The drive down to Ensenada was actually kind of pretty because we took a scenic route that hugged the coast.  But for anyone who has ever really been in the car with me for any extended period of time, I got a little car sick so I probably didn’t enjoy the ride quite as much as everyone else.

We got to the port and I finally set my eyes on what was soon to be my home for the next four months.  It’s a beautiful ship, but it was almost comical how small it looked next to this cruise ship parked just a couple of spots over.  I went through security and walked across the little bridge to the entrance of the ship.  It was shocking to me what it looked like on the inside. I don’t exactly know why it was shocking because I’ve seen some pictures and taken a virtual tour of the ship, but it is somehow different in person.  I had to travel up numerous flights of stairs to get to the Union which is on the 6^th deck to finish checking in, and then I was finally able to go check out my room.  On my way to my room, since my room is located at the very back of the boat (second to last room) on the 4^th deck port (left) side, I ran into Jillian Nedved.  We ventured on to try to find my room, and when I got there it looked like my roommate had already been to the room but wasn’t there at the moment.  I dropped off my stuff, and for a brief moment my roommate came in and introduced herself, but then had to leave.  Her name is Shelley Shapasian and she is from Cleveland, Ohio and goes to Elmherst, a school near Chicago.  She’s a pretty awesome roommate, so I consider myself very lucky.  I then went to explore the ship with Jillian.

Here’s the basic layout of the ship.  On the 2^nd deck there are the economy rooms and the “hospital” which is really more like a doctor’s office than a hospital; the 3^rd and 4^th decks are just rooms; the 5^th deck has one of the two dining halls, Tymitz square which has the Purser’s Desk and Activities Desk and Field Office, and there are some rooms on this deck too; the 6^th deck (from front to back) has the Union (which is basically like a lecture hall and they use it for large meetings and large classes and stuff that requires a lot of room for sitting), the computer lab and library, the store, numerous classrooms (I think there are nine total), a piano lounge and lots of tables and seats, and a dining hall that leads out to a sitting area outside; finally the 7^th deck has the faculty/staff/life-long-learners lounge, rooms, the wellness center and weight area (the weight area is outside), and outside on the 7^th deck there’s a little basketball court, snack bar, pool, and lounging area.  For a small ship it is still fairly big and confusing, so if you’re going to go on this trip someday just go and explore and get lost the first day. Slowly you will figure it out, but it is almost guaranteed that you’ll get lost and/or confused.

After some exploring, we were called to do a mandatory lifeboat drill.  We went back to our rooms to get our life vests and wait for further instructions.  This drill ended up taking like an hour or so to finish.  I’m sure it is important to know what to do just in case something does happen, but at the time this whole drill just seemed silly.  After the drill Shelley and I went back to our room and started unpacking.  While we were unpacking we saw the horizon moving out of our window; we were finally embarking from the port.  As exciting as it was, it was also one of those “real” moments.  We were actually doing it; we were leaving to go out to the sea.  It was a weird and somewhat frightening moment for me, but at the same time I was excited.  It was a similar feeling to how I felt in the weeks leading up to this trip.  When people asked me if I was excited for it, I wasn’t definite in my answer.  Yeah I was excited, but I was also very nervous.  The best comparison that I could come up with is the feeling you get right before you go on a rollercoaster.  When you’re standing there in line, you know it’s going to be fun, but for some reason you still get nervous and get butterflies in your stomach.  That’s how I felt for about a month leading up to this voyage.

For the first half hour or so I was completely fine, but, in the middle of unpacking, a sudden wave of nausea hit me like a ton of bricks.  Before my voyage I talked to a friend who went on it a previous semester, and she said that the ship rocked a lot more than a normal cruise ship since it is smaller.  I have never been on a cruise so I didn’t really know what to compare it to, but my mom went on one and said she didn’t get seasick at all and it was basically no biggie.  With all of this information I thought I would be fine and it wouldn’t be too bad.  Little did I know the first night on this ship would include some of the most nauseating feelings I have experienced in a long time.  I am pretty susceptible to motion sickness in cars though, so I don’t know why I thought it would be different on a ship.  Sorry, I don’t mean to scare off anyone who is reading this who will be on future Semester at Sea trips. For the record, many of the students and other people on the boat were completely fine and didn’t feel sick at all.  However, for the students that did get seasick it was not a very pleasant experience.  Walking was probably the hardest part because the boat moves so much that your body gets tossed around and it is difficult to walk straight.  The first few days walking down the hallway to my room (which is the second to last room at the very back of the boat) felt like walking around when you’re drunk (not that I know that feeling, mom).  The whole image of the long hallway was twisting and turning before my eyes which probably made me more nauseous.  Luckily, Jillian came to my room in the nick of time and we went to the 6^th deck to get some fresh air which helped a little bit.  A little later I ran into Shelley who looked pale in the face, a face that was unmistakably seasickness.  All of us were feeling like complete crap and went to try to find the hospital which was a venture in itself since we were so flipped around and couldn’t find how to get there.  We finally got there and found some medication and then went back to the deck outside to try the fresh air thing again.  We were trying to hold out until this meeting that was supposed to happen at 2000 (yeah they use military time for everything which isn’t terrible for me because it’s the only math I get to do every day haha).  We found out that it wasn’t mandatory so we all rushed down to our rooms to lie down and fall asleep.  Lying down was the only time that I didn’t feel super nauseous.  The fact that I only got like 4 hours of sleep the night before, mixed with the rocking of the ship like a mother rocking a baby, made sleeping extremely easy.

The Basics

Here is the layout of my voyage:

• Jan. 9 at 10:30 I leave San Diego to go to Ensenada, Mexico to board the ship
• Jan. 15 at 8:00 I arrive in Hilo, Hawaii and depart on Jan. 16 at 20:00
• Jan. 27 at 8:00 I arrive in Yokohama, Japan and will depart out of Kobe, Japan on Jan. 31 at 20:00
• Feb. 3 at 9:00 I arrive in Shanghai, China and will depart out of Hong Kong on Feb. 8 at 20:00
• Feb. 12 at 12:30 I arrive in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and depart on Feb. 18 at 6:00
• Feb. 20 at 8:00 I arrive in Singapore, Singapore and depart on Feb. 21 at 20:00
• Feb. 25 at 8:00 I arrive in Rangoon, Burma and depart on Mar. 1 at 20:00
• Mar. 6 at 8:00 I arrive in Cochin, India and depart on Mar. 11 at 20:00
• Mar. 18 at 8:00 I arrive in Port Louis, Mauritius and depart the same day at 20:00
• Mar. 25 at 8:00 I arrive in Cape Town, South Africa and depart on Mar. 30 at 20:00
• Apr. 6 at 8:00 I arrive in Takoradi, Ghana and will depart out of Accra, Ghana on Apr. 10 at 20:00
• Apr. 18 at 8:00 I arrive in Casablanca, Morocco and will depart on Apr. 21 at 20:00
• Apr. 25 at 8:00 I arrive in Barcelona, Spain 

For those of you who don't know anything about Semester at Sea, it is basically a study abroad program that takes place on a ship (the MV Explorer) that travels to various countries.  The classes are taken on the boat using a block type of schedule where there are "A days" and "B days" and which days you have class are dependent upon which classes you take.  For me, I am taking Immigration Law, Music Cultures, Myth of the Self, and Health Promotion and Behavior, and will have one class on A day and three classes on B day. Each class has a required "Field Lab" which is basically like a field trip for a specific day that you will do an assignment for the class.
These classes weren't necessarily my first choice for classes, but I'm sure they will be just as fun and enlightening. For anyone that is planning on going on SAS my advice to you is to start early!  I made the mistake of procrastinating (which isn't surprising considering I procrastinate everything), but in doing so, I got accepted into the program maybe a day or two after the class registration opened and all of the classes I wanted to take were full. Also, if you procrastinate things like getting your passport and applying for your visas, you'll get extremely stressed that you may not get everything in time.  So my overall advice for anyone who is thinking about applying for this is to get everything done as soon as you can!
When we are on port, we can pretty much do whatever we want.  There are organized programs that you can sign up for through SAS, there are some organizations that have been used by SAS for many years, or there are things you can organize and do as independent travel.