Rome if you want to

Dear followers,
I am so very sorry for the delay in blog posting but seeing how we are on land and not at sea it is full out amazing race style. My teammate, John. So to track back across the balearic sea to Barcelona. We spent our last two days hiking and seeing all we could afford our feet to carry us to. I'm sorry to inform you all that we never made it to beach so no fun details from that cultural experience of clothing optional. We got on the ship early because I, Malorie, had to go to an faculty directed program for my abnormal psych class. The lecture was by a women from doctors without borders. Very fascinating. Then after leaving a little late due to fueling we were on our way to the green, white and red or in short Italy. We had one day on sea before arriving early yesterday morning to Civitavecchia, or however you spell it. You can google it yourself if you really find the need but as we were told by the ship, it is a small fishing town, just go to rome. So what did John and I do? We went to Rome. As some of you might know john's parents and brother and sister-in- law are all in Rome. So we did amazing race style to find the train station off the port got a train ticket and made it on just as the doors were closing. The for the eighty minute train ride we were wondering a) if we were on the right train and b) if we would make it to the hotel on time. The rush to a hotel was because there was a tour set up for the Booren family to go to the major sights around the city. It would have been nearly impossible to find tha hotel, drop our bags and go find the family where ever they maybe in this large, crazy city. We know it is summer and tourism is more popular now but you really cannot imagine the amount of people swarming the city. So we made it and were off to see the city, the wonderful city of Oz (not really). If you want long version of the sights email me and I would be happy to fill you on but for simplicity sake we will move on.
So after that we went back to the hotel for a short brake and went out to a beautiful traditional Italian dinner! Then off to bed. We woke up early to head to the Vatican. I must add we are getting better at handling the people cause Italians are very much a different breed. So our tour guy was this oh so cute, charming, brilliant 24 year old walking encyclopedia as they call him. Just to show how much I liked him, he was from ireland and is working oh his doctorate in art history, so we really couldn't ask for anyone better, oh he was amazing! So he gave us amazing stories and details of everything! Ok well not everything since they say if you spent just 60 second at each piece of artwork it would take you 27 years to complete. So WOW overload of really old stuff! The Popes get what they want! So we bopped in and out the swarms of people and finally arrived and the Sistine Chapel. Incredible!!! Then off to St. Peter's and words cannot describe the, the, massiveness? The extravagant detail? Absolutely incredible!
Well to finish this up we are leaving tomorrow morning and it is time to sleep. Please email me if you have any questions or want any more detail, I love details! At malmang@Rams.colostate.edu
Thanks for reading! Sorry for the delay!
Love always,

John and Mally

Oh and very special thanks to Steven and Marie because without them we would be lost in Rome!

June 24, 2010 - Spain in Detail

Ok so i had this long email written and john knew about it and he said it was too detailed for the blog but it was supposed to be posted yesterday so please bare with me...

Wow! What a day so far! We stayed up till midnight to look at the stars and wish our friend a happy birthday. Then went to back to our rooms to try and fall asleep against all the excitement for land. Then woke up at 6 a.m. to see the sunrise and to watch us come into port. Although we were tired it was very much worth it! Then we got ready before our diplomatic debriefing, a guy from the US Consulate who was from cu boulder. Then our boat was cleared of customs and the mad rush to the buses followed. We can not walk from port because of some construction but there is a complimentary bus service. So once we got to our drop off place, by the biggest statue of Christopher Columbus, we started walking to find an internet cafe and since it is a holiday and yesterday night spain partied there wasn't anything open. So we had a cappuccino and headed back to our port to catch our city tour. Now we're not gonna remember all the spots on the tour but we'll try: Our bus first took us to the top of Mt. Marmora which had a great view of the city and over the MV Explorer. Next we went to a replica city that symbolized the different regions of Espana. From there we traveled to the infamous Sigriada Familia Church ("The Holy Family"). It was incredible!!! If you don't know, it's a church started by the great architect, Gaudi. It has been in construction for over 120 years and has included the designs of many other great architects. It was so awesome. We'll try to post some pictures...but if not Google it. After picking our jaws off the pavement, slowly moved on to the last stop, Barri Gotic or the Gothic Quarter. It's a really cool part of the city with ancient buildings and fun vendors. We finished the tour and decided to get lost...the best way to explore is to get lost and wonder without having any time commitment. However, we kept walking in circles finding the same streets several times...we'll work on the getting lost part. We went for dinner and walked down Las Rambles which is basically like Pearl St or 16th St...on steroids! It's huge and has a ton of vendors on it and is a lot of fun. Then back to the ship to rest for a few minutes before dinner. We went to this sweet restaurant called La Quince Liz which has a new chefs making awesome dishes for wicked cheep. We walked around La Rambles and found some fun bars and pubs to duck into and hang with the locals. After the long night we headed back to the ship for a couple hours of sleep before tours in the morning. Yawn.....
So John went to the markets and I went a monastery up in the mountains it was beautiful but I'm not going to lie once u have seen one really big church u have seen them all! No it was so beautiful on the mountain looking over Spain. I took some hikes, tried some amazing cheese and just be a good old tourist taking lots of pictures. When I got back to the ship john was laying out on top enjoying the warm weather and sunshine. We have really lucked out with weather here! I think john already talked about his trip so now we just left the port to sit in good old Mcdonalds to get free Internet for the short time we have before going back to he ship to pickup more friends and head to a pub to watch some Spain in the world cup. Otherwise early night, which here is between eleven and midnight, since we are so tired and then we will see about tomorrow...

Hope it wasn't to boringly detailed

Love you all!

Mally and John

Howdy from Espana!!!

Hello Truth Seekers!

It has been roughly 36 hours since we've been in Spain....and we're exhausted!  Here's a rough overview: (for those of you who just don't care that much...skip down the part that says "hasta luaga")
June 24
-Work up at 6am to see the sunrise and watch us tie into port (all together now... *yawn*)
-went traveling around and on a city orientation for 4 hours...it was really cool
-Went to a really nice but cheap restaurant in the city...wined and dined (*yawn yawn*)
-stayed out late walking the streets
June 25
-Work up to go on another trip/tour for  4 hours ( I, John, shared a glass of wine with my professor....slightly weird, but more than slightly fun!)
-as for Mal she's not back yet from her trip so I don't know what she's done...she'll fill in all those who care later...all 2 of you.

We really are having a blast here! It's a ton of fun, the city is really cool in an ancient sorta way, and the people are pretty nice and accepting...so long as your not an idiot (like the dozen or so students who got pick-pocked already). But it actually is quite safe here...or at least relatively safe.

Again we hope everyone  is haven a lovely beginning of summer and we miss you all!

Hasta luega! (that's "see you later" in Spanish.....we're so cultural!!!

John and Mally
Jmbooren@semesteratsea.net
Mnmang@semesteratsea.net

We're in Espana!!!

We just finished walking around Las Rambles (Pearl Street on steroids). We're going on our city orientation now and enjoying the night away!

Miss you all!

John and Mally

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Welcome to the Mediterranean!!!

We’re sailing through the Straight of Gibralter in a couple of hours.  I know…seems like a snore.  But when all you’ve seen for the past 7 days is Canada and a couple dinky islands in the middle of Nowhereville—it’s HUGE!  Plus the water is supposed to be calmer in the Mediterranean, which should make for slightly less vomiting. 

If they let us out of class (which they better or there will be a 700 person revolution) we’re gonna try to get some video.  We’ll post it if we can find free internet in Barcelona.

As of the noon report, we have traveled roughly 2300 miles since Halifax and have a wopping 450 miles to Barcelona.  Everyone is getting really anxious to get off the boat.  We’ve had another few dolphin sightings and some people “claim” to have seen whales…but at the exact time they saw them everyone else was conveniently away…hmmmmmm.  

We’ll try to write again before we get to Barcelona. 


Feeling a little ethnic…

John and Mally

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's........

........LAND!!!!

We actually did see land today!  As it turns out some islands so small that Mal could comfortably live there are located smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  They’re aproximately halfway between “Nowhereville” and “We’re Lost”.  We, of course, didn’t stop in that port because we would single handedly double the their population…and they probably don’t get facebook, a common lifeline for students onboard.

For anyone with WAY too much time on their hands, you can GoogleMap our coordinates and see where we are:
Latitude: 38 degrees 17.0N
Longitude: 026 degrees 31.5W
I have no idea what those numbers mean but good luck with that.

Yesterday was quite an interesting experience.  We happened to be looking out the port side of the boat (to be honest I don’t really know what that means…I’m just trying to fit in) and there were some Dolphins swimming and jumping toward the boat.  Mal said they wanted to play…I’m wonder why the heck a Dolphin would want to play with 25,000 TON ship with propellers that could swiftly dice them into fresh sushi rolls.  But who doesn’t like playing with life threatening objects (skydiving, bungee jumping, sharp metal blades strapped to your feet, etc.)?

After that we went to a little show that was put on in the union.  It was a clown performance titled “The Crotch of Gibralter”.  The performer, ‘Grandma the Clown’, is a confused man who dresses up as a ‘grandma’ (hence the confused part) and puts on a little show.  He (or she…now I’m confused) is a world performer from the Ringling Brothers and the ‘Big Apple Circus’ and others around the US and Europe.  (Google “Grandma the Clown” and let me know what you get—I can’t waste my Internet minutes).  Anyway…I was blessed to be selected to join him (let’s just go with ‘it’) on stage for a lipsync performance of “Unforgettable” by Frank Sinatra.  We danced, gazed into each other’s eyes, and got a little frisky.  Good news: I am now known as “the Grandma Lover” around the ship…a wonderful label I suppose.

But we have a student wide map test we must study for.  Happy Fathers Day to all the Fathers out there.  Just remember…you wouldn’t be Fathers if it weren’t for us!

So long for now!

John and Mally

Feel free to email us:
jmbooren@semesteratsea.net
mnmang@semesteratsea.net

Settled in...well sorta...

*insert StarTrek sound*

Captain's Log: 

We’re through our first two days of class and I feel like I just read the ‘S’ encyclopedia.  Both Mal and I have successfully missed part or all of a class due to unsuccessful alarm attempts.  Unfortunately, (or fortunately…however you look at it) the ship has a nice rolling feature that gently rocks you to sleep. 

Classes are a whole different animal… 
Because of the short time given to learning (it’s still not a cruise) professors feel the need to assign countless pages for reading in order to properly turn your brain to a gray-ish mush.  Each night has roughly 60-90 pages of reading for the next day and some studying for quizzes and papers.  Also, we've been loosing an hour every night...this makes the natives quite restless.

Now that I’m done complaining about being on this ¾-size cruise ship sailing to the Mediterranean, I’ll move on.  Both our roommates are pretty good people…luckly.  I just discovered my roommate enjoys eating Trisciut crackers at 12:30 pm while lying in bed…that was a nice touch…  Mal’s roommate is a nice girl from Nebraska (who is CU’s rival…so I’m all for them!).

The food is pretty much awesome!  They have been very good about having a variety of things to eat for different people.  You can also have lunch with the captain if you have the juevos (indirect Spanish translation: “courage?” ;-) “hey Swap, how bout another brewsky?”

But for now it’s time to tackle another handful of pages.

I hope everyone finds something more exciting to do in their lives than read this shoutout to the galactica!


Lovin’ it,

John and Mally

PS - email us!  It's the only think keeping us from going for a swim in the lake

One Day Down.....

......65 days to go.

We've come to the end of the first day.  The boat is rocking making everyone look like drunk idiots falling all over themselves (I guess this is where 'sea-legs' comes in).  Although you have to be pretty friendly when you're running into people you've never met before in the halls (literally running into them).  Lots of kids are getting sea sick and there are a ton of preventative drugs around.

They gave us a ton of stats about people on the boat...here's the few worth remembering:
-there are roughly 1050 people total--708 undergrad from 20 countries and 49 states.
-there would be one more person but they didn't make it on time...so bye bye to them
-the majority of people are from California, then NY/Penn, and Colorado is around 5th.
-the largest school represented is...........CU Boulder (all together now.....*booooooooooooooooooooooooo*) - but really there are like 40 Boulder kids here and we feel highly out-numbered.  We'll let you know if we have the guts to ask them about the Rocky Mountain Showdown in Boulder last year...."oops was that you're home stadium??"


Tomorrow is going to be a long day.  We have meetings planned basically throughout the whole day with times blocked out for meals.  Most of the day will be orientations and other informative meetings.

The general feeling is that if you aren't getting motion sick from the rocking ship than it's putting you to sleep.  We'll see how classes go when we have the sway of the boat lulling all of us out of focus.  Speaking of classes, those start Thursday.

Until then, I hope everyone is having a lovely time at their respective locations.


John and Mally

 

PS -  This was posted a little late because there was some internet/email problems.  Will post agian soon...

Sea bound

6 hours at the Westin hotel and we're off to board the boat. Actually i, Malorie, just took John to the dock and he is all squared away. The westin is right and I mean right in front of the dock so the walk took all of two minutes so this is very nice and easy! We saw the boat last night when we were walking back from the grocery store and it was big and beautiful with all the lights. Halifax is very beautiful wish we spent a day here but we enjoyed our country throwdown with our friends before leaving! Oh and the cab driver said that Crosby is from around here! Knew I liked Halifax! Write later when more are awake!
With lots of love,
Malorie and John

And then there were: 2 days!

The countdown continues… We are officially two days away from our flight out. Packing is truly the hardest part of this extravaganza… Oh make that second hardest…right behind mobile phones! As it turns out, we are pretty lucky to not have to worry about mobile communications in the US…because figuring it out everywhere else is almost as confusing as teaching a dog to bark in German. But seeing as how we’re updating this blog through the phone…we can’t complain too much.

We’ll be in contact from the boat…crossing the Atlantic in a whopping 9 day trip! (meaning we’ll be in classes every day…no weekends, holidays, or snow days…oh joy…)

~Bon Voyage!

Preflight Entertainment

How to you pack for two months on a boat traveling across the Atlantic?? I don't know...really...if anyone has any ideas please let me know!!!

We're 9 days away from the flight to Halifax, Nova Scotia. We'll stay in the great planet of Canadia for one night and board the MV Explorer the next morning. Then its 9 days across the Atlantic Ocean before we make the first port...Barcelona, Spain!!!