Why do I need a Turkish visa if I brought my own credit card?

Please allow me to put all you readers in the galactic into perspective before you all continue.  You see…from July 13th to August 2nd we hadn’t had a class day.  Awesome right??  Totally if you like jumping onto a treadmill that is moving at full speed…can you say rug burn??  And believe me…many of these kids could use some aloevera. 

The first day after Egypt we held a ship wide “Sea Olympics”.  Our cabins are broken up into groups based on our decks and halls.  The entire day we run out doing mostly outrageous competitions wearing our sea colors.  My sea is the Caribbean and our color was pink which was great because I brought every piece of pink clothing I own….which is none…  Mal however, was tricked out in her purple…she was the Baltic Sea.  (everyone pause for inter-relationship competition…ooooooo….conflict!!!!)  Sadly the only event we were both in was dodgeball and they had a girls bracket and a guys bracket (lucky for her…).  Dodgeball was also the only event I competed in because my skinny butt had no shot in the pull up competition.  And Mal didn’t do the synchronize swimming because she couldn’t touch the bottom of the pool…the kids pool… (oh I’m gonna pay for that one…).  In summary, the entire shipboard community now knows that Mal has a bigger arm than the pull-up guys have egos….and they have some big egos!  [side note: while Mal was playing dodgeball, I took a picture of this guy behind her who was EMPHATICALLY motioning for the girls on the other team to ‘go for Mal’…you’ll all have to see it.]  In the end though, my Caribbean Sea took the gold and will be disembarking the ship first in Norfolk, VA.  (but seeing as I have a five foot shadow following me it’s not gonna make much of a difference…) 

On Wednesday the 4th, all the students had the blessing of another Global Studies exam.  Our collective groans caused the Ships horn to sound like a whisper in the night (wow…that was poetic…write that down).  In all reality though it wasn’t that bad…partly because the students almost tossed the professor overboard and he softened up so he wouldn’t have to swim.  We got our scores back today and we’re both pretty happy (Mal more so cause she beat me….oooo more inter-relationship competition!) 

The next night we had a student, faculty, and staff member talent show.  It was really fun…  We even had our Academic and Executive Deans lip-sync and dance to “I’m On A Boat” (you might not get that older generation…).  It was some funny stuff.  Other than that we had lots of musical performance and even some performances from the kids on the boat.  The next night we had a crew talent show for everyone on the boat… This led us to the harsh reality that the ship’s crewmembers are far more talented than 840 students, faculty, and staff.  But it was really fun to watch.

This morning we had to turn in our final essay for Global Studies (moral was pretty low) which meant a late night for most of the students.  We’ll see when we get those back…I figure with 720 essays at 6-pages a piece that’s around 4,320 pages…we might get them back around our 10-year SAS reunion.  Either that or they needed some kindling to keep the fire going on the way back to Virginia.  [We got an announcement that we are running out of paper on the ship this morning…well maybe you should have thought about electronic submission!!!  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist…]

At any rate, we’ll be walking down the gangway tomorrow for our last port in Morocco.  We have four days there until we depart for the 11-day trip back to Virginia.  It’s been a fun ride……. ‘Apollo 13…signing off’ [not really…it just felt like the right thing to say…]

We’ll post again after Morocco!

Missing everyone!

John and Mally

jmbooren@semesteratsea.net
mnmang@semesteratsea.net

PS – A quick explanation of the subject of the blog: Everyday during our announcements, “The Voice” tells the special question or comment of the day.  These are almost always ridiculously unintelligent overheard remarks from students on the ship.  One such comment made the cut for this blog’s title.