Still at sea…

Yesterday was my roommate, Christine’s (aka Tine) 21^st birthday. We celebrated by booking a “special dining.” Special dining is when you can pay $35 per person to have a sit down meal with waiters in a private room. They serve you a five course meal that is different than the normal buffet. The food was really really good…mostly likely it was just because it was a break from the usual dining hall food. At dinner they served finger foods, chicken skewers with peanut sauce, pot stickers, caesar salad, pasta pomidoro, broccoli soup and lime sorbet. Then you had a choice between fish or beef tenderloin for your entre and ice cream cake or chocolate torte for dessert. The whole meal was complete with champagne and we sang happy birthday. We even got one of the waiters to take the typical 21^st birthday picture where he pretended to look at her “ID” which was really just her room card but hey, it worked! After dinner I had to meet for a group project but afterwards we had “Pub Night” on the ship where you are allowed three more drinks. Everyone socialized by the pool outside and we even managed to get the whole deck to sing happy birthday to Tine. Afterwards a group of us went up to the observation deck where we got to look out at the ocean. It was pretty awesome to look out on the sea at night.

This morning was miserable waking up. Each night at midnight we have to set our clocks forward. We lost yet another hour of sleep last night since we are sailing through time zones. All of us are pretty much sleep deprived at this point. Our first port, Barcelona, is 7 hours ahead so we have a few more time changes to endure before we get there.

Later in the afternoon we got to take a bridge tour. It was really cool to see how the ship operates. We even got to sit in the captain’s chair where he navigates the ship and I put on the captain hat! Great photo op! haha

I ended up dropping my Spanish Literature course. Even though I understood the professor and the material, the homework was just way too demanding. Our first night’s assignment was to read 30 pages of a book that was all in Spanish. Each page of text was in tiny print and in two columns. After all of that reading you had write in Spanish a journal reflection and then answer several questions on the reading- all in one night! I’m used to a lot of work at Vanderbilt but the professor’s expectations were so unreasonable and the majority of the students ended up dropping the course as well. Now, however, I am taking Modern History of North Africa and the Middle East. The professor is so engaging and is hilarious. Even though it will not count towards my major or minor it is actually nice to take a class just “for the sake of learning” for once! I need to buckle down though and get to work. I have a test, two quizzes, a five page paper and a few other small assignments due all before we get to Barcelona. Yikes! I’m so ready to finally see land again and explore Spain! We get to Barcelona on the 27^th!