Rocking and Rolling

We are on our 7^th straight day at sea. And the ship is rocking all over the place. Trying to walk down the hall is a quite a challenge. You think you’re doing fine, and then all of a sudden we hit a wave and you’re thrown into the wall. We had gotten spoiled with really calm waters and a lot of time in port.

For most people it’s been a pretty draining week, being the last week of classes. Everyone has exams, projects, and papers due. I’ve actually lucked out and had only a couple of field observations and one research paper to turn in this week. I’ve had one professor cancel our last field report, and another cancel our final, giving us extra points for attendance instead.

We’ve also been turning our clocks ahead a lot this week, almost every night we lose another hour. With the exception of Wednesday night, when we gained back 24 hours, having just crossed the International Date Line. So we had two Wednesday May 2’s. And we took advantage of that, celebrating a friend’s birthday with cake two nights.

Last night we had the Ambassador’s Ball. We all got dressed up and had a fancy dinner followed by dancing and an amazing dessert spread. It was a lot of fun. And nice to see everyone dressed up and not just wearing sweats. The entire shipboard community was out and about.

I’ve also been learning hula dance from one of the RDs who is from Hawaii. We’re going to be performing a traditional hula dance and a more modern dance tomorrow night during pre-port. It’s hard to believe that we’ll be in Hawaii on Monday. This stretch at sea went a lot faster than I expected.