We Can Dance If We Want To
Hey hey people. So, we are getting to end of the longest cruise of the whole trip, from Brazil to South Africa. Let me just say that I am SOOOO over classes right now. I have just come to the conclusion today that I really don’t like ANY of my classes. That’s right, not one. Shitty, huh? In the immortal words of Peter “It’s really the prof that makes the difference,” and these profs suck! Seriously. In my oceanography class, we spent over an hour the other day on POWERS OF TEN. Like, write this number in scientific notation. And the prof was getting them WRONG. Not to mention that he lacks any sense of structure in any of his lectures. My Japan teacher is a cool guy, but he talks so goddamn slowly, it is fucking amazing. I think about a quarter of the class falls asleep every time. In my religion class, we talked for 30 minutes last time about VOODOO ZOMBIES. People, I can’t even make this shit up. Instead of addressing really fundamental questions about religions, or even talking about the origins of the major world religions, we have really only talked about very obscure native African and American religions, and the prof keeps trying to convince us of the power of the animals spirits. And Global Studies? I mean, I could probably deal with this one if it wasn’t at 9:20 AM every fucking day. The professor is as pompous as shit, but he can usually hold my attention for the 75 minutes. Oh, by the way, every class is 75 minutes which is soooo long.
OK, sorry about the bitching, but I just had to get that out of my system. Aside from classes, though, I am having a fucking blast! Lots of fun stuff has happened during this cruise. September 20th was Neptune Day. Neptune Day is usually celebrated on the day you cross over the equator, but it got postponed until after we left Brazil; we actually crossed the equator the day before we landed in Salvador. The best thing about Neptune Day was that we had NO CLASS! I can’t tell you how amazing it was to be able to sleep in. There were some festivities that happened at 9 AM, which involved getting fish guts thrown at you, jumping in the pool, and then kissing a fish, but there was no fucking way I was dragging my ass out of bed at 9 AM on our one day off. I am really OK with not getting fish thrown at me also. Another thing that is customary to do on Neptune Day is shave your head. I passed on this too. Yeah, I’ve done the shaved head thing, doesn’t really look good, and I really didn’t have anything to prove in doing it. In the end, only maybe like 50 guys shaved their heads; whatever floats your boat I guess. Some girls did it too. And while the Sinead O’Connor look might have once been in style, let me tell you, the time has passed. But yeah, it was a gorgeous day outside, so I spent the day just chilling up on the deck, doing a lot of nothing, and it was amazing. Definitely one of the best days I’ve had on the boat so far.
Other than Neptune Day, there has been a lot of movie watching, pub-nighting, and general time wasting. Someone picked up a bootleg version of Wedding Crashers in Brazil, so I watched that again, which was awesome. They have started showing good movies on the ship’s TV, which provides some good procrastination; I am FINALLY gonna see Boondock Saints tonight, which my roommate described to me as “Badass motherfuckers doing badass shit.” Sounds like my kind of movie. We had a birthday dinner for one of my friends from the Venezuela trip, so that was kind of mini-reunion thing, which was cool. But perhaps the best thing in recent memory was the 80’s theme pub night last night. It was pretty nuts, people really went all out with the costumes; I just stuck with my headband and aviators. There was a dance floor and they were ROCKING out the 80’s music. Notable moments included Safety Dance and some hot Jackson Five action. People were just going nuts, everyone was having a blast, and the rocking of the ship made you feel drunker than you should have been after 4 beers.
Today, we got some bad news. We are not going to Kenya. The political situation is just too unstable, and there have been lots of terrorist attacks recently, including the killing of a tourist safari group. There is also the serious threat of pirates in the waters off of the Kenyan coast. And not your eye-patch, parrot, peg leg, “ARRR” pirates—your bandana, AK-47, take no prisoners pirates. Not quite as fun. Apparently, if we do see pirates, our defense is for the crew to take our fire hoses and stand at the balcony and spray the pirates, which sounds like just about the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I am pretty bummed—I was really looking forward to doing my safari and going on a hot air balloon, but oh well, the situation is really out of our hands. They have not told us where we are going instead, but the speculation is that we will just chill out for the 5 days on some beach islands off of the east coast of Madagascar. Not quite as amazing as driving through the Serengeti plain, but hey, can’t really complain about 5 days on a tropical beach.
One last thing: During this sail, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been our guest on the boat. This is pretty cool; for those of you that don’t know, Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for working in South Africa to end apartheid. He also headed the Truth and Reconciliation Committee under the post-apartheid government of Nelson Mandela. There was not as much interaction with him as I would have liked, but he did do some question and answer sessions which were very cool. He also did a round table discussion with some students and faculty today during Global Studies; of course, I choose TODAY as the first Global Studies class to skip. Well fucking done, Evan.
I think that about wraps it up for this leg of the journey. Two days until Cape Town. I am pumped; so far, I’ve got a two-day rafting trip planned, and am doing Habitat for Humanity one of the other days. I’ve got two more days unplanned. A lot of people are doing some extreme sports trips for one day; there has been talk of skydiving, bungee jumping, and shark diving. Shark diving would be pretty awesome; can you just imagine being in a cage underwater and have a Great White chewing on the bars. We’ll see if I can get a group together to do this on one of my free days.
Good talk, see ya out there.
OK, sorry about the bitching, but I just had to get that out of my system. Aside from classes, though, I am having a fucking blast! Lots of fun stuff has happened during this cruise. September 20th was Neptune Day. Neptune Day is usually celebrated on the day you cross over the equator, but it got postponed until after we left Brazil; we actually crossed the equator the day before we landed in Salvador. The best thing about Neptune Day was that we had NO CLASS! I can’t tell you how amazing it was to be able to sleep in. There were some festivities that happened at 9 AM, which involved getting fish guts thrown at you, jumping in the pool, and then kissing a fish, but there was no fucking way I was dragging my ass out of bed at 9 AM on our one day off. I am really OK with not getting fish thrown at me also. Another thing that is customary to do on Neptune Day is shave your head. I passed on this too. Yeah, I’ve done the shaved head thing, doesn’t really look good, and I really didn’t have anything to prove in doing it. In the end, only maybe like 50 guys shaved their heads; whatever floats your boat I guess. Some girls did it too. And while the Sinead O’Connor look might have once been in style, let me tell you, the time has passed. But yeah, it was a gorgeous day outside, so I spent the day just chilling up on the deck, doing a lot of nothing, and it was amazing. Definitely one of the best days I’ve had on the boat so far.
Other than Neptune Day, there has been a lot of movie watching, pub-nighting, and general time wasting. Someone picked up a bootleg version of Wedding Crashers in Brazil, so I watched that again, which was awesome. They have started showing good movies on the ship’s TV, which provides some good procrastination; I am FINALLY gonna see Boondock Saints tonight, which my roommate described to me as “Badass motherfuckers doing badass shit.” Sounds like my kind of movie. We had a birthday dinner for one of my friends from the Venezuela trip, so that was kind of mini-reunion thing, which was cool. But perhaps the best thing in recent memory was the 80’s theme pub night last night. It was pretty nuts, people really went all out with the costumes; I just stuck with my headband and aviators. There was a dance floor and they were ROCKING out the 80’s music. Notable moments included Safety Dance and some hot Jackson Five action. People were just going nuts, everyone was having a blast, and the rocking of the ship made you feel drunker than you should have been after 4 beers.
Today, we got some bad news. We are not going to Kenya. The political situation is just too unstable, and there have been lots of terrorist attacks recently, including the killing of a tourist safari group. There is also the serious threat of pirates in the waters off of the Kenyan coast. And not your eye-patch, parrot, peg leg, “ARRR” pirates—your bandana, AK-47, take no prisoners pirates. Not quite as fun. Apparently, if we do see pirates, our defense is for the crew to take our fire hoses and stand at the balcony and spray the pirates, which sounds like just about the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I am pretty bummed—I was really looking forward to doing my safari and going on a hot air balloon, but oh well, the situation is really out of our hands. They have not told us where we are going instead, but the speculation is that we will just chill out for the 5 days on some beach islands off of the east coast of Madagascar. Not quite as amazing as driving through the Serengeti plain, but hey, can’t really complain about 5 days on a tropical beach.
One last thing: During this sail, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been our guest on the boat. This is pretty cool; for those of you that don’t know, Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for working in South Africa to end apartheid. He also headed the Truth and Reconciliation Committee under the post-apartheid government of Nelson Mandela. There was not as much interaction with him as I would have liked, but he did do some question and answer sessions which were very cool. He also did a round table discussion with some students and faculty today during Global Studies; of course, I choose TODAY as the first Global Studies class to skip. Well fucking done, Evan.
I think that about wraps it up for this leg of the journey. Two days until Cape Town. I am pumped; so far, I’ve got a two-day rafting trip planned, and am doing Habitat for Humanity one of the other days. I’ve got two more days unplanned. A lot of people are doing some extreme sports trips for one day; there has been talk of skydiving, bungee jumping, and shark diving. Shark diving would be pretty awesome; can you just imagine being in a cage underwater and have a Great White chewing on the bars. We’ll see if I can get a group together to do this on one of my free days.
Good talk, see ya out there.
posted by ehindman at 12:16 PM
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