Just Another Sailing Day (July 10)

This morning I had to turn in my paper, so naturally the ship’s printers broke just when I tried to print it. Was I surprised? No. In fact, I was almost anticipating it. Luckily I could email the paper, but we can’t email any pictures so I still wanted to hand in a hard copy of the paper with my pictures. After about 20 minutes, the IT guy got the printer to work and I had my paper in hand as I dashed to class just in time. In Psych, we learned about creating memories. When we remember things, we don’t necessarily always remember all of it. We usually remember bits and pieces, and then our imagination weaves it together into a memory. That’s why a story has little tweaks when told by different people, and why sometimes the little details don’t match up. I thought that was pretty interesting. In Natural Disasters, I turned in my paper. Today, we learned about earthquakes. I can sure relate to that topic! We split up into groups and did mini presentations on different earthquakes- my group had the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. It was such a tragedy! Not only did they experience an earthquake, but they also experience a tsunami and fires from the earthquake. The fires were blazing out of control, so 40,000 people gathered in an evacuation center by the coast that was just a huge open field. Pretty safe from a fire, right? Wrong. Before they knew it, they were surrounded on all three sides by fire, and the 4th side was the raging ocean. 38,000 of the 40,000 gathered there were killed. In total, there were around 100,000 deaths and around 50,000 injuries! It was crazy to learn about some of the earthquakes that had occurred!

Throughout the day, a frenzy began around the ship. Shipboard accounts were being charged, and we could pick up our bills at the Purser’s Desk. On the bill was food charges, bookstore charges, all the SAS trips we signed up for on the ship...and…a $325 charge because fuel prices had gone up! THIS was the cause of the havoc currently being wreaked on the ship. Gas was supposed to be included in the tuition price, but since it went up so much we had to pay. Blehhh. :/ So as I said, everyone was freaking out.

At dinner, Darwin came up and asked if I’d gotten dessert. Naturally, I asked if it was chocolate. He shook his head in disappointment and walked away. All of the sudden he opens a drawer, pulls out 7 pieces of chocolate cake he’d taken from lunch, and gives them to us! Cha-CHING!!! He also brought us honey!! It’s only served at breakfast, but we love our peanut butter and honey (and sometimes, if they have them, banana) sandwiches all throughout the day.

Today, I drank wayyyy to much coffee. It’s just so free and easy to access and yummy and irresistible! Luckily, I drank mostly decaf so I wasn’t terrrribly jittery, but I probably drank too much. :) Oops!

We had pre-port for Croatia after dinner, and the inter-port student is an Engineer from Croatia. Woo-hoo, go engineers!! He’s officially the third engineer I’ve encountered this entire voyage. I feel like a minority!

After pre-port, Michelle, Brittany, and I went to a women’s Bible study. They had met before but we had just found out about it. It was good! We talked about Eve, and are studying different women in the Bible at each Bible study. Next time, we’re going to talk about Sarah. I’m glad I went! After that, the girls gathered in one room and we all did nails before bed. New country, new nail colors!