My Life...On a Ship

I can’t even start to explain how awesome living on a ship is. I have gotten use to about everything here, and I love it. I was sitting out on deck 7 forward (very top and front of the ship, above the bridge) with my friend Amanda yesterday talking about this. It is UNREAL being able to go out there to talk, read, or have a dance party (did that last night). We couldn’t even put words to how amazing it was. We sat out there and just gazed at the endless sea. We felt the slight breeze and the warm moist air. Needless to say, we didn’t get much reading done. We can’t get ourselves to actually do work on this ship yet. There is just so much to do and see that we are constantly distracted.
Everyone is starting to fall into groups of friends. It is going to change a lot, but we are all at least finding people that we know we connect with. It is cool being able to have several different groups of friends. You have to do that on the ship because it is so spread out that you may not see someone someday. We now realized how dependent we all are on phones to communicate. We have none of that on the ship to get together. It is really kind of nice to not have that though. My phone doesn’t really work well on the ship anyways, so I just shut it off. It is a nice feeling to not reach in my pocket every other second to see if someone text me or call me. I just don’t even worry about it anymore.
As for service on this ship, it is insane. Service, as in the crew that is working to help us. We have the BEST crew in the world. We feel insanely spoiled here. I come back from my first class every day, and my bed is made, my bathroom is completely clean, and our carpet is vacuumed. We also get our towels changed out every 3 days. They even will fold our clothes and whatever else and put it on top of our bed if it is just lying around. It is a weird thing for us to get use to. Jeffrey is my steward. He is awesome. He is from India and it’s the nicest person ever. He was the first person I met when I got onto the ship. He is also the first person I see every morning…always in the hallway saying “Good Morning”. He is going to get a generous tip, that’s for sure. Our wait staff is amazing as well. We have 2 cafeterias. There is one main dining hall on the 5th deck, and one smaller one on the 6th with an outdoor patio. We have a buffet line essentially, but the wait staff makes sure our tables are set and that we get something to drink. If they are not set, they go and get us silverware. We all try to do it for ourselves, but they insist that we don’t. They also pick up our plates and everything for us. We are all use to doing everything ourselves at our home cafeterias that it is a shock. 
The student life committee held their first on-board event last night. It was a photo scavenger hunt. It was sooo much fun. We all broke up into teams and made team names. We were Team Awesome. They gave us a list of specific scenarios that we had to take a picture of. Stuff like someone laying on the ground in a very public area, or someone with a panda, or someone sneaking by Desmond Tutu’s room and taking a picture in front of his door…just stupid funny stuff like that. We got points for every picture that we got, and got extra if we were creative. We also got extra points for every person that we got to join our group as we were running around the ship. My team and Team We Just Won, tied for 1st. Our prize was to pick out our favorite picture and the 2 will now be the permanent backgrounds on the ship’s computers. I thought that was pretty funny.
We missed our 10pm “Midnight Snack” that they always serve because of the scavenger hunt, so Amanda and I went to the pool bar to grab a snack. It was the first food I have bought on the ship. I got my first burger since I left Nebraska. It tasted amazing haha. I don’t think I have eaten a burger as fast as that before. We all scarfed down our food and headed to the front the ship again. They had shut all the deck lights off so we could stargaze, but by the time we made it they had to turn them on again…so we decided to have a dance party. All the faculty were inside the faculty lounge having an 80s themed party, so we thought we would start our own. We danced until about 1am on the deck; it was awesome.
Well one more school day after today before I reach Spain! I can’t wait to head out on my first wild adventure. It is going to be a hectic, fun filled trip in Spain. Then we head straight in to Morocco the next day. I look forward to writing about it all! Take care.