the great white mother

Thursday, September 8, 2011 (11:02pm) - Atlantic Ocean

the great white mother is another name for the mv explorer. how did it get that name, you ask? these eyes have never seen a more beautiful sight than this ship a couple days ago when we got back to the dock after morocco. sorry unborn children, but it's gonna be hard to top that sight. okay, maybe i'm exaggerating a little... but you get the point. we're all trying to get readjusted to shipboard life. i had to get my sea legs again. which is inconvenient because i had just begun to acquire my land legs in morocco. and let me warn you, land sickness is REAL. i felt myself moving most of the time i was on land. and i nearly blew massive amounts of chunks when we were at the mosque. not great.

having to go back to class after being in port is a cruel joke. i don't understand how they expect me to be doing my homework when i'm fending for my life in port. "library sunday's" do not exist in morocco. so i've basically been doing nothing other than homework and sleeping. and let me tell you, after sleeping for maybe 6 hours while in port... brew and i took a 14 hour nap/sleep the other night. pure bliss is what that's called. but it kind of sucks because we're getting used to the rocking of the ship, so it's not lulling us to sleep like it used to. which might be a good thing, cus maybe i'll actually stay awake during class.

so this morning, brewer and i wake up for breakfast before global studies. oh wait, we're stopped. did we crash? are we sinking? are we abandoning ship? WHAT IS GOING ON!?!?! oh, don't worry... just a casual stop in the canary islands. BUT (and this is a big 'but') we can't get off the ship. this is what the UN would refer to as torture. not waterboarding... harboring off the canary islands and not being able to get off the ship. we stopped to refuel, because it's not like we were just docked in morocco for four days or anything. but we set sail again around 1:30 and are off towards ghana once again, don't you worry.

in other shipboard news, it doesn't look like we're going to have to set our clocks forward on this part of the journey. thank goodness. my body can actually get used to a time zone for a second. but it's SO annoying being 7 hours ahead. if we don't wake up with emails, we have to wait until late evening to even consider checking our emails for responses. to put this in perspective, when it's noon my time, it's 5 in the morning your time. only my dad is up at that time. still trying to figure out what the point of a computer is without facebook or real internet... especially when nobody will email me back til dinner time.

this is a random blogpost. mostly everything that i've been meaning to write about for the past few days but kept forgetting. i have this giant map of the world hanging on my wall and everyday i mark our location on the map to keep track of our voyage. let me preface this by stating that "no, she's not retarded." brewer, love her to death, but last night she was like "wait... we have to go up and over russia?" no brew, the world is round. she thought that when we got to japan, we were going to have to go up and over russia to get to hawaii. if you're having trouble visualizing this, look at a map of the world. i have such a winner of a roommate.

most of you know that i'm working in the library onboard. one of the duties is to come up with the "question of the day" that is sent out in the dean's memo every morning. it was my turn to come up with the question the other day. and i stumped the entire shipboard community! yay! my question was "how long can a valid us passport holder enter and stay in morocco without a visa? and name the five other passport holders this applies to." now. i know you're all just gonna jump on google to figure it out. but, keep in mind... we don't have google. "google it" has become "wikipedia it" because wikipedia is one of our free websites. so i apologize in advance for when i come back and the verb 'google' has been replaced by 'wikipedia'. what a weirdo, i know. SO, instead of googling the answer... people have to look it up in BOOKS. what a novel concept. i haven't opened an encyclopedia since like 2nd grade. it feels archaic. (sidenote: there were SO many bookstores in morocco. which is kind of ironic because i heard illiteracy rates are like 70+%)

well i'm off to bed. have some homework to do and i might wake up for breakfast tomorrow which i don't normally do on this day. i'm hardcore. but guess what tomorrow is!? give up?? LAUNDRY DAY! best day ever. the little things.

signing off.