happy neptune day!!!!

Saturday, September 17, 2011 (10:00pm) - Atlantic Ocean

happy neptune day!!! for those of you non-seafaring folk, neptune day is celebrated the day you cross the equator and go from a "pollywog" to a "shellback." the day began around 7:30am when some of the crew ran up and down the halls banging on pans and blowing whistles waking everyone up. not sure why it was necessary to wake us up that early, but since i was up i ran up and got breakfast then came down to change. at 9am an announcement came over the intercom for everyone to get up to the 7th deck pool deck. so brew & i scrambled up there. the entire shipboard community was up there and there was a procession with some of the staff dressed in white robes as the "court" and the captain of the ship was painted green head to toe as "king neptune" with one of the deans dressed as the queen. she was also painted green. we had to repeat an oath basically saying we were ready to become shellbacks, then the fun began. will, michael, and i went through together. first you had to stand in one of the side pools, get "fish guts" poured on your head (really just green water), then jump in the pool. once you climbed out of the pool, you had to kiss a fish then kiss "king neptune's" ring. then they like knighted us shellbacks! officially a shellback now! brew was a big puss and didn't do any of it. lameee.

thennn people started shaving their heads. it's a traditional part of neptune day. but as you can tell by my previous posts, there was not a shot in hell i was shaving my head. so obvs most of the guys did it because why not? their hair will grow back by the time we dock in florida. but wait. a TON of girls shaved their heads too. and not just girls that already had short, crew cuts. like girls with hair as long as mine are currently bald. NOT okay. at all. there are other ways of getting attention. take your top off. dress like a skank. get blacked out. DON'T SHAVE YOUR HEAD. i understand that this is a once in a lifetime thing or that they got caught up in the moment. but in five years when they still don't have hair, jokes on them. don't get me wrong, some girls can pull it off and look kinda like demi moore in g.i. jane. but some girl, not great. the best was when girls were crying as soon as they sat in the chair and the razor turned on. they're going to be hating life in like a week. when they don't have hair. and when they look back at all their pictures in 20 years and they're bald. have fun explaining that to your kids, girls. not great.

after the neptune day festivities were over, we all had like a dance party. it was a really really fun day. especially because this was our first "study day" which means we don't have class today. awesome! spent half the day laying out and the other half sleeping. duh. it's about to get freezing in some of these ports, so i gotta get my tan on. brew got fried though. SO red. sucks. then michael woke us up from our glorious 3 hour nap around 5:30. we went up to dinner around 6 and had BIRTHDAY CAKE for michael. even though his birthday was the day before we left from montreal. his parents dropped the ball a little on that, but the birthday cake was delicious! i'm so sick of the ship food, so it was a nice change of pace.

then i had work. who works on days off!? study days are like our own shipboard national holiday. so lame. but nobody was there. i had planned on doing my homework then but ashley and i just spent most of the time trying to figure out our question of the day for this week. NOT in the job description that we have to do that. so now i'm going to write a paper and go to bed.

love, a shellback