Neptune Day & Others.

Hey, world. Been a while, eh? I’ve haven’t necessarily been more busy than normal, I just haven’t been blogging on journaling with nearly as much consistency. I’ll get back to normal, maybe. Or this will become normal. Who knows.

So the day after Ghana was a lovely day that we like to call Neptune Day, which is the day that we sailed over the equator. We were all woken up around 7:30 AM by the lifelong learners and our cabin stewards banging on pots and pans and dressed in ridiculous outfits. Farrah and I got really, really excited and got ready and Jimmy joined us for breakfast. Everyone was buzzing with excitement about the impending activities. I was convinced that I had worms because I noticed these weird bumps in my feet, so I headed down to the clinic to get them checked out, but while I was down there, they called for all participants to come up to deck 7, so I peaced out (I don’t have worms, by the way) I rushed up there and joined Ali, Nate, Evan, and many others on the pool deck. The procession begun, which included the captain being painted all green and most of the ships staff looking pretty ridiculous in togas and other such outfits. We learned that we had to make a sacrifice to King Neptune to turn from pollywogs to shellbacks and be allowed to cross the equator. The sacrifice went as follows: Get fish guts poured on your body, jump in the pool, kiss a fish, and kiss the kings ring. There was an additional option of shaving your head. Evan and I jumped up to be some of the first to be turned into shellbacks, and we did the whole thing together. I did a whole lot of running around saying hi to various people, and I took a spot near the front of the group near the head shaving station to watch everything unfold. My friend Sarah was the first girl to shave her, which was a last minute decision for her. It was a beautiful moment. Everyone was cheering her name and screaming with excitement as her hair was braided and cut off. She was crying, as were many others in the audience. Everyone was being so incredibly supportive of one another, it was so amazing to be apart of. Throughout the day, many people shaved their heads, either because of planning it the whole time of because of a last minute decision, but there was this epic sense community that made me proud to be apart of. There was an impromptu dance party, an AWESOME whirlpool, and hair everywhere. After my incredible frustration with the shipboard community after the citizen kofi night, it was great to feel like everyone was here for one another and like everyone was just really awesome. I loved it.

After the festivities, I had rehearsal for global studies which went really well! Michael told me that I’m only the second person to ever perform the song, which really the performance into perspective and made me about 1000 times more nervous. I got dinner and spent most of the night hanging out with Kevin listening to music and drawing pictures.

The next few days have kind of redundancy and amazingness. There were two separate “waka waka” dance parties during class which were awesome. There was a SICK dance party, which started with a silent rave that I joined in a bit late. I have dinner with my extended family which was nice. I learned that my friend Nick plays the piano and has an absolutely spectacular voice, so we jammed for about an hour. I performed twice and have gotten a lot of compliments, which feels pretty awesome. The ship got pretty rocky and I woke up mid air at one point which was terribly exciting.
Tomorrow we get to south africa, which I’m incredibly excited about. It’s going to beautiful, and I know I’m going to see a whale. I LOVE WHALES.