As I sit in my cabin after breakfast, I can’t help but have the slightest feeling of “what the heck did I get myself into.” I’m slightly seasick; not enough where I feel I’m about to puke, but that awful carsick feeling where the only thing that will cure this is staring straight ahead, looking out the front window at one of the lines on the side of the road. Only there’s no road to look at, no lines, there’s just water. So after breakfast and a quick stop in the campus store (okay mom, maybe a slow stop where I got some super cute clothes: sweatshirt, 2 t-shirts, a world map, and some magnets to use on the magnetic walls in our cabin, a tumbler for my tea and a world map to not only document the voyage but have everyone sign at the end.) Anywho, after “shopping,” Malia and I headed to the medical center to go check out what seasick meds they have since I only brought the little sea band bracelets because they were totally out of Dramamine at the store when I went. They have the free little packets of meds but I wanted to make sure I was set and didn’t want to go back later, so we both opted to bring out the big guns, and by that I mean get the seasick patches you have to pay for. You get one patch, cut in half, and each half lasts about 3 days and then you take it off, so maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to get today since we’ll be in Dominica but you would have done it too if you were here so no judgment! And seeing as Malia already came back from class early super sick, since her patch hadn’t kicked in, I’m thinking it was a good idea.

Oh! So, update on yesterday and the students with the visa problems, they made it on the ship!! It was pretty cool, last night during dinner at about 7p.m. they made an announcement that, “the last 10 students are about to board the ship.” So everyone ran to the edge of the ship to scream and cheer for them as they boarded the ship. Then the small group of us Chapman kids went to go find the 3 Chapman students who were part of that group. There was a camera crew and everything so it was quite dramatic for everyone. And finally we were off! Like actually this time, and not just taking off to circle the ocean. The voyage had officially begun!

After the triumphant arrivals, we headed to the Involvement Symposium, which was a presentation about how you can get involved on the ship. Basically, you can just call me Little Miss Involved because boy did we sign up for a lot. I signed up for Extend Family (which puts a group of students and lifelong learners together to form a family at sea!), the Big Brother/Big Sister program (where you get paired up with a little kid on the ship and just get to hang out and mentor), also the babysitting and tutoring aspect of the kids program, and the Ambassadors program (you get to dress up all fancy and host foreign dignitaries visiting the ship). Then the clubs and workout programs I signed up for are: SASapella (an a capella group but we’ll see how that goes), Zumba (a dance/workout thing), Yoga, Insanity (some crazy workout routine), and I signed up to be on the Auction planning committee. There is an auction onboard towards the end of the voyage and the committee gets items together and plans a live and silent auction. So that should be cool. J

After “getting involved” we had our Sea meeting. Onboard, there are “Seas,” each one is pretty much just like a dorm floor that you meet up with every so often and do fun stuff with. We had met up the first night but a bunch of people were missing and the first night was more introductions, where as last night was just fun activities and such. We elected our “Sea Captains” for Sea Olympics, where all the Seas compete against each other in games and the winner gets to disembark first in San Diego. It feels a little weird saying that seeing as we haven’t even made it to the first port, but that’s still pretty cool. Oh and our color is green, and of course I own nothing green.

Last but not least we finished the day off with a little workout session I like to call P-90X. Okay a lot of people call it that but that is beside the point. Malia brought her “Ab Ripper X” workout so we did that on the upper sports deck, which turned out to be even more difficult with the crazy rocking of the ship. Sometimes we’d hit a wave and it would help push my body up and other times it would just push directly against me. It was pretty funny. Gotta keep that Semester at Sea-fifteen off like they keep saying. It’s freshman year all over again. Then we hung out on the deck talking with some people and stargazing for a while before I headed back to the room to sleep.

Sleeping last night was a little rough partly because of the weird swaying of the boat but also because part of our wall has not stopped creaking since we started moving. SO annoying so that woke me up a ton throughout the night.

It’s almost 10 a.m. right now and I have class at 10:45, my only class of “A Day.” So I have a little more down time. I’m wondering how weird it will be to have most of my classes on “B Day.” More to come later but for now I’m going to rest and play games or read on my kindle (thanks mom and dad!!)

Adios!