Day 32: A Typical Day on the MV Explorer

Today was a very stressful day balancing all of the things I had to do with all of the things I wanted to do. There wasn't going to be any napping today. 

In the morning I wrote all of the papers/reflections that were due following our stay in China. For a few of my classes, we have to observe the culture of each country and then write about our adventures and observations when we return to the ship. For example, in my Digital Media course we have to pay attention to the advertisements, how the culture/country advertise which includes -- what kinds of advertisements they use, the types of digital media the country/culture uses, how frequently we are able to find Internet, when/if we find Internet what we do on the Internet.

In the afternoon after class, I had a group meeting. A lot of the professor give group assignments. It seems to be a way they can balance their classroom activities with what they would have balanced it with had we been going to school on a normal campus.

After dinner, Lauren had her first soccer game. I was going to go watch so I could figure out how on earth this was going to work. Turns out, no one from either team showed up besides Lauren. I didn't have much time before my family was meeting. My ship mom wanted everyone to meet up on the seventh deck at 8pm. She was going to buy everyone an ice cream cone before we arrived in Vietnam. My ship mom was not going to be getting back on the ship in Vietnam. Her plans include a Cambodia trip with Semester at Sea and then independently traveling to North Vietnam to see Ha Long Bay and Hanoi before meeting the ship in Singapore. I think she was treating us to ice cream because we weren't going to meet after Vietnam.

After ice cream, I hurried back to my room to grab a Coca Cola and head to the Union. The Residential Directors on the ship airing The Dark Knight Rises with free popcorn in the Union at 9:00 pm. Free popcorn + Dark Knight Rises = a packed Union. They should have started the movie at 8:00 pm rather than 9:00 pm because --with no nap-- I didn't make it through the movie (and I lasted like an hour and a half). By the time I left only about half of the students/viewers were remaining.



Side note.

I know you're as curious as I was about what the "soccer field" would look like on the ship. Well, as promised, this is what it looks like. The goals will be the bottom part of the basketball hoops. You can see that the black post on the left of the photo is the post of the basketball hoop. If you look close you can see the hoop near the top of the photo. Looks like a narrow field, to me.