Living a day twice & Japan Part II

So we have crossed the International Date Line and have lost close to 24 hours so we had the great benefit of gaining an extra day! Since we’re sailing East, we lost 19 hours (from Pacific Time Zone), so to adjust to the time in our next port, Hawaii, we repeated Saturday, November 22nd. We had class the first day and a free day the next.

There was a charity auction and raffle on our free day today and I won 100 Internet minutes—yay! Those are actually a treasure on the ship seeing how 2 hours of Internet are $50. Ouch on the pocket. There was a silent auction and a live auction but I just didn’t have that kind of money to bid on some of the items. I bought 10 raffle tickets and distributed them among some items up for grabs. I think I put 2 in the Internet minute raffle. For that item alone, there were 600 tickets! Yes—SIX HUNDRED tickets. I was one of the lucky 4. The live auction was fun to watch—some items went for like 400 dollars! I think a 3 night at a bed and breakfast in Malibu went for 400 dollars. A map signed by the captain went for like $300, etc, etc. Some of these items are donated by ballin (that’s slang for “rich” for my mom who is probably confused right now) faculty who own houses around the world—Nova Scotia, Finland, Norway, Israel. Many of them donated a stay for a weekend in their homes/condos, without transportation. Anyway that was that.

Most students (including myself) have been overwhelmed by a plethora of FDP papers. FDP= field directed practica. Basically day trips that we have to go on for class. And then we have to write about our experience all while trying to tie it to our class material. Fun. Here I am on fifth deck with a number of other students writing papers and stuff (stuff meaning procrastinating).

We’ll be in Hawaii for Thanksgiving—whooooo! Can’t wait to use my cell phone to call and text away.

Japan Part II in a nutshell: DisneySea in Tokyo was fun minus I didn’t understand what was going on because it was in Japanese. But any Disney park is always fun and stimulates happy feelings. I spent the second day in Yokohama—which was absolutely beautiful. The people were so friendly and it was just a nice little city with trees with leaves that change colors.

Good night from the Explorer!