-*Spring 2010 Sea Olympics*-

Sea Olympics: March 7, 2010

After weeks of planning and anticipation, the day had finally arrived: the Sea Olympics!!  There are 586 students on board living on 3 decks of the ship.  Each wing of a hall is given a name of a sea around the world.  My hall is the Bering Sea and was given the color black, which was rather convenient because everyone owns black.  (although with 90 degree weather and half of the competitions outdoors, it got rather hot!)  The students were divided up into 9 seas: Adriatic Sea (white), Red Sea, Aegean Sea (light blue), Mediterranean Sea (green), Yellow Sea, Caribbean Sea (purple), Baltic Sea (orange) and Arabian Sea (dark blue). The Staff, children, and lifelong learners made up a team which they named themselves as The Salty Sea Monkeys and the color pink.  They were so cute.  From 9:30am to 9pm were games and activities of all types of competitions from dodge ball and tug of war to lipsync and synchronized swimming.  I was our sea’s captain along with my friend Chris.  We were the two representatives for the Bering Sea.  So we attended meetings with other captains, organized and lead meetings in our sea, and then made sure out team signed up and showed up to all their events.  It was a lot of work but totally worth it. It was so much fun.  I was also on the Olympic planning committee to plan all of the activities for the day.  But specifically I was planning the trivia game.  So unfortunately, because I was leading the trivia game, I couldn’t watch the synchronized swimming which apparently was really funny.  Our synchronized swimming team consisted of 4 boys…haha.  I competed in Sea Feud, which is like the game show Family Feud.  The people on the Olympic Planning Committee went around the ship and surveyed 100 people and got the most popular answers of certain questions.  One of the questions was really funny: “Which staff member would you like to serenade you?” and then the top answers were Don Gogniat (our global studies prof), Mark White (our academic dean), Lauren Crabtree (our executive dean)- those were all obvious answers- the others were…Mrs. Medora (a professor from India who is so cute and hilarious!) and “the IT guy” (who is a young, pretty attractive guy who works in the computer lab.  The funny thing is, no one really knows his name. so when the girl during the game wanted to say him for her answer, she said “the IT guy”. And the exact answer on the board was…”the IT guy” because that is how the other people out of 100 surveyed. Haha) I also competed in the Lipsync.  That was a lot of fun.  Each team was given a song out of a hat. So our sea got Bad Romance by Lady Gaga.  Some of the other songs were Bohemian Rhapsody, Yellow Submarine, Under the Sea (The Little Mermaid), Say You’ll be There (Spice Girls), Celebration, Thriller, Don’t Stop Believing, Beat It, and Eye of the Tiger.  A lot of them were good. I videotaped all of them except for Under the Sea because they went first and my group went second so I wanted to make sure I had enough space on my memory to record ours.  We spent so long practicing our dance.  We had legit choreography and everything.  AND we had a secret weapon!.. an asian boy in our sea played Lady Gaga. But I think the problem was, he was so good and looked exactly like Lady Gaga that people didn’t know he was a boy. Haha. I bought a wig for him in Viet Nam and he wore our clothes and make-up.  I am telling you, he pulled it off soo well! There were us 8 girls as dancers and then he was Lady Gaga.  A lot of people said they liked ours. But…. We didn’t place in the top 3.  I am not going to tell you which teams won because when I get home I will show you the video and see which ones you like.  If you can’t tell, I am still a little bitter about the whole thing. Its been 2 days since then so I am slowly letting it go.  The competitions were Extreme Musical Chairs, World Cup of Crab Soccer, “Hula” Hoop, “Asian” Cube Scramble, Sea Sponge Scramble, Salty Whistle, Limbo, Pirate Pull (tug of war), The Singing SAS’ers (lipsync), Nail the Sailors (dodge ball), Synchronized Swimming, Adventure”ers” Trivia Bowl, Dean White Says, Dress Your LLC, The “Gun” Show, and The “Explorer” Relay.

                Extreme musical chairs was pretty intense.  I saw a video of it.  As the representatives from each team were walking around the chairs, the little kids were throwing wads of paper “snowballs” at them.  And then of course, like any musical chairs, people were pushing and shoving each other to get a seat.  I don’t remember how my team ended up doing in that but I think we made it to the final three.  Then for Crab Soccer we got third.  It was four on four from each team and you played with a soccer ball but on your hands and feet in the “crab position” with your butt towards the ground.  The ground was so hot and rough that people who weren’t wearing gloves got blisters which broke open and got infected….I feel so bad for them! Luckily mom I had my ace bandage because it has come in handy for someone.  The Asian Cube Scramble: two people from each team had plastic chopsticks and had to fill a cup up with ice cubes which were scattered on a table.  The team who filled it up first won.  I have no idea how we did in that, but we obviously had students who were experienced chopstick users (not me) compete.  The Limbo we did really well in. We took second.  We have Kelly who is very flexible, it was really impressive.  The tug of war was embarrassing.  Practically every other team except the faculty/children’s team had 300lb linebackers as their anchors.  We went up against the Red team in the first round and as soon as the whistle buzzed, we got demolished.  The Red team ended up beating everyone, so I guess its alright if we lost to the strongest.  Speaking of strong though… The “Gun” Show was to see which person/team could do the most pull-ups, and then the number of pull-ups your teammate did would be added to your score.  Our Global Studies instructor is very fit and he was the representative for the faculty, and he (as a 60ish year old man) whipped out 13 pull-ups.  But Jon from my team tied for first with 30.  Jon lives across from me and I just found out a few weeks ago that he went to PV High, my rival high school and where my dad works. We know a lot of the same people.  Oh and Meemee, he rented an apartment last summer off of Samuel.  Crazy, huh!?  Then the Trivia we took third with three guy representative from our team.  It was just like the Jeopardy game show but with the topics of Geography, Oceanography, Sustainability, Semester at Sea, and Potpourri- all topics to do with our voyage, well except for potpourri.  Dean White Says is “simon says” and Kate from our sea took first.   Nail the Sailors was dodge ball with 2 guys and 2 girls from each team.  I wanted to compete in this but I did lipsync which was at the same time. But its ok because I just signed up for dodge ball intramurals.  We ended up getting second in this.  And lastly, the explorer relay was funny.  It went throughout the entire top two decks of the ship with multiple people doing multiple legs of the race.  I actually “ran” behind each teammate trying to video tape it as they were doing their part.  The video is really funny but the parts in between are bad because of running.  It was pretty tiring from all that running back and forth following each person. I wont go through each part of the relay, but the one thing I have to mention because it is so funny is…flip cup.  The coordinators decided to add flip cup as part of the relay, but of course with water instead of alcohol.  So 4 people from each team had to chug a full cup of water and then flip it onto the table. Let me tell you how funny it was to watch the students teach the lifelong learners and faculty how to do it.  There was a 70 year old man learning.  And let me tell you, they got pretty good at it.  I wish I filmed it!

                During the Olympics the crew preformed a ‘man overboard drill’. We were outside for the tug of war contest and a few of us realized that we were turning drastically and then noticed that something large was floating in the water behind us.  We thought that something fell overboard and we had to turn around to get it.  I’ve hear that every time the ship has to turn around, it costs $20,000. So that’s a reason not to fall overboard. You’d owe the ship 20 grand.  After the drill we stayed there for 3 or so hours just floating in the Andaman Sea so that we could see the Nicobar Islands at 7am the next morning.  Sally and I woke up at 7 to get breakfast and see the islands AND sunrise as we ate.  It was cool even though we didn’t get that close to the islands.  Well, we got close enough that we could see a ship wreck off the coast of one of the islands.  We learned later that day in global studies about the islands.  They are owned by India, and only Indian citizens are allowed to go there. So good thing we weren’t ship wrecked, or else we’d be in a lot of trouble with the local tribes!

After the Olympics were over, we had a BBQ on the top deck.  It was awesome! Perfect weather, beautiful sunset, good food for once… it was an awesome end to a great day.  After dinner a few students went crazy and jumped in the pool with their clothes on and before you knew it, there were 50 people in the pool screaming that they wanted more people to jump in.  I stayed out and took pictures and videotaped for awhile.  They convinced Cindy, our Dean of Students to get in. Her and another administrator jumped in! God I love this school.  So eventually I jumped in as well and I was stupid because I jumped in on the deep end.  It was too congested I couldn’t even trend water so all the girls had to bond together and then hold on to the tall people who could touch. For those of you who have seen the size of the pool (mom and steven) you would NOT believe me when I say that we managed to fit 150 people in that pool.  I was even shocked.  I was always convinced that that pool could only hold 20 at most. Haha.

                So, it was a good 24 hours.  Although I have been very dehydrated and now sick.  Hopefully I can take care of myself before we arrive in India in two days. J I have to wake up at 3am on Friday to leave for my Taj trip. Goodness gracious. Oh and tonight we are setting our clocks back again, but this time 30 minutes. If you look at India, it is located in a strange time zone.  So we will set our clocks back 30 minutes tonight and then 30 minutes back in a few days.  This now makes me 13 ½ hours ahead of California. And only two days until I have reached my halfway mark on this trip. Crazy! I knew it would fly by!  And I bet the second half will fly by faster than the first half.   

                I am going to try and have my Cambodia/Viet Nam blog posted by tomorrow night because I want it done by the time I get to India!