Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we spent not on a break or 3 day weekend, but in orientation meetings, most of which were painfully boring and which all ended with the speaker saying, by the way, all of what I am telling you can be found written down in your cabins. Anyways, the day started at 9 and we heard from people from the Honor something or other (the people who handle the discipline stuff) and the library and IT staff about the library and computers, respectively. After those, we walked around procrastinating until a much needed lunch and then went to go rest until the next set of meetings. Luckily, I spent this set in a classroom with a bunch of people and one of the people who spoke for about an hour no one could understand so we were all just speaking over him or sleeping. It was bad. At around 4:00 we finally finished everything and went to hang out at the pool with some people, then had dinner and headed over to the involvement symposium by 7:30.
The involvement symposium wsa interesting, there were activities in around 10 different categories to choose from. I signed up for almost everything including:
Kids Rule!- babysitting or tutoring one of the 20 adorable kids on the ship
Vicarious Voyage- Penpal program with a classroom in the US, send them things from each country
Students of service- in charge of fundraising, money goes to places we visit and the SAS scholarship fund
Social justice club- they are not really sure what they do yet but it could be cool depending on what they do
Peer mentor for career services- helping people with resumes and cover letters and such... I took a semester-long class on this stuff last semester at Wisconsin so hopefuly I will be of some assistance.
Seder- I plan on going to the Seder the first night on the ship and then am in the process of figuring out and finding people to do the second seder with in South Africa. I might do more Jew things if they arise
After that, I went to play trivia, played with 2 other Wisconsin people, met 3 more Wisconsin people while sitting there. There are 14 of us on the ship, we are one of the largest college populations.. I had no idea that all these people were going, or that some of them existed so its cool. We are all constantly wearing Wisconsin clothes so they are easy to spot. My trivia team won second place and then I headed to bed. Both my roommate and I couldn't fall asleep and both realized that the beds are incredibly uncomfortable and that the night before we were so tired that we didn't even realize it. 3 hours later, I fell asleep only to have to wake up 5 hours after that. Fun stuff... also, we have a set of drawers next to our heads and they kept opening and shutting all night- very annoying, but duct tape is banned. My roommate and I both talked about how it is annoying how people are already forming their little cliques that they basically came on the ship with and how we don't like it because we don't want to just be friends with the same few people the whole time. And I have been like hanging out with different groups of people and I don't want people thinking that I don't like them just because I am not only with them. So hopefully it will get better now that people are meeting people away from their friends in classes and clubs and field programs in port.
Heres one fun thing we learned during the orientation with the global studies professor (everyone takes this class)... here are the 10 most popuated countries in order:
1. China
2. India
3. US
4. Indonesia
5. Brazil
6. Pakistan
7. Bangladesh
8. Nigeria
9. Russia
10. Japan
We did some exercise in order to remember it- don't remember the exercise but I remember the countries! bye for now!
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