Log 7

While I am acclimated to the majority of things on the ship, such as the constant sway, there are other things that I am taking a little more time to get used to. Firstly, in the dining areas, there are waiters that clean up after us. At Maine, we would take our things to a conveyor belt and through away our trash. Here, the waiters come to the table and remove the empty plates and trash before we even get up. Many of us try to clean up after ourselves, and some succeed, but most of the time, we get stopped by the waiters and they take it the rest of the way. The other this is that we all have cabin stewards. My cabin steward is Edwin. They come into our cabins, remove the trash, make our beds, vacuum the floor, wipe things down, etc. Every morning, I make my bed, but apparently not good enough, because sometimes I come back, and I can tell he remade my bed. I know we say this is not a cruise, but a voyage, however, some aspects sure feel like I am on a cruise.

On another note, my roommate and I just can’t get a break. The very first day we had to call maintenance to get our bathroom door fixed. Then on day two they had to come back because one of our drawers was not closing correctly, which would be dangerous if we hit rougher waters. Then again I called them because our TV wasn’t turning on. I tried the remote and the monitor and neither worked. We didn’t really care at first, but I found out some of my classes were going to be putting things on the loop that I am supposed to watch. So we got that fixed. Well now we can’t turn the TV off. Neither by remote or monitor. I can’t even mute it, which means the TV will be playing music all night.

Excitingly, however, we will be reaching Hawaii in 2 days. I will be hiking for 2 hours through a rainforest and then another 3 or so on the shoreline.

On the matter of staying active, I have started a Tae Kwon Do club where I will be teaching the very basic things. I have found others with some experience so they will be able to help me as well. I didn’t expect such and interest in the idea, but I ended up with 54 people on my sign-up sheet. I decided to split the time up into 3 sections. Two classes at 1700 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and one class at 0600 on Sundays. Right now I am just waiting for confirmation from the activities director about the space and time I asked for.