Format: Note

Today I read… a little. I still need to work on those 3 essays. I spent the heat of the day with Clay Southerland, Sean Woods, Sara Legrand and Natalie Shah at the pool. The pool is amazing during port days, no one is there and the water is freshwater not the typical saltwater. I got slightly sunburned but that’s a good thing. Lunch was perfect. It turns out that when we’re in port there is a man who makes food in the cafeteria, and it tastes awesome! I’ve never been happier about food on the ship. We’re convinced he’ll be making omelets in the morning, so we keep telling everyone that. Fingers crossed I’ll have an excellent omelet in the morning. Hopefully made from real eggs, not this powdered nonsense they’re attempting to give us. After a delicious dinner we went into casablanca, I realize I keep talking about food but it really was that great of a day. We went to Rick’s Cafe! It was very very very awkward, and we had a couple drinks. We were certainly frowned upon. Tomorrow we’re taking the train from casablanca going south, that’s right the Marrakech Express!!!!!!!!!!!!

haha, but in reality this isn’t too hard. We all just got an email about a worldwide warning for attacks on united states citizens. The quaran burning doesnt seem to make muslims happy especially during their religious holiday. The ships security has increased and we have been told to stay away from hotels protests and large gatherings of westerners… looks like that little canadian flag pin I just got might come in handy. That was a joke, I refuse to wear the canadian flag. Classes are actually pretty difficult on the ship. I have a feeling choral ensemble may have been a better choice. Although I have written many essays so far, one of my professors just sent me an email informing me I need to write three more before we leave morocco, looks like I’m staying on the ship today.

Today we arrived in Morocco, but more on that later. This is all about Spain. I LOVED Spain. I traveled by train for the first time, when we went from Cadiz to Jerez de la frontera. We had a delicious lunch with tapas and sangria, and I had my first tortilla. Tortillas are delicious and filling, I had one with chorizo in Barcelona and that was my favorite meal. There is simply too much to write about Spain, everything was amazing except for our hostel in Sevilla. No more hostels. We didn’t have an air conditioner and the night time temperature was well into the 90’s. One of our 7 room mates was a trip. Among many other things he told us that all we needed to do in Barcelona is “Get very very drunk… then it’s yes or it’s yes”. The only thing I regret about Spain is not recording our conversation with him. Hardly anyone had the lisp that I hear about in Spain. Of all the people I spoke to in Spanish there was probably only 3 that were difficult to understand. Barcelona was absolutely amazing. We visited the MNAC, la sagrada familia, and went on a bus tour of the city. We stayed in a hotel and could have probably gotten around with only speaking English. The food is delicious and the prices weren’t too bad. I could live in Barcelona, and the dogs were really cool. There was a significant number of people with dogs and barely any had leashes, they were extremely obedient and seemed to follow most directions. None of us had issues with pickpockets, though we heard that many of the people with the semester at sea tours had issues. The people in Spain don’t seem to care about working in general. It was vacation season and many shops were closed with signs that that indicated they would remain closed for 2 weeks. The only shops that were open all day long were run by Asians, they spoke Spanish well. People walk the streets entertaining and asking for money. I only paid one guy because the others just annoyed me. If I were better at Spanish I might have paid some of them to leave me alone. At night the street vendors sell “Cruzcampo o Marijuana”, and during the day squirrels and turtles are available. Post a comment to ask me more, I really could write a long novella on spain.

We walked around the shops of Casablanca today and had a delicious meal at a fairly sketchy establishment. So far I’ve been offered Marijuana twice. The mint tea is absolutely delicious. I’m listening to music from the lion king right now. From now on I feel my emails will flow this way, especially since all of my line breaks don’t seem to post to my blog. Some things smell weird here, like poop. In Spain things smelled more like fish. The animals are much more sad here, and I almost stepped on a sick kitten earlier. I’m glad I got my rabies shots. There are much more beggars here, but also the people who are working seem to work harder. Two young girls tried to get a group of us to buy tissue from them for about a half hour. The restaurant we ate at served us during Ramadan, we were fairly certain they purchased the chickens for a group next to us while we waited. Sarah, Lauren and I had bull’s meat or boars meat or balls meat we may really never know.

Theres so much to write about. Spain was amazing, especially barcelona. Ill try to write more about it shortly. We were docked in cadiz, took a train to sevilla but got stuck in jerez de la frontera for 3 hours. We spent one night in sevilla, and it was a disaster. We took an early morning flight to barcelona and had the greatest time when we finally found a hotel. More details to follow. The ship just set sail for morocco and we also just took the community photo. Im a couple people over from tutu attempting to fish my phone off of the edge of the boat with Will Farino’s lacross stick.

Spain!

We’re going to hit spain at 8am. Once we get off the ship in Cadiz we’re heading by train to Seville and spending the night there in a hostel. The next morning we’ll be taking a plane to BARCELONA! Spending two nights there then heading back to the ship. Updates to come. I’ll take plenty of pictures, hopefully uploading them is not too difficult.

Today I went on a tour of the bridge. The deadline to sign up was a couple days ago and it was filled to capacity. Even though I didn’t sign up I just acted like I was supposed to be there and no one seemed to care. Luis gave us a tour of all the communication and navigation instruments. It was very interesting, the ship has many radios and most are redundant. I asked Luis what has changed since the ship experienced bad weather in 2005. All the instruments have been replaced and they have all new windows, but really nothing has changed. There are controls for all the waterproof doors and fire doors that are controlled by the bridge, and the master override for the ships PA system was in there too. Lauren Barto asked if we could say happy birthday to Sean Woods, but Luis told us that he can only use the pa to announce the captains birthday. The tour was interrupted when someone else on the bridge saw another group of baby dolphins off the starboard side, it was neat to see all the little dolphins jumping. One of the other people on the tour asked what the procedure is for pirates and we learned the ship unfortunately has no weapons. Luis explained that when necessary the ship can hire a private security team with weapons, but they currently do not have one. He told us a story about last spring semester when the Explorer encountered pirates between Spain and Singapore. Luis happened to be on duty and noticed a group of ships heading directly towards the Explorer, they did not respond to radio calls and he could see the people on board were making distress signals with their arms. For this voyage because we are sailing with Desmond Tutu the ship has unarmed security on multiple decks that can use the firehouses to knock boats or people away. The primary method of defense for this ship is actually speed. The ship travels at 29.5 knots maximum and this is faster than most other vessels on the water. More sophisticated pirates will use more than one boat with a large rope connecting them, when a larger ships travels into the rope the smaller boats will become attached to the larger ships sides. In the case last spring the captain decided not to risk it and did an emergency start of all 4 engines to escape at a higher speed. Typically only one engine is in use and the boat travels around 12 knots. 2 Days til spain.

The captain turned out the lights on the front deck tonight. We could see all the stars! Classes seem hard so far.

Just saw baby dolphins out my classroom window.