"It's a party in the Yellow Sea..."

So we just had the Sea Olympics Pep Rally! It was pretty exciting, I have to say (even though it got a little bit long...)  But it was just meant to get everyone excited for the Sea Olympics on Thursday as well as to announce the events and have people sign up.  It's amazing how excited and involved the whole campus can get when there is almost-literally nothing else to do.  They closed the student bar, there were no other events scheduled, the campus store was closed - they really had no choice but to be involved. 

My 3 sea captains have been working over the last couple days to prepare the skit and make sure everyone had something yellow to wear tonight.  This morning I had to get up early with one of the captains so we could go to the 7th deck and download an "audio only" karaoke version of "Party in the USA."  It only took 45 minutes (the internet has been ridiculous lately).  You can probably guess that they changed the lyrics to "Party in the Yellow Sea."  It was actually pretty cute - although, thankfully, I got an acoustic performance the day before and was able to request a few changes to the lyrics :)  Yeahhhhh..... one of the better decisions I've made on the voyage.

They performed 3rd and did a great job.  There were 2 kinds of skits: the first was a skit where the lyrics to a song were changed (like ours).  The other kind was a skit that had people dressed up like the other seas and made fun of them.  They all did a good job though.  ACTUALLY, the best performance was by the Nomer Sea  (get it.. No Mercy - it's the recently formed sea for all the faculty/staff/lifelong learners/family members).  They sang the Circle of Life with different lyrics (they have 2 Broadway stars on the faculty - not too difficult) and then at the end, they raised up the 5 month old baby dressed like a lion cub a la Simba in the Lion King.  It was pretty amazing.  My FAVORITE faculty member was the crazy monkey man.  I think it was my voyage highlight. 

Yellow is a pretty dominating color when 90 people are wearing it, so they looked and sounded great.  A couple inappropriate (and offensive) chants got started, but I just needed one quick death look for them to stop.  They're learning.

I'm also happy to finally announce that I think I know everyone's name.  90 people is a lot.  Seriously.  There are a couple outliers that I'm a little sketchy on, but I've almost got it down now.  Only took me 2 months.  I'll just say that I have friends with way smaller seas that are still missing some names.

As the pep rally ended, we went to our sea meeting location to do sign up for events.  This is where having 90+ people is detrimental - it was pure chaos.  My sea captains got it down pretty well though and got the signups.  I'm bribing the whole sea with cookies on Wednesday night in order to get the banner done. 

I also multitasked during this time and resolved 2 longtime pending roommate conflicts, checked in with a struggling student, touched base with another room situation, and followed up on some other room scheduling stuff.  Even though I'm exhausted, it was a productive evening (totally makes up for me sleeping through my alarm this morning and missing the first 10 minutes of Global Studies - I would've missed everything but it was on the TV, so I could watch it).  We lost an hour again last night, so now we're 10 hours ahead of Central Time.  I think. 

I can't believe we're only halfway to India.  I feel like we've been sailing awhile.  It's been bumpy, but I can't take the patches anymore, they ITCH!  I ripped mine off today and I"m going to try to make it another 3 days without one. 

I've got 5 pictures all ready to go for the blog, but the Internet is impossible.  I've been trying to check my bank account, and pay my credit card and phone bill for a couple weeks now with no luck.  Irritating. 

Hopefully I'll get a chance to do some of those things tomorrow.  These late nights aren't helping with getting up early for good Internet though!

Missing all of you MUCHO!