Wellness Fail

Hello from India!  But hello from my cabin... I am sick as a dog and had to give up my trip today.  I was supposed to lead a trip to a Dalit village to do a work project fixing up classrooms in their school.  Unfortunately, I am out of commission and extremely bummed out.  This throat/cold thing has been going around since Ghana and I thought it passed me by... but yesterday my throat hurt all day long and I wrote it off as being tired.  Not so.  Today I woke up and it's the "hard to swallow/pounding headache/sweats & chills/painful skin" illness.   

So I'm pretty bummed that I'm missing a day in India.  Although I guess I should be happy it's not happening in a port where we only have 2 days OR in Japan where we won't be let off the ship if we have a fever OR in Vietnam where I'll be hopping a plane to Cambodia right away.  So. I'm thankful it's happening now instead of then.  But maybe I'd be more thankful if it had happened during a long sail.  I'll stop.   

Instead I'll tell you about the Sea Olympics.  My sea has a history of winning, but we did not have a great day yesterday.  We ended up 5th (out of 10). 

The day started early because it was Photo Day on the ship.  I had to get up early for the staff photo and then my sea's photo was directly afterward.  The night before my sea had met up to work out a cheer and a banner.  The banner turned out amazingly well - I will have to post a picture of it later.  I ran around all morning helping get people outfitted in yellow, painting faces and finalizing schedules with the sea captains.  It was actually quite convenient for everyone to wear their sea color - I could easily find my students in a crowd. 

We gathered outside the union to march in for Opening Ceremonies.  My sea was very loud and spirited, coming up with cheers on the spot and then leading each other in them.  My favorite was one where this very loud, very tall guy on my sea would yell "Y'all look kinda sick, whaddya got?" and then everyone responded with "Yellow Fever!"  Wordplay.

The opening ceremonies were exciting - we got to see everyone's flags and then everyone performed their cheer for the group (and were to be judged on it).  The Yellow Sea had a solid cheer that involved some clapping and stomping.  We thought we had a shot at third place, but found out at the end of the day that we got 2nd!  We were pretty excited for that, especially considering we didn't place for the flag.  I'm still a little irritated at that.  We absolutely should've placed for the banner (it was way better than the cheer).

There were 5 different venues for the games, and there were usually 3-4 events happening at the same time.  I went directly up to Hula Hooping and saw our 3 participants go out first.  I then headed over to the pool for synchronized swimming, which was awesome.  Considering each sea had 3 days to prepare (and 1 pool we all share), everyone did an amazing job.  There might have been a wardrobe malfunction in the first group (with the lifelong learners) and the Archbishop hopped off the pool deck saying "we need some censors here!"  My sea did a GREAT job!  We had 6 men volunteer to perform and they were coached by 2 of the women on my sea.  They even managed to find yellow shorts for each of them to wear. Several even shaved a "Y in their chest hair.  They were committed.  They had a medley of music, including a delightful routine to a portion of "Respect."  I have their routine on video, though I'm not sure I'll ever have enough bandwidth to upload it here. 

We heard that our sea took 3rd in dodgeball and ping pong, but didn't place at all in Jeopardy or Dean David Says.  Most of us went upstairs for Tug of War, where the Yellow Sea took a hard-earned third place.  They beat the eventual Olympic champions, the Caribbean Sea, who had 1 college basketball player and 2 college football players on their side. 

I peeked in at our team playing Crab Soccer, which seemed to be going well.  They ended up with 2nd place and tons of blisters on their hands, poor guys.  And THEN I went down to lip synching.  This was the best event of the day, so many great performances. My sea performed a Britney Spears medley.  The top 2 performances were absolutely outstanding.  They did medleys of different songs (each with distinguishable dances) and one of my friends, Cicero, performed in his sea's lipsynch.  His "lead part" was Michael Jackson's "Black or White" and he even had the white flowing dress shirt... it was perfect.  It was so enjoyable that the top 3 seas performed again at Logistical Preport last night. 

While this was happening, the Yellow Sea placed in 2nd in the Orange Pass Relay (passing an orange down a line of 10 people neck-to-neck).  We also placed 2nd in Sustainable Sculpture. 

My entire sea and I were EXHAUSTED by closing ceremonies at 6pm.  The winner was announced (again... not us), and we all limped back to our cabins to nap for 30 minutes before preport started. 

Overall it was a fun day and it was so nice to have something that the students really had fun with.  It was certainly a very unifying activity. 

I'm going to try and sleep - the worst part about being sick on arrival day is that announcements are made throughout the whole morning giving people reminders and calling certain people down to the purser's desk.  They already woke me up once.  I'm hoping they're done for awhile now.

Hopefully I'll be up and about tomorrow.  I'm supposed to go on a trip to Kancheepuram and Mamallapuram to see some very old temples.