May 22, 2011

Today was C2. I think this was actually the first time I had class on a Sunday. I was used to always having class on Saturdays because I had 4 years of that in high school. We passed by Puerto Rico today and that was really pretty, and then later we passed by the Virgin Islands at night, and they were really pretty with all of the lights. I’ve been learning a lot in all of my classes. My professor has been basically everywhere in the world. She isn’t one of those professors who just pretends to know what she is talking about in relation to all of these exotic countries, but she has actually been to all of them. We have been reading a lot of the work that she has done in all of these places. In Spanish class I have really been learning a lot because we are forced to talk only in Spanish, and everything that she says is in Spanish too. Of course a few times I caught myself saying “oui” instead of “si”, but that will get better over time hopefully. My goal is to be able to at least have a basic conversation with someone while we are in a Spanish speaking country. Some people saw dolphins today, but I somehow missed them. I was busy doing other things. Tonight we met our extended families of the boat. My “parents” are professors at UVA, they seemed like pretty cool people and I really liked the people that were in my group as well. Tonight we had a game night with lots of getting to know you type activities. The first one I did was called team challenge. In this activity we were given a pile of materials and we had to figure out how to build the tallest structure. My team was doing pretty well, but then part way through it we were told to rotate tables, so we had to keep working on a sculpture that another team was working on. We thought we were doing pretty well again, but then they had us rotate back to our first project, but the people that worked on it after we rotated it were completing it in a totally different way from what we had imagined. This made it really hard to finish our structure. Our structure had to be freestanding and stand up for as long as possible. Due to the rocking of the boat (or at least that’s what we were blaming it on) we didn’t win ☹ We still did pretty well though.