The Rhythm of the Ship

No, this is not a terrorist on our ship.  It is one of the wonderful crew doing the maintenance that goes on every single day to keep this ship, well, in ship shape. Things have settled in on the ship.  Students have had two class days for every course, and they were all over the ship studying today.  Almost everyone has now at least  fought the technology to a draw even if they haven't beaten it. The above picture took 3.5 min to upload.  Yes, the internet bandwidth is limited and as a consequence it is very slow.  I was not able open my ship email for two day because someone sent me a message with an attachment.  One day, internet by satellite will get better, but that won't necessarily make the ship a better place.  Being unplugged from the internet for non-essential things makes the shipboard community operate in a more personal way.  No one is walking around texting like back home, and I like it. I got to watch a sunset in my cabin while I was waiting for that picture to load.

People are starting to need to have laundry done.  You just fill one of the bags as full as you can get it, and a day or two later, it will magically be outside your cabin when you get up--all for the price of $6 a bag.

Tonight, we had "Cultural Preport" which is a big meeting in the Union to educate all of the voyagers about some of the culture of the next country we will visit.  Each voyage does it a little differently.  On this voyage, it is held separately from logistical preport which will be tomorrow night.  Cultural preport is not mandatory, but logistical preport is.  Tonight, we had two faculty and an interport lecturer speak.  An interport lecturer is someone who gets on the ship from the next country and spends the days at sea as a speaker/resource.  One of the faculty was Russian and another had studied in Russia, so we got a good perspective.

The Library continues to draw customers. I had a student this morning who already had a class project in her Oceanography course.  She had decided to study jellyfish and had found a useful book in our very good collection of 9000 books.  Then we went on the library network and got a journal article for her from the UVa online journals. She said, "this is exactly what I need"--music to any librarian's ears no matter where they are.  So, yes I'm enjoying this gig a great deal.

Nancy has "beverage duty" tonight. She has a part-time job as a student life assistant (or minion as I refer to it).  It's perfect for her because she wants a break from making a lot of decisions.  On certain days, students are allowed to buy two beverage vouchers which they can use that night for a two hour period to buy a couple of beers or glasses of wine.  Many UVa students "go out" late in the evening, so this gives shipboard students the ship version of going out. Since the beverages are limited to a certain outdoor deck on the ship, the Student Life staff have to cover the exits to contain the consumption.  It works, but it has been chilly at night.

Since I've gone ahead and set my watch ahead for the night, we lose an hour of sleep again. FYI, it's 11:30 on the ship as I write this off the coast of Poland and 3:30 pm back in Charlottesville.