Two by Sea on the Ship Again: Family Night

Last night was family night for some of us. Every adult on the ship was asked if they would sponsor a group of student as a shipboard family. This means that you get 6-7 students who join together for occasional meals, have an adult they can confide in, have siblings who aren't roomates and meet for other social activities. We jumped at the chance because it was such a positive experience on our 2010 voyage. The coordinator got most of the adults to take part and more than 400 students signed up to participate and assigned "families", making sure that professors had none of their students as part of the family.

Last night was the meeting for the first half of the families to meet, and Nancy I had six students who showed up (a seventh had a conflict) We were assigned a table number and everyone showed up not knowing who was in their family. We all introduced ourselves and had the "where are you from" conversations, and things just flowed from there. We have one male, and the rest were females, so Terry was quite delighted with the group. We had dinner and chatted about experiences in St. Petersburg. Hardly any of the students knew other students in our group, so this was a great time to make new friends.

We tentatively planned to meet for dinner after every port to check in, see how every one is doing and continue bonding. Ice cream get togethers are always popular as well. I'm still in contact with some of our family members from our 2010 voyage.

I woke up the next morning to a pastel sky even though sunrise was half an hour away. So, I got to watch as the sun peeked up from what looked like an indentation in the horizon, looking to see if everything was alright before coming up fully. Then, you could see it rise gradually, fully lighting up the day. I enjoyed taking lots of pictures from a variety of places and sharing the sunrise with just a few people who were up as early as I was.

The day progressed with me getting the opportunity to talk to a class about finding financial information. They are required to follow the stocks of four companies they choose and were happy to find out how to do it in the challenging online environment of a ship. In the late afternoon, we had a faculty meeting with snacks and wine. There are not a lot of meetings on the ship--one of the things I like about it--but we got a lot done, and we discussed the changes in the calendar brought about by the change in itinerary. We will have a long crossing of the Atlantic since we won't be visiting Senegal and Ghana. Most of the faculty want to keep the Ghana and Senegal information in their syllabus since it was an important part of the trip.