There are no classes today. There will be activities this morning surrounding what they call "Neptune Day" (originally supposed to coincide with most voyages crossing of the equator, but we crossed the equator days ago). I'll report back more later regarding today's activities.
Update:
This morning at around 8:00 am a band made up of crew members with a drum and some whistles went through all the hallways to wake people up. At 8:45 am, we got an announcement on the P.A. system to come up to the deck where the pool is by 9:00 am for the Neptune Day events.
Essentially, the captain of the ship comes out with no shirt on and green paint smeared all over him and I guess he is supposed to be Neptune. The Executive Dean for the trip, Larry, was dressed up like Neptune's wife and there were a few other people in robes from the faculty/staff.
They read some spiel about paying homage to Neptune and then people had to either walk across the pool and then kiss a fish upon exiting the pool. I think some people just walked in the ankle deep pool and got milk (or what looked like milk) poured over their heads. It was really crowded up on the deck and it seemed like this was going on for a long time so I didn't stick around very long. By the time everyone who wanted to do this "ritual" got to do it, it would probably be an hour long.
I went back to my room and slept some more and I woke up again around 2:00 pm and went to the pool deck to see what was going on. It was just full of people sitting on deck chairs and there were lots of people who got their heads shaved which occured after the pool-crossing event this morning. Surprisingly, a number of female students decided to completely shave their heads. I would never do that because (a.) my bald head would not be cute, (b) I wouldn't want more attention drawn to me in these other countries where we are supposed to be blending in as much as possible and (c) I don't want a majority of my photos from a trip around the world to look like crap. I guess some girls can pull it off, but at this point there are a lot of girls running around the ship looking like Sinead O'Connor and guys looking like, well, my brother Kevin.
At any rate, after trying to make my way through the masses of people who were out on deck chairs, I went to the faculty/staff lounge to try to get some grading done. The lounge seemed to be full of people who were also trying to catch up on their work too. Apparently there will be a BBQ out on the pool deck later tonight so I guess I will attend that.
We will advance our clocks by one hour tonight which will make us 5 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the U.S.
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