No classes today

There are no classes scheduled for today.

• Post-Port Open Mic Night for people to share experiences they had in India (Time: 1900 - 2000)
• Faculty/Staff Party (Time: 2000)

Update:

I thought I would use this post to relate some of the "incidents" that I've heard about happening amongst students over the course of the voyage so far...some of them are disturbing, some of them are just plain idiotic.

In Brazil:

• Some students were held up at knifepoint.  Apparently some kids tried to take their stuff but they wouldn't give it to them and that's when the kids pulled out the knives.

In South Africa:

• One girl almost went into an alcohol-related coma on the first night in Cape Town.  Apparently at one of the bars in Cape Town, they serve "fishbowls" of liquor (essentially a communal drinking bowl that contains about 17 kinds of alcohol and is very sweet).  At around 7:30 pm, she was dragged back to the ship by two of her friends who were going to simply secret her to her room, but luckily someone saw this girl coming onto the ship and intervened.  The doctor was summoned and according to him, this was the worst case he had ever seen.  He said there is a scale that doctor's use where 11 is the best and 3 is where you need machines to breathe for you.  This girl apparently was at a 4.  She was taken to a local hospital.  Emily (the nurse) was having her 30th birthday that day so she basically had to go spend her birthday with this girl in the hospital.  I've heard from some other people that this girl won't be sent home because she is a good student and she genuinely didn't realize how much alcohol she was consuming because the "fishbowl" mix was so sweet.
• One guy apparently went out late one night and made friends with some locals.   He went with them to some place at 4 in the morning and they tried to steal his cell phone.  He wouldn't give it up and he apparently was dragged by them when they got a hold of him when they were in a car - his feet got really badly hurt from being dragged and he had to be in a wheelchair on the ship for two weeks because he couldn't walk one step on his own.  This kid is apparently a complete idiot because when he was told by the medical staff that he wouldn't be allowed to go on his safari that was leaving the next day, he gave them a hard time because he felt he should be allowed to go.  According to Emily, this kid was really snotty to her and told her it was just stupid that he couldn't go because going on a safari was just sitting in a car and didn't involve walking.  She told him that he would have to walk from the ship to the bus, from the bus to the hotel, from the hotel to the safari vehicle, etc, and that the medical team would not change their decision.  Apparently this kid's mother is now giving the Semester at Sea administration a hard time because they want the money for the safari refunded to them.  Never mind that this incident was basically this kid's fault (ie. making friends and going off with complete strangers in the middle of the night and then not giving up his cell phone when they tried to take it in the first place)...this kid feels he was the one who was wronged and that he was entirely not at fault.

In Mauritius:

• A girl was apparently raped while in Mauritius - she was staying in a villa in the Flic-en-Flac beach area with friends and they apparently invited some local people back to party with them.  One of those people raped her.
• Students apparently vandalized property at the villas in Mauritius and there were a lot of incidents of drunkenness.

Other:

• One girl apparently bought a teddy bear and cut it open so she could hide alcohol inside to try to smuggle it back onto the ship.
• We learned in the last Logistical Pre-Port that out of 702 students on the ship, 93 have faced disciplinary action of some kind for something (ie. alcohol-related, getting dock time for being late coming back to the ship on the night of the departure or on one of the field trips, etc.)
• In the airport in South Africa, I remember asking our guide if we would need our passports to go through security.  One kid on the trip spoke up and said "no, you don't need your passport, we didn't need them in Brazil" - I just looked at him like he was a moron and said "Well, we aren't in Brazil."  The assumption that things would run exactly the same as they did in Brazil astounded me.  This kid likely had a lot of cross-cultural miscommunication because he was making assumptions that things in one place would be exactly the same as they would be in another!

Second Update:

I felt a little better today, but still pretty crappy.  I went to try to eat something at breakfast since I didn't eat anything yesterday - but around 1:00 pm or so though I felt sick again and had to go back to my room to throw up...so not much of what I ate this morning stayed in my stomach.

At dinner (I just had tea and toast today in addition to drinking water and getting some Gatorade), I saw my friend Emily (the nurse) and I told her my story and how I took my prescription antibiotic Zithromax yesterday but I was still sick today.  She told me that Zithromax was no good and that I should take Cipro (which is in stock in the clinic) and that I could come get her later tonight or to page her whenever I wanted if I needed it.   I told her I would wait until tomorrow to see how I felt, but then I decided I should probably just take it tonight since I have to teach tomorrow.  I left Emily a note on her door and she offered to bring the Cipro up to my room - 6 pills that I will take over the course of 3 days, 2 pills a day.  It only cost 50 cents per pill.

We will advance our clocks by a half an hour tonight which will make us 10 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the U.S.