Day 46 – At Sea

For the first and only time in the voyage, we set our clocks forward for an hour. That is because we had a fueling stop in Singapore, and Singapore is an hour ahead of Vietnam. Now, it is still unclear to me as to why we had to move the whole ship forward an hour, as opposed to simply having the person who gets in contact with the Singapore fueling company be on Singapore time. Nevertheless, I decided to sleep through Bob’s class, as instead of being an already early 8:00 am class, it was at 7:00 am. I figured it’s cool since I sit in on the class, as opposed to being actually enrolled.

When Nick and I woke up, Nick felt terrible. Not about skipping Bob’s class, but physically. It turned out that he had a fever. So he stayed in bed pretty much all day.

At 11:45 I had my SeaTV production meeting, followed by a block of classes until 4:45. At the meeting I proposed shooting an eating contest, in which speed to eat a set amount of food, as opposed to total consumption in a time limit, was the goal. In addition, I thought the food that we had to eat should be unpalatable. Kevin, a dude on my SeaTV team, volunteered to go up against me.

So after classes, I got into my lumberjack costume and went to shoot the eating contest. We went with a three-course meal: a plate of raw tomatoes and onions; a plate with a three rolls, three containers of butter, and three pieces of chicken; and a plate with roasted potatoes and pasta with alfredo sauce. For me, the hardest part was the first plate. The raw tomatoes were just horrific. I actually didn’t mind the onions so much, but I just couldn’t eat the tomatoes. I had to quell a gag reflex probably ten times on that plate.

Because of my difficulty, I finished the first plate at least two minutes behind Kevin. But then I made my move. I caught him on the second plate and destroyed him on the third. But the victory was not without a price. About a half hour later I puked it all up.

At 8:00, we finally had the first meeting of the drum circle club. I am the president of that club, and I had been fighting for time to get it started. So it was sweet to finally have our first meeting. Because we lost our space inside, we actually just brought the drums outside to the seventh deck. But the meeting was a great success. We brought up more drums than we originally had people, and, just as I had hoped, people walked up and joined in. So that was cool.

I closed my evening by heading to the middle school dance in the Union. I would review it as a mixed bag. A few of the DJs were good, others were bad. The crowd was not that into it for the majority of the time, which was too bad. But I had a blast rocking out to N’SYNC, the Backstreet Boys, Smashmouth, and, of course, “I get knocked down” by Cumbawumba.