Olympics at Sea

In spirit of a Greek Themed ship, each voyage Semester at Sea holds the Sea Olympics. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it, but the cabins are separated into sections and each section is named a sea. The Baltic, The Bering, The Yellow, The Red, The Caribbean, The Mediterranean, The Aegean, The Arabian and our very own, The Adriatic all participated in a variety of activities to compete for the grand prize of getting off the ship first when we arrive in Norfolk, VA. This may seem like a lame prize but some students have an early flight to catch or a long drive ahead of them and with an expected disembarkment time of 2:00 pm  that could present itself as quite an inconvenience. As much as I do miss home, I’m positive that it will be bittersweet the day I disembark the ship for the last time, so this prize wasn’t really at the forefront of my horizon, but boy was I still pumped and ready to go!

The night before the Adriatic Sea had a pep rally in the hallway to prepare for the day’s activities. I was surprisingly and unknowingly elected Captain of the pink team (that was our color) and assigned with all its duties such as organizing the teams, running the torch and getting everyone else on the same level of excitement. No problem! I’m a high spirited guy with a lot of energy and I always want to have fun so bring it on! I also signed up for quite a few competitions. Throughout the day I was involved in Pictonary, The Relay Race, The Lip Synching Competition, The Academic Bowl, which can be equated to Jeopardy, and I also choreographed our team’s Synchronized swimming routine, which only consisted of Becca and this nice girl named Janae, but it turned out ok. All in all, our team was quite limp compared to the others. My co-captain Devon and I were high-spirited and kept the engines going for as long as we could but they would quickly die down after that.

The morning kicked-off with another lifeboat drill at 10:00am. Semester at Sea was so kind to give us a day off from classes, but then forcibly wake us in the morning to put on life jackets and hats to stand outside for 30 minutes. Not cool! I was grumpy. I’m glad we had the Olympics to look forward to.

Pictionary was relaxing and The relay race was anti-climatic. My favorite was the Academic Bowl. It was hosted by our Global Studies teacher, Alex, which was perfect because we could call him Alex just like Alex Trebech. The Categories were Social Justice, Human Rights, Business and Science, Global Studies (duh!) and Michael Jackson.

Do you know all the members of the Jackson Five? We didn’t!

How bout Michael Jackson’s children’s names? We got this one. Do you know them?

Can you tell me where the United States gets most of their oil from? Most thought Saudi Arabia but think again. We knew the answer! We tied for third and it was the best part of the day!

The worst part of the day was when I was basically forced into the lip-synching competition. It really ticked me off that because I’m a performer and a singer that people automatically think that’s what I want to participate in. It couldn’t be any further from what I wanted to do. Sometimes I don’t want to perform or be noted as that guy, sometimes I just want to sit back and relax but nope, I got suckered into a partner routine with Devon lip-synching to the 90’s song “Baby Got Back”. Only Devon being the girl and knowing the words decided to dress up like the guy and me being the guy and not knowing the words dressed up as the girl with a big butt. I’m not going to lie, we thought it was going to be funny, but in the end I didn’t find it very amusing no matter what other’s thought and it was a tragically embarrassing part of my day.

I thought it would all be resolved with Barbeque Day: The Sequel, however I was disappointed with that too. Who advertises a Barbeque and then doesn’t have the essentials such as Burgers and Hot Dogs? Instead they had chicken and some sort of steak. C’mon!  Thank goodness there was still ice cream, French fries and my favorite: macaroni salad, but someone should give Semester at Sea a  solid definition of a barbeque.

Finally my day came to a halt with a relaxing and soothing haircut. I want upstairs to the Spa for my 6:45 hair appointment. The music was playing, the lighting was soft and it all started with an amazing scalp massage that I wasn’t even expecting. It was just what I needed after the hectic day of competition and cheering.

I mentioned how much I enjoy having kids on the boat, but today truly made that statement valid. The kids had their own separate team called Team America and they were all dressed up and just the sweetest things to be around. No tantrums, no crying, no complaining just plain joy. The cutest is Ryder and hopefully I will get a picture with him so you all can see what a beaming joy he is! Working in a daycare and doing many things involving kids makes me want to keep pursuing such work. I don’t know how to incorporate it into my plans yet but I hope to be affluent enough to create establishments that will support children in areas such as education, theater and travel. I believe in children. I believe in their individuality and their right to be who they want to be. Some of them need a lot of help to do that and I want to be that help some day.

Tomorrow we arrive in Greece. In spirit of our arrival A.B.A. sat down and watched Mamma Mia, that takes place on one of the Greek Islands which we have all intentions on visiting. Some of us have already booked our travels such as Kate, Rachel and Becca but due to other previous plans, the remaining won’t finalize travel to these islands until tomorrow, so stay tuned. With all the fun activity of today and being at sea for the past couple of days you sometimes forget that you are still traveling the world. It is so exciting to know that tomorrow morning we will be waking up in the city of Athens. A place of infinite history. History of theater, politics and architecture that I’m so thrilled to be exploring. It’s going to be wonderful.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

~Michael-Anthony

P.S. We lost.