I'm no longer in the future, I'm now in the past.

Greetings from the Pacific ocean! We left Yokohama, Japan about 6 days ago and are almost at the halfway point of our 18 day crossing of the Pacific ocean. We will be making a one day stop in Hilo, Hawaii on the 9th day which happens to be Thanksgiving! Woo hoo! We hit rough seas from the moment we left Japan. We set sail around 00:00 Wednesday and at 02:00 I was woken up to my water bottle, alarm clock and other items flying off of my night stand and rolling around my cabin. Scared the shit out of me...couldn't fall back asleep after that.  Its been fun though. It was comical to see everyone (myself included) trying to gain their sea legs. Friday things got really rough. People were walking into things and dropping things left and right. I even caught some sweet air at one point when I was running down the stairs.

I know I'm way behind on my blogs, but at this point I'm making up my entire semester in this 18 day crossing. To say that I'm overloaded with work is an understatement. So be patient. I am however enjoying this time on the ship since the last month was CRAZY to say the least. Between October 10 and November 15 I spent a week in India, a few days in Malaysia, a week in Vietnam, 2 days in Hong Kong, 4 days backpacking through mainland China and then backpacking through Japan. Sometimes we would only have 2 days in between these ports and those 2 days were school days. No time to catch our breath. Not to mention all the time zone changes as well. We just crossed the international date line. It is the only time (probably ever in my life) that I actually got a "do over" on a day. We had two Saturday November 19, 2011. We advanced the clock one hour but are no longer in the future (from eastern standard time) but now in the past. We went from being 16 hours ahead to 7 hrs behind. Weird, but it meant we got the day off! woo hoo! I'm enjoying spending a lot of quality time with my blankets and pillow in my cozy little cabin.

In all the craziness I forgot to mention a bit of news. Somewhere in between Mauritius and Malaysia our staff informed us of some disappointing news. The U.S. Treasury Department has still not issued our travel license for Cuba. Therefore they decided to add the alternate port of Santo Tomas De Castillo, Guatemala. Nothing against Guatemala but it was REALLY disappointing to find out that we were no longer going to Cuba. As an American citizen it is not every day we get offered a chance to visit Cuba, so a little bit of each one of us died in the union that night when we heard the news. Although they kept throwing the word YET in a lot...."The Treasury Department has not issued the travel license...YET." Maybe there's still a last minute chance? Just when we finally accepted the fact that we were going to Guatemala...field plans were made...trips requested....they threw in another curve ball. We just found out that the State Department has warned us against going to Guatemala due to the on going threats of violence and gang related incidents due to drug trafficking plaguing Mexico and most of Central America. Soooo we are no longer going to Guatemala...now we are going to Honduras. I don't know anything about Honduras but I guess I'm about to find out. Well I'm off to class! Talk soon! <3 "I"