Great Weather--and the Hula!

Yesterday's weather was beautiful. The water turned amazing shades of blue. Here's Charis on our room's balcony and playing cards with some of the other "dependent children" teens. Charis also had a great time at the Hula demonstration last night. Sherrie is from Hawaii and is onboard with her husband Scott until we reach Hawaii. She is a Hula expert and her presentation last night was terrific. She and Scott will come to both of my classes: in the World Theatre Performance Techniques class they will talk about Hula and other types of performances found in Hawaii. And in my voice class, they are going to teach us traditional and contemporary Hawaiian chants.

The boys learned to finger-knit yesterday: a huge group of college students and kids got together to create hand-knit necklaces for a charity project. Barek and Asher liked it so much they brought some yarn back to the room and have continued to do more knitting!

The ship is still swaying back and forth quite a bit, although last night was a little better. Evidently we have gone 300 miles out of our way to miss a huge storm in the Pacific, but are still feeling the swells produced by the storm. Several crew members have said that if we would go faster, we would not rock like we are. No motion sickness for any of us, but we are really looking forward to the ship becoming more stable.

Shipboard Life

The Captain guiding the ship out of port in Ensenada. Charis studying. Barek and Asher studying. The daily soccer game for kids. Our one-room school house is in a section of one of the dining rooms.

We are settling into shipboard life during the long voyage from Ensenda to Hawaii. We all have our "sea legs" now, but the huge amount of rolling back and forth kept most onboard up all night--and broke a glass in the kids' bathroom, sent things flying around our room, and kept most folks rolling from one side of the bed to the other all night. Rumor has it that we are too close to our destination, so they are slowing the ship down which is the cause of the rolling. It is amusing to see folks stagger from one side of the hallway to the other, but we're ready for smooth sailing. Running on the treadmill was impossible, so I switched to the eliptical machine which worked out a lot better.

Steve and I started teaching yesterday and all is off to a great start. Students seem wonderful and everyone is happy to be here, so the courses should be a pleasure for us all.

The kids are doing well with their school work. Mostly we have school in the morning and enrichment and PE for the kids in the afternoons. Although internet is sometimes spotty, so far Charis has been able to get online for her coursework. More later!! We miss everyone!!!

Ensenada Shopping

Today we went back to Ensenada for some shopping and lunch. Here is the large Mexican flag Barek mentioned yesterday. And the large Mexican Sombrero Barek bought today!

Message from Barek about Mexico

I went to Ensenada, Mexico last night. Their flag is huge and I don't mean"wow thats big"It is BIG!! After we saw the flag we went to this restaraunt which had dollar bills across the wall. Then a mariachi band asked us for a song my dad said yes.

This morning we had to get out of the harbor for the day and that is where we are now.

Photos of our ship

The Ship Library

The Faculty Lounge

Computer Lab

Entrance to fitness center and spa

Dining room

Photos!

I found a way to make my photos smaller--and so we will have photos! This is the pool on deck of our ship! More later!

We have one more day of meetings today before the students arrive tomorrow. Along with a lot of other faculty and families, we got off the ship last night and went into Ensenda for dinner. It was fun to be on land again! We'll go back to Ensenda on Sunday when we have a bit more time.

Internet communication is more difficult than expected. It turns out that only 50 people can be online on the ship at any one time. Now that we are only faculty and staff, this hasn't been too much of a problem, but when the 650 students arrive tomorrow, I'm uncertain how often we'll be able to get online. We're hoping that Charis can get access during the mornings and days to do her coursework.

Also, my idea to upload photos and video to this blog is out. There is very limited bandwidth so photos of the size my camera takes and short videos from my Flip will not work. If I have time to resize photos, I will give that a try....otherwise, this will unfortunately be a "words-only" blog.

The weather continues to be great. We eat our meals outdoors on the deck in shirtsleeves and only brought a light sweater into Ensenda last night.