Hey All You People With Your Brown Shirts On...

Sea Olympics:

The Sea Olympics are kind of a big deal on SAS. It’s when you are split up by your hall, or sea, and participate in highly competitive, varied, series of events and challenges. There are ten seas, I don’t think I know them all so I’ll just say a couple: Yellow, Red, Adriatic (Pink), Aegean (Green), Mediterranean (Orange), lots of random ones I can’t remember, and the Odyssey/Oddest Sea (White –made up of staff, faculty, life-long learners, and dependents.) My sea was the Arabian Sea (Brown) and despite having the shittiest color our sea captain was really cool and really prepared; so much so that he arranged for us to have brown Arabian Sea tee shirts made in Cape Town before the sea Olympics. It was pretty cool –the shirts all have our names on the back and made us look all kinds of professional and unified while all other amateur seas were stuck with slimy colored body paint and random outfits of kind-of corresponding colors.

 

So here’s the low down: Yellow Sea had been on a winning streak for like 3 or 4 years and needed to be struck down. They were way too full of it. Whenever they saw one another in the halls they’d yell, “Yell-oooooooooow!”instead of “hello”to one another; this was not cute. The Arabian Sea has significantly less people than the other seas because we only have outside cabins on our hall since the crew quarters are on the inside of the ship opposite our rooms; which means that we had something like 30 less people than the average team. We also had Les McCabe and my Bio Med. Professor’s daughters on our hall, which was kind of awkward because they’re both like 16. Anyways, I signed up for pictionary with Allie at like 9am the day of Sea Olympics (all classes were cancelled for the day) –it was so competitive, I had no idea. We started out with relatively easy stuff like “gumdrop”and “kiss of death”but quickly we got into phrases it seemed no one was able to get. Like “the Wright brothers.”Ridiculous. In the end our sea won first place with the quickest time of “Vice President Al Gore”(I still have no idea how we got that one, honestly…)

 

Throughout the day there were fun-filled activities like volleyball, dodge ball (there was a particularly intense game between Aegean and Odyssey where I saw a Green team member peg a 10 year old from the White Sea), Poker, Paper Boat Relay, Human Knot, Limbo (That was a crazy one. Adriatic had been pulling ahead throughout the day and it was here and in the orange pass that it was noted that they’d been obviously cheating), Synchronized Swimming, and Flip Cup (water of course - for the concerned adults back home.) I did the Mashed Potato Sculpture in which we constructed a lion that it was later noted resembled a dinosaur, oh well.

 

Overall we did okay but we didn’t win. We came in third in a three way tie between yellow and some other team. Adriatic won, but at least Yellow and Green lost; I forgot to mention that there was a heated rivalry between green and Arabian where they chanted “if it’s brown, flush it down!”We then retaliated by standing up in front of them when they were supposed to be introduced to the sea committee. I also heard we’d done better in the day but had points taken from our team for shit talking the other teams. Haha.

 

There’s so much gossip I’d love to post here but it’s been brought to my attention that SAS receives emailed updates whenever anyone writes anything on the internet mentioning Semester at Sea and a couple students have already been brought into various offices and told to stop reporting on the somewhat shady goings-on on the boat. I’ll save them for when we’re closer to home.

 

We should be in India in just a few hours! I’m planning to bum around Chennai for the first day, then my homestay for two nights and three days, and then a service visit to a disabled children’s home the last day. I’m so excited!