Sea Olympics!

Today was the annual Sea Olympics!!  We had no classes today and everyone was looking forward to sleeping in, but then we were woken up by alarms for a lifeboat drill at 10am anyway.  After the drill I came back to my room and hung around and got ready for lunch at 11:45am.  Today they pulled out all the stops and had taco day to celebrate the Olympics!  After lunch we went back and got ready for the day full of competitions.

Everyone living on the ship is divided up into areas named after various seas – mine is the Arabian Sea.  All the seas are assigned a color to wear and everyone gets really into it.  The Arabian Sea was black which was awesome because everyone has black and we looked really badass because we all put the stripes under our eyes to look intense.  We had a section of guys who all wore black Under Armor compression shorts because they felt like it so that was entertaining.  Then everyone proceeded to the Union for the opening ceremonies.

They got really into it and play the Olympics theme song over the loud speaker to have everyone come to the union and to make the announcements all day.  The Opening ceremonies introduced all the teams and all the teams had a cheer.  Some were really well prepared, but ours was last minute and very effective.  It was easy to be intimidating in a group of all black.  (Another advantage for our color was that everyone was completely black rather than jeans and a shirt color.)  Then the events started and went all day including Pictionary, synchronized swimming, tug of war, boat races in the pool, academic bowl, dodge ball, relay races, lip sync, makeover competition, and probably more that I forgot.  There were generally 2 event occurring simultaneously – one in the Union and the other on the pool deck.  I participated in Pictionary and academic bowl.

Pictionary was first and our team started out really strong but then it kind of fizzled so we didn’t win.  The academic bowl was very disappointing because it was totally rigged!  They had some teachers write the questions and each category was so specific like stuff that you would only know if you were in that person’s class and no one on our team was in the classes.  We did pretty well considering that fact, and there was a Michael Jackson category that we dominated, but we didn’t win.  The only event the Arabian Sea did well in was dodge ball because we had those pretty intense guys in their Under Armor and we took second place in that tournament.  For everything else we sort of had a lack of participation compared to some of the other teams, but we finished 4th from last overall I think so at least we weren’t the worst!

After the Olympics were over they had the closing ceremonies in the Union where the announced the winners which was the Yellow Sea.  Apparently the order of finish in the Sea Olympics determines who gets off the ship first when we get back to the USA, so it looks like I might be on for a while.  Dinner tonight was a celebration BBQ with some more great food similar to the 4th of July party, complete with ice cream and everything – so delicious!

After dinner everyone pretty much crashed after a full day of Olympics and then we had our usual pre-port meeting for Greece at 8:00pm.  We didn’t get any groundbreaking info at pre-port, just the usual stuff.  And now I am back in my cabin probably going to get to bed early tonight because we are getting to Greece tomorrow!!  I would love to have time to walk around a little bit before I go on my tour of Athens and the Acropolis.  I can’t believe after Greece we are at the halfway point of our voyage, but I am super excited for a new country tomorrow!