Posted by Amanda Back to the ship to get ready for our separate Bioluminescence kayak trips with Semester at Sea.I have no idea how we got on different trips, but we did and we dealt with it.We traveled more than an hour from San Juan to get to the bay.We got in the kayaks as night fell.My partner, Sarah from Duquesne, had her own kayak at home so she steered us along.The Atlantic where we started was warm with almost no surf.We followed our guide through a ca...

Posted by Amanda We finally arrived in our first real port.Somehow Nassau didn't feel real.The customs agent wanted to do a full face-to-face look at everyone before we could get off the ship.I assume that is a post-9/11 practice that we can also expect in Hawaii. All the RDs had to help hand out the passports.I discovered that there are new US Passports that have a microchip in them.The picture is on the first page now, not the inside cover.Anyway, the customs...

Posted by Noah It had been raining on and off since we arrived. This was okay since we had to stay on board for training for most of this time. Training has consisted of a LOT of Powerpoint presentations. These have been frequently tedious and typo-riddled. (Hey, I make a lot of typos, too, but I don't project them onto a giant screen ... I just post them on blogs where millions of people can read them) But look at it this way, it's better it's been raining. If...

Posted by Amanda We have safely arrived in the Bahamas and aboard the ship. Our flights from Los Angeles to Philadelphia and then to Nassau were uneventful. Our luggage made it without too much damage. Apparently, there is a Wal-Mart in San Juan we can hit if we realize we forgot something. We'll need magnets as the nice bottle cap/photo ones I made aren't strong enough to hold things to the walls. We met most of the other Resident Directors at the airport and...

Looks like another perfect day -- Posted by Noah I'm sitting at the US Air terminal in LAX while I write this. Okay, now I'm on the plane … geez, you think up a nice opening for a post … We spent today doing all those "we're not going to be home for a while" things. Finished packing, put everything imaginable on our iPods, cleaned, unplugged stuff. We had hoped, in vain, to fit in a screening of Cloverfield before the shuttle came for us a...