Ship life is great, as always! My only complaint is the food. I’ve told many of you that I’m completely sick of the food! It’s terrible because I’m really not a picky eater, but UGH…everything has this like bad after taste or something. Just smelling the food in the dining hall makes me start to gag. They serve us real food all the time…pasta, meat, vegetables…but it’s just ehhhhhhh. I am craving stuffed shells, grandma’s chicken pie, Aunt Ida’s ginger cookies, pizza, pretzels…all that good stuff! I’ve been living off of dinner rolls and fresh fruit. Breakfast is actually good, so I can’t complain there! Tonight I completely skipped dinner and decided to spend money at one of the snack bars on popcorn, a cheeseburger, AND frozen yogurt. IT WAS AMAZING. If I ate the same burger in the States, it probably would have tasted horrible…but it tasted like heaven here on the ship! Yes, that’s how bad it is. I’M SOOO LOOKING FORWARD TO BRAZILIAN FOOD. Anyways…enough about food! It’s been a busy week, well, kind of! We picked up speed at the beginning of the week and were going an average of about 20 knots or so. ((FYI—our ship can go about 30 knots)) During that time, the seas were extremely rocky! It made staying awake in class and doing homework difficult so I spent a lot of time soaking up the sun and playing games, haha. The seas are calmer now because we’re close to the Brazilian coast. Actually, we went out on one of the starboard decks tonight and we could see lights from the coast! See, we really are close! We still have lots of miles to go…only one more day, though! It was amazing just to stand out on the deck and see the skyline of a country we’ve been learning about all week. It’s hard to believe we’ve been at sea for nearly a week now.

OH! Guess what? Yesterday (Valentine’s Day) around noontime we crossed the equator! I’m officially in the Southern Hemisphere! Does it seem like I’m far away yet?! We can definitely tell we’re so close to the equator because it is HOT HOT HOT and the sun is quite intense. I have some bad news. Today was the first day that I didn’t spend time laying out on the deck to get some sun. We have our first Global Studies test tomorrow and I had a bunch of meetings so there just wasn’t time for sun. UGH! I plan on spending extra time out there tomorrow once my test is over! I do have some good news to go along with the bad news…we gain an hour tonight! Now we’re only 2 hours ahead of all of you.

I hope you all had a lovely Valentine’s Day! Last night we had a “Stoplight Dance,” which I had never heard of before this trip. You wear green if you’re single, red if you’re taken, and yellow if you’re somewhere in between. It was a blast! There really weren’t that many people at the actual dance because most people wasted time waiting in forever long lines up on the 7th deck to get drinks, but once we got down to the dance it was fun even if there weren’t a ton of people there. I absolutely love all the people I’m friends with on the ship…it’s weird to think that we all come from all over the place so once we get home, we really won’t all be able to get together.

HUGE NEWS! Earlier this week Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a signing session where we could have anything signed by him. Hayley and I were actually studying in the dining hall because all the lounges were full and Archbishop walked in and people started forming a line…Once we figured out what was going on, we ran down to our rooms and grabbed Semester at Sea t-shirts and our cameras and then went back upstairs. He wrote “God Bless You” and signed his name. So exciting! Then today…there was a photo session! Yes, I have a picture of myself with Archbishop Desmond Tutu! Whee! By the way – rumor has it that people are trying to get him to do a sunrise service on Easter Sunday. How cool would that be?!?!?!

Speaking of church…Ellie, Hayley and I were studying in a little nook at the bottom of the stairs on our deck tonight and one of our friends, Becky, came down. She actually took a year off from school to go on tour with a Christian group to perform on the road. Anyways, I asked her to play some songs and it was just awesome. A girl who lived in a room close by came out and started singing along too! Hayley kind of felt a little out of place, but I think she got over it. The first song she played was a St. Paul’s favorite… “Trading My Sorrows”! Needless to say, we had a nice little study break!

Okay….test tomorrow…must study! Stay tuned for stories from Brazil. I’M SO EXCITED!!!!