Have you ever felt like you lived the same day twice? Well today we have! Yesterday was Nov. 27th and today, for us, is Nov. 27B. Why? Because today, or sometime very soon we will be passing the International Date Line. All those hours that we have lost throughout the trip just came back to us so now we are on the same day as the US but we are 7 hours behind the East Coast.

We are now teaching on our longest stretch of the voyage which is 10 days with no break. Things are getting pretty serious around here: the internet is a mess and slower than ever because of all the research papers that are due and, on top of that, we have lost 3 hours over the last 4 days.

We had a nice Thanksgiving dinner on the ship. The main dining hall was reserved for our extended families so we had dinner with our 6 "children." The buffet had all of the traditional fixings like turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, macaroni, green beans, etc. The food was good, but it just felt so weird to be working on Thanksgiving. Oh well, we have had plenty of Thanksgivings where we haven't work.

Last night we had the silent and live auctions to raise money for Semester at Sea. The silent auction went on for most of the day and got pretty brutal at the end. I had bid on a couple of watercolor paintings done by some of the Life Long Learners but the bids went WAY higher than what I could afford. We did, however, win a chocolate bar and a jar of peanut butter. That is about all we need anyway. Geno was an auctioneer for the live auction that evening along with 3 other staff members and students. There were some very interesting items like a week in Colorado in a 5,200 square foot vacation home that sleeps twelve. I think that was the highest priced item. We didn't bid on anything but it was very exciting. We had never been to a live auction like that before. Geno, of course was a big hit as the auctioneer.

We have also had some pretty big waves. Luckily, they have calmed down now but for a while we were dealing with 25-30 foot swells. Geno is now obsessed with a website called www.oceanweather.com. On this site you can see how big the waves are going to be. It is fascinating, but I would rather just deal with it when it comes. During our bad day we had a Life Long Learner's chair topple over backwards and she hit her head. At breakfast you had to hold on to your plate or it would end up in your lap. It was pretty intense there for awhile - the worst we have had yet!

Fun Facts:

-One of our students got a tattoo of the outline of the world on the bottom of her feet

-There were native Japanese drummers on the pier as we left Yokohama, Japan