September 4th

Today was "A" day so I didn't have any classes. I slept in pretty late and got woken up by Slap shot when he came back from his first class. I got an invoice telling me what trips I got into for Sale 1, which covered all days trips up to and including India. I got into the visit to an AIDS shelter in Namibia, a township visit in South Africa, a service project in India, but I did not get into a socioeconomic trip of the slums of Chennai. Luckily you can try to squeeze into other time slots if there is any, and there happened to be one for this particular trip so we'll see if I got into that in a few days. I also got into a home stay in Japan which I am very excited for! China and Japan are going to be a lot of fun because I other than the home stay in Japan I am going to travel independently in both countries and meet the ship in a different port which will be exciting! (The ship has two ports of call in each country so we are not required to get back on the boat in between the ports in that particular country).
Today was also exciting because we finally crossed into the Southern hemisphere! At 8:30 pm, 7:30 your time, the boat blew one long blast of its horn signaling that we crossed. Sadly, water does not spin the opposite way going down the drain, the boat didn't flip upside down, nor did anything else happen out of the ordinary.


September 5th

Today we were woken up by the crew parading down the hallways with drums and whistles banging on doors at 7am to wake us up for Neptune Day! I got up the second time they came around and went and got breakfast. Everyone was summoned to the 7th deck, the pool deck, by 9 am for the ceremony. We had fish guts dumped on us, kissed a fish, and kissed king Neptune's ring as part of a ritual of crossing the equator. We are all now "shellbacks". After the ceremony, which not many people participated in as I thought would, the head shaving began. There was a fundraiser on the ship for the past 3 meals, for a $1 donation you would be put into a raffle to have the captain shave your head. Sadly I forgot about it every time I went to eat and didn't enter, but two lucky boys did get their head shaved by the most powerful man on the ship. My friend Lacey has been debating the past few days about whether or not she was going to cut her hair or not and put her name into the raffle and figured if she was picked, it was fate and she would do it. I got my head shaved and there was a mob of people crowded around the 3 chairs they had set up watching some of the girls get their hair cut off. I kept trying to convince a couple of my friends to do it, even the guys with short hair like mine refused. Bad sports. Slap shot refused to do it and then all the sudden I turn around and half his hair is cut off. He had long shaggy hair and now has a mullet haha. We had fun and the deck smelled like fish guts. It wasn't real fish guts but it smelled like fish. The crew was spraying down the deck and all the students turned it into a slip and slid and were sliding on their stomachs across the floor. It was pretty funny and the crew was laughing.
I went to dinner and a short little girl was walking in front of me with short hair looked like lacey and it was her! She cut her hair off! It looks good though, she left about an inch so its not completely bald like me haha. That was Neptune day in a nutshell. We are basically at Brazil. It is Friday night and they are only running one engine so we are a little ahead of the game.