September 6th

Today was a long hard day of classes, but who cares because we are in Brazil tomorrow!! We played volley ball all afternoon. The ship was barely moving because we were ahead of schedule, this allowed for some good volleyball conditions. There is a basketball/volleyball court on the 7th deck that is surrounded by net so the balls don't go overboard. We had our second pre-port meeting tonight at 8pm, this one more on health and safety rather than cultural stuff. I am a little worried about getting back to the ship in time from our trip to the Amazon. We get back to the Salvador airport at 10 am on the 11th, the ship is scheduled to leave at 8 pm, which means on ship time is at 6. You cannot be late for the ship or else you get dock time, which prevents you from getting off the boat with everyone else in the next port. Standing in line to get back on at 6 doesn't count, you must be on the ship. After the meeting we packed for our trip. This was a fun but stressful process because our bags can't be over 11lbs in order to carry them on the plane. Two people in our group are going to check bags but I think that is extremely risky, especially because we are connecting to another airport. My bag weighs 12 lbs so if they don't let me on, it will be a funny site when I open my bag and start putting on multi layers of clothes in order to get my bag to 11lbs. I am using a nice hiking back pack Allison got in Vietnam on her trip, and I think the bag itself is what is putting it overweight because I don't have as much stuff as others do and they made the 11lbs mark.
After all the excitement of packing and getting all the little odds an ends, emails, and other stuff out of the way we decided to go sleep on the deck and greet Brazil in the morning. It is really cool at night because you can see the lights on the coast of Brazil. We are a lot closer to shore than I imagined! Our plan would have been really nice to see the sunrise and watch going into port but it started raining on us so we went back to our cabins. Our plan was to get up to see the sunrise anyway.

September 7th

In Brazil!!!!! Enough said.