Almost to Spain...

1/27

We just went on a tour of the bridge,, pretty cool to see how everything works. Not quite like Titanic- no big, fun wooden steering wheel- it’s like smaller than a cars steering wheel and I wonder if they really ever use it.

We saw whales today! Two of three of them- they were a little far away but could still see them come up every 30 seconds or so. Finally, we see some kind of animal life! And there were birds- we’re still about 300 miles off the coast, where the heck were they going??

We’ll be in Spain tomorrow yayyy! I am so so excited! We’ll be spending the day in Cadiz, where the ship docks, and doing a city orientation for our classes- it’s actually a Women of Cadiz tour and we go to a couple of museums and see the Roman ruins so I think it’ll be really cool. We’ll spend the night on the ship and then we leave for Barcelona the next morning!

We’ve spent today catching up on sleep – lost another hour last night (that’s 6 23-hour days now) because we know Spain will be tiring if we’re not ready for it.

The sunsets have been amazing! My art professor has made a big deal out of really noticing the things around us and he wants us to write about that kind of stuff in our journal, which we have to turn into him for our midterm. He is much more concentrated on the trip than he is on teaching us art and wants to make sure we don’t only focus on the ports we stop in, but the journey as well. So I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the sky and the clouds and the waves and the sunsets. The waves are especially beautiful- the first few days were like choppy waves where you can’t walk straight down the hall and the ship rocks back and forth more quickly. Then there were a couple days of perfect calmness, kind of a weird calm. Now the past few days have been big waves- the ones that rock the boat but more slowly and at a bigger angle. Like there have been things falling off of our desk and drawers sliding open and closed. I never knew there could be so many differences in just the ocean waves and the way it affects the ship.

Because we keep losing hours, the sun isn’t rising until after 9 now and it’s so weird- definitely makes it harder to wake up in the morning. But it’s always beautiful.