I'm All Thumbs

Today was another day at sea – got up on time, hooray! I went to breakfast and then to both of my morning classes. I came back to the room and set my stuff down and went into the bathroom. In a moment of absent-mindedness I grabbed the door jamb to keep my balance and…the door swung back and jammed my thumb. Oh, man…what an idiot – they warned us the first day about this. The doors are heavy so that they do swing shut, for safety and all that. The captain actually told us that people lose fingers that way. That was my first thought as I was trying to run cold water over my throbbing thumb but, thankfully, it was moving OK. My next reaction was to run down stairs to the second deck where the medical clinic is. But, of course, they were closed, so I ran up to the fifth deck at the Purser’s Deck, where we’re supposed to go in case of an emergency. They paged the physician who came and looked at it and said, “Yeah, you can move it so it’s not broken. Take some Advil.” So, that was reassuring. I kept ice on it for the next couple hours and it didn’t seem to swell too much and it’s actually not extremely black and blue, even though it still hurts a little bit. The funniest part about the whole thing is that the next time I checked my e-mail, Mom had sent me a message asking about a cough I had last week when I left: “How is your cough? You know how I worry.” Haha. So, no worries, right, Ma?

This evening there was a meeting about the “Vicarious Voyage” program that the SAS program runs. They have K through 12 classrooms that we correspond with over the course of the semester and send fun things from the ports so the kids can learn a little more about each of them. You were given the opportunity to be matched with a classroom near you before the trip began, but I just signed up the other night at the activity fair they had on the ship. Here, it turns out, one of the guys I know who is also from Penn State, Colin, was signed up with a group from Pittsburgh. He saw me without a group and suggested I join his. I looked at the address of the school – it’s a Pittsburgh address, but the teacher’s email address is “phsd,” so I think it’s in Penn Hills. How cool is that? So, we’re required to send them three “cultural packets” in 11”x14” envelopes and they’ll also send us some mail. It should be fun.

I also made some plans with some of the people I met the first night in the Bahamas – I didn’t really make too many plans for Spain, because there wasn’t anything in particular I wanted to see. There are four girls, including me, and one dude, who will be in our group. We plan to go to Seville for one or two days, maybe make it to Cordoba, then spend our last two days in Cadiz, the port city where the ship will be. There was also a presentation tonight by one of the professors about dining in Spain, so he gave us some good tips and Spanish vocabulary words that we can use when we get there. I think they should be pretty helpful!

I saw another ship today on the horizon, which was odd, because there hasn't been the sight of one the entire trip. Someone else mentioned another ship today too. I need to remember to take some sunrise/sunset at sea pictures for Dad. We’re moving the clock forward again tonight, so I will now be four hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.