tests, chocolate and weasel poop

yesterday i was running around like a crazy person because i had to pick some random two-hour period in which to take a test that i wasn't ready for, and it turns out that's a very stressful decision to make. (during the test, they started calling a million people down to the clinic, and i was like, dude, that's a lot of people for random drug testing, and what if i get called in the middle of my test?!?! turns our there was a lice outbreak at the meditation retreat in india. Jeff narrowly missed have to shave his big beautiful dreads.)

the test wasn't actually SO bad...after i took it, i sort of hit zombie mode, which was sad, because i was excited to be having dinner with Lara. and then a bunch of other people sat with us, all of them very nice people, but...i was just too out of it to be able to deal with more than one person at once. Lara felt so bad about leaving me like that that she ended up buying a bunch of chocolate that we split, and we talked for awhile. sitting there eating reese's and m&ms with Lara and being seranaded intermittently by our very own Jamaican pop star Chuck Norris (Chuck Norris rocks, btdubs; he said he refused to be in the talent because he "just didn't want to make everybody else look bad") was just the thing i needed i guess, because i felt a lot better about life afterward. pretty soon Lara's going to think i'm crazy and have no other friends. and she's lonesome too since Steve the opera critic left (her husband was on the ship Vietnam-Thailand).

anyway.

after that Eva came over with her weasel coffee. weasel coffee is a Vietnamese phenomenon. someone back in the day decided that maybe it would be brilliant, instead of just using PLAIN beans to make coffee, serving the beans to a weasel, waiting for it to poop them out, and then using the pooped-out, weasel-processed beans to make coffee (duh, right? why didn't we think of that?)! sadly, it's not as good as it sounds. really, it's just really strong coffee. and then there was the show of the less talented (or: differently talented, as we prefer to say) that was pretty good, in a bad way. there was this guy who was supposed to be in it but sort of ran away, and i was little sad about it. i don't know him at all, but, from sheer observation, he seems incredibly friendly and nice, and he even goes out of his way to say to me sometimes. i wish i knew him better/he had read his poem! funny thing is, he hangs out with the most unlikely girls. hmmm.

and now today we have the day off! woooooooo!!!! (turns out i can't sleep through chocoloate croissant day though - i tried,i really did...but then i ended up getting up and eating three) and i'm (not) doing my service learning portfolio, which keeps gaining more random chapters. i'm rather sad about it. today we're actually going around the horn of Africa (hi Jessica!!!!! you're only like two and a half countries away!). we're almost in the gulf of Aden and i hope that we go through the Bab before the middle of tonight, but our whopping 12 knot average isn't going to get us there very quickly. i guess we have to stall so we can fly through the red sea, where we have to fight off more pirates.

the problem with no classes is that then the housekeeping staff stands around a lot looking lost, because they have nothing to do if the beds that they're supposed to make are occupied. i don't think Dante, our steward, has much of a concept of sleeping in. it makes him sad when we're still in bed at 8.

(ahhhh!!! a BIRD just flew by! so weird! it's a really exotic bird too!!! we can't see any land, but i guess we're pretty near the horn.)

i'm sorry.

the exciting parts of this journey, at least for you to read, probably aren't really the stories about who i ate dinner with, or how evil my two-hour econ. test was, and yet that's all i actually have time to write about :-P oops. here, i'll put up another post with day one of india.

that's exotic, right?