it was a beautiful day...

it WAS a beautiful day - sun shining, water beautiful deep blue (the water is amazing. it just keeps changing and yet it's always there and always kind of the same).

and last night was the Ambassador's Ball, so we got to see everybody get ridiculously dressed up and poke at a giant chocolate Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China and Sphinx (the dessert spread was out of this world (and trust me, now i know what's in this world) by the way). thanks to Lauren and Abby and Auntie A and my mom and my friend Marissa who did my hair, i got many shocked compliments about how nice i looked. (only one from a real live boy though...my friend Ben...Ben is one of those people who you just never quite know what he's thinking but he looks at you very intensely). anyway, i sat with Sookie and Tiara and Jennifer at dinner - four whole courses including some spinach and cheese ravioli that i had been saving up for for quite some time. to our great disappointed, there's no secret lettuce storage for special occasions, so the salad still tasted like regular ship salad, which you can accomplish for yourself if you leave your lettuce decomposing in the crisper for a week. mmm. (this was harder for people to deal with in the developing countries where we weren't supposed to eat salads in port either.) so dinner, then some live music (oh Jade, the male Norah Jones, and my friend Ashley, who's one of those really sweet and cute kinds of people) and then we got bored and hung out in Eva's room/mess for awhile and were royally entertained by Eva's roommate Britt (the we is once again me and Eva and Ryan - poor Eva and Ryan, got stuck sitting with a real awkward couple at dinner; they were friends with my friend who went crazy and got kicked off the ship), and then we had dessert, and then i pretended that dances were fun for me, and then remembered that they weren't, so i tried to go to bed, but Ariel and her weird boyfriend were having a fight/she was crying and he was looking guilty, so, instead of going to bed, which would have been nice, because i'd only gotten 2 hours of sleep the night before, i put regular clothes on and fell asleep on the floor in Tymitz Square. Eventually, Eva gave me her key and i went and took a nap with all of her laundry. it smelled nice and clean. but she's in 4003, which is at the front of the ship and pretty rocky - wee! but hard to sleep. eventually i got to go home.

the reason that i was up for so long was because we were all trying to finish our STUPID service learning portfolios, and i did some really substantial bonding with Lisa, Sam, Hanna and my hole punch in the freezingest freezing classroom on the ship. we laughed a lot though, partly because we find each other really amusing, and partly because it was 2 am (it must be noted that we also turned our clocks back an hour, so that night was a full hour longer of keeping ourselves awake). and we also had our last Global Studies test, which i was trying to study for until i fell asleep in my book, having not done a good deal of the readings. our lowest test grade gets dropped and as of yet i had an A-, but i decided to take it for shits and giggles. i ended up getting the same as my already-lowest grade. hmm. great. ironically, a great deal better than i thought i'd do - but stil completely useless to me. too bad.

another reason that the past fews days have been exciting is that the other day, my looney geography professor comes up to me and goes "YOU..." (waggles finger in my face) "should go to graduate school." apparently he got really excited about this paper that i wrote (which i thought was terrible) and was telling all the faculty about it. last night Kathy (oh Kathy. have o told you about Kathy? she's my token librarian friend for this semester) said that he and my econ. prof. were "raving" about me, which i'm quite sure was just because they were drunk. unfortunately, this means that i will feel real awful if i fail my finals.

so probably you're bored of this by now and wondering what happens when we're in port, and not when i'm sitting here watching Eva and Andy and Mike dissect Nietzsche (SHEESH. Eva gets really passionate about philosophy. it's actually kind of funny AND deep.). too bad. next week in Florida i'll do in-country posts, k? right now i'm going to sit back, take a break from studying, and enjoy this 3 musketeers bar that i've been thinking about for days. and tomorrow maybe Eva will go on another pizza date with me. we made a beautiful combination - extra cheese, olives and onions. mmmmmmmm,,,,,,,,,,,,