Thar She Bloooows!

Danny and I demonstrating the size of the waves.

Oh..Saturday was a terrible, terrible storm.  The ship was rocking and rolling, and plates, televisions, mirrors and people were flying all over the place.  Most people just stayed in their rooms and eventually classes were cancelled.

The ship’s crew said that this was the worst encounter they’d had on this ship, but the captain assured us that we were safe.  With what he had experienced, he would rate this about a 7 out of 10.  So glad I wasn’t on the 10.  This was almost worse than our Drake Passage crossing to Antarctica, and those are considered the roughest seas on earth!

These are waaaaay bigger than they look.

At one point during the morning, there was a huge popping sound during one of the waves impacts.  It went down across the ship as if rivets were popping out.  We were concerned, but didn’t ask about it.

Then, this vacuuming sound started up in the hallway outside of our rooms.  We’re on the third deck at the very front of the ship, and apparently a pipe had burst and was flooding our floor.  There was standing water on the carpet, and the crew immediately jumped into action sucking it out into buckets and downstairs.

At that point, everyone was punchy and ready to jump ship, so we found it more amusing than anything.  My top bunk kept folding up.  At one point in the night, when I visited the bathroom, I came back out to find that my bed was gone.  It had folded up once my weight was off of it.

Team sea-sickness hanging out in the windows.

The absolute longest night ensued because we were afraid to be thrown from our beds.  Sleep didn’t come easily.

We had gotten Japanese lessons from Cesar and Peter who were both from Japan, and they taught us how to avoid offending the new friends we’ll meet in Tokyo.  They taught us how to say “please” and “thank you” and “delicious” and “cute” for photos where we make peace signs to the camera.

They also taught us how to say a form of “excuse me” where you bow and allow another person to do something before you do.  If you were on an elevator, you should let the other people out first.  They demonstrated by bowing and bowing and bowing and saying “doso” to one another.  They said the only way to win the polite battles was to offer the door to someone else for so long that you miss your elevator floor and go up to the next one with them.