Mauritius & Sea Olympics!

WARNING: This is a long entry. ☺
Enjoy!


The last few days have been some of the craziest and busiest days on this trip, but they have been extremely fun and refreshing. It was nice to not have class and to get to relax and recharge. On Friday, we pulled into Port Louis, Mauritius around 0800 to beautiful weather. Although we could tell it was going to be a hot day because by 0900 when we finally got off the ship it was very humid and hot. We got off the ship with Stephanie, Victoria, and Pat, and got straight on a bus to go to the Adventure Park. Our bus driver was crazy! He was very impatient and weaved in and out of traffic and slam on his brakes. We even rear-ended a car in front of us and got pulled over within 15 minutes of leaving the pier. It was kind of ridiculous. We drove for about an hour and a half through the capital city and up into the mountains. If any of you have ever been to the Blue Ridge Parkway in America, think of how windy and curvy those roads are and multiply that by 100. The roads that wound up the mountain were basically U-turns for 15 minutes! We would drive around a sharp curve and go right into the next one. And we were doing all of this in a big coach bus on tiny little roads. It was interesting to say the least. We finally got to the park and we were all relieved to get off the bus. There was a small building with a front desk and a sitting room and we went inside and got our harnesses put on and put tons of bug spray on and headed off. The park was essentially one giant high ropes course placed throughout the mountain in between the trees and hills. The view was incredible! And we were all just in awe of the beauty that was all around us. And then we started the course. Haha. It wasn’t too hard at first—just a couple of bridges that got more shaky or had a few more beams missing the farther we got in the course. Then we got to the actual ropes. There were a few that were basically tightropes in different forms that we had to walk across. It was so much fun and I got some funny pictures of Stephanie at one point when she lost her balance and was hanging on the ropes in an incredibly awkward position! One of the last things we came across was a giant cargo net hung between two trees that we just had to climb across sideways. This was the hardest thing and we are all still sore from it! But after that we got to go on a small and refreshing zip line before we returned to the main reception area for lunch. We were all exhausted and extremely hot and we had all been eaten alive by mosquitoes (even though we put on 2 coats of bug spray with Deet!) so we got back on the bus and headed for the beach.
We went to Flic-en-Flac Beach which is the most beautiful beach I have ever seen. The sand was sparkling white and the water was incredible—blue and green and just the right temperature. We paid $10 for 2 chairs and an umbrella and we all jumped in the water and then took naps in the shade of the umbrella. It was the perfect way to end the day and we couldn’t stop thinking how lucky we all were to be laying on a beach in paradise with nothing to do. We only had about 2 ½ hours there before we had be get back on the bus, so we walked down to the supermarket and bought some newspapers, postcards, and some ice cream bars. The clerk rang us up for MAR1140 and we thought that was high but we were in a hurry and didn’t have time to do the conversion exactly. And she had a scanner and computer so we thought it was right. But Sarah and I got ripped off 610 Rupees! Which is only about US$20, but still, we were very surprised when we got back on the bus and realized what the clerk had done, but we didn’t have time to go back and confront her, so we let it go.
We got back on the crazy bus and held on for dear life the whole way back to the ship. We played word games and talked, and some people got dropped off at the waterfront so they could at dinner and drink before they had to get back on the ship. But we all wanted to go back to the ship because they told us they were having another BBQ for dinner and we were all very excited. On Neptune Day, the BBQ was very good—hot dogs, hamburgers, corn, ice cream sundaes, etc. But we were all very disappointed because all they had was some BBQ chicken and nothing else that even remotely resembled BBQ food. But it was too late to get off the ship so we just ate whatever we could and then stood at the railing and watched all the students pull up in water taxis and normal taxis and stumble into line. Everyone was drunk! It was pretty funny to watch.

We hung out for a while talking to people about their experience in Mauritius and then got ready for the Opening Ceremonies of the Sea Olympics!! We are the Bering Sea (our hallway on Deck 4 port) and our color is purple. So everyone painted themselves with purple face paint and donned scarves, bandanas, tights—anything they owned that was purple. And we got our mascot, Tiffany, ready as the best pirate ever! We are the Bering Sea Purple Pirates and she had on a pirate costume and a boat that hung on strings from her shoulders with an aluminum foil sword. We were all pretty pumped up and we were screaming and chanting and waving purple balloons around. The other seas got crazy, too. There are 10 seas on the ship and some of the other ones were: Arabian Sea (Brown—UPS), Adriatic Sea (Pink Panthers), Aegean Sea (Gang Green), Red Sea (Red Bulls), Mediterranean Sea (Blue Smurfs), Yellow Sea (Yellow Fever), Baltic Sea (Black Ninjas), Caribbean Sea (Orange-Convicts), and the “Oddies-C” (White—the faculty, staff, life-long-learners, & dependent children sea). It was a lot of fun watching everyone go crazy with their colors and their mascot. There are a lot of creative people on this ship! We all made flags, too, and ours was a big white cloth that was soaked in tea bags with a few holes burned into it and a big treasure map painted on it. We had even painted purple sea creatures in the waters and written “Bering Sea Purple Pirates” in old scroll. Our cheer was pretty awesome—we wrote an SAS-themed “song” to the tune of the pirate song. It went like this:

Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, a pirate’s life for me
We live on a ship, we try not to trip,
We’re here for the Bering Sea

We’re purple, we plunder, we’ll drag you under
We’re here for the Bering Sea

So join the ranks or walk the plank
We’re here for the Bering Sea
Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, a pirate’s life for me!

It was so much fun and we were really loud! A lot of us lost our voices after that. After the ceremonies, we watched “Slumdog Millionaire” in the Union. It was an incredible movie and we loved it, but it was very sad. It was set in India and it actually made us a little nervous to get to India—well, more than we already were.
The next morning, yesterday morning, we woke up early to eat breakfast and get ready for the first event of the day. Sarah had volleyball at 0930 and they won 2 out of 3 games and got to move on to the 2nd round. My first event was the O-Relay. We stood in a line and passed an orange to each other using only our necks. We were the only team to get it all the way down the line on the first try without dropping it! Then we tagged another person who did a wheelbarrow race and when they were finished they came back and tagged us and we did a fireman’s pass. This is where we all stood in a line with a cup and the first person scooped water out of the pool and poured it into one cup, then we poured it into the next, and so on. We were the first team to fill our bucket at the end of the line and we got gold for the relay. We were feeling pretty good about our team at that point and we all dispersed to go to our next events. I didn’t have another event until 1430, so I walked around and watched some of the other events. They included a Paper Boat Construction & Float (we had a cool boat but it sank like the Titanic and went straight to the bottom of the pool), Twister, Spelling Bee (we got Silver), Pictionary, Texas Hold ‘Em (We got Gold), Dodgeball, Sudoku, Hula Hoop Contest, Flip Cup, Limbo, and a Mashed Potato Sculpting Contest! We got Bronze in the Mashed Potato Sculpting with a man holding the world and the words “Ubuntu” and “SAS 09” around it. I didn’t know mashed potatoes could be sculpted like that! Other teams made a Pink Panther, the Taj Mahal, and Les McCabe! There was food coloring and everything, it was pretty intense. Sarah’s next event was Tug-of-War, which we lost horribly because we have the smallest sea and only 10 guys on our whole sea, most of whom were off doing a different event. The Workout Relay was also around this time and it was the most hardcore thing of the entire day! The participants were so intense and have incredible determination. There was a push up contest, a chin-up contest, a sit-up contest, and a wall-sit contest. Les McCabe did the chin-up contest and he is so strong! And there was a girl that did 53 full sit-ups in 1 minute! It was tiring just to watch. I don’t think that our team did too well in the first three parts, but we dominated in the wall-sit. We had Tiffany (our mascot) do it and she did a wall-sit for 17 minutes!! And she wasn’t the only one—Abby (a dependent child, probably about 10 or 11) was right there beside her the entire time! It was unbelievable. At 5 minutes they had to raise their arms up in the air, at 8 minutes they had to lift their heels up, and at 10 minutes they had to cross one leg over the other and wall-sit with one leg. So for the last 7 minutes, they were sitting their with their arms up, their heels raised, and one leg crossed over the other. It was awesome to watch and we were cheering them both on even though Abby was on the other team because she was amazing and it didn’t even seem to phase her. SO we tied for gold in that one, but we didn’t place in the Workout Relay because we weren’t strong in the other three parts. But it was still really cool to watch. Sarah went back to play the 2nd round of volleyball and they lost, but they said it was still fun. My next event was the M&M Find. Basically, they put 10 M&Ms on 20 blue plates, covered them with tons of whipped cream, and 2 people from each team had to find all the M&Ms and drop them in a cup using only our mouths! It was held outside on 6th deck aft which was a really bad idea because it was SO hot and the whipped cream had melted and resembled old milk by the time we started. But it was so fun! It’s a lot harder than you’d think, and I only found 9 because one of them had slipped off the plate hidden inside a bunch of whipped cream. Haha. It was all over—in my hair, my eyes, and all over my face! After that, I had to go get ready for the Human Knot. There were 10 people from each team that stood in a circle and grabbed hands with 2 other people and we had to get untangled into a circle formation. It was SO much harder than it looked and we ended up getting ourselves more tangled up then when we started. And it was also held on 6th deck aft, so we were all sweaty and hugging and wrapped around each other. It was so funny and we never actually finished. After the 10 minute time limit we all had to just let go and head off to our next events. I was done after that, but Sarah had Synchronized Swimming at 1600. This was crazy! Everyone was gathered around the pool like we were on Neptune Day and we got to watch each team of 10 people dance to crazy music on the deck and in the pool. Most of them were awesome and very creative and funny. One of them made fun of Les McCabe and his weight lifting, and they even had Luke record a fake “noon announcement” about missing weights on their music mix. It was very funny. The Aegean Sea (who got gold) did a music mix that started with “Thriller” and it was really good. Most teams lifted people up and/or flipped and jumped. The Mediterranean Sea used “Umbrella” as one of their songs and even had a routine worked out with their umbrellas. There were many guys donning bikinis and some of the faculty in the Oddies-C even had balloons under their white t-shirts. Haha…you can guess why. And when they jumped in the pool the balloons moved and were on their shoulders! It was hilarious! Our team had some crazy technical difficulty with our music (“Put your Records On” by Corinne Bailey Rae was the song on the person’s iPod right before “Pump It” and the first 10 seconds of it played about 50 times. It was so funny and awkward and now everyone probably hates that song!) and half the team forgot the routine and it was bad! It wasn’t too bad, actually, but it wasn’t the best. Half of the team had shirts on in different colors that represented the other teams and we all yelled “Walk the Plank” at one point and the other half of our team pushed them in. And they did a routine to “Pump It” by the Black Eyed Peas. And at the end, Tiffany (in her mascot costume) yelled “Pirates Unite” and 3-4 of us from the audience ran and jumped in the pool in our clothes and we all started doing our cheer. It was awesome! Haha…at least we were spirited! We ended up getting dead last, but we had a lot of fun with it.
After all the excitement, we went and dried off and had dinner. We ate dinner with the twins and Pat and we had just been talking about how sick we were of ship food and how the dessert looked inedible when a group of girls brought half of a giant birthday cake over and asked if we would finish it for them. We all eagerly said “of course!” and finished it off. It was delicious and we were all very satisfied and went to play cards in the Union until Closing Ceremonies. The Closing Ceremonies were not as crazy as the Opening Ceremonies had been the previous night because everyone was completely exhausted from a full day of competitions, but we were all still excited to find out who won. We swept the awards from the first night, getting Gold in the Flag contest and the Mascot contest, and we got Silver for our cheer! We might not have done very well in the actually events, but we were very spirited. And the best part was that we got 3rd place overall! We honestly were not even expecting to place, and we tied for Bronze with the Arabian and Yellow Seas. The Red Sea got Silver and the Adriatic Pink Panthers got Gold. They really deserved it! The prize for the first place winner is they get to get off the ship first in Ft. Lauderdale. And for that reason I did not want to win. We’ll all have to get off eventually, but we’re going to try to stretch it out as long as possible.
We never want to leave and we can’t believe it’s March already. We keep hearing from alums and professors and staff to enjoy every minute and soak it all in because it’s over before you know it. We are making the most of our trip and every minute of every day I have to stop and ask myself if this is real and we are both extremely grateful to be on this unbelievable adventure.
We went to sleep fairly early last night after watching a movie because we had to go back to normal (well, normal for SAS) life today. Sarah and I both have midterms and projects due tomorrow so we’ve been studying all day.
We had our first meeting today about the SOS Auction and I’m excited to plan it, it seems like it’s going to be fun.
Other than that, we’re just getting ready for India—we get there on Thursday!
We love and miss you all and we hope you are doing well!
-K&S-