Jellyfish, submarines, and bridges: Oh my!

Location: Eastbound in the Baltic Sea

Hey everyone! Good to know that those pictures are showing up for you. I was just informed that some computers view commas in my blog posts as periods. Sorry! Everything looked fine from my computer last time I was able to check it. I knew that it looked a bit odd on Jazlin's iPad, but as nobody else had mentioned it I assumed it was an isolated incident. If there is anyone besides me who is not experiencing the strange comma syndrome I would like to know! For everyone else I recommend copy/pasting into an external text editor if that makes it more readable for you. I can't really change it now that I am on the ship.

So, first day of classes! I woke up at around 7:30am this morning, only to go to breakfast 20 minutes later and find out that there was no breakfast because I had missed another hour time change the night before and they stopped serving at 8:30 (I am 10 hours ahead of PST now.) Oh well. My first class was not until after lunch, so I spent a bit of time in the newly opened campus store before heading up to lunch (a pair of SAS sweatpants and a sweatshirt were planned purchases, and the small sizes sell out absurdly fast. Actually all the smalls in the sweatshirt I liked had sold out in the hour before I arrived, but it's all good.) As I was sitting on deck eating my pasta, bread, and rice (finally there are no objections to my eating those things in conjunction! Yeah!) I encountered the first interesting occurrence of the day. I was absently looking out over the water, when I saw some pale shapes drifting along next to the ship. At first I thought they were pieces of trash, but I quickly realized that they were actually jellyfish! They kept coming too––hundreds of jellyfish drifting in little groups past the ship. They were kind of a yellowish color, all shapes and sizes, and the angle of the sun on the horizon made beams of light shine through the water, giving them a dreamy, luminescent quality. I was pretty excited, as I haven't really seen anything like that before. No pictures, unfortunately. Hopefully it will happen again and I will be able to snap a few.

Next came my first SAS class: Mixed Media Visual Journal. That is going to be fun; I'm very glad I chose it. The class is basically sketching, painting, writing, and random arts and crafts activities all rolled into one. It is all very academic of course; they don't just unleash us and our paintbrushes upon the world. There are prompts to document concepts in each port, but the topics of the 16-pages of official spreads we create are going to be pretty open, which is nice.

I had a bit of a break, and then went on to Cross-Cultural Psychology! That class also looks like it will be really interesting. It doesn't hurt that our field lab is studying the cultural context of Samba dancing in Rio de Janeiro (and getting to learn a bit ourselves.) Field labs are a day trips you take with each class. Your professor chooses the country/activities, and each one counts as 20% of your class grade. As Semester at Sea professors come from universities all around the US (and abroad) the content of these field labs is naturally quite varied. The field lab for my Visual Journal class is to study the art of tile painting in Lisbon, Portugal, so that is pretty awesome too.

Then came the second interesting occurrence of the day. During the evening announcements they told us that the ship would be going under a bridge in about 45 minutes and we may want to grab cameras and come out on deck to look. Everyone got really excited, and we went out to the deck to see that, sure enough, there was a giant bridge rising up in the distance. We all trouped on out to the observation deck on the front of the ship where it was super cold and windy, and everyone cheered as we went under it. We have actually been in a relatively narrow/shallow bit of ocean east of Denmark from which land is visible far in the distance from either side of the ship, so a bridge over this part of the ocean isn't as crazy as it sounds. Stretching from Denmark to Sweden, this bridge apparently divides the North and Baltic Seas (note that I have yet to verify this information or actually look up the name of the bridge because the internet is on the fritz. That also means this post probably won't be up until tomorrow morning.)

Below you will also notice a picture of a submarine. We were passing it, and everyone was squinting and saying "Hey, is that an actual submarine?" before a voice came over the loudspeaker to inform us that yes, it was actually a Russian submarine. The loudspeaker folks are very helpful. The picture was of course taken with my telephoto lens, so the submarine looks closer than it really was. Still interesting though.

If you're still hanging around don't forget to comment! I check them every morning, and if there are none I may just fall back to sleep and miss breakfast again. You wouldn't want that on your conscience, would you?