Chute happens, Live with it!

This is what one of my newest t-shirts states, but first I should cover some shipboard life since I was on the sea for 9 days in between Japan and Hawaii. There was a great deal of work to do during this time, including the second of our three Global exams and my final quiz in World Dance. Both went pretty well but I'm definitely glad that they are done with. My roommates and our friend Scott decided we should celebrate Easter somehow and ordered ourselves an entire platter of cookies to split which led to many leftovers. It was worth it but we had to step up our exercising afterwards. We started a Shipboard drive to fund different scholarships on the ship and such through raffle tickets, an auction, and donations. The auction was really fun but intense how much people are willing to spend on certain things. I did not win anything although I did buy some raffle tickets. I signed up for the Talent Show on the ship and they had so many people sign up that they held auditions. At the time I didn't think I had done that well but apparently it was fine because they let me perform! The show was really fun although it is really difficult to dance on the ship. I forgot my dance halfway through so I just improvised for most of it but I still had a good time. Almost every single act was amazing which is kind of intense considering there were around 30 acts. I did another dance a couple of days later when we had a logistical pre-port for Hawaii. Our World Dance professor had some of us do a hula which was actually really fun. I'm starting to get pretty good at this hula business!

Now onto Hawaii! The first day our ship cleared pretty quickly so we asked some people at the hospitality desk where to find a good beach. We took a quick bus to Ala Moana mall which we had to go through to get to the Ala Moana beach. It was right next to Waikiki beach but less populated, mainly just with some smaller families. We hung out there for a couple of hours finally getting to use our cell phones until around lunch time. We then headed back to the mall to pick up some cheese fries and smoothies which we had been craving. I then had to take the bus back to the ship to meet up with hula FDP for World Dance class. We actually had a few of my professors and Life Long Learners on the trip which was pretty fun. They took us to a hula shop that sold different items involved in hula and also had a cleared area for the lesson. Our kumu, or teacher, was "Auntie" Germaine and she was pretty intense and worked us very hard. I felt like I was back in a strict ballet class again! After learning quite a bit we had a break so we went and got drinks down the street before our instrumental lesson. Mike Kop then explained all of the different major instruments associated with the hula and how they were made, he even let us try out quite a few of them. He also answered a lot of our questions on Hawaiian culture before Aniseh, our World Dance professor, invited us to her family's cookout for MICE which is a computerized musical group her husband puts together on the ship. We walked down Waikiki beach until we reached Kalakaua Park along the beach and listened to them play and had a good amount of food. We also did some of our hulas that we learned in class in the ocean together which was pretty fun. After that I met up with my roommate, Megan, and our friend, Scott. They were hungry so we went to Jimmy Buffet's and got a quesadilla, exactly what I needed after the cookout! They had a live band playing which was really neat too. After that we just sat along the beach until really late and took the bus back to the ship because we had to wake up really early the next morning.

We had to wake up very early to get breakfast before catching a van to the North shore for SKY DIVING!!!!!!!! It took around 45 minutes to get there and once we got there we had to sign waivers so we wouldn't sue them later on. After that we met with our tandem diving partner, mine was a huge guy name "Papa Dop". Before I knew it I was harnessed in and we were walking out to the plane. Megan and I were on the same plan along with 3 other SAS girls and their tandem partners. We got up to 12,000 feet and they just opened the door and went for it. There was almost no warning before we were going down. The funny part is that my partner actually had us go out backwards and do some flips before starting our free fall. We fell for about a minute through a set of clouds before pulling the parachute. We then went around in circles are the airfield for around 2 to 3 minutes. It was really fun but I did get a little nauseous when we had our chute pulled going in circles. It definitely was a rush. I still can't decide whether I enjoyed bungeeing more or not because they were so different. After a little wait the van took us back to Honolulu and we decided to go to the Pearl Harbor Memorial. The only thing we saw there was the USS Arizona exhibit but it was really cool. They showed us a 30 minute movie for background on what actually happened that day, and then took us on a boat to the actual memorial which is located on top of the remains of the ship where it sank. It was really beautiful and interesting that the actual ship is still there under the water that the memorial is located. The USS Missouri was right next to the memorial as well but we didn't have enough time to do both. After that we took a taxi to a Wahoo's to get some enchiladas before walking to the mall again for the post office. We walked around Ala Moana some more before making the long trek on foot back to the ship which took about an hour but we were definitely hurting by the end of it. Hawaii was fun as a two day stop but I kind of feel that it is inevitable that I will return so I wasn't looking forward to it as much of some of our other ports. I did quite a bit in those two days and had a great time, but it was more of a teaser to return than anything else. Now its back to the work for seven days before we arrive in Guatemala!