Two Days at Sea - 25 & 26 September

We spent two days at sea between Hong Kong and Vietnam and it was miserable. Everyone was exhausted, sick and completely unmotivated to do any kind of school work. That included me. I caught some sort of crud in China that moved into my sinuses and decided to stay there for a while. I was operating in a fog for the two days and managed to walk into several walls and a garbage can. Not the epitome of grace!

During this time, we had all sorts of meetings that required at least some semblance of sentient thought. I hope I faked it well enough. We had a faculty meeting on the second night at sea and it turned into a catharsis about being trip leaders to students who just want to party and get drunk. Apparently, my particular trip wasn’t the worst of the lot which is a blessing of sorts. After the faculty members finished venting, the Executive Dean got up and vented too because he was having a horrific day dealing with the aftermath of the drunken students. I don’t know that anything was actually resolved at this meeting but we all felt better knowing that we weren’t the only ones having problems with the students. I’m rather dreading being the trip leader for India. That has the potential to be a disaster of epic proportions.

We also had meetings for the cultural and logistical pre-ports on each night. I was feeling uber cruddy on the cultural pre-port meeting so I skipped it and went to bed with my box of Kleenex. I recovered enough to attend the logistical pre-port and got another earful from the Dean, the doctor (who had been dealing with the drunks too) and a student who all made comments about the poor behavior of the students while in China. There was no joy in the South China Sea that night!

With our ears ringing with recriminations, I scuttled off to my cabin to get some blogging done on China and get another early night. Not much to report I’m afraid. It was just a couple of days that had to be endured.