June 20 – Drop/Add Day – Today we have experienced the vagaries of internet connections via satellite. We’ve been without a connection all day, and the estimate is that it won’t come back up until 1 a.m. this morning. (Note: The ship's internet connection was out for two days. - JLC) Luckily, the library catalog mostly works (for some reason, it, too, has been slow), and we’ve had a fairly busy time checking out reserve books, especially the Lonely Planet Guide to Mexico. (We dock tomorrow in Acapulco.) Unfortunately, one of the two copies of that guide disappeared early this week, so we’ve been running on one copy for everyone on the ship. I expect to see it back on Sunday when the ship leaves Acapulco.
June 18-19 - The 18th was Orientation day, during which there are introductions and welcomes, as well as a lot of lectures about the ship, and what the faculty expects of the students. The 19th is the first day of class, and all the students are running around trying to find their classes. This is made more complicated because the classes have been moved around quite a bit, so there is no up-to-date map of where the classrooms are. Also, tomorrow is Add/Drop day, so enrollment is still in flux.
There hasn't been a lot of seasickness among the "voyagers," because we've had fairly mild seas. In fact, at least once today, I saw the ocean literally "as smooth as glass," which must be where the old saying comes from.
One of the challenges of the summer voyage is the compressed time frame (65 days) we have to accomplish many of the goals that the fall and spring voyages accomplish in 100 days. We rarely have more than 4 days between ports, and in several cases, we have two days between ports -- in one case, only one day. So, I think there's going to be some difficulty keeping continuity of the classes, with such frequent interruptions by ports. But everyone is aware of that and are working specifically on those issues.
