7 days on the ship and it's the best day yet!!!!

this is too cool to wait till tonight to blog about!!

today is beautiful out! and it's been a perfect day!

for lunch kristi and i met up with julia. this is the girl that we are traveling to cinque terre with. she is so well traveled and knows a lot about everything.

after lunch i went out on the deck to read my global music stuff and was out there for like an hour and a half.. i might start getting some color hopefully!  you would never know i've been on a ship for a week by looking at me right now..

so this afternoon kristi and i signed up to take a bridge tour! it was so intense! all sorts of buttons and levers and lights and monitors and all sorts of cool things and the Captain was there!  So we got to sit and talk with him for a bit and ask him all sorts of questions. Then i asked if i could take a picture with him. he said "of course, do you want to sit in the chair" as in THE CHAIR, the captains chair! how cool is that! so i have a picture of me in the captains chair with the captain!

so i learned from the tour that the ship is only 25 feet underwater.  it is usually driven on auto pilot (except when entering port)

now we got to go on the coolest bridge tour possible! and it was totally by coincidence. we signed up for this a few days ago because it was the next open one that neither of us had classes during.  well it just so happens that we entered the straight of Gibraltar right before it started.  for those of you who didnt have a super sweet map quiz sunday night to teach you what the straight of gibraltar it is the body of water that is between the closest points of Spain and Morocco.  So as you go through it like we just did/are you can see Africa (Morocco) to the right and Europe (Spain) to the left at the same time they are only about 20 miles or so apart! How cool is that! So we are in the bridge going through the Straight and able to see two countries at the same time!

on a hill in Morocco there were rocks that spelled out "God, country and king" in Arabic. I know this because some kid on the tour with us could speak Arabic and not only pointed it out to us but also translated it to us.  So cool.  So we stayed on the bridge as long as they would let us, when they finally booted us kristi and i climbed up to the seventh deck to look out at it some more. there were so many people out! so then as we are spanding there just looking out at Spain, my dream comes true!  WE SAW A WHALE!!! there were like three of them at least that we saw surfacing but one of them actually pulled its tail out of the water!! it's like it was waving at us!! =) im so happy and totally satisfied! =)

So it's not even dinner yet but i have homework and maybe going to some explorer seminars to finish off the night.

ONE MORE DAY OF CLASSES TILL BARCELONA!!!!!

LAST time change! woohoo. official time difference after tonight will be 6 hours ahead of ohio and 7 ahead of sean.