Quick - very random note #2

Random Note #2

From Philip 

Sailing now - half way to Hawaii - but the Internet is so slow, it took me 35 minutes just to bring up this page. Photos are impossible. Facebook hasn't come up yet, after 47 minutes.

Well, here's some stuff from a couple days ago. 

QUICK update for the past few days – too much has happened. 

Arrived San Diego Sat night, then Sunday with shopping for groceries at Ralphs (Kroger associate), had to go to Best Buy on the Trolley to Mission Valley Mall to get dead battery charger, back for supper with Jean C. to Little Italy at a less known-restaurant than very popular, long line at Fillipi’s (Bosciloi chicken mushrooms). Monday morning the MV Explorer had arrived by 9 at the main dock, but my electric shaver died and we needed some drinks, so went up to Rite Aid, to get new Noreclo shaver, rum, and wine. In torturous multi-step stages, loaded our 6 bags (4 large, large ones) on the Hotel Shuttle and went to the dock, which let us off far, far from the entrance, pulled bags 2 at a time to the next stage of 6 so we could keep an eye on them (with no help from crew or others which had been promised), from 11:30 to 1 pm, gradually going through security, on to the dock, up the gangway, and into our cabins – yeah!

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday was orientations, meetings, and meetings, info in the faculty/staff only Glaser Lounge near the front of the ship (7 deck), Jean helping us to load and set up the library and the faculty and course digital Academic Folders with syllabi and readings, and Reserve books and DVDs.  Jean left on Tuesday when we arrived in Ensenada and before our second Life Boat drill after students had boarded and after Deej and I took a 2 hour morning walking into the port buying trinkets, postcards, and beer. To get stamps we first went, as instructed, 3 blocks and then right; the 2 more blocks, and then 4 more blocks, and waited in line and bought the stamps and mailed a post card to Deej’s mother.

Orientations: Wed and Thurs more orientations until Friday’s first day of classes (A1) and the first day for open the library and start to train our 10 students over the day, as we open at 8 and close at 2300 (11 pm, get used to the 24 hour time references! Folks). Thursday we gave 7 individual presentations or orientations to the 7 seas (Red, Black, etc), with Jonathan’s great 3-minute video of him and I and the library, plus our talking.  And I jumped in at the first talk at the end with teaching two Hind words (celo = go and bus = stop, enough), which Mark Thomas, the main academic dean liked enough to repeat on and on for the 7 sessions, at least with celo. Met lots of fantastic students.

Friday first day of classes, while I went up about 6:00 am to the Library on Deck 6, meeting a very friendly Nepali crew member, who seems to be around about that time each day.  Set up a good place for our flags, and found DVDs to put on the loop for showing on 3 TV channels in cabin rooms. Later got a little sea sick around 10-12 am.  Yuck.

Library: Helped train some of the 10 student library helpers as Jonathan had organized their schedules and a training list to go through for each one of the students.  My training of Dan and Schlyer went fine at 5 -7 pm, as we logged in checkouts from the night before, and Dan re-drew our fantastic White Board welcome for the Voyage and for Hawaii.

Seminar: The evening was topped off with a wonderful first 8 pm seminar where C. Fallscheer (astronomy) , C. Emmett (location, maps), and M Thomas (maps lie) gave short presentations in their fields in the Union. 

What an amazing last few days.