Embarkation Day

Location: MV Explorer, 4.78N 20.41W

Our little ship is simply beautiful. I went on a Carnival cruise once and it was all neon and plastic and the cheesiest thing you've ever seen. It gave me a bad taste for ships. The city of Nassau is a port town and therefore bustling with tourists during the day. They are all old and overweight and rich and obviously completely culturally unaware, as the only part of the city they ever actually see is the port area that has been completely stripped of anything authentic and paved with gift shops. I'm sorry; I don't mean to stereotype cruise-goers, I know there are some lovely people amongst you lot, completely the opposite of what I just described. But all the tourists I've seen in the past few days, being herded along onto tour busses (minivans) that merely slow down in front of Bahamian cultural landmarks as a driver says a few words, gave me all the more distaste for cruises in general.

The Explorer is different in every way though. As she should be, after all we keep being reminded that this is not a cruise, but a voyage. She is about a quarter of the size of all these other ships that tower in the background. She is also a state of the art academic campus. And as I said before, she is beautiful! Everything just looks very classy; none of the gaudy neon frills that Carnival boasted. I can't believe I'm actually even comparing the Explorer to that cruise, but that's the only point of reference I have as far as ships go. But this is essentially, a very beautiful, miniature, floating campus, and my home for the next four months.

So this morning I helped myself to the continental toast for the last time and headed to the beach with my roommates. I really need to be more careful in the sun, I was out for merely an hour and am already completely burnt. The Caribbean never fails to be worth every bit of burn though.

For lunch we went to this little local takeout place I discovered last night that serves four-dollar conch burgers. That's another cool thing about the Bahamas: the local cuisine consists of conch and rum cakes. I've been to many a Caribbean island but I've never seen conch on the menu. It's actually really good. I think I'm going to miss it.

From there we headed back to the hotel and checked out. I was glad to get out of there; it was a very charming little hotel and everyone was super nice except for one of the front desk ladies who insisted on calling me over every time she saw me to have a fit about how we had way too many people in our room and would have to pay. That woman had the eyes of a hawk "I saw those other two girls go back into your room and you know you have to pay extra for them right?" This was a daily occurrence. The truth is I made the reservation for as many people as we originally planned, and the other two girls were a last minute addition. Not that it wasn't a blast, the front desk lady just made me super uncomfortable.

Lizzie and I decided to walk to the ship despite all of our luggage since it's only a few blocks away. Somehow we made it, checked in, attended the supervisor meeting, ate dinner out on the deck overlooking Nassau, and now here I am in my room, all unpacked and right at home. Mostly everyone is going back ashore for one last night in Nassau but I am exhausted and looking forward to a good night's sleep.

Tomorrow we leave for Dominica. Our departure has been delayed though due to a mishap with several students' Brazil visas. They never received them and so were flown out to Florida to pick them up. So due to a good twenty or thirty of our classmates still being stuck in Florida dealing with visa problems, departure has been delayed until the last plane tomorrow night arrives in Nassau.

Also, a small note: since the internet on board is extremely limited, I am typing all of my posts in word document and it may be a while before I actually have the chance to post them online. The dates and times marked are those when I originally wrote them however.