Thursday, January 19th – Everyone onboard?!

    Such an early day! A short 6.5 hours later (at 6am), I was up and getting ready to go and eat breakfast! The food doesn't seem bad on the ship, but I noticed not a lot of rice on board =/ I'm making up for with bread and butter. After breakfast, we had a short briefing about who we're going with and what we're doing during check-ins. I worked outside on the docks and getting students check-in bags ready, giving their name tags, and telling them their cabin number. It was great meeting most of the students that I'll be seeing for the next 4 months and then seeing the people I've been hanging out with all week in Nassau and Senor Frogs. I worked from 7am till noon and I was thinking it was going to be all day, but I'm glad we got let out at noon so we could go and eat lunch. I met my new roommate! Her name is Ashley and I actually met her at the Wyndham resort! So I'm glad I already knew her!

I tried to take a nap after that, but "The Voice" came on a couple of times with announcements. "The Voice" is the speaker system that is heard throughout the ship, especially in every room. I unsuccessfully tried to sleep for about an hour and then had to wake up at about 4pm to do a life boat drill! We had to change to long pants, long sleeve shirts, shoes, hats, and of course life vests! It was a whole drill and it was funny to see everyone with their life jackets, but it was a very serious drill because of what just happened in Italy with the cruise ship there. After a good hour for it, I went with Jessey guys to go and eat dinner, then we walked around the ship because some people still haven't seen it.

Oh yeah! I found out that we're actually leaving port wayyyy later than we're supposed to. There are 13 students that haven't gotten their Brazil visa (because of Pinnacle of course). So we were supposed to leave at 5pm EST January 19^th, but now we're leaving at noon EST January 20^th to accommodate for the students that are going to be flying in from Fort Lauderdale to Nassau once they get their passports and visas back. The one thing I was worried about for a while was if we were going to still be able to get to Dominica on time and they said we will. I'm excited or Dominica because I do have an independent trip planned the very first day we get there!

Miho