Brest, France

Bonjour!

Originally we were supposed to go to Dournanez, France, but there were some complications happening there so we went to a port just an hour away. Sadly there is not a whole lot of things to do here, but we have made our own fun. We had a one-day sail from England to France and we anchored just outside of the harbor for the night and since it was the Captains birthday and the sun was shining and the water was calm, we got a swim call!!! WE FINALLY GET TO SWIM! They split us up into 2 groups and I was in the first group. We only got to jump in like twice because each group only swam for 10 minutes because of the cold water and lack of time before sunset. I jumped off the boat deck, which is the highest deck you can jump from! As soon as you hit the water the cold finally got to you. Like before you jump you’re so excited because it’s the first swim call, and then mid jump you realize that you’re about to jump into the English Channel in October! It was still such a fun time even if it was only for 10 minutes; it was the wonderful end to a school day. The next day we arrived in France and got shore leave after our classes were over and the ship was clean. The first day we just looked out for bakeries and Internet, which we are deprived of on the ship. As I said before this port did not have as much stuff to do as uor previous ones, but we made the most of it! One of the days we took a city bus our to a beach area by a harbor and brought some speakers and played ultimate Frisbee for a few hours and had a nice picnic on the beach which consisted of a variety of cheeses, pâté, and baguettes.  Then we headed back to the ship to gather more people to go play Laser Tag! We walked about 15 minutes to the place and strapped on our guns and vests and just burned off all of our energy playing the game. I was on the red team, but the blue team won L . Yet it was still fun! Our Port Program for this port was by far the most fun! We went out and sailed Hobie 15 Catamarans. We took out 15 boats with 3 people in each of them, I was with Clio and Grace and we just cruised around on a Catamaran dinghy! 3 of the other groups capsized their boats, but it was all good fun. The water was warmer than the air surprisingly! Our boat almost capsized but we saved it, and at some points we got going so fast that our boat started planning, it was amazing, I was the skipper for most of the time, cause no one else in my group wanted to be! But it was such a cool experience sailing dinghies in French waters! Do not even get me started about the bakeries in France! Almost everything I have eaten in France has contained some form of bread. I have had chocolate croissants, almond croissants (my favorite) and 2 whole baguettes, and a variety of Panini’s. And of course I would not forget to go to a creperie, I bought La Carene crepes which is “tiramisu” style, with coffee ice cream and lots of chocolate sauce! And there is this one ice cream place that only had 2 flavors of ice cream, but there’s something about it that is just so delicious! It’s strawberry and vanilla soft serve ice cream mixed and it is amazing! The weather has also been getting warmer! It was like 35 degrees and sunny here one day, and even though its overcast a lot of the time, it is still so warm! The food and the weather here definitely gets two thumbs up!

Au Revoir!

-Megan

Falmouth/Penzance, Cornwall, England

We arrived on the 22^nd in Cornwall. As we were docking I got to go on the small boat that hang off the side of the ship, what my job was to do was to hold a fender right in the tip of this small dinghy while we were literally pushing the ship to the right direction it needed to go to dock. It’s fairly intimidating feeling like you’re going to crash into a 210 foot sailing vessel. After we docked we were able to get shore leave in Falmouth and the first thing we did was go out and explore and go to Tesco to get some junk food, and we stopped to get some famous Cornish Kelly Whip ice cream, which was so good. I have no idea what made it taste so good, it just did! We returned to the ship after our explorations and then went to sleep. The next day we had a port program in Penzanze which involved us going to listen to a lecture about an environmental program that tries to locally prevent pollution, they hope that their program will spread, it’s called Transition Penworth. Afterwards and afterwards we went to a local farm that is involved with Transition Penworth. That port program was not my cup of tea, but it was still cool to see what people’s ideas are. The next day we had a full day of shore leave and we just hung around Falmouth and I went shopping and then we stopped at this food place called Harbour Lights which is famous for fish and chips and its very obvious why, it was delicious and I had these things called cheese chips which are chips (French fries) covered with mozzarella cheese. The next morning some girls and I from the ship got up at 5:30 and went for a jog. Let me tell you, it was epic! We jogged down to the Pendennis Castle and sat in one of the windows (it was fairly small) and got to watch the sunrise over the ocean. It was majestic. I am trying to watch as many sunsets and sunrises as possible! The next day we had our 2^nd port program. We went out to Penzanze once again and  we visited a local high school called Mount Bay Academy. We got to mingl with some of the students and we found many similarities and differences between our culture, lingo, and apparel. Everyone got along really well. They had to wear uniforms everyday, and it was a public school, but it seemed so much like it would be a very prestigious prep/private school. After we went to Sennen Cove, which is this beautiful beach area, it had white sand, but the water was freezing. We weren’t allowed to swim but we all got our feet wet! My friend Clio and I sprinted along the whole coastline of the cove, it was a magical moment! :P  And on the way home on the bus ride we saw travelling gypsies in the caravan! Have you ever heard of a Cornish Pasty? They’re like a type of bread/pastry filled with potato, onions, and meat. That’s the traditional type of Pasty, but you can fill them with whatever you want! They even have dessert Pastys. Cornwall and Penzanze were both beautiful places in England, and it was sunny for the most of it, which just made everything even more amazing!

Talk to you soon,

Megan

A Typical Day At Sea!

A day at sea!

 -Wake up at 6:30

-Go out on deck for gym class at 7.We stand on the boat deck (upper deck) and stretch and do push ups and sit ups and all the stuff (There’s only so much you can do on a ship!)

-Go down below and eat breakfast

-Be out on deck for Colors at 8 (Colors is like a daily meeting with everyone on the ship to find out what’s going on during the day.) Colors is always at 8 no matter what and you always have to be present and always on time or else you get to do the early bird watch from 6-7am!

-Then we stay out on deck and work from 8-9 at cleaning stations, I currently clean heads (bathrooms), which change when each watch time changes. While the galley crew from yesterday cleans the banjer (our sleeping, eating, classroom, and social space) and the galley from that day goes and cleans up. (We each have galley groups made up of 6-8 people and there are 6 galley groups. I’m in galley 3, so on my galley day we get up at 6:30, have to be at the galley at 7 and then we help out the cook and the cooks mate for that whole day, and we do galley once every 6 days. Galley is great because you don’t have to do your 2 hours of daywatch and 2 hours of nightwatch, so you get to get a full night of uninterrupted sleep and you just have galley and classes for that day!)

-Classes go from 9am – 6pm and during that time frame you have your classes, daywatch, and lunch. Our schedules differs each day based on whether its day 1-6. Some days I have as little as 3 hours of classes, and some days I have 6 hours! But no matter what we always have 2 hours of watch, and you have lunch at 11:30 or 12, it depends which seating you are in.

-Daywatch is fun sometimes. My favorite physical watch position is lookout because you stand at the bow of the ship as the ship is pitching and you get that butterfly feeling in your stomach, and I’ve gotten drenched by the waves of the North Sea while on lookout, it was quite the experience, then one time on lookout a water plane circled around and the pilot waved at me! Lookout can just get boring sometimes though since your out there by yourself for an hour until the next person scheduled there comes to relieve you. I enjoy doing Helm as well, helm is a term for steering the ship. It’s kind of intimidating though.  Nightwatch helm scares me a lot because you cant see where you’re going, you have to say on the course or else the navigator yells at you! And when the water is really rocky you get thrown off the helm sometimes because the rutter is getting smacked my waves which jolts the wheel to the side which then lifts you off the ground. That’s when the harnesses come out! Steering a 500 Tonne ship with 60 people on it sure is fun!

-After daywatch we have dinner from 6-6:30

Then we get free time to do homework or watch movies or whatever ( unless you have daywatch from 6-8 or nightwatch from 8-10)

-Lights out is at 10pm every night. Just the banier lights go off, but we have the aft and fore nooks to do homework or silently chat with friends. But everyone is typically asleep right at 10 because were all so tired. It’s surprisingly easy to fall asleep with 22 other girls in the room! I have the bottom bunk which I have managed to fall out of sometimes because the ship is rocking back and forth because of the waves, but our bunks are very comfortable and just a little bit smaller than a twin sized bed!

Nightwatch hours run from 8pm to 9am. My current watch is from 12am-2am, every 3 weeks it changes times.  On October 6^th my watch time will move from 2am-4am. We are all divided into watch groups made up of 6 or 7 people and the watch groups you’re put in at the beginning of the year is the group you’re with most of the time fro the rest of the semester. It’s crazy how close with them I have become, we get up in the middle of the night every night together! It’s quite the bonding experience. Anywho, the previous watch wakes us up 15 minutes before our watch starts. An alarm never wakes you, someone always wakes you up which is nice! During nightwatch 2 people clean the heads, and the rest of us go on helm and standby (there has to be 2 people on the helm cause its tough by yourself), lookout, and firewatch which is where every half hour you make rounds of the whole ship making sure everything is safe and that no fires have started because there is a lot of tire hazards on the ship.

After your nightwatch is done, you get to go to sleep until the next morning where you do that all over again!

And whenever you have free time, everyone is asleep because you’re so tired all the time, and it’s tough not being able to eat whenever, just mainly at mealtimes and the small amount of free time you get on some days.

It gets really tiring sometimes, but when we get to port, its like our weekend because at sea we always have school no matter what day it is!  It’s amazing how you lose track of what day and date it is!

So that is a typical day at sea :D

Some Pictures

Ireland :)

Belfast/Ballymena, Ireland:

We docked in Ireland on the 18^th on a beautiful day, our docking attracted a few people to our ship to watch. We had a meeting with the faculty about the guidelines for this port and then we were announced shore leave. What is the first thing i did? Walk to McDonalds, for internet, but mainly a Big Mac, we are deprived of fast food on the ship J . Afterwards we met up with another group from the ship and went glow bowling and played around in an arcade, and then just chilled in a field in the middle of Belfast. We returned to the ship with all of our junk food from Tesco. Tesco is basically our lifesaver while at port, its just a grocery store with junk food, and we all come bag with so many bags of food from there to last us for the sail to the next port. On the 19^th 4 friends and me took a train to Ballymena to visit my friend’s mother’s cousin’s dairy farm. It was actually such a cool experience we got picked up at the train station and taken to their home. Get this, their house is 300 years old and Timothy Eaton (as in the Eaton Center in Ontario) was born in that house, and Prince Charles and Camilla were visiting there just days before we arrived there. The family that owned the place were some of the nicest and most hospitable people I’ve met, they gave us an amazing lunch composed of 2 sausages, a fried egg, REAL bacon, potato bread, soda bread, Irish wheat bread, and pancakes. They literally did not stop giving us food, after we thought we couldn’t eat any more they came around with dessert, like a lot of cake and bars. And I’m pretty sure they had an infinite amount of tea, and the milk they had was fresh from the farm so it tastes so good! Afterwards they showed us around and we came across these adorable Jack Russel Terrier puppies and played with them for a long time. We went out into the field with the puppies, and my friend had brought a guitar so he brought that and played it. It was so awesome! Helen (the farm owner) took us around the farm in one of the old fashioned land rovers, and then took us into town in her nice land rover, we bought some snacks and got a brief tour of Ballymena and then we headed over to climb Mount Slemish, I stopped halfway because I was getting tired, but the mountain was loaded with sheep, and it was the exact same mountain that Saint Patrick used to herd his sheep on. We went back to the farm afterwards and we got to witness a calf being born, which was a little gross but still cool. We were driven back to the train station and had a joyful ride back, jk most of us slept on the way back. We arrived in Belfast and walked to the McDonalds where we discovered some Class Afloat Floaties that had made some Irish friends, we chatted with them and got some potato wedges with garlic mayo (from McDonalds!) and then wandered back to the ship. That was probably my favorite day at Belfast. As you know we have 2 port programs at each port and for one of them we had a lecture about the history of the city at Queens University, and then the same day after that we went on a tour of the city and got to look at all of the Murals regarding the Protestant and Catholic uprising in Ireland. The murals are all beautiful, I will upload photos as soon as I get them from my friend’s camera (my camera died there).  We also saw the peace wall that separates the Protestants and the Catholics; they have all these powerful messages written on each side of it. The artistry is just amazing, its hard to believe that people can create that! The next port program we got to go to Giants Causeway, which is these natural rock formations that resemble stepping stones, and then the waves would crash up against the rocks and it was epic! You wouldn’t think it was Ireland if you saw it, the beaches looked sort of tropical and they were white sand beaches! And the sun was actually out for once in the UK. We also got to cross a rope bridge that went over crashing waters, which was fairly intimidating since you’re trusting rope and wood to suspend you over jagged rocks and water. But it was still so breathtaking to see how big our world really is, and it’s a privilege to be able to see all of it.  That’s basically how Belfast went for me. It has been one of my favorites out of the 3 ports we’ve been to!

Talk to you soon,

Megan

Stornoway, Scotland.

Stornoway is a very small little place right next to the water. It's adorable though and all the locals were ridiculously nice. We arrived a few days early. Then on our actual "day of arrival" we had our arrival day school schedule and then did a Captains Clean of the ship, which is basically a very, very thorough cleaning fo the whole entire ship. And the Captain then inspects it. Then we were announced shore leave until 11pm. For the first day we went into our groups of 4 or more and just explored around, we went to the Lewis Castle and then got internet to talk to our families. Oh wait, the first thing we did was go to a convenience store and got chocolate and just alot of junk food because we do not get to have that when were at sea, So everyone just buys so much to stow away and eat it later when were not allowed to go out and get food because were just chillin in the middle of the north sea. The next day we had our Port Programs which are organized by Class Afloat, we got to go see the ancient Lewis Chessman which was pretty cool. Then we went to Calanais, which is these ancient rock formations which are in the shape of a Celtic cross and apparently each stone lines up with  a  star and has something to do with the Solstices. It was really really awesome, then we went more into the Scottish countryside and went and saw a Broch and got to go inside it, it was so cool, I'm planning on uploading photos once I get them all organized. The next 2 days we just explored around Stornoway and went to thrift shops, food places, and the castle. Clio and I would go for runs everyday, and we are trying to run at every port since we do not get very much cardio on the ship haha. Stornoway was a nice quiet town :)

What I've Learned So Far:
If you make the AB's mad just get them a cup of coffee and it makes it better
Never get caught without shoes on in the ship.
Falling down the stairs when the ship is pitching hurts.
Surprisingly, cleaning the heads (bathrooms) is the best cleaning job on the ship

to be continued.... :)
-Megan