Neptune Day!

May 28, 2012

Back on the boat today. Already miss Peru, and it hasn’t even been 24 hours. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the rumble of the engine in my room though—or the rocking of the ship—until I went to bed last night. I was rocked to sleep like a baby. That is, until the shipquakes. Not sure what they are, but they make my whole room rattle like there’s a mini earthquake and woke me up at about 3am.

Oh well.

Tonight we re-crossed the equator. Apparently, if you cross it twice and don’t worship King Neptune, it’s bad luck on your voyage, so it is SAS tradition to celebrate the crossing. The way you do this is by getting “fish guts” dumped on your head (green water), swimming across the “southern sea” (the five foot pool), kissing a fish (a real fish), and kissing the rings of King Neptune and his consort. Of course I did it! I even kissed the fish (the part I was most excited for), which was disgusting!

My friends Toni and Bill

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but one of my friends on board is an 8-year-old named Nick. He and I have a secret high five whenever we see each other, and he kept coming back to practice. He’d been t Machu Picchu and had a new alpaca hat (very similar to mine) which he wears everywhere now, and proudly too.

What’s cool is that on the ship we’ve created a culture of our own where wearing a llama hat (or a sweater like I bought) is awesome and everyone, including Nick’s peers (other kids on board), thinks so. At home, he’d likely get made fun of for his hat (especially as we are basically on the equator), but here, it’s the cool thing to do. Everything is. Everyone is so accepting of everyone else (well, for the most part), and I feel like we’ve become a tight-knit community. I never want to go home! Sorry mom and dad :D