Sunday
January 18th
It
was a day on sea, we didn't stop anywhere. When we woke up, we
decided to go run again, but not as long as yesterday...My legs still
hurt! I ran 10 minutes while Tessje and Ingrid were walking.
After
that, we had breakfast, and we went in the conference room for a new
activity: towels folding! Every night, when we go back to our cabin,
we have new towels waiting, always folding as an animal. As we didn't
have anything to do, we decided to learn how to do it! We learned how
to do a bulldog and an elephant...I can say that I definitely am
really bad for that! Even if the animator came to help me, my towels
didn't want to look like animals!
It
was the first day where we had real sun, not clouds, so we decided to
tan! We found the last seats free (every single seat on the deck was
taken) and we fell asleep. The only thing I didn't think about was
that: we are approximately at the same latitude as Central Africa,
which means that the sun is VERY hot. I put sunscreen on, but only 15
UV and only once. As I usually don't get sunburns, I didn't think I
was gonna have some this time..2 hours later I discovered that I was
wrong! My entire body was red, I had the mark of my sunglasses...I
looked like a giant tomato! After watching a tequila contest on the
main deck, we went in the hot tub. We spent around 2 hours in it! I
left before everyone else to go put aloe on my sunburns. After eating
a the pizza bar, we went in our cabins, talked for a while and got
ready for our last night on the boat. Once we were ready, we went to
the guest service where we paid for our excursions and the tips:
everyone on the boat has to pay 12$/day to pay the 1000 people
working on the boat. At our last dinner, we said goodbye to Yulia,
our waitresses, we gave her an extra tip because she was just so nice
and all the waiters stood in the dinning room with a candle to say
goodbye.
We
decided to end our night by seeing a Las Vegas show, a musical with
songs from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's.
With
6 of the exchange students, I went in our cabin and we finished the
night talking about our cultures. It was super interesting to
discover how different it could be! For example, the girl from South
Korea said she had school from 8 in the morning to 10 in the night.
An entire day at school! She talked about how was the relationship
between her country and South Korea, she told us stories she heard
when she was younger... The vietnamese girl said that when someone
dies, the people living in the house have to be very careful if they
have a cat because if it jumps over the coffin, the dead is gonna
stay in the house forever. Because of that, people usually give their
cat away when someone in their family dies. She also said that when
they lose a tooth, they don't put in under the pillow, put they throw
it outside, over the roof of the house! I also learned a myth about
how the astrologic signs appeared. (I can't say it here, it's too
long). The norwegian girl told us that for Christmas, they all hold
hands and dance around the Christmas tree, singing songs. The belgian
girl said that they don't have Santa in Belgium, only Saint Nicholas.
We told about which country we were making jokes, for example I said
that in Switzerland we made fun of french people, portuguese, belgian
(I tried to explain to the belgian girl why we described them as a
bit retarded but I don't think she understood!). The Norwegian girl
said that they didn't like at all Swedish, or Danish people, all
these nordic countries make jokes about each other. Germany makes
jokes about Poland. At the end we realized that in every country
(except South Korea), we all have the song “Frère Jacques”. So
we all sang it and recorded it. It was awesome! It sounded so
different! It said the same story in every language, except in
Vietnamese where it means: little yellow bird who tries to fly!
