Rosario and I got up this morning and booked it to the field study office. Today was the last day we could sign up for day trips for everywhere through Chennai. I signed up for Operation Hunger in South Africa because all of the township visits are while I am on safari in Kruger. Rosario and I also signed up the Adventure Park and Beach in Mauritius. That should be fun.
The second day of Global was really interesting. We watched Sylvia Earle’s TED speech. She is a famous marine biologist who has pioneered ocean research. Her speech basically told up that we need to clean up our acts in the ocean, while there is still time. If we don’t we are basically screwed. Then in lecture, we talked about this place in the Pacific gyre (current) where there is currently 100 million tons of plastic floating around taking up an area roughly the size of the United States. The thing that really shocked me was that there is no effort to try and clean this up. Apparently it is so bad that you can just reach your hand down about a foot in the water and pull up handfuls of plastic. The last part of the class was a panel with Captain Jeremy, the COO of ISE and the international law professor. The only really exciting thing that came out of the was that Captain Jeremy said we use 1.8 tons of fuel per hour to run one engine (we are currently running on one engine) and another .6 tons per hour for electricity. So roughly that’s 56 tons a day. Multiply that by the 54 days we are at sea and you get 3024 tons of fuel for this voyage. There goes my carbon footprint.
In Dr. Strenecky’s class we had to bring 3 items that describe ourselves. I chose my camera, a picture of the fam, and the little packet of pixie dust that Ebonee was nice enough to get for me from the Boutique. It was really interesting to see what other people brought. We then divided up into groups for our project and that was about it.
We had a presentation from Global Nomads, which was founded by SAS alum. Global Nomads travels all over the world connecting middle and high school students with live feeds from other schools all over the world. Apparently they are working with SAS for the 100th voyage.
We had a BBQ up on 7th deck. The food was so good. We had hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, baked beans and ice cream! YUM! Mackenzie, who I have just decided to call Jenn because she reminds me so much of Ben’s friend Jenn on the houseboat, and I went to a workshop on journaling that is led by one of the LLLs.
After the workshop, in addition to the BBQ, to help kick off the 100th voyage we had a “Mash-Up” Mixer. Basically it was a WTF theme. It had potential to be really fun, but it was just ok. They played terrible music so everybody just kind of stood around awkwardly. I felt like I was back at BGA because there was about the same amount of people there and all of the awkwardness. We were just one electric slide away. Towards the end they finally started playing normal music and everyone started dancing.