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Tuesday, July 22, 2003I'm back!What a week. I tried summarizing the entire thing in a letter to Maggie...it ended up being four pages and i didn't even come close to finishing. so i think i'll take this in steps, and basically write until i don't want to anymore, then pick up where i left off the next time i post.First day was just one huge day of traveling: we left at 8 in the morning and finally got to our motel at 9:30 at night. Nothing particularly interesting about that day, except to my amazement when i got to the hotel room i had completely blanked out on maggie's cell number, so i spent about 45 minutes just trying to guess the number, and it wouldn't have taken nearly as long except i was using a phone card, automatically tripling the time necessary. Next day we woke bright and early to stand in the series of 6 lines, taking a total of 2 and a half hours, to get on board the ship. Before they let you on though, you must sign a form saying that you don't have any of the symptoms of SARS. I turned to my brother and said, "Cole, start coughing really hard and really loud, and i'll shout "He's got SARS! Scatter!!", and everyone will run away and we can skip this damn line!". He wouldn't do it. Once on the ship we headed to our rooms, which would have been an ordeal itself had we not been on a ship similar to the one we were on. It could have taken close to an hour, given the size of the ship. It's huge-i mean, four 747's lined up huge, and width wise it is twice as long as broadway. We chilled in our rooms until about five thirty, when the first scheduled activity for my age group "15-17" was to begin. A bunch of people headed up to the 12th deck, where Fuel, the teen lounging room, was located. Fuel consists of four areas: a dance floor, a snack/drink bar, a lounging area with couches, and an internet cafe. The dance floor came complete with killer sound system and laser light show. It made for great dances, which we had every night. Anyway, the first "activity" was basically just getting together and meeting everyone. I must've met about 100 people in a time frame of 30 minutes, so i didn't bother remembering any names. I suppose i made some sort of impression though, because for the rest of the trip absolutely EVERYONE seemed to know my name. It was virtually impossible for me to walk the ship without someone shouting out "Hey kyle!" or running up to me expecting me to know them. Ok, so that sounds snobbish, but it's honestly not-i made a sincere effort to remember everyone i met, but names are difficult for me in the first place, let alone remembering so many at once. as for faces, i could swear i'd never seen some people before in my life and they ran up to me as if i was their dearest friend. also-in the whole "meeting" thing, there was some sort of ice breaker where everyone got together with people from their own states and talked to them and met them. I sat alone in a corner until someone offered me to be from Georgia. Screw new mexico!! At 6:30 our first dining experience began. The main dining room consists of three floors, the ground floor being on deck 3, then a spiraling marble staircase that leads up to deck 4, and then continues up to deck 5. There was a huge space in the middle of both deck 5 and 4, so you could look down at the other floors and all the people. A huge chandelier hung over that space, and the tables were placed either next to that space (in the middle) or towards the outer rim of the room. I sat at the outer rim of the room, adjacent to an outer wall that was comprised by one big window facing the ocean. It was very cool. Depending which way the ship was facing, we could watch the sun set over the ocean's horizon as we ate dinner. And what a dinner it was. All food on a cruise is included, so their are no prices on the menu. Whether you have two lobsters and a steak at dinner one night or simply a salad you still end up paying the same ticket fee. So of course you eat like CRAZY! When i first sat down i was almost overwhelmed because of the number of forks and knives (and their were many), but i remembered the good 'ol trick, outside-in. After dinner i headed back up to the room to change out of my semi-fancy clothes, and back to my good 'ol Salvation Army street clothes. I have this theory: i could spend time caring about how i dress and what shoes i wear, like SO MANY other guys do...or i could take that time that i would normally be fussing over those thing, and use it to improve myself and my personality. The first dance of the week started at 10:30, and i went to that. Lots of rap. I now just call it "Ass Music", because the only real point of it is for ass shaking. I danced anyway, because all of the over guys were pussies and just watching the girls do all the work. A techno song came on and i got to do my little liquid hand-jive, and people seemed to really like that. While dancing i met two latin girls-Dianna, who was puerto-rican, and Natalia, who was Cuban. I later called Natalia "Hoochie Girl", because of her...very latin dancing. i think latin women come out of the womb dancing like that. I hung out with those town the rest of the night, and we stayed up till 2 just hanging out at various places. Yeah...that was Cruise Day # 1...only...6...more...
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