Day 1: Dinner: For Prisoners or Military Only <-- yep, that's right, we eat prisoner food

Dude, the Comfort is FREAKING AWESOME! Everything is pretty much what I expected or better. The ship is SO HUGE, I literally get lost every time I leave the berthing (dorms). It’s also really hard to find your way around since every single hall looks exactly the same and there isn’t a single landmark to help you either. Also, there are separate staircases to lead to separate areas to the ship, so you’d have to climb up like 6 flights of stairs, go across the hall, then go down another 4 flights. We’re in the “overflow” berthing for civilians on Floor 4 (Top to bottom is: 02 01 Main 1 2 3 4) so we’re at the very bottom. So you have to take the stairs eveeeerywhere (and I thought Trieste was bad…).

I think the best part is that everyone’s super friendly here. Almost every single person smiles and says hi to me even though they don’t know me, and they recognize that I’m new to the ship right away. People always approach you and sincerely welcome you to the ship. I usually don’t feel very comfortable around people at first, but I felt like I belonged right away and could get along and talk to everyone really well. It’s just like one big family :) Also, since there’s barely any internet or TV, people mainly entertain themselves by hanging out or doing activities together, so it really forces you to hang out together; which is good, because otherwise we’re always so disconnected in our own little worlds. You really have no CHOICE but to bond :) One of the officers said that one of the best things about the ship is that nobody has an ego here, and I really think that’s true. AND people from like every single country are all on this one ship and it’s so cool to see the diversity.

Yeah, I’m just really excited to be here and really eager to try everything out. Living conditions aren’t that bad, except that it gets REALLY COLD at night and the blankets aren’t really sufficient enough. I usually wake up because it’s too cold and it makes it so much harder to get out of bed -__- another thing is that communicating is so hard on the ship since we can’t use phones or internet, so we just have to rely on running into each other. I really do wish I could’ve gone to Costa Rica and sailed through the Panama Canal with everyone; because when else are you going to have such an awesome opportunity right? Oh well, I guess, just gotta make the most out of what I’ve got. But this is such a good once in a lifetime opportunity and I’m super glad I’m doing it, yippee! :D

Other cool military vocab: Berthing (dorms); Head (bathrooms); Galley/Mess Deck (dining area); Muster (meetings)