On the sea

Our onboard clown, Barry Lubin of the Big Apple Circus in New York City, did a performance for the shipboard community last week. Flat Stanley who is on Semester at Sea with us from the elementary school in Madison got his picture taken.

We have been on the Atlantic now for ten days since leaving Cape Town. Tomorrow, we will dock in Buenos Aires.

The ten days on the sea have been relatively uneventful. Barry has met with his classes four times each. But we also had an off day for sea olympic competition. We attended the lip synch competition, into which the students put much more energy and commitment than the put their classes, but we were not involved either as participants or spectators in anything else. Barry used the day off to grade World Religions midterms. Barry and a colleague from SU, Andrea Meador Smith, professor of Spanish, were the main speakers in the Global Studies class earlier this week speaking about the Dirty War in Argentina back in the late seventies and early eighties.

Yesterday, Jayne went to "high tea" hosted by the Dean's wife for faculty spouses. She also has gotten to tour the ships bridge with the dependent children. Barry has yet to see that. Last night the dependent children (and many others) dressed up for Halloween. The students had a dance in the student union and the adults one as well in the faculty lounge. We were there for awhile, but didn't dance! (Don't worry or even try to imagine that!)

In Buenos Aires we will visit old haunts from our time there thirty years ago (if we can find them). Saturday we are taking a group of 15-20 from the ship to a Methodist Church to attend worship and then hang out with their young adults and eat a small asado. Sunday night we're going with an SAS group to a Tango dinner. We are also trying to arrange a visit to a human rights museum at one of the former detention centers run by the Argentine Navy during the dirty war. Many people were held there, tortured, and then disappeared from there.

We'll report on our visits.