SEA OLYMPICS!!!!!

Duh-duh da duh-duh-duh-duh (insert Olympic theme song here)

It’s SEA OLYMPIC time!!!!!!!!

Every voyage (spring/summer/fall) Semester at Sea hosts the Sea Olympics about half-way through the voyage.  Everyone gets off of class and participates in Olympic events representing their Sea (our Sea’s are equivalent to a dorm hall on a land campus).  The Seas are: Aegean, Adriatic, Arabian, Baltic, Bering, Caribbean, Mediterranean, Red, Yellow, and Vitamin (which is the faculty/staff/children/life-long-learners made-up sea).  I am a proud member of the Baltic Sea!!!!!!  Anyway it is super fun and exciting and everyone gets really into it.

I, along with others, am a part of the Sea Olympic committee, which means that since before Ireland I have been helping plan the Sea Olympics for the F12 voyage—aka the best Sea Olympics Ever!  We have to figure out what events we want to do, where and when the events will be held, what materials we need (keep in mind we have no budget so we have to be creative), who we want for judges, how to score each event, etc.  We are a very ambitious group and came up with a plan for 30 events!  We thought that was about normal as we had come up with a good list with lots of variety (the life long learners and dependent children participate so we make sure to have a wide variety of events that are good for all age groups and skill sets.  There was a schedule and rule sheets and we just had everything planned out and were all set to go. Our faculty leader, Jacques (who is super awesome by the way) presented our plan to the board and got it all approved.  He came back to us and told us that when he told them how many events we wanted to do they balked—apparently most voyages have about 5-8 events total—that’s it.  Then he handed over our schedule and master plan and they were like, “well….ok then!”  It was really cool and we were surprised that most voyages had so few events.  We literally had more events than any other voyage EVER!

Anyway, we started with the Opening Ceremonies on the night of the 27^th which basically involved everyone on the ship representing their Sea colors hard core (face-paint and capes were involved) and screaming out their chants with the aid of African drums and vuvuselas (am I spelling that right?).  It was a mad house and there was so much energy in the room we had to yell into the microphones to be heard—it was great!  Then we had our lip-synch competition, the first event.  Each Sea had to have a group of no more than 20 people come up and do a dance and lip-synch in front of our deans (the judges).  We had lion king, Michael Jackson,  Beyonce, Titanic, you name it.  There were crazy costumes and flashlights and it was absolutely insane what people came up with.  Keep in mind we are on a ship in the middle of the ocean with no access to anything so people were digging through their closets to put together costumes and using creative computer programming that I don’t understand to piece mash-ups together and figuring out where we could go to practice so that no one would see…it was incredible!  I have videos of all of the performances if anyone is interested because I would be typing for hours if I told you about all of them right now.

The next day was the actual Sea Olympic Day.  As a committee member it basically meant that I sprinted from one end of the ship to the other from about 11:00-5:00 not taking even one minute to sit down or get something to eat---it was soooo fun.  I am that weird person that loves to be the one in the background scrambling to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch and running around like a chicken with my head cut off---it was so much fun.  And of course I competed in some events for my Sea!  We started the day with two secret events.  No one except committee members and judges knew what was going to happen, we just had kids volunteer to participate—mua-ha-ha

The first secret event involved four people from each Sea. We had one person sit in a chair and the other three had to do said persons make-up using only their non-dominant hand and they had about a minute and a half to do it.  Keep in mind that we are on a ship so we are rocking back and fourth and we jammed all the chairs together so that no one would have enough room and they would be “fighting” each other to have enough elbow room to apply lipstick and blush and eyeshadow, etc.  It was hilarious and the Union full of onlookers was cheering and laughing and it was exactly what we wanted out of it.  In the end my Sea (go Baltic!) ended up winning :)

The second secret event was called make-em-laugh.  We have a professional clown on the ship as well as an actor who is crazy (in a good way) and so we enlisted them to help us.  We had two people from each Sea line up and told them that all they had to do to win this event was not smile.  Then we sent the clown and the actor up there and let them do whatever the heck they wanted in order to get people to smile.  It was the funniest thing I have seen in a long time and trust me, that is saying something!  They were playing with people’s hair, whispering the most random crap in their ears, pretending to make out with them or each other, using the kids to try to get to people, talking in accents, complaining about traveler’s diarrhea, blowing whoopee cushions in their faces, I cannot even begin to describe how funny it was.  We were all falling out of our chairs laughing—literally—and we had a seven way tie!  I have no idea how they did it, it was impossible but somehow they beat it.

The other events were awesome and I will give you a full list below—please e-mail me if you want to hear more about certain events or the day in general but the only other one I will describe in detail is Synchronized swimming.  This event was the last of the day and everyone was squished as tightly together as possible around our little postage stamp pool on the aft deck craning their necks to see the performances.  Being on the committee I got a prime seat just in front of the judges and right in the middle of the splash zone-haha.  Again, these performances were amazing, especially considering that the pool had been empty the last few days due to rough seas so no one could actually practice in the pool.  We had all sorts of songs and dances and costumes and it was a blast.  There were boys in bikini tops, some in zebra stripped spandex, even a couple in Speedos, there was face paint and glitter and tapped on paper shells and it was great!  People did back flips in the air, belly-flopped, spun, kicked, twirled, danced and sang like there was no tomorrow.  The best part though was when the student who uses a wheelchair did a wheelie down one of the thing little dividers between the pool and the drainage area (literally his chair just barely fit down this thing) and then launched himself sideways into the pool, chair and all for his Sea’s finally.  EVERYONE went crazy!  The pictures we have of him going in are only surpassed by the smiles on everyone’s faces in the background as he did it—it was the highlight of the event! 

After that there was a lot of clean-up and scoring for us committee members but it was one of the best days I have had so far and I loved every minute of it.  The next day in Global Studies we announced the winner and handed out trophies that the children had made. Here are the standings:

1. tie (yes a tie, we had 30! events and there was a fricken tie!) between Caribbean and Bering

2. BALTIC----yeah baby!

3.  Aegean                                              

4.  Mediterranean

5.  Vitamin                                            

6.  Yellow

7.  Red                                                    

8.  Arabian

9.  Adriatic

Here is the list of all of the events:

Lip synch, secret events one and two, tug of rope, synchronized swimming, jeopardy, phase 10, volleyball, blindfolded drawing, ping pong, speed/hearts/euchre/crack house card games, lightning, ninja, musical chairs, wet t-shirt relay, limbo, taboo, obstacle course, backward scavenger hunt, pass the orange, pull-up contest, hula hoops, water balloon toss, backward spelling bee, mens and womens dodgeball, frozen t-shirt contest, and tank…..phew!

Hope you all are well and had a good Halloween!

~Colleen