Bryce & Rumors

Bryce

 

Dr. Dana, as the ship’s  physician is called, has her 10 year old son with her.  He is one of those amazing kids that grown ups love.  His smile goes ear to ear, he is incredibly bright, and has a wicked sense of humor and appears undaunted by his somewhat celebrity status on the ship. At the Student Activities fair on the second night he created his own sign up for a Dungeons and Dragons group and has most respectfully been working with the RDs to organize meeting times, reserve rooms, and recruit and corral the 20-something students who signed up for the club. 

As I may have mentioned, there is a mandatory Preport Meeting prior to each of our ports where we are given essential safety information (all on 1 sheet of paper known as the green sheet) and there is the requisite awareness, safety warnings, and information about the immigration process to make the following day go smoother. 

At the first meeting, Dr. Dana (who has the soothing voice and comfortable demeanor) ran through a multi-slide show about STDs and why condoms are so important.  She then noted that only 4% of men have been show how to properly put on a condom and to the hoots of the audience proceeded to give the lesson to the whole audience and explain how to make a dental dam out of a condom.   Somewhere throughout this already notable session, Bryce started making he-man muscle poses from behind the projection screen which had everyone laughing, then he emerged with a Target bag filled with condoms that he began tossing like confetti into the audience.  The crowd went wild.  He even headed up to the balcony where I sitting and showered some down from above.  It was so hysterical.

Last night at pre-port, we briefly saw Bryce disappear behind the screen with his Target bag again.  His mom did her session, this time on the perils of drinking to passing out, when to call the hospital and when to get your friend back to the ship (I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this later as the RDs get to monitor these folks if they are too far gone to let them go back to their rooms.)  Then with total deadpan, she mentioned how honored we were to have the Captain’s nephew with us and to give him our full respect as he had a brief message to share.  Out from behind the screen came Bryce wearing a captain’s uniform where he introduced, with complete seriousness and a fake Russian accent (as our Captain has) how to use an old-style and new style Japanese toilet to do nombre 2.  He had a picture of the squat toilet behind him as he illustrated with perfect comedic timing how to pull down your pants (yup, he did), squat and offered ”not-to-do” tips (don’t fall forward, the perils of falling backward) and where to put the TP.  I was  in tears – as were most.  Then he showed the electronic version of the Japanese toilets (which I remember confused me when we stopped in Japan on the way to Indonesia.  Apparently they flush automatically and  have a variety of buttons that stream wash your parts.  It was actually quite useful information for us all, but what a hoot!  Certainly not dry boring meetings.

Rumors

As you can imagine, a small, closed shipboard community is a fabulous laboratory for watching rumors incubate and grow.  The first I encountered was that 8 people had left the ship in Honolulu.  This had a variety of strains: they were sent home, they were unhappy.  By the end of the day I heard 11 people had gone home.  There were in fact 2 students who went home for personal reasons after careful vetting with family.

Then I heard that we weren’t stopping in Myanmar and Mauritius and that we were going to Cambodia instead.  This rumor seemed to spring from one of our resource lists, maybe a bit outdated or not fully updated that had Cambodia on it but didn’t have Myanmar.  I assured that student that we’d probably hear about the change before it was subtly updated on the website like that.  By later that day, the word was that we were skipping South Africa.  There is indeed a drought in South Africa which we were made aware of and we may have some water rationing, but it all got lumped in.

Another rumor has sprung up that 5 or 6 students are going home in Japan because they are unhappy but that they aren’t going to tell anyone because they don’t want to be stopped.  Although I know of at least one student who is still struggling with significant homesickness, Japan is probably not going to be her closest shot at getting home.  We’re hoping by Vietnam she may have found more joy in the journey.  We wonder if we might not notice students sliding off the ship with their 2 large rolling duffle bags if they were leaving to go home.  Clearly they wouldn’t be heading for a 3 night trip. 

A rumor control section has just been added to the ship’s daily memo.  It will be interesting to see what else comes along.