Well, we lose ANOTHER hour tonight. After just losing one last night. Yay. This is so exciting (not.). Good thing is that losing sleep means were getting closer to Spain!! Exactly 6 days and we will be there!! Apparently we arrive in Spain around 5:40am, so plans are in the works to get up and watch us sail up/ the sunrise over Barcelona. Should be amazing.

But, that means our first exams are in less than a week. Yuck. Those can wait haha. I thought I liked all my classes, but the fact we don’t have weekends means we can’t procrastinate on reading/homework like normal. So yesterday I spent about 4 hours in my room reading. On a bright side, it would’ve taken me like 10 hours at home with distractions such as facebook, TV, texting, ect. So that’s slightly better!!

We had our first “Exploratory Seminar” tonight about Spain. A speaker who lived there for a while gave an optional speech about how to dine out in Spain. Apparently there are about 7 meals; breakfast, midmorning snack, tapas, lunch, tapas, dinner at 9:30-11pm, and then tapas again. So it looks like I shall be up late in Spain all night every night! Cool deal.

But not having Internet blows. I thought I prepared a lot for the countries, but now I need to rent hostels/ get trains/ research times and stuff. Yuck. I just sucked up like 30 minutes of time researching train timetables and price, not even booking them. Thank goodness Italy will be the only one that will really need us to do that! But, thanks to those sucked up minutes, we now have Italy planned. We couldn’t fit Cinque Terre in like I had hoped, but I’ll live there in a few years so it’s forgivable. The plan is to spend 2 days in Naples doing FDPs for our classes (mine are Pompeii/Herculaneum visits and hiking Mount Vesuvius) and exploring the city/ eating pizza in our free time. Then we will head up to Rome for 2 days and rush around frantically seeing things. Then we will go to Florence for two days and hang out. When we leave there, we will hit up Pisa for a quick picture and then go to the port city of Civitavecchia where our ship sails from. We will get to Civitavecchia a day before we leave to save money while sleeping on the ship/ see the baths and other touristy areas in the port. We have budgeted the trains to be about ~$100 and the hostels to be about the same. So it’s perfection! Italy is gonna rock, and if we get lost, where’s a better place to get lost at?!

We watched the movie “Inception” yesterday in the Union. It’s basically like a movie that’s super cool (it’s about dreams and alternate reality-esque stuff) that ends with you saying “wait, what?” so it’s pretty good. But anyways, there is this scene where the main guys are fighting the bad guys in like a zero gravity/walls move sorta scene (you should watch it if you haven’t, cause I’m completely butchering it) and the boat started rocking way hard and it was awesome. It made you feel like you were actually in the movie!! So cool.

Everyone is starting to get seasick again. Since we are about 2/5 of the way out, I guess the waves get larger? Anyways it’s rocking like mad. People who have never gotten seasick yet are starting to spew and I’m not gonna lie, when you try to take notes while the boat is literally opening and closing the curtains with it’s force, I tend to get a tad queasy myself. But I will be fine!

We just got word that we have to fuel up in a couple of days (apparently it’s like >$500,000!!!). Normally I wouldn’t care, but the location is amazing. We will be docking literally FEET AWAY from the Rock of Gibraltar!!! Okay, maybe not feet, but close enough to see the apes (Did you know there were apes?! I didn’t, that’s wicked!). So that is gonna be so cool. Play hookie and be “sick” that day? Heck yes.

But yeah. Pretty sick, can’t wait!