So Halloween was interesting on the ship. Some people dressed up for the whole day and some just for the dance at night. One kid named Kevin dressed up as this kid named Rory who is from Australia and always wears flowered button-ups and a hat and usually always is carrying around his GoPro.
But, the dance was like a middle school dance. We still had a good time! It was held in the Union and there were costume competitions. There were some good ones, like one of the Field Program directors was “dock time” wearing scrubs with different amounts of dock time on him. Some other good ones were Roshan (the coolest crew member!), Dan dressed up as the most typical SAS kid, and tons of people were chefs! I myself didn’t really plan ahead and decided about 30 minutes before the dance that I was going to dress up in a toga as a Greek woman! Easy peasy!
But the big thing was NEPTUNE DAY! So, on Semester at Sea or any other time when you cross the equator, there are specific traditions. On Semester at Sea we were woken up at 7:30 AM by all the crew and some SAS administrative members by pots, pans, drums, singing etc! Then at about 9 o’clock the festivities began! “King Neptune” gave us a grand ‘ol speech telling us that we were polywogs and were turning into shellbacks by doing these traditions. In order for us to become a shellback we had to get “fish guts” (normally it would be real fish guts, but on our ship it was something else) dumped on us, then jump into the pool, and then kiss a real fish and King Neptune’s ring as we got out of the pool! We did it in a group of six friends so it was a lot of fun.
Another SAS tradition was to shave your head! So lots of the guys shaved their heads, or got mohawks, and some ladies shaved patches of their heads, parts or underneath. It was a ton of fun! For an hour we had a rager up on the 7th deck…IT WAS AWESOME. And I am getting so freakin tan, which is awesome too! I didn’t even expect this day to be fun, but it was a blast!