Friday, January 2, 2009

For some reason, we had a 7:30 wakeup call, even though we were in the middle of the seas. We were sleepy, so we didn't get up until a little after 8, at which point we basically slept-walked down to breakfast, ate like zombies, and then came back to the room, at which point we promptly went back to sleep - until noon. We just read and worked on the computer until lunch time. We had a long lunch with Peggy and Lindy, talking about what we liked best on the trip, what we were doing after getting back into Ushuaia, and all of the different ways someone could die if something went wrong so far away from civilization. Our trip has been quite lucky (knock on wood) - no one has suffered anything remotely serious - seasickness seems to be the only malady.

After lunch, we went into the bar for more unlaxing. Lots of other people were doing the same - nice lazy day. At around 3, Anja told us that we should expect strengthening waves shortly - a storm was coming. So we tried to get as much stuff done for the end of the trip as possible - diary, packing, making sure nothing in the room would go sliding, etc.

At 5:30, there was a trivia contest on information relating to Antarctica and the wildlife we saw on our trip. We were teamed up with Helle, Per, Caroline, and Craig. There were about 6 or 7 other teams. We thought we were doing well as Christoph asked the questions, but weren't sure how the others were doing. The highlight, actually, was Christoph trying to give all of the questions and the options for the answers. He told us on the first day of the trip that he has trouble with English, especially pronunciation. Several times he would ask how to pronounce things, such as the "ght" in tightly. He also said the following words in more or less identical pronunciation - ship, sheet, shit, sheet, cheat, chip, and cheap. During the grading we thought we might be doing well when the table next to us (who was grading us) cheared when we finally missed a question - #20 out of 32.

At the end of Anja's lecture, Christoph handed out all of the answer sheets, and ours was last, meaning we had won. We got a bottlle of champagne, and split it at dinner. After dinner, the storm Anja warned us about started to really amp up the waves' intensity, so we packed a bit more just in case the next day would be a total waste.