EFT, Part 2

I really enjoyed being on the cruise. Forcing 60 college students to hang out only with each other for 4 days is amazing. People could retreat to their rooms, but really there was no escape from getting to know everyone in the program. We made several stops on the cruise, but there also was a lot of down time. I enjoyed the time on the boat as much as the excursions because I played a massive amount of card games. Egyptian Rat Screw, Hearts, and a new game I learned, called 45 were just some of the games that I played. I basically dominated most of the games, and everyone learned that I was pretty much always up for a game of cards. We did other bonding things on the boat too. There was a bingo night, and after we played music and had a dance party. Also, this semester we are having a tournament of different events that everyone in the program is going to compete in. So I have a team of 8 people and the whole group played a game to see how well we know our teammates. I now know first, middle, and last names of my team, hometowns, greatest fears, majors, minors, biggest turn-on, ect. During the actually group game, certain teams got really competitive and there was a lot of arguing about who was actually winning and how to score the game. The bonding time on the boat was a lot of fun.

The excursions were absolutely breathtaking. The first stop was at Cape Horn. For each excursion, we took little boats. There were only a couple of boats so we had to be ferried into each stop. Since half of the boat were at least 65, loading and unloading of the boats took quite a while. Cape Horn was beautiful. We had to get up and off the boat by 7 am, so we were all tired, but the view was amazing. There was also a huge statue/monument that we hiked/walked to. We were required to wear our life-jackets every time we left the big boat and they wanted us to wear them on land as well...kind of weird. I guess they didn't want us to loose the life-jacket. So anyways, the trip to Cape Horn was early and cold, but very beautiful. I sat down and just stared at the ocean and the view. I could have spent the rest of the day just sitting and watching, but everyone was eager to get on our way.

The next stop that afternoon was at another island. Kelsey and I got the impression that we were going to see something to with Aborigines, but it turned out we were going on a hike to a look-out point. We had two options, the hill hike or a beach walk. All the pepperdine students did the hill hike. I wore a lot of layers because we were so cold that morning at Cape Horn, but hiking definitely got our blood pumping. 10 minutes in, our group stopped and took off all our layers and left them to continue up the mountain. I was at the front of group and Rafa, the P-dine BA director, was almost running up the hill, so I tried to follow as best I could. Once we got to the top, again the view was incredible. We all sat down and just looked out. One of the wilderness leaders tried to get us all to be completely silent for 2 minutes and just listen to nature. We started out pretty good, but then one of the boys farted and everyone cracked up. The older lady was laughing so hard and her husband thought it was the greatest thing ever and later asked to take a picture with the guy from our group. soooo funny. I could have stayed longer just looking, but we eventually headed down the hill where we were met with hot chocolate. YUM!

The next day, we didn't have an excursion until 5 pm. So we spent most the day playing cards. The excursion was a boat ride...in the small boats... to look at glaciers. There was actually boats that went out at 3, 4, and 5 pm to accommodate the entire boat full of people. Rafa decided that he wanted to go on every tour, so he snuck his way onto a boat for each time slot. The glaciers were gorgeous. We saw birds that kind of looked like penguins, but could fly, so were not penguins. Little parts of the glacier fell every couple of minutes, which was pretty cool to watch. We all tried to yell and whistle to get a big piece to fall. On the way back to the big boat, we drove close to some waterfalls and the boat driver tried to get us wet.

The final excursion was the last morning at 7am to see penguins! It was definitely a memorable experience, but also my least favorite excursion. There were hundreds of penguins everywhere, but we were on a roped off path so we couldn't get too close to them. They smelled really bad. We were up so early that morning that the sun was rising as we were getting off the boat to see the penguins. That sunrise was pretty spectacular. There were penguins on both sides of the path and every once in a while a couple of penguins would want to cross over to get to the ocean. We tried to sneak up on the ones that were crossing, but they would chicken-out and turn away. We headed back to the boat, and then a couple ours later we arrived at Punta Arena for our last day of the EFT. I will give another update about Punta Arena soon.


Pics of the Cruise: http://pepperdine.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2047118&l=dead2&id=8505998

Pics of Penguins:
http://pepperdine.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2047120&l=0a00c&id=8505998