Istanbul

August 12, 2013: Istanbul day 1
Today was pretty much a sea day for me. We arrive in Istanbul at 4pm, so we had the usual sea day hours for the morning and afternoon. It was pretty quiet all day, less than 15 kids in each of the two sessions (one sign-in sheet has 15 rows, that’s how we know generally how many kids we have, this week on tweens, we’ve easily filled up two sheets a session). I skipped lunch to sleep because I’m not sure if I actually fell asleep last night at all, so I ended up being thoroughly exhausted in the morning. I was more awake in the afternoon. It was nice though, we played Skip-Bo, went outside, did puzzles for an hour, and played Ickle Bickle. We docked about half an hour early, so all but one of the kids left before then. It was odd because his parents came late to pick him up as well. I didn’t get to the room until 4:30. I attempted to nap again (unsuccessfully) until dinner. Dinner was rather disappointing. They didn’t have the pasta line open (this randomly happens, I never know when to expect it to not be there), the pasta in the regular line was undercooked, all the meat was pork or fish. I think they thought that everyone was just going to eat out since it’s an overnight.

Movie night in Club HAL. One of the two people in each group had the night off, so Ryan and I combined the kids and tweens for our movie night. It went well, I played Uno with a group during free time, alternating between that, syncing wii remotes, xbox controllers, and getting out coloring pages, markers, and colored pencils. We put on Finding Nemo (to the protest of my tweens, though they loved it anyway), gave out popcorn and finally got to relax the rest of the evening. I got back to the room after we’d cleaned up and Jessie called me to see if I wanted to go out. I wasn’t nearly ready and they were leaving right then, so I decided it’d just be another overnight to stay on the ship (Meghna had left before dinner, and the rest of Club HAL was leaving around the same time as Jessie). I went to the OB for a bit and talked with Lauren (one of the dancers who was on the Oosterdam last summer as well), then called it an early night, hopefully with better sleep than last night