celebrating july 4th in European waters

July 4, 2013: Sea Day
My second 4th of July on ships. This one was definitely more interesting. Last year, it was kind of ignored on the ship, but here, I got an invitation to attend a party in the Northern Lights followed by “all American buffet” in the OB. That was interesting, but more on that later.
The morning shift was good. We played games, played with model magic and went to the sports deck. One girl was there 15 minutes early, which was odd, but only about 10 of the tweens came in total, so that made the morning easier. They all had fun and didn’t want to leave when we closed at 11:30. I had a somewhat quick lunch, then back to work for the afternoon. We had a lot more kids come this afternoon. They all were pretty happy with pathfinders, and the craft activities, however a few of them were not happy with me when we did Gaga Ball. About half the group had played before, either yesterday or back home, but half had no idea how to play. While I was explaining the rules, a few of the boys who knew how to play already kept interrupting me, even knocking the ball out of my arms. He did stop finally when I threatened to not let him play. After that, they generally played nice with each other.
Dinner was quick, then it was back to work once again for Spy Night! After making spy IDs, we went on to the scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt took over 45 minutes; that was unexpected. For some reason, they just had a really hard time finding the clues and then realizing that we were serious about the rules about finding the clues first, then the answers. By the time they got to their spy gadgets, they were all very frustrated with their teams, so we made sure that didn’t take long. After, I did Chinese Numbers with them. Some had been on cruises before so they remembered the trick, and they were very bad about not telling it the rest of the group. It was an interesting night overall, but I think once they got over frustrations they were all pretty happy.
Once we superSan-ed, we all got ready and went to the Northern Lights for the 4th of July party. It was pretty fun, most people were standing around drinking though, so Meghna and I didn’t stay too long. We went to the OB for the “all American buffet,” there were a ton of people there, and some of the entertainment department had decorated, so the OB looked really cool with stars everywhere. They had punch, hot dogs, hamburgers, ribs and sandwiches. It was by far the biggest crowd I’ve seen at the OB. I hung out with Linda, James (a photographer), and Regina most of the night.