DOCKTIME??!

Well it has finally happened, I have gotten so behind on my blogging that I cannot remember what happened on the four days between S.A. and Mauritius. But dana has reminded me of the big event: the global studies exam. What a fiasco this was. We had one day after S.A. before the exam, and that one global studies class was supposed to be a review. Well it turns out their idea of a review was to inform us each of the teachers would be set up in a different classroom for the hour and a half of class and send us off to ask them our own questions. This meant that 732 students were released to go find one of the dozens of guest teachers from the past 15 classes about random topics and figure out what to study from each of them for the exam. The exam was 100 questions, 3-6 from each teacher that spoke in global studies. These topics ranged from wind patterns to each countries history to the evolution of species. It was chaos. Everyone threw a huge fit and complained to the directors, who informed us that they hadn’t met until 45 minutes before class that morning to decide how to do a review. So pretty much everyone had one afternoon to cram all the information- some people were freaking out a bit but try as I might I could not manage to stress myself out over it. It’s just really hard to get into the study/school mode here. Needless to say the average on the exam was pretty low, thank goodness for the huge curve or else most people would not have passed.

Mauritius was an enjoyable short stop; there isn’t a lot to report since it was just a day. Dana and I signed up for an SAS trip called blue safari which was a 45 minute tour in a little submersible- so a tour of the reefs and a shipwreck about 30m down. There were two submarines, one seated like 15 and one seated 5, we snagged the 5 seater which was a good choice because the walls were just huge glass windows giving us a panoramic view whereas the bigger one only had portholes. Also a cool little factoid, everything that was red on the surface turned pretty much black underwater- my swimsuit, nailpolish, even our blood changed to a creepy greenish hue. It was crazy. We were hoping to spend the rest of the afternoon at the beach, we have yet to swim in the ocean, and the water there was gorgeous crystal clear turquoise and completely calm, but alas no such luck on the beach. The guide for our little blue safari decided to drive us to the market to drop us off there and that ended up taking an hour and a half entirely the opposite direction of the beach so we really didn’t have enough time. Instead we just sat down for a nice long lunch and took a water taxi back to the boat later that afternoon.