Getting to know you...

So now I shall start trying to catch up on the past 30 days I spent in Cape Town. I made it 30 days without getting sick, but the first day we actually got out to sea I caught a bug that has been going around the boat. It was some sort of flu bug, but I am finally getting over it and glad I got it at the beginning of the cruise rather than later. The one plus side to having a month stuck in port is that you get to bond with your fellow scientists as well as the crew. So, I will take this time to talk about some of the people I have met and the times we have had. This can be a good and/or bad thing. You want to build camaraderie between the scientist and ship crew so that you have a smooth sailing experience and their is always a chance for things to sour before you leave spending a month in close quarters amongst 60 people. Fortunately, for us, we all seemed to find and build relationships which has made this an enjoyable cruise so far. Usually it takes a couple weeks to get comfortable between the two groups and we had that going out the gates. It was funny and interesting to hang out with the crew at the local bars and get their perspective. We are just transient passengers that come and go through home. What I found amusing is that due to this ephemeral relationship they don't often bother learning our names. They just come up with nicknames. For instance, one of the guys, Allen, looks like like the albino dreadlock guys from the Matrix so they call him the "Matrix dude" and another guy has a resemblance to Matthew Broderick so the call him "Ferris" from Ferris Beullers Day Off (the other guy in the picture w/ "Ferris" was Jeff the computer guy from the boat. He was a fun guy to hang with). They hadn't come up with a name for me at that point, but one of the bar tenders had started referring to me as "Captain America" so they agreed that it was suitable enough and it has stuck since then. I don't know why other then the fact that I was obviously American, but I was relieved to say the least that I didn't get stuck with something that sucked. We also had a couple of Brazilians, Luciano and Rafael come on that have been fun to hang out with and are promising a good time once we get to Brazil. Looking forward to that day! They didn't really get nicknames other than the "two Brazilian guys!"




The bar we most frequented was a bar right down the the docks from us on the waterfront called "Mitchell's." It was a good atmosphere and surprisingly enough it had good food. I was one of the first places I ate when I arrived in Cape Town and they had a great seafood platter that cost about $10 American or about 70 Rand in South African currency. They also had great brick oven baked pizzas. We made good friends with the bartenders and throughout our time they would either take us or tell us the good local bars to go to, so we got to experience the tourist side as well as get a taste of the local lifestyle as well. One of the boats favorite nights at Mitchell's, though, was their karaoke night. If you were there you really didn't have much of a choice to sing so if you weren't comfortable getting up there, as I most certainly am not, then you start drinking beers and taking shots until you have enough liquid courage to make a fool of yourself. Fortunately "Ferris" and I did a song together and then I got talked into doing "Super Freak" with one of the kitchen staff, Mike. I was most certainly heavily intoxicated by this point so can't really vouch for how it went! I'm pretty sure one of the crew has a video of one or both of the performances so I will see if I can get my hands on it and then decide whether or not I am willing to show it! But Mitchell's was our watering hole for a month. From about noon until about 2 am you could find at least on person from our ship sitting in there. It was nice b/c we didn't have phones so if you went out on an adventure and came back to the boat and nobody was there you knew where to go. If you were a soccer, rugby or cricket fan then you were in luck. It was on all day everyday. I was a fan of the soccer, but none of us understood the rule to rugby or cricket and trying to explain them was even worse so we just didn't bother.


At the end of it all we were actually sad to leave. We had spend a month there with the locals getting to know them and it was starting to feel a little bit like home. I realized that when we left I had spent as much time there as I had in Miami and when I'm down I will have lived on the boat longer! The cruise has been going pretty good so far aside from the virus going around, but I will get into what's going on with the cruise over my next several posts. I'm trying to catch up with the Cape Town experience for now so I will try to get posts up more frequently now that I am feeling better and we are getting into a solid rhythm.

Cheers from somewhere in the South Atlantic,

-J