So in the fall of 1999 I was told about a summer voyage that was to embark on a tour around the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic Ocean. Thinking..."What the Heck"...I decided to apply to the University of Pittsburg's program Semester at Sea, and you know what? Those suckers let me in.
After a full junior year in college working my butt off to pay for the trip and other expenses, just before my twenty-first birthday I got onto a plane headed for Frankfurt, Germany and eventually Athens, Greece. Not knowing what surely to expect and soon found myself on a voyage of knowledge and self discovery. Little to my knowledge I would make ties to friends that would last a lifetime and see places that I only knew about from history books and dreams.
In total, I traveled to Greece, Spain, Norway, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Egypt, and Israel. I had a special moment with a new friend in a church in Cadiz, was forty feet from Eddie Vedder at a Pearl Jam concert in Oslo, I played in the confines of Red Square and the Kremlin in Moscow, saw the very first smurf in Belgium, almost got married in Portugal but did cut off half my hair, hiked up the Duomo in Firenze, walked through the depths of a pyramid in Egypt, sank in the Dead Sea and hit an Irish Pub in almost every country.
The friends I made on the trip were imcomparable to anyone I have back home. Friends that are now scattered across the country constantly IMing or calling one another to tell each other how much we miss them. My roommate, Amanda is from Kettering Ohio and goes to the University of Miami in Ohio. She is a wonderful person with a good heart, I saw her writting to her boyfriend (Anders) half of the voyage, the other half she was sleeping in the room or working in the library. Then there's Dawna, who is from Florida and attends Florida State University. She was the first person I met on the entire voyage and along with Amanda the three of us shared a cab from our hotel in Greece to the ship. I will never forget the three of us getting excited to board this massive ship and then were told to go the opposite direction. However the MTS Odysseus soon became our home and we had the ships to ourselves for the first couple of days.
Then there is the family, of which I was adopted into. See I met this guy in a church in Cadiz and we started talking about this huge Corpus Cristie thing and soon he was inviting me to go out with him and his friends that night. Unfortunatley I had to bail but spent the night haveing a wonderful conversation with Dawna. He left the next day for Barcelona and I didnt see him the rest of the time while we were in Spain. That was a good thing because for some reason it kept us thinking of one another and soon we became inseperable for the rest of the trip and even now. This is Douglas Neal, the brother in the family. Well one night in Norway I was introduced to the rest of the family. Ellie Bayrd, the Daughter/Sister, Janay Ramos, the mother, Brad, the disapearing cousin, and Todd, the poolman. Soon I was adopted into the family as the cat and moved up in the ranks to be the babysitter...soon the kids were taking care of me and I quit my responsibilites as the sitter (some would say that they fired me) and became the massuse. Well from that night that I met them in Norway we all became the best of friends and even though the family tree grew to be quite large, the six of us were the Rat Pack of it all.
Norway was beautiful, green and cold. Traveling up the Fjords we began to feel the anticipation of finally arriving at a port after five days of rough seas. I for one was glad to be back on dry land. Norway was an interesting port. It seemed as though everything was very expensive.
~D~