jackalope

One of the most amusing things about living with people from different countries, especially if they don't know a lot about the US, is that they'll believe just about anything you tell them! Last night we had something Swedish for dinner, the menu called it "Flying Jackob." We had never heard of that before, but we figured it must be similar to a Jackalope. Throughout dinner, we talked about how great it was to eat Jackalope again, and all that. The Australian and Brit who were eating with us played along, though they hadn't actually heard of Jackalope (until that Pixar short "Boundin" came out-there's a Jackalope in it). We described to them what Jackalopes are, and then a German girl sat down with us. So we went through the explanation again.
She said, "I thought this was chicken!"
And we said, "No, no, it's jackalope. Look at the menu-they just spelled it wrong!"
I thought she was going to start crying when she said, "It's like a rabbit, right? I don't want to eat a rabbit!"
"Too late," we said, "You already started eating it, may as well finish it now."
I think she figured out in the end that we weren't actually eating jackalope, but she did believe us for a while. I'm not sure what she believes about Jackalopes though.

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Rachel

Merry Christmas!

Well, folks, I think I've successfully survived my first holidays away from home.

I got back from 2 weeks of being on an A-team (a ministry team that stays off the ship for the durarion of time that the ship is in a port) and it was Thanksgiving. We had big plans for celebrating. But, it didn't work out. Then we replanned and it didn't work out again. I spent Thanksgiving Day taping paper to the floor, in preparation for drydock. It was pretty much the worst Thanksgiving of my life, but it's also the first time in my life to not be able to have Thanksgiving dinner and family discussions on thankfulness and getting totally annoyed by my relatives and all that.

Then, I was off the ship for another 2 weeks, another A-team, during drydock. I got back from that about a week before my birthday. After the big let-down of Thanksgiving, I was anticipating the worst. But, actually, my birthday was pretty good. My K-group (onboard family) had dinner with me, with chocolate cake and rainbow ice cream. And we arrived in the Philippines that day. There were about 6 birthday cards waiting for me in the mail container. So I got multiple birthday cards in the mail, on my birthday, for probably the first time in my life. Entering my mid-twenties was a bit traumatic though.

A week later was Christmas. We had celebration on board for about half the day Christmas Eve and all day Christmas Day. I think they plan a lot for us so that we don't have so much time to think about what we're missing at home. Again, because Thanksgiving was so terrible, Christmas didn't seem so bad to me. The annual picture of the ship's company is taken on Christmas day:



And here I've zoomed in on me and some of my closest friends:




Here I am with my cabinmates, three of them actually live with me and the one on the left just pretends to: