living like elle

This blog is about the place I call home right now and how living on a ship works 🙂

So as you probably know by now, I live on a ship. I packed two duffel bags for four months and moved my life onto a ship that sails the world. Our ship is called the MV World Odyssey and its homeport is Germany. So everything on the boat is in German, it took me way too long to figure out which bathrooms were the women’s. There are around 500 students who live on the ship, and another 600 staff, faculty, and ship families that live here as well.

Jessica is my amazing friend who came on this voyage with me. We moved onto the ship on January 5th, into an outside double room which is a nice space but can get crowded with all the shit we have. At this point I have been living on a ship for over a month so I feel confident talking about the ins and outs of ship-life. The ship doubles as our classroom, college campus, and home. We take classes in various random rooms around the boat, we hang out with our friends, and we have our room which is our home. It’s a very unique dynamic living here, we have breakfast, lunch and dinner with our professors, counselors, doctors. We spend so much time with the staff working here. If we have a question about one of our classes we find our professor at lunch. It’s an awesome dynamic, it’s as if we’re all family. Everyone has each other’s back and we all care for each other.

Living on a ship is not as glamorous as it may seem though, we do our laundry by hand in our sinks, we get so bored we do crazy things like start a damn blog, we generally live in a four by four box, and people take to smoking cigs as a fun and social activity because we are not allowed any alcohol. When we do have an occasional beverage night we are limited to two drinks, they search all our bags, we can not miss class, there are random drug tests, and people get drunk tanked. There’s a lot of wack shit honestly but overall the good will always be better than the bad and we put up with the wack shit they put us through because in the end everything they do is for our best interest and lets be honest; it builds character. Although they wonder why students always drink too much and get in trouble in the country, it’s because they have us on this tight leash for all of our sea legs. Then you put the monkeys in the wild and they go wild, we’re young dumb college students I don’t know what else anyone would expect. 

Above all that, living on a boat is pretty fucking awesome. At any time of day you look out and you have the best view you have ever seen in your life, you’re surrounded by water 24/7 with no sense of where your location may be. The sunrises and sunsets are unreal, the most beautiful things I have ever seen. The people! OMG I love the people on this boat, everyone is genuine and so amazing. The food gets repetitive and I may eat butter noodles everyday but eating dinner with your friends every night is so fun. The connections you make, I’ve known these people for one month, some only a week or two and they feel like family. You’re always trying something new because why not. Even though it sucks not having your phone or wifi there is something so beyond wholesome about all of us being disconnected and living in our own ship world. 

Living on a ship is a weird concept and I’m still trying to figure it out. I moved a few bags into a box sized room on a floating campus and had no idea what the future of this move had in store for me. Living here is incredible, we have created this community on this 600 foot floating world. It’s like our own little town where we can walk everywhere. You know damn near everyone on the boat and the connections are so pure and wholesome. It’s like a huge family, I know that sounds weird but when you live this close with so many other humans you all become family and you all have each other’s back. There’s definitely some drama, it feels like high school at times but it’s honestly one of my sources of entertainment, it’s like the news of the ship.  

I want to talk a little bit about how the education on the boat works, I’ve talked about how awesome the views, the people, and the community is but we are all here getting an education. I was for sure a little skeptical about how education would work while on the ship, I had no idea what to expect. To say the least, I am receiving the best education I ever have in my entire life. How classes work on the ship is every student is required to take the global studies course, and then you pick three other classes that fulfill requirements at your home university. I am taking global studies, macroeconomics, reading without borders, and agriculture: world interdependence to population and food. These may sound like average classes but on semester at sea they are so much more. We have A days and B days on the boat and it’s like a block schedule. We also only have classes during our sea legs. We just finished a 11 day sea leg to Jordan so we had classes for 11 days straight, but when we get to port our country travels on our weekends. But it’s not always that long, we only have a four day sea leg from Jordan to Cyprus. The professors on this boat are so amazing, they are the best professors I have ever had. I have never had professors care so much about their students and be so passionate about teaching us the course materials. My professors are so great that I love going to classes, I love listening to the lectures, and I love having class discussions. On semester at sea the class sizes are also much smaller then at my home university so there is so much one on one time with the professors, you can ask any question you need, and if you need to have a longer discussion you can meet them for lunch or dinner because they eat in the same places us students do. This ship is teaching me how to be a global citizen and instead of just learning about the US, all my classes are teaching me the content in a world view, I am learning about the entire world and the issues that it faces in regards to my specific classes. 

All in all if you ever get the opportunity to live on a boat. Say fuck it. Leave your college town, go out of your comfort zone and experience new things. This is the best thing I have ever done and even though I miss my family at home so much it’s going to be heartbreaking to have to leave my ship family in a few short months.