Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Sorry it took so long! Malta, Turkey and Tunisia

Well I don't even know where to begin. Malta was great! Seeing mom, dad and Morgan was awesome. We had a great time and it felt so good to sleep in a normal bed although I do love my bed on the ship too :) We had a great day in the old town Mdina which was really neat. We saw Michael Jackson's This Is It and for anyone who hasn't seen it, go see it! It's amazing. Having to say another goodbye to them was hard but having the chance to show mom, dad and Morg my life right now was really good. There's no words to describe what I'm experiencing. It truly is life changing and I'm glad they got to meet my crew, second family and second home.

We had cold and rocky sail to Turkey but it was all worth it once we got there. Turkey was amazing I loved it there and want to go back someday because it was so beautiful and the people were so nice. We had a home stay with Turkish university students who are studying to be captains of ships. We were paired up to stay with people and Courtney and I had a really nice girl. She told us a lot about the Turkish lifestyle and culture and the breakfast her mom made was truly amazing. We had Turkish tea and coffee and traditional Turkish pastries. Then we got a tour of the high school in Istanbul that specializes in Marine studies. It was really interesting and everyone loved to here all our stories about all our travels.

Right now I'm in Tunisia and it's gorgeous here. Again the people are so nice. Yesterday a few of my friends and I had a taxidriver who took us on a tour of Tunis and we got to see Carthage which is an ancient Roman town. The second town the Romans built and then he took us to a village where the buildings are only blue and white. It was really cute and we had a nice lunch there. After that he dropped us of in the main area of the city Medina and we shopped around in the markets. Today we walked around Medina again and some of my friends got some great Henna tattoos. Tomorrow we go on our port program which will be a bus tour through Tunisia. We'll be going to the Sahara and seeing some of the places that Star Wars was filmed. All the guys are very excited about that. We'll be staying a hotel for a night and then heading back to ship all day the next day making a few stops here and there. We leave on the 4th of December and then we'll be heading to Morocco :)