2 Days Until Spain

Hello Everyone!
I am now 8 hours ahead of you all and tomorrow we are done advancing the clocks forward for a while, landing on 9 hours ahead of Cali... YAY! The past couple of days have been pretty busy and they are about to get even busier so I hope I will be able to keep up to date on my blogs.
Lets start from wednesday... Our ship had an amazing race competition that involved finding different checkpoints based on clues which were word scrambles, riddles, anagrams etc. My team was made up of three guys in our hall and 5 girls. We had a lot of fun trying to figure everything out and running around the ship well, not running, speed walking :) Unfortunately we did not win (there were 80 teams!) but we had a lot of fun in the process.
Two of the people in my hall had birthdays in the last two days so we had two different birthday party dinners followed by birthday cake that their families ordered. It was fun to be a part of celebrating their birthdays and was a great opportunity for some bonding.
Yesterday was a very interesting day. I was so tired from all of the time changes that I almost fell asleep in all of my classes. As soon as they were over I came back to my room and took a nap. I then woke up....5 hours later! Needless to say I felt very refreshed and was able to take on the rest of the day easily. Due to too much sleep however, I was not tired at night and Danielle and I proceeded to stay up talking until 4am. It was pretty hard waking up this morning but we had a nice room mate bonding night.
Tomorrow we stop in the Gibraltar straight for gas, it will be the first time I see land in 9 days! I also have a test tomorrow in my global studies class and have another test on Sunday. As of Sunday we will have completed 1/3 of classes.
Tonight I had dinner with my extended family that I signed up for. My “mom” is the dean of students so I plan to get in good with her :) She seems really nice and we had a great conversation over dinner. After dinner with the “family” I rushed off to a photography seminar so I could learn about interesting ways to take pictures and how to get a different perspective of the world. Right after that I went to a seminar on independent travel in Countries where a panel of people that have traveled a lot answered questions and told stories about their experiences.
We will be arriving in Spain in two days!!! I am so exhausted, excited, and stir crazy so I can’t wait to get off the ship and explore.
Off to study for my tests, miss and love you all,
Lauren