The Second November 20

This blog is WAYY overdue but I figured I should at least throw it out there that way back when we crossed the international date line. So we had two November 20ths! Even cooler though…we were literally in a time zone that does not exist for an entire day. (Standard -13…look it up) This was because, rather than reversing our clock 23 hours, el captaino that I love so much decided that he’d have us reverse our clocks 24 hours…and then lose an hour of sleep the next night. Thanks for that. Because my body just LOVES losing an hour of sleep every other night. Especially when we get the day off from school on the second November 20^th but not on November 21^st.

To keep us entertained during our day off from school on the Second November 20^th, we had a World Food Summit on the ship. It was kind of like a model UN except different. I don’t really know how it was different because I’ve never actually done Model UN. But I represented Japan and we wanted to find out a long term solution to the food crisis (which was that like 70% of the world’s supply of rice was wiped out in an out-of-season tsunami). Another group focused on the short term solution, which was especially fun because Japan was the only county unaffected by the “crisis” so we had all the power in that group. For the long term solution, as Japan, I got to repeat the refrain “environment” many many times while everybody else talked about population control and opening barriers to trade.

It was actually a fun hands-on learning experience. We had people representing the G-8 plus all the countries we’ve been to on this trip and a few other. There were also “lobbyists” and special interest groups running around trying to push their agendas. It was almost representative of how policy-makers go about solving international crises. Except that we’re a ship full of idealists and when “Condoleeza Rice” agreed that the US should stop investing in biofuels in order to provide food security to SE Asia I had to step in and just tell her that she simply could not agree to that.

In the end though, I’m pretty sure that Japan won.