Lottery Ticket

I consider myself to be a pretty lucky person. I am living on a ship with great peers and amazing professors. My classes only have 20 students in them and are incredibly informative. I love knowing that I will apply the knowledge from my classes to the ports we visit and I actually can see how my learning is applicable! Everything about the ship is remarkable and there is nothing to complain about... except my luck.

             Apparently I lost my luck when I moved into room 4015 on the ship. I've never been seasick before, but the Atlantic Ocean has bigger waves than I've ever encountered. To stop the seasickness, I placed a scopolamine patch behind my ear. The morning after I put the patch on, I woke up and my vision was slightly blurry. I didn't think much of it, but as I sat in class my vision got worse and I had to hold my textbook far from my face to read it. In my next class, I became slightly nervous when I realized I couldn't read the book at all, but I felt reassured because I could see everything else in the room and could read words that had font at least two inches tall. I blamed the blurry vision on the rocking boat and motion sickness. But, as I asked about other people's vision I quickly realized there was nothing normal about the blurriness- at which point I practically sprinted to the ship doctor. I soon learned that a rare side effect of the patch is blurry vision. Apparently my eyes were over-dilated (they looked completely black) and they could not focus on the small text. The box for the patches talked about what to do if you have blurry vision, but ironically, that is printed in size 8 font and I could not read that due to the blurry vision. The doctor informed me that this happens to a very small percentage of people. Thankfully, after removing the patch my vision returned to 20/20 within hours.

        So that was weird. Today my vision was perfect and I didn't feel sea sick, but I encountered another rare occurrence. We use electronic key cards, like the ones at hotels, to open our cabin doors. Mine has been finicky from the beginning and it often takes me a few swipes of the card to open my door. My door opened this morning but when I tried to open it after dinner, it flashed red lights at me. I tried for five more minutes and finally found the cabin steward, but his master key wouldn't open the door either. We then got the head honchos to use an actual key that manually opens the bolt and I sat in my room, in fear of getting locked out again, until the official doorman came to fix it. The official doorman's name is Prince. During the half hour Prince spent fixing my door I found out a few things: he is from India, this is his fourth year being on a ship, the electronic door locks take six AAA batteries, and best of all, the batteries on our doors only die every 14 months!! Between the odds of getting blurry vision and a dead door lock, I think I should buy a lottery ticket. As they would say in the Hunger Games, "may the odds be ever in your favor," and trust me, the odds of weird things happening are definitely in my favor!

     A trip does not become an adventure unless you have the unpredictable happen to you. So now, I can official say I am on the adventure of a lifetime!