All Hail King Neptune...

Today is the day we crossed the equator and with crossing the equator comes a ceremony. A tribute to King Neptune and his Mermaid Queen. This ceremony is the foulest and most disgusting of ceremonies ever, but fun if you're not the dreaded Pollywog. Pollywogs are anyone who hasn't crossed the equator before. This would be me and 3 others in our cast. One guy in our cast even skipped out of it on other ceremonial crossings; so he's due to serve as a Pollywog. Two of them didn't participate, which is fine, but we should've been representing our cast well and the 3 of us served with pride and we STILL smell from it all. Our other 2 cast members were other roles. One was a nurse and one was a pirate. First we all met up in the Crow's Nest Bar up on deck 12. The others tied all of us Pollywogs together with rope and led us to the Lido Pool on Deck 11. We were marched in and escorted by the pirates. The judge (our Cruise Director) was leading the ceremony and pronouncing all of the Pollywog crimes. We were all penned up in a wood fashioned jail cell in a section of the pool while all the pirates tormented us with buckets of water. King Neptune and his Mermaid Queen made their entrance and sat in their thrones. The judge presented all the Pollywogs and their crimes to the royalty as we all knelt before them while our crimes were read. As cast I guess our crime was that we're too cute, we could sing AND dance, and that we had bodies that no one on the ship could ever achieve. That was a laugh. The Mermaid Queen being jealous of her husband's attraction to the girls sent us to kiss the fish and be at the whim of the doctors and nurses. We were escorted over to this HUGE fish sprawled out on a table and forced to kiss it by the pirates. We were then led to the operating table where the doctors and nurses smeared all kinds of disgusting concoctions all over us. I was close to vomiting as eggs were smashed on my head, bean soup was poured all over me, some anchovy mixture was smeared on me and whipped cream. The smell was incredibly disgusting. We were chosen to "live" which is not a good thing because we had to sit poolside with this foul mixture of cold ingredients all over us. Some were fortunate enough to get dunked for the sharks, which meant they were IN the pool and getting rinsed. The ceremony went on and the food was starting to dry. Before I let anything get too dry, I chased one of our girls posing as a pirate and gave her a BIG hug with all my slimy goodness. Ha ha!! Revenge!! It was THE most disgusting hazing event (well since I was never part of a fraternity so the only hazing event) I've ever been through. I heard that navies get ultimately worse so I'm thankful to have participated in a mild one. I'll have my certificate of crossing the equator now and on the next one I can torment the Pollywogs as a pirate or doctor. I took a shower afterwards to get all the nasty smells off me. I washed my hair twice and scrubbed down and there's STILL a faint smell of the mixture. Yuck!!! It was fun though and with some other postings I'll get some pictures up soon. We actually cross the equator around midnight tonight. I can't wait to see the water swirl the other direction.

We're on our way to Ecuador now. Galapagos central. The Islands are too far away from port to see, but maybe another time. I was out in Amador, Panama for a bit, but we didn't have much time to see anything but a mall. That's just how it goes on these changeover cruises. Peru and Antarctica are just around the corner though. I would like to see Machu Pichu, but I don't know if that will happen. I'll wait and find out.