He turned to me as if to say

I wasn't going to post anything today, but it's 09/09/09, and the fact that it doesn't matter for the first time here whether I put the day or the month first, I thought it worthy of a posting.

Today, like a real sailor, I swabbed the deck (me hearties!). Before you ask, it was not, in fact, the poop deck. However, it is the deck where I clean the eggs, which might merit a name change, but I covered the whys of that yesterday.

My roommate Katie and I went to play football (soccer) with a bunch of guys from the ship tonight. It was really fun, and there are few times where I have felt more out of place. For one, we were the only girls. For two, there were only four white people in the group of 12 or so. For three, we went to a somewhat sketchy area. This cute little boy who was about eight or so kept calling me "white person" in French (Julie, help me out. What do they say?). Then he would laugh and laugh! I would make faces at him and take off my sunglasses and he would laugh! We ended up playing a bunch of guys who were congregating at the field, which was really intimidating. I only touched the ball a couple of times, but I did well both times, so I felt happy about that. We ended up having to walk back to the ship as we apparently only arranged for a ride OUT to the field, and I got to walk with a deckhand named Greg from Liberia. He was a cool guy, and walking with him made me feel better about walking at night. Plus, I had a bunch of dirt in my eyes, so I was practically crying all the way home and had to wear my sunglasses most of the way. And Africa, well they just don't have street lights. But about halfway there I got my eye issues worked out and it ended up being okay. All the guys we played with wanted us to come out with them and play on Monday, but I don't know if I will.