Preparing for an end

You may know this by now, but we get woken up before every watch and meal. This day was no different, at 11 am someone (I didn’t really catch who) woke me up for the first watch of the day. This was just like every other day and the unordinary thing with this morning were not this, it was that when I stepped out of bed, my room was completely empty.

I was the only one of my three roommates that had slept the whole time until watch. After about ten minutes all three came rushing down in bikinis to switch clothes and eat breakfast. The explanation for their loss of absence before was that they had decided to go up earlier to sunbathe before watch.

They aren’t alone in these thoughts, basically the whole boat is sun crazy. Everyone wants to work on their tan the last days so that they can have as much color as possible when they arrive to Sweden. I thought that skip sleep when we’re already sleep deprived for some sun sounded crazy at first, but I have gotten warmed up to the thought and actually think about doing it tomorrow. This is because we have watch from twelve to four and can’t get a nice tan during that time because only some parts of our bodies are exposed to the sun. You can see this if you look at my stomach compared to my arm (my stomach is very pale). The only sun hours other than those that we have watch on are the ones before watch so it’s logical to sunbathe before watch if the tan is important.

I think that the obsession with the tan is more about how we’re so close to home that we can almost touch it than the actual sun itself. All we do is prepare for our arrival including sunbathing. Everyone on the boat have by now developed a homesickness and everyone is so keen to come home that the most common thing to hear on Gunilla is what someone’s going to do when they get off Gunilla, me included. I even have a list in my notes of things I want to do and food I want to eat when I come home. It has been a lovely, exiting, thrilling, tiring and fun trip and I’m thankful for the time I have had but the days are coming to an end and I meet that with both happiness and sorrow inside of me.

This is my last blog for this trip so just let me say thank you Gunilla. You’re an experience I will never forget.

By: Maja Aderby, midskepps