Sitting on a big boat, parked in a bigger river

First I must admit I am writing from class, however you will be happy to know this is part of my course requirements. Secondly, my professor is the spitting image of Ben. No joke he looks very similar, with a number of mannerisms that make it hard for me to separate him from my brother. At the moment, we are parked in the river that leads to the Shanghai port. Our current location is 31*09.47' N and 122*38.43' E. We have been traveling back and forth between Hong Kong and Shanghai for a number of days and now we are anchored down. Apparently, the distance between the two ports takes only
2-3 days to travel, however, for class and orientation we require 7 days at sea. So, as a group, we took a vote and decided to park for 2 days in order to save around 32 tons of fuel. The fog makes it difficult to see through but as the sky darkens a
number of freight liners are lighting up around us.

The wonderful thing about this experience is that we can really unite together and effect change like having the boat conserve fuel. With only 150 students we are all able to interact on a more personal level. The breakdown of students aboard ship is about 60 Americans, 10 Canadians, 20 Mexicans with a great amount of diversity among the remaining 60 or so remaining students. We have representatives from China, Japan, Singapore, Ghana, Spain, Australia, Germany, Bulgaria, and Russia (there are more but it is all I can think of at the moment). Our captain is Greek and many of the officers are Italian or Australian. The majority of professors are American however one of my courses is taught by a women who was born and raised in Germany but who has lived in Australia for 20 years and is the head of the Italian department at her home university, talk about multiculturalism. Most of the crew is Greek, Guatemalan, or Indonesian.

Classes are going well and beginning to realize they assigned too much work in the beginning so I think they are going to start lightening the load. I feel pretty confident though so I'm not too worried. Over all things are going quite well. Today is our last day of classes before heading into Shanghai, one of the busiest ports in the world! For the most part I am going to hang out with locals in Hangzhou where one of the girls aboard has family. After a week onboard the MV Oceanic II I am quite ready to get off. Sorry there aren't any pictures yet. Hopefully I can write from Shanghai and upload some. The internet on the ship is limited which restricts me from downloading pictures.