7500!

September 26 2007

Here I sit, showered, shaved and well slept after a day with the ship at Princess Cays and me tucked up happily in bed. I have box count this week, the cruise version of soft count even if it is only the boxes off the tables. Fortunately the machines are only dropped once a week and there are no cashiers involved in counting them, only the head cashier. I have an hour and a half now before I start work, probably only 6 hours before the casino shuts and then an hour to finish box count after that. All in all a pretty short and easy day.

Once box count is finished I’ll head up to deck 15 and the buffet and get something to eat. It’s a strange time of day to be walking around the ship, there are few if any people out and about at 3.30 in the morning, the deserted decks are usually wet after having been cleaned and all the deck chairs are neatly stacked to the sides in preparation for all those pale and wobbly bodies to sprawl across come morning. The buffet is usually deserted as well, sometimes a few odd people eating but more often it’s only me scavenging among the limited selection available at that time. I’ve gotten into the habit of eating my main meal of the day when I finish work and when the buffet is empty. The view out the window may actually only be the reflection of the empty room and the food may be virtually identical each and every day but the selection is still bigger and the quality better than what is available in the staff mess. On port days I take advantage of the variety of real food available off the ship and on sea days I delve into the snack foods in my cabin to keep me going in the few breaks between working but I still seek out that fried selection from deck 15 at night.

The journey back to my cabin is equally as eerie because now I have to walk along deserted passenger corridors to the bow of the ship before taking the crew lift down to deck 6 and home. Walking along the corridors it’s necessary to keep an eye on the floor. People who have ordered room service, or simply loaded up a plate at the buffet and taken it back to their room, leave the empty plates outside their doors. Some of the plates are neatly covered with a napkin as if there is some shame in what they’ve done or, perhaps, out of respect for the dead while others simply stack the plates haphazardly as if proudly displaying their kill.

Once I get back to my cabin, if I’m lucky my roommate is out and I can turn the lights on. Changing and crawling into a neatly made bed that even has my boxer shorts folded and carefully placed on the pillow by the cabin steward I can stretch out (okay, even I couldn’t write that bit without laughing), set my alarm and read for a short time before falling asleep. I’m lucky that my original roommate had his ‘medical problem’ and got sent home. That meant that I could appropriate the bottom bunk and the advantages are numerous. It’s a little further away from the air-conditioning vent and doesn’t get as cold. There is much more storage both in cupboards and on a shelf that runs the entire length of the bunk. It also has a small bedside table with a drawer and a shelf, a handy place to put my growing collection of magazines. My wardrobe is quite big and more than ample to hold the clothes that I have, a shelf at the top with my backpack and a few odds and ends and a pile of dirty clothes accumulating in the bottom. Every couple of days I simply throw all the dirty clothes into a bag, leave it on my bunk and the next night it all comes back, folded or on hangers. The bill is minimal with my uniform being laundered for free and it only costing, at the most, $5 a week to have all my other clothes cleaned. A cheap price if it saves me having to spend wasted time in the crew laundrette fighting for one of the washers or dryers and having to figure out how to use the iron.

What do I have planned for this week? I am in desperate need of a haircut so I’ll be heading back to my Jamaican barber on Wednesday. Thursday is Grand Cayman and my day to pick up new magazines and drink coffee while looking out at the harbour. Friday is Cozumel and Maria (the other cashier) and I are heading out for cheap Mexican food and even cheaper beers. Sounds like a rough week but I guess that’s what you get sailing the Caribbean. I’ve been using my new camera like a demon, basically retaking the same shots that I had already taken with my old camera so I can do a comparison and see if the money was worth it but also in an attempt to figure out all that it can do. Just wait until I get to Walt Disney World and I start reporting how many photos I’m taking each day.  I would have had to have taken out a second mortgage to pay for the film processing costs in the old days so I, for one, am a big supporter of the digital revolution.

So, week has gone by since I wrote the above and now I sit here, showered and shaved and with about 3 hours before I start work.

Last week I managed to get my Jamaican haircut and I was pretty happy with the result. Admittedly it’s a pretty rough head and it would be hard for even a really bad haircut to make it look any worse but it’s tidy, fast to wash and dry and at least I have some hair to get cut, even if it is getting greyer and greyer every day. The haircut was my big adventure for Jamaica, along with lunch at a little restaurant. Grand Cayman saw me eating takeaway €œpay by the weight€ food from a supermarket and then sitting in a little coffee shop overlooking the harbour and reading a magazine with one eye and watching the people go past with the other. In Cozumel Maria and I wandered through most of the tourist shops in town and then ate cheap Mexican food and drank cheap Mexican beer (or at least I did, she drank water) in a little restaurant skirting the main plaza. All in all a somewhat typical week.

This week is going to be a little different. We have a Coast Guard inspection to get through. I’m not too sure how often it happens; this is the first one since I’ve been aboard so it can’t be too often. We have had it drummed into us that we have to know absolutely everything there is to know about safety onboard and especially everything there is to know about our duties. We will be having a drill and there will be Coast guard guys roaming around asking random people random questions and woe betide if you get or wrong or, even worse, say you don’t know. I would hate to be the one that screws up and makes the whole ship have to go through the same thing next week (and the next week and so on until we get it right) because I can’t imagine the captain being too impressed I doubt anyone else would talk to me. Apart from that the week is just going to be the normal round of working with a little bit of getting off and eating and taking photos. My big purchase for the week is going to be a couple of extra memory cards for my camera which should give me the capability to take about 750 photos a day at Walt Disney World (which is only 3.5 weeks away!!) without having to rush back and download them to my laptop. Now let’s take a second to do the maths here€¦750 a day by 10 days€¦uhm, that’s about 7500 photos. I hope everyone’s prepared for a long time spent looking at my holiday snaps.

I know that this is probably the shortest email I’ve sent the whole time I’ve been here but routine is really putting a kink in my doing anything at all interesting. Don’t be surprised if there isn’t much out of me for the next few weeks but once I get off the ship and hit Walt Disney World I’m sure that things will pick up on the writing front.

Greg