Dry Dock in Hamburg

And the boat is out of the water....

We are now in dry dock. They essentially had us drive into this tank, I guess you would call it, and then drained out all the water. We are apparently resting on concrete blocks with cushioning. I'll try to take some pictures later to show. And now that we're staying in one place for awhile, I think I'll try to find an internet cafe, and finally post some pictures.

So far dry dock has been pretty nice. The guest services crew all decided to buy coveralls so that we don't have to get our clothes dirty while we're here since we don't have to wear our uniforms. The first day we went around and covered all the floors in our areas with plastic so that it won't get dirty. This was actually quite a long process, and we were pretty creative with it...

Since then, we've been doing a lot of cleaning. And we deal with all the contractors on board, so that means that we're still doing a lot of checking in, and checking out as well. This is sometimes difficult since they mostly only speak Polish or German, or some other language than English. But we've been managing.

I haven't managed to get out yet since I've been doing the night shift and am pretty tired during the day. But tonight is my last night, so I guess we'll see. The others went into the red light district the other night, and I heard some iteresting stories from there...

The weather here is much colder too, I wasn't quite prepared for this, it's been as cold as 10 degrees, and it's been pretty rainy. Hopefully the weather is much nicer back home.

The dock in Cork, Ireland, when we arrived in Europe.

We actually arrived earlier than scheduled, due to a guest having a medical emergency (he had a heart attack, I think he ended up being okay though). So instead of arriving in the morning, we arrived at midnight, and all the crew of course decided to get off the ship.

Of course, during the week in a small town, there isn't really too much open... actually, nothing at all was open, much to our dismay.

Luckily one pub owner near the pier realized the profit he could make off the crew, so he opened up, and we all piled in for ridiculously expensive beer in an Irish Pub. From left to right, these are some of the people I worked with: Sara (my roommate) from Italy, Humberto from Mexico, Natasha from Puerto Rico, Karoly from Hungary, me, and Marcelo from Brazil. We're a pretty international department.

Showing our creative side with the plastic that covers the floors. I don't have pictures of us putting the actual plastic down, unfortunately, maybe I'll steal some from people later to post. Let's just say that it involved some rolling on the floor, as well as a process we called "the tiger" to make sure that it stuck...

Atlantic Crossing

Alright, I think I'll make this a quick one. We are now officially on our way to Europe. We left Bermuda today, and we have the next 5 days at sea. We even passed through the Bermuda Triangle, but nothing interesting happened, and we made it out okay.

The guests are definitely demanding this cruise, which we keep hearing is a good warm-up for Europe. Tomorrow I move back to the desk from being the telephone operator for a couple of cruises. Hopefully I still remember how to do things. At least we'll have a bit of a break while we're in dry dock in Hamburg, Germany for a couple of weeks. But of course that also means a really messy/dirty ship while they fix everything up. And lots of training. But of course it also means no guests....

Lifeboats

I was trying to decide just what I should write about since it's been awhile since I've been online. Then I remembered that I had mentioned my new emergency number awhile ago...


Anyway, so with my new emergency number I am at one of the passenger lifeboat station, and I have to participate in the passenger drill (which somehow seems to always be on my break on the first day which makes my day seem even longer, but that's another story...) So, this week, as a part of the crew drill, they had to lower the lifeboats on the starboard side to make sure that everything was working properly. So that meant a lifeboat ride for me!

Not quite as exciting as it sounds really, but still kind of cool. After we had our drill, which for me consisted of pretty much just standing at my station, everyone from our crew had to get into the lifeboat while it was being lowered. I sincerely hope that we don't have any emergencies and actually have to use those things, because they can fit 150 people, but that's only if you get very close to your neighbours.

I was on shift during this time, so it was sort of nice to be able to sit in the lifeboat as they drove it around for 40 minutes. We did have one small incident where we decided to play bumper-boats with another lifeboat, but they are both okay, and survived the incident.

Other than that, things are still going well, I got off the ship the other day and went to lunch in Costa Rica with my coworkers from Mexico. Definitley nice to have some real food for once.

I've been getting a few requests for pictures - the computers on the ship, which are the ones I mostly use, don't have usb ports available because they're very worried about viruses. So, maybe once we're in Europe I'll have a chance to go to an internet cafe to post some of the pictures I've taken. Speaking of Europe, next cruise is our transatlantic cruise, Europe here we come!