Finally Back on the Ship

So, after an already long vacation, and then a nice 2 week bought with a bad flu, I am finally back on the ship. My trip was fairly uneventful, aside from being pulled aside in the Toronto airport after customs. They took me to a room on the right hand side, and the customs officer asked me about four times if I really had nothing to declare. I of course answered no, that I was just in transit through the US. He then opened my bags and verified this.... very exciting.

My flights were good, we left a bit late from the JFK airport, someone needed some medical attention onboard, but they never fully let us know why. So then I got to Barcelona. More about Barcelona another time, when I'll post some pictures too.

Life on the boat has been fairly easy to return to. Everything is mostly the same, it is just taking some time to remember everything, and learn the new processes for things. We also have a mostly new team. There are I think four new hires since I left. I am now one of the more senior people on the team, which feels a bit weird since I was the newbie for so long. Right now we have 3 Mexicans, an Argentinian, a Britt, one other Canadian, an Italian, a Brazilian, and an Indian on the team. We're still very international.

Today was an interesting day. I'm not sure on the exact details, whether the immigration authorities changed their policies, or whether it was partly our fault, but they decided today that the Greek officials wanted to see all the non-EU passports before we were cleared to leave port today. This essentially meant that we needed to collect 1700 passports from guests.

I got called into work an hour and a half early, and got to stand in the Pier Terminal informing guests of this. There were two of us there stopping all our guests as they came in (there were I think 3 other ships there too, one was the QE2). I'm pretty sure that I will hear "are you a guest on the Brilliance? What country is your passport from? The local authorities are requiring us to collect all non-EU passports so that they can look at them before we are cleared to set sail this evening. If you have a passport with you now, we can collect it here, or if it is still on the ship, then you need to take it to Guest Services on deck number 4 as soon as possible..."

Of course lots of people didn't want to hand over passports. Especially Americans. "we've always been told never to surrender our passports to anyone when travelling". And a surprisingly large number of them seemed to think it was because of the election. But of course we were collecting all non-EU, not just American, but that seems to be how they think.

Anyway, I'm tired out now from standing on the pier for 5 hours telling everyone this constantly, and trying to relieve their fears that we will lose their passports. Times like these I sort of wonder what I'm doing here....