Abanodon Ship!

11:30am EEST/4:30am EDT

Just got back from my first lifeboat drill. No big deal. My assembly station is a bunch of the musicians and singers and dancers… And all the new people. So basically, our job is to stand there and not be in the way. Which, if the ship is sinking, is fine with me. And then a meeting with the whole crew and the captain, which was pretty uneventful. I guess he’d been on vacation or something and had just recently come back (I think he rejoined the ship the same day I signed on) so he didn’t really have anything to say. Not that I minded that either. And then the S.T.Y.L.E. awards. STYLE (cuz I’m too lazy to type it with the periods) is an acronym NCL uses for… the crew? Or something? It’s like a philosophy of the company and… They do a great job of jamming it in your face. We have to wear STYLE pins every day as part of the uniform, things about STYLE or the “stylish crew” are all over in the back crew stairways and stuff… And they talk to the guests about it too – there are STYLE cards the guests can fill out about a crew member. STYLE stands for “Service, Teamwork, and Yes Lead to Excellence!” and every month, they have an awards ceremony where crew members, who are nominated by other crew members, are chosen for various things they’ve done onboard and win various prizes. For example, crew member of the month gets you $400. There are 12 categories, I believe, and some are for individuals and others for teams. The individual winners get to stay a night (and can bring a friend) in one of the big suites with butler service… A bunch of the other prizes are free meals in one of the nicer restaurants with a bottle of wine, etc etc. Even though the lady who was presenting the awards had horrible timing with her speech and the Powerpoint presentation, she burned through it and it was mercifully short – although the cheese factor was still pretty high. And THEN we had a Cruise Programs department meeting. Which again, wasn’t too hateful. Sat and talked about various issues that had come up, presented those STYLE cards to the people they were about, introduced the new guys (including me) and wrapped up. All told, the whole thing (including the fire drill that immediately preceded the lifeboat drill) only took about an hour and 15 minutes. Not bad at all.

Today, we’re in Helsinki, Finland. I don’t think I’m going to get off the ship today, for a few reasons. One: I need to do laundry. More like, I need to figure out where to do my laundry... And then do it. Two: my right knee is REALLY pissed at me about yesterday. I need to start stretching and stuff on a regular basis, but ESPECIALLY if I’m going to be walking around for 4 and 5 hours at a time. Three: the city isn’t really close. There’s a shuttle you have to take, and it costs 10 bucks for a round trip ticket and… Well, I don’t have 10 bucks. Not til tomorrow, anyway. Saturday is payday. It’s also our first day in St. Petersburg and I can’t pick up my money until 1:30pm. I have a ticket for the shuttle to St. Petersburg but I don’t know if I should trade it for a ticket for Sunday, since I don’t really have money and I can’t pick up my pay until 1:30… Bah we’ll see. Anyway uh… Oh right. Four: we’ll be back to Helsinki next month. And Oslo! Of course, the pay I get now is SUPPOSED to last me for the whole month (since we only get paid monthly) but I have to give it all to other people. So we’ll see. I think I can make something work so that I can go to some of these places next time around. Anyway, those are the reasons I’m staying onboard today.

Tonight is the first night I’m not scheduled in the theater. I don’t know how I feel about that… I kind of like it in there, but probably because it’s like a “safe zone” of sorts. It’s familiar and comfortable because it’s where I’ve spent most of my time thus far. Speaking of, last night I sat backstage for the Country Gold show. The music wasn’t TOO horrible, but it was still pretty irritating. Nice part was, though, the only thing I did the whole show was hand the cruise director a wireless mic, and hold the curtain open for a guy who had to hold a girl up in the air as they went out on stage. And then before the show, lay out all the performers’ mics and check the batteries… After the show, put them away. Easy enough. Actually, most of this job is pretty damn easy, once you learn where things are and the basic procedure of what they want done. Ya know, for trivia, turn on and unmute the mic. Wait for the start time, and turn off the background music. Done for an hour. Come back, turn the background music on, put the mic away (unless there’s more trivia later). Sometimes you run into some weird issues (we had one with the video feed to the TVs from the Wii a couple days ago) but… That’s the bulk of my job. That and setting up/striking stage sets. Mic checks and shows in the theater are pretty easy, although right now I’m not doing much with them. But watching Matt, he’s usually not doing much. Since the shows are the same, the channel mutes and stuff are all programmed in the board, so, for the most part, it’s pushing Next a bunch of times throughout the show. And playing background music or a backing track for the show. Setting up bands is usually only a few channels. 3 or 4 on drums, bass, keys, 3 horns, and vocals. The board in the booth is big enough that everything has a dedicated channel. Everything’s labeled so it’s the same every time. Some of the smaller live music setups are the same – everything’s labeled and the boards have dedicated tracks for, say, the karaoke mics and the band. Pretty much a cakewalk. Mmmmmm cake…

My belly just grumbled real loud. I was thinking I might head up to the mess hall to get some foods, and I’d say that confirms it. I need to figure out where all on the ship has wifi, so I can tote my laptop around and get online. Gotta be careful though, I spent 43% of my internet card last night getting this blog and the photo album set up. The internet on board is fairly slow and cuts in and out when at sea. Understandable, the weather wasn’t great last night and the internet’s coming over satellite to the middle of the sea… There IS a souvenir shop right off the gangway – wonder if I take my laptop up a few decks and to a place with some windows, if maybe I could pick up some internets from them. I’ll have to do some experimentation. Also, I wonder if I could transfer Word documents over to a Blackberry and then like… Copy/Paste them. Or just this amount of text. Or something. Igor told me it’s no problem to find wifi in the ports of call, but I walked around for hours yesterday before I could find one that wasn’t locked that actually was connected. Thus the Blackberry plan AT&T offered seems to be pretty slick. OH – that reminds me. I need to call T-Mobile too. I owe them some money and I need to get them to cancel my service or whatever. NOTE TO SELF!

Ok for real, my stomach sounds like it’s going to start ingesting my other organs if I don’t eat something soon.