RyanOnTheShip: First day on the ship.

Oct 20

I’m on the ship! Everything worked. We had our first safety drills and meetings. Annette walked me around the ship for a first tour. Just enough to give me a sense of how much area there is to get lost in. I’m totally going to get lost. I can’t even remember which way is fore and which is aft yet. And yes you can feel the boat moving. I think we’re still in port, but you definitely feel it.

I’m unpacked now and the computer is set up so I can recharge my ipod and download my photos and such. I need to go get my A-pass tomorrow, which is how you spend money on the ship. It’s a card you charge up with cash and then swipe to spend it. A little freaky. It’s how you pay for internet too. So tomorrow I gotta get me one of those.

Ate in the crew cafeteria today. It seems very reasonable, but tonight I’ll be going to some restaurant with Annette and Megan which should be fun.

Also this keyboard is seeming less itty bitty as I get more used to typing on it. That’s sort of a relief. I was beginning to wonder if I’d get used to it at all.

Oh and my room is NICE. It’s small, but it’s not at all cramped and the privacy it affords is wonderful. It’s nice to be able to retreat somewhere when you’re in a new environment.

Tonight we had dinner in the Ocean View lounge which is the first place I actually saw the ocean moving by the ship. I didn’t know we were actually moving. Tonight the sea is perfectly still. The food was ok, and later Megan, Chris (her husband, who has joined us for this cruise) and I went to Quasar which is a disco lounge. Megan chose it for it’s relative seclusion. The older demographic of this cruise tends to stay away from that bar. We had a couple drinks and chatted and then headed back to the rooms. The décor in Quasar included a matrix of LED’s on the ceiling that flowed and strobed to the music. Pretty impressive really. I’ll have to take a video sometime before I don’t even notice them anymore.