Back to the ship.

The Equinox is the same as the Eclipse.  It’s insane, but it’s SO the same that it doesn’t even occur to me that I’m in a different place most of the time.  So instead of insane it seems normal, but it’s not.  It’s weird.

 

So to have a place be the same is one thing, but there are things about the people here that are the same too.  Even when they’re different people.  So when I walk through security I’ll think to myself.  “Oh yeah, you’re the friendly one,” or “you’re the one who’s going to scowl at me for no reason this time.”  Less scowling here in general actually than on the Eclipse.  Celebrity seems to recruit different ethnicities for different departments too.   This is not a good thing for breaking down stereotypes.  There are many exceptions, but a lot of the time people look like what they do. 

 

But beyond all of that there are several people that I’ve seen around that replace specific other people in my mind, like, “the spiky haired chick who hangs out at the bar,” and, “the security guy who stands there just like that,” and the one security girl is also strikingly similar.  There are others, but I know that the mind is a sorting machine so the similarities are somewhat manufactured and as I get to know any of these people, the similarities will surely fade, but for now; striking.

 

Just a note here.  This particular paragraph is about a week younger than the paragraph before.  Some people’s similarities fade, in part I believe, because the new people begin to inhabit and take over the places in my memory that the Eclipse people were before, and thus I merge rather than compare.  Sort of like the cuckoo chick pushing the competition out of the nest.  BUT there are some people though that defy differentiation, stubbornly remaining so similar to someone else that they do nothing but remind me of that other person.  I won’t name any names, but when Annette, who I was with on Eclipse, comes aboard next cruise, I will have to ask her for a ruling.

 

The rest of this post will be heavy on pictures, so I can just catch up to current events and not get too bogged down.

 

1st Port.  Sicily, Italy.  City – Messina.

 

Didn’t get off the ship today.  Too much training.  Next time.  Sicily is barely an island.  You could throw a rock and hit it from the mainland.

 

 

Second Port.  Piraeus, Greece.  (near Athens)

 

Did just a bit of walking.  Ate a peach.  Good one too.

 

And this is a picture of the most exciting thing that I saw at the port that day.  If you can’t figure out why, you might ask Jon Hiskes.  And Jon, I found a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in the crew library that I’ve been reading.  And you might note that this ship is no longer branded Celebrity, but someone on the ship told me that this ship used to be Celebrity, so I’m betting that this is the one.

 

Third Port.  Kusadasi, Turkey.  (near Ephasus)

 

Well Kusadasi was awesome.  What can I say.  I got a fantastic shave and haircut from Tomas the barber.  He is clearly the best.  I kid you not, it was just like the Bugs Bunny cartoon.  Shampoo, towel, haircut, lather, shave, aftershave, wax the ear hairs, wax the upper cheek, lotion, massage face, rinse whole head, dry, powder, blow dry, massage neck and arms.  Wow.

Dylan getting the treatment.

 

Then Tomas sent us across the street for Kebabs.  Second best decision of the day.  The lamb was incredible.  The flatbread was baked to order in their wood fired oven.   It was also Wow.

Did I mention that my first two new friends’ names on the ship are Brian and Dylan?

 

Hey look Jon and Celia, Donair!

They turned our lawn into a lounge.

 

Port Four.  Rhodes, Greece.

Nice old city.  Acceptable internet.  Lousy service.  How’s that for boiling it down.

Yeah, maybe you should expand your horizons.

 

Port Five.  Santorini.  -  A Big Day.

 

I skipped training and we rented ATV’s.  Nuff Said.

Do you see the zigzag path going up the cliff?

 Yeah.  We took the tram.

Helen.

 Ian.

Ryan.

I can barely express what public nuisances we were today.  I can’t believe they put up with this.

Woah. Fish and Octopus.  Sadly we didn’t eat that.

This was our super awesome doggy friend.  I think he recognized that we were pack animals and he tried to get us to stay by nipping our ankles, and then he ran beside the ATV’s for a good mile up an incredibly steep hill in the blistering heat.  We loved him.

Go Dancers!  My friends are so talented!

The entirety of the islands around Santorini are part of the crater formed from the largest volcanic eruption the world has ever known.

There are hardworking donkeys that take people up and down the path.  The others rode.  I probably should have too, but I wanted to walk.

The path.

The end of an epic day.  Best yet.  More to come.

 

Port Six.  Mykonos, Greece.

 

We had to make a conference call to Corning today.  The venue wasn’t so bad though.

People said this beach was not the best.  It seemed pretty good to me.

Hi.  We’re calling from the beach.

 

Later on tonight there was a big birthday party for Jason from a-capella.  That was pretty amazing.  It was down in the depths of the ship in crew bar where there’s lots of loud music and dancing.  It reminded me that you hear a lot of techno on the ship, and a lot of Lady Gaga and such.  It pretty much never changes.  Good time though.

 

Port Seven.  Naples, Italy.

 

There are other stories and photos about Naples in the other post, but here’s a little throwback to how I was doing my blog on the Appalachian trail.  This was back on the ship after the port.

And that was a pretty amazing way to end the first cruise. 

Technology hates me, technology loves me.

Well first off, let me apologize for not getting these posts up as often as I would like.  Some of the fault is due to my fighting with my computer and the internets of Europe.  Some of the fault is that I just haven’t written as much as I would like.

 

It’s been a very busy first cruise.  There are lots of training classes to go to, and the show schedule is a few more hours than it has been in the past, and of course in the evening there are parties to go to, people to hang out with, and entertainment to see and hear.  So it all adds up to not a lot of down time.  Add to that, amazing places that I want to do my best to get the most out of while I’m there; well the blog is one of the first things to slip through the cracks I’m afraid.

 

So I spent the day in Naples recently.  My friend Brian and I spent a lot of time walking around, which was great.  Naples is sort of a dirty run down city, but with amazing old castles and millions of tiny apartments all stacked on top of each other down tiny crooked alleys.  Laundry hangs on lines above you, people throw washwater out of their third story apartments into the street and the smell of urine is common.  I actually saw an average looking woman helping her 2yo son piss on the sidewalk of a well travelled street.  Pretty amazing. 

Ayyyyyyyy.

Anyhow, fantastic cultural experience, but when we started looking for internet to use we ran into all kinds of trouble.  The first place was a café where we bought drinks and then tried to connect.  First it wouldn’t work, then we were told to move to a table (dragged into place) closer to the door.  No?  Well try this other network.  Then my computer would connect, but strangely not Brian’s.  The connection would stop and start and was never very good.  Over the course of about 15 minutes we managed to download a single mp3 that Brian needed (he’s a jazz piano player).    So we went inside the port to a much cleaner fancier looking café.  They advertised internet, so I bought a sandwich and tried to log on.  Didn’t work, so I went up to ask and the guy’s English wasn’t very good, “The ship, Internet byldidlnea doesn’t work,” so, something about the ship and the internet not working.  When I looked confused he gets in my face and says, “Do You Speak ENGLISH?!” and repeats the non-english that he said before.  The sandwich sucked.

 

So we headed out of the port and into town again.  Lot’s of places are closed because it is Sunday, but we’re told to try McDonald’s.  Great.  Ok, so we go to Micky Dee’s and ask for the internet password.  Get this.  The password has to be TEXTED to your phone.  Ironically, I , who have never owned a cellphone can receive texts; but only through my Google voice account.  Fail.

 

So back on the ship I’ve been trying to get the $100 that I lost in the kiosk back.  There is a kiosk in each of the 2 crew bars that allows you to put dollars on your ship account which you can then spend anywhere on the ship.  There are no cash transactions on the ship.  So on my first day, I open my account, I get my A-pass (ID card/cash card) and I go to the machine which is about 10 feet away and I put in two $50 bills.  Something seemed not to go perfectly, but nothing too weird.  I thought the machines just displayed messages a bit differently on this ship or somesuch.  BUT when I go to get a drink at the bar the next day, no money, zero.  A hundred bucks, poof.

 

So I head down to the payroll office and they tell me to come back in a couple days after they take the money out of the machine and balance it against what is in people’s accounts.  If there’s an extra hundred, problem solved.  I come back after going to Naples for the day.  They tell me that they counted the money and it balanced.  Great.  But they say they will tell the Chief financial officer.  I’m not optimistic, but ok, I’m told to come back tomorrow.  When I get back to my room I get a phone call from chief financial and he asks me all about when exactly I say I put this money in and goes into detail about how they check and recheck the cash count and mistakes were not made.  He was not threatening but was vaguely menacing, perhaps to see if I would stick to my story, which I of course politely did.  “Well I guess we’ll just have to go back to the video and see if your story matches the tapes,” he says.  “Yes, thank you, that would be great,” I reply.  It is important to note here that not just the kiosks, but the entire ship is under constant video surveillance.  It is in effect a giant technology facilitated panopticon.

 

As I’m setting up for the glassblowing show that evening, Helen, my team leader come up to the stage and says, “they say they have your hundred dollars.”  And that I need to call right away and maybe run down to payroll immediately because the money went into another guy’s account and he and I both have to be there to sign papers.  I felt kind of bad about this, because this other guy is apparently waiting there to lose his free $100 that he got the other day through no fault of his own.  (he apparently used the kiosk before me, but I don’t remember anyone being there) So I call this number where there is no answer and then call someone else and they ask if I can come immediately, so I do.  Oh and right as I get to the payroll office, an officer tells me she just closed the door and to bang on the door, so I do, and the nice (but confused) human resources woman opens the door and says, “you don’t have to bang on the door, it’s open.”  The officer meant the other door inside the office.  Oops.  So the purser was there and she was waiting for me and gave me a paper to sign and, poof, a hundred dollars back in the account.

So in the end, the big brotherness of the ship got me my money back, which was awesome, but always remember, they might be watching. 

A day for flying.

Today the clock says I’m 9 hours older than I remember being.

Jet travel is always an amazing experience for me, and I think that’s the right way to feel.  We live in a special time, that we can climb inside a machine that will transport us halfway around the world in a matter of hours.

Ahh, but just because things are amazing doesn’t mean they work smoothly.  People are so much more unreliable than physics.  At the Seattle airport I showed up about 2 hours early for my flight thinking, “I’ll check in and then have a nice dinner, etc.”  I got to the gate and the airline people were setting up their computers whatever that means.  The one guy asked if I was waiting for a seat assignment and said he’d be doing that in about 10 minutes.  So I waited, a while, and another while, should have gone to get food, but I thought maybe I’d get to choose my seat first (I like the window) if I was early.  Well it never happened.  After an hour and a half of sitting and reading, people started BOARDING, so I went up.  “Oh no no, we’ll call your name.”  So I sat, and about a minute later I heard “Rblflbragh Mellinger,” so I went up, waited in line, “Oh no that wasn’t YOUR name.”  Right.  People are boarding.  Everyone is in line.  So I go to the counter again.  “Oh here’s your boarding pass.”  Thanks.

The flight was pretty good.  A lady asked me to trade seats so she could sit by her friend.  I thought her friend was in the middle of the plane (I DID get a window seat) so I was VERY reluctant, but after some more gesturing I discovered that he had a window seat on the other side of the plane.  So that worked out well.  I still got my window seat AND didn’t have to sit next to someone who was angry at me for not accommodating them. 

Then I fell asleep and had an AWESOME dream about the plane almost crashing.  I think that I’ve figured out that real-world white noise is a strong intensifier for my dreams.  The pilot was trying to put the plane down in the ocean, but the waves were WAY to big.  Think 20-25ft. swells.  So as he’s coming down this big wave comes at us and instead of crashing over the plane, it kicks the plane almost straight up, so the pilot gives the engines all the power they have, but the plane slows and rolls upside down.  This is all very vivid.  We’re going very slowly at this point but somehow the pilot rights the plane and gets us back on course.  There was some other stuff about my helping move around emergency mattresses once the plane had landed and other things that don’t make a whole lot of sense, but the action sequence was pretty phenomenal.  The real plane landed fine in Amsterdam, and the hop to Rome was uneventful.

So here’s the fixin’s bar for the bread that I took a picture of and then forgot.  Mmm.

Yummy Amsterdam Airport Omlette.  Note unadorned bread.  Grr.

Once in Rome, I was surprised at the lack of immigration control.  I guess that checkpoint in the Amsterdam airport when I showed my passport to the serious looking man covered it, because after I claimed my bags in Rome, I walked through the “Nothing to declare” door and I was basically on the curb. 

Non-crashing, to-Rome-flying, plane.

The bus to the hotel was a bit confusing.   The guy drove around the long term parking lot twice.  I saw people that had just gotten off the bus still at the stop on the second pass.  One guy got on at that stop with his girlfriend, then got off the bus , leaving his gf, and got back on at a different stop as we were leaving the parking lot.

Finally got to the hotel.  The clock says 11pm.  I’ll try to sleep until 6am then have breakfast and catch the bus to the ship.

First Post of the New Adventure.

Welcome!  As many of you probably know, I have signed up for another contract with Celebrity Cruise Lines to blow glass on one of their cruise ships.  The last time it was the Celebrity Eclipse.  This time it will be the Equinox.  The names are different, but the ships are almost exactly the same in layout and appearance.  Those of you that followed my last blog will recognize places from the other ship, on this ship.

I believe I will be flying to Rome next Thursday to board the ship on Friday.  There are many things to do before then, but getting this blog started is one of them, so I can check that off the list.  Another benefit this time around is that I found a nice offline editor, so I should be able to compose less rushed entries and upload them more frequently without  spending a ton of money on the ship's expensive wifi.

So I'll leave it at that for now.  Next time I'll try out the offline editor.  Wish me luck in travel and logistics.