Friday, April 16, 2004

(My First Week Here)

Well, so far the whole week has been spent running around, doing paperwork, training, going to orientation classes, answering calls that I DO know how to take care of. More on orientation tomorrow.

My second morning here, Mehai (the other IS manager) took me to a staff director's meeting so I could meet some of the key people. There are around 50 nationalities of people on the ship (95 total in Carnival, even though is a US-based-only cruise line), so communication is entertaining. At one point, the girl that was in charge of the spa pointed out that a lot of guests would be thirsty and didn't want to have to buy bottled water after paying a fortune for the spa. The main guy suggested that they put a pitcher of water and glasses in the spa. She retorted that it wouldn't help things at all. Everyone kept going back and forth about it, and she finally just said that it would tick people off to have a picture of water and glasses on the wall when they were thirsty. She hadn't ever heard the word "pitcher," and said that it was NOT an English word (she was from England). I really feel like a minority, I have only met two other Americans, and there are 1050 employees. Heck, I have met WAY more people from Romania alone than I have from the US. The guy that I work with is from Romania, as well as the waitress who normally serves me, and a number of other people that I have seen..

My roommate (Mark) is also British, although he will only be here another week. He was a DJ for Carnival for a while, and eventually moved to the Interactive TV, and now is an IS manager. He has been filling in for the normal IATV guy while he has been on break, and he will be back today. He has a lot less stuff, so the room will be less cluttered, but I also gather that he is probably less fun to hang out with. Mark and I have gone to the crew bar on a few nights. He took me to a restaurant/club that a lot of employees hang out in called the "Boat Yard" in Barbados Wednesday night (this is the only time I have been off of the ship). He is hilarious, and only has about 5 more weeks before his contract is up (he is spending his last 4 weeks on another ship). He is immigrating to Canada to be with his girlfriend, and probably won't be back after his vacation.

On my first night completely at sea, I decided to wander the ship. I walked pretty much every deck from top to bottom, which took a while. If you don't include the bilge and engine areas, just the actual decks of the ship that people walk on, there are 15. Unlike buildings (which have 10-ft floors), each floor is around 12 feet high, some higher. My office is 7 floors up. For exercise reasons, I have been making a point to take stairs everywhere, and it is 96 stairs from my room to my office. I don't spend a lot of time in there, so there is a lot of walking around. I feel SO out of shape, when I get to my office I am out of breath completely. After a couple of trips, my legs feel like rubber. For the past couple of days, though, I haven't taken the elevator unless I was with someone who was taking it. Of course, since the ship isn't a perfect box, different stairways go to different levels. It took me a few days to figure out which ones go where. I would say that there are around 30 elevators, and they are worse than the stairs. Some only go a floor or two, some go 9 or 10 foors.

Since I am an officer, I usually eat in the officer's mess hall. It is funny, they really make up the tables. There are 8 pieces of silverware, the napkin folded differently each meal, a separate bread plate, water pitcher and goblets, full-service and a menu, and a salad bar. The food isn't as good as the food in the passenger areas, obviously, but it isn't bad. When we are underway, they turn off all of the lights at the front of the ship so that they can see better on the bridge. Since we are miles from any land whatsoever, it is really dark out. The number of stars are amazing. It is funny, if you walk up to a main deck, you can hardly see any. I love to just stand out on deck, night or day. I know it won't be this way always, but every single day has been perfect weather. No waves, wind with us, clear sky, and sunny.

The night that the Destiny was docked in Aruba, I decided to take a bunch of sunset pictures. It was really pretty, there were a number of sailboats, and I took a rather insane number of pictures. It is lucky that they are free. :) Here is the harbor that we were in, a speedboat that went by (which you can see in the harbor), and an odd sub-looking device being towed by a tug. There were about 50 other boats, but I did refrain from taking pictures of them all. There is a nifty mountain right in the middle of the island, and the night really makes a nice view. Here is a B&W also . . .

I have decided, since the class is free, to start taking Spanish again. It will be a bit tough, as the girl teaching it hasn't ever taught before. She tried to start the class by insisting that we only speak Spanish, and refused to speak in English. That only worked for a half hour, as no one there knew any Spanish. It is also tough because she is Costa Rican, and the way that she insists things be pronounced is NOT traditional Spanish, which is what I learned when I took it. We'll see how it goes. She kept repeating phrases and trying to get us to figure out what they were, then caved in an started putting up some vocabulary words. She put up one, then informed us that she didn't know what the word was in English . . . 

For those who are interested in the Destiny, I will give you a couple of pictures and descriptions here. This picture is of the side, I wasn't able to walk far enough down the pier to get the whole thing. This one is from the front and side (and is the one you can see the lifeboats in). If you look closely, you will see near the front of the ship there are several openings. The front one, and the middle of the "T" in Destiny are the same size. They are easily big enough for me to walk through with someone standing on my head. If you look closely, you will see a bench seat on it, this might give you an idea of how big the ship is. Here it is from the front. Destiny was launched in 1996, and at the time it was the largest cruise ship in the world. There is now one (the Queen Mary II, owned by one of Carnival's companies) that is one and a half times bigger, so we aren't even close anymore. However, it is the second-biggest class of ship in the Carnival fleet. There are 3,300 passengers right now, and 1,050 employees. It is amazing, watching them make dinner for nearly 4,500 people each night. For the employees, there are five mess halls, two bars, a gym, two hot tubs, two internet cafés, and two private sun decks. For the guests, there is just too much to describe here, but the link on the navigation bar will take you to the site about it. I have a picture taken of where one of the sets of guest elevators comes up through the center of the ship. This isn't taken from the top, but two floors down from the top. There is a waterslide, which also shows the main top deck area where one of the guest pools is. To give you an idea of the size of the ship, here is a picture of a rather large cruise ship parked next to us. I was on the 9th floor deck edge (keep in mind that there are 15 floors), then I backed up and went to the tenth deck so you could see part of the deck and the other ship. I took the first picture from where the guy in red is in the second picture. Just for the heck of it, here is pretty much the same picture again at night. Every Carnival ship has a whale tail, here is ours . . .

Carnival was born the same year I was. The reason that they are called "Fun Ships" is pretty funny. When they opened, they were a laughingstock in the industry, since everyone else had been around forever. Then their first ship set sail, and on the first day out it ran aground. Rather than freak out, they started organizing parties while it sat, and everyone came off of the ship saying how much fun it was, even though it ran aground. They have been called the "Fun Ships" ever since. An interesting thing is that the IS director kind of collects Carnival memorabilia, and he had an original ticket to the first ship. Right now, if you buy one of the least-expensive cruises to the same place the first ship went, the cost is less now that it was in 1972. With the depressed economy, that's how far ticket prices have come down. Of course, it also shows how much profit they make during good times . . . :) Carnival now owns pretty much all of the cruise companies that were laughing at us in the 70's . . . 

This morning I am in Aruba to connect to a fast connection. I am one of only a few people on board with internet, most employees have to pay for it. However, it isn't a direct connection, it is through a proxy server, so I can't connect directly to AOL or to upload to my web page. They also have a lot of web sites blocked, like the one that you are reading now (actually, not just mine, but all of Geocities). So, my plan is to come here once a week to upload pages to here.