What’s new Buenos Aires?
It still seems odd that this is actually somewhere I’ve been twice before. It seems so very strange sometimes to actually think of the places I’ve been, let alone the places I’ve actually managed to go to more than once.
Embark day is always its own special brand of madness. I have been on this ship before, and she’s sister ship to the flagship so I know the layout relatively well. But that doesn’t change the fact that when you first board a new vessel things are a little haywire. There were only three people joining this turn around, including myself, and our day started with being somewhat abandoned in the hotel lobby for about an hour as the driver who was supposed to pick us up apparently didn’t realize that he was supposed to come in and fetch us otherwise we had no idea that he had even arrived! So after an only slightly frantic call to the after hours line, the driver came back and found us and we managed to get where we were supposed to go.
Once boarded there were the standard welcome onboard meetings, the trainings (which all three of us had done multiple times in the past) and the briefings from HR. Once you hit noon, then work starts and the emergency drills, and the rehearsals and sailways, and by the time you realize that you really didn’t have a minute to stop for much in the way of dinner, you’re falling into bed and are almost out cold between one sentence of your book at the next.
And somewhere in the middle you manage to unpack.
There is one issue onboard that I had forgotten tends to come up on runs out of Buenos Aires. Since we are sailing out of Argentina we have a justifiably high count of guests who primarily (or only) speak Spanish. This by itself is of course not a problem at all. Where the problem lies is that the vast majority of crew members don’t speak Spanish; we have many translators and there are many individuals on each team that are bilingual, but we are primarily English speaking. This leaves for quite a few upset people who don’t have a clue what we are saying. So it will be interesting to say how that works out, not being one of the crew members who speaks anything but her mother tongue, I am somewhat helpless to assist in the issue.
Either way, whatever happens, I’m in for better or for worse now…so…haul anchor, here we go!