Expectations – At Sea – [11/04/2018]

So far…I’m afraid to say that this contract has not precisely lived up to my expectations. This is a nice ship, but she’s much older and smaller than I’m used to (the flagship is one size up from this one) – and the room I’ve been assigned is small and tucked up out of the way. Which is not really so bad, if I look at like the Little Princess living in a garret room (that’s actually not a complaint, I quite like playing Sara Crew). I’m hoping to get another poster for the wall, fill up some of the blank space.

This is still proving to be a hard team to crack as far as getting ot know people goes. With my job and schedule being the way it is, I see people only rarely – and this team has obviously been together for a really long time. Whether they mean it to or not, that makes them hard to get to know, they aren’t seeming that big on welcoming the new kid on the block. And since I missed the crew party, there hasn’t really been an opportunity for me to break in on my own, not that I’m that forceful socially anyway. I’m okay with that for the most part, since I usually prefer my own company, but it’s not necessarily easy.

There have been 4 time changes in as many days and another one coming this evening, which has led to the guests being confused and showing up to things either either late or early, and then getting quite irritable when I can’t pause class to catch them up when they finally wander in a half hour late. We only have three sea days which means I have to offer classes on port days, and everyone complains about that because it “gets in the way of their tours”. Hard to make people happy when things are actually out of your control. I had someone storm out of the room this morning because she had arrived a half an hour late, disrupted the class (because apparently she couldn’t figure out how to get the door open, though it isn’t locked and opens easily), and then didn’t want to wait for the machine to start up.

Rough start…

But that would all be fine…really it would, none of that is anything I haven’t dealt with lots of times before. The disappointing thing is, that the whole point of taking this contract was a) so that Amras and I could stay together on the same ship and b) so we could see Cuba, which neither one of us has ever seen. The thing is, there is some bizarre US law (recently put into play by…an administrative individual that I am far from fond of) – that says that cruise ship crew must work a full 6 hour shift before setting foot in Cuba for leave. This doesn’t effect me so much, I can teach extra classes – but Amras is a muso, he doesn’t work 6 hour stretches, and only works at night. We have no idea how we’re going ot make this work…or if we can make it work. We can escort tours seperately, but we might not be able to do any exploring together…

And me with a brand new camera..