Salt Touched

Every day’s a struggle when you’re living down below
When your worth is measured by whether or not you’ve got a window!
~ Cruise Ship Life Rap (courtesy of the Dawn Princess)

Before anyone can really understand the strange significance of what I’m about to report – you have to understand just how rare it is to have natural light below the passenger decks. Natural light onboard to a crew member? Golden, and rare as a unicorn (or chocolate chip mint ice cream at the ice cream station…scratch that, you have a far better chance at the ice cream station).

Keeping that in mind…

I was sitting with my supervisor at dinner last night (my supervisor is brilliant), and she happened to ask me what kind of cabin I was in this contract. Now, my position lost our “good” cabin on this class of ship about half a year ago or so when they rolled in a bunch of new entertainment programs. We bumped down from a fair-sized double-bed cabin to the same size of bunk bed cabin I used to have in my librarian days. Still private thankfully, but certainly not what we had been lucky enough to have before.

So the conversation went something like this:

Me: Oh, I’m in a bunk cabin. We lost our good cabin on the big ships when they did the cabin shuffle to bring in the new bands.

PM: y’know I think I have a double-bed cabin spare until December because we don’t get the new group until then. Come by the office later and I’ll get you set up.

At this point I just think “sweet! Better room! Bigger bed! Yay!” and somewhere in the very back of my mind there was a vague tickling of “maybe…yeah, dream on…that’ll never happen…”

I pop down to the crew office and collect my new key and check out the new digs, with the plan of moving the next day as it was already late. And then I open up the door to the new room and there, glowing with light real moonlight….is a porthole.

I have a porthole room.

I have a window!!!!

This is a temporary thing, and will likely not be something that will happen ever again after the end of this contract. Even as it stands I might only have the room until the end of November, after that it depends on whether or not the new group coming on has more than five members (if they don’t, I can stay).

But real, true, natural light…I can see the outside world…

This is definitely one of those things that you likely will never understand unless you have lived below decks…that quote about “your worth is measured by if you have a window”? that’s not a joke…this is a “little” thing that isn’t at all that little..

Excuse me, I have to go and stare at the ocean now…

You know…from my window!

This coming cruise will be a new experience for me. Well, perhaps not completely new but new in the context of being a workshop host.

This coming turn around port we start a full ship charter. In this case it’s the Blues Cruise. The thing is, the bring in all their own artists, their own everything, and they won’t be needing my classes. So the workshop gets closed down for a week and I go volunteer for helping with autograph signings and greeting people at the doors for their events. A few hours a day, certainly nothing too difficult.

I almost feel guilty, as other parts of the ship: the culinary department, beverage, the stage techs, they’ll be working extremely hard and very different hours.

But me? I handed over the keys to the workshop to my boss this evening, she will hand them to the people running the charter tomorrow morning, and I just…glide for the rest of the week.

The last time I was on a charter cruise was…I think at least 5 years ago, when I was still working as a librarian on the big ships in Alaska in between world cruises. The most entertaining one stands as the Twilight Charter where they did all their events at night and walked around in red contact lenses during the day…that one was definitely…odd.

But this one though? This stands to be a super easy week, with a light schedule and no major commitments, and at least one day completely off – I wonder if anyone has any idea how rare that is out here!

I am slowly but surely adjusting to the fact that I am on a much bigger vessel than usual! You see, the flagship – and the class (that is to say size) of ship she belongs to – is relatively small, though in industry terms she’s considered “mid-size”, holding somewhere around 1400 guests plus the necessary crew.

The ship on I’m now? Well she’s still considered “mid-size” if you compare her to something like…the 6,000 passenger ships that some other companies run. But for us? She’s one of our second biggest ships in the fleet.

It’s been a long long time since I was on this class of vessel, well, a long time in ship time. The last time I was on a ship of this size was in 2013, which is an eternity ago in ship years. The length of time away means that I had to get an employee orientation when I arrived, and also means that – while my feet are slowly finding their way – I am still spending large portions of my day either getting lost or completely underestimating the time it takes to get from point A to point B! I’m used to living one deck up from my office, and a five minute walk away from everything I need to get to. Here? I live down on A-deck, and my deck 2 office is at the other end of the vessel. Let’s just say that’s definitely thrown my morning timing off!

But my boss is brilliant and the rest of the team seems nice enough (though much smaller than I’m used to!) and while my cabin is tiny I’ve at least made it homey.

And hey, I’m not getting lost as much as I was a few days ago!