halloween

October 30, 2012: Tenerife, Santa Cruz
We had a general emergency drill this morning, which meant that all crew had to participate (aside from the few necessary to keep the ship running for the 45 minutes as the drill went on). I had to go to the front office as usual to hang out until they dismissed everyone to go to their life rafts. Then, they went through all the coast guard questions and gathered three rafts together to go over some of the important life raft things again.
I see why we have these kinds of drills, but why must we wear our life jackets the whole time. The life jacket hurts, it pushes against the back of my neck (because it’s too big and weighed down) and I feel it the rest of the day. It’s very frustrating.
Anyway, after the drill I had to make sure the girl wasn’t going to come up today since her parents hadn’t been up to sign her up for port day. I waited while Brian called, as I waited I saw all my friends leave the ship. So, by the time I found out that I could get off, most everyone had already gone, and it was almost lunchtime. I had decided just to eat lunch on the ship by then, because it was only 20 minutes until it opened; I met Jim in the hallway and he invited me to go off ship with him and the acupuncturist Ginger after someone else got back (they’d split the day off-ship because one had IPM).
I had a burger for lunch alone by the pool. Most everyone was already off the ship; someone told me that only about 200 passengers were on board. I got off the ship with Ginger and Jim. We walked around for a bit and Jim tried to find a bank so he could exchange some money (he lives in Spain, so they have his bank here so he was going to put US Dollars in his account and pull out Euros). However, after we waited at one bank, it turns out they were only affiliated with his and they can’t do transactions for his bank. So, we went to another one down the road; after a 20 minute wait there, all the computers went down, so it was all for nothing.
We walked around for a while and met Glenn and Blake (the bass player, he got on in Ft. Lauderdale. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned him yet). They were all kind of hungry so I tagged along as they looked for a place that had tapas and wifi. Finally we gave up on the wifi part and sat in a restaurant. They ate and I had a tea. We sat there for a really long time, so long that I was worried about finding internet before I got back on the ship for work (Brian asked if I’d take his shift tonight, he’ll work for me another time). Finally we left the restaurant and Jim and I separated from the group because he needed to get back to the ship too. We got back to the main street by the port and found what we’d spent an hour looking for: many restaurants with wifi. The cast and Brian were sitting at one of them and I joined them to use the wifi for a little while before I got back on the ship.

October 31, 2012: Las Palmas
Happy Halloween! I slept in today and had work at 12. The girl was there when I took over for Brian, but her mom came to take her to lunch after a few minutes. So, I had lunch to myself again. After a rather quick lunch of pasta, I went back up to Club HAL. I managed to get some pumpkins cut out since Brian asked if I could cut out some more (both for the girl to decorate and for us to decorate for the Halloween Party).
The girl came up soon after lunch, and we spent the afternoon decorating pumpkins. I also cut out some witches hats, ghosts and bats since I was getting a bit tired of pumpkins. Near the end of the afternoon, I had a great idea and made a pumpkin with a light in it, out of paper of course. The girl saw what I was doing and made me cut stuff out for her to do the same. I had an orange pumpkin, a slightly smaller black pumpkin, and I cut out bits of red, orange and yellow to make a flame. I layered them so the flame was behind the face, but still the pumpkin had black eyes and all that. I think it looks pretty cool. My flames turned out pretty cool too I think, I snipped the edges so they look kind of frayed, but they also kind of look like they’re moving (or at least more like fire). I keep showing this pumpkin to people (I used a magnet to put it on my door!).
After that, I was done for the day. I went downstairs to meet Glenn and Edison who I’d seen earlier still on the ship and said they’d get off with me after 4. Neither of them answered their phones or their doors, so I got off on my own (I didn’t want to wait around, I’ve had enough of that). Not far off the ship, I met Jim and Ginger as they were heading back to the ship. Ginger decided to go back out with me. Yay, I had a buddy! We went to the mall and just looked around for costume pieces for her, and the ever-important wifi. We tried for wifi at McDonalds, but it wasn’t very good so we walked around more. I hadn’t seen anyone else to stay off-ship with me, so I got back on the ship with her for dinner. We were finishing dinner when Edison came up. I talked to him for a bit and we ended up going downstairs to grab computers, change and go back out since he knew somewhere we could get internet. I finally got to upload pictures! We spent an hour on the internet at the café before we had to get back on the ship before all aboard and so we could get ready for the Halloween party.
I curled my hair and borrowed the wand Maria (cast member) got at Wizarding World of Harry Potter and became Luna. I went up to the Crow’s Nest and was surprised at just how many people were dressed up. I had kind of thought it would be mostly crew. There were some pretty creative costumes: cereal killer, ghosts, witches, Lady Luck, belly dancers, genies, etc. I took a lot of pictures with the other crew members there (mostly from the entertainment department: the cast, librarian, life stylist, party planner, musicians, but of course the photographers were there too). Amongst the crew we had superman, batman, Betty Bop, Pippi Longstocking, a vampire, Luna (me!), punks, pirates, and many more. It was a lot of fun to see the creative side to people that I see every day in uniforms. We all danced a lot and clapped for the winners of the costume contests. After that, I went down to the OB and hung out with everyone that had come down from the party (it was crew curfew in guest areas). It was a fun night in general.