leaving Venice again

August 8, 2013: Venice day 3
I knew I wasn’t going to make it off the ship today, but I did end up making it to breakfast. I really hope that today isn’t any indication of what breakfast will be like the rest of the cruise because it was incredibly busy and there were no tables available for more than 5 seconds once vacated. After breakfast I went back to the room and went back to sleep until lunchtime since there wasn’t that much time in between and nothing really to do since the passenger safety drill took up half that time (I didn’t have to do wristbands today, but there’s nothing we can do around the ship while the drill is going on, just have to stay out of the way). Lunch was really busy as well, that made more sense though since the drill just ended.

After lunch we started our sea afternoon. Leah and I are together on tweens this cruise. We had a lot come in to register this afternoon, so I took over the first few activities while Leah talked to the newcomers who needed to register. They’re all still pretty quiet. I do love the game UNO very much now, it’s easy enough to explain to non-English speakers and most of the kids from every country seem to generally know how to play. We played that for a while, had a ship drawing contest, then played Ickle Bickle before going up to the Sports Deck for Gaga Ball. Some of them don’t really get the fact that it’s not actually dodgeball, that they can hit the ball to keep it away, but at least none of them are overly aggressive with the game like they were last time I was on tweens! We had a quick water break in the Lido since it was so hot outside, then it was back to Club HAL. Leah and I kind of switched for the last hour, I assisted the parents registering and signing out their kids while Leah ran the activities. It was rather hectic the last thirty minutes because at least 5 families came at once and none of those kids spoke English. It seems strange to me that the parents know English rather well, but the kids don’t understand it at all. Anyway, while I was helping all these families register, Leah was trying to get all 20 of them set up on a Wii or Xbox. It was kind of crazy. I think we finally have about 40 (half) of the tweens registered now, so maybe not many more new people will come after the sea day tomorrow, so it’ll be easier on both of us.

Lights, Camera Action night was extremely quiet. Only 10 were there at snacktime, then we were down to 6 by the time we started making movie posters. A few more came while we were doing that, but our number never went above 10 again. So strange, usually nights are the busiest times of the day, but it seems like this cruise a lot of families want to have dinners together.

I’ve been having some trouble with housekeeping this contract. Meghna ordered room service a few weeks ago and they didn’t take the tray away until a few days ago, after we called a few times about it (gross), then there was an incident of not having any toilet paper for a few days (April and I went to the office and they got defensive, I’m not sure if I mentioned that here when it happened). The problem tonight was that they took away our dirty towels, but did not bring us any new ones. I went to the office and they acted confused and gave me a number to call. I called it and they said they’d send some down for us. Two hours later I called back (I was really ready to go to sleep because it’s hour forward tonight and sea day tomorrow) because no one had come yet. They answered the phone and were surprised when I told them I still hadn’t received the towels. I was very happy when 5 minutes later, someone came by with towels for us, soft fluffy, freshly out of the laundry towels too!