port day..

August 4, 2013: Kotor, Montenegro
I had port day again today. It was a late arrival day though, so I had the morning off and didn’t have to go up until 11. We’d apparently arrived very early (9:30 instead of 11), so it was at open tender by the time I got up to Club HAL, nice for the rest of the staff since they didn’t have to wait to get off. It was a very busy day. I had 11 kids there for lunch, and a few teens I had to kick out of the Loft while the kids and I went to lunch. It was a bit of a hectic lunch because the 3-year-old that doesn’t speak English was there, and wasn’t happy about something, she kept repeating something over and over and over in Russian and was getting frustrated and upset when I didn’t know how to respond. Then one of the tweens kept running off away from the group, and I wouldn’t know where he was for a few minutes. Luckily once he came back and I told him that he needed to stay with the group, he would ask me if he could go get a refill of drink or something. We got ice cream once everyone had finished eating, and that was the quietest they’d been all day, so that was nice. Even the Russian girl sat and ate her ice cream quietly.

The rest of the afternoon dragged on as more as more kids came, they fought over the Wii controllers and Monopoly rules. I finally had to find all 8 Wii remotes and sync 4 to each Wii, and make sure they knew not to mix up the remotes and to take turns, or else I’d take all the remotes away. That calmed them down for the most part, and I took over the banker job in Monopoly with less interruptions. It was nice for a while, some girls playing Just Dance on the Kinect, others playing Wii and the rest playing or watching Monopoly. At the end of the afternoon, I was pretty tired, but I had to take three of the kids down to their room because Ryan had given permission for me to do that since their grandmother had a hard time moving around. I had maybe an hour in my room before dinner. Linda had organized for her, Johan, James, and me to have dinner in Pinnacle, but that ended up falling apart because it filled up with guests, so they had to cancel our reservation. Maybe next cruise we’ll finally be able to do that, we’ve been trying this whole cruise to make that dinner happen.

It was Olympic night in the Loft, so we hung out for an hour before going up to the Sports Deck where they wanted to play dodgeball. I refereed that for an hour, when they finally got tired of it, then we all went downstairs. Not long after that, most everyone left because they had curfew at 11. So, for half an hour, it was just one teen playing Guitar Hero while Jenny and I read. He left and we read for a little bit before deciding it was late enough that we could go ahead and clean up and close for the night. I’m supposed to meet Linda at the OB to discuss plans for tomorrow, but I don’t really want to stay long because port days tire me out, especially with as many kids as I had today