limbo

Don't worry, I'll post more about my second week later, but for now...

With this job comes lots of time spent in what I've come to call 'limbo.' Stuck between one place and the next. There's airport limbo, hotel limbo, de-bark limbo... It's one of the things that, despite... 8 contracts now? I have yet to get used to.
There's nothing we can do about it, it will always exist. It's the 'in-transit' (I guess that's the technical term?) time that must be passed in order to get from one place to another.
I haven't decided which is worse.

Boarding the ship, you're stuck first in airport limbo, then hotel limbo. It's not so bad, especially if they give you a direct flight or a semi-short layover, but it still is generally an entire day of travel, which might not seem that way, but it truly is exhausting. Once you finally arrive in the home port city, you must wait and catch a shuttle to the hotel. But once you're in the hotel, what do you do? Occasionally they flight you so early you have a good bit of time so if you're not feeling too tired and are feeling brave enough, you can venture out and explore the town, oh, and if the weather is cooperative. Usually though, the hotel is so far away from the airport, and from the town the other direction that it's a big task to get anywhere.
Most of the time, however, the plane lands in the mid to late afternoon, and you arrive at the hotel around dinnertime. So, the only thing to do is get comfortable, find dinner somewhere, and then wonder what to do with the rest of the evening until a reasonable time when you can get to sleep. At least the hotels usually have free wifi, so you can surf the internet for a time, maybe watch a movie on the TV. Usually I just end up going to sleep early for lack of anything better to do.

Leaving a ship is another set of limbos. First of all there is the de-bark limbo (rather, disembarkation). You have to get up with the sun to go to the crew office to wait in line and get paid, and typically there is nothing to do after that until meeting in the crew messroom to disembark. That's about three hours. In that time, new crew members come on board and take over your room, and of course breakfast is closed early because they don't want guests hanging around when they should be leaving. There's not really anywhere to go where you're not in the way of something else going on. Most all your friends are sleeping in or going off in port, so you've said all your 'goodbyes' the night before. Nothing left to do.
Finally, the ship is at what we call '0 count' which means all the passengers have gotten off the ship, so crew are allowed to go through immigration. After immigration, there's a shuttle ride and then the airport. Depending on the season and the airport, there may be no checking luggage until 2 hours before the flight, and we've usually been booked for flights later in the afternoon so we're stuck outside the security lines. Not all the time though. When we can get through security, we at least have one less bag to look after, though two is sometimes still too many. There's a few hours to kill, staring at the same seats and restaurants and gates. Again, usually airports have wifi, so it's a great time to catch up on all the news you've missed while away, but you can only do that for so long, and you don't want to take a nap in the airport for fear of someone stealing your stuff or missing your flight. And of course, you never want to wander far from your gate, just in case something changes...

So, now you know about 'limbo.' It's unavoidable this job, but I'd much rather it was consistant at least!