July 9, 2013: Lesbos
Today was by far one of the longest days I’ve had on ships. I had a quick breakfast before Kids in the Kitchen at 9 this morning, then we went up to Club HAL for the two hours remaining of sea morning activities. The kids were all a bit crazy, they didn’t want to do anything other than play Wii. We did at least manage to get them to half-heartedly play scattegories and decorate picture frames.
Right after we finished our sea morning at 11:30, I had to go down to the Entertainment Office to help with tendering. There were four of us: Meghna, Brittany the librarian, Santana the party planner, and me. Meghna went downstairs with an easter basket to collect the tickets while the rest of us went to the Queen’s Lounge to give out the tickets. We weren’t even anchored yet and we weren’t even scheduled to be anchored until 12, but there was a giant mob waiting in the Queen’s Lounge when we arrived. As soon as we got to the table and tried to put order to the madness reigning around us, and start giving out the tickets, everyone began to crowd forward, pushing the table into us so we almost ended up falling over onto the stage behind us. It was crazy. We gave out all the blue tickets in the first 15 minutes, and had to start giving out the reds right away because there were still too many people in there waiting. At this point, they hadn’t even started tendering! They finally called a group down, and we soon ran out of red tickets as well. Brittany had to run downstairs to get the basket and some of the blue tickets so we could start giving out another group of blue tickets. That was confusing, because they were still calling the high blue numbers and we were giving out the low blue numbers again. The flow of people coming to get tickets never really slowed down until around 1. At that point, the Queen’s Lounge was full of people waiting for their number to get called, and it was at least a 45 minute wait to get on the tender after tickets were given out. So much insanity. There were a bunch of guests that came up to the three of us to get us to do something to make everything go faster, or to complain about the wait, or to tell us that this is appalling and they’re never cruising with HAL again. I was seriously about to cry, because these people were screaming at us while others were still trying to get tickets. That caused the people getting the tickets to ask questions, get frustrated and start yelling at us as well. My go-to line for this situation is now: They just told me to come hand out tickets, I have no idea what goes on downstairs or with the tenders, they don’t tell us anything. About half the time it calms people down, and it also means I don’t burst into tears while they’re screaming at me.
We went through all the blues and reds three times before Open Tender was finally announced at 2:30. No crew shore leave though, after all that craziness I don’t think anyone really wanted to risk going ashore and dealing with the line to get back. I can’t even imagine how crazy it must’ve been for guests to board the tenders to get back to the ship. At least ashore security is there, in uniform, which generally makes people not act so crazy, mean and childish. We were supposed to leave at 5:30, but when I left dinner to go up to Club HAL at 6:45, we were still not moving. Insanity. There’s talk that we won’t stop there again. As much work as sea days are, I’d much prefer a sea day to repeating that.
After we finally got to leave the Queen’s Lounge, the four of us returned the stuff to the entertainment office and talked with Dave (cruise director) for a while. He had a bottle of champagne left over from The Marriage Game the other night, so he opened it, someone got glasses and we split the bottle to celebrate our survival of the madness. We sat there for about half an hour, recovering before we all went our separate ways. I came back to the room, watched a movie and then took a nap before dinner.
Tonight in Club HAL wasn’t quite as much insanity as the afternoon was, but it was pretty hectic. Free time was fine, all the boys who’d been complaining about not playing Super Mario Bros this morning got to play it tonight, and I played Skip-Bo with a bunch of the girls. After snack, when our Olympic Night started, that’s when things got crazy. We had 25 there, 10 of them boys, so to make it fair, we decided on groups of 5 with 2 boys per team. That didn’t go over well, the boys wanted to be one team against all the girls. After a few minutes of them arguing with Leah over that (I’d been cleaning up snack), it was too loud for me to even hear myself, so I got their attention, then just took over in organizing the groups since they weren’t doing it themselves. I yelled for two boys to come see me, then three girls, then I told them to go sit as a group and get to know their teammates. It was much quicker and there was less resistance than letting them choose their own groups. Finally we made it to the Sports Deck. Once we were there, we had to spend a few minutes putting them BACK into their groups, and then adding the little kids to the groups. I’d lost my loud voice by then, so Meghna had to take over (Leah is pretty soft-spoken as well, and Betty was taking one of the kids to the room to call their parents because she felt sick). The first activity was the human knot, which was confusing because the older kids all knew how to do it (we’d done it a few nights ago), but the younger ones didn’t understand. So, it ended up two groups finished untangling before another two groups had even created their knot. We kind of ignored that fact and went on to free throws. I was under the basketball net to make sure each kid got it in before running back to pass the ball to the next member of their group. The little kids had a hard time with it, so I gave them the rule that all they had to do was hit the net, not necessarily get a basket. That helped make it even. Slowly more and more of the tween boys dropped out, and other kids got picked up, so for hula hoop relays, I stayed on the sides and entertained the kids that were sitting out. Thank goodness it was almost time to go by then, we just played a circle clapping game, and bounced a tennis ball to each other. I think all of us counselors were very thankful when it was time to head downstairs to wait for the rest of the parents. I was absolutely exhausted from today. Hopefully Seattle approves the Captains decision to make it a sea day instead of repeating this crazy tendering again!
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