just another embark day

Dec 29: Ft. Lauderdale
I got off rather early because I had to work Open House starting at 12. The shuttles took forever to come, there were at least 100 crew members all trying to get on the first four shuttles at once, I didn’t even bother because there were so many people opening the back doors and climbing over seats just to get a spot. After a few more shuttles came, most people left and the shuttle I ended up in wasn’t even full. I chatted with one of the dancers until we arrived, and I made my way to Publix while she had some shopping to do at Ross. I got everything I needed and was wandering around trying to decide if I wanted to have more snackfood when I ran into Christine. We talked for a bit, checked out and then headed our separate ways, me to get Moes to take back to the ship for lunch, and her to GameStop to get xbox games that we’ve been trying to get for a few weeks now with no luck in port. Turns out that Moes didn’t open until 11; it was about 10:30, and I wanted to make sure I was back on the ship at the very latest 11:30, so I had to give up hope of having non-ship food this Ft. Lauderdale.

Open House went pretty well, quite a few families came, and we didn’t really have too many complaints about the required parent sign-in, the age groups, or the fact that we can’t allow 2-year-olds in. Success!

Anyway, after Open House, I went to the Bow to call Mom, and stayed there through sailaway, almost until our Entertainment Department meeting. The EM and Cruise Director were impressed with how well we’d done with the Christmas cruise, and that was really all they had to say that applied to Club HAL. It’s always rather unproductive for us to go to these meetings every week; most of what they talk about has to do with shows. After the meeting, Amanda and I decided to just head straight up to the Lido and get tea before dinner, we met Johan on the way and he joined us. We were actually there so early that we managed to reclaim our old table in the fishbowl (the big round ‘family’ table in the middle.) It was fun to finally be able to sit at the same table as our friends now, we just know too many people to sit at the smaller tables nowadays.

Welcome aboard party. I really prefer not to talk too much about that actually. To sum it up, it took at least 45 minutes to complete our “Contract of Fun.” (Normally that takes 10 minutes, if I’m writing really slowly that day). Not the best first night, it kind of makes me dread the rest of the cruise with these kids.