fun times in Monaco

July 28, 2013: Monaco
I had to help with tendering this morning again. So early. It wasn’t too bad though, we basically just sent everyone straight down to a tender as they got their number, so we were at open tender by 9:30 again! I like that part. Linda and I had breakfast, then we got off and went to the aquarium and oceanic museum that we’d seen last time. That was fun, we spent a lot of time there, taking pictures of the fish, reading about them and stuff.

It was a fun time. By the time we left, it was past lunchtime and we were extremely hungry, so we found a somewhat cheap restaurant and got sandwiches and had a quick lunch before going to a supermarket. Linda needed “snacks to share” for a party tonight, and we ended up finding a lot of good stuff in the supermarket. I managed to finally find some Dr. Pepper!!!

It was interesting getting back to the ship. Getting on the tender was fine, but it was really rocky as we made our way to the ship; we had fun and got a bit splashed in the process. But, when we got close to the ship is when it got more interesting. We had to make about 5 tries to get close enough to the ship for them to tie us to it, and after those 5 we had to make another few attempts before we got the back of the tender securely fastened to the ship. Then, we discovered how incredibly rocky it was. We kept slamming against the platform, hearing cracks as the tender hit metal rings, the water level kept going way down then way back up and we kept going somewhat far away from the platform before quickly slamming back against it. It took at least 15 minutes to get everyone off. They basically picked me up and handed me to the people on the platform because they were worried I might fall in I guess. (There were two people on the tender helping people get over, and two on the platform). It was a fun adventure! :)

I went through my pictures and deleted the many many blurry ones (the light was bad in the tanks in the aquarium) until dinner. We had Tamarind tonight because it’s Jenny’s birthday. I enjoyed it; I still think my favorite part of the meal is the crackers and sauce they give us at the start though.
Tonight in the Loft it was Improv night. We let them hang out and chat for about 45 minutes to see if anyone else would come, then started with Random Lines. We ended up doing Random Lines for an hour or so, then snack arrived so we took a break for that. No one seemed really to want to do anything else, so we gave up on the idea of charades and let them talk. They all left by 11, so Jenny and I cleaned up some, then played MarioKart. A few came back around 11:30 and stayed for a few minutes before leaving again, but that was it. Kind of nice for us because it meant we could close up a little bit early. Livorno tomorrow; Linda and James are both IPM so I’m probably just going to get off for a little while and get internet.

back in France again!

July 27, 2013: Marseille
I had breakfast before going back to the room to change so James and I could go to Marseille after his drill. He didn’t have a lot of time because it was formal night and he had to set up to take formal pictures early, but we wandered around for a while, got some lunch, and did some shopping before coming back to the ship. Sometimes even if it’s not for long, it’s just nice to be away for a bit. I finally got a rug for my room so I don’t have to step onto the cold floor first thing every morning!

Once back on the ship, I decided it was time to upload pictures, so I spent an hour of my internet card talking to Mom while pictures loaded. Lots of pictures! It was nice though, I avoided thinking about how much that time online cost me.

Work tonight was fun. The teens hung out for a while to see if any more would show up to make the boys and girls teams even for our Gender Wars night. Trivia questions were interesting, one of the boys actually knew a lot of them, and the girls knew absolutely nothing about most sports or cars. Going through all those questions took a lot of time, so we had snack once we got through them all, then moved on to Balderdash. A lot of them left during that because they have to be up early for excursions tomorrow, so for the last hour we had a very small, some played Xbox and the rest played MarioKart, not such a bad night! :)

Barcelona embark day

July 26, 2013: embark Barcelona
I got to breakfast just in time this morning, it was 9:30 and they were already closing because it was embark day (I’d forgotten it was embark day, thank goodness I wasn’t any later). It was kind of funny actually, I got there and ordered a waffle and then they closed the curtain for the line next to where I was standing. So, I stood around next to the closed counter for them to finish making my waffle; I’m glad they seem to like me in the kitchens because they could’ve just refused to make me one since they were closing up breakfast.

After eating my really good waffle (freshly made, just for me, haha), I went back to the room to wait until lunch then Open House. I met Miranda, one of the two new Club HALs at lunch. It was a quiet first hour of open house, I think people had just started getting on the ship. The next two hours though were busy. I kept going back and forth between talking to teens who’d walked in, answering questions from parents, and writing the Club HAL room phone numbers down on the registration forms. It was nonstop until we closed at 3. We had a short meeting, then Leah and I took the wristbands down and waited for the drill. Some of the officers and boat commanders ended up kind of doing my job for me during the drill; I’m supposed to check and make sure all the kids have the correct color wristband with the correct boat number on it, and give them one if it’s incorrect or if they don’t have one. The boat commanders actually did the searching part for me, so I just had to give wristbands to the kids they pointed out to me. After that, I was free until the Entertainment Department meeting at 5:45. There’s a ‘new’ EM now, she was here, but left for vacation and it seems like everyone that knew her before this loves her as an EM. That’s a good sign. The meeting was basically the same old stuff that doesn’t really apply at all to Club HAL, but it was short so we got a nice length dinner. I just read after dinner before going up to the Loft early.

The Loft tonight was busy. There’s over 150 teens on board, and I think we saw around half of them. The first night is always a bit awkward, a bit more so this time because Jenny (the other new Club HAL) has never worked with the teens before, so she was just following along with what I did. I had a few games of Apples to Apples going on until they got tired of that. The second group had started playing MarioKart, so my group ended up talking for a while. It was kind of odd, I’d ask them questions and they’d hesitate to answer, then ask me. They seemed very interested in my life, but I did get them talking to each other eventually. We played “Move Your Booty” for an hour before “Two Truths and a Lie.” By the time we got through with that, it was much less awkward and snack had arrived. So, it was a much easier night after that. I sat and chatted with some Canadians about French and travelling, and got a group chat going on. Slowly they all left, most still pretty jet-lagged, so Jenny and I cleaned up and got to leave a bit early.

Barcelona

July 25, 2013: Barcelona
It was a bizarre day. My head was still hurting from yesterday but I went up to breakfast in an effort to find anyone who might have plans I could join in on for the day, but no one was around. No one was around all day actually. I took my time getting ready after breakfast and started laundry when Kristin called, she had a bunch of kids and needed help getting them lunch and I was the only one still on the ship. So, I helped her and kids get through lunch. I finished my laundry and decided that I needed to get off the ship, even if my head was hurting and I had no one to get off with. So, I got off. I met a girl from Housekeeping getting off at the same time and she was all alone so we decided to band together and walk around for a bit. We took the shuttle to town then walked down Las Ramblas, looking at the stores and all the souvenir stuff they had. We didn’t even walk all the way down before we headed back; it’s a long street. I had dinner, then wandered around the ship for a bit before going back to the room to wait on Jessie to call me to tell me the plans for tonight, Ana’s last night on board. I never heard from her, so I ended up falling asleep. Early, boring night for me, but at least I felt better today than everyone else did!

stuck on the ship in Marseille :(

July 24, 2013: Marseille
I didn’t get off the ship today. We had a Child Safeguarding training at 1 and I wanted to sleep in a bit, so there wasn’t enough time to take the shuttle 20 minutes to town and 20 minutes back. Not fun. So, I ended up reading/sleeping most of the day. I had meals at least, but other than that I just read and slept until work. The training was basically common sense for those of us that work with kids: tell each other if a child is acting strangely, don’t let kids sit in our laps, use the rule of 3 for trips to the restrooms, etc. I bet it was kind of annoying to Security though, since most of the situations we were supposed to discuss in groups were Club HAL situations.

It was Pirate Night in the kids room! Fun and exciting times were had by all. It went well I think, we only had 6 which helped. We gave them face paint, had them make a sign and hats, made a treasure map of our own, read a story, then went off on our treasure hunt because the awful Pirate Pete (from the story) had stolen our treasure chest when we weren’t looking! It was a short treasure hunt but they loved it anyway. They all behaved as well, which is odd but great!

long but nice day in Monaco

July 23, 2013: Monaco
I had to be up really early to help with tendering this morning. I got to stand at the stairs and collect tender tickets. Surprisingly it went really smoothly. There was no wait except for right at the beginning when a few shore excursions went off at once, and then it was only a short wait. So, since everyone was just getting a ticket and walking straight on to the tender, we were discussing going into open tender at 9 (we started giving out tender tickets at 8). At 9:10 they made the announcement for open tender, I had to stay at the stairs for a few extra minutes to collect the rest of the tickets but then I got to go up and have breakfast with Linda. Breakfast was nice and relaxing, I felt like I’d already been productive and that it was going to be a great day!

After breakfast, we went down to change, met up with James and got off the ship to explore. We walked up lots of stairs to a garden and palace. There were some pretty views and we got to see another ship come in from there (they were docking which is why we had to tender). We took a lot of pictures around the garden, of the view from the wall, of the buildings around, of the random statues in the garden, etc. It was fun. We started to get hungry so wandered more into town to see what was there; we happened to catch the last bit of the changing of the guards. We were wandering around up there and I ended up buying a laptop bag like the Paris bag I bought two years ago; I’d accidently left mine at home so have been using my bookbag to carry around my laptop on days when I carried it out with me. All the restaurants there were kind of expensive, so we made our way back down the hill closer to the marina. Linda remembered a meeting she was supposed to attend, so went back to the ship leaving me and James to find lunch. We found a place to eat and I had a crepe (yum!). It was a bit funny because James hasn’t heard me speak French much, so he was a somewhat surprised when I talked to the waitress.

We got back to the ship and I didn’t do much until dinner. Right after dinner we had Kids in the Kitchen, so we met the kids at Slice (the pizza area on the back deck of the Lido) and they put together their own pizza. Only 5 of our kids showed up, but 20 of the tweens were there. We gave the kids some free time when we got up to Club HAL, then started Olympic Night. April and I didn’t want to spend the whole night outside, so we had them get into teams and decorate flags, come up with a secret handshake and song, then we talked about favorite sports for a while before going outside. Once on the Sports Deck we discovered that it was pretty windy. We played a few games out there anyway: an obstacle course, races, relays, sharks & minnows, etc. Finally things just got a bit hectic and it didn’t seem like anyone was having much fun anymore so we headed back downstairs to play 4 corners.

I was on after-hours duty tonight. It wasn’t so bad, three boys played Super Mario Bros, one of my kids was there for a little while and we bounced a balloon around, then two more came and they watched a movie until one of them decided she didn’t want to watch a movie so we went through 4 or 5 different games before her parents came. Not so bad of a night, but I am so tired, I was up before 7 this morning, and now it’s after midnight!

sunny day in Livorno!

July 22, 2013: Livorno
Today was a great, simple day! I had a lazy morning; got up and ready, had breakfast, took a nap then went out to Livorno with James. We walked around, he exchanged some money and I found an ATM to take money out. After that, we found a pizzeria and had lunch before walking around some more. It was nice not to have anything really to do and just hang out and enjoy being in Italy with no definite plans.

I came back, attempted to tackle the 300 pictures from Pompeii but ended up taking a nap until dinner, I dreamed about finding Dr. Pepper in a port and bringing a case back to the ship. Yeah, there are some very simple things I miss, drinking carbonated drinks other than Sprite and Fanta.

Dinner was quick and then it was off to work. Free time was interesting tonight. I think the kids are getting bored with coloring posters for the theme every night; they were at least excited about making puppets with paper bags. Finally we got to start our second movie night. We still haven’t gotten cups for our snacks, which is a very big problem with 300 kids on board. After one bag of popcorn, all the kids were asking for water, so we decided just to pause the movie and take them down to the Lido for water. After all that, most of them didn’t even finish one glass of water. Once we got back to Club HAL, they were all worked up and wouldn’t sit still at all, we kept having to tell them to sit down, stop talking, stop asking us what we’re doing after the movie, etc. Most of them got picked up before the movie ended, which was nice