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I meant to keep up this blog while I was on the ship, but the internet and time didn’t allow it. But I said I’d let you know how it went! Three days before I left I got an email asking if I could go to the Caribbean Princess instead of the Star. In the Caribbean. To say I was disappointed with my itinerary would be an understatement. I’d been there before and it was nice for a bunch of rum and beaches, but I wanted culture, old towns, Europe, New Zealand and Petra.
I want to tell you the story from the beginning. How it was awesome and overwhelming and hard. I remember in the first month realizing that I was not having fun. As someone who sets the intention to have fun— to rearrange my life to have as much fun as possible— this was disappointing. Had I made a mistake? Was this not as good of a fit as I thought it would be? Then something shifted and cascading events avalanched into a situation where I can’t believe how happy— HAPPY — joyously grateful and playful and creatively challenged and blissed out HAPPY — I am so frequently.
This is how it began.
There was drama getting to the ship that seems irrelevant now. It was St. Patricks Day and Spring Break in Miami and somehow 5 hotel reservations were not received. The night before I was to start work, I finally got into a hotel room at 1:30am. I was expecting a roommate who never showed up, and got notified at 2:30am that we would need to be downstairs and ready to be picked up at 7am (which was before the breakfast we had been promised would be available). I was grateful to have my US phone service to navigate this mishap, but I can’t say I was rested when I showed up.
The ship can be overwhelming to passengers. Having been on Princess Cruises before, I was somewhat more familiar with the layout and the names of the lounges, but it still takes some time to orient yourself and find your way around. Underneath the passenger areas and in the crevices between the stairs and elevators there is a maze of crew area that I hadn’t seen before. I still find it thrilling to go through the ‘crew only’ doors where the floors aren’t carpeted, the walls aren’t designed to be appealing and water drips on you from random overflow of condensation. My point is that it was a huge, multi level maze. On the first day I was given a pager I wasn’t sure how to use and I was escorted everywhere I needed to go— from my cabin (surprise! Your roommate is married so she’s living with him!
Not only did I get the bed where I could put my feet on the floor, I had more drawers than I’ve had in a year and privacy and the freedom to play music and turn on the lights when I couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night!) to safety training in the training room. Put on this uniform and I’ll pick you up at this time, you have 15 minutes to eat in the officer’s mess before training, and I’ll come pick you up after to take you to your cabin where you change into a different uniform for the sail away party.
Everything was a blur. I knew that at some point I would able to see the big picture— how the different rooms and hallways were connected, be able to picture the floor plan at any time in order to navigate the most efficient route— but not today. We were climbing the stairs and I’m blindly following people through hallways. I’m wearing a blue polo shirt and unflattering white shorts and then all of a sudden I’m line dancing with the other cruise staff by the pool, trying to make it look like I know the steps. I’ve had dreams where I’m in a play, I’m a main character, and I don’t have the script so I have to make up my lines. That is exactly what I felt like. It was so surreal to go from not knowing where I was to being in the in-crowd, where everyone was acting like I belonged.
By day 2 they started letting me go places I’d been before without an escort. There is a part in the front of the ship where I got so lost I avoided it for a week. I later realized that it’s really easy— just stay on the blue floor and don’t let the brown floor distract you. For the first two weeks I knew how to get across, but I didn’t know which crew elevators I could use and which doors I could go through to get to the passenger areas, so I would go in a sideways U shape to get from the lower back of the ship to the front, then up then across to the back of the ship. By the first day of the second cruise (2 weeks later) I couldn’t believe that when the new passengers asked me for directions, I knew how to tell them where to go!
Though the ship is run by a company that is based in the US, and most of the passengers are from the US, and everyone is supposed to speak English all the time, I found myself in a different culture with subtle rules that you don’t know you’re breaking until someone tells you. For example, we are allowed to eat in the big passenger buffet, but only at certain times and I wasn’t really told what those times were until I went when I wasn’t supposed to go. I didn’t know what to wear in what places, and when I’d guess I’d guess wrong sometimes. On my first day the Entertainment Director told me that I would make mistakes. I needed to hear that. I knew logically that I would, but I needed to forgive myself as much as the others forgave me.
After about a month the chaos began. One of the girls on the cruise staff was medically disembarked which made our team of 5 a team of 4 to cover all the activities. I later found out that this was the first year that Princess would be in the Caribbean during hurricane season, so they were throwing every new cool thing at our ship first. It started with a cruise with a corporate trainer who taught us how to be more entertaining. This was fun. Suddenly every activity became a show with opportunities to be funny. Mistakes became jokes. Losses became wins (if I got more laughs). This job was now not just satiating my travel thirst, it was bringing my acting training into play every day.
The next week we learned the High Seas Heist. We spent hours in training between activities learning all of the details, the characters and the distractions from the clues that would lead to who did it. I was given a blonde wig and big sunglasses to develop the role of Tiffany Chastain, daughter of the late explorer, Huntington Chastain, and victim of the heist.
After that, I spent the next couple of weeks learning the Detourist — a series of workshops designed to inspire people to have more fun, try new things, have deeper conversations and see the world in a new way. But I’ll tell you more about that later.
Post Cruise Contract #1