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It was my last week on the Caribbean Princess and my last night doing Liar’s Club. We had four new words and I needed some new stories. The night of Liar’s Club was the most stressful and the most exhilarating night of each cruise as I searched my experiences for funny stories that might fit the definition of the word. The word was sexfoil. The real definition was a plant with 6 leaves. There was an obvious dirty road to take, but I preferred to take a higher road. What else might have 6 somethings? I was brainstorming with my colleagues in the officer’s mess when the Captain came in to say hello. He had a bowl of onion rings. We all got very excited as we hadn’t seen that onion rings were available. They weren’t. It turns out that if you’re the Captain, you can just go in the galley and get some onion rings if you want to. So the Captain shared his onion rings with us and shared stories about how onion rings have just recently come to Italy.
I realized I had my story. For Liar’s club I told this story and then invented an ending where I told the Captain that it was my last cruise and I had been on board for 6 months and had never seen the bridge. He invited me to come up since he had to go drive the ship anyway. I made up what it looked like on the bridge based on stories I’d heard from others with all the buttons and giant windshield wipers. Stef told me that you could see everyone’s balcony so I talked about that even though I couldn’t figure out how that could be true. And then I saw a sexfoil– a sort of fan sticking out the front of the bridge with 6 propellers. In my story the Captain told me that this sexfoil was the instrument they used to predict the weather– that, in fact, that very week the sexfoil had come in especially handy with the hurricanes in the area. He had used the sexfoil to decide to go to different islands to avoid the hurricanes. My fellow Liars Club contestants tried to reveal the ridiculousness of my story to the audience — this ship with the Ocean Medallion, the ship with the fastest internet, would use a fan instead of, say, radar? It didn’t work. Everyone voted for me anyway. I was even surprised they were buying this story.
The next morning Stef was doing the Ultimate Ship Tour which ended on the bridge. I taught a Zumba class and then took the fastest shower to meet them for the end. My day had come. I got to see the bridge. It was surreal to be there after making up the story of seeing it the night before.
We’re on the bridge!
And it was really hard to take a selfie with us AND the view– which was awesome. I loved watching the birds swooping around.
There’s the crew pool– when we were down there I was always reminded that the bridge could see us.
And there were the giant windshield wipers!
There’s the part facing the windows
And it was our last week together!
Then Captain Paolo came out. He was there helping to roll out the Ocean Medallion stuff. He had worked with my cousin Loren, so he took me in the back to show me the part Loren had worked on.
And then I quickly ran down to do a paper airplane competition in the Piazza.
Reflection:
In the 6 months I spent on the ship I worked every day. The least I clocked in was 2.5 hours. The most was 13. Some days we started at 6:30 am. Most days we started at about 9 and worked until 11 or 11:30. Some days it wasn’t worth it to wear makeup because I would sweat it all off at the deck party, but most days I did. I got three really bad colds and worked through them. I had one night off where I was off duty after 5:30pm. In the year and a half that I didn’t work before I got on the ship, I read lots of books and watched lots of movies and tv shows. On the ship I couldn’t focus and couldn’t get through a movie without falling asleep. I think I read 2 short books and finished one movie. On my international flights to Qatar I saw the end of most of the movies that I started on the ship. As I write this I’ve been off the ship for about 6 weeks and I’ll return in about 10 days. I’m looking forward to going back knowing what I’m doing, at least more than I did when I started. I’m curious to see how the next adventure plays out.