Here We Go Again!

Alright, so I have been a colossal failure at the blogging thing, but as I prepare to start my second contract, I’m going to make a second attempt.

I’ll start with a summary of the rest of my first contract.  By some miracle, I managed to finish. There were moments when I thought I couldn’t do it, all the way up to the last week. About 3 months into my contract, I started getting sick at least twice a month. Nothing life threatening, just colds and tonsillitis (more on that later) and aches and pains, but it was annoying and made it very difficult to keep my morale up.

I made a lot of friends, had a lot of fun, and got the hang of the work. LOVE Europe. Barcelona is my favorite place in the world. Italian food is amazing. I had the most incredible meal of my life in Livorno, Italy. Italians know how to eat. I struggled so much in Italy and France because of the language. I got lost in Civitavecci when I decided to wander by myself one day. I’m usually okay with wandering around until I find myself in a familiar place, but I got unbelievably lost that day and started to panic. I had wandered out of tourist area so NOBODY spoke English. Finally found one lady who spoke a little English and told another lady where I was trying to get to, and she kindly offered to escort me back to my destination. The entire time she babbled on to me in Italian, knowing that I didn’t speak Italian and she didn’t speak English. It was comical.

Unfortunately, I lost my camera so I don’t have any pictures to post.

So it was a long and exciting journey and I’m proud of myself for doing it. I can’t say this officially, but as far as anybody I know knows, I am the first female American to finish a contract as an Assistant Waiter with RCCL. Might not be true, but I’m gonna go with it.

Not only did I finish, but I’m going back again! I think I might be insane. So next week, I’m off to Copenhagen to join Jewel of the Seas. Excited to have a fresh start on a new ship, but sad to be leaving my friends on Liberty.

So, why am I going to the Jewel, you ask? Long story. It all started halfway through my contract when I started getting tonsillitis. The medical facility on the ship does the best they can with what they have, but I was getting frustrated. The nurses and doctors and I were on a first name basis. Every time they saw me coming, I’m sure they rolled their eyes. But my work was suffering from the illness and I was determined to get it taken care of. After tears and some harsh words Dr. Carlos wrote to RCCL Miami office and asked for me to be approved for a tonsillectomy during my vacation! This made me happy, but I was sure this was going to be an out of pocket expense for me and I don’t have insurance since the ship covers our medical when we are there. It wasn’t until the day I signed off that I found out that the company was covering the full cost of the surgery!

So on July 10, 2 weeks before I was supposed to rejoin the Liberty in Barcelona, I had my tonsillectomy. I was declared Fit For Duty the day before I was supposed to fly to Barcelona. Unbeknownst to me, my assignment and flight had been cancelled because Miami didn’t know if I would be FFD. So I drove the 3 hours to Chicago only to find out that I didn’t have a reservation. Called the crew helpline and was told that the Scheduler assigned to me was based in Manila, so I would have to wait until 3 AM to get anymore information.

A day later, she contacted me and told me that I had a new assignment on Jewel. Jewel is a lot smaller, so there is less crew and smaller cabins. But I’m excited about the itinerary. I’ll be doing the Baltic ports for a few weeks, which includes Denmark, England, Sweden, Italy, and during the crossing, Iceland! Then on my birthday (September 16.  FYI, I would like the Harry Potter Wizard’s Collection. Only $300) we arrive in Boston and do Canada, Boston, and Maine for another month. After that, we do the Caribbean, but much better ports than the Liberty’s Caribbean itinerary. I’m happy that we will be in Cozumel at the same time, so I’ll get to catch up with some Liberty friends.

So that’s about it. I’ve had a good vacation, making new friends at home, catching up with old ones and spending time with family. This extra week of vacation has been nice to have more time to recover after surgery and watch the Olympics J

Looking forward to my next contract, making goals to switch departments and make better money in Restaurants.  And update my blog. 

Monkey Brains

Once again, I have failed. It’s been hard to come up with things to write about because it’s just become my normal life.

I’ve had some hard times, but I’m really loving this life. I guess it’s the free spirit in me. Although this isn’t necessarily freedom. Sometimes I refer to the ship as Azkaban or Alcatraz of the Seas.

I’m learning so much, though. I think I’ve learned more on the ship than I did during my four years of college. About life, about cultures, languages. And it feels like the sky is the limit. Working here will open so many doors for me. Before, if I had gone to Chicago or New York City (my favorite places in the world) and tried to apply for a job in a restaurant there was no chance I would get hired. Now I feel confident that any one of them would hire me. I don’t know if I want to be a waitress for the rest of my life, but it will be something I can do for extra cash or until I figure out what I want to do.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out what I want to do in the company. If I want to switch departments or try to advance in my current department. I kind of like being unique as far as being the only American assistant waiter and I’m not sure if I’m ready to give that up. I guess I like the attention. But switching departments could bring more opportunities. I would love to be cruise staff. I could see myself making a career out of that. Become Cruise Director someday! There aren’t enough female Cruise Directors. That would be cool. 

So I think I will start a series on the interesting things that I have learned about different cultures and some of the stories people have told me.

I’m gonna start with China. There’s this Chinese guy that is an incredible story teller. He told me so much about Chinese culture. And it’s crazy. He told me that he is going to take me to China and have his mom make me monkey brains. They kill the monkey themselves. It’s very expensive.

He also told me about baby soup, which is illegal. They eat babies. They pay pregnant women big money for her unborn child and make soup out of it. Unbelievable.

He then told me an awful story about his favorite dumplings.  Every morning he would wake up early just so he could go get his favorite dumplings from a shop. One day, he arrived at the shop and there were police there. Meat was really expensive, so they had been buying bodies from a nearby funeral home! He was upset about that.

Probably the most interesting thing we talked about was marriage. He told me that his parents were pushing him to get married and want him to go to an agency that matches up people on his vacation. He went to one during his last vacation and had a meeting with one girl. But she was ugly. So when she asked him what he could offer her he told her that he had no money, no job, and no education. So he escaped that one.

Men have to pay a large amount of money to the father to marry a woman. Especially if they pick the woman themselves, not through an agency. There is currently a couple on the ship that met each other and want to marry, but they have to save up the money to pay her father. So both of them are using the money they make to save up. She’s paying her own father so that she can marry the man she loves. Crazy.

So then he asked me how much he would have to pay to marry me. When I told him nothing, he couldn’t believe it. He was especially shocked when I told him that the bride traditionally pays for the wedding.

I’m very sad, because he is leaving for vacation in a week. He was supposed to go in April, but they pushed up his vacation because they want him to join the Voyager soon. All of our Chinese crew members are being sent to the Voyager because they are going to Asia this summer. I think the Liberty is going to be suffering because of this. The Chinese assistants are the one’s with the highest ratings and biggest cap size. We could be struggling for awhile.

A lot of transfers have been happening lately. Royal Caribbean can do whatever they want with us. A few weeks ago, they informed one of our Brazilian crew members that she would be going to a different ship when we arrived in Ft. Lauderale. Well, she is married to one of the guys on Liberty who is from Croatia. But they didn’t care. He was to stay on Liberty, but they needed Brazilians on the other ship. She decided that she was going to resign if they sent her. Fortunately, one of her paisanos stepped up. He volunteered to go instead. Anyway, if she had resigned he would have been the next one they sent.

These transfers have been hard for me to accept. I’ve been learning that you can’t get too attached to the people you meet on the ship, but at the same time you have to have close friends on the ship or you’ll go crazy.

Okay, that’s all I have for now. Until next time. 

My Ridiculous Life

I am finally going to do a post of a typical day in the dining room. I’ve started this post a million times, but every time that I start explaining what I do everyday I get really tired. So. Here we go.

I’ll start by telling you about the layout of the dining room. On the Liberty, we have 3 levels of the dining room, deck 3, 4, and 5. Each has it’s own galley, or kitchen. The galley is in the back of the dining room and it’s where all the action is. When you look around the dining room, everything is so calm and smooth. The galley is the exact opposite. Waiters yelling at chef’s to hurry, waiters yelling at waiters to get out the way, waiters yelling at their assistants to get them something from the galley, dishes being thrown around, assistants pushing each other and fighting for glasses, coffee, tea. It’s a madhouse.

I usually try to get to the dining room by 4:00 to get everything ready. I have to make sure I have coffee cups and saucers, water pitchers, coffee pots, teapots, bread tongs, and water and wine glasses. Usually, I have to fix some stuff, which means I go around to other people’s side stands and steal their equipment. In my 2 months of experience I have learned that you can never have too many saucers. Never.

After I make sure I have all of that, I hide it. Put coffee pots on one of the chairs at your table and hide them under the tablecloth. Cups and saucers in the back of your side stand and cover it with a napkin. Usually this takes about 15 minutes, depending on how many things you have to hunt down.

After that, I head to the galley to fill up my water pitchers. Water pitchers are the most important things. If you don’t have 4, then your gonna be running back to the galley all night to refill your water, and there’s really no time for that. So after they are full I put them in my side stand and tie them together with a napkin. You can’t always hide everything, so you just make sure nothing is easily accessible. It will take someone who is “shopping” a minute to untie the pitchers, so they’re just going to move on to the next side stand instead of risking getting caught.

Now it’s time to set up the table. Not hard, just have to set up water and wine glasses. The waiter is in charge of the silver and plates.

Then, I gather all of my butter dishes and creamers, put them on a bar tray and head back to my cabin to put on my uniform, maybe take a quick nap.

About 5:15 I go back to the dining room to finish getting everything. Head back to my side stand to check the damage, meaning figuring out what babbaloos have managed to fix from me in the 45 minutes that I was gone. By this time, pretty much everyone is in dining room and fixing other people is really hard, so now it’s time for me to turn on the charm. Put on a really pathetic face and bat your eyelashes, “Vidal, somebody fixed all of my coffee cups, can I just have a few of yours?” Usually get 2 or 3 from a few different guys, and I’m set. I’m not proud, but you gotta do what you gotta do.  

Now is when it gets really ridiculous. Every night we have to serve condiments with the food. Sour cream for baked potatoes, horseradish for steak, mint jelly for lamb, brandy sauce, parmesan cheese, on and on and on. Assistant waiters must provide all of this when the waiter is serving the food. “Ma’am, would you care for some sour cream on your baked potato?” So at 5:30, the chefs bring out the condiments for us to put in bowls that we bring to our side stand. Kind of. Like everything else, there is never enough. And the chefs are busy getting the food ready, so we’re not their first priority.

So, for instance, the chef will put out a few boxes of butter. We all stampede toward the butter and start grabbing handfuls to fill up our butter dishes. Butter is gone in 2 minutes. We stand and stare and hassle the chef in charge of condiments until he brings us more butter or horseradish or sour cream or or or.

There are some condiments like the cocktail sauce for shrimp and mint jelly that the chefs make, so when it’s gone it’s gone. So then your stuck fixing someone else every time you serve shrimp. The next 20 minutes are spent in the galley yelling for condiments. If one deck runs out, you usually run to the next deck to see if they have any. I have found the deck 5 is usually the best for lemon, cheese, sour cream, and horseradish, deck 4 for cocktail sauce and mint jelly, and deck 3 always has butter the earliest.

And then there’s the bread. Every night at dinner, we serve a variety of bread before and during appetizer. Every cruise we have assistant waiters that are assigned to the bread line. At 5:30, the bakery in the deck 4 galley brings bread down to all of the decks. The 4 assistants assigned to bread line must then fill all of the bread baskets. There are supposed to be enough bread baskets for everyone, but of course, there never is. So about 10 minutes until 6 we all make a line and wait for the bread. This is the time every night when I wonder what I am doing here. Why am I doing this job? A head waiter oversees the whole thing, yells at us all to get in a single file line and come calmly when the bread line puts the last tray of bread in the baskets. It never works. The last piece of bread falls and STAMPEDE. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. People cutting in line, grabbing 3 bread baskets for their friends, elbowing, yelling, fighting. I hate it. I was talking to my friend Gustavo about all of this tonight. We were waiting for bread and I said, “Gustavo, do you ever think about how ridiculous our lives are? You’re one of my favorite people on the ship, but if you are about to grab the last bread basket, I will elbow you in the stomach and yank it out of your arms. And the bread isn’t even FOR me.”

When you don’t get a bread basket, you have to go to the bakery and fill your own basket. I have actually come to prefer this. You’re in control of how many sourdough rolls you get and you know how many of your guests eat sourdough every night.

So now it’s 6:00 and time for the guests to arrive. As an assistant, my basic responsibilities are to fill water, serve bread, give drinks, serve wine, condiments, and clear the plates. Sounds easy, and it mostly is but it can get hectic, especially when you have demanding guests.

After the guests are finished eating, I get to go wash all of the dishes. I load all of the saucers, butter plates, coffee cups, glasses, and silverware onto the waiter’s trolley and take it back to the dish ring in the galley. I have to put all of the dishes on racks and give them to the dish guys to put through the dishwasher. Then, I have to meet my dishes on the other side, load them back on the trolley, and set up for second seating. A lot of people pay the dish guys to put all of their stuff through the dishwasher first and put all of their stuff in the racks, I find that the batting of the eyelashes and sad face can sometimes work just as well.

So there you go. After I set up for second seating, everything goes pretty much the same. It’s an exciting life.