Unnecessarily Early

06122016

we woke up very early, packed, checked out and had the hotel concierge hail us a cab.

The embarkation tickets for the cruise had some text on them that said “...arrive 4 hours prior to embarkation…”

now, the army has only exaggerated my being punctual, and changed the way i read timelines. Where i come from, if you tell me to be there are 0700, I have to show up by 0650 at the latest, so for a 1200 embarkation time, 4 hours early is 0800, the concierge said the cab will take 35-45 minutes, means we should leave at 0700. This means we wake up at 0600 to pack.

The cab took us 25 minutes to get there, meaning we got there at like 0730, the cruise terminal wasn't even open yet.

We ent up sitting next to a bunch of the crew/staff, the HR manager approached us to give us the paperwork, at which point we realized we were in the wrong place.

so we chilled out for about 3 hours before finally getting our room keys and checked in, then another 45 min before boarding the craft.

getting our room key was a situation into itself.

they checked us into room 1810, as our ticket had stated, however, at some point since we printed that ticket (before we left for Asia) and the day of, we had been moved without our knowledge. so they checked us into this room, but none of the names were right on the paperwork, after a few minutes and a few different cruise agents it was straightened out.

turns out we were moved up a deck, i think it is the same size room, but we have a slightly better view.

we then napped, after having woke up so early, the idling of the engines put us to sleep.

we woke up to get some food. honestly i was unimpressed, it was buffet style food, that wasnt that great, certainly edible, but nothing as exciting as what we had been eating for the past 6 weeks.

we attended the mandatory safety briefing about where to stand around and how to put the life jacket on and how not to panic when the shit hits the fan.

it reminded me very much of army safety briefs.

we wandered around, stumbled into a canadian couple from the Toronto area that was very nice, and started some laundry in the self service launderette on board.

while watching our laundry spin another canadian couple ran into us. I guess they were also wandering about the ship checking out the nooks and crannies. wayne and ida, he was some kind of mechanical engineer, and she an english professor. She was as i understand an English Second Language teacher to professionals from all over the world that came to her university. She thusly made friends from all over the world and they have travelled pretty extensively.

we got late night room service, that was also pretty unimpressive, and went to sleep.