mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice

Today we’re doing a crew safety drill. We have to be at our stations (chelle and I are each station E, deck 5, but she is starboard and I am port side) We have to remember that there are 18 life boats and 65 life rafts, and the lifeboats hold 150 people each and the rafts hold 25 each. And that the extra life jackets are deck 4 on the open deck, on both sides. Cause the Coast Guard might ask us those things. Oh, and if a person goes overboard, we are first to throw them a life ring, and then find a phone and dial the emergency number and tell them which side the person went over on – because that determines which way they turn the ship, and if we accidentally tell them the wrong side, then the person will get run over when we turn in the wrong direction. Red the sailor left port.

There’s another drill, a passenger drill, later, but apparently since we’re station e, we just have to the crew one, not the passenger one. So that’s nice, although we are supposed to stay in our cabins during it. So that sounds like a good time for a nap.

On a typical day, we play 3 sets of 45 minutes or an hour each. Every once in a while there is a formal night, (tomorrow is one) where we get to dress very snazzily and play in the fancy restaurant instead of just the Cova Café. I like the cova café a lot though, where we play overlooks the grand staircase, so when we play you can hear us all over, two floors down. We’ve made friends with the waitstaff in the café, too. Bojan, who can’t stand classical music, but who loves the tangos. Por Una Cabeza in particular, so he gets all excited whenever we play it (which we are trying not to do too often – we are trying to cover a lot of new music. We have enough that we could very well play a new set each night and never have to repeat things) (but it is nice to repeat things. I like playing the things I know, and the tangos are fun)

So far, we have not been busy, but we have not been bored. There have been things we are required to do, but we are not working very hard except when we play, in the evenings. It tends to happen that we stay up late, get up early, but then we have a few hours in the afternoon to nap. Kind of the exact opposite of what I am used to, but it works out. For the next couple weeks, we have a scattered schedule of training sessions, for various things. A few of them are going to be boring and pointless, like the one we have to go to in two days, about filling out time cards (which we already know how to do) – while we’re in the Cayman islands! Bah! At least it’s in the morning. We’re going to try to get off the ship then anyway.