Non Stop

Non Stop

3^rd May 2011

Today has been pretty much non-stop. After a couple of hours sleep, it was up at 8 am for training. We only found out the night before that we had training. As I was walking past the message board on my way to S.O.B I saw my name at the bottom of the list. Hernan, Retish (our new AMP) and I had training from 9-10am. Great!

Trying to wake Hernan up was a challenge. He wasn’t even in his own cabin. Ringing somebody else's cabin was rather awkward to say the least! There was a bit of a switch around last night due to some bed hopping – welcome to ship life! Ship life really is a knocking shop at sea!

Just as I was walking into the training room I heard the trainer saying “Don’t worry, I understand if the photogs haven’t been told about the training. Let them sleep. I’d rather they do their training another day with plenty of notice than them falling asleep in class”… just as I was about to turn around and sneak out the door she caught me. “Lou, you’re photo aren’t you? Oh good, the others must be coming then, right?” I double checked David wasn’t on the training list (he thought he was). The lucky git went back to bed for a few hours. Before that though David to run and wake the new AMP up. Poor guy didn’t realize he had training. In the end, we all made it to training – as for falling asleep, a few of our heads were nodding. Marlene (Guatemala) from Guests Relations fell asleep a couple of times. She’d just finished a night shift and was sent straight to training.

The training went on until 10.45. As it is a sea day there’s very little to do so catching up on sleep seemed to be the best option. At 12.15 I was up and getting ready for a four hour stint in the gallery. I’ve sold quite a few folios, 2 cameras (2 in one morning), camera cases and memory cards this cruise. After an hour break it was back into the gallery for another two hours. Today my 2-4 hour stints in the gallery are split up by 1 hour breaks. Handy.

Now I’m on my 2 hour dinner break before I go through to 12.30 or 01.00. Including training I’ll have been on the go 11-12 hours.

Tomorrow we are in Haifa, Israel and I’m out again shooting tours. I thought the tour in Greece was tiring. This time we are all sent to separate places and my tour will last 9.5 hours. I’m so glad I get the evening off. I’ve got to head back to the gallery before retail training so I’ll try and get some more details on tomorrow tour.

**UPDATE**

Retail training has been moved to tomorrow. There was a crew only show tonight in the Savoy theatre. By the time I finished work and showered the show had already started. A little later I headed down to the lab. Fede was going to give me a hand with cropping: a few tips and how much space to leave and how the final image would look after cropping. Let’s hope I do better next time. He did say my positioning and exposure were excellent so I’m happy about that. Positioning people and getting the exposure right can be hard in Ressi as there’s not always a lot of space to maneuver. Sometimes getting further away from your subject isn’t always an option.

Jeni had to lend me a short sleeve top for tomorrow. In Haifa the tours are all based upon religion. At all religious sites everyone, without fail, must cover their knees and shoulders. All but one of my shirts have sleeves and guess what? It’s in the dirty washing (my suitcase is my dirty washing basket now). So next time we are at port I’m going to have a look around the shops for a few short sleeve tops as I’ll no doubt be doing the tours again.

As Jeni and I have both been complaining about how fat we’ve become we decided to finally do something about it… rather than just talk about it. It was midnight. We headed up onto Deck 12 where there is a mile long running track circling the swimming pools and spa. As we are so terribly unfit we only jogged for 15 minutes and walked a couple of laps to cool down. It was quite hard running against a strong wind, you don’t seem to get anywhere. It’s more like you’re jogging on the spot! After jogging we headed down to the Crew Mess for juice and cereals (as you do). By the time we headed back to our cabins it was about 2am… waking up tomorrow at 6am for the tour is going to be a real nightmare!! Wish me luck!