Cruising The Seven Seas: Lady Corsica

Lady Corisca

25th July 2011

Lady Corsica… who is she? What’s the traditional attire? According to Image, it’s the Crete Girl dress! As for who is Lady Corsica… it's me!

I was once again on gangway, this time in Corsica, rocking my favourite costume minus the hat/head piece. I was a bit worried people would notice that this was the traditional attire Corsica, especially as we had plenty of French guests on board. I was over the moon about being able to wear my favourite gangway costume though. I always get good counts and it’s a brilliant outfit to skip around in, having a laugh.

Feeling tried after very little sleep I was ready for gangway. Fede was shooting me. Sandra was sitting in the corridor in the dolphin costume. Hernan would be shooting her.

We had to pull Fabio out of bed. We wanted to switch him with someone else. He was too drunk to speak. None of us were happy with him, to say the least. He’d kept us up last night banging on the walls trying to cause arguments. We almost called security. We are all reaching the end of our tethers!

Fede popped out to see if the gangway was ready. It was, but the Captain wasn’t giving the all clear until later and none of the tours were leaving until 8. We waited around for 15 minutes and no one exited the ship. Taking the opportunity we ran up to the mess for a bit of breakfast. While walking around the ship in costume I got a few smiles, laughs and confused looks. Climbing the stairs dressed up as a dolphin or wearing a huge, long dress, wasn't exactly an easy task!

We were back on gangway at 08.00 and people were starting to trickle out of the Mariner. It wasn’t long until the tours came bringing along a mad rush of guests. We couldn’t grab them quick enough! The Italians were as difficult as they come, but we managed to get quite a few shots.

Sandra was trying to smudge in Italian from inside the dolphin. It even freaked a couple of people out… they didn’t expect the dolphin to talk. Every so often the gangway would go dead and sooner or later another mad rush would come. It was pretty temperamental.

During the breaks in between rushes, we took the chance to take a few photos of ourselves. This was mainly for Fede’s benefit as he’d be leaving after this cruise. What’s worse is he’s port manning and of course Jomar didn’t let him know. I offered to take his place so he could go out but you needed more than 24hours notice to do that.

Towards the end of gangway Fede’s batteries had completely ran out. Hernan was nearly out too. Fabio was the only one with some life in his, so he took over shooting me for a bit. Later, looking through the photos he’d taken, they were all over exposed or blurred. One things for sure, he really was too pissed to work!

Once gangway was over Luci, Sandra, Hernan and I headed out into Corsica. Just outside the port was a small market selling local produce from cheeses to pates to honey. Popping into a few of the shops, the prices were incredibly expensive. The stuff however was nice though so maybe next payday?

We were all starving and looking for somewhere reasonably priced to have lunch. A pizza would set you back anything from 15 euros plus. We wanted to go somewhere with wifi which wasn't as easy to find as usual.

In the end we stumbled across a small bar/café type place. The food was excellent and the guy working in the place was brilliant. He spoke a tiny bit of English and Spanish and we could manage a few words in French so there was a bit of a mix of languages going on. He couldn’t believe we were all from different places and switching between English and Spanish (1 Brazilian, 1 Colombian, 1 Argentinian and 1 English).

After having something to eat we decided we’d better head back to the ship.

Hernan had set up and the rest of us wanted to sleep for an hour. Hernan photographs pretty much anything. He saw a stray dog walking towards him so he bent down and took a couple of photos. All of a sudden a guy came out of nowhere, screaming at him in French and tried to knock the camera out of his hand. Jumping up, the French guy was telling Hernan he wanted to see the photos, telling him to delete them. Telling the nutcase to bugger off, we carried on walking back towards the ship, completely gobsmacked. Why would someone be so bothered about taking a photo of a stray dog?

The rest of the evening was a bit of a blur, even though there wasn’t much to do. The new charging system is still giving us problems. There are eight cash registers but only five can be used and there’s one tax refund machine.

As we aren’t going outside the European Union and we are using Italy as our home port, we have to charge tax on top of our original prices. All the other ships in Europe are charging 18% tax (most are using Spain as their home port) but in Italy, the tax is 20%! All the receipts have to be kept in numerical order and if any get lost, we’ll face a hefty fine which will no doubt come out of our wages.

Trying to keep receipts in order is impossible, especially when there are four of us on the tills. Before we just used a plain till roll, saved the receipts and stacked them up at the end of the day. We can’t do that anymore in case any get lost. It’s a bit of a mess for everyone involved. It’s a relief that we’ll only be doing this for seven weeks… but those seven weeks can’t go quick enough when it comes down to charging the guests for their photos!