Technical Writer

Caribbean Cruise Aboard the Crown Princess

Here are some photos to show the interior of a cabin aboard the Crown Princess, which incidentally happened to be mine and my husband's, in mid-January in the Caribbean.   

This is the Crown Princess mini-suite, which simply means that there was a sitting area with a couch and a couple of chairs, and a small balcony with four lounge chairs and a table, quite useful for having breakfast in the cabin at 7:30 a.m., and for standing at the rail to let the night air whip my hair into a salty tangle.

I took the photo before we unpacked our bags. The unusual bed cover is to protect the coverlet from the suitcases flung on top.  We didn't jockey our own cases. Passengers relinquish their bags before they board, and by evening, our bags had been delivered to our door. We carried aboard only modest hand luggage.

  Here is another shot to show you the small yet adequate cabin, which was mid-ship on the so-called Dolphin deck, which has a significant advantage in that  when one stands looking down, over the rail to the ocean, there is no view of other balconies. All other balcony cabins overlook balconies below, and our Dolphin deck escaped that fate because the lifeboats are slung beneath our deck, which extends to cover them.  Of course, I could look up at people watching me, but most people were not watching the sea. Instead they were at the casino, in the vast auditorium, in the remarkable number of small, intimate lounges and bars, or dashing about in the noon-day sun in port.

I want to show you the flowers my husband had delivered to our cabin. I put them outside to enjoy during our alfresco breakfasts. 

Our cabin was serviced at least three times a day by Lauro, from the Philippines.  He was responsible for 17 cabins, every day of the week. On shore, I talked to cruise ship personnel and learned that employees of the ship line work on 10-month contracts, and work 11-hour days, with a couple of hours mid day for a break, which they might use to dash ashore to enjoy private time. 

The service staff are usually either from Eastern Europe--Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria--or from either the Philippines or the Latin American countries. I imagine that the competition for these jobs is fierce, with an eager pool of willing workers at the ready back home. As a result, the service employees are really top-notch. One cruise ship staff member told me that his salary provides a better-than-average income for his family in the Philippines, and that he can send his sons to a private school. He added that when he is home, he is treated like a king. Our waiter and our cabin steward have been at the job for many years, having worked up to their present positions.

The officers, crisp and polished, are often from sea-faring families, and pleasant to talk to, but we did not frequently interact.

The Crown Princess is a new and pretty ship, with commissioned art everywhere, at every stairway and landing, on the walls of public rooms, and even in the cabins; it is everywhere. The art is mass-market and meant to please the viewer.

Here are a few pictures, which I have requested to use, but have not yet been given permission. I might have to remove them at some point. The works are far better to view on board ship.

 

The mosaic floor is in the central atrium that rises three floors and is surrounded by graceful spiral staircases. Musicians entertained here in the evenings and at night, and in other places besides.  The musicians are classically trained string and wind ensemble performers.

I took these ship photos on the first day in a port, when most people were ashore or in the many dining rooms or other public spaces, and not here, in the morning.  As for lounging about like a kidney, nothing can beat the area on the top deck, called the sanctuary, where children are not permitted.  Again, either no one has found this spot, or they are all at the beach on shore. I took the picture late morning on the second day out.

In all, I would return to the Crown Princess, if i could avoid the rest of the 3,000 passengers, which I managed to do this day.  In fact, a person is never amid the crowds due to the design of this ship, which cost 1billion dollars to build and furnish.

Borrow This Line

When you want to stir things up a bit at your next 

luncheon, drop this little phrase to no one in

particular.  It's quite provocative.

The work is not all about the tiara, darling, but our responsibility to others.

Angels Over Grand Turk Sept. 07, 2008, the Islanders Say

In the memory of the very old who have lived here all their lives, the island of Grand Turk had always escaped hurricanes.  There had not been a great hurricane since 1949 except for two, including the one that hit the island in 1960.   That, compared to Hurricane Ike, was like a child’s watering can upturned on the sunny beach, but in early September, Grand Turk was lashed by the fury of hell, but no one died.

Grand Turk is the capitol of the British overseas territory of Turks and Caicos, and a new governor arrives every four years at this outcropping of eight small islands in the ocean, west of Cuba and north of the Dominican Republic.  The governor presides over a place named for an interesting species of cactus, and where Columbus dropped anchor October 12, 1492.  Later, pirates ruled in the 17th and 18th centuries, and after the coast was clear salt rakers arrived from Bermuda and settled down to export their haul.  The salt trade eventually collapsed, and now the principle employer on Grand Turk is the British government. 

Of the 3,000 people on Grand Turk, I met police, small shop owners, and taxi drivers and tour operators (who will take you all around in an hour) and all of them exhibit great devotion to their island home as is no wonder, because the island is a place of great beauty.

Grand Turk was in the path of Hurricane Ike in the days leading to its collision with the island.  The islanders were not especially alarmed by the approaching storm because Hurricane Hannah had flooded the place just three days before, and even up to the very end the people believed they were safe.  Does lightening strike the same place three days apart?  As it happened, it did.

This is the story two people told me.

A lone British military helicopter pilot was aloft, tracking the hurricane and keeping watch over the islands.  When the pilot realized that Grand Turk would be at the center of a new storm against all predictions when even Hannah was a surprise, he flew to warn the island because by then communication had been broken.  To prepare for the worst that he expected, he stopped at a supply base to pack in as many empty body bags as the helicopter could hold. 

As he flew into the gathering storm, he had to change course through raging wind and rain because human bodies were storm-tossed through the air.  He dipped and dodged around the human forms, and when he finally landed after the hurricane's ferocity had passed, he believed all the islanders would be dead. 

The pilot made for the island’s hospital and delivered the body bags to the nurse who told him body bags were unneeded for in fact no one had died.  Ninety-five percent of all buildings were destroyed. Houses were washed away or smashed and vegetation was upturned, but no one had died, although they had stood in their houses with water up to their chests.  The wild horses?  These wise and sturdy creatures, descendants of the horses of the Spanish Conquistadors, every one of them made for the relative safety of the island’s airport runway and they survived, too. (Look for the airport near the bottom of the map. The island is only 7 miles long, and 1.5 miles wide.)

The islanders of Grand Turk love their island in the deep blue sea.  They have theories about what the helicopter pilot knows that he saw in the raging air above Grand Turk that day, and while they do not forebear to speak of it, it is not for an outsider to write another word about their story.

Here is a link about the island and Hurricane. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4699477.ece.

Backward Glance

The gangway is never a place for farewell.    The departure from ship is the denouement of a voyage, after farewells have been said, or left unsaid.   I could have told him that in six months we would meet at the top of the Empire State Building, but I did not. I will live with that look of reproach upon Nick Ferrante's face, but I will not succumb to it.

Was it the hat?  I have always been fond of men in hats, having married the best of them.

Full Moon Start of a Voyage

Tonight is the night of the full Wolf Moon. This moon is also at perigee, the closest it will come to us in 2009 in its eliptical orbit of the earth--an auspicious start of the voyage.    We ship out just before the peak of high tide tomorrow evening, which is at 7:12 p.m. from the Port Everglades turning basin.  I will stand on the balcony in the salt air and watch the lights of Florida recede while the moon rises.

Sailing Away

http://www.princess.com/bridgecams/kp/crown_bridgecam.html

Tomorrow morning I embark on an excellent adventure to the Caribbean.  I am posting the webcam so someone might alert the captain if it appears that Cary Grant is making any untoward advances upon me. Oh, I know that the good man is no longer with us, but time aboard ship is mutable, and further, although I am married, aboard ship no one will notice, and my gown is always fetching.

A Man at a German Christmas Market

The huge Christmas market in Nuremberg is over rated, in my opinion.  Give me the small, local markets where the townspeople display their own wares or sell their hot wine, gingerbread, and every good thing to eat.  The markets are also a good place to observe people at their convivial best. 

For instance, here is a handsome man of Germanic extraction.  Note the gleam in his eye.  He is probably going to buy something nice.  In fact, he did buy something nice, and then he took it all back to his hotel and distributed the goods to all the employees.  Notice the fine hat and professorial bearing. This is an individual at home in the world, where in fact he has lived all his life when not lost in profound thought.

I learned that this person's ancestors came to the United States from northern Germany 100 years ago and he learned the German language from his great aunt, when he was but a pup.  He calls his language skill "kitchen German," but he uses it bravely, and with special success, especially in tiny villages. He had to improve his kitchen German to earn his PhD, he told me, and that was back in the day when a PhD actually meant something.  So here he is now, back in Germany (remember, he travels all the time) to continue his studies at the famous Goethe Institute.  What an excellent fellow.

German Village of Glass Blowers, Lauscha

Lauscha is the very heart of the German, Christmas glass-ornament industry of small companies, many of which have been family run for decades, if not centuries. To celebrate the Christmas market this year, prized model trains have been set up in a classroom in the school near the rail head in this town in the former East.  Someone has made a model of little Lauscha, and hauled it out for all to admire as part of the annual Christmas Market in December, just a few weeks ago. 

The town was built along the river, in the cleft of the valley surrounded by steep, forested mountains, and a narrow road runs along the river, and a small, two-car train follows the road and the river through villages along the way north from  nearby Coburg. The road by the train station is paralleled by a roadway on each side, and all three roads run through town, encircled by connecting roadways.

In the town live 4,000 thousand people, and today, a bright Christmas market day in mid-December, you can follow the crowded main street to the top of the town to the town hall, and inside are rooms set aside by glass blowers to demonstrate and sell their wares.

The earliest photos taken in Lauscha are of families in their homes, sitting and working on decorating glass ornaments at the kitchen table. Glass has been blown in Lauscha since the 1597, in the forest of Thuringwald along the sandy banks of the brisk river Lauscha.

In 1846 Albert, Victoria's beloved Bavarian prince, decorated a Christmas tree with blown glass ornaments from the villages near his home in Coburg, and ornaments from the remote land come to the notice of rich Londoners.  The illustrated London News showed a pretty drawing that Christmas of the royal family gathered around their gaily bedecked tree.  Within just a few years, blown glass ornaments from Lauscha became popular in England.

The woman in the photo is painting a glass ball just blown.  She paints a bit, then twirls the ball in its stick handle while she   dusts glitter over the wet paint.  She repeats the process until the ornament is complete.  The glass painter looks as if she could have sat for the photo in 1950, not just a few weeks ago.   Notice the lighted torch at the end of the table. The glass blower had stepped away for just a moment and kept the tool aflame. There are early pictures from the beginning of photography that are not dissimilar to this. 

The ornaments may be entirely mouth blown, or they may be blown into a mold as are the red and golden pine cones in the basket here.  I saw a humble basket of simple, round mouth-blown balls on the floor and they were exquisite.  I imagine them on a table-top tree as the only but perfect ornamentation. 

First Footing in the New Year

The Scots have a custom I am ridiculously fond of and oddly bound by, and that is recognizing that the person to first step foot over your threshold in the New Year bespeaks the fortunes to come of the household.   What one wants is the best of people to be the first footer, because then all the New Year will be sunny and bright and full of good cheer.  Fortunately for me and my household, it worked out quite nicely, thank you.