last fort lauderdale

i'm sitting in starbucks ft. lauderdale nursing a coffee.. and a cold. For the first time since the first week of my contract, I'm sick. I feel miserable - sore throat, headache, chesty cough- with the florida heat making it even more foul an experience.

this is, however, my last ft. lauderdale. I have only 7 days to go. Today is my last turnaround day as I leave in St Thomas. It will be a strange week - i'm not line dancing instructor anymore, i don't get to run country night or ship building or walk for the cure or any of "my" events.'

We also had some amazing passengers last week - including a honeymooning couple who were on for 20 days that we really got to know and spent alot of time with in port. They were rad. now they are gone :(

We have two sea days to start off. battling through those will be the hard part - but then, 5 port days home.

I am still loving it, but i'm sick and tired and need to sleep

pancake house has too much choice of menu items!

well i'm sitting at a dutch pancake house in Aruba. I'm by myself at the moment because I missed my pager thismorning and Miko had already left, while i was waiting around for him (my fault entirely - my pager is unable to be heard in my overstuffed work bag.

I just had the most amazing crepe - provencale - with ham, brie and chives!

Miko is coming here at 1pm, so i'm sitting and waiting for the provencale to settle before I order a sweet crepe when he comes. How to choose? Strawberry or Banana.. or Alecia tells me that the Apple and CInnamon is number one.

Damn you, delicious pancake house and your ridiculously large menu of delectable carbohydrade laden delecacies.

I have time to kill however, and have been checking up on all the Aussie news on ninemsn.com. now, before you judge me for my choice of news source, it's linked through messenger and is the quickest to load. Apparently there's Wild Weather in QLD... oh no! I had no idea! Also a big sexual harassment case against DJs... I feel I have missed so much.

Also, in a disturbing turn of events, I now find myself physically jarred when seeing "-our" as the ending to words americans spell with an "-or". for instance FLAVOUR. spin out! Also the word MUM. Now, I of course, still spell these words correctly, it's just odd seing them in published media.

9 days until I leave the EP - and only 11 until I'm back in Brisvegas! I can't wait to see everyone again! i'm considering a SIzzler style welcome home dinner? hmm...

my tan is coming along however it is constantly overcast and i never get a chance to soak up the full intensity of the sun. devo. also, i'm kind of fat now. I battled the whole way through my contract, but in the last month i've kind of let go. I'm not MEGAFAT or anything.. just 'rounder' i guess. yuk. be warned.

rain rain go away

oh my gosh i am so glad to see sunshine again. Last cruise was completely rained out!

For the whole 10 days, we had tropical storm Otto hovering above us, bringing wind, rain and depression to the whole emerald Princess.

It was especially bad in Barbados, where everything was flooded and closed, and in st. kitts, where we did not even dock. We had to cancel island night not once, but twice - finally putting it on on the third last night of the cruise.

However, we had a great bunch of passengers last week - 99% of them took the logical approach that we can't control the weather and still enjoyed their holiday. This bunch especially loved to dance - from the rained out sailaway party in the piazza to the last night piazza party, we had a great time.

My tan has alltogether disappeared, thus today begins operaiton mega-tan .. one hour of tanning every day. I generally get a 1 1/2 - 2 hour break around midday, so maximm sun exposure will be gained.

I got my new flights for heading home to brisbane. I now disembark in St. THomas and, in the best news possible, I found out i have an overnight stay in st thomas. I have a hotel room booked, and have fantasies of spending the day with friends at Magen's bay beach, then standing on the pier waving as the Emerald Princess disappears into the distnce..

Mark's replacement finally arrived - Miko is here and he is great. Miko is from Seattle and used to be a professional dancer before he busted his knee... I have been carefully studying his dance style and trying to steal his moves like i did with mark.. but Miko is too good and his steps are too complex!

TOday Hersh leaves. Kenzie, his gf, was here this week with him and is about to go off and do cruise staff training. They are going to the Diamond Princess together next month- how cute!

in fact, i have to get back to the ship now to say goodbye to them. better scull my starbucks and get moving!

17 days to go!!

Port Reports :)

I have to say, the ports on our new itineraries are SO much better than the ports on our previous ones. However, my judgement may be clouded by the fact that I had been to each of those previous ports more than 10 times each..

I have been fortunate enough to do some wonderful tours in each of these ports as well. I’ve already written about Dominica, but I haven’t said anything about the rest of them yet- so I thought I’d do a quick overview.

Bonaire
Bonaire is a lovely Dutch island that is part of the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao) in the Southern Caribbean. I went on a snorkelling expedition on board a teak schooner called “Samur”. Now owned by a Dutch Bonaire-ian family, the boat was built in Thailand in the 1940’s, commissioned by a US CIA agent. He retired from the service and he and his family (and pet dogs) sailed the world in this little junk-style ship. It then passed to a Dutch family who did the same thing, eventually reaching Bonaire and settling there. They then ran the ship as a charter boat in the area until moving to the US to further their children’s education- which is when it passed to the ship’s new owners/operators, the family’s good friends.
We sailed to a small island called “Klein Bonaire” which is a small sand island that is a protected marine park. Here we did a drift snorkel along 300m of the in-shore reef, which bordered a massive drop-off into a deep ocean channel. It was simply beautiful – so many gorgeous fish- -especially the myriad of beautiful species of parrot fish. The whole island is made of parrot fish poo- they scrape the coral with their beaks and almost immediately poo out the crushed coral as sand. One parrot fish can poo 150kg of sand in a month!!
The island of Bonaire is very beautiful – it is out of the hurricane belt and thus is semi-arid. The people who live there are mostly of Dutch descent and speak a language that is a combination of Dutch, English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. They had a lovely market there, which kind of felt like a mini Southbank market - people selling the lovely quality crafts they had made themselves (not the mass produced crap you see on most of the islands). I was very impressed!

Aruba
Aruba is a very beautiful, semi-arid island – lots of cactus and dry scrub. It is also a very developed island with many luxury resorts, hotels and shopping centres. It’s almost “posh”. My tour here took us to the butterfly farm (which was actually exactly the same as the one on St. Maarten), the aloe vera factory and to see the amazing rock formations on the far side of the island. These rock formations were spectacular with massive granite boulders strewn around the arid landscape as if they had been thrown there by a family of giants.
Aruba was VERY nice – however it was a Sunday and everything was closed when I got back to town, except the diamond shops. Boring! Next time, I look forward to wining and dining in one of the many nice beach-side restaurants.

Antigua
Today I was in Antigua – our first stop on the second 10 day run “eastern Caribbean explorer”. I’m really impressed by this lovely ex-English island. My tour took us across the countryside of the island, where our guide provided us with heaps of information about the island, its people and history. The island has a population of 86,000 - 30000 which live in the capital St. John. Lots of stars have homes in Antigua, including Eric Clapton (we saw his house)! The Crossroads rehab centre is also located in Antigua – where Britney Spears and Whitney Houston have famously spent much of their time.
We visited Nelson’s Dockyards, the docks set up by the British government to service all the ships in the Caribbean. The island was of great strategic importance and was protected by 40 English forts. We visited lookouts, forts and the interpretation centre – where we saw a super cute “sound and lights show”. The Antiguan people are lovely, very organised (albeit super relaxed) and very proud of their country and heritage. The main industry on the island is tourism, although it used to be a huge exporter of sugar back in the slave days.

Upon returning from the tour, I went to subway for lunch and had my regular- six inch roast chicken on wheat bread, toasted, with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, capsicum, olives, cucumber, salt & pepper and mayo. It was the taste of home! SO creepy that it tastes exactly the same, right down to the white chocolate macadamia cookie!

In other news, I got extended seven days – so I will be leaving the ship in St. Thomas in two cruises time. I leave on the 26th and will probably get home on the 28th of October. It’s annoying but I must say I could do with another week’s pay…