farewell

Independence of the Seas Voyage # 216
6 Night Caribbean Voyage

Well hello! This was a really good, fun and positive cruise. Crazy to say that when you consider that we are in GI level 2 as 200 people have fallen sick with gastrointestinal related illness. Nasty! We’re having to sanitize our work areas every hour and the guests aren’t allowed to help themselves at the buffet. This means many of the non-restaurant crew are having to help out. Luckily us photographers haven’t been called in yet!

There have been many giggle filled moments this cruise. Most of them are ship/photo related and I don’t think anyone else would see the humour in the situation… Don’t believe me? Well okay, I’ll share one such story. Annette, Matt and I were displaying the first formal night’s resi (dining room) pictures and we were enjoying the odd snort of laughter as we commented on the regular food-on-face, napkin-tucked-into-shirt and open-mouth-talking pictures when we came across a series of shots of the same man, striking various, rather ridiculous poses. This got the giggles flowing, only to be turned into hysterical guffaws upon coming across a photo of a very very large woman. Her size itself wasn’t what was funny, after all our cruises are packed with many larger-than-life “personalities”. To understand the joke I should first explain that during resi we first take a horizontal photo of the couple sitting side-by-side and afterwards, quickly snap a vertical photo of them each individually. In this event, the photographer had judged our hungry lady to warrant a horizontal photo for her single shot! Not so funny? Told you so…

The giggles continued with various Corridor parties (with the exception of one shoppe, our corridor houses only photographers and so we have taken to camping outside our teeny tiny cabins for some after hours socialising. One night Annette and I decided to take advantage of half price cocktails in the Labyrinth (the guest nightclub) so straight after work we rushed down to get changed into outfits worthy of such a glamorous evening, when we received a call to go down to the lab for a last minute meeting. Oh dear. We had to hobble and toddle our way down to deck 0, only to be met with stares from the rest of the team. It was like being caught wearing make-up by a caveman, “Why you put colour on face?”. The look on their faces, although embarrassing at first, served for uncontrollable giggles a couple cocktails later. Who can only have one cocktail when they’re half price?

Highlight of the cruise: After the tragedy last cruise, we have managed to semi-redeem ourselves by saving 14 Cubans who had been left drifting at sea after their boat had broken down. It is assumed that they were leaving Cuba in order to illegally enter the USA, but I guess fate had other plans for them.

This was the last cruise with Matt and Lore and everyone was very sad to see them go. They really looked out for everyone and will be missed by all. The send off party was amazing though! Good luck guys!