EN Help, I live in a sauna!

I'll keep saying it, the month has flown by. Honestly I'm not even sure anymore what all happened in the past month, but I'll try to write a good blogpost. Get ready for September!

Work
I spend my days mostly with work, work and even more work. A lot of my hostess duties are still the same, but at the same time a lot has changed. The most important thing we do is getting cabins ready for new arrivals and then welcoming those new arrivals. Besides that, we get a lot of last minute, random tasks that no one else does and so we have to do them. At this moment there's only two of us in hospitality, which first of all means we have a very intensive work schedule (we have three days off for every two weeks) and it also means we never get all of the chores done that we should get done.
Last week I had some help one day from one of the ship kids. In the morning we made some beds and in the afternoon we baked 100 cookies, which we then distributed amongst all crew. Baking cookies is normally part of our job as a hostess, but  we really don't have the time for it now and so it was a lot of fun to get to do that again!

Life on board
Shiplife is different, but also quite similar to when I was on board during the field service last year. Of course the main parts of life are the same: everyone works (mostly) during the day, we all eat in our dining room together and we have a few different meetings during the week. The biggest difference for me is the amount of people on the ship. During a field service we have around 450 crew members, plus around 200 daycrew who come to the ship to work every day. That also means that people depart and arrive almost every day. At this point we have about 135 crewmembers on board. We still have people leave and arrive every week, but not as many as normally. I personally like it a lot that we have less people on board. I know almost everyone and hang out with people I probably wouldn't hang out with during a field service, because they would be in different social groups. On the other hand it makes saying goodbye to people a lot harder, because there is a much stronger bond with the people you do know.
I also notice a bit of a difference in the workpace. Over all, when I look at hospitality, we don't have as many people coming in and leaving and that lowers the workpace a bit. On the other hand, it's much higher, because there's only the two of us. You see this in other departments too, because there aren't enough people to fill the normal schedules and so many people have to work more than usually. But COVID is to blame for that part...

About COVID, that's something we don't see a whole lot of here on the ship. The whole ship is quarantined to a certain degree, which means we don't have to distance on the ship and don't have to wear masks, unless in the same space as crew in quarantine or restrictions or local contractors. We also still don't have shore leave (by which I mean we are not allowed to go to shore) and on the dock to which we are moored, we now have to wear masks when walking. We are expecting to get more restrictions on board, as contractor workplaces will increase, but for now we are enjoying our freedom!

While everyone is very busy with work, we still try to do some fun things in between. Every Friday night we have movie night, a few weeks ago we had a real ping pong tournament and every once in a while we play some games in the evening. We do notice everyone on board is quite tired, but in this way we also try to keep life besides work fun!

Bad luck
Oh yes, the sauna story. Anyone who has heard me talk about the ship, has probably heard me talk about how cold it can be, thanks to our very good AC system. Unfortunately, the aircon too needs some maintenance from time to time and this time, it's the corridor my cabin is on that doesn't have AC. It has been over three weeks since the AC was turned off and I have to say I've gotten quite used to it by now, but in the beginning it felt like a sauna when you entered our hallway and then our cabin. We hope the AC will turn back on next week (after which I'll probably think I live on the north pole), but we actually think it might take a while.

And that's not where the bad luck ends. Last Saturday I helped with the dishes in the dining room and my phone fell in the water. It's been in rice for a few days and we're not sure if it will work again. For now I have a back-up phone from someone else to borrow, with my own SIM card, so at least I can contact people.

I had wanted to put some more pictures into this blog, but I don't actually have that many pictures right now. There may be some more on my own phone, but I can't really access those now. Hopefully next month there'll be more!

Thanks for reading!