Day Eight: Start of Week 2

Well, this morning started off with a bang. I was supposed to report at 7:45 am to take care of all of the immigration things that I have to do before I could get off the ship in New York. I woke up at 8:00. Needless to say, I was running late. I threw on my glasses and an outfit that was near my bed and ran. We were meeting just down the hall (a 2 minute walk, but still) so I knew it wouldn’t be the end of the world. They weren’t there. So I went to the Crew Mess. Not there. The Officer’s Mess. Not there. The Crew Recreation Room, the Lecture Room, the I-Don’t-Know-How-Many-Others Rooms. Not there. I went back to the Officer’s Mess hoping to find someone who would be able to help me. I ran into my supervisor and she told me where to find them and to be prepared to be yelled at. I’m telling you, they are cranky here. Or, as Lego but it, “they run a tight ship.” Well, I found them and got to the end of the line. It looked like they had just finished attendance, but I didn’t want to point out that I was late. At that point it became cattle time again. We stood in a line on the deck until they moved our line to the outside of the shipping building/custom’s office, then moved our line inside the building. This was an hour long process before I could see where our ending point might be. When we got to the light near immigration, they started to pass out everyone’s paperwork. When they came across mine, they called out my name and told me I should be at the front of the line since I am an American. I felt kind of bad for jumping, but it took a LOT less time for me to get through with everything. By the time I actually got to the counter, it took me a minute to be finished. So I got back onboard to get ready to get off the ship.

I walked in to Times Square with Lego. She and I had some shopping to do so that I would have some clothes to wear on the nights we can wear our own clothes. We found an AWESOME store called Conway with super cheap prices. I bought three pairs of shoes, two tops, two jackets, a dress, and a pair of leggings for only $86! Craziness! Leah met up with us there and Lego headed back toward the ship. Leah and I met up with Gabe and ended up having lunch at Planet Hollywood. It was actually really good! I’m always afraid that a place like that is not going to have good food since it’s such a tourist place. We went shopping at a couple more stores before I started my LONG walk back to the ship. It was nice because I got to talk to Jim the whole way back.

When I got back to the ship my roommate told me that we needed to “work on” my not waking up to an alarm. I told her that that was my biggest fault and that it has been a problem since I was a kid. Don’t know what to tell you. I took a shower before I had to be upstairs at PM registration. This was super easy and consisted of having parents fill out a form about their children so that we know all the important stuff. I would not mind having that as my duty any Sunday because I was still able to get off of the ship in New York. For some duties you are not able to do that at all.

This evening we had our opening night program with the new group of kids. It was interesting. The 2-5 room had some kid puke, so they spent most of their time in the jungle gym which meant that we were not able to go in at all. We had a child whose parents described a concern as “transitions.” Wow. He was ODD or Autistic or something. He kept walking around talking about how he hated being there and would kick things, yell, and spit. When we were playing 2 Truths and a Lie, his brother wrote “I suck, I’m weird, and I hate myself.” When he showed it to me he started to cry. It was really sad and we talked to the mom after. I think this is not irregular behavior. When they arrived before all of this, they said that “the three devils are here.” Nice. We also had a ton of kids who like to scream. It seemed like a crazy day. Not end of the world bad, but way worse than last week. It should be interesting.