Having never cruised before, I was caught off guard by the international flavor of this type of travel. I guess that since our port of departure was in Florida, I expected the ship to be staffed by Americans and the guests to be the same. This is not at all the case. We are a veritable Floating UN, as are many other ships, I suspect.
Name tags spell out the unpronounceable staff names of those who serve us as well as their homeland. I love this! Traveling with me are individuals from Romania (the nurse who tended to me), Philippines (our waiter each evening who is enjoying flirting with my almost 21 year old daughter), Peru (the bread guy at dinner whom I also saw selling beverage packages), India, Canada and Macedonia to name a few. The captain, in fact, when proposing a toast at the Captain’s Toast event (a tad cheesy to me) said that the staff of over 1,000 represents 64 nations, and the guests numbering 2,800 represent 44. I find this amazing as we float along the sea this evening.
Folks are helpful and speak some version of English. This has posed my greatest challenge, however. On the phone today, trying to order Gatorade via room service I was asked several questions to which I replied with a sentence that may or may not have had any relationship to the question asked! So be it. The Gatorade eventually materialized at my door, so the language/accent/hearing disability barrier is can be overcome.
Knowing bits and pieces of a few languages, I tried to ask a couple of ladies on the elevator at a slightly frenetic moment disembarking at one port what language they spoke to see if I could be of more help switching out of English. They were too captured by the moment, or their English too limited for me to be of any assistance since they never said “Portugese” or “Itailiano.”
Would that the whole world could function like the 64 / 44 nations on a cruise ship! Living on earth would be a lot more gracious.
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