angst

oh, the days of high school dances...

ACTUALLY

caribbean cruise 07

Certainly haven't updated for a long time...and I don't know if anyone reads this anymore.  But anyhow, here's a full entry with pictures!

I must confess that I didn’t have too many expectations of this cruise.  It was another cruise with T and S (it’s almost like a tradition now) and unfortunately T and I were beginning to drift even further apart.  Well, we do have our moments when we’re tight and sharing secrets and stories, but believe me, there are plenty of off moments too.  In short, this cruise just offered more opportunities for us to almost get away from each other.  I wonder what happened to those carefree childhood days.

We shuffled off to our rooms, settled in, met our incredibly cute waiter, Samuel, who happened to be one of those dark, suave Portuguese types.  He had plenty of tricks to show us and we were all so easily amused and happy.  I wonder if he enjoyed serving.  Probably not though, I mean, who really enjoys being at the beck and call of every passenger’s little whim?  He was SUCH a fun person to be around.

He doesn't look too funny in this photo but he actually is in real life.

Here he is showing us one of his tricks.

So as T got to know the other teens, I got to know the musicians – you know, the people who provide background lounge music at the bars.  Both of us had excuses to feed our parents when we stayed out late: T’s was “I see you guys all the time, I only get to see these teens on this cruise!”  Mine was “When will you ever meet someone who works on a cruise ship?”

One evening, I was finally convinced to go and hang out with her ‘teens’.  Gah, I can’t stand that word and I don't even know why.  They were all gathered around the swimming pool, laughing, taking photos of each other and T bounced over and settled herself between two of them, ditching me immediately.  I was kind of expecting this, so I stood around, feeling amazingly awkward until I sat down and joined another group.  They seemed nice enough, so we sat and chatted (small talk really, and I was quickly getting bored) until we ran off to the diner on the cruise, where one of the girls started talking about whiskey she smuggled into her cabin.  And that was when I, for some random reason, began to hate the superficiality of being a teen, the desire that adolescents have to impress and appear ‘adult’ by boasting about the amount of drinks they can down in an hour and still stay sober.  It was lame, I’d heard it all multiple times before.  I mean, honestly – all that fake sophistication?  Please.

So after twenty painstaking minutes in the diner that was practically dripping with cholesterol, we finally left and I fabricated some kind of excuse to leave the gang, eventually making my way down to the Schooner Bar, an area decorated to look like an antique boat, with old sails and fishing net ropes, rich leather seats, a bar area with a marble tabletop.  In the middle of it was one of those background lounge musicians playing an electric baby-grand piano, and being a music dork, I couldn’t help talking to him.  He turned out to be Martin, from the UK, with that crisp British accent you hear in movies.

I heard Martin sing and play the night before, and I remember it being rather ordinary.  The song he was singing didn’t particularly show off his vocal skills, so I drew the quick conclusion that he didn’t have an incredible voice, because if you had an incredible voice, you wouldn’t be singing on a cruise ship.  His playing consisted of random chords, occasionally broken chords, the usual stuff.  Then that night, I sat by and asked how he learned – that’s always an interesting story, how people learn to play their instruments.  He said that he semi-taught himself to play.  Being sixteen, I could ask all sorts of questions like “Do you like your job?” and “What would you do if you weren’t playing here?”  It was great – I found out about his life, about how he’d rather be singing on stage with a band instead of being a human CD player.

Then he let me play, and I started off with a soft piano version of Sarah McLachlan’s Angel, then accompanied him as he sang several songs.  It happened like this for the next few nights too, we covered some Les Mis, a lot of You Raise Me Up, Coldplay’s Scientist (but the pages were mixed up so he had to make up the words).  The thing though, is that his voice is completely different when he sings on his own, without playing the piano.  It becomes so much stronger and powerful and impressive, and that’s saying a lot since I’m extremely picky when it comes to voices I like and respect.

The first time I played and accompanied him, I went to the bar with my mom afterwards.  I got a drink on the house :)

I played for forty-five minutes on Thursday night, and we did a couple of duets.  It was awesome.  The odd thing was that I was having so much more fun with this guy who’s probably 10-15 years older than with other kids my age.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s not an Older Man Syndrome or anything.  So why is it that I prefer hanging out with older people?  Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve always been the younger one in a class?  Or almost two years at Deerfield?  A certain upbringing?  Family background?  I wonder.

I heard a trio, Rosario Strings, playing in the dining room one dinner and again, being a music dork, discovered when they were playing in the Aquarium Bar and parked myself in front of their mini-stage with my camera that records minute-long videos (yes!).  A violinist, guitarist and double bassist, playing all sorts of tangos, old pop songs, Richard Clayderman, and OF COURSE, Phantom of the Opera.  I visited them almost every single time they played in the evening and got to know them well, which was fun.  The violinist Dino, in particular, has such amazing vibrato.  I’m so jealous.  I listened to them for a while during the last night and a couple from the UK approached me and asked if I wanted to play the violin, and that I should ask Dino if I could play something on his.  Don’t ask me where they got that because I have absolutely no idea – but that man’s accent was so quintessentially Cambridge, I loved talking to him.  I wish I could’ve tried to play, but Dino didn’t use a shoulder rest and the violin would’ve slipped off my shoulder if I attempted.

I must’ve looked pretty strange at the bars, whether I was listening to Martin or Rosario Strings.  I’d just sit there for at least an hour every time, by myself, fiddling with my camera, usually without a drink (the bartenders didn’t even bother asking for my order ever since Martin announced to the audience, “She’s only sixteen!”); eyes half-closed, sitting there and soaking up all the live music.  It’s also a perfect place to go people-watching.  The social scene in Martin’s area works like this: from ten to eleven, you’ve got the families, the older couples on their honeymoons who waltz in a way that makes you sigh, and after twelve, the college kids come out – most of the time, the frat boys and sorority girls.  It’s highly amusing, especially when the college girls seat themselves on the leather stools around the baby-grand piano and stare, infatuated, at Martin.  It's different with Rosario Strings though, most of time you've got the old couples.  Once a really annoying frat boy interrupted when the guitarist was playing something and asked him if he knew how to play Hotel California  I wanted to punch his face in.

Friends, heed the following advice if you want to have a good time.  Hang out with the waiters, because that’s where the party’s at.  Believe me, they are SO much fun – something I only discovered on the last night (ARGH!).  It was eleven when I walked into the dining room and saw them polishing the glasses in preparation for the new batch of guests who were boarding the next day.  I initially wanted to check out the grand piano there, but it was locked so I hung around and talked.  I was the only guest there and I got a lot of strange looks, but it was funny instead of awkward.  One waiter in particularly kept on telling me to order a champagne, or a vodka: in his words, “I’ve been drinking since I was twelve!  And Paul, since he was ten!”  The same guy tried to persuade me to stay out and party with them afterwards, and as much as I wanted to, being grounded for the summer by my parents when they found out didn’t sound too good.  Honestly, my mom freaks when I’m not back by 1 – imagine rolling into my cabin at 5 in the morning.  Haha, I honestly wish I’d known about this earlier!  He told me all these crazy stories, and he has plenty of them since he’s worked there for five years.

Did you know that when a woman (usually college age, or young 20s) asks a waiter to sleep with her, he usually does so?  It’s all about customer satisfaction.  And in the end, he doesn’t lose anything because what happens on the cruise, stays on the cruise.  And I’m sure he has a good time anyway.  Or the time a Spanish woman fell in love with her Muslim waiter on a cruise.  She left her parents and became a waitress, they married, but divorced soon after.  Oh, and the guy who ‘slipped’ from Deck 7 to Deck 3 so he could get money off his insurance policy.  Unfortunately he was taped by a guy on jet-skis.

My parents, of course, worried.  I guess that’s their full-time job, especially my mom’s, ever since she discovered that a nineteen-year-old girl was thrown into the sea on a Royal Caribbean cruise.  People don’t even know whether she was actually thrown, or whether she decided to commit suicide, or even if she stumbled off drunkenly.