Germans and rocky seas and everyone is a magician

We are now doing the “repo.” I used to think it was pretentious when people said “repo” instead of “repositioning cruise” but now I am brainwashed. The ship goes into dry dock for 3 weeks in Mobile, Alabama, and then resumes it’s 24/7 machine slavery until the next dry dock. It is intelligently packaged as “sail from New York City to New Orleans!!! And go to islands in the middle!” We are going to the Caribbean and a little bit of South America for about 2 weeks. We’ve left the fall and come back to balmy evenings and gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous clouds. We are on board with a bunch of Australians (?) and Germans who are being led by a tour group with t-shirts that say “Albatros.” Maybe this does not mean “albatross” to a German and doesn’t seem like their tour group is called “DisasterTragedy.” Anyway, there are a surprising number of svelte people with tasteful clothes, crazy hair, and geometric glasses.

Last night was the rockiest night so far. The ship was pitching all over the place, so it felt like someone was standing at the head of your mattress and lifting it 2 feet, then went to the bottom of your mattress and lifted it 2 feet, then did the same thing on the sides. Our next door neighbors’ closet doors slammed open and closed every 10 seconds which we could hear pretty clearly. Everybody had booze fall off of shelves, we had a little jar of hair accessories shoot off of a shelf. It is a testament to the carpet and bottles used by Absolut that nothing broke. My roommate lost her mind. Another castmate had a drawer shoot open every 3 minutes. There was a lot of getting up in the middle of the night and becoming McGuyver. There was also a lot of “did a whale just ram our ship?” or “what did we hit??” since things were slamming into the sides. There are barf bags all over the place and I feel slightly queasy and the ship is non-stop creaking. It is moving around like crazy. Apparently the hull is made to be flexible and once upon a time the seas were so bad that some windows shattered from the boat flexing underneath it.

In other news, I discovered that our cruise director is also a magician. That means we have 3 magicians on the ship: the cruise director, the lighting technician, and the actual magician. This is fascinating. Especially because the cruise director never really hangs out with the magician so I wonder if they hate each other. Apparently some ship magician said “whores do tricks, we do illusions” which is pretty great and bizarre.