"I don't remember whereabouts in your gallery our photo was. But it was quite shiny"

Welcome one and all to my shiny new blog, in which I’ll be waxing lyrical about the goings on onboard my new home, the M.S. Westerdam. Join me for weekly(ish) photos, misadventures, genius quotes and a whole load of stuff I haven’t even thought of yet. Rather unusually, I may actually have to change the habit of a lifetime and impose some self censorship, owing to the fact that anything I post on here essentially has the potential to get me fired. Oh well, here goes….  

 As is the case with many of the previous adventures in my life, this one began with a bit of a challenge. Hopping into a taxi at Lisbon airport, I handed the driver the address of what I thought was where the ship would be. Eventually we arrived outside a building which was fairly impressive but most definitely not the MS Westerdam. At this point the driver gesticulated to say “here we are”. After telling him numerous times how I was really after something that would float, and wishing I knew more Portuguese, he eventually realised I wanted to be in the port across the other side of town. Fast forward 15 minutes to our arrival at the ship, where some smooth negotiation was required on my part as I realised that owing to our earlier detour I was now slightly short of the full fare. As I counted out my last cents into the guy’s hand he realised I had literally nothing more to my name and let me off the last couple of Euros. Once again, my ingenious façade of complete disorganisation – in this case arriving in a country with a wrong address and insufficient funds for a taxi ride - appeared to have worked….

 After hopping onboard, having a bit of a safety talk and a tour of the ship, my assigned photography team buddy Kenny wasted no time to introducing me to the Officer’s bar, where I met a few of the crew, whose generosity resulted in my not buying a single drink all night. For once though, this had nothing to do with my being tighter than a Badger’s backside (even I can’t complain about $1 a beer), rather the fact that due to a glitch on the ship’s system I was registered as underage and therefore wasn’t actually allowed to buy booze. Score!

I originally thought we were heading straight to Fort Lauderdale, Miami, but soon learned that we had an extra stop in Madeira beforehand. Whether this was part of the intended route or simply to welcome me onboard I couldn’t say, but whichever it was we were off…  

My first morning was spent in the photo gallery, most likely baffling my new photo colleagues with my absence of sales prowess and complete lack of till experience to boot. Luckily they’re a helpful bunch and have been showing me the ropes – good job as we’re all on commission! There’s been a helluva lot to learn in a pretty short space of time and it’s proving quite a challenge keeping it all in my head, I think I’m due for a memory upgrade pretty soon.  

Waking up in a new country is always cool, and Madeira greeted us with some very welcome November sunshine. it’s a Portugese archipelago, only about 280 miles square, and they produce a lot of wine. (If you were hoping for more useful information from this blog I’m afraid you’ll be sorely disappointed, but there are plenty of guidebooks out there which will doubtless prove very informative and helpful, rather than mostly irreverent). More importantly, they also have these wicker basket sledge things which two dudes in the whitest get ups you’ve ever seen push and steer down the super steep and narrow streets, broadsiding round the corners and flying over give way junctions with reckless abandon, which apparently has been a tradition for hundreds of years. Realising this could well be the closest thing I’d get to an adrenaline rush for some time, I had to have a go, so myself and new photog buddies Jadine and Kenny hopped in for the 2km ride downhill, which mainly involved being bounced around like a pea in a whistle down the streets of Funchal whilst trying to enjoy the awesome views along the way. Ace. After we roamed around some more, and I tried unsuccessfully to get a pic of the ship in port to whack up here (I’d forgotten what a bitch shooting into the sun can be with no flash) we hopped back on board to begin the 7 day crossing to Miami. I know it’s a bit dumb to have no pics of the ship up on my first blog, but it’s kinda tricky when I haven’t gotten off it in almost a week - patience people! We arrive tomorrow, and apparently the U.S. Coastguard are coming aboard for an inspection – no doubt it’ll be a laugh a minute. Lastly, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that a crisis onboard was narrowly averted today when I thought my iPod had bitten the dust. Mercifully, I managed to fix it, which is undoubtedly a very, very good thing; y’see, no one is quite sure of the effect that depriving Olee of Metal within a confined space would have, but I doubt it’d be pretty. I’ll wager that conducting a similar experiment in the next series of big brother would make for pretty satisfying viewing though….