Back in San Juan

Greetings from San Juan…again. I like it here…which is good since I seem to always be here. After today I won’t be back for two solid weeks. I will miss you Puerto Rico.

I know I just posted 3 days ago, but the last three days have felt like an entire cruise. We have a new hire in our department and things are going pretty well with him. I feel like it’s tough for me to train him as I barely understand what I’m doing. However, the last few days have forced me to step up and take charge and I’ve realized that I know more than I thought I did or that I was using. I got to follow before and now I get to lead so it’s good- good growing experience.

I’m not sure if you follow sports, but last night was the Super Bowl. We put the floor over the ice rink and turned it into the party spot. We had Colts fans on the left side of the room, the Saints on the right, and the people that didn’t care in the middle. There was an ice sculpture of each team’s logo, balloon arches in team colors, and each guest got a team specific sign to cheer with. They had drink specials and a buffet of hot dogs, wings, chips, and salsa. We had all of our TVs on in the ice rink (about 30) and we played it on the video wall we project on for ice shows. We don’t receive a live CBS feed, but ESPN rebroadcasts it for ships. However we missed out on all of the commercials….many people’s favorite part of the Super Bowl. ESPN just shows ESPN commercials over and over during each break. To get around that and hopefully assuage the anger of not having the network commercials, we had football trivia during each break. So my Super Bowl consisted of sitting behind a switcher and going to trivia during each break by either running a power point of giving cues to roll video. I was also taking calls about when giveaways would be and letting the other techs know. In some regards I got to be a production manager last night…and I really liked it. I might have to talk to the PMs about how to make the switch. We were unclear if we would receive the feed of the halftime show. I was fairly certain we would, the head broadcast tech thought that we wouldn’t. As a back up, we had a few crew members with a Blues Brothers act ready to go on. Higher ups than me gave them the go and in the middle of their first song we got coverage of the half time show. Ooops. Oh well, we let them perform anyway so people got a live halftime show. At the end of the game, I didn’t get the result I wanted…I wanted both teams to lose and the NFL to say that they would let last year’s champions keep the title.

In the last post I forgot to mention waffle day. On the last sea day of last cruise I stopped by the broadcast room for something and the head broadcast told me that he was on his way to meet our friend and go eat waffles on the bridge. The bridge bridge. Like the bridge where they drive the ship. He invited me and I went up with them. We walked up to the bridge door, rang the doorbell/intercom, and the bridge officers invited us in. There was a guy with a waffle maker and a whole stack of waffles ready to go. They had ice cream, strawberries, and whipped cream as toppings. So we each fixed a plate and took our seat. We were soon joined by some ice skaters and the executive officers- Captain, Staff Captain, Hotel Director, etc. We were all just hanging out eating waffles. I guess waffle day is a fairly common thing…I’m excited for the next one. They let me look through the binoculars before I left. I want to drive next time.

I’m not sure what to do in San Juan today. I had a blast here last time- I went exploring around the fort and found a path to the ocean. It was an amazing view standing on the rocks between the city wall and the ocean. Today will probably just be phone and internet. Maybe some food. All aboard is 11 but I have to run a show at 10. In addition, I’m 4 days behind on my editing. Awesome.

Thanks for reading! Love you guys!