Well I’ve now been too all the ports that I’m going to go to here in Alaska. Juneau and Haines are really the only places that have good internet. I suppose Vancouver will too but I’ve only been there the once that I came in. So my updates are going to be about once a week.

I got paid last week, and it was an exciting $500! My roommate decided that he wanted to buy an xbox 360 slim but he doesn’t have a credit card, so he asked me to buy it and he’d pay me cash. So he gave me $200 and I put it in my pocket. Well unfortunately I don’t have a wallet and when I pulled my iphone out of my pocket later, the $200 fell out and I didn’t realize it until it was way too late. So My nice $500 paycheck has turned into $300. Ah well. It sucks to lose $200 but it’s not the end of the world.

All of the Holland America ships end in dam. The ship I’m on now is the Ryndam. The ship I had my interview on in Florida was the Noordam. There is also the Amsterdam, Rotterdam and about 10 other dam ships. So they make t-shirts, sweaters, umbrellas and a lot of other accessories that say “dam ships” on them. It’s pretty funny and throughout the cruise people refer to them as the dam ships.

Our printer has been having colossal problems this week. Apparently it’s been having issues for about a month and Ocean Images has been delaying sending out someone to repair it. Well it’s a very expensive piece of equipment and we need it in order to make any money since we sell prints. Well it broke down the first day of this cruise and wouldn’t print anything for a few days. My photo manager has been spending all night every night trying to get it fixed. He’s been able to get it to work intermittently, but after printing 200 photos or so it overheats and we have to wait. This is obviously really bad for revenue. We’re hoping that Ocean Images will send a technician to fix it for us.

I’ve been getting to know the other people on the ship pretty well and very fast. It’s amazing how quickly we get to know each other. I would say that nearly half the crew are Indonesian and the other half are from all over the world. I am a huge minority as an American. My friends are from Sweden, South Africa, Romania, England, Indonesia, Ireland, America, and many other places. A couple nights ago as I was hanging out in the officers bar, one of the guys who is a shop ambassador, (which means he helps people figure out where to spend their money on the ship) told me that there is a huge need for someone to help translate for the Chinese people who come on board. Apparently they are usually very rich and spend up to $100k on diamonds and watches. He said that simply for referring these people to the shops and doing a little bit of translation, he would tip me about 1% of what they spend. I think growing up in China might turn out to be useful.