Saturday Jun 21,,7:44am
Well our first work week is done,,,Praise the Lord. It was very productive, so I am told, and if tiredness is any indication, then we did a great job.
We completed the pulling of internet cables and it was excruciatingly hard and time consuming. Now I am moving on to installing new lights and switches in an office renovation. This is quite a job since all walls (bulkheads) on this ship are either solid steel or hollow partitions crammed full,l (very tightly) I might add, so it is extremely hard to fish a steel tape down the partition. I succeeded on 3 walls so far and hopefully I will not have to do more.
We left the ship yesterday for the first time and ventured downtown in search of "THE FAN"!! We had somewhat of a map which showed the city streets but very few names of the streets. We did stop and ask several people, none of which understood us, until we met a nice couple who spoke English and told us the "mall" we were looking for was right behind us.
Once inside, we saw no store that even came close to selling fans so we saw a young man who was sitting in a recliner and Peggy asked if he spoke English. He said "yes" and Peggy proceeded this long explanation of what a fan was, and how it worked and if he knew where we could buy one. The first thing he said was "Slow down" and repeat what she wanted. After she finished he replied "2 Euros". We finally understood, he was in a vibrating recliner, like you find in any mall, and he was telling us how much it cost. So much for "understanding English".
Now we had left the ship without eating and we were very hungry, so we started looking for a place to eat. We had the usual options of Burger King, McDonalds, but we wanted pizza, pizza, pizza.
We found a nice little pizzeria upstairs, that had English menus, and we went in and had a wonderful brick oven pizza. I was even able to conjur up my junior high Spanish and managed to get directions to a very large store that sold fans. Hoorah, we are closing in on "THE FAN".
We started out, using our best navigational and Spanish instruction skills and headed east or was it south,,anyway you have to understand. From the time we left the ship Peggy kept saying "I don't think this is right, I think we are going the wrong direction, this is not the way I was told to go, can you get us back to the ship, do you know where you are going?" I assured her she could either trust me or take the lead,,either way was ok with me.
We did make it to the store, which was downtown, and when we saw it on the corner Peggy said "Hey, that looks like a Foley's, and I said No, it looks like Neiman Marcus and we are not going to find "THE FAN" in there. We go in and it is a huge, swank store and we walk down the aisle and out comes the sales ladies with perfume samples, you know how it is. We make our way up to the 4th floor, which is 4 of many more, and ask about "THE FAN". The sales lady says, in broken English, "Go across the street to our other store" which we did, go in and ask about "THE FAN". They said, "3RD floor", so up we go and voila,,they have "THE FAN"!! We make our purchase and proceed downstairs and I see a sign that said "Hardware and tools" so off we go. When we arrive downstairs, and the first thing we see is a large display of fans,,,all much cheaper than we had just paid. Peggy looked at me and started to say "Do you think.....and I stopped her and said NO WAY am I going to go back and try to return a fan and get another one cheaper....we have "THE FAN" and we are gong to just chalk this up as another lesson of life.
It had been a long hard day and we had walked to the end of the world, or so it seemed, and it was getting dark and still had to make it back to the ship before curfew so we headed back. Sure seems a lot further when you are dragging "THE FAN" in a large plastic bag that drags the ground forcing you to bear hug a box as you trudge back to the ship. However, there is a God moment in all this. As we are on our way back to the ship, Peggy notices a young man on a bicycle who was having a terrible time because he had a large, plastic bag full of clothes that he was balancing on his bicycle and trying to make it down the street all the while the bag was falling apart and he was trying to corral falling clothes and ride a bicycle at the same time. So Peggy stops him and asks if he would like to have our nice, big, heavy plastic bag "with handles I might add" and he was so happy to get it.
He was a young man who was leaving port to go back to Ghana, west Africa and we were so happy to do something so simple as a plastic bag to make his day much better. We told him "God Bless You and go with you" and off he rode into the darkness.
I have rambled enough, I missed breakfast this morning because of new schedule so I am about to go and wake Peggy up and head back downtown for more adventures and hopefully more "God moments" await us.
Love
Ken and Peggy
