fair winds and following seas

This place is beautiful, every building is diversely shaped and creative in design and colour, for a historically conquered people i suppose it makes a lot of sense to see so much variety in influence but it's fascinating for me to see. The people living here seem to take a lot of pride in the history of the city, everyone seems to know the date the buildings come from as well as the purpose and sometimes even the date of restoration, which I don't think you'd come across so easily at home in London. This is another place that embraces botanical beauty, there's roses growing all over the place and the current major seems very keen on fountains as there's loads here and allegedly they have only just been installed, definitely gives the place extra elegance. The city is made up of a lot of open squares which reminds me of Spain and has the same laid back vibe, food and drinks served at outdoor seating well into the night and often a accompanied by a lone guitar pl...

We have salt in our blood in our sweat and in our tears, and so when we go back to the sea, we are returning to ourselves.  Having sufficiently gorged myself on all the things I'd been missing, namely Domino's Pizza, Galaxy chocolate and Ben and Jerry's ice cream (seriously if you haven't tried the birthday cake flavour you NEED to) I suppose it's about time I head out to another ship, checked in today to see my flights are ready, so now its official. I've had a long break and I'm lucky they didn't summon me back after only a month, but I'm still a little glum to be leaving, I'll be missing Christmas, New year's and my second birthday in a row. The good thing is I'll be back for my summer festivals which are a huge part of who I am and I was sad to miss that this year.  Being that it's winter right now, which is not my season at all I haven't been super social, I tend to hibernate a little bit so I haven't caught up with a...

I've mentioned before that time flows differently on ships. The venue I was first assigned to here was time travel themed which I now find very fitting, I truly believe in ship years as a concept, it feels like I've been here forever...Now that we are part way through July, September feels just round the corner. I wouldn't normally wish away my summer, back home summer is what I live for, with tech fest and all the other great festivals I get to be a part of, I tend to want it to last forever. Here the summer is going to be spent assisting 3 day cruisers which means packing everything our ship can do into a shorter space of time. We have enough activities and shows to fill a 7 day cruise so it's pretty tiring cramming it all into 3 and a lot of the set ups are in the sun, either out on the beach or on the top deck. It's funny, I managed to go through asia still pale as a ghost because I was very respectful of the dress code and being covered up, here I'm going...

There's a private island we go to every 3 days to set up a calypso band for the cruisers. I tend to go early and chill in the hammocks in the shade of the palm trees at the beach and watch what goes by. I've seen chickens running around wild with lizards, there's sharks and stingrays swimming through the waters and schools of flying fish. It's a pretty relaxed place with not too much going on apart from the beach, music and food so I like it a lot, it's being pimped out and turned into a floating theme park any day now in an attempt to attract the millennials to cruising, so I don't think I'll enjoy it quite so much then. If it wasn't changing I'd have applied to work there, the islanders have a great life, 25 days a month they have ships visit, they bring guests ashore but they're usually gone again by 6pm, after that the guys pack down and lock things up, then they set up a campfire, play some guitar and have a few drinks, they have a telesc...

Naturally when you join a boat, some of the things you used to take for granted become sacred to you. When you join a boat that goes into dry dock, that list multiplies tenfold. I've never lived in a more dirty, scary, noisy or dangerous environment, and my last house was up for demolition ha! Every walkway is a demolition zone, every inch of the ship that's become familiar is strange once again. There's no cut off for power tools so the noise is night and day, every one of us is doing extremely physical work, and the ship has frequent power and water outages so we stink. Most of the contractors don't speak any English so you get used to reading body language pretty quickly. It's lucky I'm such a nerd because the new set of lights we've been given for our theatre and the amazing team that provided them are the only real highlight of this work for me. The ship also got a new lighting desk and I really like it, I spend most nights and a chunk of my day progra...

How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be from one minute to another - Alice Working on a ship, every time zone change that gives back an hour is a reason (obligation) to party. The parties here are completely bizarre, it's actually a little like being at boomtown festival, for anyone who's not been it's this little festival that builds all these stages and places to dance and drink in and some of them are tiny rooms and others are much bigger but with a twist like a concealed entrance so you think you're going somewhere smaller. I remember being at boomtown festival and walking past an unassuming caravan, it looked completely normal but then I saw 50 people piling out of it so I went through the door for a closer look, and it turns out the caravan was an entrance, they had put it on top of a hill and when you walked through the entrance led you down a tunnel into a huge room with a bone chandelier and cave girls dancing in bone c...

"In other countries a long wait at a train station is a dull thing and tedious, but one has no right to have that feeling in India. You have the monster crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendors of the costumes--dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond speech." - Mark Twain  At a lot of the places we visit, if you arrive by boat you can immediately see the beauty of where you are. I'll always hold Thailand sacred for this, and Langkawi is similar, you'll first notice the clarity of the crystal clear waters, you can spot schools of fish darting around together from the edge of the boat or a bridge and sometimes the odd jellyfish, as you look towards the island there are trees everywhere as far as the eye can see, in mountainous clumps and towering over buildings and settlements, and beautiful white Sandy beaches. I find this far better than being driven in alongside buildings and you get a real sense of th...

Someone told me recently to savour the good times here because they are fleeting, I was sort of dismissive because I feel like I do this anyway but I held it fresh in mind recently when I came to understand exactly what he meant with regard to ship life. A lot of people are leaving the ship before we leave asia, recently I realised that we were having a change of crew on a show, and that an inside joke we had was likely to be lost. There's a scene change where I am stood opposite side of the stage from two of my colleagues and there's a “sexy snake” dance going on centre stage, we are all standing in the wings facing each other ready to take the props off, a few shows back I started dancing to the girl opposite and then her and a guy we work with would dance back and it cracks me up every time, this time even the production manager joined in from the floor above, I was in stitches laughing. Then I realised the girl leaves in 11 days and the guy is training up for another depart...

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. Penang is exactly the sort of place I expect you'd want to end up if you class yourself more as a Traveller than a Tourist, the best thing about it is that although it's clear there are attempts made here to encourage tourists, those attempts manifest in a creative hub with plenty of its own culture. I often find popular tourist attractions tend to reflect the western world in order to attract westerners and make them feel welcome, I hear warning bells whenever I see a MacDonald's or a Starbucks, but that's not something you're going to get here. Instead you'll find an easy to navigate town bustling with flavours and colours, nothing's overly shiny or flashing at you, it's the colours that burst to the forefront, exploding out of flowers, bushes and temples and street food amongst cracked and uneven pavements and crumbling plaster that suggest you're getting something real and the...