Eli: Honolulu & Waikiki

Been in Hawaii for a week. Time has been going quickly. Arrived in Honolulu on Monday the 11th, was surprised I had a roommate in the hotel room and began my training on Tuesday morning. My roommate is from Connecticut - will be a dishwasher onboard one of the ships. We have not gotten our ship assignemnts yet. She also went to culinary school and has pastry experience - she's hoping a pastry position will open so she can transfer.

It's been a week of confusion - to begin with my itinerary from my cruise representative stated to be in the lobby at 1030AM, Tuesday morning and meet up with the shuttle bus for transport to the training facility. My roomate and I had discussed our schedules but she was to be in the lobby at 715AM to catch the shuttle. The only thing we could come up with were different classes. Come to find out I was suppose to be on that shuttle as well - I had to take a taxi to the training center. And the taxi driver got lost - he had a GPS system and all. The address I was given was for the Coast Guard Air Station which was the wrong address. After getting the runaround, I finally found out the point of contact's name but not the building I was suppose to be in. After an hour, the front gate security figured out it was the Coast Guard Boat Station training center 5 miles away.

With the transferring of one ship to the Carribean, the cruiseline is in all disarray. There will be two remaining ships in Hawaii until May... then one more ship will be transferred and one remaining in Hawaii. In the meantime, there are 900 employees from the first ship that need to be placed on either boat. So right now, there are not enough rooms on board for us new employees. It surprises me that the company is still hiring with a large surplus of people. We are all currently living out of suitcases in a hotel. Typically, we would have done training on board but with lack of space we've been in the hotel. It's nice since on board we would have 4 people to a room and very little space - at least at the hotel there are only 2 people per room and a large space.

For training we were divided in two separate classes of 20. From there, we all had several classes - alcohol awareness, sexual harassment, water safety, fire fighting, CPR and first aid. Water safety was alot of fun - we had to demonstrate if we could swim, float in immersion suit... it's a good thing I took a few swim lessons to get used to a deep pool and not be able to touch the bottom. The fire training was fun as well. We all dressed up in fire-fighting suits, handled the hoses and put out a mock fire, went thru a maze in darkness (that simulated a smoke filled room) and we had to find the exit.

It's amazing to find out these required classes cost the cruise company so much. They had stated this whole week of training costs about $8,000 per recruit. Plus the cost of the MMD card and flying us out to Honolulu - the company pays quite a bit per person. With this training though - the turnover rate is extremely high. I heard most people do just one season then move on to a less stressful environment working on a barge, steam boat or ferry. The course is not difficult - the only way you can flunk out is if you do not show up for class - we actually had one person fail due to attendance. Miss two days of training and you are fired. Strange though there are a bunch of ex-NCL employees that live in Waikiki working various jobs in town. These are the folks that were fired from the ship but cannot get home. (If you are fired, you have to pay your own way home, if you decide to go).

Was given the day off today at the last minute. Everyone went to the beach... will begin department training in the morning for the rest of this week. We should be receiving our ship assignments by the end of the week.