Victory and Peace: An Update on June 17, 2009

Saying goodbye to Cardiff and Wales went pretty smooth, and wasn’t very difficult from my perspective. We set out in the morning on the 8th, and figured to be sailing for a couple of days. After an uneventful morning on mooring stations, we were poised to get off early at 3:40, and I was exhausted, so I decided to take a nap after I ate lunch.
My nap was interrupted by a fire alarm, and I was honestly a little upset because I thought I was *another* drill. It turned out to be real when I got up to the fire station within a few minutes, and things were certainly solemn. We had our firefighting teams out at the fire, and there was a mass of confusion with us left back as to where exactly the fire was. This caused some concern for those who were behind, and made me want to get more involved once I shook off some scares, so I helped wherever they needed me, which was mostly to do a lot of air bottle running between where the attack teams were and to where they could fill up the bottles. Pretty early on, the captain called everyone to their muster stations to clear space for us so that it’d be easier to work. The fire took a good four hours to finally extinguish, and in the end most of the parties involved were exhausted, but there was no serious damage to anything or anybody. Thank God for keeping us safe.
The fire had started in our toilet paper storeroom (we had enough TP still, don’t worry and get creative) and was started by some wild sparks from welding. The aftermath of the fire was one of the worst parts of the whole thing, and for about 12 more hours, it was too hot to enter the space where it had taken place. The next day I got the job of cleaning the place it had happened, and that was quite a task, so Aaron (from Minnesota who doesn’t like hockey) and I were elected (after some delay) to be the two guys in the actual room where the fire went down, and what a mess it was. There was literally about 5 feet of ash that we had to clear out, and we got into a little battle with it, so we ended up looking like coal miners. Eventually we dug through the mess and cleared out about 10 huge garbage bags full of ash and sopping toilet paper.
When we arrived in London, we worked from 9 am until 11 pm putting up the gangways and navigating up the “mighty” Thames (they must not have seen the Mississippi or Ohio since it’s about the size of the St. Claire River). This meant that most of my department had Friday off, which for me meant exploring. We headed out with no direction, but eventually stumbled upon the tower bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and some other things in that area. On the way home, four of us kind of got lost but it ended up that we were going in a good direction. At one point, it felt like we were in the Middle East, but we made it back to the ship safely! The next day I was set up for some tours, but things were a bit slower than they expected and unfortunately I didn’t end up giving any tours. On Sunday, I was able to get a free ticket to the public transport in London and check out some of the town more, like Big Ben and Buckingham palace.
One thing that is awesome is that one of the last big projects for the ship has been finished within the past week; the Hope Theater. It’s a massive, well, theater in our lower decks that can seat about 400 people, and it has been used quite a bit already. We’ve had concerts and services in it almost every day. This kind of stinks for me because my room in directly below, but I survive. The worst part is that I am on Firerounds this week, and will be sleeping (or attempting to) during the day hours, but I guess I can sleep through most anything.