❀ I promised you I’d find out what the hotel staff does when the ship is laid up for the winter, the answer is they get their pay pretty much year around. Viking apparently has found it is worth paying good people over 12 months to keep them from fleeing to other employers.
If they work in the off season they sure aren’t going to admit it to pax. They claim they catch up on their sleep and get done all the “stuff” a life requires. Seven months a year they basically have no time off, although they manage to get haircuts, etc. It must be a crazy life but I bet Viking sort of “takes care” of them, gets them medical care, etc.
Cruise ship staffs we’ve talked to in the past say you can save a ton of money because there isn’t much to spend it on or time to enjoy it.
❀ The other DrC caught the “ship cold” a couple of days ago and now I have it. Runny nose, cough, the usual uglies. We had planned some sightseeing in Vienna, where we are now docked. Looks like that won’t happen. Trying to press on through a cold is a good way to to turn it into pneumonia, which we do not want to experience. So we’ll stay aboard and take it easy.
Cruise ships, like airliners, are places where catching some respiratory illness is a greater risk. If nobody brings a cold onboard when we sail, someone will surely pick one up in a port along the route.
More often than not one or both of us end up catching something and we fly home coughing. I’m thinking I’m getting a little old to voluntarily expose myself to a densely populated “petri dish” like this.
❀ I was rereading what I wrote yesterday about the houses hereabouts being similar. I started wondering if the stucco covers stone block construction? It might, houses here are built to last centuries and be passed down in the family. We heard yesterday about a house that has been in one family for roughly a thousand years! That boggles the mind.
By contrast, the DrsC have purchased or had built six brand new, never occupied houses over the past 50+ years, and still own 2 of them. It never occurs to us we might own something for a lifetime.
