Sailing again

Sailing again.
A new job, new company, new itinerary.
On a first glance, it perhaps seems strange why on earth have I left my previous position where I had better salary and had a certain promotion waiting for me. Here, I am paid less and starting absolutely from the bottom again, nobody knows or cares much about my previous experiences. But - and this is a very important "but" - I hoped that perhaps working conditions and life in general might be less stressful and I was ready to bite the bullet & even take lesser financial results just to have some kind of "normal life" and not a brutal, 16-17 hours working day constantly. It is a sad truth about cruise ship crew life and until someone pulls the necessarily laws and fines, this will be a reality for most of us.

I had embarked for the very first time in Muscat, Oman - extremely tiresome, 15-hours journey - and arrived into desert country where architecture looks like something out of "Arabian nights". It is very clear these people are wealthy since they had build all of this in the middle of desert and it looks very clean, glitzy and rich. My ship had started its voyage in Singapore and it slowly sails towards the Mediterranean Sea, than Baltic later.

Everything is so different here that I want to pinch myself.
First - passengers are extremely elderly people who can afford 42-day cruise and since they are not in a hurry, everything is about their comfort and leisure. They browse around, chat with a crew, enjoy their nap in the sun and here definitely I have nobody haggling over prices of the key chains. The atmosphere is extremely relaxed, my working hours surprisingly tolerable (I had a bad luck to arrive just before seven navigation days, but once we hit Europe it will be one port after another), company not only encourages but insists we should eat in a spiffy, top-deck restaurant with passengers (beautiful view from the top of the ship) so this is goodbye to greasy canteens. When I look back at the years I had spent working under really difficult circumstances and a constant, huge stress, this looks like oasis. I used to work from 8.30 a.m. until 3-4 a.m. next morning for weeks and months, this was just a normal, regular policy and many were weeks that we never saw the outside world because we were constantly working - I remember not having time to do my laundry and re-using & re-cycling the old socks. Now here, they have computer machine where working hours are carefully logged and not only I have decent working hours but even on navigation days I got 3 hours dinner break, which is a huge relief for feet. It still ends up in 11 working hours per day, no matter how one looks at it, but the atmosphere is far more relaxed and my initial impression is that I could and should have come here long ago. My previous salary was slightly better but I worked under huge stress for way too long and all these years of exhaustion left no trace whatsoever on my life - except that stress resulted in a weight gain and I feel completely out of shape & older than my age. For the start, I am treated as a complete beginner here - I keep quiet, will see what time brings - financial gain will be far lesser than previously but it looks like I will have a decent working life and won't be dead tired at the end of the day. What a life, when 11 hours working day seems so relaxing and beautiful, compared to what I used to do.