Post-Delivery

Ouf!
After much trials and tribulations, the first ship is out and en-route to pick-up her first cargo! It's been nuts getting to this point. Every one has been putting-in the hours and it was time to finally invite everybody out for dinner; the designers, the managers, the bosses, etc. We gathered at a Sea Food restaurant all 40 of us! The managers were quick to order the most expensive booze available in the place: about $100/500ml. of that horrid white baijio that only they would drink. Also, they were ordering $20/pack of cigarettes...all on our tab! Well, I guess that we were all overdue for a night out and they were making up for lost time. After a few 'campeys' most were having a good time. The tough field managers preyed on the innocent nerdy designers and forced them to bottoms-up. It didn't take long for the designers to fall into a quasi coma.
This is the point in the project where you 'kiss and make up' and congratulate and thank everyone on a job well done even if only a few days earlier, you were ready to throw knives at some of them.

After dinner, it's time for KTV!
We all gather at a posh Karaoke establishment. It's like going to the old cinema complexes (think cinema centre-ville) where you have several rooms on each floor. This goes on for 6 floors. In this big room, you have big long couches that are placed in U-shape around the giant TV screen. At one end of the room, there's also a dining room table with chairs. This is where the card games are played. As soon as we entered the room, five guys rushed to sit around the table and they ordered three new decks of cards. The excitement and fun that they were having was quite entertaining. I was being taught by "1.1" That's his nick-name 'cause he's the vice project manager (The PM, of course is number 1). These mild mannered and relatively quiet guys were lashing out on the cards, picking them up at sub-sonic speeds and throwing them back on the table with so much force that they were barely sitting on their chairs.
This was way... to boring for me. So, i gave my chair to one of the few other observers and made my way to the big lofty couches and parked next to the project manager.

Regardless of their vocal talents, anybody and every body took turns standing up in front of the TV screen and belched out-of-tune lyrics. Most songs were Chinese love songs. Of course, it's much more enjoyable to watch them sing than to hear them sing. And, in case you are wondering, I passed my turn on the mic that night (wasn't drunk enough)



As a gift to myself, the next night, I went with Kev to a massage house. A young boy kneaded the knots out of my back and a young girl was giving Kev a head massage. At one point, as I’m drifting off to lala land, the boy rolls a long tube of paper and I can feel it being inserted into my ear. Amazingly, at about the same time, I fall asleep on the bed with this thing in my ear. Kev took a picture with his phone camera. The paper is on fire. God knows what this was for…


Now, it’s back to business… the big push is on the 2nd ship now. Of course, it’s running late. I could do with a week off on a sunny warm beach. Getting pics from Pascou on the Cayman Islands isn’t helping either. Ah…what I wouldn’t give for a few days R&R…