A blog about Tenerife, Linedancing, Food, Shopping etc.

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Saturday, February 09, 2008

I am a seaman

It's Saturday and our day off.
Today I don't do much. I have put some clothes into the washer mashine and painted my toenails red. And now I'm bloging, but I really try to take this weekend easy and just rest.
Tonight we are going out for dinner with my work-mate Eija from Sweden. She is here on Tenerife for holiday right now. We have been working togeather on a ship going between Finland and Sweden.
Some of you probably don't know that I have been working for many years on the sea. I think it's about ten years if I count all the years together.
If I wouldn't sing I probably would be working somewhere on a ship when I like that life so much.
You work two weeks onboard and then you are off two weeks and that is an advantage that fits me very well.
Onboard you live in a cabin and you get all food you need from the crews diningroom and the cleaners are cleaning the cabin and providing your bed with new sheets. And when you step onboard you get your uniforms clean and new pressed from the crews wardrobe. You don't really have to think about anything else than the work you are doing onboard. You just work, sleep, eat and style yourself. Once a month we have had been trained to know more about wines, and sometimes even about whiskeys, which is quite interesting.
The staff is like a second family for you and you meet a lot of passengers from different nations. It's very special to work on a ship and I start missing it every time I think about it.
My grandmothers dad was a shipowner in the beginning of last century and owned some boats running at the westcoast of Finland bringing people back and forth to the town. The roads were not so good at that time and the people often choosed to go by boat when they liked to visit the town.
I don't know but maybe I, because of that, have got the seaman blood in me? There is a saying; `one time seaman - always a seaman´, and I believe thats thru. But I know some of the seamen call me a `lake sailor´ when I've only been working on boats between Finland and Sweden. They think you need to sail on the big oceans to be a real seaman.
Now my youngest son Daniel also has comitted himself to become a seaman and has been studing the proffession at the Seaman institute in Finland. His daddy is educated helmsman and Clas' daughter is also working as a cashier on a ship.
You maybe wonder what I've been doing on the ships? The last years I was working at the Tax free market onboard and even in the parfume shop and in the clothes fashion shop.
I went to work on the ships, for the first time, one month after I turned eighteen (you have to be eighteen years old to be allowed to work onboard). Then in the beginning I was working in the kitchen when I'm an educated chef as well.

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