On Thursday and Friday we packed up all our belongings and transfered them down to our new cabin on deck 5. It's funny that compared to living in our house, the cabins are very small. But going from a small cabin to a somewhat larger cabin (approx 50% bigger) seems like a huge change. The first morning we woke up, Heather said from the bed - Wow look how far away the door is! Now it is about 6 metres away instead of 4.
Thankfully we have not accumulated too much "stuff" during our time onboard, so it just took a couple of trips with a trolley and some crates, and we had it all moved. By Friday evening we were all unpacked and settled.
This week was also the start of the new school year onboard so Liam and Kara started new classes with new teachers. It has already been noticible that Liam's homework is more difficult than it was a couple of weeks ago when he was in the year below. We have been blessed with an influx of 5 new teachers in the group of new recruits that joined a few weeks ago. Sadly, Liam also had to say goodbye to his teacher for the past year - Miss Kath, who has been a great blessing and encouragement to him.
On Thursday evening, the children got to sing in the ships prayer night. Liam and Kara both have lovely voices and enjoy singing which is great.
This past weekend was another very busy and exciting time onboard the ship with nearly 9500 visitors coming over Saturday and Sunday. The Trinidadians just love books and are buying them by the thousands. 10% of our sales each day have been bibles.
On Sunday afternoon the queue to come onboard was so long that I timed somebody from when they first joined the line until they came up the gangway. It was one and three quarter hours.
To help with the wait, we had music and various programmes taking place on our outside stage and we also distributed water and sold cold drinks to the crowds.
Sunday proved to be a very long day as I was up at 6am to leave for a church team. 5 of us from our ship family all went to the church whose service started at 7.30 am. I don't normally get up until 9 on a Sunday so this was a bit of a shock to the system. However, as they have a second service, we were only there for 2 hours and were actually back on the ship by 10am, just in time for a couple of hours sleep before lunch and the start of a very busy afternoon.
Today we joined about 50 other ship people to go to one of the few beaches in Trinidad. It's a 45 - 60 min drive each way but it was nice to get out even though it did rain and was very cloudy most of the day. However the great surf made up for the weather and we spent most of the day in the sea.
Last week we went to a park - this is Kara hanging upside down from the cross section of the Rugby posts.
So now we start preparing for our last weekend here which will no doubt be absolutely manic.
