The Neptune Cruise
“when I overheard drunk diplomats talking about swimming across the Nile, I knew it was time to call it a night.” - random quote (one of many) from Embassy happy hour last night… and it’s even better if you know the full context, which I prb shouldn’t write b/c this is a public-access web site, after all…
So today, I did not think about swimming across the Nile. No, today was the Neptune cruise, an Embassy employee event held on a boat called the Neptune in northern Cyprus. It was great, but as a consequence I’m pretty tired right now, so my writing will be short and list-ish.
Highlight: The US Ambassador to Cyprus was instructing me on how to best jump off the front railing of a boat mast into the Mediterranean Sea in northern Cyprus. SO frickin awesome. Well, and I know myself when it comes to jumping off of things and swimming. Pretty much instant happiness anyway. In short, today was a great day. I def need to go back to northern Cyprus. It was Turkish and it was way cool.
Also, learning that in the adult/’real world’, events like the Neptune Cruise are just as, if not more, important for meeting people and networking than being at work itself. Maybe, then, our whole selves do count. Those random skills we learned and things we like to do that we say have nothing to do with our ‘real jobs,’ can actually open doors in their own way. It does actually matter that I (finally) feel comfortable walking around in a 2-piece bathing suit, and that I can leap off a 20-foot boat with the Ambassador’s kids and tread water in the Mediterranean with random diplomatic people for an hour.
Other random thoughts from today and the past few days:
Just because information is classified, doesn’t mean it’s remotely interesting. At all.
The families of the Embassy people also went on the cruise today. My oh my diplo-kids… they say ‘pardon?’ and ask politely if I prefer to be called “miss” or just by my first name…. those kids were more composed and together at age 9 than I was at age 19! I did have a fairly in-depth conversation about pop music stars Kelly Clarkson, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus with the Ambassador’s 8-yr-old daughter, though… thank you summer camp ppl for teaching me all I needed to know abt that! We were listening to that Taylor Swift song in which the dorky girl is in love with her jock best guy friend who dates glamorous girls (“She wears short skirts, I wear sneakers, she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers”… The girl in that song was totally me at one point in my life, tho that’s not so much me anymore… now I’m more about Miley Cyrus’ “7 things I hate about you” or Pink’s “Who Knew”, if my love life had to personify a pop song… which it definitely does not).
This was a better song selection than when we first boarded our boat and heard “I wanna fuck you, fuck you, right on the floor… cuz pussy is pussy…” (it’s the dirty version of a rap song I’ve heard before… I’m not sure how it made it into the stereo system of the boat in northern Cyprus… OMG. Again, the reach of pop music is (sometimes problematically) boundless. Needless to say, that song was turned off before the diplo-kids could hear any more of it. Tho watching everyone’s reactions to the above lines was pretty priceless…
Like that time at camp when the assistant director and a whole bunch of the staff aired, to an audience of 40+ 12-yr-olds, a movie that started with the line “hey bitches” and featured fun talk of masturbation, sex and boys skinny dipping. (the movie was called “Now and Then.” It was a great movie, just not for a huge group of girls whose parents entrust to you, the responsible adult…) Yep, that was the same sort of priceless.
“There are certain things that guys look at when they look at girls… But ladies, I can’t tell you. That information’s on a need-to-know basis.” - another guy from the embassy, at happy hour last night. Well that was a good time too, now wasn’t it? In the words of the other intern, “happy hour turned into happy night” and featured a trip to Cypriot Burger King, a drunken Marine, a Palestinian-Cypriot bartender that my coworker liked, and a few too many mojitos… good times with the coworkers.
“There’s a really great Syrian restaurant. [But] don’t talk shop there.” - another embassy person who I talked with on the cruise today
“Buenos Aires… Now that’s a divorce post.” - another emb person. The Foreign Service is quite an interesting lifestyle…
Work is going better. So is life in Cyprus. Maybe I’m actually meeting people and getting a life here now! Yay! I’m thinking in terms of small successes, like being able to successfully open the lock on the door to my office. It’s a weird sort of combination lock thing (which I’m never good at as is), and to make matters worse, it’s located at an awkward height. The past few mornings saw me standing on my tip toes, dazed and tired, spinning a lock and overshooting the numbers/failing at opening the door… But well, I can open it now! I also succeeded in not forgetting this lock’s combination, or any of the combinations of the locks on the doors I have to go thru at the Embassy. If they say that moving up in the world is all about opening the right doors, it does help to know which combinations will unlock them. But seriously, considering my abysmal track record when it comes to remembering numbers/codes/passwords/PIN numbers, I’m ridiculously proud of myself.
So today, I did not think about swimming across the Nile. No, today was the Neptune cruise, an Embassy employee event held on a boat called the Neptune in northern Cyprus. It was great, but as a consequence I’m pretty tired right now, so my writing will be short and list-ish.
Highlight: The US Ambassador to Cyprus was instructing me on how to best jump off the front railing of a boat mast into the Mediterranean Sea in northern Cyprus. SO frickin awesome. Well, and I know myself when it comes to jumping off of things and swimming. Pretty much instant happiness anyway. In short, today was a great day. I def need to go back to northern Cyprus. It was Turkish and it was way cool.
Also, learning that in the adult/’real world’, events like the Neptune Cruise are just as, if not more, important for meeting people and networking than being at work itself. Maybe, then, our whole selves do count. Those random skills we learned and things we like to do that we say have nothing to do with our ‘real jobs,’ can actually open doors in their own way. It does actually matter that I (finally) feel comfortable walking around in a 2-piece bathing suit, and that I can leap off a 20-foot boat with the Ambassador’s kids and tread water in the Mediterranean with random diplomatic people for an hour.
Other random thoughts from today and the past few days:
Just because information is classified, doesn’t mean it’s remotely interesting. At all.
The families of the Embassy people also went on the cruise today. My oh my diplo-kids… they say ‘pardon?’ and ask politely if I prefer to be called “miss” or just by my first name…. those kids were more composed and together at age 9 than I was at age 19! I did have a fairly in-depth conversation about pop music stars Kelly Clarkson, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus with the Ambassador’s 8-yr-old daughter, though… thank you summer camp ppl for teaching me all I needed to know abt that! We were listening to that Taylor Swift song in which the dorky girl is in love with her jock best guy friend who dates glamorous girls (“She wears short skirts, I wear sneakers, she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers”… The girl in that song was totally me at one point in my life, tho that’s not so much me anymore… now I’m more about Miley Cyrus’ “7 things I hate about you” or Pink’s “Who Knew”, if my love life had to personify a pop song… which it definitely does not).
This was a better song selection than when we first boarded our boat and heard “I wanna fuck you, fuck you, right on the floor… cuz pussy is pussy…” (it’s the dirty version of a rap song I’ve heard before… I’m not sure how it made it into the stereo system of the boat in northern Cyprus… OMG. Again, the reach of pop music is (sometimes problematically) boundless. Needless to say, that song was turned off before the diplo-kids could hear any more of it. Tho watching everyone’s reactions to the above lines was pretty priceless…
Like that time at camp when the assistant director and a whole bunch of the staff aired, to an audience of 40+ 12-yr-olds, a movie that started with the line “hey bitches” and featured fun talk of masturbation, sex and boys skinny dipping. (the movie was called “Now and Then.” It was a great movie, just not for a huge group of girls whose parents entrust to you, the responsible adult…) Yep, that was the same sort of priceless.
“There are certain things that guys look at when they look at girls… But ladies, I can’t tell you. That information’s on a need-to-know basis.” - another guy from the embassy, at happy hour last night. Well that was a good time too, now wasn’t it? In the words of the other intern, “happy hour turned into happy night” and featured a trip to Cypriot Burger King, a drunken Marine, a Palestinian-Cypriot bartender that my coworker liked, and a few too many mojitos… good times with the coworkers.
“There’s a really great Syrian restaurant. [But] don’t talk shop there.” - another embassy person who I talked with on the cruise today
“Buenos Aires… Now that’s a divorce post.” - another emb person. The Foreign Service is quite an interesting lifestyle…
Work is going better. So is life in Cyprus. Maybe I’m actually meeting people and getting a life here now! Yay! I’m thinking in terms of small successes, like being able to successfully open the lock on the door to my office. It’s a weird sort of combination lock thing (which I’m never good at as is), and to make matters worse, it’s located at an awkward height. The past few mornings saw me standing on my tip toes, dazed and tired, spinning a lock and overshooting the numbers/failing at opening the door… But well, I can open it now! I also succeeded in not forgetting this lock’s combination, or any of the combinations of the locks on the doors I have to go thru at the Embassy. If they say that moving up in the world is all about opening the right doors, it does help to know which combinations will unlock them. But seriously, considering my abysmal track record when it comes to remembering numbers/codes/passwords/PIN numbers, I’m ridiculously proud of myself.