photos:
I had tried to put them on the right place, but it was too time consuming – so all together in the start.
Oh, this was frustrating – I had been writing for an hour and wanted to change to the explorer to see my photos so that I know if had forgotten something but whatever key I accidentally had pressed, “word” closed without even asking if I want to safe the text or not and everything was gone ☹
Ok, new
start…
Let’s begin with the start, “Georgia” left Kaohsiung at 1:30 and I had been
awake two times before, because the engines became louder and I thought now we
leave. For whatever reason I woke up early, too and so I was a bit tired all
day. Maybe that is the reason that I didn’t find back to the tight and strict
exercise schedule I obeyed last time, or I am just less motivated. Last time I
wanted to learn the “pistol squat” and the splits but I am not flexible enough
for both and even that strict schedule of hourly exercise didn’t help. But I
will do something, and I re-started the “results” program, that app that forces
me to do exhausting jump squats and other things that I would not do
voluntarily. I remember well how painful it was when I began with it last year,
because after a few months, re-starting is not much better (and by the way, the
app always demands more than I would do on my own).
At 9:00 (say “nine hundred”) the security officer called me to come down at H/C deck. He showed me
some things that were new to me like the emergency escape breathing device EEBD
in orange (sealed for emergency) and blue (for training). You must open a
complicated shutter, take in the mouthpiece, close your nose with a strong
magnetic clip and pull on a string to get oxygen for 15min to escape from
smoke.
We then made a tour outside to the life rafts and the life boats. Again, you must
loosen a complicated mechanism on front and back of the boat and the officer
admitted that it is a bit complicated but in case I would be the only survivor
I should know it. It is an interesting idea – the big ship is in such troubles
that I must leave it and the complete experienced and well-trained crew had
died. I guess the lights will be out, the storm, heavy rain and the roaring sea
call my name and I go to choose the life boat on the starboard or port side,
not for aesthetic reason, no, the ship has list (SCHLAGSEITE) and in this
situation I try to remember what has to be done to get the boat to the water.
Let’s say I managed to do it, the poor thing is down, the sea smashes it
against the ship, huge waves try to drown it and I wonder how to get down those
10m and how to open the door and close it before I share the space with a good
part of the ocean…
But in reality it is much better than that! If I am the only survivor, I can go
in the life boat directly, close the door, turn on the battery and press the
“hook” button – the boat will go down to the water, me included. Then I would
preheat the system, turn the key to start the engine and go on a private cruise
without having any plan, without orientation. Maybe the last survivor of ship “Georgia” would eventually die of
thirst.
This time, we didn’t exercise putting on the immersion suit but the life
jacket. It is another type then last time and maybe at least this I would
manage to put on even when I need it.
The rest of the day was business as usual, I cut 2 and a half videos, the half
one is from Hongkong where I again have 45 min of hidden camera, this time in
the sense of the word, because you can see me struggling to get it out of the
case and then I put it in the net-pocket of my bag where it glimpsed out, filming the net and
recording the conversation with the taxi driver (see day 197). I was to sleepy
to finish it and took a nap.
When I wrote my diary, I saw that the translator German-English on my phone
didn’t work anymore. He told me that I am offline, but this should be normal
working conditions for an offline translator, but he offered only
English-Chinese. My “spare-part phone” had been very strange during the last
weeks, always showing a fuzzy screen until by trying this and that I could fix
that but then it was extremely slowly, 2-3 sec between pressing a button and
the reaction. Now I was curious if this translator would work and be it slowly.
He did and what is even more, from one second to the other the phone turned
back to normal speed, I even could see this recovery process!