By Brian Bruns Brian Bruns Level: Basic Brian David Bruns, cruise ship insider, is author of Cruise Confidential: A Hit Below the Waterline. He is also a professional artist, art historian, writer, ... ...

Working as crew on a cruise ship is a singular experience. For those who choose to endure the tribulations, it is an existence that will absolutely change your life, surely for the better. Whether living or just learning of this lifestyle, focusing on the negatives must be avoided because they are misleading: there are simply too many tribulations to endure to rationally justify the lifestyle. Yet like most things in life, the rewards are much more than merely the sum of challenges overcome.

That being said, there are three barriers to companionship at sea that one needs to be aware of. Each of these can be overcome with a little maturity, but because ship life is a necessarily transient lifestyle it caters to the young and inexperienced. Armchair adventurers and cubicle dreamers commonly focus on the promise of working in exotic ports, imagining they are tackling the world at large. In fact, it is a small world indeed that takes you from port to port, but it is just as foreign as any on the map.

The Language Barrier
When first starting work as a waiter with Carnival Cruise Lines, I thought my native English would be an advantage. Wrong! English alone is spoken on cruise ships in guest areas, of course, but in the few off hours crew obtain from their hectic schedules, anything goes. While the occasional Australian or Canadian may relax in their English tongue, we are quite alone. The crew is from all over the earth and for most English is a second, if not third or even fourth language.

In after-hours, most crew split into national groups and speak their own languages. When a cluster of, say, Romanians, are off work together they naturally switch to Romanian. Most are considerate enough to maintain English when a foreigner is with them, but after a drink or three native tongues take over. I use Romanians as an example because I had visited there numerous times and was familiar with their language. Yet of all the nationalities I stereotyped, they were the least inclined to use English for me. Whether they were merely insensitive or assumed I understood more, I don't know.

Few things make one feel further from home than being surrounded by a sea of foreign-speaking people.

The Cultural Barrier
There are times when something familiar is all you want, when pop culture is a comfort. Most people don't realize how much time they spend talking about sports, TV, music, literature, or movies... until they can't. I am not a sports fan, yet I chafed at only seeing cricket and soccer on TV. I don't like big Hollywood blockbusters, but that was the only thing I had in common with most crew, other than work. Of television most only knew Friends or Dallas, or just maybe Married... With Children. As an American, I was truly alone on cruise ships. I found myself praying for Canadians, the most likely to understand me, though even they had vastly different forms of entertainment (oh, too bad you missed the curling championship, eh?)

The feeling of being alone in a crowd is acute at sea. Americans are used to and expect an unparalleled amount of personal space and privacy, no doubt due to our prosperity and vast land resources. Most of the world would never dream of having their own bedroom as a child growing up, nor even sharing it with but a single sibling. This becomes apparent at sea when personal space is limited to merely your own tiny bunk.

Bodies are everywhere... even in your own cabin! Roommates constantly engage in sex in shared cabins, or throw raucous parties. Yet even the polar opposite can pose a problem: I had one cabin mate who was a born-again Christian insomniac from India who would talk psalm until exhaustion took him. Even in my bunk, head and feet pressed against the walls and my curtain drawn, I was subjected to a nightly sermon until the wee hours of the morning! Another would blast a 40-part Chinese miniseries dubbed over in Thai at high volume despite my pleadings for quiet.

The Body Barrier
All those bodies were constantly changing, too. You have no time to build a rapport with most people around you because they are on their way to somewhere else. Every week dozens of crew come and go on the big ships. Friendships form and disappear with amazing rapidity at sea. In such an inhospitable environment you cling to whomever clings back, and then suddenly they are gone. Most affection is merely a band-aid. The few couples I knew that came to sea together all left apart, broken by the pressures of ship life. More often the women became empowered by their brush with American ideals and refused to blindly obey their husbands any longer, invariably leading to a split.

Not just bodies abound, mind you, but really nice ones. Because crew are invariably young and attractive people from all over the earth, naughty things happen. While on the surface this may seem nice, any first-worlder will quickly realize that they are a prize worth fighting for. Many people will go to great lengths for the hope of a green card. Before you know it, nearly every relationship you have becomes a source of uncertainty as you question motives. Women I had never met before came out of the woodwork in attempts to seduce me, simply because of my nationality.

The superficiality of the relationships at sea is seductive, though. I look back fondly at how many people from all over the earth I know and can now relate to. Of course, it's not really the ship life that I am happily recalling, but the growth of awareness that was blossoming within me. Truly ship life is more than the sum of its parts.

Brian David Bruns is author of Cruise Confidential: A Hit Below the Waterline, Where the Crew Eats, Sleeps, Wars and Parties. This hilarious cruise ship expose was researched for more than a year by living and working as crew. He was the first American in Carnival Cruise Lines' history to endure a full contract in the restaurants without quitting. He continued on with numerous cruise lines, from Holland America to Wind Star to Radisson's Six-Star lines, delivering his amusing and informative art history lectures. For more information, see http://www.CruiseConfidential.info Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_Bruns