Dreaming of churros

In the sweet void of dreams, I am floating. I can’t recall what I saw, heard or experienced, I just know that I was at peace. Then a small voice registers in the background. It keeps chanting “Wake up Marta, it is six o’clock and you are supposed to help in the kitchen in 10 minutes”.

The voice belongs to the person on nightwatch, designated to watch the ship and wake people up at the right time. I slowly snake my way out of the warm covers and outside my door I meet my fellow kitchen helpers, looking as tired as I feel. In a rush we prepare breakfast and at quarter past seven the whole crew is awake and eating. After line-up at eight my watch is released from it’s duties and we are allowed to go on shore.

A few friends and I make our way through Tarragona, pausing frequently to take pictures and look at Google Maps. We try to find a second hand store and the mall, but we end up somewhere completely different and eat ice cream. As we locate the mall and make our way there, I spot a book shop called “Re-read” and I know this place is for me. We find the english books in a corner and start looking through all these second hand books. We find many novels we want to buy, but at the end we leave empty handed.

After lunch, meeting up with more people, a pee trip to the ship and a trying to
sunbathe/swimming break we make our way into town once again to find legendary churros. Google maps leads us all around the place and I even get to speak some broken spanish in order to achieve our mission, but we fail. We are forced back to the ship to eat dinner and after all this walking, I’m exhausted. Starboard had a harder time though, they were on watch on our last day at bay and had to work a lot. Tomorrow we set sail to Teneriffe and I am very excited.

Marta Sadowski, NAB2023