Astro Findings
Being working on cruise boats for several years as a photographer gave me the chance to meet many different people. Something that not many people seem to understand is that living in a boat is very different to living in a flat or a house and it has a big impact on people’s social behaviour. New friendships can be developed, new love stories can take place, couples can divorce, babies may be conceived or even born and some may even pass away!
A luxury boat that is moving into the seven seas is like a small floating city. One factor many people overlook at is the fact that on board there aren’t just passengers and holiday-makers but also members of staff that have to stay on the boat for long periods of time. It is strictly forbidden for those people to develop social relationships with the passengers but sometimes it is inevitable.
The most typical profile a passenger is that he is around 60 years old, retired and wealthy. Although they all belong to different professions and educational backgrounds, the bottom line is that the vast majority of them are very successful in their fields. Apart from the expected diplomats, lawyers, architects, doctors and highly credited professionals it’s common to come across shop keepers, vendors and many small scale businessmen. So, education isn’t a key factor although wealth seems to be.
Of course there is a small part of passengers who although they don’t make enough to be afford a luxury, they are happy saving hard in order to make their dream come true cruise. Some of them simply want to experience a different lifestyle which differs from their daily one greatly. Even though I gained most of my experiences on Silversea Cruises where I used to work, other friends mine that used to work for Oceania Cruises and Cunard Cruises have had similar experiences.
Talking about sports, golf is definitely the king with tenis and polo being popular too. I would strongly encourage people to try a luxury cruise at least once in their life as it is definitely a unique experience worth the money spent.
Tags: Cruises, Holidays, society, Travel
Posted in Cruises · July 15th, 2010 · Comments (0)
The last 20 years and the revolution of the internet and the computers has shaped tremendously the games kids have been playing. From the classic outdoors war games simulation and football we have ended up in today’s computer based activities.
Whether the change has been for good or not is a question that only the future sociologists will manage to answer. Older generations who didn’t have the chance to be part of the games revolution are quite harsh about today’s kids main or sole activity with their main argument being that all those games do not stimulate nothing else than the brain as the body remains idle!
In my mind, because today’s kids are exposed to such a vast amount of information since the advent of the internet, they have more general knowledge compared to my generation that information was based on the TV and the newspapers.
Creativity, great emotions and collaboration are cultivated by both types of play, the traditional one and the technological one alike. A very good example taken from the time I was a kid is a great game boys used to play which we were calling ‘exploration’. The idea was getting ‘lost’ into an abandoned warehouse or an inhabited mansion and try to discover as many weird and unusual things as possible.
The peak of that game was the day we broke into that huge warehouse that was owned by a electrical components supplier who went bankrupt. Our imagination was running with 100 miles per hour each time a very odd object was on our way varying from cable ties to circuit breakers , it was all stimulating our minds big time.
Similarly, playing today a typical adventure game on a computer can lead to similar emotions if say; the main character is entering a similar building and is looking around for something interesting. The essence is still the same although the way has significantly changed. Having the chance to experience both traditional games and the digital ones I can say that the emotional and mental excitement I was getting out of the two was equally important and by no means one was better than the other. In conclusion, it is harsh to reject computer games are useless and they have nothing to offer just because they are not physical enough.
Tags: creative play, Kids, society, teenagers
Posted in Kids · June 29th, 2010 · Comments (0)