#Me too... I'm a waitress on cruise ships

"Mom, should I go? Should I fly to Miami? What do you think it is going to be like to live on a cruise ship?" asked Ann softly, almost whispering to herself, while her mother, Marie, was busy packing a huge suitcase just five feet away from her.

Probably Ann's voice didn't' travel those five feet across the tiny room or maybe her mother was not interested in revisiting the same argument all over again with her young, reckless daughter, because she never replied.

As a proud mother of a magna cum laude graduate student, Marie never fully came to terms with Ann's decision to accept a menial job on cruise ships, as a waitress. Although quite well paid, the job would take her only daughter halfway across the globe from Romania, somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

Indeed, Ann had just graduated with honors from a prestigious college in Romania, her native country, but all of a sudden, she decided not to pursue an academic career there, but rather apply for a job on cruise ship. It was true that the salary she was offered to work as a simple waitress on cruise ships was so much higher than anything she could have make with her fancy college diploma, in a country with a collapsing economy, such as Romania, similar to all the other East European countries' economies upon the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Nonetheless, her family and friends were flummoxed by this career choice. Moreover, Marie could not make peace with the idea of having her only child traveling 9000 miles away from home to live on a cruise ship, for 10 months, in a confined space, alongside with strangers from all over the world; it was dangerous and not respectable at all, in her view.

The family's financial difficulties were greater than even at the moment, but this...? This was unacceptable! As a single working mother, Marie had raised Ann all by herself, and making ends meet was always a challenge, but she always placed her child's education above all and sacrificed everything for that. However, since the collapse of the communist regime, the country was going through a severe recession, and their family, like most other families in Romania, was struggling to survive.

***

With no answer from her mother, Ann returned to checking her bran new passport with a colorful, beautifully stamped US Visa on it. As if she got into some kind of a trance, she was turning the pages over and over again, carefully checking and touching each one of them, as if she was trying to find a flaw or memorize each dent... only to reach for the hundredth time the page with the US Visa on it. Every time she got there, her perfect porcelain face, with full lips and sparkling green eyes, would lighten up in a triumphant smile.

Ann never had a passport before, but then again no one else in her family had one, as not too long ago, Romanians were not allowed to travel anywhere outside their country. Isolated behind the Iron Curtain for decades, during the Cold War, the country had been surrounded by barbed wire fences, guarded by armed forces, ready to shoot anyone on the spot for any attempt to cross. The freedom to travel was quite new and Ann was the first one in the family about to do so.

She was only 21 years old, freshly college graduated, but this tiny yet determined young girl of just 5 feet 2 was ready to embark upon a great adventure.

***

The flight to Miami went on like an illusion. For 21 hours, counting the two layovers as well, Ann drifted in and out of consciousness. The combination of changing air pressure, lack of sleep and stress left her mentally numb.

It was 7 p.m. when her plane landed at Miami International Airport. With her body wired on another time zone, seven hours ahead, she was experiencing a terrible burning sensation in her eyes, while her body was aching all over, when she stepped out of the aircraft. She was exhausted beyond anything she had experienced before. As she was rushing through the international transit area, instinctively following that huge, unfamiliar crowd of people, suddenly she felt so alone. In a flash, it became so darn real! Her family, her friends, her childhood home... It all seemed left somewhere in the past.... in another life, even in another dimension.