During my final months of college, I went through a kind of mid-mid-life crisis, if you could call it that. I was about to finish my degree in management and I wasn't quite sure what to do next. I started thinking about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and I told myself it had better be something good.
Factor in two things that I feel very strongly about: food and travel.
Hence, my sojourn to culinary school and my subsequent internship in the Hilton Bonnet Creek and Waldorf Astoria Orlando.
But now what? The long term goal is really to open up my own little bistro/pastry shop but I haven't saved up near enough moola for that, and I'm not confident enough that I've had enough experience in the industry either. I mean, if I have to take that big a step, I wanna be sure that I'm going into it having taken all the necessary steps to (as much as possible) ensure success. Go big or go home, and believe me, I'd do anything to attain the former rather than the latter.
So I realized that for now, I'm going to need a job: something where I can do what I love, earn a decent income and travel, too, if it's not too much to ask...
Right.
I wasn't even sure that a job like this existed. Fortunately, Adrianne, a really good friend I worked with in Orlando, shared a lot of her cruise experiences with me. It was lucky that she did because, at that time, I didn't know a lot of people who'd been on cruises. It's pretty much unheard of where I'm from. Anyway, long story short, I wanted in.
Fast forward to today: after several months going through the whole application process (yes, it takes that long, I don't even want to think about it anymore.) I'm finally about to embark on what I consider my dream job, doing what I love, travelling the world and earning decently while I'm at it.
I'm convinced this is what I want to do and I cannot wait to step foot on places I've only read about. I'm especially looking forward to eating food that I've never encountered before. (I swear I will eat anything and everything at least once.) On this trip, I want to learn as much as I can, eat as much as I can (weee!), explore as much as I can, and grow as much as I can.
So this is how my journey, several years in the making, came about. This is why I'm going to be living and working on a ship for the next ten months. This is my foodtrip and I reckon it's definitely going to be unforgettable.
