Calm before the Storm

Thanks for all your emails. yes we are ok after the hurricane.

what an adventure.
It all begin Saturday evening after work.

our boss wanted everything out of the office, kids club and towel center because hurricane Emily was to visit us the next night. we lifted everything up to the theatre, the only safe place in the hotel.

that night just before our show, we told to pack stuff for a few days becasue we were going to stay at the hotel in case a hurricane hit. Exausted, most of us stayed up late that night gathering our stuff and making sure everything was out of the way.

Sunday morning, people were using my ground-floor appartment as a motorcycle parking lot. I could barely lift the little luggage i packed, but got though it.

Since we had put everything away, all our activities took place in the theatre. The whole hotel was told that they needed to spend the night there. It was still nice and sunny out, so i went around the hotel taking pictures - yall know me and reasurring worried guest that everything would be ok.

Everything was in the theatre - the restaurant personnel used part of the backstage area to prepare food - the buffets still went on normally.

By 1 pm, all the guests had gathered into the theatre for an information session. We were told that a capacity 4 hurricane named emily was coming from Tulum and would hit us around 11 pm.

We still had to entertain the guests, so we went straight to practicing for the disney show, which we let people participate in.

I tried to spend as much time outside as possible- as it got windier a few guests started getting nervous. A woman from calgary asked me if i could stay with her and her two teenage daughters cuz they were getting scared - we took them into our disney show to get their minds off it.

By suppertime it started to rain a little bit- I killed time by going around and talking to the guests. A man from Dallas had just arrivied and couldn´t believe this was happening- apparently the airport told him it was nice and sunny. One man told me abut the time he had to go through a tornado, and others kept asking why we weren´t nervous - we animators thought it was so cool that a hurricane was coming. i´ve never seen one before and wanted to see that crappy kids club wash away (i know, not nice huh lol).

By supper, the theatre was packed. All 400 guests or so had come with their blankets and pillows and they started to work on nailing the doors shut.

We only performed part of the disney show that night - two numbers, The Little Mermaid and Hercules were taken out. During the last number, The Lion King we got a surprise- near the end of it, the lights went out. It was pretty funny because people thought it was the end of the show - a generator switched a few light back on and we started dancing with no music. At about 10 pm all the doors were nailed shut.

The canadian family felt better when i told them they could stay backstage with me. I played cards with them and then went around to see how people were taking it on the other side. Most were trying to sleep as the theatre was only lit by the dim sidelights.

It was a pretty long night. Most the animators cramed themselved into the costume room and tried to sleep there - i knew i wouldnt have been able to, so i didn´t bother. I kept going in there to peek out the window- i could see the winds blowing and how hard it was raining.

Later on i sat in a chair in a corner and tried to sleep, but each time I did, something always woke me up. People kept walking around, some needed help to get to the bathroom (outside the emergency exit, so yeah, we did step out in the hurricane for like a minute), kids crying, more nailing doors shut etc.

The hurricane stopped around 3 am, and by 7am we were let out. The roof on the sports bar was totally smashed. There were trees that had fallen everywhere. The palapa (roof) of our towel centre flew away and landed in the swimming pool. Amazing - i´ll be posting pictures of this sometime soon. the hotel next to us , Wyndham Azteca was completely damaged, and the people at coco beach were sent to a spent the night in a school during the hurricane.

Even though most of us didnt sleep, we still had to work - and we worked hard, cleaning everywhere (yeah, animation team was the cleaning team that day), and still had to come back that night to hold Casino Night (i was falling asleep).

Despite the damages, alls good now.