Day 35
Misty/foggy, wet, windy and cool. What a contrast from the previous 34 days. Stuck at sea but powering along at 19.5 knots, with weather like this on Ground Hog day - this was Saturday July 23rd – again.
A traditional sea day morning so nothing worth writing about and day one of the advanced ukulele class. There weren’t so many there! Many of those with their own instruments seem to have stayed in the middle group, as they are still improvers rather than beginners, and know that just having your own, does not make you an expert. With Salomon pushing hard for the class to learn, say, all the chords in ‘G’, ‘C’ and ‘F’, playing them from the music or a chord chart is one thing, but memorising them all is a different ball game altogether. At our level, whether it be ukulele or a keyboard, Paula is most definitely a reader and she is not alone. If you are not going to be playing a 9th, diminished or augmented chord, particularly on the music issued on the ship, then at the moment, learning them is of academic value anyway and they’ll be easily forgotten. We’ll see.
The fingers of my left hand are still in rebuild mode after the tendon transfer op and although much improved, they still lack the strength and dexterity required for some chords and chord changes.
The clock advanced an hour at 2pm again so we were at lunch at 3pm, where the buffet vegetarian curry was supplemented by mushrooms and the roast of the day, pork. We get a lot of pork on board.
No Mal and Marie at the afternoon trivia as Mal’s turn to be not well, with a visit to the doc at 4pm. We didn’t win...
The early show in the Vista was by the atrium pianist/entertainer, Darren Bethell, backed by the orchestra. A very relaxed and fun performance, including the whole audience taking the mickey out of the latecomers as a group! Not for the first time, a ship’s entertainer putting on a far better performance than some of the guest entertainers.
The scheduled outdoor deck ‘party’ had to be moved indoors as the weather was too grim and it didn’t really seem to be firing, so we gave it a miss and watched the TV instead.
Day 36
Sunday July 24th, but my diary says - Monday 25th. That is going to be a problem for the next few weeks, but I put my watch back to July 23rd, so there is some accuracy. I also keep the dual time on UK summer time at the moment, so that I have a reference of sorts.
We’d gone to bed about 11pm and had the TV on for another Rock ‘n’ Roll lecture, which was easy enough. It finished on the dot of midnight and on the off-chance I might be lucky, before switching off, I flicked over to Channel 24 Sport (where they never seem to publish a schedule that goes more than 2 hours ahead) to see the 5 red lights on the gantry of the Hungarian GP, and the start. Woohoo! I watched the whole race live and not once did the TV picture pixilate (which is a major problem for much of the day at times). That meant it was 1:45am before the TV went off. I was awake and up at 8:30am though.
More fog, rain and a cool wind. The hardy ones would be pounding deck 7, getting in their daily exercise, whilst some of us left them to it and ate. A day for a cooked breakfast and some pork sausage I hadn’t heard of before but they had a real chorizo type kick.
A normal sea day morning and I went with Paula to the Aloha ukulele class and sure enough, Salomon had each attendee on his list have to play 4 chords that he called out – but they were allowed to ‘ring a friend’ (once) if they got stuck. One or two managed to get all 4, with or without assistance, but Paula wasn’t one of them. (I wouldn’t have managed either). She asked if that meant she had to return to the beginner’s class, but that wasn’t the intention. It was a bit of a waste of a 45 minute class and they only played one song - ‘Doh, Ray, Me’, which is probably the only piece so far, where I can’t manage the chord changes in the verse, as the fingers won’t work. Just a combination of chords that I find difficult if in a hurry.
A bowl of broccoli soup and a buttered roll sufficed for lunch, before returning to the cabin.
Once again, no internet bank access – not even to their main website. Weird and very frustrating. I then started reading a paperback book that has been passed around to several passengers, Michael Connolly’s ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’. All who have read it have enjoyed it so no doubt I’ll also enjoy it. That will be the first book I have read on this trip as I left the Kindle at home.
The early show was an Australian comedian we hadn’t seen before. He started off fairly slowly, but got better and at least he wasn’t telling jokes we’d all heard before. His finale which went down a real treat, was an adaptation of the famous Ronnie Barker monologue of the story of Rindacella. (More hiccups for the spell checker.) He carried it off very well indeed. For those unfamiliar, it relies on transposed letters at the beginning of a word, so ‘smart fella’ comes out as ‘fart smeller’. Judging by the audience reaction, this went down really well.
After two instantly forgettable acts, it was a relief to get back to a decent one.
We had a full turnout for dinner and Mal had been diagnosed as having acute sinusitis. We had the bowl of crudités again and Marie and I behaved in a way that our parents would have been ashamed of. At the end of the meal, I used two bread sticks as a goal whilst she tried to score a goal with a cherry tomato… Very naughty of us.
Although we’d opted out of Sharon Owen’s first show, a Barbra Streisand tribute, there was nothing much else going on (though Paula did manage a Cha-Cha with Graeme which introduced her to a couple of new moves that I have been instructed to learn), so we went to her second show. Once again, a performer with a fairly good voice, but the patter needs a lot of work. Part way through, she left the stage as the band played a good rendition of ‘Hello Dolly’ and returned in her Barbra wig and a new dress. Apart from a good saxophone solo and being bolstered by the resident singer Meghan for a duet, not an act we’d return to in a hurry. The others in our group when discussing a mark out of 10, rated her much lower than I would have done – but they are really tough! I’ll stick with a 7/10 to be consistent with other marks. If you got 7/10 or 70% in an exam, you’d be rapt, but rating performers is slightly different. In an exam, 5/10 would be average or a pass, but to me, 5/10 or under is a real fail, 6 – 7 passable, 8 and upwards, good. Maybe I should volunteer to cruise with Princess for free, three months a year, in return for rating staff, food, services, systems and entertainers?
Tomorrow’s evening schedule is a real problem for us, as we have the Mexican at one end of the ship and the juggler at the other, neither of which deserves our attendance, so I hope there is something to dance to.
Well, four days completed of ‘the Chunk’ and still relatively smooth sailing. There has been a bit of a swell, but hardly noticeable and to date, we haven’t heard of anyone getting seasick, yet we do know that is a real fear of cruising, for those who haven’t yet tried it. We can’t say it doesn’t happen, because we have had rocky days in the past and we know that lifts banging, wandering down the corridors, up and down the staircases needs a steadying hand, isn’t unusual.
We had an email from M & M who are on the World Cruise and just like us, crossing the Pacific, they had the fog crossing the Atlantic. Tough for new passengers. It will be school summer holidays in the UK right now, so we have no idea if they have loads of families on board. We have only had about 10 youngsters on at any one time and some of them might well be staff family members.
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