Day 8
December 6th: At Sea
Bob: The day after the Panama Canal was an "At Sea" day, and that gave me time to recuperate as I had been unexpectedly fatigued simply by sitting on deck in the blazing sun during the hottest part of the day as we passed through the Panama Canal. Some folks have a constitution that allows for sitting around and soaking up the summer sun, but after decades of trying I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I do not. We used the day of rest to catch up on processing the pictures we had taken of the canal and updating our journals. To minimize storage space for the pictures, we had adopted a strategy of carefully screening each picture before backing them up onto the computer and the extra backup chip. As we scanned through them we flipped the ones that were stored in the wrong orientation, deleted the obviously bad pictures, and even try to find the "pick of the litter" pictures for situations where we each took several pictures of the same thing. We really had to do that on the computer since it had a much better viewing screen than any of the cameras and gave us a true "apples to apples" comparison of all the various pictures on a given topic. Once we picked the best one we could delete the rest and that saved a great deal of storage space. But we broke off at 10:00 a.m. to attend a ballroom dance class, which was basic swing (East Coast Swing, or Lindy as we call it). It was a nice refresher and we learned one new move to add to our collection of Lindy steps. I value that because I quickly get bored doing the same basic dance steps. We took another break at 1:00 p.m. to take a watercolor painting class. "Manny", the instructor had a day job of playing the keyboard in the ship's orchestra (really a band) but he also seemed liked painting as a sideline and appeared to have volunteered to teach painting classes. Although basically American, he seemed to partly be of Japanese extraction, and the painting style he introduced us to was certainly of the Japanese style, right down to the Haiku poem he had us make up and put off to one side of our painting. That was the first time I had ever worked with watercolors from a tube, and naturally the tube burst in my hands and I made a royal mess of things before finally figuring out how to begin. Still, at the end we and almost all the other folks in the class had some really interesting looking paintings, which I think reflected a lot of credit on the instructor. |
Monika: Another day at sea to recover from the strenuous day of cruising through the Panama Canal. There really were not very many activities we wanted to attend, since the port lecture on Jamaica seemed to have been cancelled. However, we still did have fun going to dance class with one of the dancers from the production show by the name of Crystal. Today she showed us a few steps for the swing. We did admired how Crystal could keep her balance on a moving ship in high heels. But she was of course graceful in everything she did. We also appreciated that she took the time and energy to teach a class, when she had to be in a production show in the evening. After lunch we went to a beginning watercolor class that was taught by the keyboard player from the band. It was really wonderful how he got us to create a halfway decent picture in 30 minutes and gave us some insight into how to work with watercolors, very carefully, and make sure things are dry before painting over anything. We did a Japanese style painting of a mountain in the fog. Even I, who has no visual creativity, managed a halfway decent painting. In between I downloaded pictures, read, wrote, and of course ate. |
Bob: I had a long, and much needed, afternoon nap while Monika composed her impressions of the Panama Canal, after which we had a nice dinner in the Bordeaux Dining Room with a couple from Texas (near Brownsville) and a couple from St. Louis. I much preferred the table for 6 rather than a table for 8 because I was just enough closer to everyone that I could hear everyone speaking. I seem to have trouble understanding soft-spoken women in particular, which may be partial hearing loss in the higher frequencies on my part or a lack of volume and projection on the part of some women. Monika hustled us out of dinner to attend the Captain's reception for repeat Princess cruisers, where she had some nice rum punches. The reception ended just in time to attend the evening production show, "Dance". The scenery and song-and-dance numbers included in "Dance" were astonishingly varied and energetic. It careened from an opening set of a old service station where the ensemble danced rock-and-roll numbers directly to a Viennese ballroom where the ensemble danced sedately to Strauss's "Blue Danube". That sequence of jaring transitions left us not knowing what would come next, which I guess is part of the charm of these pastiche production shows. Our ballroom dance instructor from the morning, Crystal, did a solo number where she danced a kind of "Sheherazade" harem dance with a big muscular guy who could throw her up in the air and so forth. Wow did she nail that performance! But perhaps my favorite number simply because it scored so high on the Silliness Scale was a very elaborate ode to "Sara Lee" the bakery girl. The lead male singer put his heart and soul into singing about his longing for cheesecake, pie, fudge brownies, and all the other assorted gooey goodies coming from the Sara Lee bakery while a bevy of dancers costumed as pieces of food were prancing all over the stage. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland and certainly would not have been everybody's cup of tea ("I'm Late I'm Late, For A Very Important Date!"), but I enjoyed it very much. The male singer performed the number in a deadpan, straight-faced manner that somehow accentuated the silliness of the whole thing. |
Monika: For dinner, we had made reservations in the Bordeaux dining room, the "on your own" or free-scheduled one, and asked to be seated at a table of six. The advantage of the any time seating is that you can decide when and how big a table and have new tablemates every night. However, the disadvantage is, you have to make a reservation and get new tablemates and new waiters every night. I really did miss, getting to know your tablemates well, as we have done on the other cruises and having waiters that know your preferences. After dinner we went to the production show which was simply called "Dance". It featured dances from all over and different times, for instance, a beautiful Viennese waltz to the "Blue Danube", a river dance, an oriental "Sheharazade" type dance in which Crystal, our dance instructor, was featured in a Pas de Deux. It was good to know one of the dancers and try to find her in the different costumes and sometimes wigs. Great fun. Crystal had told us there was ballroom dancing in the Universe Lounge at 9:15, not too late for us. So we went and enjoyed dancing several FoxTrots and Lindys. The different movements came back quickly. Not many people were dancing so we had space to try different steps. |
Bob: We topped off the evening by going dancing for an hour in the Universe Lounge aft, where I finally got to use some of our ballroom dance lessons. There were enough people on the dance floor that I didn't feel too conspicuous (the "whole world is watching you" effect), but also few enough people that the floor was quite empty and I didn't have to constantly watch out for impending collisions with other couples (the "bumper cars" efect). Afterwards I read a bit and then turned in for the night while Monika went to the champagne waterfall celebration amidships. |
Monika: Bob decided to retire, but I was curious about the "Champagne waterfall" that was scheduled at 11:15 in the Atrium. The atrium is in the middle of the ship between decks 5 and eight. On deck eight was our cabin So I just had to walk over to the atrium. In the middle of the atrium on deck 5 was a pyramid of champagne glasses, with the top only having three and a ramp next to it so that a person could reach the top. At 11:15 the Maitre'd, with great fanfare, carefully placed the last glass at the top. Then everyone counted down from 10 and at zero he started pouring champagne into the glass and letting it overflow into the rest of the glasses. After that passengers poured additional bottles down the waterfall I had been co-opted to drop balloons from the top at time zero and had fun dropping the already blown up balloons down onto the people at the bottom. After that I took some pictures, and when I saw that they handed out free champagne on the lower decks I went down to deck six to partake. The champagne was excellent. When my glass was empty, I went to a railing to take some more pictures, one handed since the empty champagne glass was in the other hand. Franco, the waiter that greeted us with a smile and hello every morning at the breakfast buffet, came up to me, took my empty glass and handed me a full one. I smiled back at him, thanking him and enjoyed the second glass. After that, I figured, enough, it is time to go to sleep. |
