Wednesday, November 7th - At Sea.
Bob: While doing our morning stretching exercises in the gym up above the bow, I suddenly noticed that every one of the elliptical exercises and every one of the treadmills was in use. Since the exercise floor was similarly full with folks in my group, the entire room was basically filled to capacity. Yet in the afternoon and evening when I passed by the exercise room was almost vacant. The casino, in contrast, was almost completely deserted in the mornings and started filling up in the afternoon. By evening the tables where games like roulette and blackjack were played were completely filled and maybe a third of the slot machines were occupied. That pattern was, of course, the exact reverse of the usage pattern for the exercise room and led me to speculate that there might be an association between the biorhythym cycle and the tendency to engage in either exercise or gambling as a way to produce endorphins. I do wonder if anybody has looked for the pattern that people active in the morning tend to like to exercise whereas people active in late evening or night tend to like gambling. The causal connection, of course, would be more difficult to determine because becoming addicted to either exercise or gambling could just conceivably cause a person to shift their daily activity schedules around to times "best suited" to doing that activity. |
Monika: Today we had our second Spanish lesson, and I wish they had Spanish every day instead of only 2 or 3 times. We are picking up at least a few words. Dancing was the cha-cha-cha. While we were trying to comprehend what our instructors were trying to tell (and counting 1-2-3-cha-cha-cha for a 4 beat dance did not help at all, I always had learned it as: long, long, cha-cha-cha) and falling over each other, a couple that was watching us, came to our help. They gave us very good individual instructors, so that by the end of the 45 minutes we were ok. When I later saw them on the dance floor, it was quite obvious, that they were accomplished dancers. He also explained the counting: The long-long I was used to, are on beat 2 and 3 and, the cha-cha-cha on 4 and 1. So to start out correctly you get a throw-a-way 'one' before going into the layman's long-long cha-cha-cha count. We really thanked the couple. Finally a dance lesson where we were less confused at the end. After lunch, our cruise director and his wife gave a half hour demonstration on "How to look good on the dance floor". They had been a competitive dance team before he joined a cruise ship 15 years ago and he was very good at explaining how to take a good dance position. This was probably the best instruction on how to get ready to dance that we have had. |
Bob: The after dinner entertainment was an Australian singer by the name of John Christie, who sang predominantly popular tunes from the 40s through the 60s. He accompanied himself on the piano for many numbers, but somehow it all sounded rather similar after a while; that is, big band brassy sound with piano and a heavily ampIified microphone vocalist belting out the Tin Pan Alley tunes. Possibly I was getting jaded, but I did miss the comic aspects of Pengelly's performance and the variety of types of music that Izzy had provided with her singing. After the performance we transitioned from the Coral Theater in the bow to the Safari Club in the stern to watch a very curious game while we waited for the karaoke session to begin. The game involved teams that were required to find things like false teeth or doing odd things like showing off surgery scars or having the the men taking off their clothes or wearing women's bras or lipstick. The teams were quite motivated to do all those things and the crowd simply loved it, but Monika and I just stood and watched in amazement. I was going to attempt to sing "On the Street Where You Live" from My Fair Lady at the karaoke session that night, but when the time came I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I had practiced the lyrics that I had and even warmed up correctly by working with Monika, but I didn't have the complete lyrics and I was missing the melody lines for the part between the verses. The karaoke machine would, I was told, provide the lyrics but it did not provide any staff with notes. That meant I would be guessing at the melody for parts of the song, and I could reasonably expect I would get parts of it wrong and sound absolutely terrible, and that thought was anathema to a perfectionist such as myself. So rather reluctantly I gave up karaoke for the moment and we returned to our stateroom for the night. |
Monika: A couple of nights ago, Bob had watched the Karaoke competition and thought he might want to enter. So he had looked at the available melodies. They have 4000 songs in the Karaoke machine, and there was exactly one Bob could do - "On the street where you live", from "My Fair Lady". But it had been years since Bob had sung it. He did remember the first verse, but after that it became a little murky. But still, he thought he might enter the competition on this night. He kept practicing, and even warmed up in the cabin. When we got to the Safari Club at the designated time, we watched the last 15 minutes of a game called "Quest" were teams had to fullfill certain requirements and I guess got points for doing it first, second, third, etc. The requirements were quite bizarre: For instance, "show an appendectomy scar". Then they became more risque: show two pair of man's trousers, not on the person and show two bras not on a person. Anyway there was an enormous crowd and of course great hilarity. I could see that Bob was becoming more and more apprehensive. The biggest problem really was, that he did NOT remember all the words, would have to rely on the teleprompter and so could not really pay full attention to the music. If they had had "Don Quixote" from "he Man of La Mancha" Bob would have confidently sung it, since he just had sung at to great success at the recital. But a song he had not sung for over 10 years in front of an enormous crowd gave him thought and I agreed, that this probably was not the right song and venue to start his Karaoke career. So we quietly left the Safari Club, although we knew our tablemates were waiting. But we would explain on the morrow. We just retreated to our cabin, read for another hour so that Bob could get to sleep. |
| Prolog | Germany Map | Cruise Map | Epilog |
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||