Bob:

Using the "Princess Patter", which is what Princess calls its daily calendar of events on a cruise ship, Monika had sketched out which of the many activities offered we would participate in during the day. But first we started off the day by walking a mile around Deck 7 and watching a beautiful sunrise over the horizon astern of us. I enjoyed both the warm, mellow light that occurs right after sunrise (or right before sunset) and the curious patterns of light and shade that you sometimes see when the sun is at a low angle. The sunrise gleaming off the waves is always interesting, but the shadows of the railings and lifeboats overhead on the deck were also very pretty.

Monika:

Bob:

After a leisurely (and big!) breakfast (I actually awakened with hunger pangs during the night and was probably compensating for that), we spent a quiet hour or so in the cabin. Since Monika was using the laptop to catch up on her journal entries, I continued reading "Pretty Poison", a unique book in that it has capsule sketches given at the beginning of each chapter about some plant. I didn't know, for example, that in Europe in the old days, blackberry bushes were planted around graves to keep spirits from wandering out. All I could think of was going to the cemeteries to pick blackberries to make jam!

Our first activity was to participate in a ping-pong tournament. Both Monika and I were eliminated relatively early, but we still received credit for participating and had some fun. That wasn't really much exercise, but the line dance class we attended afterwards more than made up for it. The only confusing thing about line dancing is that I have to remember to always lead off on the right foot, which goes against years of intermittent, and generally unsuccessful, training in ballroom dancing where I always lead off with the left foot. It is amazing to me that almost the only thing that I can remember from ballroom dance classes makes me also incapable of learning how to line dance. To paraphrase some ancient Greek, when I take dance classes the gods must just laugh.

Monika:

Bob:

The port lecture at 11:15 combined Dublin and Belfast, which was a pity as there wasn't enough time to really do Dublin thoroughly. We learned about many of the sights but ended up totally confused about where they were located in the downtown area, which left us complete at sea as to exactly how we should walk a loop to try to see them all. The information about Belfast was equally sketchy, but I hoped we would find a good map somewhere at the dock or in town that would help us construct a reasonable walking tour.

We split up in the afternoon as I wanted to see a presentation on Admiral Lord Nelson of the British Navy (circa 1800) while Monika wanted to attend the champagne art auction. The powerpoint show and talk on Nelson was really quite good and I learned, rather to my relief, that his daughter Horatia had been taken in by his brother, I think, after she was orphaned and went on to have a quite normal life as the wife of a village vicar. I have a lot of sympathy for orphans or abandoned children, so it always makes me feel better to learn of one, like, say, Art Buchwald, who made out well in life.

Monika:

Bob:

Monika found me again at Marlene and Chet Solender's performance of songs from Rogers and Hart in the ship's theater. Besides hearing Marlene sing a lot of very nice old songs, she filled us in on the 25-year collaboration of Rogers and Hart until Hart's untimely death from alcoholism. She contrasted the way Rogers worked with Hart and the way he later worked with Hammerstein by telling us that in the Rogers and Hart collaboration Rogers would write the melody and then Hart would come up with the lyrics.

In contrast, when Rogers later worked with Hammerstein, Hammerstein would write the lyrics and then give them to Rogers to write the melody. That went a long way, in my view, to explaining why the musical productions of Rogers and Hart seem to be mostly assemblages of songs loosely held together by a story line, whereas the musicals of Rogers and Hammerstein are more tightly-knit musical stories in which each song fits into a specific point in the story line. The latter composition is also true of opera, so the famous musicals of Rogers and Hammerstein do bear an uncanny resemblance to the structure of classical opera.

Our final activity was a presentation on "Celestial Navigation of the Ancients" by Julius Talarico. I had taken a short nap after lunch, so this time his soothing, mellow voice did not put me to sleep, thank goodness. The content of his talk was, considered as pieces, very good, but the overall structure was just helter-skelter as far as I could see. I honestly thought I could have structured it better by taking the basic problem of locating oneself on the open ocean and then presenting the three basic approaches of pilotage, dead reckoning, and the chart-based positioning that required finding an accurate latitude and longitude. I would have hung the details, so to speak, on those three main topics, which I think would have grouped or clustered the ideas for the audience much better. Still, I did enjoy his slides and the detailed information included on them.

We tried to go to the evening show, a magician, at 8:15, but by the time we arrived 5 minutes early, there wasn't a seat to be had in the entire theater. So I gave up and returned to the cabin to download and backup pictures so that I could clear the cameras for taking more pictures in Dublin. I also got wrapped up in finishing "Pretty Poison" and that was why we didn't finally get to sleep until about 11:00 p.m.

Monika: