Sunday, April 3: At Sea
Bob: After breakfast I tried the front desk again and this time got through. My new-model safe with the numeric keypad rather than the key card type of lock, seemed to baffle the people they first sent out. So when 10 o'clock rolled around and Monika left for the morning session of arts and crafts, I stayed behind to wait for the next team of safe crackers. These teams, by the way, always work in sets of three apparently to discourage any collusion or theft from the passengers. But finally around 10:45 the main guy on Team 2 used a special key to manually retract the lock and our safe was functional again. I hustled up to deck 10 to join Monika in cutting out decorations to be used in decoupaging some plates in the afternoon session. My choice, naturally enough, was a bunch of classic balloon prints that Monika had thoughtfully put aside for me. So I cut those out and we stored them in a plastic sheath until the afternoon session. Since we had not been able to exercise in our usual morning pattern, we decided to walk around Deck 10 for a while before lunch. The wind was really brisk and the waves were higher than the previous days, and the relative wind when walking forward was really difficult to walk against. By the end of 8 laps we were both pretty exhausted, but felt much more justified in eating lunch! |
Monika: Arts and crafts for today was decoupage. After breakfast, Bob had called in our misbehaving safe - our table has been starting a pool on how many safes we are going to 'break'! While he was waiting for maintenance to come and fix the safe, I went upstairs to reserve him a seat for the session. We were going to put paper cutouts onto a small plate and then put decoupage cement on it. The morning session was reserved for the cutting out, and the afternoon session for the decoupage onto a plate. Jimena had a lot of different stuff for us to cut out: there were sea creatures, flowers, candy, strawberries, and balloons. Well I knew what Bob would like, and immediately saved a page of balloons. I went with sea creatures, two fishes, a starfish, a fan, and a shell. Bob finally came and enthusiastically started to cut out the balloons. There also were some animals with their names in Italian underneath. I brought a page of those along for the grandchildren. I thought I would make a little book out of them after we returned home. Cutting everything out took quite a bit of time. We took our cutouts with us to our cabin, but then went up on deck for some walking. The wind had freshened and we had one section where we were jet-propelled and another where we were trudging against the wind. This makes walking actually rather interesting, but after 8 laps or 40 minutes we both were rather tired and stopped to have lunch. |
Bob: A large outdoor buffet was set up by the pool highlighted by a nice pig's head and some beautiful fruit carvings. |
Monika: We had lunch at the Botticelli buffet, but when we walked out to the pool deck, we found a beautiful buffet set up and, of course, went around taking pictures. |
Bob: We joined Sandy and Debbie for the afternoon session where we applied our decorations to the plates and covered the whole shebang with a thick coating of decoupage cement. My balloon plate turned out OK, but Monika's was a more intriguing seascape and many of the efforts of the people around us were downright artistic. I was the only guy there, however, which if it had not been for Sandy and Debbie would have made me feel a bit out of place. |
Monika: In the afternoon session we used decoupage cement to arrange and anchor our design to the plate and then kept slopping the cement over it to cover it. Bob's balloons looked rather nice with clouds around it. Sandy, Debbie, and I had all decided on sea creatures but all our plates ended up looking rather distinct. Another woman next to us decorated her plate with flowers while another used the candy all around. It is amazing how different every plate looked. |
Bob: Taking our finished plates back to the cabin to dry, we rested until it was time to get duded up for dinner as it was again a formal night. For me, that was simple as it just meant I wore my suit with a different tie. For Monika, of course, it was much more complicated as she was putting together a new outfit for each of the formal nights. Sometimes it pays to be a male! |
Monika: This was another formal night, and we both dressed up. Formal night at dinner meant, the menu came wrapped with a little black bow rather than in the normal folder, but otherwise it was not much different from what we had before. But all the other couples were dressed up too, and we had lots of fun taking pictures of each other. |
Bob: The evening performance in the Caruso Theater up in the bow was called "Circles of Life" and used the theme of a circle to loosely (very loosely) connect a set of song and dance segments. The opening scene was a carousel rotating on the moveable platform in the middle of the stage while the ship's ensemble danced to music from the musical "Carousel". Very pretty. Other scenes used the "Syncopated Clock" instrumental music of Leroy Anderson with a set depicting a gigantic clockworks, and a bunch of clowns doing a comedic dance routine in front of a large "wheel of chance" like you would typically find in a circus sideshow. The grand finale was based on the Olympic Games and had several of the performers decked out in elaborate feathered outfits complete with the five rings of the Olympic symbol. They danced at the front of the stage while black and white movies from the early Olympic games were projected on the screen at the back of the stage. I found I got so engrossed in watching the old movies that I started ignoring the dance routine! Ah well, it was a pleasant evening show and relaxing enough that I could easily get to sleep thereafter. |
Monika: The production show in the evening "Circles of Life" was a lot of fun. It built song and dance numbers from different circles, starting with a carousel, going on to circus wheels, clocks, etc. and ending with the five interlinked Olympic rings. We were again sitting way back on the balcony and the sound was not too loud; we could see well and Bob even tried his hand at some pictures. |
| Index |
| Prolog | Map of Transatlantic Cruise | Map of Drive in Ireland | Epilog |
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