Wanderung 26

Walkabout, Sailabout

March - May 2012


 

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Monday, April 23rd, 2012: At Sea between NZ and Fiji

Bob:

I am always amazed at how busy our "At Sea" days aboard ship turn out to be. When we left New Zealand, we were both way, way behind in our journal writing, so one way I filled in any big gaps in time during the day was to open the computer and start writing. That is fun but takes a surprising amount of time as I kind of have to re-live the day in my mind and then convert those experiences to words. If I am only trying to remember one or two days back, I can usually do that fairly accurately. But if more than 48 hours have elapsed, I sometimes have to jog my memory about what we did by talking it over with Monika, looking at any souvenirs or brochures we picked up, or going through the photographs for that day. The farther back in time I have to go, the more difficult this reconstruction process becomes, probably due to the decay of episodic time-tagged memories for that day.

After breakfast, we walked on deck for a half an hour, but then stopped into the shipboard Internet Cafe to catch up on our email. At the very least, it was always a relief for us to know that there have been no catastrophes occurring in the family. Beyond that, however, we enjoy the email updates we get from some of our relatives and the Facebook tidbits we get from others. It helps us stay connected to our friends and family despite being halfway around the world, and that's a wonderful aspect of the modern electronic age.

Back in our cabin, I started writing letters on Princess stationary while Monika worked on the computer. Our steward, Jaynal, who hails from the Philippines, had given me some of the Princess letterhead stationery, and I had procured envelopes in Auckland, so I had everything I needed to write my sister and my niece. Writing letters is also surprisingly time-consuming, so by the time I broke off it was around 11:00 a.m.

We decided to warm up our voices and practice the songs we were scheduled to sing in a summer recital. We finally worked out how to practice on board ship by using our netbook computer to play the music over stereo earphones. Each of us uses only one earphone so we both simultaneously hear the musical track and can coordinate our singing. That is particularly important for "Master of the House" as we intended to sing it as a duet (which we later did, complete with a chorus!).

With our voices fully warmed up, we attended the choir practice session. I was singing as a tenor and having trouble with the harmony sections our choir director, Rose Winters, had prepared for us. Rose had arranged some really nice harmonies for the music, but I was out of practice in singing as part of a choir and not used to holding the harmonic line against what seemed to be an overwhelming tide of basses and altos singing the melody line. When it worked, it was beautiful, but I could feel/hear my pitch control wavering in some sections, and that really irritated me. But Rose was a cheerful, energetic director and always used only positive feedback, so it was a lot of fun. One trick she used was to gesture with one hand at different heights to visually signal when the note sequence was going up or down. I had not seen a choir director do that before and I thought it was quite effective in leading us up and down the musical scale.

We attended the port lecture on Suva, Fiji, given by Ronelle Adams that afternoon, and once again she had filled it with a lot of useful information. Unlike New Zealand, much of the information on Suva was decidedly mixed in character, as she warned us not to let our credit cards out of our sight, to carefully specify the details of a contract with any taxi drivers and only pay at the end of the journey, to avoid the "sword salesmen" who pressure you to purchase wood souvenirs, to not wear any expensive jewelry, and to leave at least half our money and credit cards back on board ship as street crime was fairly common. That plus the knowledge the Fiji was ruled by a military junta put it in a decidedly jaundiced light. Given the paucity of things to see in Suva and difficulty of arranging anything else, we opted to join the ship's tour to the rain forest park outside Suva instead of ambling around on our own. Can you blame us?

For once we were energetic enough after dinner to attend an evening performance in the Princess Theater on Deck 7 forward. The performance was a husband and wife team in which the husband played the violin and acted as a comic, while the wife played the cello and acted as the straight man. It was rather as if Victor Borge and his wife did comedic routines with classical music on strings rather than with a piano. Two things simply amazed me: First, that the man could play a violin very well while throwing himself around the deck and kicking his feet out as if doing a Russian sabre dance.

Second, at one point they intertwined themselves like human pretzels and each one was playing with one hand on their own instrument, but using their other hand to do the bowing on the other person's instrument. I had once seen Victor Borge do something similar with a piano piece designed for two pianos, where he intertwined his hands with the other pianist's on the keyboard, but I would never have imagined you could do that with a violin and a cello! Anyway, we both thought their performance was a gas although some of the audience seemed puzzled by the odd mix of comedy and classical music. Technically, however, they were both very good and so it was a lot of fun and satisfying for us, as well as being a very nice end to the day.



Copyright 2012 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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Prolog Map of Drive in Australia Map of Transpacific Cruise Epilog

March 2012
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
April 2012
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
May 2012
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 30

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