Wanderung 26

Although the wound was not hurting, the whitish fluid had continued to accumulate under the bandage, so after breakfast I returned to the medical center. The doctor said it was just serum fluid rather than pus, which would have been a greenish color. I suppose that’s good to know if I find myself in a similar situation in the future! The doctor removed the dressing anyway so that the wound would scab over in the air, and said everything looked completely OK to him, so I was relieved. The total bill for both doctor visits, the bandage, and the antibiotics that I took for a week was $ 181, which was completely paid by Blue Cross and Blue Shield when we got back home.

Monika started updating her journal whilst I crunched ahead on some of our New York Times crosswords, something that I had been too busy to do for, well, since we left home, really.

At 11:00 we vocalized and practiced our recitial songs, and then at 11:30 we had a second rehearsal of the Pop Choir. That day we emphasized "Slow Boat to China", "Pearly Shells", "Hukilau", and "I Left My Heart In San Francisco", making good progress on all of them. I think it is good practice for us to sing in a choir and try to hold our parts in the face of other folks singing different parts, but oh did I wish we had the sheet music for all the parts so I could SEE what was supposed to happen and have my brain understand it better. I was still uncomfortable with "winging it" by ear alone.

We met our tablemates at 2:00 in the Razzmatazz Lounge to exchange photographs and such, and that turned out to be a lot of fun. I started copying Ian and Judy's movie files to their laptop, but it was an older version apparently with just a USB version 1 serial port, so the transfer of a little over 7 gigabytes of MP4 movies took a couple of hours! But Alex and Roya had also brought their laptop and they had both movies and pictures of their trek up to the Mt. Everest base camp on the Nepal side of the Tibet-Nepal border, which we were all eager to see. So we looked through those for almost two hours, by which time we had pretty much exhausted Alex and Roya's pictures AND the battery on Ian and Judy's laptop! They had to return to their room to plug it in and finally complete that backup, and the rest of us dispersed until dinnertime when we met at our table in the Rigoletto Dining room for another pleasant meal.

Alex related that he intervened in a potential conflict on the pool deck over the placement of deck chairs, for heaven's sake. His opinion was that some folks were getting a type of "cabin fever" after so many "At Sea" days, but we all agreed that some uncivil things were definitely happening on board ship. I found that passing strange as we are all on holiday in the veritable lap of luxury. After dinner we watched the sun setting and then finished up the evening quiety reading our books until it was time to turn in for the night.