Wanderung 26

Bob:

I was way behind on my journal entries, so I spent some time after we had walked for an hour on deck and had breakfast to catch up on my writing. But we broke off at 10:15 for a rhumba dance class. It was taught by Cruise Director Peter and Charley, one of the ship's female dancers, and the lesson was really quite good. I learned a new basic step, moving in a back and forth "Z" pattern rather than the basic box step I had been taught long ago, and learned some other moves to the side that would allow me to have some variety in how we rhumba'd on the dance floor.

But first at 11:00 we warmed up and practiced our recital songs before heading off to the Pop Choir rehearsal at 11:30. That was a lot of fun. After lunch I continued journal writing but also spent some time trying to draw diagrams about my feet movements for all those rumba moves so that I could relearn them quickly if we had another opportunity to go to a dance.

Our invitation to The Captain's Circle "welcome back" party was at 4:45, so we attended that to see the Captain give his spiel and get some free drinks, of course. Although the orchestra was playing, the dance floor already had a table on it with the various prizes and we could not try out some of our new dance moves, which was a pity as I need all the practice I can get!

From there we went straight down to dinner, after which we attended the headliner entertainment for the evening, a "Mentalist". That turned out to be a magician who specialized in fake mind-reading tricks and illusions. He really was quite good and left us with the distinct "How did he ever do that?" question in our minds, but honestly we can only take so many magicians before we become blasé about seeing apparently impossible things happening before our very eyes.

The performance kept us awake until 9:00, when Rose had another sing along, this time with some Golden Oldies on the play list. I felt obliged to support these sing-alongs as it had been my idea, after all, and I was pleased that there was again a good turnout. As before, Rose handed our sheets with just the lyrics on them, but the tunes were familiar and we all just sang the melody lines, so it went well. The only problem was that I had already sung for an hour and a half that day, and my vocal cords were getting well and truly fried at the end of yet another hour of singing. I knew we had the Pop Choir's final performance two days hence, so I was very much hoping that my voice would recover as I went to bed.