Wanderung 27

Bob:

Our first activity of the day at 9:00 was decorating notecards and envelopes to send home to our friends and relatives, and we became so caught up in making them (I made 7!) that we skipped the Port Talk on Casablanca. It was surprisingly fun to use the remnants of wallpaper samples provided and then do cut-and-paste to make something creative that would fit someone we knew. Somewhat surprisingly, we wrote letters for most of them and finally mailed them off from Funchal, Madeira.

We finally called it quits to take in the Swing dance lesson at starting at 10:15. That was mostly review for us, but I get very rusty on the long layoffs between cruises, so it was good just to try to dance again.

When walking to lunch, we noticed that we were cruising quite close along the coast of Spain and actually passing quite a large city, which might have been Valencia but I'm not sure.

After an early, light lunch and a quick warm-up with our recorded vocalizations, we attended the second Pop choir rehearsal. Given the small size of the Pacific Princess (600 passengers), it was not too surprising that the number of volunteers for the Pop Choir was correspondingly small. We ended up with about 9 regulars, 3 sopranos, 3 altos, and 3 men who all attempted to sing both the tenor and bass parts, with varying degrees of success!

The music was a completely different set to what we and the other members had sung on previous Princess cruises, so we were back to learning a whole new set of songs by ear alone, as no sheet music was provided, and that was rather difficult. So difficult, in fact, that I think some of the original members gave up on the choir. Fortunately we had a lot of "At Sea" days coming up that would give us many opportunities to practice! I had the good fortune to sit next to Lou, a big, barrel-chested man with a correspondingly big voice. He belted out the tunes and fortunately knew the melody lines for almost all of them, so I kind of followed his lead and tried to blend in, and I think the guy sitting on the other side of Lou tried to do the same, although I couldn't hear him.

While we were in Barcelona, Santa's elves had apparently visited the ship because suddenly Christmas decorations were all over the place. Christmas trees were everywhere and garlands lined the stairs.

During the afternoon we downloaded all our pictures from Barcelona, which took a bit of time as Monika had taken 250 or so and I had taken over 500. But I was happy to find that the "sweep panoramic" feature of my new camera worked quite well in close-in situations, even indoors, a very difficult task! There was some distortion, of course, somewhat like you would get use an extreme wide-angle "fish eye" lens, but still you could get a a feeling what the entire visual panorama actually looked like, which is so difficult to do from a set of distinct pictures.

We also made plans for what we would do in Gibraltar as best we could given the map provided by the ship for that port. I ultimately came to dread seeing the words "Not To Scale" on one of the ship's maps, as the map was typically VERY distorted as to real distances. That, of course, made it very difficult to plan things like feasible walking routes, etc. At dinner we chatted with Chris, Tina, Pat, and David about their plans for the following day, but we turned in quite soon thereafter so as to have a good night's sleep for our planned activities the next day.

In the evening, we were told over the ship's intercom that a passenger had taken ill and that we were getting closer to land in order to have a coast guard boat pick him up. The goal was to take him to a hospital in the next bigger town on the Spanish coast. Curious as to how this would all be done, we went out and watched the emergency transfer from the promenade deck. It was fascinating watching the little ship carefully maneuver next to our big ship. But in the end, the transfer went successfully and we wished our fellow passenger the best of luck in recuperating on shore.