Wanderung 27

Bob:

We had a nice breakfast at the buffet while plotting our daily activities. Chatting with the couple at the next table, a rather humorous moment occurred when the lady guessed that Monika was Puerto Rican due to her accent--I had trouble not laughing aloud and breaking into a theatrical rendition of "Maria" from West Side Story. I have to learn to control this dratted sense of humor!

Our first activity of the day was to make angel ornaments at the 9:30 Arts and Crafts session. We both had problems with the angels' heads falling off, and I think beheading angles has to be some kind of mortal sin or something. But we managed to overcome that by dint of lots of glue and ended up with two pretty Christmas ornaments.

At 10:00 we listened to the 3rd officer discuss the life of a deck officer, some of which involved the many years of training and working one's way up the ranks that are required to become a ship's Captain. However, the talk included pictures and descriptions of the bridge of the Pacific Princess. The bridge was a bit old-fashioned as it was a 1999-era design with separate displays for radar scopes, engine controls, and electronic maps, quite different from the integrated displays on newer cruise ships. I was also interested in one of his slides picturing the Titanic and detailing all the changes in ship safety that occurred as the result of that disaster.

After lunch at 12:30 we had our normal practice with the Pop Choir, where we learned that our final practice and performance would be the next day! Whoa, talk about pressure! Still, I figured that as long as we had Lou (nice big guy with the really big voice) to carry the men's section we would be all right.

I thought we could relax and take in a waltz lesson at the 2;30 p.m. dance class, but I was mistaken as the two dancers started with the forward-progression type of waltz step (European style?). That was new to us, and before we could really get used to that they piled on an odd kind of left-hand turn for the corners plus several other complexly choreographed steps. I ended up completely lost, which on a dance floor tends to make me tense, so it was not the relaxing session I had looked forward to.

We even attended a lecture on sharks at 3:00 by Jules Talarico, whom we had heard lecture on other ships. He had very interesting information on sharks and great pictures, but I had forgotten how soothing his voice was and found myself drifting off occasionally. Afterwards, in fact, I just gave up and returned to the cabin to nap before dinner.

The evening production show was "Cinematastic", which we had not seen, and it turned out to be quite nice. Sitting just a couple rows back from the dance floor gave an immediacy to the experience that would be completely lacking in the large theaters on the bigger ships. Of course, the dance troupe was correspondingly smaller than on large ships: only 3 men and 2 women and there was just one male and one female singer, But they were all quite good and the song and dance numbers were based on the best tunes from popular movies, so it was a very pleasant evening.

That took us up to nine o'clock, and since karaoke began at 9:15, I decided to stay up and try my luck at that. They used cute little electronic tablets to schedule and control the music-and-lyrics system, and unfortunately I found that the intersection of songs I knew and songs on the tablets was vanishingly small. In desperation I tried "All of Me", an old Frank Sinatra hit that I had sung a few years back, but the karaoke presented the accompaniment only with no notes from the melody, and for that particular song there is no clue about the melody line in any of the accompaniment.

Parts of it came back to me, but I know the research that shows recall is worse for poorly-learned material under high levels of arousal. Well there I was in front of an audience trying to recall a melody from several years back, so that was really difficult and I only managed to remember bits and pieces. For most of the song, I found myself making up a melody line that did NOT correspond to the original. Sigh. I did, however, support the ever-effervescent Lou in several numbers, and since he could belt out the melody line from memory, I could just adjust to him and harmonize pretty well, so the experience didn't end up a total loss. And so, sadder but perhaps somewhat wiser, belatedly to bed.