Thursday, 4/24 – Same, same, no different! Gym, breakfast, Coffee with Tjalling and Craig, the 3rd Electrician who was a hoot – more suited for having a microphone in his hand than being behind the scenes. Just too fun. Then downtime – spent in the lounge – until Dr. Steven at 11 with a fascinating talk about The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire. That man is just so multi-faceted! Wide ranging knowledge combined with the best sense of humor and delivery. Anyhow, the long and short of it is that the Ottoman Empire was doomed to fail from the beginning, then they joined the losing side of WWI and that just totally destroyed any hope of continuing on. Their empire was carved up by the winners of WWI, basically on paper by 2 army generals who hadn’t ever even stepped foot on any of the territories – the ramifications of that are still felt today. The flood of refugees isn’t anything new, but began years ago – religious persecution and war have always been an issue – current day governments just need to figure out how to deal with it better today.
Then it is onto lunch, where we easily find a seat today. What is with that? Except, oh, that’s right, the Ice Cream Social is today! So everyone raced up to the Lido pool deck to get ice cream before lunch. Sigh. And it’s only vanilla and pina colada ice cream – with tons of different toppings to choose. Nope. We had lunch first – salad and another excellent slider, today Fried Chicken. More lounge time for coffee and cookies, then to Alex and Turtle 101. He’s equally good at presenting with a relaxed and humorous style. We know much of what he is saying about the turtles, but do find his pollution talk – about ALDFG, Abandoned, lost and discarded Fishing gear – interesting and disheartening. That is now the #1 issue with turtles and other sealife. Another interesting fact – there are now turtle nests in Spain. Normally only on the East Coast, turtles that have managed to get through the Gibraltar straits have stayed in the Mediterranean – mostly because they can’t swim back out in the currents – and have made the Balearic Islands their home. Now they are nesting there too. Cool!
More down time in the cabin, blogging and watching an old Charles Kuralt show about the Dick Van Dyke Show – excellent. Then surprise! Craig, the 3rd electrician, comes to the room to fix our clock! We’re stoked! And told him how good he was and how much we enjoyed his coffee chat. The funniest thing though – we debated going up to him after the chat to ask about the clock, but then decided, nah, that’s too cruisy-passenger-complaining-weird question-y, so we didn’t. And here he is!!
Next we are off to the gym, the lounge, dinner – Antarctic Queen! Otherwise known as Chilean Hake or Merluza – one of our favorite fish. And it is as yummy as we expected. Once again service in the dining room is super fast, and we are in and out in less than 30 minutes. Um, well, what the heck, we can make the early show – which we do – grabbing less than ideal seats, but it is Doug Funk, the comedian, so we don’t really need to see. His 2nd show was better than his first, in my opinion. It was all improv with members of the audience and a totally crack up. We laughed hysterically the whole time.
Since it is still so early, we even have time for TV in the cabin before hitting the hay. Only 2 more sea days left…..
Friday, 4/25 – Same, same, no different…just another sea day. Coffee, gym – with an amazing sunrise that greets us this morning – no breakfast.
Coffee chat with Tjalling and the navigation and safety officers as well as the Staff Captain. Fun and interesting, with the safety officer and Staff Captain cracking jokes and picking on each other mercilessly. You can see how much fun they have on the Bridge – they are all friends, family and just fun. Next we are off to the World Stage way early to get seats (yeah, constant theme in the World Stage – gotta get there early to get decent seats to see the whole screen) – but it is nice and peaceful here and a great place to just sit and read until Dr. Steven arrives and begins his Man on the Moon lecture. That guy – what an incredibly smart and knowledgeable jack of all trades! He’s a space nerd too and just loves all the stories and history surrounding space exploration. Another great presentation.
Lunch is lunch – we manage to find one of the elusive 2 tops, have our salads, get some chips from the surly server at the panini station (she is wildly unhappy – every day), hit the lounge for more chips (stocking up for tonight’s cabin night) then back to World Stage to read and wait for Alex and Tribes of the Ocean. Again, fascinating, this time all about whale and dolphin cultures, how we should call them tribes or families as they are so close to each other, emotionally, behaviorally, culturally. Alex had great stories about how whales and dolphins train each other to hunt, to behave, to swim together, etc. Also how human interaction with dolphins in particular can be a bonding experience. Humans can teach wounded dolphins to dive and swim again, and dolphins even help humans fish! There is something called Dolphin assisted fishing, where the dolphins coral the fish then give a signal to the fisherman who is waiting in the water with a net to capture the fish. The fisherman then takes the fish from themselves and also feeds the dolphin. How cool is that?
Leaving the theater, we decide to wander past Rolling Stone to look to see where they have the popcorn for the movies. Since the movie started at 2, we figure it will be all gone, but wanted to get our bearings for future sea days. Duh. Should have been doing this every day! They pull the curtains to close off Rolling Stone (a new feature after drydrock we’re pretty sure), and right inside the curtained off area on the bar are plenty of bags of popcorn. Score! We grab some for our cabin night tonight – totally set for the evening now. And also know we need to keep doing this after Alex’s lecture to stock up on cabin snacks!
Gym and lounge next. Then onto Dressy night – woo hoo! We decided to go to dinner a bit early, since we’ll be hanging out in the cabin all night (it’s Step One and Move in the theater which we have seen). But oh my word – it is a major CF in the dining room. At 6:15, even though there is no general walk in line to speak of, and only 2 sets of people in the Club Orange line, there are people in the reservation line who keep walking up and cutting in front of the Club Orange line. It’s weird and frustrating and really annoying, with no “policing” or coordinating from the restaurant hosts and hostesses. After standing there for about 5 minutes with no forward progress (what do these people talk about with the host/hostess about? Get the table, get out of the way!), we ditch the dining room and head up to Lido. They’ve got the same food (with the exception of the Lobster Calypso dip – which is not worth the frustration of the dining room!). Excellent decision. It is gorgeous outside, with plenty of tables, so we get to pick and choose what we want, and eat al fresco. What could be better than that? Plus, I had wanted the quiche for dinner, which I got on the buffet, and it was, in a word, awful. Thank God we didn’t go to the dining room! I also had the Frito Misto, which was amazing – and that was perfect for me. Ed had the Frito Misto, salad and salmon. We were perfectly happy.
Then a quick lounge run to see if there was any shrimp – there wasn’t – and to the cabin for a night full of No Good Deed on TV and an early night – sort of – because we have one more hour forward!
Saturday, 4/26 – Early morning, what’s new? Today is a jam-packed day though! We have 9am Coffee chat with Tjalling and the media manager, who handles all the media and communications onboard from the daily programs to the information on the TV – coordinating information from Seattle. Coffee chat finished, we quickly run down to the World Stage for Tjalling’s 10a Port talk (quickly running to get a decent seat!).
We’re pretty much going to be here all day because we are staying in our seats (scored the good seats on the balcony!) for the 11am Ask the Captain’s – then running up for a quick lunch before running back down to World Stage to get a decent seat – forcing us to sit through Tjalling’s Port talk again at 1pm – only because we want to see Alex at 2pm – and as mentioned above – we need to get there to get seats where we can see the entire screen on the stage. Don’t judge us!!!
Tjalling’s port talk is good, pretty fast though since he has to go through all 3 ports in 45 minutes. But he does a good job of all the main interest points if you aren’t on a ship tour. Although he does sort of downplay just how steep the climb is to the Botanical Gardens in Funchal. Ah well, passengers who do no research get what they get! And with the number of scooters and wheelchairs and walkers on this ship? Ain’t nobody walking up any of those hills! No how, no way.
The Ask the Captain presentation is actually quite nice for folks not familiar with these ships (i.e., 1st and 2nd time cruisers maybe). He goes through a PPT on the ship’s operations, including a virtual tour of the bridge. And when he talks about the Azipods everyone behind us oohs and ahhs. Yep. We’ve sailed too much! Anyhow, it really doesn’t matter what he says – the way he speaks, his pronunciations and cadence are so fabulous, we could listen to him forever – speaking about whatever!
We, of course, left after the first dumb question, running up to Lido for lunch, and snagging the last 2 top (one marked handicapped, but what can you do? We don’t want to share, so….). It just happens to be Kingsday in Holland (celebration of the King’s BD – which is actually tomorrow, but they have made a decree that Kingsday will never be celebrated on a Sunday), so not only is today Orange day onboard, we are also celebrating the King. Which means a special lunch buffet section with Dutch food – yay! Bitterballen (meatball missed with bechamel), Kaassouffle (cheese souffle – deep fried), Kroketten (deep fried veal with bechamel), Veal sausage, and Poffertjes (those great little puffy pancakes) and Oliebollen (think donut hole) for desert. Yum – I had planned to get the Bami Goreng, chicken sate and pulled pork BBQ slider – but oh no – Dutch it is.
Then back up to the theater to grab seats for the 1pm port talk (remember good lecture seats area at a premium). Sadly, though they were rehearsing for tonight’s show and the doors are closed, and our doors were opened last. Actually, they weren’t opened at all, but a passenger peeked in and we all decided to go with her inside which was a good choice since our typical good seats were already taken. Oh well. 3rd row it is. I blog, Ed reads – we don’t care and we can still see most of the top of the screen for Alex who is next.
Alex has a great presentation (aren’t they all? Yes, they are) on the Straits of Gibraltar. While the straits have the 2nd highest density of ship traffic in the world, 2nd only to the Malacca straits (where we were on our last cruise), and 20% of worlds maritime shipping, it also boasts the most biodiverse water in the world because of the mixture of the Atlantic water (current running into the straits) and the deep saline water from the Alboran sea running out of the straits. The straits are home to giant sperm whales, pilot whales, dolphins, even sea turtles now (as we know from Alex’s other presentation).
He gives a very interesting presentation about the sea life in the straits: Striped dolphins are the most abundant in the Mediterranean; Iberian orcas live here too – but a small population of only 100 animals. Orcas almost exclusively eat blue tuna, which in turn has many metals and toxins (mercury, etc.). Usually a mother’s 1st calf doesn’t survive because all the metals and toxins from the tuna are stored in the mother’s milk, and those toxins are passed onto the baby. He also talks about the Almadraba fishing net system – a technique used for thousands of years in the Mediterranean to corral and catch tuna in a system of nets that trap the tuna. However, there are now conservation methods for the tuna which have worked really well, growing the tuna populations astronomically. Unfortunately, the catch allowances haven’t increased accordingly, so the measures end up overprotecting the tuna, which are predators that go for anchovies, krill, etc, and they’ll eventually kill off the little fish, endangering the whales who eat the little fish.
One other fascinating fun fact: Dolphins need to think to breath, keeping half their brain awake to continue breathing. This means when captured for rehabilitation, any procedures need to be done with the dolphin semi-conscious; they can’t be sedated into unconsciousness because they will stop breathing. We learn so much from these – most of which we forget in moments out the door (except for writing them down here!), but everything Alex talks about is so interesting, it’s a great way to spend an hour in the afternoon.
After Alex, we have to run to the gym early so we can be ready for Tjalling’s Ponta Delgada Q&A session in the Rolling Stone lounge. Because we need more info on Ponta Delgada? Nah, because we love sitting through the stupid questions to see how he will answer! It’s our comedy for the day. Today isn’t all that funny – but there are still some silly questions, and loads of people who did absolutely no research and expect Tjalling to plan everything for them.
Drinks on the balcony, then off to our Seafood Boil. Tonight is Orange night – in which we do not participate – thus, the Seafood Boil in the Lido tonight, so we aren’t even having the “Dutch” dinner (which isn’t all that interesting quite frankly). Ed does have his orange-y polo shirt, which he wears, but I don’t have anything even close to Orange, so I just go casual with my jean skort and top. Eh? Who cares.
The seafood boil is really nice – we have a lovely table by the window to enjoy the view as the courses come out in sequence, as soon as our drinks arrive. Lobster Bisque, which is very good, but I should have skipped – as I’ve said before, I eat soup, I’m full and done for the evening. Then the main event, the boil – a bucket full of crab clusters, shrimp, branzino, mussels and clams in a yummy garlic and white wine sauce. I get lucky and have tons of shrimp, which works for me – while I offload all my mussels and clams to Ed. It is all very well done, well prepared and very tasty. We turn down the dessert, of course, and head off to the rest of our evening pleasantly sated and not totally stuffed full with a bunch of heavy food.
Which is good, because we hit the late show, ending our evening with the Showmen’s 2nd show – just as good as the first – and then early to bed (well, not really) for our early port call tomorrow. Land ahoy!
Andiamo 