Thursday, January 17, 2008: At Sea again.
Bob: We started off our day after breakfast by walking for two miles on the promenade deck and then attending Ambassador June's Hula dance class in the aerobic exercise room on deck 11 right in back of the Outrigger bar. We had fun practicing the four dances we already knew and learning a new one based on taking a car ride. Since the hula dance has movements that tell a story, they seem to all be paired with songs that have a strong narrative, kind of like ballads in mainstream Western culture. However, the hula dances and their associated songs that we learned were all pleasant, good-natured songs rather than the often lugubrious tone and sad themes of traditional ballads. Ambassador June even mentioned that she uses certain hula dances to put herself in a good mood, and I can see that the cheerful music and rhythmic body motions might strongly elicit positive emotions by working on the endorphin system. Certainly it did so for us! From hula dancing we just walked forward to the Outrigger bar where we had another craft session with Joyce. This time we decorated some nice foam picture frames with various sea creatures and things associated with being on the beach. For me it is always fun to see what you can do with a given set of raw materials, so I constructed a beach scene with a palm tree, clouds, and the sun at the top, footprints in the sand at the side, and various fish and seashells at the bottom. Then I wrote Aloha and 2008 with the glitter glue and voila, I had a nice picture frame for the refrigerator when we get back. |
Monika: Another day at sea, another day of arts and crafts and culture. In the morning we were kept busy with Hula lessons - after all our final, public performance was scheduled for tomorrow evening. We then watched the Pacific Whale Foundation talk on fishes of Hawaii. Finally, we made a couple of picture frames with magnets to be put up on the refrigerator: a foam frame onto which we glued a palmtree, fishes and shells. |
Bob: Taking our picture frames back to our room to dry in peace, we hustled back upstairs to the Blue Hawaii lounge for a presentation on the fish of Hawaii by Louise from the Pacific Whale Foundation. Her slides were beautiful and I was particularly happy to see a picture of the "humu humu nuku nuku apua'a", which is the Hawaiian state fish. That name roughly translates as "quilted or stitched together colorful fish with the nose of a pig", if I remember correctly, and in fact it is a pretty thing less than a foot long with nice yellow white and silver colors, a chevron in the center, and a puckered mouth that could conceivably look like a pig. After a quick lunch in the buffet we attended the shore excursion presentation with Michael in the Stardust Theater, where we decided to take a snorkeling tour on Kauai. Then Ambassador June gave yet another craft project plus history of Hawaii session. This time she told us the history of cattle and horses in Hawaii plus the Mexican cowboys who came over to teach the Hawaiians how to run a cattle ranch. While she was regaling us with these historical snippets, she was also instructing us on how to decorate cowboy bandanas with beads, which is apparently the Hawaiian style for such things. It was a lot of fun even though I was constantly "changing channels" between lacing beads onto my big red bandana and listening to June's historical information. Proudly wearing our new bandanas, Monika and I had a snack while sitting on the outside rear of deck 11 and since it wasn't raining we could sit right at the back railing. Monika had coffee but I found how to make some very nice hot chocolate and we both picked pieces of pizza that were almost all crust and no cheese or meat to snack on, figuring that those pieces were basically no more harmful to our diets than regular baked bread. We retreated back to our cabin for the rest of the afternoon where we took turns using the computer to update our journals, and then we set off for dinner and the evening's entertainment. |
Monika: After lunch, June our Hawaiian and Tahitian ambassador had us make beaded bandanas. It is good that they have moved her classes to the Stardust theater, because it is the only venue that holds the 700 or so people attending her craft classes. While giving us instructions on how to bead the bandanas, she told us about stories about how the cowboys came to the Hawaiian Islands. It is wonderful to watch her tell a story, because she unconciously tells everthing with mouth and hands. Of course, everyone wore their bandana, so after a class like this, you always can tell who attended. |
Bob: We first went to the Blue Hawaiian lounge for an extra session of magic with Matt Marcy. He did a couple of tricks and I was called up on stage to help with one of them where I tied his thumbs together with wire pipecleaners but he could somehow slip out of them or separate them enough that he could catch rings and even my belt. The coup de grace was when I held a samurai type of sword, which I know was real steel although the edge was dull, and then somehow slip the sword through his tied thumbs. He did that right in front of my eyes and I still don't have any clue how he managed it. He was also a reasonably good comedian with a gentle rather than biting sense of humor, and that made it a lot more fun. In contrast, Chris Alpine, the comedian who was the featured performer for that evening, had a comedy routine that was mostly comprised of ethnic jokes like Polish jokes, and satiric riffs on the foibles of various kinds of people. He also reacted to situations on the ship and people in the audience in an ad lib or improv fashion that was quite funny but often had a biting or sarcastic edge to it, such as when he described Fanning Island as an "armpit". He really filled the time with non-stop patter that had most of the audience in stitches, but we didn't like the parts of it that made fun of stereotypes or ridiculed people. |
Monika: We weren't very hungry, so we went up to the buffet and had a light dinner, before going to the Blue Hawaii Bar to see the magician one more time. He was just as much fun. Bob was actually up on stage helping with one of the tricks, and he could not tell how it was done, although he watched very closely. Entertainment this evening was a comedian. He did a stand-up routine, by a calling on different people in the audience and then making fun of them. Also his other jokes were usually disparaging of one group or another. Altogether, there may have been a few really funny bits, but I am hard pressed to remember. |
Bob: Afterwards we went up to the Outrigger lounge for some Hawaiian music and were treated to Ambassador June dancing the Hawaiian Lullaby while cruise director Doug was singing. He clearly had a really good, trained voice and she was a great dancer, so that was quite a show stopper. We later heard he was a Julliard graduate, and I can well believe it because he was perfectly on pitch and had a beautiful, controlled, vibrato. June also asked her class members to come up and perform The Hukilau Song with her, so that was my debut performance as a hula dancer. We were having fun but I was in shorts and a T shirt and the air conditioning was cranked way up, so after starting to shiver we gave up and returned to our cabin for the night. |
Monika: But our evening was not over. June had announced that at 9:00PM she would start off a Hawaiian evening in the Outrigger Lounge. We thought this would be worthwhile watching, so we went up. She started out dancing what I think of as the most beautiful of the dances we are doing and to my vast surprise, our cruise director who so far only introduced acts, actually sang the melody in a beautiful, trained tenor voice. I held my breath listening to him and watching her. It really was a magical moment. After that she did another of the dances we knew, and even asked the people in the audience who where in her class on stage to do the easiest dance. It was a lot of fun. After that the band played more Hawaiian music, but modernized so that it could have come from anywhere. Since we were not dressed for dancing, we went to bed. |
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