Wednesday April 16th 2008
Noon position: 33 degrees 65' North, 58 degrees 50' West
Bob: Up before 7:00, we attended our usual morning stretching class. My range of movement was noticeably better for several of the stretches than it had been the first day, which was gratifying. We also found the stretching was a good way to limber up for our morning walks and, besides, we needed those Vitality tokens if we were both going to earn a nice, new Royal Caribbean rucksack! During breakfast we noticed the ship was basically moving very slowly. We were pitching around in an unusual fashion and had almost no wake at all, just enough forward thrust to keep steerage way ( just a couple of knots) in my judgement. The Captain later clarified in his Noon announcement that they had retracted the stabilizer wings and adjusted them to work better during that lull in our forward progress. The Walk-A-Mile on the upper deck was, unfortunately, cancelled again, but we just went down to the Promenade deck (deck 5) and made three laps around the entire ship, which we estimated to be about a mile. In some ways, circling the Promenade deck was even better than multiple laps on the jogging trail on deck 12, because the promenade deck loop forced us to walk up a flight of stairs to the helicopter landing pad in the bow and then descend down a similar flight of stairs on the other side to be able to walk aft. Getting some stepping action in with the fast walking probably made it a better overall workout. At 9:00 we attended a lecture on the Bermuda Triangle, which is really more like a Bermuda Rectangle according to our lecturer. He really was an excellent storyteller and regaled us with stories about lost ships, ship crews, and airplanes over the last 150 years. When he started to seriously recount stories about Atlantis, though, he was telling it as if he really believed in it, and I found that mildly disturbing since from the scientific point of view I haven't read a shred of evidence for any advanced 400,000 year old civilizations (or space aliens, for that matter, which he also mentioned). I probably would have spun the tale as the "Myth versus Reality" of the Bermuda triangle because despite the wacky myths, there is a weather nexus in that area leading to unstable, quickly-changing weather conditions that really do account for a disproportionate number of accidents, disappearances, etc. |
Monika: After morning stretch and breakfast we found out that Walk-A-Mile was again cancelled due to weather. Since we got our Vitality point anyway, we decided to walk on deck 4 which was more sheltered. At 9 we listened to a destination lecture about the Bermuda Triangle. This was less satisfying, since it seemed, the lecturer bought into some of the Atlantis myth. I would like to have heard more about actual scientific theories about the disappearances. Two things seemed clear: there are odd weather patterns in this part of the Atlantic and there seems to be some magnetic distortion to the compass settings as well as innumerable coral reefs and shoals. |
Bob: That afternoon Monika went to an art auction and attended a belly dancing class, neither of which held much attraction for me, so I snuck into bed for a quick nap figuring that maybe that way I could stay up later. It was kind of pathetic that I never seemed to manage to stay up past 10 in the evening and was thus missing out on all the night life that Vicky assured us existed on board. But Monika dragged me out of bed in time to shower and assemble my clothes for dinner, and we had our usual nice conversation with our tablemates while enjoying an excellent meal. We all agreed to try the Portofino restaurant on the following evening to sample some of the Italian cuisine that was featured there. |
Monika: We again set our clocks forward at 11:30 AM and had lunch. After lunch I attended the art auction for two reasons: they served free champagne and gave away free "art", basically lithographs of up-and-coming artists. There were a lot of people at the auction; I got bidder number 289. Of course, I did not bid on anything. I was surprised that most of the paintings were Giclee printings (which is a digitally printed reproduction of an original painting). We have a Giclee of Laurie's "Mermaid" painting, so I was aware of what it was. I was surprised of the number of offerings (giclee prints, lithographs, etc) that were not even bid on. The auctioneer always told the gallery price and the starting bid. For most pieces the starting bid was 2/3 of the gallery price. For a new artist it might be less, for a signed Marc Chagall lithograph it was 80,000 when the Gallery price was 89,000. So the starting bid definitely depended on a cheaper assigned value, rather than the gallery price. Sometimes, they threw in more than one painting to sweeten the pot. Even though, my guess was that scarcely 1/4th of the pictures were bid on, the gallery must be making a profit, since the champagne was flowing freely. At the end, we turned in our bidders card and got our piece of free art, another 8x11 lithograph. When I came back to the room, Bob was taking a nap, so I quietly left for a cup of coffee. I also looked at all the pictures the busy photographers had taken of us and later went up to deck 15 where there was a little chapel. Very cute, but since a Baptist minister was just about ready to give a service, I did not linger. |
Bob: The evening show was a comedian named Jonathan whose forte was imitating the voices of different singers. I thought he was quite a good singer with his "natural" voice, and I was very curious as to how he shaped his voice to imitate singers as different as Ray Charles, Johny Cash, John Lennon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. I particularly enjoyed his Hank Williams imitation because he stayed "in character" for the entire song and really did a good job conveying emotion with the words. Whereas when he sang medleys and shifted his voice for each performer he was mimicking, I got caught up in listening to his vocal imitations rather than what he was actually singing. He was clearly a gifted vocal mimic. He also had a great control of his body and used that Chaplinesque talent to good use in some of his skits, such as when he imitated the uneven speed effects you would hear when playing a very old cassette tape. Another skit of that type was a performance of a karaoke song in the future based on the premise that all the listeners would be deaf because of listening to IPods and radios turned up too loudly. So he carried out the performance entirely by mimeing actions for each word rather than singing. Since the song was fast-paced, that involved a lot of quick shifts of body actions, and his execution of all of that was extraordinarily facile. His jokes were fair to middling, and even though some used ethnic stereotypes as a basis, I did not find his routine offensive. I think that's because he spread it around by telling a single joke making fun of each ethnic group like the Scots, Irish, Polish, Americans, and so forth. But after each such joke he would quickly move on so that he never seemed to be belaboring any one particular group. |
Monika: I got Bob up for dinner. The night before, our service had been especially slow. Not because of our wait staff, who were excellent, but because the kitchen messed up our orders. So to apologize, our headwaiter opened a bottle of rather good wine for us. Since none of us were really bothered by the extra wait, we had too much fun chatting, this was really an extra bonus. Of course, this night, Alison's (our waitress) orders were filled first and we got out in plenty of time, to rest before the evening entertainment, which turned out to be a comedian and vocal impersonator who was quite good. It was interesting to see, that the theater was again completely filled. It really is important to get to the shows early (20 minutes) to get a seat. |
| Prolog | Map of Trip | Epilog |
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