Sunday April 20th 2008
Noon position: 38 degrees 16' North, 23 degrees 36' West (Course 88 degrees, Speed 17.7 knots)
Bob: Well, the best laid plans o' mice and men gang aft aglay, as Robert Burns said, and I did get a good night's sleep until about 4:30 when I awoke with a brainstorm about how to use our $5 money-matching coupons at the roulette table. It involved my betting on black and Monika on red at the same time, so one of us was sure to lose but the other was sure to win (except when the house numbers came up). If the house numbers didn't come up, after three turns we should ideally have been $15 to the good. In retrospect, that really wasn't worth losing a couple of hours of sleep over, but at the time it seemed so brilliant that I even was inventing names for my new strategy like "Wall Street Wagers", or "Federal Reserve Board Bets" in honor of the bail outs of the big Wall Street firms like Bear Stearns with public money. In this case, we would be using RCI coupons rather than the U.S. Mint, but the idea was basically the same: Heads, I win; Tails, you lose! I was also trying to calculate probabilities and expected payoffs in my head, and doing that mental arithmetic really kept me awake until it was time to rise and shine for our morning stretch class at 7:30 a.m. Returning to our normal "At Sea" routine, we had breakfast after the stretching class and then did the Walk-A-Mile, after which we attended the destination lecture for Lisbon, Portugal. Dr. Ryan actually combined Portugal and Spain into one presentation, which as a result was overloaded, but we did get some useful information out of it. One caution that I wish I had heard before our last visit to Lisbon was to watch out for the pickpockets that prey on the tourists coming off the cruise ships That would possibly have saved me from having to buy Monika a new camera after our last visit to Lisbon (see Wanderung 14). |
Monika: Finally, we made it again to morning stretch and Walk-A-Mile, slowly closing in on another vitality backpack - maybe even a t-shirt. After that it was another destination lecture, this one on the Iberian Peninsula.It was again somewhat jumbled but it was interesting, especially since we had been to some of the places and so things looked familiar. I stayed around for the lecture by the prosecutor. But this one started to get gruesome, discussing how to determine time of death. So I decided not to go again. Bob had awakened early and was all bouncy and excited when I woke up. So he just stayed for the first lecture and then headed for our room, to make up a few ZZZZs. I met Helen and she dragged me along to a Portuguese language lesson. Portuguese is close to Spanish, but there are marked differences. Since I speak neither language, it does not really matter. |
Bob: I hit a wall of fatigue at 10 a.m. that felt just like jet lag. That took me by surprise because we were only losing one hour per day, which the body should typically adjust to without any problems. Still, I didn't feel like fighting it and returned to the cabin for a short nap before lunch. Helen and Jeff accompanied us to the "Old & New Masters" art talk that afternoon and I liked the slides of all the artwork and discussion of the artists' lives and so forth. We covered Rembrandt, Picasso, Chagall, Miro, and Max, a modern artist whose works figure prominently in the shipboard art auctions. None of us four appreciated, however, the heavy-handed commercial emphasis of buying art as an investment that kept percolating up in the presentations and audience questions. To be fair, at least some of the time the "money" questions were posed by a member of the audience, but at other times the presenters laid a spiel on us about how much the price of the artwork for Rembrandt, Picasso, and Chagall had appreciated, and by implication of course how much we could expect the artwork from Miro and Max to appreciate in value in the future. That economic leitmotif was completely irrelevant to the quality of the artwork itself and for me it detracted from the presentation. |
Monika: After lunch we attended an art lecture on the masters. They covered in detail Rembrandt, Picasso, Dali, Chagall, Miro, and Max. If you haven't heard the last two names, don't worry. They are right now being pushed as being "collectable". Well, they are selling. But I do wish they had added at least one impressionist. But I guess, they do not have any impressionist masters for sale. We then learned the cha-cha-cha. And it was nice to get just some basic steps down without a lot of "choreography" as they tried to teach us on the last ship. To cool off, we stopped at the Two Poet's Pub, one of the places on the promenade. Our coupon book had one for a free beer or glass of wine. So I enjoyed a Michelob while we sat outside the pub on the promenade watching the people go by. |
Bob: Our next stop was a cha-cha lesson and that was exactly what I needed to build enough confidence to try to dance cha-cha in the evening dances in the ice rink on Deck 3. The rink was covered by some kind of coated metal or wooden plates for those sessions, and it was wonderful having enough space for us all to practice without bumping into each other. The session right after dinner was a lot of fun and we tried cha-cha, rumba, a tango and a Lindy before heading off for the evening headliner performance. Unfortunately, the singer was once again over-amplified to the point that our ears were hurting and we left early. Instead we ran across a piano, bass, and violin trio in the Schooner Lounge and listened to them for a while. We tried to go dancing once again at 10:00 and for the first 20 minutes or so we were fine, then somebody upped the amplification to disco levels, drat it! When we had to shout above the music to try to communicate, we gave up for the night and headed back to our cabin. There I worked on my journal a bit while Monika did crosswords before turning in for the night. |
Monika: After dinner they had again put a dance floor on the ice skating ring and so we had a lot of space to practice the cha-cha we just had learned. What fun! Dancing was interrupted by the evening show. A female pop singer. Again the amplification was so loud, that this time, we actually left and Bob complained at the guest relations desk. We were happy to go back to dancing on the ice rink. But after 3 or 4 songs, they also cranked up the volume, indicating to us that it was time to go to bed. |
| Prolog | Map of Trip | Epilog |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||