Sunday, December 5th, At Sea

Having eaten too much and exercised too little over the last few days, I felt a great need for exercise, so after breakfast we walked 16 laps (4 miles) around the promenade deck. The Veendam was really rolling, pitching and yawing as the big swells swept underneath her, and that made our morning walk much more interesting than our usual simple stroll on the promenade deck. Most of the entrances to the promenade deck were in fact roped off, but we found that the two rearmost entrances on Deck 6 were unblocked and so made use of them. It was very odd seeing the bow of the ship yaw sideways about 15 degrees as the ship was lifted up onto a crest, after which the bow would pitch steeply down into the trough of the next wave. I was awfully glad that I don't seem to have a tendency to get seasick, at least not on a ship as large as the Veendam.

Possibly because of all those blocked entrances, during the first half hour of our walk we had the deck completely to ourselves. That was fortunate as we kind of stagged back and forth across the width of the promenade deck as the ship rolled underneath us. Those side railings, by the way, do not look nearly so tall if the ship is leaned over 10-20 degrees to the side as when it is sailing along bolt upright. The crew started their morning ritual of swabbing the decks and hosing off the lifeboats and windows promptly at 8:00 a.m., so we had to moderate our pace a bit to step over the hoses and around the guys working.

We saw a passel of sea birds cruising along in the wind eddies created by the Veendam, so when Monika went to see the Executive Chef discuss food preparation on the Veendam, I took the camera out back and tried to take pictures of the birds. That had to be some of the hardest photography I have done in my life because the ship was rolling, pitching, and yawing about and I was buffetted by the wind while trying to take 30x telephoto shots of a small, swiftly and unpredictably moving sea bird. The only way I could do it was to start with the lens in the wide-angle position and wait until the bird started to pass by the stern low down so it was framed against the sea. Then I had to quickly zoom while keeping the bird in the frame, press the shutter release halfway down long enough for the autofocus to function, and then finally take the picture while hoping the bird was still in the frame. But I like a challenge, so I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

Meanwhile, Monika found out a lot about the training and promotion hierarchy of the stewards and cabin crew, as well as the curious fact that the Veendam was a "Grease Ship" as she put it. That is, the Veendam used the waste cooking oil to mix in with the normal diesel fuel to be burned by the engines. I have long yearned for such a "Grease Car" for driving about cheaply, and was surprised to hear that Holland America Lines was instituting that kind of grease recycling process on board all their ships. Kudos to them!

We also attended the last port-information lecture with Chris Fisher where he discussed "Things to See and Do in Montevideao and Buenos Aires". We had planned to walk around on our own in Montevideo, Uruguay, and the relatively compact size of the central part of the city and the proximity of the cruise ship berth to all that seemed to make our plan feasible. Buenos Aires, on the other hand was described as a really large, complex city, and I was just as happy that we had booked our last excursion in Buenos Aires as a way to see at least the city highlights. I would not have enjoyed rolling all our luggage around the city while being on a constant lookout for pickpockets, muggers, and snatch-and-grab thieves, which were reportedly quite common there.

After lunch we attended Missy's fifth lesson on Spanish, which had to do with family members and countries. She kept the scope of each lesson quite limited and that helped us all pay keen attention to what she was saying. I was also carefully saving each of her handout sheets (1 per lesson) because I thought I would augment them with notes and then take them along on our next visit to a Spanish-speaking country. We had also considered attending a lecture by Chris on the regional food offerings, but I was just too tired and turned in for an afternoon nap instead. That gave me enough energy to dress up for the last formal night and to carry on what I hoped was a cogent conversation with our dinner companions.

The evening show was billed as a performance of classical music, but that description turned out to be rather misleading. The "classical" numbers were pop-classical mixes, and included songs like "Parsely, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" that I had really never even thought of as classical. The "Ode to Joy" section of Beethoven's 9th Symphony was sung, but the pronunciation was so poor that the Germans sitting next to us could not understand any German and we could certainly not understand any English, leaving it unclear as to what language was actually being sung! Nevertheless, some operatic arias were squeezed in amongst the pop and we really enjoyed the show except for the over-amplification of the sound system. I had my earplugs inserted and was OK, but the folks sitting next to me were sticking their fingers in their ears at the loudest parts, and that is just dratted uncomfortable and so unnecessary to the enjoyment of classical music.