Wanderung 34

After 4 straight days of walking around cities in England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, we were craving a day of "Rest and Recuperation " at sea. When we stepped out onto the Lido deck to go to breakfast we were greeted by a plethora of towel creatures. Of course, we had found a towel creature every night: there was the rabbit that wanted to cuddle up to Bugs Bunny, the frog who was looking at our maps, and of course the monkey that was just "hanging around".

But this was so much more. It seems that all the stewards had gotten together to make their favorite animal and exhibited them all around the pool and even along the windows. I especially liked the two swans.

The main task of the day was packing everything back up for disembarkation in Copenhagen, Denmark, the following day. That was complicated a bit by now having a set of dirty clothes as well as clean clothes, which I try to keep separate in case we find a laundry facility en route, and the inescapable fact that we are accumulating bulk. I do not refer to gaining weight ourselves, although that is also a problem on long cruises, but rather to the seemingly inevitable accumulation of things like souvenirs and maps from the ports of call, and daily schedules, pictures and such like mementoes from the cruise. Some, like the Dutch windmills we received after a flower tour, were unusual and cute enough to be packed along, but rather awkward and fragile and thus hard to accommodate. We try to pack fragile items like those in layers of clothing in the middle of our hard-sided suitcases, and that generally works but makes it decidedly more difficult to pack the clothes around them.

One final complication was that Zuiderdam had eliminated the ship library and the typical "Passenger Book Exchange" shelf that we had found on all previous cruise ships. Thus, my typical strategy of packing along cheap paperbacks and then just depositing them all on that exchange shelf at the end of the cruise and thereby gaining more room in our suitcases to pack the new items, had failed. I delivered a formal suggestion about this to the Customer Service desk, but never received a reply.

I broke off packing at 9 o'clock for an informative lecture about "Myths and Monsters" by the professor, which was fascinating as he presented some of the ancient monsters as well as the ones still present such as the giant squid. Right after that we were joined in the theater by Linda and Jerry to listen to the port lecture by Ian on Copenhagen, where I hoped to pick up a few tips.

Ian covered the Nyhavn harbor area, the Tivoli, Royal castles, the main shopping street called Stroget, and museums, etc. When talking about the Little Mermaid statue, Ian included some info on the life of Han's Christian Andersen, and I found it interesting that he did not initially think about writing as a profession, but then a friend who had listened to his stories insisted that it was his best shot at earning a living. I also did not realize that "The Ugly Duckling" was essentially a metaphorical autobiography as Andersen had been an outcast in his early years, but ultimately found success as an author years later.

Ian finished his lecture with a hilarious set of oddball signs that he had photographed on his travels around the world, and I took copy shots of his best ones to add to our own collection of odd, conflicting, amusing, or easily mis-interpreted signs. We especially find the warning signs in Australia that we call the "Aussie boy don't do this!" signs as they warn about falling off cliffs, getting eaten by crocodiles, and other such dangers around Australia.

The last one was from the London Tube, where the lower sign had been put up by pranksters and was not removed for several days.

I finished packing just before we broke for lunch at 12 o'clock up in the Lido Deck and had our last shot at trivia at 1 o'clock with a final picture of the team that included Preacher Doug who had joined our team.

We had signed up for the 2 o'clock "Walk For The Cure", which on the Zuiderdam was a charitable work whose proceeds went to three different cancer foundations, and that made us much happier than similar events that only support the Susan G. Koehmen breast cancer foundation. It turned out to be a rather cold, windy walk, but we persevered because an awful lot of the human race dies of cancer and some of those deaths are preventable.

Although I had managed to get almost everlything in our bags, I just could not fit in all our books. In desperation, we finally collected our excess books and took them up to the non-library in the Crow's Nest where some equally-desperate passengers had just started using a couple of empty shelves as an informal passenger book exchange. I carefully put our books into the English-language book shelf and wished them a long and happy life being read by, and bringing enjoyment to, future passengers on the Zuiderdam. We picked up one small paperback that looked interesting in exchange, but I could easily fit that ibne into my courier bag so it came along with us.

Linda and I thought that Jerry and Monika deserved a final Happy Hour, so we accompanied them as they had a couple beers in the Billboard lounge from 4-5. Then I wore the new Van Gogh flower tie I had purchased in Amsterdam to our last dinner with Bob and Janet in the dining room. That was to break it in, so to speak, and they recognized it as a Van Gogh. I finally got Janet to talk some and we all had a pleasant dinner before giving Hasan and Eka their extra tips and heading back to the Billboard lounge to hear Ian and Danny perform another request show. We sat close enough that I could see each guy use his iPad to recall the lyrics of each song, but the iPads showed no notes, so they both must be playing the melody lines, at least, purely from memory, which is an amazing feat to a non-musical person such as myself. We actually tried dancing to one of the melodies and moved enough that Linka could not get a clear picture

Linda and Jerry then went on to the variety show in the theater, but we returned to our cabin to finish up packing for our disembarkation. We decided to keep some of the papers like the New York Times crossword puzzle pages, but we threw out the daily ship schedules as I have been keeping up fairly well with the daily journal. Even with that additional material, we seemed to be able to cram enough stuff into our suitcases that we SHOULD be able to get the rest of it into our handbags in the morning. Then we tagged our suitcases, put them outside our cabin door, and relaxed a bit before turning in for the night.