We woke up this morning to a relaxing day at sea. In fact, I felt a little under the weather – maybe it was all the beers and tropical cocktails I had yesterday. 🙁
I soon sorted myself out with a couple of paracetamol washed down with a gargantuan drink of water, and a plate of bacon, sausage, fried egg, mushrooms and black pudding at breakfast.
Afterwards we wandered around the topmost deck, watching the birds diving for flying fish. We saw the surface of the sea come alive with a massive shoal of the fish, while the birds swooped and dived and, more often than not, successfully caught their prey. The sun was very hot on my back and it wasn’t long before I sought the coolness of the shade.
At 10:30am it was time to go along to the Curzon Lounge for the final talk by aviation expert Colin Hobbs. This time his presentation focused on the giant aircraft such as the iconic Boeing 747 and the truly huge Airbus A380, a double-decker aeroplane that holds over 700 people. As ever, it was an interesting talk interspersed with Colin’s amusing anecdotes and jokes. 🙂
Lunch was a delicious barbecue out of the Crystal Pool deck, and afterwards we met up with Colin in the Conservatory. I work in IT and, the other night, Colin had asked me about alternative operating systems to Microsoft Windows. I advised that Linux was an excellent choice, and was free! I explained in some detail about the different Linux distributions and recommended that, for a Windows user wanting to make the transition the best options would be with Linux Mint or Ubuntu. As I had my laptop with me, which uses Ubuntu, I offered to demonstrate it to Colin and answer any questions he had. A computer tech’s work is never done… 😉
At quarter past two we went up to the Crow’s Nest for the final round of the “Battle of the Sexes”. We had an extra couple join in this time, so the ladies had five and the men four on their teams. The first round was “identify the celebrity” and the second round was “what’s the phrase?” based on those Dingbat type puzzles. For some reason the answers to those just popped into my head instantly, so the ladies knocked spots off the men in this round.
The final round was music; a short excerpt of a song/tune was played and you had to state the title of the song and the artist. Once again the women excelled, and indeed we won this round, and the competition overall! Yaayy!! Each team, however, won a bottle of wine, so we enjoyed a nice bottle of white, shared out between five of us. 🙂
We sat around a bit, watching a Wii bowling competition and enjoying our wine, before going and getting sorted out. As it was a sea day, then tonight was formal night once again.
We sat out on the balcony for a while, then got ourselves titivated up and dressed in our gladrags; I wore a long burgundy dress with sequins on the bodice, and a matching sequinned jacket, teamed with a gorgeous and unusual Murano necklace.
Then it was up to the restaurant to eat far too much as usual. I really will have to go on a strict diet once we get back home. 🙁
The show tonight was a new guy we hadn’t seen before; he must have just joined the ship in St. Kitts. He was called Mike Sterling and had performed in the Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables in London’s West End. We was a decent singer and we enjoyed his show, especially when he did The Music of the Night.
Afterwards we went to the Crow’s Nest where the classical guitarist Robin Hill was explaining the different guitar techniques and effects as well as demonstrating them. We stayed until it was time to go to the syndicate quiz, where we found John and Linda already waiting for us, having requested the bottle of wine. So we were about to enjoy our second freebie bottle of the day! 🙂
As we were last night’s winners, we started the quiz on -1 points, which is the winners’ handicap. We didn’t win tonight, only managing to come third, but we weren’t complaining; we enjoyed the quiz anyway.
I was pretty tired by now, so we went back to our cabin where I read a while, before falling asleep, lulled by the sound of the waves. Tomorrow we were due to reach Port of France, Martinique.