Not a lot to write about today really. It was just another of those long, lazy sunny days when time is of no consequence and you can just enjoy yourself and the feeling of being alive. 🙂
While sitting out on the balcony this morning some movement on the surface of the ocean caught my eye; it was a large school of flying fish. Flying fish are a very common sight once you get into the tropical latitudes, and their silvery bodies glint and flash briefly as they glide over the water’s surface and disappear again.
In fact, looking around in every direction all we could see was glittering miles of deep blue ocean as far as the eye could see. It makes you feel so small and insignificant against the vastness of the oceans; three quarters of the earth’s surface is covered with it. It reminds me of a little song we used to sing at school:
A sailor went to sea, sea, sea
To see what he could see, see, see
But all that he could see, see, see
Was miles of deep blue sea, sea, sea.
So we just did the usual stuff, went to the talks, walked about, ate and drank etc. Then we decided we’d have a dip in the pool, as the water should have warmed up by now.
So back in C149 we donned our cossies and grabbed our pool towels and went up to the Neptune pool. There were quite a few people in the water. Dipping my toe in, it felt a little cold but everyone assured me it was fine once you were in, so we took the plunge.
Sure enough, the water was quite exhilarating once we got in and started swimming. I like it when the ship is at sea because the natural motion of the vessel creates waves in the pool as well. So we enjoyed a half-hour splash about before climbing out and allowing the sunshine to dry us off a little.
Then we went back along to our cabin, got a chilled drink each, and sat out on our balcony for a while. It might not sound like much, but it really is so pleasant just to do this; to watch the Arcadia just glide through the water, feel the gentle sea breeze on your face and enjoy the balmy air.
Around tea time we could see “land ahoy”; a couple of islands which looked fairly mountainous. One of the mountains had the distinctive conical shape at the top indicating it had been a volcano. We learned that these remote islands, seemingly in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, were the Cape Verde Islands. We were interested to learn that because we are already booked to visit these islands in January 2014, in a cruise from Tenerife on board Fred Olsen’s Braemar, the same little ship on which we enjoyed our Amazon cruise in February 2011.
The dress code for tonight was informal (jacket required but no tie) but I decided to give dinner a miss as I could feel that the sea air must have shrunk my clothes a little, lol. 🙂
Instead, while Trevor went down to dinner, I went along to the Intermezzo champagne bar with my Kindle and indulged in a couple of glasses of Jacquart rosé champers, which was delicious. Then Trevor came along to meet me afterwards and we headed off to the Palladium theatre, where they were showing André, the comedy magician again. His show was really very good; even outside the corny patter some of the tricks/illusions he does are refreshingly different and quite impressive.
Then it was along to the Rising Sun as usual for the quiz, which was called ‘Back to School’ and featured topics such as history, geography and maths. One of the couples, Frank and Brenda, from our table in the restaurant joined us. We felt we’d done quite well as we answered most of the questions and we swapped our papers with the team at the next table to be marked out of 35. When the paper came back, we were surprised to see that we’d only scored 28 as we thought we’d done better than that, but on checking we discovered that three of the answers we’d given which were correct had been marked as being wrong by the old farts in the other team! So we actually scored 31 out of 35, which wasn’t too bad. We didn’t win, however, as the winners scored 33. I did, however, dispute with the quiz mistress one of the answers; the question was “What unit is a binary digit most commonly known as?” and the answer, of course, is Bit (binary digit. But the quiz mistress said she’d also accept ‘byte’ as an answer. That is, of course, totally wrong as a byte consists of eight bits and is a completely different unit. As someone who works in I.T. I always like the saying that goes:
There are only 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don’t.
We sat around for a short while chatting to some of our fellow passengers before heading back to our cabin for a nightcap and a relatively early night before propping open our balcony door as usual to avoid the drying effects of the air conditioning.