Mumbai tomorrow

A good night’s sleep

What a relief. I think that heat just drains you.

Caught up a little on the scandals/news in US. More of the same.

Spice trade

The speaker discussed the importance of spices and how the search for them drove navigational discoveries by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. Also how and why it was dominated by the Arabs prior to these navigational findings. As an example, nutmeg requires the type of climate present in those Islands (now Indonesia). You can take plants back to your home country but they won’t grow. It was true of a lot of them.

Trivia

Just 4 of us. We missed by two points this time. As usual we had the right answer in some cases and chose a different option but we had our victories among ourselves.

The dancers get stuck with calling these trivias. On large ships, all they are required to do is to dance. On smaller ships like this one, they have multiple tasks. They are all non-Americans among a largely American passenger population so the pronunciations cause some anxiety as some of the passengers are really not nice to them. They are good about spelling the words out for us (hach for “h” causes some amusement). But these are so delightful. Ages are around 18 to early 30s.

T-shirt seen on ship

“I don’t need to use Google; my wife knows everything”

Cold weather ahead?

The ship’s boutiques are selling jackets. Makes on wonder with 90+ weather outside.

Dubai

We just got notice that we have another night in Dubai. We arrive at 1 pm on one day, have all of the next day, and leave around 2 pm the next day. We then have about 6 days at sea. Yippee on all counts.

Lunch

Ed nixed the English pub luncheon but we had a nice visit with a very adventurous, and bright couple in the dining room. One of my least favorite passengers was at the same table (complains all the time about something) but she was isolated on the other sider regaling another poor couple. Not very Christian thoughts on my part but honest nonetheless. We try  to turn all her complaints around into positives but I doubt she gets it.

La La La

This movie was shown in the Cabaret Lounge this afternoon. I left after 15 min. I’m sure we’ll see it resurrected as a play soon. But Ed stayed. I knew he would. Once a movie has started he’ll stay regardless but this is his type of movie.

Trivia

OMG we won. And with only 3 of us. And we were sure we were bombing. So few answers (2?) were we sure of. But we discussed the answers and quickly came to agreement and moved on in our uncertainty. Well son of a gun: we won with 15 right!

We played with a woman we usually have in the afternoon but I have had some dislike of working with her as she will insist on certain answers and always says “ if you had taken my answer we would have won.” She was gracious today and it was really a team effort with no egos enforced. The only comment she made was that one of her answers was right and we should have put that one down. As usual, we ignored the remark.

But when it came time to claim our “prize” I had heard that they got little keychain flashlights on board recently. She really wanted one so I took the lead and told the staff that we didn’t want any more champagne and could we have something else a flashlight if he had them. Well he brought us 3 and so she got her wish. I felt good about that. I was tempted to ask him for a full 6 (to give to our usual players  who are now on the overland to the Taj Mahal) but I didn’t. Ha

So the next day when our buddies return we have great plans for telling them how good we did without them. Ha.

Casual pics

I took my one size fits all saloon girl design T shirt for the casual pics this evening. Daisu is the photographer tonight, a very calm, shy man from Japan. It was so cute to see him getting into these shots and laughing at the results.

Dinner

Italian theme and Oscar the matre de made a special pasta dish from his region of Italy. He is such a delight. He buys all these costumes to fit the ports we are in and wears them around to each table. So funny

Bravo

Was the name of the big dance and sing production number tonight. I tell you these kids (none over 30) are amazing dancers and so athletic yet the girls are such tiny little things. And one of the male dancers left for medical reasons and they are simply filling in as if it was meant to be one less dancer.