AT SEA MAKING FRIENDS!

Tuesday, January 24, 2017      75 F / sunny / calm seas to rough

At Sea/ ms Oosterdam

Today I was resolved to enjoy coffee on the balcony all morning and so I did, almost finishing my book about the Clark family of Virginia, of the Revolutionary War, and Lewis and Clark Expedition. The Caribbean was peaceful, the sun was shining, the balcony had shade, and the temperature was just right.  TK went to the pool, but returned with croissants and a Danish just as I was getting hungry.  I will need to get back into WWI mode when I get home,

I stayed on the balcony until 12:30 when we went to the Captain’s luncheon (by invitation). This was a situation where we could not opt to sit alone, so fortunately we sat with two delightful Canadian couples, one from Ontario on Lake Huron, the other from British Columbia.  No politics! We shared cruise stories, about the Panama Canal, Acapulco, Hawaii, even Egypt. We each received a Delfft Holland America tile as a souvenir.

About the food: Thank goodness our Mariyadi was the server. So I do not appear to be negative, let me ask you how much would you like a fish (Pontano-whatever that is) with its skin still on?  The coconut pie was delicious. More on food later.

After lunch we met a couple from Akron, Denny and Reggie. She is an Ohio state director for DAR and we talked a long time about that. TK and Denny were engaged in conversation about Akron, gas prices, and Longaberger baskets.

After that I hurried to the “Making Windows 10 Your Own” class. I have really learned a lot from Georgia and will be anxious to try all that I have learned on my Desktop at home, even the laptop I have with me—when we have free Wi-Fi!!  I will be so organized, with my own special tiles all named according to my system, my clean desktop (Georgia says nothing should be on the desktop except the recycle bin), and an efficient task bar!!

By now it was time for dinner and a good thing because I was hungry—I really did not eat anything at lunch except the pie. We ordered the shrimp and a spring roll for appetizers—who would like passionfruit jam on their shrimp??? Have you ever tried a spring roll with barbecue sauce? Just asking. Even the strip steak had a sweet sauce on it.   Haris emphasized how much he liked the banana crisp, so I ordered that—it was warm and very good!

Right now we are sitting in the Main Stage auditorium waiting for the show to start—we are actually giving the comedian, Mike Robinson, a chance!! And as it turned out, this comedian was also a ventriloquist.  That meant that we heard about three jokes in 45 minutes. The puppet had his eyes on a man in the front row who turned out to be a police officer. Comedian Mike asked how long he and his wife had been married, the answer was 33 years. Mike said, “That’s not a big deal on Holland America, just look around.” That was funny.  At the end, Mike said he was a politically correct comedian and didn’t use the word dummy, that “Terrence” was a Mannequin-American. As ventriloquists go, he wasn’t bad.

As we were walking out of the theater, we overheard an older man asking another older man how he liked the show. That man replied it wasn’t bad. The first man replied that he liked it a whole lot better than the music show on Wednesday (the Irish and Danish duo)—he said he did not like and could not understand the music.

I will add that we are definitely enjoying this cruise—our suite is phenomenal, the ports we are visiting are favorites on the Caribbean, our dining room servers are perfect, TK is enjoying the pool, and I am really happy with the Windows 10 classes, among other things!

TK’s Take: When he was talking with Denny today, he learned that three people had been taken off the ship already (hopefully nothing dire) and the average age of the passengers is 68 years old. Hmmmm. You can read between the lines here!

Tonight's towel animal--a rabbit with attitude!