Ryanair -- Photos of Rio

Walking by a man selling nuts in Rio I could not resist. The peanuts are covered in crusty sweet coating and little pieces of coconut are covered in the same. So delicious.

 On returning to Rio we searched out the nut man and took a healthy supply back to the room for the trip. Here the nuts are mixed with a few other treasures. The cheesecake lollipops were a delight on the ship. We tried to eat some everyday.

Here the olympic stadium for the Olympics looks great but the rest of Rio is still under a lot of construction. How they can be ready in time, I don't know.

Our stop in Salvador Bahia had a huge elevator (279ft), dividing the lower town from the upper town.
Here is a street scene from the upper town. You see the old and the new.

Ryanair -Beware before you book

 We left amazing Barcelona to take a Ryanair Flight to Rome. Ryanairs moto is ‘point to point’, no frills cheapest fare. We paid $150.00 Canadian for 2 flights oneway. Good Deal!  Went online to checkin, one can do this 30 days before but you pay extra if you do that. So I went on again 7 days before to checkin online. We were travelling in low season so prices were less. 1 bag of 20 kilos= 30 euros, 1 bag of 15 kilos= 20 euros, to pick seat=4 euros, priority seating so you have a place for hand luggage=6 euros. I ended up paying more for luggage and seating than our seats originally cost but I did it for Greg’s peace of mind and mine but not so much mine. I just sucked it up and paid with my credit card online. Could not print out the boarding passes but I saw them.

Greg reading in our cruise room.

Greg studying the map in Rome in our hotel room.

And lunch in Rome consists of cheese, drink bread and homemade salad. 

Got to the line to drop off bags and because I did not print out the boarding passes, it was going to cost 15 euros each ($25Can) to have boarding passes printed out. I just kept refusing and finally when the third person came to tell me I had to do that, I stepped out of line, opened my ipad and started checking in again to find where I saw the boarding passes. (I had to sign in on Barcelona Airport wifi and needed to pay money so checked the free box and then somehow read I would get a free iphone in the mail. Knew something was wrong. What had I joined?) After half an hour or more, I got online and I found the boarding passes again. Showed them to the guy and he said OK. Hah!  I kept that 50 dollars in my pocket.

Then we had to show the boarding passes when checking in with security. I had kept my ipad open to the passes. However, one pass got read and then my ipad said I had to refresh it. So I stepped out of line again and searched again until I found the passes again. Got through security. Then I had to guard my ipad so I could get on the plane. I managed. Put the ipad in my bag. Then had to show the boarding passes again to get on the plane. Found the passes again.

Somewhere during all of this I read where one could download the Ryanair air app. But as Marcia knows, I could not find the app store. What a nightmare. Greg and I were so happy when we finally did get on the flight. Next time, I will think twice before I book Ryanair, the airline for cattle!

Rio's favelas...neighborhoods going up mountains

In Rio, the rich people lived in the valleys. The poor people really owned no land so they built their homes going up the mountains. These neighbourhoods are called 'favelas' which used to mean slum. However, they are built well and are now part of the culture. Greg walked up the mountainside and took these photos. There are cement stairs all the way up to the top.

Here Greg is looking down at where he came from.

They decorate, paint and have art all over their walls and fences.

This is a picture taken from the highway. You can see the favela going up the mountain. It has taken me over 3 hours to load these photos. The ship was rocking around last night and all day today. Just hang on as you weave across the hall. 

Dinner is waiting. 

Wyona

The Beautiful Trees

From Wyona:

Greg and I have been travelling back and forth along the boulevard a number of times a day to Urca, Sugar Loaf Mt., Cococabana, Ipanema, and Corovado to Christ Redeemer (one of the new seven wonders of the world).

I spied some orange tree trunks along the way one day. It took us a few times before we could locate the same grove so we were ready to jump off the bus and examine them.

I tried to identify the trees on online. The best I could come up with is a manzanita but this tree is not indigenous to Brazil.

Help me Glen.

The vegetation here is fabulous. I never get tired of looking at the trees.

If I were a bird or insect I would not want to tackle and of these trees or the flowering bush.

Such beautiful flowers stemming from prickles.

And last is the trees that jumped out in the forest to scare little children.

Wyona

Life of Travel

Wyona and Greg started traveling the world 38 years ago.  After retirement they continue to travel and this is where they will document their tourism experiences.  Enjoy!

We began in Alberta. 

We continue to enjoy our home town.

Visiting the Costwolds, UK before retirement.

Penguin Rookery, Ushuahia, Argentina

The trip was advertised as a catamaran adventure to a penguin rookery.  On the ship you have a ticket that tells you the meeting place and time and someone with a white paddle held high walks you down to the motor coach or boat.  In this case by the time we got there another group ad loaded before us, so of the 225 seats not many were left.  Greg sat on the top of the boat which is like sitting on the top of one of the hop-on hop-off coaches – pretty windy when the wind motor is started and the trip heads off for a 2 ½ hour ride up to the rookery.  We were promised that there would be places that sea lions slept out on rocks and told that we were to watch for whales, but all of that would be dependent on the animals.  “Which side of the boat to the whales like,” someone had asked.  “If you are on the starboard side, they are on the port side,” was the answer.  Truthfully, we saw a family of beautiful orca whales, which is unusual for that bay.  And the sea lions could be smelled first and seen later.

The trip reminded me of a trip I took on the barge at Shuswap in the early 1960’s.  The hills and mountains roll by.  The water changes colour.  The pace is leisurely.  We watched an albatross fly back and forth over the tail of the boat, swooping down, turning, flying back over us – magnificent for those who braved the cold outside the deck:  Wyona, Greg, me, a German traveler and his dad who came out occasionally, a disabled woman who tucked herself  into the corner where the cabin met the deck.  She only moved when someone would help her get up.  After an hour Wyona and I had everything we had brought in the way of clothing, wrapped around us, and she was sharing one of her gloves, so that we both had one warm hand and one cold hand.  The art teacher from the boat huddle between the three of us for a while, since we were using the body heat that would transmit itself hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder between us.

“Do you want to go inside yet,” Wyona kept asking.  I like the adventure to all of the senses: the wind on my skin, the sound of the water, my hair blowing across my mouth or flying straight behind.  Greg went inside and bought a sandwich – just one, for old time’s sake.  It was $5.00 and must be a sandwich that is well known, since it is the one that we ate when we went to the other penguin rookery.  “No.  You can’t make me eat that.”  I could still remember the first one I ate.  “This one is different,” said Greg. “No mayonnaise.”

Wyona, today with a buffet tucked away in her travel bag, provided cheese, rye bread, cake, Coke.  Any surprise I can think of she can pull for somewhere.  “I bet you don’t have any chocolate.” 

“Oh yes, I do.”

Those who had the preferred seat in the cabins were 4 across on each side of a table with no room to bend or move.  They sat that way for 5 hours – worse than an airplane.  Now we froze on the outside, but had all of the other advantages – really living in nature!  Our toes so cold we didn't know if we would ever feel them again, our faces windburned from the sun, our best logical powers heightened as we tried to figure out how to maximize a blanket we borrowed from someone inside, making a blanket for one cover all three of our legs.

In the elevator and then again at a pre-dinner reception, I asked people what trips they took today.  Both couples had taken the Penguin Rookery Adventure and said politely, it was nice but I don’t think we would do it again.

Not us.  We would do it again.  With more blankets.

On Living Yesterday Again

We had two May 6ths.

May 6th – Day 1 and May 6th – Day 2.

... evening in Petropavlovsk ...

The purpose is to get us back in sync with the rest of the world, since we have been gaining all of these hours and now have to give them back some way. Greg sleeps in. Wyona sleeps in. I try to dress in the dark and slip out to walk the halls of the 7th floor – 3 minutes to the other end, and 3 minutes back again. Getting out the door is has its difficulties. My watch is on upside down. I have a sweater which I have now put on inside out, and the second day, inside out and upside down. With just one speck of daylight in the room, I think I could do better.

... the sailout ...

I had a fantastic day yesterday. A fellow Canadian at our table is a decade older than me. His wife sits by him, since he can’t always hear the conversation and she gets very close to his ear and then speaks in a loud voice for him – and that is with his hearing aids in. I can look at him, tell a story as loudly as I can, think he is lip-reading, but he gets hardly anything. Last night John, from Australia sat by him and kept the conversation going. But John’s wife kept poking him in the ribs, telling me that he had to talk softer, since she couldn’t keep the conversation going on the other side of the table. The old man still needed John to speak louder. The louder John spoke, the more his wife kept giving him pokes in the ribs, whispering in an aside to us that the loud voice was due to the 3 afternoon martinis and that no one needs to talk that loud.

Oh, this is fun!

... night seas ...

Yesterday the waiter forgot to give Greg his main course at lunch.

The woman next to Greg called over the maitre d’, told her that the guest had not received his meal yet, and that this was unacceptable. The poor waiter came back cowering with his supervisor. The food was just late from the kitchen. Greg would have gone without 10 meals before he would have said anything, let alone in that form of complaint.

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Before that, the woman had bawled Greg out for using her bread plate – which was really his bread plate, but I she had decided it was his, even though she said she doesn’t ever set tables with bread plates. In the mean time her husband had alerted the waiter twice that he needed ketchup on his hamburger, even though the hamburger was many minutes away from being served to him. Subsequently her pasta was sent back to the kitchen because it tasted too much like spicy ketchup. All of the while the man was telling us he is an investment counsellor, in insurance and he can tell us how to invest our money for the next two years where it will get maximum returns. Wyona had told him that our ship is not running sailing at maximum capacity, and he dismissed her information, saying that the stats on the empty rooms is inconsequential and that what he doesn’t like is being nickled and dimed to death as is done on this boat. I don’t know why all of this was so fun. The only time the man was thunder-struck was when he asked Wyona how many children she had. Long silence from her. She said eight. Finally he was spechless.  

... sunset ..

Long silence from him. Then “Are you Catholic?” 

No, she said. 

He said, “I am the 7th of 7 kids. My mother was 45 when she had me.” When he asked Wyona how many grandchildren she had, long silence again. That is because Wyona hasn’t got enough fingers to count them all, and she doesn’t have Charise at her side giving her the right answer. When Wyona finally came up with the number13, there was another long silence.

A lunch hour always to be remembered by us.

Arta

My Happy Birthday

I wore out before the last hours of my birthday were over. I began my birthday when I walked on the 7th floor, up and down the corridors from Rooms 7002 to 7208 – up and down, until tonight when Wyona asked if we had seen last month’s room attendants, I had to say, yes, I passed them many times in the hall this morning. They work on the other side of the ship where I do have of my walk.

Wyona has been sick, so we had lunch together in the Ocean View, moving down the row of vegetables and pointing to everything we wanted on our salads. Yum to artichokes, shredded zucchini, toasted sesame seeds and pumpkin sees – all of the items that are just too troublesome to prepare for a quick meal at home! I saw the Russian Matryoshka Doll lecture and took notes, copious ones, having so many already. The bottom line is, if you like it buy it. There are no nesting dolls you can purchase that will be more valuable next year. And even the ones that a person can buy in the subway in the middle of St. Petersburg may have been made in China. I have no idea how I ended up in the Beyond the Podium Lecture called American Madams 1860-1910 but I was there with Greg and another dinner companion. I had the suspicion that I would be listening to a talk about madams in the Alaskan Panhandle – since Alaska is where we are headed. I was taking notes and able to refer to remember Mother Featherlegs and Diddlin’ Dora’s Saloon and know that I have to do some internet research when I go home to scan again the poem written by Lusk, Wyoming’s mayor who immortalized Mrs. Charlotte Shepherd.

My day went from good to better. Of all of the seminars my notes are the most copious when I sit in the Photography Question and Answers Sessions. Greg and I went to dinner and came home to tell Wyona that if she had joined us she could have had her choice of Beef Wellington, Lamp Chops, or Lobster Tail. I choose the latter to go with the oysters – two, still in the shells. No pearls were found. I had ordered a small cake, brought from the kitchen, my name tastefully written on it. Nothing like creating your own birthday party!  Our two waiters joined the table singing Happy Birthday. That was good. But the 3 tables of fun loving Germans who toast and sing at every opportunity joined in, raising the volume level more than I had anticipated – a blush from me for my 73 birthday to say the least. I still like to remain anonymous.

I watched the iBroadway Stage presentation – twice: 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. I was wondering what my favorite songs were tonight: On Broadway? Defying Gravity? Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You? We will Rock You? The good thing is that I could hear the show twice to help me make up my mind.

Can you imagine me stopping by a jewellery store on the way back to my room. Wyona and Greg had spent some time in there while I was at lectures today. She tried to convince me that a lovely pearl hanging on a black diamond necklace would be the perfect birthday gift and that I should buy it for myself. I opt for a new used car instead. Greg said it would be a hard choice, but if I choose the jewellery, I could just hold out my ring finger and say, “I am wearing an automobile on my hands”.

We had late night pizza in the Ocean View – a ‘60’s thing to do. 

I don’t know what a ‘70’s thing to do would have been. I am still having trouble getting good models for what it is like to grow old.

In any case, I had a lovely birthday.

Arta

A Small Room

We are going to a meeting today to tell us how to change rooms – from our small one, into a larger one with a balcony at the back of the ship.  The bigger rooms on this ship were booked long before Wyona had an interest in coming back to NE Asia.  The room has a double bed, and a two-seater couch which folds out at night or for afternoon naps.  There is no room for two people to pass at the bottom of the bed, so one person has to move one-way while two stand on the other side of the room, and then the action starts the other way. 

Alternatively someone can walk across the tops of the bed to go from the inside door by the corridor straight through to the baloney.  I saw David do this many times on the last cruise. Greg took this route once and proved he was good at it. Wyona and I would require a step ladder to get up on the mattress.  A step ladder would be a room accessory that we do not need, for there would be no space in which to store it. 

Yesterday Wyona threw out the red roses that came to us compliments of the Captain’s Club.  I thought the flowers had another good week in them so I resuced them from the garbage.  She citied having no room for them as the reason they had to hit the garbage.  By the morning I agreed with her, since together we were up a few times in the night, waiting for emails and during that time, while manoeuvring in the dark, we spilt glasses of drinking water into side drawers.  While drying those out we threw important jewels into the garbage along with the wet Kleneexes.  Cruising as a togetherness project is helping Wyona and me develop new life skills.

The Year of the Pig in Gold

“Do not walk alone in places that are unknown to you.” That is what the sign said as I looked down a side alley off of Haiphong Road. And that is what is keeping me from doing an early morning walk all alone. So I laid here thinking about window shopping yesterday.

The gold jewellery in the window is exquisite and reminds me of the gold souks in Dubai, -- at least the amount of gold.

What makes this different is design, especially a choker necklace with the main design being a large pig, three columns of baby pigs hanging 4 deep from the sow’s underbelly. A fantastic tribute to those born in the year of the pig and the first time that I have been sad about being a dragon.

Down one isle of the Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre were a series of display cases, each holding two watching which were each circling 360 degrees, slowly, slowly and the sparkle coming off of the watches was so amazing that Greg, Wyona and I were all drawn in for a closer look.

We talked for a long time about the spectacular design, Greg finally remarking, “All of that and a watch besides.”

Wyona said of the salesmen in high end dark black suits standing near-by, “I bet those young men double as armed guards. I am going to find out the price of one of those watches.” She came back.

“Four million Hong Kong Dollars.”

That math was too hard for me even though I have been dividing every HKD price by 7 to get an idea of the cost in Canadian dollars. Having to work with six zeros at the end of some figure closed me right down for a moment. “That would be half a million dollars,” offered the salesman who had come over now to give Wyona more details on the watches on the pedestals. Exquisite beauty and a joy to look at.

We travelled on to other glass windows. In one shop, the silk skirts of the dresses were billowing, aka the famous Marilyn Monroe shot over the sidewalk grate. We searched to find where the fans were placed – in the far corners of the windows. A shop close by had large, fluffy 3-D clouds hovering down at the mid point of the window – eye-catching, though I can’t remember anything that was in the window except the clouds.

When we passed the diamond watches today, I heard the tone in Greg’s voice change to gruff. He said to Wyona, “This is the last time I will ask you. Do you want one of those watches or not. I am not bringing you back here. Either get it now or never!”

Arta

A Near Miss

I thought Greg, Wyona and I were leaving for Vancouver on a 7 a.m. flight and then on to Hong Kong. She was sure the departure time was 12:05 pm. I said again to her, "I am pretty sure it is 7 a.m. I have been looking at that timing for the past couple of days." She said, no, -- noon. We traipsed downstairs at her house to look at the tickets. One set of tickets said noon, the other said 7 a.m.

“Greg? What does a person do when they have five hours to kill between flights,” Wyona asked.

“I usually walk,” he said. Then his eyes grew wide, for he thought he was coming along with us and would have missed his early morning flight. That is the way Aeroplan points work. He will get to the row of three seats we have booked together to fly across the Pacific, but not in the most convenient way. Wyona’s and my flight is different for we are using up the return ticket from when we flew back from Shanghai last year.

Wyona made me laugh tonight with her follow-up phone call. “I just want to warn you, we are not in a hotel for our three days there, but in something more like a hostel. Well, really it is a one-star hotel. No toiletries. No towels.” 

I don’t care.

For the curious, we will see Taipei (Taiwan), Nagasaki (Japan), Busan (South Korea), Jeju Island (South Korea), Tianjin (China), Shanghai (China), Kobe (Japan), Tokyo (Japan), Petropavlovsk (Russia), Seward (Alaska) and then continue on down the coast to Vancouver and home.

Arta

Notoriety

Wyona and David in bare feet,
splashing in the water in
front of St. Mark's Cathedral

“Why might the photographers on the boat know you”, Bonnie asked.

I told her I would tell this painful story.

To begin with, I have a nice hand held Canon SX220 HS – purchased because my arms would get too tired carrying my larger Canon on day trips off of the boat.

A lovely purple colour and I can tell it apart from Moiya’s camera, for though hers is the same camera, it is a turquoise colour.

David and Wyona with their shoes back on.

One afternoon while the boat was docked, David came rushing down to have Moiya and me come up to the veranda view from the 14th floor and look with him at another boat that had docked, people streaming off of it.

It seemed there was no organized way to pick up luggage and both he and I were busy taking shots of travellers sitting on huge piles of luggage while their friends were still off gathering more cases of goods.

That night I downloaded my pictures, and then a little later picked up my camera and erased everything on the memory card.

I was careful.

I saw the first picture that said, do you want to erase all, and it was a picture I recognized from the afternoon shoot, I said yes.

Moiya and David at the canal

When the erasing took longer than normal I had my first clue as I thought, how odd.

That took longer to erase than usual.

Then I looked at the camera and thought, hey, I thought my camera was purple and not turquoise. Whoops.

When Moiya came back to the room, I asked her to lay down on her bed while I talked to her.

David and Arta looking over the
Grand Canal in Venice

She said she wasn’t tired. I told her she might be when I was finished my story.

I began by telling her that I have seen David all over the ship, taking pictures for days now; I would see him in an easy chair, looking over the ocean in some lounge, erasing the pictures he didn’t want, then I would see him down in the Centrum doing the same thing a few hours later. I told her that he doesn’t have those pictures anymore.

I have erased them all. Moiya was pretty cool about it, but they weren’t her pictures.

Then David came into the room.

I had to start my story again. When I began to retell my story, Moiya took the bedsheet and pulled it slowly up over her head so she only had to hear and didn’t have to see.

“You erased them all?”

“All.”

“Do you know any way to get them back?”

“Not that I know of.”

“I am going to the ship’s photography department and maybe they can help me.”

All of the above pics were those recovered
from David's camera
due to the magic of the Celebrity Photo Dept.

This may have taken Dave 5 trips, over the course of three days. Each time they felt they were getting a little closer, but hadn’t had success yet.

“Your sister-in-law.”

“Are you still staying in the same room with her.”

“Is walking the plank legal?”

He would come back and torture me with what they were saying.

The department eventually accessed a program that would bring Dave’s 1000 pics all back. The department was successful because I didn’t know to format the disk every time I erased it, something I have now learned.

That is how everyone in the photography department got to know me before I won their special prize of $100 of free pictures.

Greg and Wyona just bought a new camera yesterday – exactly like Dave’s and mine, but Greg’s is fuchsia.

When I saw the new camera I asked Greg if he had anything he wanted me to erase on it.

Arta

Singapore

... sky approaching Singapore ...

The sky never ceases to amaze me. I feel this way at home.

Even when it is -40, in Alberta, you can look up and think that the sky is breath-taking. I often feel that breathlessness when I look out of a balcony on the boat at sunset.

The sun setting, and the ripples on the water look different every night.

... mist at Port Kelang ...

One thing I like about a buffet table is that I can circle it a number of times before I have to choose what I will eat.

That circling, looking at something a number of times, that is what I miss when I am on a bus tour or looking out onto a river.

Even with my camera in hand, it is still often too late to take a picture by the time the thought crosses my mind.

This was particularly true the morning we came into Port Kelang.

"I will take pictures when the mist rises," I thought.


But the mist never rose.

Kuala Lumpur War Memorial

I also found that when the five of us travel together, there are few chances to get pictures with more than a couple of people.

We scatter like seeds in the wind, so while I could get a picture of Wyona and David, Greg and Moiya were somewhere else.

This airport in Singapore only rivals the one in Barcelona.

"Look, you can eat off of the floors," says Wyona there.

"Yes, my favorite airport," replies Greg.

 ... two weary travellers at the Singapore airport ...

I hadn't seen the airport in Singapore before, so I wanted to walk around. "Gives Barcelona a run for its money, doesn't it.  They agreed.

Fast Food Duck

I have always tried to find something new in every day -- and after so many years of practise, the task gets easier and easier. I saw it here -- my first look at a duck fast food joint.

Colourful enough.

On reflection, I should have gone in and ordered some food.  Fast food duck!  Would have been fun even if I hadn't have eaten it.

How much weight can my luggage carry?

I wanted one of these folding baskets from this street merchant.

I could imagine the fun of serving bread in it to my guests and how amazed they would be when they saw it collapse.

Moiya had already figured out how many hours it would take her to make one with her jig-saw, which made buying one doubly attractive.

Wyona was half way through negotiating the best price for three of them, when she, at least, figured out that we were already tossing out precious rocks and shells we had collected because we were overweight with out luggage and there is only so much that will fit in our pockets.

Waah!

Arta

Moiya Doesn’t Want to Leave Home

Today at lunch Greg said he can’t believe that this ship is going down to Australia, then up through Hawaii and on to Seattle so that it can do the Alaska cruise. Next year. “What ship are we on?” said Moiya. 

“The Solstice,” said Greg. 

“Oh.  I have been on it so long, I think of it as home,” said Moiya.  “And I can tell you, I don’t want to leave home.”

“Write a note to your kids and tell them that – just go on from Singapore to Australia, and on and on, and when you finally die, the ship can just drop your ashes in the sea.”

There is a little bit of that feeling in all of us.

On other matters, I have been going to the dining room every morning to check the lunch time menu.  It is posted on the “My Time Dining” side of the ship.  I have been waiting for a repeat of the Balinese Style Chicken and Beef Satay with Peanut Sauce.  Today I found it on the menu, along with  Papaya with a Hint of Lime cold soup.  “I am doing the cooking and inviting everyone for lunch at the dining room,” I told Greg and Dave at the in-depth 11:00 am lecture on Malaysia. 

Ordering was hard, for we just wanted Marius to bring us sticks of vegetable, beef and chicken sticks of satay, like the ones they serve on the streets of Malaysia. “Just put them in the middle of the table,” said Wyona.  “This is an all-you-can-eat-buffet, isn’t it,” said Wyona.  To make it easy for the cooks in the kitchen the server wanted to know how many times to order these three dishes to change them from an appetizer size to a main course. 

Another server came by and laughed when he saw us. “We have been eating this in the crew section of the ship for the last three days,” he said.  “You should have been eating down there with us.  I ate 11 sticks last night,” he said.

“We have been trying to get down to that dining room,  to where you eat, but they keep a line between us.  We have always suspected you are getting better food down there.”

I have a half an hour before I go to Art 101 this afternoon.  The class is causing Moiya a lot of stress – she doesn’t like the mess, or maybe I should call it the freedom that comes with watercolour.

 “I want a face on this body.  Here, just put a dob of red here, and there the face is,” said the teacher.  That just doesn’t work for Moiya or me.  This morning we had another water colour class, and David just brought back a lovely print, a gift from an art lecture he attended. 

“I have never seen water colour classes given on a boat,” said Wyona.

 “We are so many days at sea,” said Greg.  “We are going right around the world on a boat and they have to figure out things for people to do who don’t want to go for $200 massages, or work out on the treadmill all day.  What is popular are the classes they run in the internet lounge.  So many classes there and people are standing shoulder to shoulder to listen in.”

On the point of classes, lectures and shows on the boat, we keep going to the Love and Marriage Game Show which is hard to run on this boat, given the demographics of the people who are sailing.  It is the first time this boat has gone through the Suez and around India and the trip has attracted seasoned cruisers.  This morning at 10 am in the elevator, I caught the scent of the specialty coffees offered to these cruises from 8 am to 10 am.  Their speciality lounge was closed down and they were on their way back to their rooms, carrying their coffees.  These are not the kind of people who join up for the Love and Marriage Game.  One couple said they had been on the game, many years ago, and then the husband piped up, “And since that day, I have been sworn to silence.  I don’t talk at all.”  Either the couples are too smart to go on the show, or they have rehearsed and refined the answers to the questions that could be problematic to their marital happiness once the show is over. And those are the questions that make the rest of us laugh.

We have heard a new question.  What is it that your wife likes to do out of the house?  Between the five of us, we have been making guesses about how others in our group would answer that question.  Dave says he like to fix things.  Greg says he likes to go to lectures. The answer given by most men about their wives is ... my wife likes to shop. 

This is not true in our cases.  “I don’t like to shop,” said Wyona.  “I shop because we have to have groceries, because someone else needs new clothes, because an appliance needs to be replaced.”  Here is my answer as to what I like to do out of the home she continued.  “I like to cruise.  And Greg, what do you mean by saying you like to go to lectures.  Where do you go to them all?  On cruises!  So give it up and just say it.  You like to cruise as well.

Well, way to open up my eyes, though I say to everyone, there is something about saying that phrase that makes me uncomfortable .  Wyona points out that years ago cruising was absolutely out of sight as something a person might do.  But now many people cruise.  “Not my friends,” I countered.  But that really isn’t true.  Still ... the word cruise can be softened by saying I like to travel, a phrase that means the same thing.

David says he likes to fix things.  He hasn’t been doing much of that on the boat.  He wakes early – and nothing really begins before 10 am, except breakfast. He does go to everything – participates in the ship OlympiX; today he went to a lecture on how the engine room runs, as well as the destination lecture on Port Klang.  As well he goes to the 9 am Bible Study Group – now a person really has to have read every possible thing to do in every hour of the day, to have found that group. 

Yup.  A good question for all of us to answer.  What is it we like to do outside of the home?  Not much question about what we like to do.

Arta