9/5 All at sea at last

Wednesday 9^th – At sea

At last a sea day! We lost an hour overnight and missed  the morning gym sessions. Brekky on the back terrace was very pleasant. J scurried off to Zumba while I toiled with laundry (how I suffer - and J never mentions in here how often she does it!!!!  grrr). We are heading pretty much due East and I would have expected some sun on our balcony but it is pretty much dead overhead.

Morning trivia was interesting. We tied with 3 other teams, thanks to changing a correct answer. A very strange question – which event in 1881 has been the subject of 30 movies? J suggested the shootout at the OK Corral and I said . . oooh what about Custers Last Stand so we changed to that. Wrong! (J was correct - it was the OK corral) The tiebreaks consisted of US sports questions but luckily nobody got them. A spectator popped up and told us who took the Green Bay Packers to a championship (he lives there) and that kept us into the 3^rd round. Alas, we didn’t know how Rocky Marciano died (plane crash).

The quiz was greatly delayed by endless announcements from the bridge, the cruise director and various translations thereof. So it was straight up to the pool for 70s music quiz. We had one American lady with us and won that by several points in the face of quite a lot of competition. There is a young couple who keep saying they want to share with us and I made a point of inviting them but they had other commitments.

We had a leisurely lunch on the terrace, during which the most amazing craft passed us in the opposite direction. Sadly we didn’t have a camera but it looked like a large white plastic submarine? Similar to the daily cumulative quiz on the Epic, there is a cumulative trivia – we only have 2 sea days but this will be the definitive trivia contest for the trip. We went up and met the American lady from this morning, recruited another passing American couple and caught a loose Israeli at the last minute to make 6. J had the pen and did a brilliant job of involving people and allowing time to think but still getting an answer down. The bottom line was that we got 13/15 which will be very competitive at the half way mark.

Greece is going to be interesting – the new French President is talking of scrapping austerity and going back to big spending and the Greeks are obviously keen to avoid further painful savings and dump their commitment to the recovery package. Europe could well be falling apart before our eyes and Greece would not be the best place to watch it from but we are going to be here for the next week. (J doesn't really care)

J is currently doing Zumba again after we sat out next to the pool listening to a capella. There is no doubt they are very good but there is also a limit to how much of it you need in your entertainment and musical diet.

Its really a pity about the $70m – we could easily do a lot more of this. We met a retired professor yesterday who is contracted to Princess to deliver lectures on their boats. Wow . . . getting free cruises AND getting paid to deliver three 45 minute talks a week. You would think he is happy with that? Nope . . he doesn’t like having to walk 200m for a sandwich. The fact is he could have one delivered free but what is his problem?

We hit the gym again before dinner, where we found that Mr & Mrs Omar had changed seats! This took the contest to a new level. In a moment, we decided to go back to our original seats, which left J sitting next to him again. We both chose the same dishes – a crabcake that featured chipotle sauce and soccatash, although which was which I could not say; followed by a mixed seafood dish. Inter-table discourse began at about this stage and we were soon enjoying a lengthy review of the Omar European vacation, including repeated references to Omar’s  appreciation for sex museums, which help him stay up to date with new tricks. Great.

The evening entertainment program failed to excite us and we opted for some cabin time.