Friday, 11 May 2012

8/5 Malta, no lotto and Alexander the Great


Tuesday 8 - $70m Lotto jackpot and Malta.

One of the things we amused ourselves with over dinner, apart from tantalising Omar, was speculating how we will allocate the jackpot tonight. We are being quite reasonable and don’t mind if there are a few winners. That should be 11am our time today. We cruised into port during the stretch class. J stayed on for the body sculpting and I burned calories on the cross trainers. We had brekky at the rear, looking out across the harbour and the cliffs with the town of Valetta on top. You will recall we came here in November (come on . . concentrate). Tomorrow we are at sea but next time in port we should go out the back and take brekky in the open air if it is shady as it is today. We are just sunning on the balcony and getting ready for the 10am trivia. We don’t have much to do ashore and will only go in after lunch. We got Coke Zero yesterday to go with the $5 scotch we brought on board from Civitavecchia.

We passed the morning in the Sky lounge and won 3 trivia sessions. A spare American lady turned up and combined well with our knowledge set. It turns out she is an orthopaedic surgeon married to another one with children who are all specialists too. We took lunch out on the terrace I mentioned above – wonderful out there with warm still air and NO FLIES! It didn’t hurt to have the white cliffs and old buildings of Malta in the background. There were very few passengers around and the terrace was mainly populated by officers. A lot of Sethefricans.

We went ashore but only as far as the wharf for internet access. Horror – 3 other lucky undeserving Bastards each won $24m of our jackpot payout. Never mind – there is still $20m on Saturday. There is a steep climb up to the town and it was better to spend the time in the gym so we went back. Just in time to pair with a nice American couple to win the big afternoon trivia. This was our 5th win of the day (although in truth 2 were unopposed). Yes I know we said we weren’t going to sit in trivia sessions all day long but most of these were 45 minutes apart and we were chatting with people in between.

J did Abs and I rode the crosstrainers until time for dinner. We turned up at 6.15 sharp and asked if we could eat in a hurry. 30 minutes later we were out having sunk 3 courses -  a seafood risotto, hake cooked and served in a paper package and osso bucco respectively, and to finish we were positively delighted to have the opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with our alltime favourite from Cunard – the Marquesa (a great chunk of chewy/creamy chocolate ganache).  No sign of Omar tonight.

The Irish comic worked hard but was pretty dull, we went to the nightclub for the Bee Gees hour and then took a breather before the a capella group and the talk on Alexander the Great. Interesting but not inspiring.

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