Not Packing Today - Forward Art Tour

Ninety-five percent of our fellow passengers have to pack today because they are getting off the ship tomorrow. We are fortunate that we get to stay on!

Cruise cards # 5 and 6:

My cruise card didn't work in the machine that prints out a copy of your bill. Passenger services fixed it. (Ken's card worked.) At night my card did not work in the door to our room. Passenger services gave me a new card.

To take advantage of a quiet sea day, we took a self- guided art tour of the forward part of the ship.The ship supposeddly has over $1 million worth of art. I m talking about the ship's permanent art collection, not the art auction schlock.  The art auctions are (apparently, and to my continuing surprise) a profit center for the ship. That is another ball of wax entirely.

The art that we saw today is mostly located in the stairwells. This means it is fairly hard to photograph, due to lighting issues and bad camera angles. But we did our best and snapped photos of a few of our favorites. Today we viewed the art in the forward stairwells, plus some in the Piazza.

Artist Unknown

Terraza by Didier Lourenco of Spain. We have seen his work on other ships - we always like what he does.

California #99 & 126, by Morris, USA. This was one of a set of three - not sure if it is 99 or 126, or if that is the name of the set.

Adrift, by Gugielmo Di Mauro of Italy

My favorite, in the Piazza - Untitled, by Don Li-Leger of Canada

The book club met to discuss The Fault in Our Stars. It was a small group but we had a nice discussion. I suggested that they not choose books from the Young Adult genre.

The water got rougher as the day went by. Eight to ten foot swells:

In the evening we saw a second show by Steve Moris. He is very polished as both a comedian and a musician. His timing and delivery of jokes is perfect. It is easy to see why he has been selected as a Princess Cruises Entertainer of the Year.

The final show (on every cruise) is the International Crew Show. It starts out with the distribution of balloons (lots and lots) to the audience. People start blowing them up and batting them around. This is when you see 70-year-olds acting like 5-year-olds and having a lot of fun. What a brilliant way to get the audience warmed up. Then four guys from the cruise director's staff come out and lead the audience in YMCA. If the show had stopped here, it would have been a good time, but the best was coming up. One by one some very talented crew members came out and performed. Mostly it was singing, but some of them accompanied themselves on an instrument. The best was a man from the Philippines who sang a song that he composed and played along on the guitar. With a little professional voice coaching I think he would have a commercial hit.

There is an unwritten rule about eating in the main dining room: Don't talk about politics or religion. Most people figure this out intuitively. We shared a table with three couples from Northern California. They spent the first 10 minutes talking about getting their propane tanks filled up. Then they switched to the topic of water and the "known fact" that people in LA wasted water and took 15-minute showers, while people where they lived only took 2 or 3-minute showers and how much they resented people in LA and didn't want to have to share "their" water. (Although they did ask us to build a pipeline down to California so they could have some of Alaska's water.) 

After they had exhausted these topics (actually, long after) they spontaneously launched into a tirade which made it clear that we did not share their political affiliation. (Have you ever had an experience where you are talking to someone who assumes that because you are white you share their prejudices and so they start saying bigoted things as though you are part of the old boys' club? I have - more than once - and this was that kind of experience.) After they declared that they didn't know who voted for "him" it was time for us to leave, and we did - before the main course had been served. It was either leave or get into a very uncomfortable confrontation. Since it was the last night of the cruise we didn't have to worry about running into them again. The maite d' was very helpful and found us a new table far away.

Thank you for putting up with my venting. I find it really helps to write it down. It's much easier to let go of it after putting it out there into the blogosphere. Living in a "community" is quite a different experience from living at home.

Time to lighten up . . .

Seen on a t-shirt: "I don't need Google - my wife knows everything."

Seen on another t-shirt: [It was unprintable and offensive.] The wearer had a physical age of 60+ but a mental age of 15. What is with people? Oh, that's not lightening up, is it?