Happy Chinese New Year to you all!
Well, here we are celebrating Chinese Lunar New Year, the year of the horse we believe. May this day bring good luck to everyone we know either in person or on Cruise Critic.
The day was full of fun activities and lectures. One talk involved the legacy of Captain Cook delivered by Howard Krug, and Pan Am's Pacific Clipper by Willie Aames. The afternoon time slot went to Ruth Sinai who spoke about deep sea and deep space explorers. We hope to catch these talks on our TV. Speaking of which, the TV reception was totally interrupted all day. We must be between satellite feeds because it was affecting all of the ship's TV's. We will have to be patient until the reception gets better, which might not be until we are closer to French Polynesia.
One of us finished the report on yesterday's exploits, while the other took his usual deck walk. We went up to the Seaview Pool and sat at the side railing catching a breeze. It was mostly sunny and comfortably warm with temps in the high 70's. That can be deceiving since you do not realize how burned one can get if not being careful. The deck fellows have been very good about bringing ice tea or water to us. Ramon is one of the guys back there and he is most friendly. When he is not there, Salvadore takes care that we are not getting dehydrated.
The Captain came on with his daily greeting of "Jolly good afternoon to everyone". He said we had 710 nautical miles to reach Pitcairn Island on February 18th. It will be a short stop where we drop anchor and let the locals come onboard from 8am to noontime.
One of us had a haircut at 4pm, and the "barber" Luchel did a fine job. He will go back to her for the next haircut. Rene the manager is still here, but we do not see her as often as we used to. But then we only pass through the Lido (where most of the staff eats lunch) about once a day. Then we usually order from room service and keep it light.
The entrance to the dining room was decorated nicely for Chinese New Year. We remember when the entire dining room on both levels were decorated. We also recall how many guests and even some of the staff collected the lanterns and other decorations and took them to their rooms. The most decorations are the colored napkins at each place setting and a different type of printed menu. Tonight we had one Caesar salad, a small plate of baby pork ribs, a bowl of beef soup with ramen noodles, and mains of General Tsao chicken. All of it was very good especially the chicken. We added one small slice of chocolate layer cake and a few slices of pineapple.
After dinner, we rode the elevator with a very attractive lady who obviously was not a passenger. It turned out she was the instrumentalist Irina Guskova, who was about to start her second show of the evening in the World Stage. Too bad we missed it.
The clocks went back one more hour this evening. Now we are one hour off of Pacific time. This too will take its toll by the end of the week. Too many changes too fast.
Bill & Mary Ann
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