World Cruise - Day 13 - Jan 25 - At Sea

Good morning, sunrise:

We saw some dolphins from our balcony this morning playing in the wake of the ship:

As I mentioned earlier, photographing dolphins is somewhat difficult.  You basically have to aim your camera in the general direction and then snap the pic when they come above the surface.  Here is a more close-up pic of the two dolphins in the photo above:

You can pretty clearly see the dolphin on the left, lesser so the dolphin on the right.  Anyway, we had fun watching them.  I have to remember not to try to get the perfect pic of the dolphins, otherwise I miss the general fun of their show.  So once I get a pic that is OK, I put the camera down and just enjoyed the scene.

Internet has been spotty the last two days, pretty much not available for a day and a half and only occasionally available during the past 12 hours.  So some of the daily blog entries are lagging by a day as I upload them if and when I have a live Internet connection.

Answering some of the recent blog comments:

Julie, we typically sit in the back of the Cabaret Lounge (where the performances take place) and they never make any announcements about not taking pics.  But I do take all of the pics without flash, which is why they aren’t always the best photos.  So I am zooming in with low light and often the performers are moving.  So I usually have to take 5 or 6 pics to get one that’s clear enough to use.  Because I’m sitting in the back, no one seems to mind.

Patti, the lens cover is still a problem and now it appears that there is a small piece of lint inside the camera on the sensor.  The lint is not visible on the photo unless I am zoomed in.  It’s possible (maybe even probable) that the lint got in the camera because I was using my finger to manually close the lens cover.  So I may just return the camera (it’s less than a month old) and have a new one sent to connect up with us while we are in Hawaii.

Sonia, the photographers onboard are not really setup with anything to do any camera repair.  Since the camera is so new, I will probably just send it back and get a new one.  That will likely be easier than locating a camera shop that is able to do immediate service.  And the guy playing the guitar by the pool (Ken) is quite the character.  He times his playing and singing in between the other things going on at the pool.  Unfortunately, he and his wife Joan get off in San Diego.

We did OK at trivia in the morning, but missed several and ended up in third place.  What is a costermonger?  A seller of fruit and/or vegetables (we put money changer).  What language is the root for the following words: caviar, kiosk and kaftan?  Turkish (we put Russian).  How many vowels in the Greek language?  7 (we put 5—here they are: alpha, epsilon, eta, iota, omicron, upsilon and omega).  Afternoon trivia was not our full team, since people were getting ready for formal night, so we didn’t do as well on that trivia.

Dan beat me in the ping pong finals today.  So another silver medal (I have three now).  Only one gold.  That’s really all I need, I just wanted some stuff to give out as prizes for the Cruise Critic Fantastic Fifty photos.  I entered two photos in the ship’s photo contest.  Actually, I entered one and Krissie entered one, since you can only enter one photo per passenger (he said it was fine to enter for your spouse).  I don’t think I’ll win, since most of the photographers onboard have DSLRs with high powered zoom lenses.  So the toucan pic I have that is grainy another passenger has as brilliant closeup.  That’s the tradeoff of having a pocket camera vs. a DSLR.

We’re out at sea along the Mexican coast, so we don’t often see other ships, but the container ship above passed by on our starboard side today.

By the pool today they were playing wooden horse racing.  Six wooden horses and they roll a die to determine which one moves forward.  If you look closely at the lady with horse #5 (second from the right), she is holding a pepper out in front of the horse, apparently to get him to go faster?

Tonight was the second formal night of the cruise.  There is a reception in the evening with the captain, who is pictured above with me and Krissie.  His name is John Foster and he’s from UK.  Most of the captains we have known in the past are Scandinavian, with many of those being Norwegian.  John is very funny and several people said that he should have his own comedy DVD for sale.  He was having fun talking about the road rage on the walking track between the “clockwise and anti-clockwise” so he made an executive decision that we are all going “anti-clockwise” (counterclockwise) from now on.

The evening show was “Motor City” with many of the Motown hits.  I typically crop the photo from the evening show, but left this one as is so that you can see the sight lines from the back of the Cabaret Lounge.  It is really more of a lounge than a theater, since it is all on one level, with no stadium seating.  I usually sit in back with Ken (in “Ken’s Korner”).  This is the second of the production shows of the trip, apparently there will be 8 different production shows throughout the world cruise.  The male lead singer is James and the female lead singer is Ketsia.  The dancers all do double duty on the cruise director staff, running the various activities throughout the day.  Krissie and I both like this being a smaller, more intimate ship, although the Captain announced that Princess is building two more ships (Royal Princess and one yet to be named, possibly Regal Princess) that are both megaships.  That seems to be the trend.  We just hope they stay with this one for awhile.

We won the evening trivia with David on Broadway shows.  Rosemary is great at Broadway and Arnold is great at music.  We won another lanyard.  It’s funny to have all these things we are collecting from winning at trivia and other games, not really sure what to do with them.