Day 4 - Sloshin'

Last night at 2 am the ship moved into a new time zone – GMT-9, which isn’t a widely used time zone. In fact it’s so not widely used that Fitbit doesn’t have a setting for it, which means that neither my watch nor Dave’s will display the correct time. We spent about half an hour this morning trying to fix it out without any success.

My day started with Tai Chi at 8. We’ve now learned 3 moves, a positively glacial pace that I am totally good with. Today I coined a new term – there’s something called a bow step, which is a controlled step diagonally forward, but as the ship is rolling the step is sometimes less controlled and larger than intended. I call this a boat step.

After Tai Chi there was time for breakfast, then I met up with Dave for Coffee with Dario, this time with the executive chef Lenin from India. He talked about the organization of the kitchen staff, ordering food, inspections, and how much food waste they are allowed on average per passenger. He is married with two college aged kids, and has been working on the cruise ships for 29 years. It made me wonder how that works, but of course you can’t ask that.

Dave headed off to the cooking demo, where he discovered that Dario is also a chef. I went to the ship scavenger hunt, which today involved solving (very simple) clues to locations on the ship and taking pictures of them. I paired up with Donna, who is on her first HAL cruise. We foud everything fairly quickly except for the art gallery, which doesn’t exist on this ship. I took her back to see the whiskey barrel and that may have cost us the win.

Then it was a short rest before Hula for me and Hawaiian history with Kainoa for Dave. We both enjoyed ourselves. Hula has gotten even more complicated, but we’ve completely learned to moves to Little Grass Shack and I hope we’re going to continue practicing them in class for at least one more session! Afterwards I picked up Dave and we went to Hawaiian brunch in the dining room with a much better group than yesterday.

I had time for a short ‘ukelele practice and some blogging before official the official papa (lesson). Our weather is mostly cloudy and about 72, so Dave decided to try to sit on the promenade deck and read – it’s been too cold previously. Ukelele class was awesome as usual; Pua our teacher has delusions of grandeur when it comes to our abilities. Apparently we are having a showcase before we get to Papeete where the ukelele and hula classes will both perform, including at least one song where they will perform together, which will be interesting because there’s considerable overlap and at this point a lack of ability. But we’ve only been playing and dancing for 3 days, so there is time for improvement. The picture's not very good, but you get a sense of the number of folks in the 'ukelele class.

After class I got bit by the time zone problem and thought I only had a short time to be in the pool. Fortunately I didn’t let that deter me and I ended up with over an hour of fantastic sloshing in the pool. At 4 there is Aloha hour when the Hawaiian ambassadors play and dance and sing by the pool, so I got to hear a little of that before I needed to go shower and change for dinner. Dave was able to stay longer since he wasn’t wet.

Dinner at table 1 was enjoyable as always. I was starving from all that time in the pool and had two appetizers and a delicious bowl of dos frijoles soup for dessert.

After dinner we went to the show, Wendy the Cellist again. For me the show ranged from mediocre to actively icky. Afterwards Dave went to listen to the Dam band and I went up to the Crows Nest to play tone deaf music trivia, where you need to guess the song title and artist from hearing the lyrics read aloud deadpan. It’s harder than I thought it would be given that I’m a lyrics listener. It was a good time. That’s all for tonight!

Cruise note: You can see below that although our heading continues to become more southerly, our position gets more north of the rhumb line.