Two Days at Sea (April 8, 2016 & April 9, 2016)

Reading Length: Afternoon Cuppa Tea

Kristin Reporting!

April 8th:

We found out that our ship’s captain changed yesterday in Phuket, Thailand! When the 12 ‘o’ clock Captain’s report came over the loudspeaker we were shocked to hear it begin with: “Ching, ching!  Ching, ching!  Ching, ching!  Ching, ching!” Were we back on the Pacific Princess?

The new captain is named Captain Hashmi. D joked that maybe they always change the captain to a middle eastern captain when a ship is headed to the middle east in order to facilitate relations with those countries!

The captain gave his noon navigational report and then he said, “I like to end my noon reports with a seafaring expression...” Yay! I felt a Jona dance coming on! The expressions were back! This was one of the things we loved about the Pacific Princess but the Italian Captain was very hard to understand through his thick accent.

Today was a typical sea day for me– I spent it on the computer.

Bill work, work work, and blog work!

Yum, yum, yum!

We went to the comedy show tonight. The comedian we went to was okay. Some of his stuff was not funny, and some of it was not. We noticed that comedians seem to be very popular though because even the 10:30pm show was pretty packed! The comedian was Mike Doyle, and the best thing about him was he had an amazing singing voice. But, he only opened and closed with a song.

It is time for me to go to bed. It is 12:07AM.

April 9th:

Today I went to the 10AM craft class and made an origami kimono and learned how to put on a saree.

The point of the Saree lesson was to try to convince us to buy a Saree in India to wear to the ship’s upcoming ball. I thought the Saree looked like a very comfortable and stylish outfit. However, I'll look to buy one online when I get home because they are 7 meters of cloth! That folds pretty compact but I know D will not want to have the added bulkiness to carry around, and he would be right because we have very little space as it is. I don't know how we will even fit in the knick-knacks we have collected so far!

In the afternoon we had to attend an immigration inspection for India. We collected our passports at the door and entered the room. There were 9 officials, and 3 of them served 1 person at a time! I was directed to one set of three men.

I handed my passport and shore permission papers to the official in the middle. He read a number off of the shore excursion paper, "4167". The man to his left consulted a list of names, and said, "4166". The man on the far right said, "4166" and crossed out the number 4167 and changed it to 4166. The center man then passed him the passport and the man on the far right stamped the two pieces of paper and my passport. Actually he slammed the stamp on the ink and slammed the stamp on the pages. If a stamp was a weapon, you wouldn't want to mess with that guy! Then the papers went back to the guy in the middle, and were handed back to me. Why 3 people were necessary to do this job which is usually performed by one person in most countries, I had no clue.

I then waited 3 minutes outside before D showed up. I asked him what the heck took so long, and he said, "I have no idea." We started the process at the same time, and both had 3 people involved. Weird! D then told me that he thinks that in India they make-up jobs in order to employ their massive populace! He followed that up by making a general comment that “India is in big trouble.”

[Davin Interjection: Actually, the reason I was held up was because the couple in front of me only had a one entry visa, and the customs clerks were arguing about whether that was acceptable or not.  Technically both of our next ports were in India, but at the same time, we had to go around the outside of Sri Lanka between them. 
   
Honestly, the whole thing was the most ridiculous thing ever!  I wonder if the customs department didn’t just inflate the number of people needed for this job in order to bum a few extra cruises.  More power to them, I guess, but it was still ridiculous!]

Then we had some lunch. The beef stew was actually decent.

I read some news articles and I am severely behind in reading the daily news handout. I cut out some of the quirkier things to mail to Scott. Then I uploaded to the blog-- the satellite internet connection was not good enough last night, and sent off many emails.

We went to the gym but the weights were all in use and with only 30 minutes til the gym closed we were forced to skip today. We will go early in the future.

So, we went into the jacuzzi– it was crappy but nice.

Now I'm watching some Babylon 5 and will work a little on the blog and then go to bed.

We are now 11.5 hours apart from San Diego time. This means that when I get the chance to text Scott, we don’t overlap for very long before one of us goes to bed. However, this is a blessing in disguise because my right hand is totally messed up and despite that I’d be tempted to text Scott for as long as I can!

The current state of our 'Pantry'