Day Six – See the Sea

Sorry to keep everyone waiting today. For whatever reason, didn’t feel much like blogging today.

It was slightly saddening to be awoken by sunlight – it means we’re heading home. It’s been difficult to keep the Dr. Seuss philosophy – don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened. Besides, I still have a bit of time left. I spent most of yesterday morning writing the blog post – 2,500 word posts do, indeed take a while. I did try to be a bit more out-of-my-cabin, which had mixed results. I attended the Q&A with the hotel manager and head chef, who answered a number of interesting questions. They pack 54,000 eggs and 50,000 bottles of beer on this boat; the song “50,000 bottles of beer on the wall” would take a while to complete. The hotel manager definitely had a sense of humor, and was the most talkative of the bunch. They discussed things like plumbing, recycling, and the fact that excess food that can’t be served becomes fish food…the chef joked that the fish weren’t happy because we were well below the normal amount of wasted food on a cruise. They showed the laundry room; there were three dryers in the image whose loading doors were nearly as large as the people operating them…unsurprising if you’re drying an average of 6,000 sheets a day.

I tried three different times to get to the rope course, however all the teens ended up over there; I would’ve been on line for over an hour. I’m uncertain whether it would’ve been worth it. Lunch was light, but something notable I must try to make myself are grilled tomatoes. dressed with a little pesto sauce and a bit of salt, they were impressively delicious, and were definitely a standout. I ran into Chip the Magician near an elevator; he does indeed bear a resemblance to Peter Capaldi, though he had no idea who I was talking about…I then had to briefly explain Doctor Who to him. Even though he explicitly said if we ran into him to stop him and ask him to do a coin trick, I was rather principally opposed to that…however, a young girl and her family did go up to him and asked him; I watched from a distance, as it was just as wonderful to see the wonder on the girl’s face, rather than the cynicism and attempt to figure the trick out if I were the one participating in the trick.

In the evening, I went to the pub for dinner, if only because it was close to the area where they did the ‘battle of the sexes game’, in which I managed to participate. It was amusing in that the person picked before me was nearly three times my body mass, and over a full foot taller than me. He was a teddy bear, but the apparent difference between our statures was lost on no one. The much greater overall amount of physical diversity on the men’s team would turn out to be incredibly difficult, given the list of tasks – move lemons between necks without using hands, two golf balls with a foot-long rope attaching them needed to be relayed from between the knees of one team member to the next, and putting on and taking off a t-shirt in succession was a much harder set of tasks to do with tall and short people, there was a clear physcal advantage that the ladies had, given that their heights and body shapes were all much more similar. Of course, the scoring was such that the last event was worth more than the earlier ones, which lead to the conundrum of games of this nature – if all games are the same, the game ends whenever one team has the majority score, so it very clearly could end early. If the scores are weighted to favor the end events, the earlier ones don’t matter. Moreover, being a judge in these games makes it a matter of determining when ‘close enough’ really is ‘close enough’, and trying to avoid being pedantic while also preventing an ‘anything goes’ free for all. The last event was “the singing bee”, where one team sung a song, and the last word needed to be the first word of the song sung by the opposing team, the last word of which would need to be responded to, and so on until one side froze, and was unable to respond. It’s amazing how many song lyrics I know, and how difficult it can be to come up with those song lyrics on the spot…although I did manage to help the team with my rousing rendition of “we will rock you” – my singing was as amazing as you’d expect, but I did have the crowd doing the whole “stomp stomp clap” routine. By the skin of our teeth and a dozen technicalities, the men managed to win. It was a good time. I won a branded pen and beer cozy.

I was planning on hitting up the club for the night, to see if I could meet up with Jon and Lauren, but I decided to nap for an hour, and when the alarm went off to head out, I lost all ability to leave my perfect comfy bed. Sleep tonight, party tomorrow.