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Saturday 4 November 2017

Saturday 4th November - Mixed Cultures and Green Lights

There’s not really a lot to say about sea days.  Peter did his classes.  People think he’s brilliant.   All the usual.  So I thought I’d write a few notes about the passengers.

First of all, the surprise is the number of passengers under 40.  There are loads of them! It’s nice to see the younger and different attitude and styles to” formal night, they bring a breath of fresh air to the evening.

There are loads of different nationalities on board too.   Although most of the cruise passengers are British, there are a substantial number of Germans, Dutch and Australians about.  There are enough German and Dutch Passengers to warrant all the announcements to be repeated in their languages.  We also have a group of 30 Malaysians on board.  They are bubbly and noisy and friendly and chatty and seem to take over the Bistro when they are in.  Really nice people, although there are a couple of cultural differences we’ve noticed, such as eating grilled tomato and porridge together at breakfast time, or constantly filling large flasks with hot water – we assume to make tea their way.   The crew seem to be from across the globe: eastern European, Indian/Pakistani, English, German, Asian......  A real mixed bag.

Some passengers walk around in socks – which seems a bit odd to us.  Everywhere inside is carpeted, but it is all public areas, just like any hotel.   There’s also the guy that goes everywhere with a grubby looking puppet on his hand.  It looks like a cow with an eye patch or something.  Each to his own I suppose. 

A couple of other interesting things about this multicultural society we have here on board.  We discovered from the Dutch Host that there is no word for sea spray in Dutch, he made one up in honour of Peter’s Art Class .  We also like the fact that our cabin steward is from Myanmar and his name is Naw Wai.  Yep!  It’s pronounced Nor Way.  We ain’t gonna forget his name in a hurry.

We watched the 2nd guest act in the show lounge last night.  His name is Bruce Thompson, and we really enjoyed the show.  We’ve seen his act before, but it didn’t matter, we were still laughing out loud.  Really funny.

And the final thing that I have to mention about today’s sea day: WE SAW THE LIGHTS!  Yep, a short burst of the elusive Northern Lights graced the front of the ship a little after 10pm.  Not only did we see them, but we even got a couple of photographs.   It wasn’t the best showing, but we are hopeful for more when we get to Alta tomorrow.
We don’t have any tour escorting duties at Alta, so a lie in will be the first indulgence, and then we plan a little bit of a walk out to a nearby hill.   Whether or not we get to the top will be tomorrows question.  Alta here we come. 

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