Day at Sea
Since we had the day "off," we slept late before grabbing breakfast in the cafe and going to Fiona's presentation on Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tallinn. Greg checked out a demo/cook-off among some of the ship's chefs, which included a sugar pulling demonstration by one of the pastry chefs. Most notable were the various factoids thrown about: only 5% of the food prepared on the ship is wasted (astounding, given what even we left on our plates), and the food storage in the hold of the ship has four forklifts for moving things around.
We did the daily crossword, then went to lunch in the main dining room where we were seated at a table for 12. Our tablemates were a couple from Colorado, a mother and two teenage daughters from Georgia, and a fascinating older couple from the San Francisco area. We could have talked to that couple all day, even before we discovered that the husband was an applied mathematician who had worked with pioneering nuclear projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1950s.. He mentioned their first computer, the Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine, ORACLE, and I asked that most important question, "How big was it?" Eventually his wife pointed out that usually "And what do you do?" "I'm a mathematician" is the end of the conversation. We were among the last in the dining room when we finally left.
After lunch, we went to a history class called "Highway of the Vikings," which I noted in my little journal as "short & kind of odd." Despite its brevity, it began with the ice age and worked forward; my notes include a sketch of a game board, and a traditional toast: leave no ale in the horn. Later, we snuck in partway through a Polish language class in one of the bars, where Renata, a really interesting Lithuanian crewmember, taught us colors, numbers, basic phrases, and the vital "how much does this cost" and "where is the bathroom."
We walked around the jogging track until we were just too cold, then climbed even higher to deck 12, found a pair of blankets on some deck chairs, and sat there until we got too cold; we sat on our veranda where the wind was a little less pronounced, and worked on thank you notes.
We had heard good things about an a cappella group onboard, so we sought them out at a diamond collection unveiling in the Emporium after dinner. Allegedly they had only been working together for six months (I never did find out whether they got the gig as a group or individually), but they were quite good. I was amused to find that in this case, the big guy was the bass; people always assume that it is, and I'd have to say this was the first time I ever knew that to be true. After their brief set, we returned to the room for more thank you notes, three kinds of CSI on TV, and sodas we'd been carrying around since Harrod's.
Pedometer count: 9,003
We did the daily crossword, then went to lunch in the main dining room where we were seated at a table for 12. Our tablemates were a couple from Colorado, a mother and two teenage daughters from Georgia, and a fascinating older couple from the San Francisco area. We could have talked to that couple all day, even before we discovered that the husband was an applied mathematician who had worked with pioneering nuclear projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1950s.. He mentioned their first computer, the Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine, ORACLE, and I asked that most important question, "How big was it?" Eventually his wife pointed out that usually "And what do you do?" "I'm a mathematician" is the end of the conversation. We were among the last in the dining room when we finally left.
After lunch, we went to a history class called "Highway of the Vikings," which I noted in my little journal as "short & kind of odd." Despite its brevity, it began with the ice age and worked forward; my notes include a sketch of a game board, and a traditional toast: leave no ale in the horn. Later, we snuck in partway through a Polish language class in one of the bars, where Renata, a really interesting Lithuanian crewmember, taught us colors, numbers, basic phrases, and the vital "how much does this cost" and "where is the bathroom."
We walked around the jogging track until we were just too cold, then climbed even higher to deck 12, found a pair of blankets on some deck chairs, and sat there until we got too cold; we sat on our veranda where the wind was a little less pronounced, and worked on thank you notes.
We had heard good things about an a cappella group onboard, so we sought them out at a diamond collection unveiling in the Emporium after dinner. Allegedly they had only been working together for six months (I never did find out whether they got the gig as a group or individually), but they were quite good. I was amused to find that in this case, the big guy was the bass; people always assume that it is, and I'd have to say this was the first time I ever knew that to be true. After their brief set, we returned to the room for more thank you notes, three kinds of CSI on TV, and sodas we'd been carrying around since Harrod's.
Pedometer count: 9,003
Labels: honeymoon
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