Day 21 - Friday, 11/29/24 - At Sea to Piraeus

 Today. In the last day of the first half of our voyage.  It's also the first sea day after 7 straight port days, which tend to get tiring.  After breakfast and our interdenominational devotional, we attended Nick's coffee chat with Florin, our Hotel General Manager.  We've sailed with Fortin many times including last year on the Grand South America.  He's our favorite person in this role.  Besides answering the typical questions about his role onboard, he spoke extensively about the recent dry dock and showed a number of pictures.  We also learned a number of interesting things that happened during the dry dock.  

First, 100+ containers for the dry dock got offloaded in Europe because the shipping company did not want to sail to America and face having the ship unable to unload due to a projected east coastdock workers strike.  So HAL had to get them loaded them on another ship and they arrived one week after the dry dock started.  Secondly, we learned that most of the dry dock workers were flown in from various European countries.  They apparently had specialized skills in ship repairs.  As had been noted by previous coffee chat guests, a lot of steel work was replaced.  Over 1,000 workers were housed on the ship and because the LIDO was completely taken apart, the Main Dining Room was used with the crew using the upper floor and the contractors the lower floor.  He also gave thanks to Samantha who worked all night the night before we guests boarded to restock the new library.  He made mention that the reason the Dive In was not open the first two days of the cruise because a contractor cut the power feed to use it for a spa need.  

He also noted that he was also super proud of his son who is now a 1st officer flying jets for Skywest after quitting his job on HAL following his dad's footsteps.  He concluded noting that he thought it would be good for Seattle staff to sail on the first cruise after a major dry dock and see what it's like.  It's really not a great idea to do a major dry dock and immediately head out on a 42 day cruise.

Florin is getting off in Piraeus to go on a short vacation before joining the pole to pole cruise in January.

After the coffee chat Debbie gave a brief shore excursions presentation about our remaining ports of call.  Afterwards, I went down to the deck 3 atrium to turn in our passports for the inspection of them by Egyptian authorities when we dock in Piraeus tomorrow.  This will save much time when we arrive in Alexandria in a couple of days.  Nick then gave another port talk covering our stop in Tunisia.  

Following lunch, Michael Sullivan gave his final talk on Golden Age to Gig Age" which was really good once again.  A new speaker, Howard Krug, gave his first lecture on a HAL ship and his topic was pyramids (It's not your Mummy's Tomb).  It was interesting to see examples of pyramids from all over the world and at various time periods.  His major point was that contrary to reports on the History channel, aliens didn't assist in building the pyramids.  We then went to our customary spot in the Crow's Nest where I wrote and caught up on YouTube videos.  We decided to watch the movie at 6pm, A Trip to Greece, and eat dinner afterwards and then take in the juggler's show at 9.  About twenty minutes into the movie, I gave up  on the movie as it was so boring and not engaging.  So I ate a light dinner and went to the 7:30pm juggler's show which was very good.  As it turned out, Angela showed up as well after bailing from watching the show.  Jaz Danion's final balancing act was some palm fronds with a feather as the key item At the end, when he removed the feather, the balanced fronds totally fell apart crashing to the floor.  It was impressive.

We ended our evening catching up with the latest episode of The Curse of Oak Island on Angela's tablet in our stateroom.  We were in bed early as we have a very early shore excursion tomorrow. I should note that the seas were very calm all day without much motion to the ocean.