Day 26 - Wednesday, 12/04/24 - At sea to Malta

 After a couple of intense port days in Cairo, Egypt, it was really refreshing to have a sea day to recuperate. Like most sea days we're up fairly early to get some breakfast before the 8am inter-denominational devotional time. This was followed by a coffee chat with the HR manager. However, it conflicted with a major lecture by Ida Kolte on Rome versus Carthage, which was an interesting lecture on the conflict between the two powers of the day. It was essentially a summary of the of the battle between Hannibal and Rome, which he took the 38 elephants over the Alps and all but one of them eventually died because of the cold weather. And on top of that Hannibal lost in Rome.

Because this is such a relatively long cruise, the safety at sea regulations require that the muster drill be done once again. So we had to visit our muster stations and then watch the safety video once more. Watching the safety video re-enables the television to be used for other viewing purposes. Then at 11 AM Nick gave another report profiles talk this time on Gibraltar. Gibraltar is a fun port to visit. We've been there a couple times. The macaque monkeys which number about 300 are fun to watch, but you have to be really careful because they are masters at thievery. After lunch, Howard Kruze presented another of his lectures. This time it was Days and Knights of Malta, which was an interesting presentation about historical issues related to the island of Malta.  Watching and listening to the presentation gave me a better understanding of the strategic and historical significance of Malta because of its position in the Mediterranean Sea.

Captain Paul Adams then presented a voyage overview presentation with lots of slides and what was particularly interesting was that he had slides of the docking maneuvers and undoing maneuvers and it was very interesting to see that in an animated format. He also gave all sorts of statistics about the voyage, and and he also indicated that he might do another updated version of this towards the end of the voyage on one of the sea days. This type of presentation for me was much more informative and valuable than the typical "ask the captain" presentation. In fact, I would say it's the best presentation by a captain that I've ever seen on any ship.

For the rest of the afternoon, I spent the time in our stateroom polishing up my blog postings for the three previous days. For the last week, I've been experimenting using the dictation method found in Google Keep to dictate my blog entry. The downside to this method is that it takes a bit of editing to clean up the grammar and spelling issues. The upside is that it's much faster to capture my thoughts, and I probably write more words via dictation than if I'm pecking them out on the little keyboard at the bottom of the phone screen or on my Bluetooth portable keyboard.

Tonight was dressy night and we changed into dressy clothes, but as is our custom, we ate in the Lido where we were joined by our friend, Pam. After dinner, lecturer Howard Krug happened to stop by our table and so we chatted with him a great deal about his background and  history and it was interesting to get to know him a bit more. On my way down to the theater in the Lido pool area I encountered Richard who was an entertainer on the grand South America cruise. He's married to Ida Kolte who is the history presenter on this leg of the cruise. They have their little four year old daughter with them on the cruise. He'll also be lecturing a little later on in the cruise about  events surrounding the Atlantic Ocean area and in the crossing to Fort Lauderdale.

The entertainment tonight was another performance of the Rumba Kings from Seville. Once again, they were wonderful entertainers and their set lasted over 50 minutes, which is about five minutes longer than the typical sets. Afterwards, Angela adjourned to the room to rest up and I ended up in the atrium by the Christmas display doing the dictation for this blog entry. A couple then approached me and asked me to take their pictures and I obliged. It turned out they have a son that lives in Des Moines, which is right next to the town of Burien that we live in Washington state.

Tomorrow we're not scheduled to reach Malta until 4 PM so it's like another sea day and so we'll have our normal round of lectures and events. The sail in is to projected to be quite pretty; and weather permitting, the bow will be opened for viewing. I would add in conclusion that the ship is slowly being transformed into a Christmas wonderland with Christmas trees and decorations being on display throughout the ship. In the atrium, the trains are set up with a couple Christmas trees and there's a whole table full of other ornaments and figurines to be displayed and those will probably be put out tonight. They tend to do that decorating at night.