Thursday, April 10, 2014

Espresso, mmmh, mmmh, good!...

April 8, 2014
We have chosen to have a set dining time of 8:00pm (as opposed to choose-your-own-time or the early time of 5:30pm—excuse me, DINNER at 5:30? I could understand breakfast at 5:30 but DINNER??). Our tablemates are very nice—if very conservative—Republicans (or is that an oxymoron?). There is Anna (from the Netherlands) and Ray, each were married for 49 years, lost their spouses and have been together for about 8 years; she was a Dutch naval officer and he was an US Navy officer. John and Pat, he was an itinerant court reporter (traveled the world doing that!) and she was a nurse. Gerry and Guy, don’t know their background yet.

Randy spent five (5!) hours learning about Windows8 in the computer lab. Can’t believe he is so interested! I’ve even downloaded PhotoGallery and MovieMaker so he can practice! Evan, the “TechSpert” is very good, I have gone to several of his classes and he has helped me a lot with Windows8. And Randy wants me to upgrade his computer at home to Win8 and get him a touch-screen monitor. OMG, RANDY (!?) wants Win8??? Be still, my heart!

We are spending our days wandering from class to class (I am, right now, in a class in the Wajang Theater on Italian cooking [hasn’t started yet, hence I am able to write my blog] and then we go to a “TechSpert” computer class—don’t you just love the jargon?) or enjoying our cabin. Especially since they fixed our espresso machine! What a tough life, lounging on the sofa, sipping an espresso.

We go to the Crow’s Nest every night to have a martini (or two—what the heck, neither of us is driving anywhere!) Our favorite bartender is Ryan (what a surprise!) who will be working at the Crow’s Nest for the entire cruise. Holland America has a different philosophy than Princess, Princess moves bartenders every two weeks. So on our World Cruise we had to train a new one on martini making every two weeks!

We are storing up our energy for these seven days because we will be having 15 port days out of 19 and 11 port days in a row. I know you all feel much sympathy for us in the trying days ahead and we (ahem) thank you for your concern. I am, however, really, really looking forward to Spain and Portugal. Of all the ports we are visiting I think we’ve only been to two (Barcelona and Lisbon) before. Don’t know what they will think of our Arizona-Spanish, but I’m at least going to try to speak a little Spanish.

This lunchtime we have an invitation-only lunch for suite guests, probably with the ship’s officers and tonight we have dinner with the Captain. Everything seems to happen at once but then since we have all the above-mentioned port days I guess they have to cram everything in almost together.

Photos are going to have to wait; I tried for 10 minutes to upload ONE photo (small) and couldn't do it!

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