Musing on cruising…

Why isn't it Muising on Cruising? But I digress.

By this many months before our last—uh, make that most recent—cruise, in 2012, I had already organized a couple of tours and the rollcall on cruisecritic.com had about 400 messages. This roll call cruisecritic.com (you’ll have to become/be a member, but it’s free and I’ve never gotten any junk from them) only has about 75 messages so far and we’re about four and a half months out!

Nonetheless, I’m excited about this cruise. But then, cruises are what we get excited about! All those new cities and experiences and we only have to pack and unpack once per cruise. Heaven! And we are waited on hand and foot.

Aside: (friends know that I am easily distracted and almost infinitely curious, hence, I often have several asides in my blogs) Where does the expression “wait on hand and foot” come from? I’m still a bit of a Luddite in that my first thought is to go to some of my books (yes, I still have reference books), such as Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable but neither of them seems to care a whit about being waited on hand and foot so I had to go online. The best of the websites seems to be the StackExchange which explains it thusly: “So far from my research, this seems to be the basic idea; that a person being "waited on hand and foot" has handmaids and footmen (or their equivalents) to perform any manual labor the person would otherwise have to do on their own.

The term may have different but related origins; it could be related to a similar term viewed from the other side, that a person is at someone else's "beck and call", responding immediately to any gesture by the person being served. An extremely attentive servant or corps of same could respond not only to obvious hand gestures, but by more subtle movements of the feet.

Lastly, it's perfectly valid to think of it in the more modern sense of being pampered physically. To "wait on" someone or something is to be immediately available to answer any need. The term may thus have originally been "to wait on someone's hand and foot", thus meaning to have no other duty but to address any need of that hand and/or foot, be it heat, cold, an itch, or in more general terms responding to its every move including as a gesture having meaning. Over time the possessive may have been discarded.”

So, cruising allows us to just enjoy and not have to worry about laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning up after a party, or much of anything except getting to the next activity. So decadent. And yet there actually are people (gasp!) who think cruising is supremely boring. I might agree with them during our first seven days on the ocean cruise when we spent the time merely (!) crossing the Atlantic. Seven days with nothing to do but

·      get a suntan by the pool (well, it IS the North Atlantic, we probably won’t be spending a lot of time by the pool)

·      play bridge (there will be a bridge teacher on board and there will be much time devoted to bridge)

·      go to cooking classes (there is a dedicated kitchen on board just for cooking lessons)

·      party (we’ll be in a suite; see above on cleaning up!)

·      look at the art on board (Holland America has world-class art on board each of their ships and some ships have $2,000,000 worth of said art; they even have a curator who gives tours)

·      gamble (well, we don’t gamble so that probably won’t be on our short list of stuff to do)

·      watch movies (there is a large movie theater on board)

·      laugh, sing-along, and enjoy the various performers that perform every night on board

·      learn to knit, crochet, use Photoshop, draw, paint, etc. (most classes are free)

We won’t be bored, I can assure you. And within one day Randy will have trained the bartenders on how to make the perfect martini (stirred, not shaken [sorry, James Bond] and with just a whisper of vermouth and a single pimiento-stuffed olive).

Oh, yes, and today is our daughter’s birthday! She was born at the Bangkok Nursing Home (a luxurious place to have a baby!) an unspecified number of years ago, in Bangkok, Thailand. Happy Birthday, Kathy!

Spanish? again? But I’ll have to learn to say Bar-thuh-LONE-uh…

I’m getting behind on my blogging! As I wrote, our next trip is a cruise across the Atlantic on Holland America. It will take 27 nights and 16 ports and culminate in an orgy of Spanish ports. Of all the ports, there only two that we have been to before this trip, Barcelona and Lisbon (where we got ourselves hilariously lost with three other couples and GoCars; read all about it http://worldcruise12.blogspot.com/2012/07/gocars-exciting-way-to-explore-and-see.html) , not counting Fort Lauderdale and Dover, the ports where we embark/disembark.

So, yet again, we are trying to practice our Spanish but I’m sure the Spaniards will fall on the ground in hysterics, especially since we will be speaking not only very halting Spanish, but Mexican Spanish not Castillian Spanish. About all I know of Castillian Spanish is the the ‘s’/soft ‘c’ are sounded like ‘th’ so Barcelona becomes Bar-thuh-LONE-uh. Spanish is a very musical language; we’ll just be sounding a bit off-key!

The best part of the river cruise is that our children and their spouses will join that trip in Vienna (and 2/3 of us will see the Lipizanner horses at the Spanish Riding School). I’m not at all sure what we will do for the four—FOUR!—days we will stay in Vienna. Luckily, the River Princess includes several tours at each stop in the cost of the trip. How nice is that!

It’s still 168 days until departure and yet I am going into full-blown, what-will-we-do-in-[fill in the city name] and what will I wear when we’re there. One thing we did on our world cruise last year was overpack. I will NOT overpack. I have to repeat that: I will NOT overpack. That resolution is helped immensely by the fact that even though we are flying first class from London to Istanbul, Turkish Air only gives you one, count ‘em, ONE free checked bag. So Randy and I have resolved that we will not take the seven (yes, I’m embarrassed to say, SEVEN) bags we took last year. We will take one checked bag and one carry-on bag. Each. It will make life so much easier!

Soon I will start thinking about perhaps, maybe, possibly, shopping for ? Clothes? Camera equipment? A new computer to take with us? That’s aside from the computer I will probably have to buy for Randy as his is having more and more BSODs (blue screens of death—all you Apple people can just shut up. I KNOW you don’t have those things. And nobody hacks an Apple. Etc, etc, etc. I’m a PC person and shall always be a PC person. So there.

So, off to peruse the internet to find tours and clothes and cameras and computers. And, oh yes, a new Corvette! Red, of course.