Sleep. Sweet blissful sleep.
Of course, I woke up at 4.55am because my body is now used to its 5am alarm call. But with no steam pipe above me 5am passed and I drifted in that restless dream state for another hour or two, then fell asleep properly.
I finally emerged from my cabin just after 8am and found the lido full, a younger crowd than I’m used to. There weren’t any spare tables so I joined a man sitting quietly with his phone, and he demanded conversation.
These conversations follow a standard flow. Where are you from, how is the cruise, what do you do for a living? He’s from Maryland, he brought some of his family on this cruise so it cost him $30k and he owns three businesses. Garden ponds, garden lighting and the third a more interesting one, providing mentoring to other small business owners on how to manage and grow their business. He seems weary of the constant change in the world but credit to him, he’s embracing it too, running his mentoring business online with customers globally.
He was only 41 when he started his first business. Now 61 he cruises twice a year and has sold 80% of one of them, so well done to him. Sounds like he does still do a fair amount of work though..
Today is a sea day so nowt to do but eat, drink and be entertained. As I get 24h free internets that’s the primary source of entertainment. It’s limited though to 300MB of data so I’m hoping to hell Windows doesn’t decide to try and update. Also means no photos will get uploaded as at 6MB each that’s precious web content not reaching me.
Comical emails. Recruitment agency want to talk to me.. “I’m currently on a vessel just off the coast of Cambodia and may not be easily available for a call at the moment.”
A knock on the door. It’s Desmond, one of my two new attendants for this new room. He actually asked me what to call me so they now call me Stuart rather than Mr Scott which feels far better. It’s a Caribbean sounding Desmond rather than a British one, although I think he’s actually Indonesian.
His colleague is called Agust, with the ‘a’ pronounced the same as in the word ‘apple’. After Desmond told me their names I looked at him and went, “Sorry, ..” and he smiled and replied, “After July.”
As I hadn’t heard his name clearly the first time this left me bewildered. As you’ve already read his name it’ll be more obvious to you, and indeed the moment he repeated, “Agust” I mentally slapped myself for being so damn slow.
Desmond wanted to come in and clean the room. The one I’ve occupied for 18 hours and has already had a visit from them in the evening yesterday. They leave folded towels and chocolate too. That reminds me, I need to check Australian food import rules to find out whether I need to eat all this chocolate before I get there. But I assured Desmond that the room needed no cleaning and really, just don’t worry about it. I’m fine.
I am fine. I don’t understand why the international overnight accommodation industry has standardised on a daily change in bedding and towels, let alone (as here) daily hoovering and other services. Come back next week, you might actually make a difference then.
300MB of pure web browsing appears btw to be about an hour these days. Although that does include preloading a number of web pages that I can now peruse offline.
Albert is back, with a concern that I have damaged luggage. It sounds like a misinterpretation of my request for assistance with my camera bag. He’s taken it away now with a full understanding of the issue. It’s quite possible that it would’ve survived until I’m home but when I mentioned that I wont get home until February (and have three more HAL cruises before then) he understood why I didn’t want to wait.
I like Albert. It’s hard to not like someone that comes to your room and goes, “Let me solve all your problems.” He’s even going to ask maintenance to reduce the airflow on the aircon so that it’s less noisy. I did also thank him for getting a good night’s sleep.
Albert returns, without a bag. He has a form instead that I need to sign, to acknowledge that the upholsterers may damage my bag in which case I can’t sue them. I guess they’ve had bad experiences with designer bags before and overly litigious passengers. I can’t see the upholsterer damaging my bag, although I suppose it’s possible he’ll fall while carrying scissors and slice the whole thing open. In which case they’ll be invited to sew closed the gash and I’ll have a comical looking camera bag. I’ll take the risk.
I do find it amusing that instead of the onboard tailors my bag will be fixed by the upholsterers.
A talk on the Thai ports we’ll be visiting convinces me to spend money on an excursion. For once the onboard costs aren’t an order of magnitude higher than local prices and there’s a chance to get inland a bit. The guy speaking wasn’t trying to sell anything, he just provided useful information on local costs and options. I’ll try and do things for myself the other two days we’re in Thailand.
An hour with the Captain (and 200 other passengers) was interesting. A brief potted career overview then some fun things about the ship and how it works from a ship’s officer perspective. The azipods have 10MW electric motors, driven by electricity generated by the ship’s engines. It has six engines, two 12 cylinder diesels (the only ones in use as I write), three 16 cylinder diesels and a gas turbine that’s sodding expensive to run. Apparently the hotel part of the ship gets priority on the generated electricity, to the extent that the bridge crew know exactly when everybody’s got out of bed because the ship slows down, less electricity available for the engines.
Back in my room and I find out the stupid tablet has rebooted, losing me just under 200 preloaded tabs – 150 of them were ones I’d opened at home, keeping them in memory to read while offline. Fucking microsoft and their stupid fucking operating system. Who the fuck reboots someone’s computer while it’s offline, the lid is closed and they haven’t given explicit permission.
I have now disabled automatic updates and will keep them disabled until I get home. So much for breaking my normal rule of keeping them disabled permanently on all PCs. I mean, shit, it didn’t even have ‘net access and still decided to fuck me over. Yes, I’m annoyed.
Dinner tonight was a close run thing. The food was ok, a tasty but tiny chicken tikka starter, a delicious and sadly far too sensibly sized butterscotch panna cotta and between them whole-wheat mushroom crepes, brown rice pilaf and creme fraiche.
The company is where things got interesting. The 70 year old widow sat opposite me halted her interrogation only long enough to make sure I knew her husband had sadly succumbed to cancer while her younger sister said little but kept looking at me, ignoring the couple on the other side of her. I would have talked to them but the lady sat on my side of the table never looked away from her husband and said very little. He stared back and spoke only to complain about the cruise, the food and the service.
I knew I was in trouble even before we discussed hearing difficulties, and I admitted I had to keep looking at the two sisters to be sure of hearing them properly. The younger one’s “That’s why I keep looking at you” was met by a sharp retort from her sister.
“Are you sure that’s why you keep looking at him?”
I diplomatically looked away from them both but still overheard, “Well, yes, there is that.”
A polite but determined escape once the meal was complete was successful, but not before two separate invitations to join them for a 4pm happy hour on any of the remaining days on the cruise. I think they meant the scheduled ‘two for one’ drinks offers in the bar.
The silly thing is that the 70 year old dances, so if she’d suggested meeting in the blues bar at 11pm I’d have said yes. But just for a dance. I’m not sure how someone that’s only ever followed ballroom would cope with my lead. Maybe better than I’d cope with their follow.
Confirmation from home, the utterly gorgeous cat that I had to scare off with a fire engine wont be invading my garden any more. I now want to know who hit her, she was an intelligent little cat so I can’t see her getting caught out by someone driving sensibly. We’ll probably never find out, certainly the person that killed my tortoiseshell never owned up to it.
Out to see the show. Song and dance routine, this time by professionals. It was polished. I’d like to dance with some of the ladies involved. Wondered how they’d cope with non-choreographed dance, but they’re young, know how to move and can already follow a choreographed lead so I suspect they’d be fine. Better than me.
On the way back to my room, overheard in the corridor, “You have water splashed all up your door. I hope it’s water.”
By then I’d been on deck, watched a lightning storm over the southern tip of Vietnam. Most of it was behind clouds so only a couple of proper lightning bolts but it was quite eerie, lightning with no thunder.
At 9pm the telephone rings. I answer and hear a cheery Albert, asking if he can pop over and see me. He brings my bag with him, expertly repaired, the new thread similar in colour to the old but not a complete match. The stitching is further apart too, 8-9 stiches where previously there were 10-11. I didn’t point this out, the old stitching with the correctly coloured thread was dying anyway so this is better.
Inside the bag the disclaimer I’d signed, promising not to get upset if they broke it. They’ve negated its value as I could now destroy it and get upset, but there’s no reason. Also inside was a printed job form, telling me the name of their ticketing system and revealing that I was a ‘very low priority’. I think that’s reasonable, the ship’s needs need to take priority and other passengers may have more pressing issues than ‘this has started to wear out and might break some time in the future’.
But it’s done, and I can go to bed happy. Tomorrow a new country..