Happy Easter Sunday everybody. Onboard today are a number of different religious services taking place with the main, multi-faith, service taking place in the theatre at 10am.
We both had a nice lie in with Mark leaving the room at 9:30 and Pam just after 10am.
Mark had breakfast in the Carinthia Lounge (eggs florentine a favourite of his) and he then attended the 10am lecture about Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton. The speaker, Dave Wright, was very passionate about his subject and varied his tones a lot - many could take presentation lessons from him. Mark reckons it was one of the best he has attended.
Pam then met Mark at the end of his lecture, as she was going to do the next one. Pam’s talk was by Gloria Barnett about the Ocean and the creatures that live beneath the ocean. The deepest part of the ocean is 11km which we (as a planet) have never found a way to explore that far. The furthest we have gone, with robotic cameras, is 4km. The lady lecturer was very funny as she was suffering from jet lag and kept losing her train of thought. She was also very knowledgeable and a very good scuba diver. She showed us many videos, from her scuba diving trips, of the fascinating animals that live beneath us. My favourite was the turtle who came up to her camera twice for a chat.
Pam then met up with Mark, who had been doing laps of the promenade deck, and we went back to our cabin to be greeted with a clean room and a nice present.
Then it was off to lunch in the Kings Court buffet where we knew something special was happening. Today’s ship tour section should be G32, to finish off decks 2 & 3, but we are switching to the buffet for this special day.
Kings Court is split into 2 sections: the galley area (which is smaller and turns into a specialty restaurant, at night, with either, Indian, Oriental or Italian food plus a small, free, pizza/pasta restaurant to one side); the main buffet area.
We are going to be boring and start by giving some pictures of breakfast. It is the usual fare with fruits, yoghurts, cereals, oatmeal, cheeses, cold meats and fish, danish pastries etc… There is obviously a full cooked breakfast area too.
There are loads of seats available too.
Now let’s talk about lunch as it is lunchtime time. The galley area has fast food.
The main buffet area has a big selection but today it was bonkers. Half of the area had been transformed into chocolate heaven. There were displays of chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies and even a chocolate turtle. Plus individual areas with delicious things like hot cross buns, doughnuts, truffles, different types of cakes, cupcakes and a chocolate fountain. Pam did not have a healthy lunch but a sweet lunch. The displays were incredible and the chefs staff must have been working for hours to make them.
Obviously there is normal food and, on any other day, this has a slightly bigger selection.
At night you can come here for dinner and again the selection is very, very good with free squash drinks and tea/coffee and mr whippy ice cream available all day.
Back to our day. Pam went off to another talk. This time by Diana Janes on Crime, classic murder cases and early forensics. The talk spoke about the early pioneers of fingerprints, DNA analysis, blood analysis and footprints. It turns out that most of the pioneers were British with a couple of Germans, French and Austrian scientists too. The best of the inventions was the fingerprints which were discovered by a man who noticed that it seemed that the same people were claiming their pension. So instead of just a signature he would also ask for a fingerprint. This helped him discover that we all have different fingerprints. The funniest story was a burglar who broke into a hardware store with no torch hoping to not be seen. But the next day the police were at his door to arrest him. This surprised him, but not the police as he had stepped into paint in the dark and the police simply followed the footprints to his door.
We met up again and joined Andrew and Diane for the music quiz. The questions are getting harder or all the food is eating up our memory cells. We were pants. We played the sequence board game in which the girls thrashed the boys so the boys went up to play shuffleboard to see if they fared any better in the competition there. We were paired together and it was Andrew’s first time playing. Just like our earlier bingo luck, his first time luck took us to the final where we won (beating Raju) and were awarded a measly stamp each. Every little helps we suppose.
To celebrate the boys played Paddle tennis but the mobility of them both is not was it was decades ago so there weren’t many long rallies. The court is thankfully small but Mark still thinks his back may regret this in a day or two. Pam meanwhile was phoning home and our family were together celebrating Easter making it easier to see them all at once - we will be home in 3 weeks! Another phenomenon occurred which started back on Arcadia. When speaking to our eldest daughter Katherine, the officer of the watch announced that a pod of whales could be seen. Pam managed a glimpse. We really must ring her more often but getting her during the day is not always easy.
Then it was time to dress up for dinner. As it is a gala night there is always a theme and this time it was black and white. So after putting on our glad rags we headed to the restaurant. We had arranged to have dinner again with Janet and was joined again by her friends Ann, Moira and Joan.
As the theme was black and white we had black napkins and champagne at our table. Pam got Mark’s. Pam had a gouda cheese quiche with chicken and leak , lobster bisque soup, Fillet steak with dauphinois potatoes and veg plus Strawberries and vanilla cream with shortbread for dessert
Mark had a seafood salad, followed by lobster bisque and a lovely piece of plaice. Only ice creams for dessert (no Ben and Jerry fish food as that would have completed the set).
After a great chat and a wonderful dinner we parted company and headed for the theatre for the show by the Royal Court Theatre called “Be our Guest” which had as the first song - be our guest - but with the words were changed to describe cruising on Cunard. There was a duet with songs from the artists Adele and Emile Sandie and the finally were songs from The Greatest Showman. The cast had been on here of over 8 months and their contracts end soon so this is the last time they will perform this show together. Pam and Mark were on here for a short cruise in October and think we saw their first performance of this show together too.
After briefly heading back to our cabin to update our blogs and fill out immigration forms for tomorrow, we headed up to the Carinthia Lounge for the late night quiz. We managed 12 out of 20 as it was very hard but was joint 1st with two other teams and lost on tie breaker about how many Oscar nominations the film Psycho received. We said 6 but it was 4. Still it was only for a bottle of wine.
We parted company with our quiz team and headed to bed. Busy day tomorrow in Namibia.
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