Saturday, October 28, 2017; Sea Day, Skirting Typhoon Saola

Saturday, October 28, 2017- Sea Day, Skirting Typhoon Saola

We awoke to sunlight streaming through our balcony door, with some blue sky and clouds.  The outside temperature is 82 degrees with a moderate amount of humidity.  The seas are 8-10’ with white caps, but the Diamond Princess seems to be handling the sea conditions better than the Norwegian Pearl did.  The ship’s stabilizers are doing a pretty good job of minimizing the side to side rolling that was such a problem on the Norwegian Pearl on our most recent Alaska cruise. 

Our clocks got set back an hour last night, so we were up by 5:30AM.  We headed down to breakfast in the International Dining room just as it was opening at 7:00AM and opted to share a table.  To our pleasant surprise, we were seated right next to Judy, from trivia yesterday.  She had her husband, Bill, with her this time.  He just retired from a job with the City of Victoria.  Ben was able to get an order of congee in addition to the western frittata for breakfast.  By the time we finished at 8:30AM, there was a huge line leading into the dining room, waiting for seating.  I guess we’re lucky to be on a jet-lag induced early bird schedule

We met up with our trivia gang for the morning trivia session, and ended up in a 3 way tie for first.  After a tie-breaker question (what was Dom Perionne’s occupation when he invented champagne), it was down to 2 teams.  Then we had 3 sudden death tie breaker questions, but each team got all 3, so we all ended up with Princess string bags as prizes.  

We then attended an intro to Japanese language class, and then attended a Glockenspeil class before heading to the buffet for lunch.  There was a paper airplane contest at 1:30PM.  For this contest, you stood on deck 6 and tried to fly your paper airplane through a Hoola hoop held up in the air from deck 5.  We were surprised by the turn out and participation.  There were over 100 people with airplanes.  Ben and Janet both tried, but missed the hoop.  The prize was a foam finger for anyone who got through the hoop, and there were probably 5 planes that made it.  There were a surprising number of Japanese women who participated- they made up the bulk of the contestants.  

We met up with our trivia partners for a music trivia, but we anticipated we wouldn’t really do well.  We ended up with 30/50, while the winning team was a couple with 38/50.  

We received vouchers for a Specialty Dining cover charge as part of our booking package, so we decided to use them to have dinner at the Sterling Steakhouse.  It is usually an extra $29 per person cover charge.  The Diamond Princess doesn’t have a a dedicated dining room for the Sterling Steakhouse.  Instead, they close off the rear-most section of the Horizon Buffet with curtains and room dividers, put out linen table cloths, and dedicated waitstaff for the Steakhouse.  Janet had a 10oz Fillet Mignon, while Ben tackled the 20oz Porterhouse steak, which looked like a huge slab ‘o cow.  They also had a chocolate journey dessert.  It was a fine meal, but we were glad that we didn’t have to shell out the $29 per person covercharge.  

We met up with our trivia team mates for the 7:00PM evening multimedia trivia game which featured sound clips from musicals.  While we ended up with a decent 17/20- good enough for second place, a team in the back of the room managed a perfect 20/20, and was awarded a bottle of champagne.  

Our trivia mates went off to their 7:45PM dinner sitting, while Janet and I stood at the back of the Princess Theatre to see the Illusionist show.  It was standing room only, but we didn’t think we’d have the stamina to stay up for the 9:45PM show.  It turned out to be a pretty ordinary illusionist show.  I guess our magic show expectations were blown up by the “Magic To Do” show that we saw on the Crown Princess in Norway. That was spectacular in every way.  

With that, we turned in for the night.