Tuesday, October 31, 2017; Halloween at sea

Tuesday, October 31, 2017; At Sea

We met couples from Nevada and Vancouver at breakfast.  Most of the people on this cruise appear to be veteran cruisers. The Vancouver couple had actually traveled around the horn on another Princess ship with the same Captain Todd McBain who piloted us around typhoon Saola. 

This morning’s trivia was a special Halloween trivia, with questions from scary movies and phobias.  We were looking forward to taking a group picture with a new crop of foam fingers, but Ken said he dug around the lockers and actually came up with some carabiners for us, so we took a group picture with Ken.

There is an incredible collection of pumpkin carvings in the atrium.  They use a brown pumpkin, instead of what we are used to seeing with orange pumpkins.  There was also a fruit carving demonstration, where they produced some amazing fruit centerpieces.  Ben sat in on a Japanese class hosted by the guest Japanese enrichment lecturer, but it was as dreadful as his lecture on the women of the Eto era, so Ben left to get a cup of coffee after 15 minutes. 

We did watch a showing of a Disney/Salvatore Dali collaboration animated movie called Destino, which was interesting. The Art Gallery staff did an interpretative analysis of the short, which was educational as well, but then they wanted to sell us art items from the production of Destino, including story boards and such.  

We sat for lunch with a couple from Glasgow and a couple from Australia.  It’s surprising how many people on this ship have sailed around the Horn of South America.  The Aussies had done it, sailing from Australia, making a stop at Easter Island enroute to the Western shores of South America.  Both couples did have stories of pickpocketing and robberies that they had experienced in their travels through Europe.  The Australian had been on a business convention when a team of thieves had gassed a whole floor of the hotel and cleaned out wallets and watches from guests on the entire floor while they slept.  That was scary.  Makes you want to make sure you double blockade the door, or just stay out of Europe.  Both ladies had their purses stolen while traveling through Europe, and the Aussie gentleman caught a woman pick pocketing his wallet out of his pants as he stood in front of the Mona Lisa at the Lourve.  When they tried to get a museum guard to do something about the woman, the guard simply said, “You must be more careful” and waved them off.  

The weather has been gray with moderately heavy seas. Swells have been 15 feet and the winds around 25 knots. The ship has been rocking and rolling a bit, but overall, the ride has remained pretty comfortable.  

We met our trivia partners for afternoon trivia  but ended up out of the top 2, missing 7 out of 20 questions.  The winning team got string bags.

At dinner, the waitstaff had nearly all dressed up for Halloween with elaborate costumes and make-up.  They were all more relaxed and animated, making for a fun dinner.  

We saw the early production show which featured two acrobats with humor, balancing, juggling, and ring skills.  They were Daniel and Kimberly Craig, from Canada and the US.  They were able to speak a decent amount of Japanese and put on a good show.  

We met a new couple, Tom and Janette, from Georgia at an evening Multimedia Flag and geography trivia quiz.  Our usual trivia partners have late dinner seatings, so they were still at dinner.  We were terrible at the flags, but got most of the geography questions right, so we finished in the upper half of the room, but the winning group had a perfect score.  We then went with our new partners to the evening Halloween trivia, which was entirely different from the morning Halloween trivia.  We also had a couple, Richard and Janice from Yorkshire, England join us.  We did win that round of trivia, and were awarded a bottle of champagne.  The next trivia was a movie poster trivia, so we swapped the new champagne bottle for cold one from our refrigerator, and opened and shared it with our new partners during the movie poster trivia.  We ended up winning that trivia as well, and got another bottle of champagne.  We decided to stick around and watch some karaoke while we drank that second bottle of champagne, and the bar staff were kind enough to swap our bottle for a cold one.  After draining that bottle, we made a late night buffet snack run, and then turned in for the night.  

We arrive in Vietnam in the morning.  The Captain said the approach to the port is very tricky, but he was confident that he was going to be able to get us to the dock.  Princess processed our single entry visas for Vietnam and delivered landing cards to our cabin.  It only cost $52 per person to have Princess handle the visa, and it is hard to beat the convenience of that if you just need a single entry visa.