Friday, July 6, 2018- At Sea, Norway to Germany

Friday, July 6, 2018- At Sea, Oslo to Warnemünde (Berlin)

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We awoke to calm seas and moderate cloud cover.  There are plenty of other ships plying these waters between Sweden and Denmark including tankers, freighters and containerships.  One tanker slowly passed us and it appeared to be riding high in the water and had tons of water cascading off the decks and from ports along her side.  She must have been pumping out ballast water to prepare to take on a new load.  

We had breakfast in the dining room and then attended the morning trivia, where we joined up with Dave from Virginia, who showed up wearing a periodic table T-shirt.  We were also joined late by two women, Sarah from Kentucky and Judy from Minnesota.  We had a decent score, with Dave pulling his weight with a few good answers.  We scored 19/20, but there was a 4 way tie for first place with perfect 20/20 scores.  I guess the questions weren’t that hard after all.  The tie breaker was how many nation states are in the UN.  The answer is an astounding 193.  One team guessed 192 and won Princess notepads.  

There was a presentation on Tallinn where two women in Estonian costumes were interviewed by Fab, one of the Cruise Director’s staff.  The presentation wasn’t really very informative, but at one point, the two women got up and demonstrated a short folk dance, which was a pleasant surprise.  

We hit the gym for a bit to make sure we got our activity rings on our Apple Watches closed, and then got cleaned up and had a quick lunch at the Alfredo’s Italian free restaurant in the Atrium, which serves a limited selection of pastas and personal sized pizzas.  The service was pretty quick and the food was decent enough.  

We attended a presentation on Matryoshka Dolls and Russian Lacquer boxes.  We learned a bit about the traditional artwork that is used in these art forms and how to spot fakes.  They also explained a bit about how they are made, and at the end of the presentation, there was a drawing for a chance to win a Russian Lacquer box. We didn’t win, but got consolation prizes of tiny Matryoshka dolls (1/2” long, solid replicas) that might have been suitable for a tiny Christmas tree decoration or ear-rings.  

We had a brief Afternoon tea break for tea and scones.  We are never too far away from a chance to eat something.

Next was afternoon trivia where we teamed up with Sarah and Dave again.  We scored 17/20 while the winners scored 19/20, winning notepads.  Janet noticed that a tall single woman has been on most of the winning teams so far. She usually comes in at the last moment, but sure seems to know her trivia.  Too bad we couldn’t recruit her to our team, but the competition will certainly keep us on our feet.  

There is a lounge reserved for Platinum, Elite and Suite passengers.  We dropped by and sampled the feta brochettes they were featuring and watched a bit of the World Cup games in the nearly empty lounge.  A pair of non-English speaking men came in and sat down to watch the game.  They were not Platinum, Elite or Suite passengers, so the staff tried to get them to go to a different lounge, but they simply grunted and ignored the staff.  Since the lounge was nearly empty, the staff gave up and let the men stay to watch the game.  

We started watching Red Sparrow on the TV in our room.  The Regal Princess now has an on-demand video system so you can start and pause any movie at your convenience, a huge improvement over the old systems that would simply play the movies on a set schedule.  It was always impossible to catch the beginning of a movie, or stay to the end with everything else going on around the ship.  We paused the movie and went for an early dinner.

We saw the early Showtime featuring Kieran Powell, a ventriloquist.  He put on a decent show, but at this point, it would take something very unusual to impress us now that we have seen so many cruise ship ventriloquist acts.  We finished our evening with a Who Am I quiz game, where we teamed up with Sarah, and an Aussie couple Ian and Karen.  We managed 13/26 while the winners ended up with 19, scoring themselves some wine bottle stoppers.

We returned to our room and finished the Red Sparrow.  These espionage movies can sometimes be so confusing to figure out who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.  We’ll just have to read the book to figure it out.  

Around 10PM, we passed under the bridge that connects Denmark and Sweden.  It’s something else to see a bridge seemingly in the middle of the sea.  Tomorrow we should be arriving in Germany.  We booked excursions for Warnemünde Germany and Tallinn Estonia using non-refundable on board spending credits.