Thursday, December 6, 2018- At Sea From Guatemala to Cabo San Lucas Day 1

Thursday, December 6, 2018- At Sea from Guatemala to Cabo San Lucas Day 1

The nice thing about sea days is getting to sleep in- to a point.  Most of the dining venues on the Viking Star close for breakfast at 9:30AM, so you can’t really sleep in as long as you want without missing breakfast.  But, then again, nobody is in danger of losing any weight on a cruise ship.     We had breakfast in the Restaurant, but it seems that despite the waiters using iPhones to enter the orders, they always manage to get some thing wrong.  I ordered eggs and lamb chops with sauted potatoes, but the last time I ordered the same thing, they brought only barely a tablespoon of potatoes- not enough to soak up the egg yolks, so I asked for a double portion of the potatoes.  And to make sure, I clarified it a second time before the waiter took off that I wanted extra potatoes.  And Janet ordered a single english muffin to soak up her egg yolks.  When the order arrived, Janet got no english muffins, and I ended up with a double portion of lamb chops, and just a tablespoon of potatos.  Janet also notice something that Princess does that Viking doesn’t.  When the waiters ask you what you’d like to drink, if you ask for tea, on Princess, the waiter puts the stirring spoon in the cup on the saucer.  If you ask for coffee, the spoon stays on the saucer.  That way, the beverage servers know right away whether to pour you coffee, or bring you a pot of tea.  On Viking, you end up getting asked 2 or 3 times whether you want coffee or tea.  But in the end, you get fed, and the food is high quality.  

Our trivia team reconvened at noon, and although we put on a good show, tying for second place, we missed out tying for first by one point- and there were two questions where we had entertained the correct answers, but put down the wrong ones.  Bridesmaids again.  One of the stumpers was “What was the name of the cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”  We had no idea the answer was simply “Cat”.  The two teams that beat us by one point had a tie breaker of “What year was pre-sliced bread introduced?”  Answer=1930.

The satellite feed for the media system was down today, so no streaming movies or rebroadcasts of the live lectures.  That seems technologically odd that they would have to rely on the satellite to stream all their media, when it would be so much more efficent to keep the media on local servers on the ship.  Perhaps, licensing requirements demand that real time authorization be obtained for movie streams, but it really makes no sense that they wouldn’t be able to stream the lectures recorded aboard the ship.  With the video streaming down, the relative lack of activities on the ship become all the more glaring.  On Princess, we would have had 3 different sessions of Trivia, a Spanish language class, and Ballroom dancing class. But since Janet has been feeling under the weather, this has given her lots of time to sleep to speed her recovery.  

There has been a slight uptick in the visible marine sealife around the ship with more flying fish, and a wider variety of birds with Nasca Boobies joining the Brown Boobies.  The ship was now being followed by a flock of about 12 birds.  Unfortunately, they have left their marks on the windows of the Explorer’s Lounge at the front of the ship.  We’re sure the crew are not too happy about having to clean all that up.

There were lectures on the Mayan culture and on Biological Parasites.  The lecture on the Mayan culture was really trying to stretch comparisons between the rapid disappearance of the Mayan civilization and the current threat of global warming because there was a 3 degree increase in temperature that was associated with the disappearance of the Mayan civilization.  The lecturer seemed to be implying that if the Mayans had realized their evil ways and placed a tax on carbon emissions before it was too late, that they could still be enjoying human sacrifices on their stone altars today.  Not hardly.  The biologist’s lecture on Parasites was much more interesting.  Dr. Carin can be a bit of a chameleon herself, as she donned a slightly more conservative dress and parted her hair a little differently, completely hiding the shaved part of her head, and revealing a Mary Tyler Moore look-a-like.  

Her talk on marine parasites included a tongue eating sea louse that replaces the tongue of some fish species, and a crab parasite that turns them into zombies.  You have to wonder if a human analog to the zombification organism will develop!

We had some unbelievable colors streaming from the horizon as the sun set.  Perhaps the volcanic ash contributed to the show.

We had dinner in The Restaurant with our trivia group, which was nice because it was Carol’s birthday, and we got to share some of her birthday cake.  Apparently, Viking already knew it was Carol’s birthday, even though Greg did not make prior arrangements.  They probably get that information off the passenger passports.  The wait staff came and sang her Happy Birthday.  Janet and I later sent her a singing Monkeygram thanks to our new iPhones.  

We closed out the evening with violinist Juliette Prowess, a New Zealander, who did a pop/rock violin program with canned back up music.  It was similar to a program we had seen on Princess with a male violinist, but Juliette was technically a better violinist and had been a studio muscian in LA and part of the Riverdance troupe.  And she used conventional fingerings- the guy on Princess used wierd fingerings (2nd and 4th positions) which freaked Ben out.    

Tomorrow is another day at sea.  We’ll order room service breakfast again to shake things up a bit.