Wednesday, March 27, 2019. At Sea

Wednesday, March 27, 2019. At Sea

We had to move our clocks forward another hour.  Unfortunately, all our devices (iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches) need the user to enter in a city in order to set the time zone if you aren’t connected to the internet through a cell phone provider.  While that’s no big deal when you’re in a country, it’s not intuitive when you’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  We ultimately found out that we had to enter a city called Rikitea in French Polynesia in order to get our time zone set correctly.  It would have been so much easier if they just let the user click on a map of the world.  That’s our suggestion to Apple for future updates of the iOS operating system.  Definitely a first world problem.  

A destination and enrichment lecture we attended informed us that we have passed out of the Californian current and entered into the main Pacific gyrus, which is a huge counterclockwise current that originates in equatorial waters and carries warmer waters.  This has been reflected by a increase in temperatures into the 70’s today.  We also learned that we might run into schools of flying fish, flying squid, and may even see signs of the giant Pacific garbage patch. So far, we haven’t seen any of those three items yet.  

We did our usual morning trivia and missed winning by 1 point.  We guessed the wrong meaning for the word nubile, as well as what two trees are mentioned most frequently in the Bible.  Then we had our second installment of the progressive cruise long trivia.  The questions seem to be drawn from a more select pool of harder questions. We managed 6/10.  We knew of at least one team that managed to get 8/10.  They were the only team that knew that Queen did the theme music for the movie Highlander.  We don’t know how our team is doing relative to the other 25 teams because no cumulative score has yet been posted, but we were told to expect to see a running tally starting tomorrow. 

After lunch we watched “Juliette Naked”, which featured Chris O’Dowd from the TV Show The IT Crowd- one of Janet’s favorite comedy shows.  Contrary to the title, there was no nudity as the title referred to an unreleased rock album which nerdy super fan played by Chris O’Dowd comes across while mediating a fan site on the internet.  It ended up being a somewhat lame romantic comedy, but it’s a movie checked off the “to be watched” list.

The Princess Theater featured a Black comedian who really worked hard at playing the race card for this largely white audience, although relative to most other Princess cruises we have been on, there are actually quite a few black families and couples on board.  The comedian acknowledged this by saying that looking around the audience, he could see just enough black faces scattered around the audience that he could feel safe.  He commented it’s no wonder there are so few blacks on cruise ships because black people don’t have a good history when it comes to traveling by ships, alluding to slave ships.  Most of the act was a little close to being a little too racist, but he said he could get away with just about anything because he represented an oppressed race and if a white person ever tried to do something to hurt him, it would be a hate crime ala the Jessie Smollet fiasco.  The few black couples seated near us didn’t seem to be laughing all that much, but he did keep us entertained for the duration of the show.  

Dinner turned out pretty good with prime rib and prawns the size of small lobster tails.  No surprises on the menu, but the menu remains quite extensive with at least 6-8 choices for each course of the meal.  We sat next to a couple who spoke Cantonese to each other, but were fluent in English, albeit with an accent, with the waiter and other passengers. Ben could tell it wasn’t Mandarin, and we learned it was Hong Kong Cantonese.  

Tomorrow will be our last day at sea before we arrive at Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Looks like another big trivia day with morning, progressive, Beatles trivia, afternoon trivia and evening Rock-N-Roll music trivia.