Friday, November 15, 2019; Rhodes, Greece to Port Said, Egypt
Our air conditioner didn’t seem to be working last night so we had to sleep with the door open. It was 75 degrees at day break. The cloudy skies and rain are now left behind as we head into the southern Mediterranean on the way to Egypt, and Port Said, the entrance to the Suez Canal. Today is basically a day at sea, even though we are scheduled to drop anchor off Port Said in the late afternoon and remain anchored for about 12 hours before the Suez Canal traffic opens up to southbound ships.
We had a leisurely breakfast in the dining room followed by a day of trivia. We met with our team of Bob and Mary, Paul and Linda, and managed to win the Morning Trivia by one point. We did have to negotiate with our grading team who didn’t believe that the stapes is the same as the stirrup bone in the ear. You can look it up- it’s the same thing, like patella vs knee cap. We’ll avoid having that team grade our quizzes from now on. They were a pretty humorless bunch.
We attended the enrichment lecture that was titled Ancient Mediterranean- Cradle of Civilization, but it turned out to be all about plate tectonics, and very little about civilization. It took him 45 years to cover about 15 billion years of the earth’s natural history, but he didn’t hit a single civilization because the era his talk ended on was just as Homo sapiens was emerging as a distinct species. It was easy to nap through most of that lecture. Ben had wisely brought his ear buds so he could review some TV themes.
We did manage to get in some guilt reduction today in the fitness center. We could see more and more vessel traffic around us as we approached the coast of Egypt and the Suez Canal. There were lots of huge container ships and bulk carriers steaming in the same direction as us.
We grabbed a quick lunch at the poolside grill and then headed off to try our luck at a Harry Potter trivia. We didn’t do too badly, but were several points off the winners, who really knew their Harry Potter trivia. They asked questions like how many horcruxes were there, and name each of the 3 Deathly Hallows. You even had to know what patronus Hermione was able to summon. You even had to finish a quote from the movie script when Dumbledore asked Snape “After all this time?” What was Snape’s reply? We’re sure that our sister-in-law Catherine, who has read the entire series in English, Spanish and Mandarin, would have aced that trivia in her sleep.
We were back to a normal afternoon trivia with our team, and actually managed a win with a perfect score of 20/20. The differentiator question proved to be what is the color of the Welsh Poppy. Paul had an idea it was either yellow or orange, but he wasn’t sure, and none of the rest of us knew for sure. We guessed yellow correctly. We think virtually everyone else had guessed red from the collective groan that rang out from the room when that answer was revealed.
After dinner in the dining room, we tried our hand at Famous Faces trivia with just Janet and Ben, and came in our usual second place by one point.
We watched a violinist perform pop songs, and a few pop arrangements of more classical pieces with the Princess band backing him up. He was proficient, and did an unusual number that sounded like Hungarian folk music mixed in with imitation bird calls, but much of the program pandered to trying to make the violin seem cool by playing pop songs like Hey Jude, instead of any really good classical virtuoso pieces.
We finished up the night with TV Themes trivia with our full team and managed another win- 3 in one day! We managed a perfect score of 15/15, and were surprised we were the only team to manage that. We shared the bottle of champagne around the table as the party band played, and we exchanged pictures and contacts. We have been teaching everyone how to Airdrop with their iPhones and iPads.
We begin our passage through the Suez Canal at 4:30am, but I don’t think anyone is going to bother setting an alarm clock to witness our entry, which will occur during the dark of night. There will be commentary by a local expert starting at 6:30am, so maybe we’ll try to get up to hear that from the buffet. It’ll be over 90 degrees outside, so looking at all that sand from the comfort of the buffet makes sense.
