Saturday, November 30, 2019; At Sea, Oman to Sri Lanka Day 2

Saturday, November 30, 2019; At Sea, Oman to Sri Lanka Day 2

One nice thing about sea days is the ability to sleep in- relatively speaking. We still find that we have to force ourselves to get up early enough to cram in all our planned activities each day, which usually amount to eating and entertainment. 

We had a sit down breakfast followed by our morning trivia.  We finished in our usual 1 point off the lead.  Any idea what sport James Gibb invented in 1890?  Neither did we.  

Ben napped instead of hitting the fitness center to try to speed his recovery.  We had a light lunch in the buffet and then met our progressive trivia team.  We were pleasantly surprised to hear the host announce that there had been a spelling error in the last quiz and that if you answered “Fear of Depths” for Bathophobia, you could claim that point. We didn’t think he would own up to having a wrong answer, but he earned a notch in his esteem belt for that. 

The stakes on his bonus question have been raised to 5 points.  The question was what is Whoopi Goldberg’s real name.  We knew her last name was Johnson, and were pretty sure her first name started with Car..., but couldn’t nail it.  We guessed Carol, but it turned out to be Caryn.  Fortunately, he did offer half credit or 2-1/2 points if you managed to get either the first or last names correct so we didn’t lose the whole bonus.

Today, we held our own and ended up with a cumulative score of 59 1/2 points, which ties us for first place with one other team.  There are 20 teams in this progressive trivia.  

We had a light lunch in the Buffet and then rested up, watching destination and enrichment lectures on the in-room on-demand video system.  After the opulence and orderliness of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and even Oman, the lecturer warned us to adjust our expectations for Sri Lanka, which will seem much more third world, crowded and dangerous.  

The Enrichment lecture was about the Tea economy. We learned something interesting.  When the British wanted Chinese Tea, but didn’t want to pay silver for it, they flooded China with opium from their poppy fields in India and Afghanistan, and used the Chinese cash from the opium to pay for the tea they wanted.  This lead to the Opium war.  

We finished our afternoon trivia one point off the lead.  In monetary terms, what does ERM mean?  Not what we guessed, at least.  But there were at least a few international financiers who did.  

For the evening’s Harry Potter trivia teamed up with the kids that we had teamed up with during the earlier Disney trivia, and learned that they were 14 and 9 years old.  Their mother joined us, and we managed to tie for first place with another team with younger people.  We lost the tie breaker of guessing how many pairs of glasses Daniel Radcliffe went through while filming the Harry Potter movies.  The other team guessed 40 and we guessed 34, but the actual number was 160, so they won some notebooks.  Fortunately, the other team shared so the kids got notebooks as souvenirs of the game.  

We opted to skip the Princess Theater presentation, which was a crew talent show.  We have seen these in the past, and there is certainly a lot of amateur talent among the crew members, but we opted to turn in early, and watch Casino Royale to refresh our memories and maybe help with a future Bond trivia.  Tomorrow will be another day at sea, the last before reaching Colombo, Sri Lanka.