Sunday, December 15, 2019; At Sea, Bali to Singapore Day 1

Sunday, December 15, 2019; At Sea, Bali to Singapore Day 1

We were surprised to see that it was after 9am when we awoke this morning.  We skipped breakfast and just hit the International Cafe to get some coffee on the way to our morning trivia. We managed to win with 16/20, and got some aluminum water bottles, which we will give to our room steward.  

After trivia we worked to get our exercise rings closed before lunch.  During lunch, we noticed a petite Filipino gal having lunch who really looked out of place, even with all the younger passengers on this cruise segment.  She was rocking some 5” stiletto heels and the legs of a dancer on the production team, but we didn’t recognize her as anyone on the entertainment staff. She appeared to be dining with her husband and relaxing in the buffet.  They both appeared much too young to be on this cruise as passengers, but perhaps they were traveling with parents or even grand parents.

The weather has been in the 80’s with occasional monsoon downpours that send streams of water across the pool deck.  There was supposed to be an ice carving demonstration on the pool deck but the rain made conditions too slippery to proceed with ice carving, so it was canceled.  We got a chance to talk a bit with Kaitlyn who was going to host the ice carving and learned that she had spent some time in the Army before starting to work for Princess, where she has been for about 3 years.  Her family recently moved from Southern California to Puyallup, so she’s actually from our neck of the country now.  It is rather unusual to run into many Americans who work on these cruise ships.  

One of the AAA benefits we have been getting is a free photo print. We usually get a voucher good for a Free 5x8 print, which is usually a gangway pose or other casual shot around the ship, but we learned from Ben’s brother Franklin that sometimes you can get one of the 8x10’s, if they are feeling generous.  We were able to get a nice 8x10 during our Rome to Singapore segment, but when we tried to pick one out for this 10 day Singapore round trip segment, the gals at the photo desk said we’d have to pay an extra $10 to get the 8x10.  That made Janet quite sad.  Later in the day, we ran into the photo department manager, with whom we had made friends with because his girlfriend and us connected on the Pompei excursion, and also later on the Petra excursion.  Janet told him of her sad tale, and he said “No problem, we can make it right”. That turned her frown upside down and made us both very happy.  A little kindness can sure go a long ways.

Our trivia team got beat by one point in the afternoon trivia when we got our Caspian and Black seas mixed up and we couldn’t come up with the father of the Pleiades.  But we wouldn’t want to be hogging all the trivia wins.

This was our last formal evening for the cruise.  We had just got our last batch of laundry back so Ben’s shirt was nicely starched and pressed.  We had lobster, of course.  

We did a Broadway Trivia after dinner and were happy that it was an all new trivia.  Broadway has never been our strong suit because we usually only see shows that are available on DVD.  In the past, it was always helpful to have team mates who had ushered in theaters who knew a lot of the shows, but we had no such luck tonight.  We did well enough not to embarrass ourselves, but were beat by 2 teams that each had 3 points over our score.  Their tie breaker question was how many performances of Phantom of the Opera have there been as of November 2019.  FYI it is over 13,000!  

We discovered the first day after leaving Singapore on our final cruise segment that our coffee card punches did not expire, and we each had quite a few left over from when they were refilled for the Dubai to Singapore cruise segment.  So for this final cruise segment, we didn’t have to exchange our mini bar for coffee cards.  The ship came up short on whisky and bourbon mini bottles (apparently a shipment wasn’t received in time in Singapore) so we got coupons good for any 2 cocktails.  We sipped those tonight while watching the production show Bravo.  We have seen and enjoyed this show several times before, and every time, it’s been a little different.  Earlier in the cruise, they had to work around a missing male lead singer, and also swapped out a female lead singer since we boarded in Rome. The production team has finally procured a replacement male lead singer, and he is really very good.  This show also features a guest soprano, and when she came on the stage, BINGO- it was the mystery woman we had seen in the buffet at lunch with the stiletto heels.  She is petite, but boy, can she belt out the arias and hit those top notes dead on.  We learned she is Filipino but calls Taiwan home.  She certainly deflates the stereotype of operatic sopranos being the fat lady with the horns on her helmet.  

We began the sad process of getting our suitcases repacked since our disembarkation instructions and luggage tags arrived on our door in the morning.  We will be doing a disembarkation tour of Singapore, ending at the Stamford hotel, where we’ll spend the night before our flights back home the following day. Our main suitcases will hold anything we won’t be wearing in the next 2 days, while our carryon sized suitcases will just need to get us through our last night in Singapore.  

Once our packing was done, we watched a funky movie called the Peanut Butter Falcon, staring a Down Syndrome adult who breaks out of a nursing home to go on a Huckleberry Finn like adventure on the Gulf coast with a fugitive sociopath who ultimately proves to have redeeming features.  It turned out to be a cute little movie despite the odd title and premise.