Day 71: 20231203 Sunday, December 3, 2023
The clocks moved forward an hour during the night. Price and Ciara did get up to do a cycling class and woke us up at 9:30am knocking on the door. We had missed the morning trivia and destination expert lecture, so we grabbed a bite to eat and coffee at the International Cafe. The ship is much more crowded on this particular cruise. At 10am there were two lines of at least 10 people long to get either coffee or food orders at the International Cafe. We walked in on the last part of the Maori cultural presentation which Price and Ciara were watching. It is a series of talks and on this one they were explaining the cultural significance of tattoos in the Maori culture. Ironically, the man who was giving the talk did not have facial tattoos and when someone in the audience asked why that was, he got a bit choked up and explained that it was actually his children’s generation that brought that part of their culture back to life because it had been banned when he was a child. They closed the lecture with a song and dance where the man did the dancing and the woman played the guitar. The woman ended up stooping awkwardly on the stage to play the guitar because she didn’t have a stool to sit on or a strap on the guitar and the production crew did not put spot lights on either of the performers. Hopefully the production crew will be better prepared for future installments of this cultural presentation series.
We then checked out the shore excursions talk. Janet sat at the very front of the Princess Live venue, in front of the podium. Price, Ben and Ciara were at the very back. The presentation was mostly on the mechanics of the ship’s excursion system rather than a description of the ports of call so Price, Ben and Ciara snuck out to watch the Passengers vs Crew tavern games in the Piazza. These involved variations of things to do with ping pong balls, solo cups and cards. Passengers who wanted to volunteer to participate had their names drawn from a bag, and although we didn’t participate, it was amusing to watch.
Lunch was a bit of a misadventure. We decided to try the sit down dining, which is only offered in the Allegro restaurant at the very back of the ship under the Vista Lounge. The only way to get there is to go to the back of the ship and then take the stairs or elevator down. We got there right as they were opening at noon and got seated pretty quickly. But despite being some of the first to be seated, service in our section of the dining room was extraordinarily slow. It took 5 minutes to get menus, 15 minutes to get drinks, and 20 minutes to place our orders. It was nearly 90 minutes when we finally got to desserts. The food was OK, but the service was so slow it was a bit aggravating. A pair of Asian women got seated at a table next to ours, and it was apparent they had zero English skills. Unfortunately for them, there was nobody on the wait staff with any Mandarin skills and the restaurants menus were only available in English. We ultimately determined that they were Chinese because Ciara could recognize a few words, so Ben tried to use the Google Translate App to help them order lunch, and to suggest to them that they really needed to download a translation app to get through this cruise. Oddly enough, they seemed to have some sort of translation app on their Android Phones, but when Ben showed them the Mandarin translations, they seemed to have to process it with their own phones rather than read it directly off Ben’s iPhone screen. They kept saying they had “domestic roaming wifi” and “Thank You”. We tried to explain to them that on the ship, their cell phone roaming would not generally work and that they really needed to download and use Google Translate or similar translation app which an work off line with a downloaded Chinese to English translation pack. We ultimately used Google Translate to take a photo of the menu and translate it into Mandarin, and they took a picture of the translation, which allowed them to at least have some idea of what was on the menu. Ultimately, they ordered by pointing at things on our table and indicating to the waiter to bring them the same. They are going to have a pretty miserable time on the cruise with zero English skills and no translation device. Oddly enough, a bilingual multigenerational Chinese family was walking past our table and when we asked if they could help, they seemed really put out. Even though the Grandmother spoke with one of the women just long enough to say the women thought we had placed lunch orders for them, which we certainly did not, the Grandmother split after telling the women that we didn’t order for them and made no effort to help the two women. The lack of even any resemblance of kindness was a bit baffling. We suggested the ladies eat at the buffet upstairs where they can get their own food without menus for future meals and treated them with a Pina colada and strawberry daiquiri as we left and wished them a pleasant cruise.
There was an enrichment lecture on mapping of the New Zealand Coast by Russell Twomey who turned out to be a decent speaker. It is interesting how the Dutch, English and French all approached their explorations differently. The Dutch were the first to map this part of the world in 1642 when Abel Tasman first encountered Tasmania and then subsequently sailed along the west coast of New Zealand. At the time, legend was that there was a southern continent that was a paradise overflowing with gold and riches. But when all they encountered were ferocious half naked Maori warriors, they quickly lost interest in the area and beat their way back to Batavia (Modern day Jakarta in Indonesia, which was the center of the Dutch East Indies).
170 years later, James Cook successfully circumnavigated New Zealand, proving it was not the southern continent of legend. He had better success engaging the Maori in trade to the mutual benefit of the British Empire and the Maori tribes. The British got whale oil, timber, fresh water and fish while the Maori got beef, mutton, steel, muskets and gunpowder. They negotiated the Treaty of Waitangi which granted Maori the same rights as British Subjects. What the Maori didn’t realize at the time was British Subjects are not British Rulers, so eventually that lead to a series of wars and is still a source of tensions.
French explorer Jean-François Marie de Surville actually crossed paths with James Cook. They came within 31 miles of each other off the NW coast of the North Island, although they had not seen each other nor were they aware of each other’s presence. The French, however, due to a combination of scurvy and cultural insensitivities, did not fare so well with Maori tribes. A party of their officers were invited to dinner, unaware that they were the feast. That put an end to French interest in New Zealand for at least the next 60 years.
We did participate in the afternoon trivia, which proved pretty hard. We got beat by 3 points, but as they say down here, we weren’t playing for sheep stations. The winners got Princess wine stoppers, and we learned a few new trivia facts including Bob Clampett’s creation of Bugs Bunny in 1938, the fact that Brazil is the only country in South America to have been a monarchy, and that the Orient Express ran from Moscow all the way to Beijing, rather than just to Istanbul.
We continued to have trouble with the Princess Dine My Way App, which simply doesn’t work. On the Grand Princess and Coral Princess, the restaurant hostesses were gracious enough to set up reservations for us so that we could dine at the same time at the same table through the course of the cruise. Perhaps it is because there are twice as many passengers on the Royal Princess that the restaurant hostesses and managers refused to set up dining reservations for us and insisted we had to do that through the Dining Reservations phone number. Ben nearly had a stroke after calling that number, being put on hold for 5-10 minutes, and then being hung up on 3 times. When someone finally came on the line with the 4th call, that person really got an earful, but we finally succeeded in getting a regular seating assignment for the family.
The entrees selected for dinner were macadamia encrusted fish and a meat pie. The meat pie ended up being a little disappointing because it was made in small metal pots where the pastry crust was sucked deep into the pot, and there was just a small layer of meat and gravy inside. We were expecting at least some kind of veggies and a bit more filling to the pies. The fish was good though. Dinner service was actually faster than the lunch service so we were actually able to finish before the first Princess Theater Performance by Dale Burridge, an Australian singer who had roles in the Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. He had a good voice and interacted with the audience like a comedian, but took too many liberties with the tempo and beat for Ben’s tastes. He did get a standing ovation though.
In the Piazza, after the Princess Theatre performance, an acrobatic duet of Daniel and Kimberly performed some pretty amazing acrobatics on the marble Piazza floor without pads or safety gear. It was like a mini Cirque du Soleil routine.
We finished the night with a snack run. We were hoping to cash in on a Premium dessert, which is included in our Plus package, but when we got to the venue, they had put away all the toppings and weren’t able to build the desserts for us, so we had to settle for a couple of scoops of gelato. We did end up making a run to the buffet before it closed for soup. Ben had his traditional late night bowl of soup, Janet had a cheese and nut plate, Ciara had just tea, and Price made up for his lack of hearty meat pie filling with a bit more real meat.
The clocks go forward yet another hour tonight. We’ll have to set alarm clocks to try to make it to the morning trivia tomorrow.
