20240505 Sunday, May 5, 2024. Cinco de Mayo at Sea

 20240505 Sunday May 5, 2024: Cinco de Mayo at Sea

It sure was nice to sleep in a nice comfortable bed for a change.  The mattresses and bedding that Princess provides are among the most comfortable we have encountered in any hotel, and were vastly more comfortable than what we encountered in Mazatlán.  We slept like rocks.  We were able to get up in time to grab a quick breakfast in the buffet.  Perhaps it’s the layout of the buffet with multiple islands rather than a long single counter that seems to lessen congestion and improve efficiency of food distribution.  There also are many more 2 top tables than in some other buffet dining room set ups on ships we have been on so we had less trouble finding a place to sit.  

Signups for cruise long activities were this morning. Janet encountered a group of 4 who were looking for another pair to complete the maximum team size of 6, so we joined them.  There is a couple from Florida Butch and Jane, a single from Arizona Mike and a single from Florida John.  Mike had worked in Wenatchee for 6 years in the past. He is a retired medical technician.  

There was a 10AM regular trivia we attended to warm up for the first Progressive Trivia, which was scheduled for 2PM.  We sat next to the people who we had officially teamed up with for Progressive, but they seemed hesitant to team up for regular trivia, so we kept separate score sheets. At the end of the quiz, we had scored a win with 19/20 points, while they had scored 18 and 16 at their table, but we claimed the prizes (Caribbean Princess coasters) for all six.  

Later in the morning, there was a Logos trivia where we teamed up with Mike.  We won that with a perfect score, and got more coasters to add to our booty collection.  That was pretty good racking up two wins in one morning.  

Ben had a light lunch while Janet chose to save herself for afternoon tea.  You could hardly tell it was Cinco de Mayo but they did have churros at the buffet.  Oddly enough, in the evening, they would be replaced by a Ramen station.  There are no Mexican passengers and probably no Mexican crew either.  We then joined Mike for a Music through the Decades trivia.  While we do well from the 60’s through the 80’s, we do poorly on the 90’s, 2000’s and 2010’s.  Mike got a few of the latter, but there was one team with a perfect score that took the win easily.  It proved we weren’t invincible.  

The first Progressive Trivia got off to a rough start with a couple of bad if not entirely wrong questions. One was what do you call a 4 sided polygon with all unequal sides.  Their preferred answer was rhombus, but by definition, all 4 sides of a rhombus must be equal in length.  The correct answer is a scalene quadrilateral, and there was some definite grumbling about that.  

Two other poor questions involved geography.  One was which country is considered Scandinavian but is not located on the Scandinavian Peninsula.  The most common answer to this question is Denmark, but their preferred answer was Finland. However, the northwest part of Finland is considered to be on the Scandinavian Peninsula and linguistically and culturally, Finland is much closer to the Hungarians than Swedes, Norwegians and Danes.  The third bad question (wrong answer) was what country is home to Europe’s largest glacier.  Google says it’s Iceland, but their answer was Switzerland.  Now Switzerland does have the largest glacier in the Alps, but there are certainly larger glaciers in Norway and Iceland.  The Aletsch glacier in Switzerland is the largest in the Alps, measuring 171 sq km, but the Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland lies east of the mid Atlantic ridge which separates Europe from North America, and it measures over 8300 sq km.  This indicates a significant ignorance of European geography by the quiz maker.  A really clever person would have asked which European country lays claim to the second largest glacier in the world.  That answer would be Denmark, which owns Greenland, whose ice sheet is second only to Antarctica for glacial mass.

And one question was based entirely on a disproven urban myth that in the 1940’s museum workers accidentally dumped Cleopatra’s mummy into the Paris sewers.  In fact, Cleopatra’s burial site has never been found.

The Cruise Director’s staff who is in charge of the progressive trivia seems to have done a poor job vetting his questions, and also has not set it up very well.  He intends to only post progressive results once at the mid cruise point, and he does not award any prizes or recognition at all for winners of each session. He does not even survey who won each session so that people have at least some idea of which teams to look out for.  He just had everyone turn in their scored sheets without making a determination of what was the highest score for the day.  It also sounds like they are only giving out certificates of participation instead of any real sort of prize, so we’ll see how this plays out.  

We dropped in briefly to afternoon tea for Janet’s lunch and afternoon pick up.  It's good to note that the bakery goods on the Caribbean Princess are up to our usual high standards for Princess, which the Grand Princess seemed to fail utterly during our transpacific crossing last fall.  

Tea was followed with a Matinee show by vocalist and instrumentalist Ellora Lattin, who came across like a younger Taylor Swift at a much earlier stage of her career.  Her performance was energetic and entertaining but doing covers of other artists including Taylor Swift.  However, she did play a video clip she made in high school featuring a song she did write to allow her to do an off stage costume change, and that really cemented the early Taylor Swift vibe.

   

At last night’s dinner, we noticed a lot of vibration and noise at the table we were seated at, which was kind of in the middle of the dining room. On our way out, we spotted an empty table next to a room divider that looked to be potentially quieter, so we asked the head waiter if we could be reassigned and he obliged.  It turned out that the new table was much quieter and although the vibrations from the propeller shafts below still made a booming noise like a dance club on an adjacent floor, they didn’t shake this table at all.  The table we were at yesterday must have sat on a resonance node tuned to the propeller shaft’s vibrations.  Having a room divider wall next to us also eliminated 50% of the dining room noises, and also helped direct my voice to Janet so she could hear both me and the waiters better.  We had prime rib, which was quite good.

The Princess Theater showtime featured the wife of yesterday’s male vocalist.  Crystal Cimaglia did a Celine Dion tribute honoring Celine's long running residency in Las Vegas before she came down with stiff person syndrome.  Crystal did a good job of capturing some of Celine Dion’s mannerisms and could really belt out some power ballads, but on occasion was just a tiny bit pitchy.  And despite the potential for bad luck, she finished the show with Titanic’s My Heart Will Go On, complete with imagery of her being under water.  

We finished up the evening with comedian Ed Regine, who was featured on the Tonight Show 12 times, although we would guess that was about 20+ years earlier in his career.  His stand up was very much in the line of Red Skelton and Rodney Dangerfield, including some of the same very old by reliable marriage and relationship gags.  “My wife sees our neighbor kissing his wife goodbye every morning as he leaves for work, and she asks me why I don’t do that.  I say, why would I?  I barely know the woman.”

As we head east across the Atlantic, we will be crossing over many time zones, so tonight we lose an hour.