20250915 Monday, September 15, 2025. Another Day at Sea

20250915 Monday, September 15, 2025. Another Day at Sea

There was brilliant sunshine and blue skies outside with a temperature of 92º at 8am and 80% humidity when we pulled back our curtains this morning.  There are fishing vessels prominently displaying multiple huge red Chinese flags and also Chinese coast guard vessels patrolling the Yellow Sea, which extends between the northeastern Chinese coast and the Korean Peninsula.

We got into Janet’s Viking Birthday cake for breakfast and discovered it to be made of strawberry and coconut mousses covered with a chocolate gel that made it look like a Neapolitan ice cream cake.  It was actually quite light and not too sweet.  Since the refrigerator in our stateroom is working properly, there were no issues with disappearing or spoiling birthday cakes.

We did also make a quick tour of the World Cafe buffet so that Ben could get his cappuccino fix and some yogurt.  It’s interesting that on the Chinese mainland, the Chinese branded yogurts are all made to be drunken with a straw forcefully stabbed through the plastic and foil top.  The containers are cardboard and the top seal is very hard to separate.  However, on the ship, they don’t have the plastic straws, so you have to use a knife to cut an opening in the top to allow it to be peeled off.

Fortunately, they also have a Greek yogurt in a plastic cup with a foil top that can be easily peeled off.  We also stopped at Mamsen’s to get one of Mamsen’s famous waffles with the Norwegian brown cheese and fresh berries.  This was the first time we have gone for those waffles on this cruise.

We attended a lecture on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.  It was an interesting treatise on this timeless work of literature dating from the 6th Century.  It is still required reading at the Naval Warfare College today, and has been influential in not only military conflicts, but also business strategies today.

As the lecturer pointed out the major strategies outlined in the book, and how they have played out in both ancient and modern warfare, it is clear that the arrogance and small mindedness of our current leaders will inevitably lead the US into humiliation in any major military conflict.

The Aquavit Terrace had a steamed Dim Sum special lunch which we tried.  Almost everything on offer has been offered on the steam tables in side the World Cafe buffet at some point except for BBQ pork bao, which were good.  We had those at the Andaz hotel buffet, and they are a favorite.  They also had fresh walnut buns, which are hard to beat when fresh out of the steamer.

Our trivia team converged at 12:15pm for the third trivia of the cruise.  This one had a much harder set of questions, but we were one of only a handful of teams that knew what all 5 letters of LASER stand for.  But we ended up losing by 2 points.  We didn’t know that the losers in the Tour de France and Iditarod races are given red lanterns, and also didn’t know how many pieces are in a standard double six dominoes set.  And we got tricked by the question what is the closest star to us.  It is the Sun, of course, not Proxima Centauri.  The team that beat us was the team that had won the very first trivia, held when we were all on the overland excursion, so they were returning champions.

After trivia, we tried our hands at something called jam painting.  This is a Chinese art form where you use jam, like what you would spread on toast, to make art by painting it on a ceramic surface.  This can be done to decorate a plate for an exquisite presentation, or in our case, just for fun.  Our jam wasn’t particularly designed to be edible, but no harm would come to you if you simply licked your design off the plate.  We created depictions of bamboo on ceramic tiles with the jam, piping onto the tiles, and then spreading it with the edge of a card and using a fine brush to add leaves. This was perhaps a little more successful than our attempts at Chinese calligraphy, but the tiles will weigh a bit more than the calligraphy paper in our suitcases.

We attended a future cruise talk on the Nile and Mekong river cruises. It was fun to relive the Nile cruise, and then learn of the idiosyncrasies of the Mekong cruise.  There is no developed cruise port at the embarkation point on the Mekong river.  The ship just nudges itself into the mud on the river bank, drops a boarding gangplank, and passengers have to trudge through the muddy river bank to climb aboard.  They were trying to warn anyone with mobility issues that this is not the cruise to sign up for.  We hope they give passengers galoshes to don before trudging through the mud.  They also emphasized that the weather is either HOT or HOTTER, and always HUMID.  It sounds like a real adventure, although it will require a 5 hour bus ride from Angkor Watt to where the river cruise ship will embark passengers.

  
We had our interest in this itinerary peaked because they offer it over Christmas, but it is a 15 day itinerary, so it is too long for our kids to be able to join us on.  Later, we went down to talk with the future cruise desk and found out they offer multiple sailings, but after January 1, 2027 the fare goes up by nearly $2000 per person.  We booked it for ourselves in November 2026, but after we returned to the stateroom, we realized we will just be coming back from a river cruise in Portugal then, and will also have to prepare for whatever we have planned for Christmas with the family, so we may end up canceling the reservation.  We will need some time to get over jet lag from returning from Europe, and if Vietnamese visa requirements change again (highly likely due to Trump’s antagonistic and inflammatory foreign policies), we probably won’t have time to apply for and get formal visas.

We enjoyed a bit of tea in the Wintergarden in the afternoon with Janet enjoying a Mango infused green tea and Ben having a “gunpowder” tea that is only slightly oxidized and comes in the form of tiny rolled up balls.  Contrary to the name, it didn’t taste or smell at all like gunpowder.  

The port talk revealed that Qingdao is actually the more modern Pinyin spelling of what was originally Romanized as Tsingtao by the Germans.  So Tsingtao is essentially German for Qingdao.  Qingdao is another example of western imperialist influence on China.  In 1897 the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm’s naval forces laid claim to Qingdao, taking it from the Qing Dynasty by force and justifying doing so by clauses under the terms that ended the Opium Wars.  The Germans were given a 99 year lease, similar to how Hong Kong was given to the British.  The Germans and British expatriates saw the need for a supply of beer for the German sailors, so they started a brewery adhering to the German beer purity law to create a German Beer in China.  That beer, Tsingtao, has been produced in Qingdao since 1903.  

Over the many years, supply chains have brought barley from Canada, yeast from Australia and hops from Western China in to the production process, and eventually rice was added into the ingredients to make this a truly Chinese beer because rice is not allowed under the German beer purity laws.

Qingdao did change hands a couple of times between the Germans and Japanese before finally ending up back in Chinese hands.  The Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI, granted German concessions in China to Japan, rather than returning them to China.  This lead to massive protests which started May 4, 1919 which lead China to refuse to sign the treaty, and instead negotiate a separate treaty which in 1921 returned Qingdao to China.  This was apparently accompanied by a huge payment by the Qing Dynasty to Japan.  But that didn’t last too long because in 1938, Japan reoccupied Qingdao.  Eventually, Japan’s surrender to Allied forces at the end of WWII ended China’s Japanese occupation.  

There are plenty of German and European architectural influences in Qingdao.  And the Tsingtao brewery museum is one of its top tourism attractions, drawing over 3million visitors a year.

We had dinner in the Restaurant with Janet opting for the excellent Viking steak and fries, and Ben choosing the veal tenderloins, which were also excellent.

Veal Tenderloin

Milk Chocolate Rochier

After dinner we were entertained by a troupe of Shaolin Kung Fu students who came onto the ship in Shanghai.  They are mostly middle school to high school aged boys. They put on an exciting exhibition of Kung Fu including some examples of multicombatant fighting and the use of several different kinds of weapons.  With all the martial arts scenes in movies, it seems like we’ve been over saturated with highly choreographed and edited fight scenes, but these kids showed their stuff.  There were also a few unusual tricks.  

A pair of them shattered iron bars on their skulls, and one of them was able to throw a nail through a pane of glass to pop a balloon on the other side.  The glass had a bullseye in it like you might get on your windshield from a hard rock strike.  Ben was a little concerned about the possibility of iron or glass shards causing injury, but nobody had any sort of eye protection, and nobody swept the stage for nails or glass fragments after the balloon popping demonstration. 

One of the last demonstrations was a guy who took the lying on a bed of nails trick to a new level, laying on 4 spears- laying prone with one spear under each foot and one spear on each side of his chest.  He literally has pectoralis muscles of steel.

The ship will arrive in Qingdao early tomorrow morning and will overnight there.  We have been forewarned that the new international cruise terminal there will take 20 minutes to walk through before we can get to where buses can pick us up.