January 2 - Happy New Year from somewhere in the North Pacific

Once again I’m behind in writing.  I’ve got no excuses. We’re in our third day at sea with 6 more to come.  The seas have been consistently rocky, but not too bad.  Evidently that’s going to change overnight and get worse.  

On December 31 there were a lot of squalls off to our starboard side and after one of them I managed to get a couple of pictures of a rainbow which was very close to the ship.  It was actually briefly a double and you might be able to glimpse it in these photos.

The New Year’s Eve party was out on deck around the pool.  Last year it was inside in the Grand Salon and I liked it much better because it was very muggy and humid outside .  I went up to the Observation Bar with some friends and that’s where we stayed for most of the evening.  We had our twelve grapes at midnight so hopefully 2026 will be a good year.  It was a nice evening but I was feeling a little melancholy.  For some reason this year more than the last few I have been missing Al more than ever. These are a couple of photos of staff who joined in on the festivities.

New Year’s Day and today have just been typical sea days.  I’ve played trivia and listened to a few lectures on taking better photos and the experiences of a former war correspondent.  I went down to the Club last night and actually did dance a few times.  And of course I seem to go from meal to meal and bar to bar with friends.  I’ve made some new good friends and we talk and laugh a lot which is good.  We also gossip about some of our fellow passengers.  As on every cruise there are a few characters who I try to avoid.

I don’t think I’ve written about them before and since I haven’t got much else to write about I think I’ll tell you about a few of them.  We have one man who is a 6’4” German who is probably the most narcissistic person I’ve ever met.  There’s a big group of Seabourn people on a Facebook group and this guy, Ullie (a nickname) every day posts lots of photos on the forum.  They always include at least one selfie which he takes standing in front of the mirror on his closet door and showing him in his evening’s outfit.  In fact yesterday he posted ones of both his daytime and evening attire.  I was at a hosted table one evening with Ullie where he was pontificating about something and no one could get a word in edgewise.  Our host was a Bulgarian chief engineer and to try to get the rest of us a chance to converse I asked the officer if Bulgarian was a Slavic language.  Big mistake!  Ullie proceeded to give the table a lecture on the history of migration from Asia to Europe covering thousands of years.  I tuned a lot of it out but I did catch along the way something about an Egyptian queen who should have helped Romans but couldn’t because there was a volcano erupting somewhere in Africa (don’t know how that fit in).  There was also something about the Turks being stopped at the gates of Vienna.  How this all tied in to my question I’m not sure.  By the way Bulgarian is a slavic language.

At the same table there was an American who looked like he could have appeared in “The Walking Dead.”  I asked where he was from and he told me he used to live in Charleston, SC but didn’t want to live there anymore so he is on his way to live in Vietnam, Da Nang specifically.  I asked if he had been there before and he proceeded to tell me that 1) he’d never been to anywhere in Southeast Asia, 2) he doesn’t speak Vietnamese and 3) he knows no one at all in Vietnam.  Maybe that seems normal to some people but I found it strange to be moving somewhere given those facts.  He’s made friends with another of my shipmates that I’ve dined with once and don’t plan to again.  She’s a bulimic from Belgium whose late husband was evidently a Michelin starred chef.  The night I dined at the same table she did it took her 15 minutes to place her order because she questioned the poor waiter about the way in which each item was prepared.  Fortunately we have choices of where and with whom we eat unlike when Al and I first began cruising when you had assigned tables and seating times.

So I’ve rambled on enough and I’ll conclude this.  We’ve been getting extra hours of sleep all along the way as we set the clock back.  Tonight we do the opposite.  When I go to bed tonight on Friday, January 2 I will wake up in the morning on Sunday, January 4.  We’ll cross the International Date Line and lose a day.  The captain on his noon announcement told us that of the approximately total 900 passengers and crew on the ship, not a single one has a January 3rd birthday, so no one will be cheated out of a celebration.  So far now, aloha.