Saturday March 30^th

At Sea in the Red Sea

We were awakened in the middle of the night by a text message from our phone company welcoming us to Djibouti and informing us that our current plan does not cover us there. Well I guess we must be quite close to the shore now.

When we woke up Brian’s Apple watch and his phone gave the time as 7:00 AM and my good old Swatch watch gave the time as 8:00, which was the correct time according to the ship’s TV channel. No doubt we must still be close enough to Djibouti for our electronics to get the time zone wrong. Thank goodness for old-fashioned technology.

The lecture schedule was jam packed again today – and we seemed to spend the whole day in Illusions, with only a very quick stop at the Kings Court to get lunch and to the Royal Court Theatre to watch the 4 lovely ladies of Ida perform a matinee show.

I did manage to squeeze in choir practice. I was determined not to participate in the choir this time, as choir practice takes up so much time. However, as we will be singing Jerusalem just before we arrive back on England’s green and pleasant land, I simply could not miss it. The other singers are all very good, and I think we sound quite professional already. Our leader made a request to the sopranos to try to not sound so posh and BBC like, which I though was a bit unfair as that’s probably how they were trained. However, I must say when you are singing “Drunken Sailor” posh is a bit out of place. The altos had no problem with not sounding posh.

During the afternoon we stopped briefly to unload the weapons we had taken on board prior to our passage through the pirate zone. No need for weapons now as we are sailing in peaceful waters again.

It was 4:30 by the time we were done with the talks, and that gave us enough time to head to the Terrace Pool for a swim and some serious sunbathing. Again, it was not crowded and we were able to sit in our favorite spot near the bar. The sea is very calm with just enough of a gentle breeze to cool you off. We again discussed how a Caribbean cruise would be fun, but alas not this year as our niece is getting married on New Years Day. Maybe next year.

Geoff and Heather did join us for dinner. They certainly are an interesting couple. Heather talked about her job teaching English in Syria, and Geoff told us, amongst other stories, about how one of the wax works figures from the Edinburgh Dungeon (with which he has some association) was in his conservatory, and how passengers on a passing train called in the police because they thought he had a dead body residing in the conservatory. Nothing like that ever happens to us, but then we don’t live near to a railway line.

The show tonight was “Rhythm of the Night”. We had seen it before, but with the current 4 lead singers it was even better than previously. They are all so talented and so full of energy; I was actually quite exhausted at the end of the show. No Commodore Club for us tonight. To think that they had done a full rehearsal and 2 shows that night was amazing. I hope they do the show again on the crossing. We headed back to our cabin singing away; the music was quite contagious.