Day 34:
After being stuck on buses with a zillion other people and visiting crowded tourist destinations, we were feeling DONE. We decided to order breakfast in and spend a relatively lazy morning hanging out on the balcony. I made some tea and took my breakfast outside, where I immediately put my feet up on the railing and sipped my tea with a contented sigh. I could actually feel myself unclench.
Day 35:
I spent most of today working on work stuff. It’s really hard, because the wifi on the ship is really spotty. Every time I’m in the dedicated lounge set aside for World Cruise folks, there’s always a queue of mostly old ladies complaining to the concierge about how they can’t get on the wifi. The concierge probably has a script for this situation, since it seems to happen 17 times an hour.
Day 36:
I spent all today doing work stuff while the Pirate stayed in our cabin, because he’s now in the throes of the same creeping crud a lot of folks on the ship have had. It’s annoying, because on every shore excursion, there have been people on the bus coughing like they’re bringing up their internal organs (we call them “Hacking Nancies”).
All of them seem oblivious to the fact that they’re making everyone else sick. One woman, after a truly wet, disgusting, loud round of coughs, looked at everyone defiantly and said “Well, I don’t feel bad.” It’s no surprise to us that about a week ago, the captain announced that there had been an increase in COVID cases. Suddenly we were no longer allowed to dish up our own food at the buffets, and they started being a lot more strict about making people use the hand sanitizer before going to the buffet.
Day 37:
I’m exhausted. For the last few days, we’ve had to set our clocks ahead an hour every day. Right now, we’re 14 time zones away from where we started in California. Today, I woke up at what was 4am just a few days ago. I hate being woken up early. It always feels like a punishment. I also dislike the feeling of sleeping all day and so missing out on events and getting things done. It’s weird to exist in a world where days are 23 hours long. I can hardly wait until the return journey, where our days will be 25 hours long, and I can get an extra hour of sleep without missing a thing.
Day 38:
Today, I was looking through the program and saw that there was a matinee of Gulliver by the theater troupe Box Tale Soup. I’d seen in the program that it was a puppet show, and I thought it would be fun. It turned out to be more than fun. It wasn’t just a puppet show – there were three live actors playing all the parts, with one guy being Gulliver and the two others both playing characters themselves and using some puppets that weren’t the normal person-in-a-box, hands-above-head kinds of puppets, nor were they marionettes. They were more like articulated dolls, manipulated by the cast members like puppets. The staging was really clever, and the original music (all done a cappella) was really lovely.
You can see their YouTube intro here: https://youtu.be/RWOGdubGyHE
The ship they’re talking about in the video is the ship we’re on right now. If you ever happen to be where they are, absolutely check them out!
Day 39:
Tomorrow is Penang, Malaysia, but now it’s my turn to be ill. I want to go on our field trip, since it’s to a spice garden and a butterfly farm. We’ll see how well that works out!
I Love You But Fuck Off 
Oh I am so loving this. Tell me how were the sea legs? I was told on a ferry twixt Patmos and Paros, in sign language cos I speak no Greek, by the most glamorous woman of a certain age, who was dressed all in black, with high heels and a shiny black patent belt around her hour glass waist, she conveyed to me, via her dumpy, aged, fiercely Greek maid, that I was only to look at the horizon. So I wonder about a rough sea and a bigger boat.
The worst part of the trip was the North Atlantic and Bay of Biscay right at the beginning of the trip. But this isn’t just a cruise ship – it’s an ocean liner. That means that it has a heavier hull than other ships, so is more stable in those rough seas. Walking around the ship wasn’t really difficult, although most people made use of the handrails in every corridor. Using the treadmills in the gym, one had to hang onto the handrails on those as well. But since we got through the Bay of Biscay, the sea has been completely calm. Looking out the windows or off the deck, it’s easy to believe I’m in a building on land watching the sea go by. There have been a couple of times on land that I’ve felt like the ground was swaying, but never for long.