The Journal

 

 My life at sea.  
January 12. 2000

There is a very interesting shipboard rhythm...I love all the lectures  and I don't miss any of them.  We have about 5-6 university faculty aboard who spent a year developing a coordinated curriculum to include history, natural history, geography and geology, oceanography, culture of the many lands we area visiting, music and art, and so much more.  Yesterday, for instance we had a session on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," listening to a British actor reading it and talking about the symbolism, etc.  Today is was people of Polynesia with some great stuff on oceanography, deep sea creatures, whales, birds, etc. and of course, the mysterious statues of Easter Island and Thor Hyerdals' theories. Appropriate, because we will dock there in two days by zodiac (the ship is too big to dock there) and stay for two days.
      We have so many other sessions--yoga, reflexology, wellness clinic, poker players, bridge, a chorus of singers, creative writing, geneaeology, drawing and art of all sorts, and of course a number of exercise skills like power walking, stretch and tone, aerobics, etc--none of which I do. Instead I am doing ballroom dancing, an hour in the morning with all kinds of great dancing---rhumba, tango, meringue, samba, waltz, western swing, fox trot and jitterbug among them.  Yesterday, I managed to dance for three hours by the time morning, mid afternoon session, and 10-11 p.m. times were done.  There's a very nice guy from Milwaukee, of all places, who really likes to dance with me--and I haven't danced for 30 years, so I'm really loving every minute of it.  It's  definitely taken the place of tennis on my exercise agenda, along with ALWAYS walking the stairs, seven flights, often three or four times a day. I said, no elevators for the entire trip, and so far that's worked.
     The dining room is down three decks, the cinema is down seven decks (I do this several times a day sometimes) and a couple of my friends are up three decks on the aquamarine deck, and I drop by before dinner when invited for a drink, so, you can just imagine what I spend good times doing on sea days.
     
     So, at 10 p.m.--in 10 minutes someone is waiting for me to dance on rock
 and roll night!  Just wish I had brought more clothes to dance in.