Day 65/138 2022/2023 Viking Neptune World Cruise. 2/3 sea days.
We definitely lose track of what day of the week it is on the ship! The weekend flows into the weekday and there seems to be no distinction from any other day, but today was Sunday Brunch Day on the Viking Neptune, so today it was somewhat easy to know that it was a Sunday.
Instead of going to brunch though, we decided first thing to listen to the lecture by Viking Resident Historian Robert J. McMahon on the “History of Indonesia”. Given we have never been to this part of the world before, we were fascinated by what we learned this morning. Some fast facts about Indonesia:
Population 267 million
3 times the size of the State of Texas
700+ languages
Median Age: 30 years
6 official religions
more people practise Islam in Indonesia than the entire Middle East
I’m getting very excited about visiting Indonesia. It’s definitely somewhere I’ve always wanted to go, but just never had the time!
We both went to the gym after watching the lecture on Indonesia in our stateroom. We thought the gym might not be too busy this morning with the Sunday brunch going on, and we were right. There were till quite a few people working out, but we were each able to grab a recumbent bike when we wanted to ride one.
Reading my Kindle while the Whoop app on my Iphone is tracking my fitness progress. I had my heart rate up over 152 today on the bike so it was definitely a good workout!
Team Trivia was a bust again today. I mean who actually knows all of the names of the Jackson 5 brothers? We got Michael, Tito and Jermaine but we did not know Marlon and Jackie. The questions are really so obscure. Today’s other confounding question was who was the first singer to be awarded a Gold Record? We thought it was someone who would have been on the Pop charts, but nope, it was Perry Como! Obscure questions that there is no way anyone knows the answers to.
We finally went to the Sunday brunch at around 1pm, after Trivia, but the brunch was being served on the 85F pool deck and had been going on since 9:30am this morning. I do not eat seafood and I’m afraid that is all I could smell in that temperature, which was turning my stomach, so I skipped the brunch and instead went straight to Calligraphy class.
Calligraphy class was interesting today because it was our 2nd to last class, and we were learning how to make Zoomorphic animals. These animals were used to decorate the 8th century type of writing we were learning in class.
Birds, snakes and dogs.
These animals were fairly easy to draw especially with the directions we were given, but I didn’t like any of these animals so I started googling zoomorphic creatures and found some I liked instead and started adding them to my sampler piece of writing that I did yesterday. The instructor came around to check on our progress with the zoomorphic creatures and horrors of horrors she discovered that I was doing 15th Century zoomorphics on my 8th century writing style! At which point I was told that it didn’t matter, we could do what we wanted, since it was going to be our work of art! Then I was told that if I really wanted to find more 8th Century zoomorphic creatures I should google ‘The Book of Kells’ in the British Museum. Anyway, it seemed like a bit of a wasted class today, since tomorrow we have to write our piece, colour it, and decorate it with these zoomorphic animals, I’m not sure there is enough time tomorrow in a 1 hour class to finish all of that, but I guess we will see.
Our shipbuilding team met up again today and we worked for two hours on putting the finishing touches to our ship. We just needed that one final push on getting the ship ready for tomorrow! We also did a very quick sea trial for our ship in the pool on the 7th deck, when most people were in the Port Talk for Indonesia.…and ”by jove, I think we’ve got it”! The ship floated! Lyle our engineer, did some thinking and rejigging of things last night and with his wife Linda’s help, the structure of our ship changed to be more stable. The ship looks fabulous and I can’t wait to share the photos with you tomorrow from the Ship Building Competition!
Tonight was our turn to host dinner and we chose to host at Manfredi’s in the private dining room! We had invited 5 other couples as the room holds 12 people and we had to change the time of the dinner to 6:30pm from 7pm, since the Viking Neptune‘s ‘Cavalcade of Stars’ (guest talent show) was being held at 9pm, and we all wanted to be finished dinner by 9pm in order to watch the talent show.
Richard and me hosting at Manfredi’s tonight. We had Australians, British, Canadians and Americans at the dinner. A very nice mix of friends we have made on the ship and a lively time was had by all! I had quickly made and decorated place cards for everyone this afternoon and had Richard take them down to set up the seating arrangements. We just barely finished our meal in time for the talent show at 9pm.
The ‘Cavalcade of Stars’ was a fantastic opportunity for guests on the ship to be able to showcase their talents and there are some really talented people on the ship! We were glad we came back to our cabin to watch the talent show on our tv, though because the ship is really rocking and rolling as I’m finishing up today’s blog. We are south of East Timor and experiencing some high winds and swells.
Dili is the capital of East Timor and we are somewhere in the pink area, below East Timor experiencing big swells!
Our clocks go back another hour tonight. We will be 14 hours different that Eastern Standard Time! Its obviously very difficult to figure out when is a good time to chat with anyone back home, but we still try and keep in touch, even if our replies are delayed!
We received our copy of tomorrow’s Viking Daily when we returned to our cabin after dinner. In the daily we saw that the Shipbuilding Competition is being held at 2pm tomorrow and we need to bring the ship down at 1:30pm to be put on display. Our final calligraphy class is also at 1:30pm tomorrow so I will try to go to the morning calligraphy class at 9:30am, to be able to finish my quote, otherwise I will not get the opportunity to write out the quote on good art paper and decorate it. Hopefully the morning class is not full!
Stay tuned for pictures tomorrow of our beautiful ship and to hear all about the Shipbuilding Competition! I can’t wait to show you the ship and fingers crossed our team’s entrant floats for 15 seconds!