So here we are safely aboard The Queen Elizabeth. I haven't talked much about cruising in these blogs but feel that today gives me an opportunity as we are all at sea for the entire day with no disembarkations (what an ugly word that is for getting off a ship). So this blog is about part of our latest cruise and I will tell you about others in future blogs.
After all the hassle of airports, form filling, COVID tests etc, it was nice to know that for the next eight days all that nonsense is behind us. Or so we thought but not so. Health declarations for Jakarta, something else for Bali, details of the size of our inner leg for somewhere else (not really).
Of course, it's the Queen Elizabeth and not the QE 2. The old QE2 is static in Dubai and probably not far from the airport where we were a few days ago.
This Queen Elizabeth is like a throwback in time. All glitter and silver service and arty farty but very good food. I'm sure the little bit of a pig I ate last night would be pleased to know it was an animal of obvious discernible taste.
The following day we attended a number of lectures. We always do this on cruises. If they are good lectures they can be enthralling. If they are boring, you can always go to sleep and somehow the slight motion of the ship is very conducive to nodding off now and again.
There's only two things that make a good presentation
1/ Is the subject matter interesting and
2/ is the presenter engaging and do they know their subject and can they get it over in an entertaining way?
First up was a guy by the name of Daniel Thibault who was introduced as Daniel Teeboult and pointed out his name was pronounced Teebo.
That took me back to my days in the first year of grammar school when we learnt audio visual French. This involved the Thibaut family who were in various areas of a house or hotel, I forget which.
It was all "Bonjour Monsieur Thibaut"
"Bonjour Jacques."
Monsieur Thibaut is dans le deuxieme etage
Jacques is dans le troisieme etage.
And so it went on over numerous etages (floors to you and me). Didn't learn much French but did learn that most French houses have more than 12 floors.
Anyway, Mr Teebo's presentation on the history and culture of Jakarta was extremely well presented and engaging.
Then we had a presentation by General Sir Peter Cosgrove designed to scare people witless. Actually, it was designed to discuss the problems in the Indo Pacific from an Australian viewpoint.
Australian because he was formerly Governor General and Head of the Armed Forces. We were intrigued by the newsletter advertising the talk in the following words.
"The Indo Pacific from a placid pond to whirlpool in 10 years - how to stay afloat. Peter Cosgrove sticks close to his security knitting." You could say it had us in stitches, but we must have missed the knitting part of the talk.
His presentation was nowhere near as slick but very worrying as he likened a certain present-day dictator to another dictator from the 1930s and 40s. I'm not using names here as I don't want this blog to be banned, but I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.
He talked about the fears of nuclear war and the use of unmanned craft in both the air and sea. The world is in a very dangerous state at the present time and he brought this out admirably if somewhat bleakly.
Being fairly sociable people, we always ask to be part of the largest table possible for our evening meal when on a cruise. On this one it means a table of six. So we were pleased when we found out that the table we had been assigned was a six seater. Problem is nobody came to join us and so we sat on a six-person table all on our ownio.
Let's hope some others come to join us in subsequent nights.
My favourite was the table of 12 which we had on a river cruise in China. It was a table of many nations. We had four from New Zealand (although two of them came from Barnsley but had lived in NZ for over 30 years but still had strong Yorkshire accents), two from USA, two from Canada, two from the UK (that was us) and two from Australia. We had a wonderful time with them - there was lots of laughter and joking.
Anyway enough for today. Speak to you all again tomorrow as I continue to look back on our latest trip away.