Wednesday 25 December 2019

Silver Muse cruise, Day Two - Chrimbo in limbo

With thanks to Silversea for this cruise
We spent today pootling down the east coast of the South Island, at the grand speed of 8 knots, which even total landlubbers like me will immediately recognise is pretty slow. So it's been Christmas Day in Nowheresville, the coast barely visible in the cloud that made sea and sky uniformly grey - but the sea at least was calm (there were bigger waves in the swimming pool) and it was only mildly cool. Not bad weather for this latitude.
It was pretty lively inside - Santa arrived for pressies and selfies, to loud appreciation from the surprising number of families on board (children are not usually a Silversea thing) as well as the crew. People mainly just chilled during the day, hanging out in various lounges and in their cabins suites. The busiest place on board was, as usual, the Arts CafĂ©, which is deliberately fairly small with limited seating, so it's always in demand. It was just lovely to catch up there with server Miriam from Peru, who remembers and recognises us (and *cough* my dress) from the previous two cruises we've been on together - friendly, cheerful, TINY and cute.
It was a soporific sort of day, the ship just easing from side to side with minimal - and comforting-sounding - creaking. There was napping, there was delicious deep-fried camembert at the Grill on the pool deck under a heater, and then there was Team Trivia. We fronted up with hope in our hearts, and ended up placed in a not-very-prepossessing team of just four, with one younger Californian man and an older Scottish lady. But we did pretty well: 14/20. The winners got 19/20 but they were a team of eight, so if you calculate points per player, we were well in front... Questions included: What is DCL in numbers; who starred in Monster; and where is Barajas airport?

The evening brought the ritual Venetian Society gathering, where dinner-jacketed crew, from the captain down, met to schmooze with the many repeat guests on Silversea, and to celebrate those who (rich, greedy, habituated, unimaginative, addicted - or, of course! simply discerning) had accumulated big numbers of nights on board Silversea ships. The star tonight was 1131 - pretty impressive, but somewhat short of the 5000+ night record of someone on the last Silversea cruise we did. What really struck me were the several couples who had completed 78 cruises. That's pretty mind-blowing, I reckon. (We're up to 8 cruises ourselves, by the way, with a total of around 80 nights so we've some way to go before we reach the grand total of 100, which brings the coveted reward of free laundry. Though we will never qualify for that because - sorry, it's my job - we have only actually paid for 10 nights.)

We shared our dinner table with two other Kiwi couples tonight, and had a jolly time not having to explain anything we talked about - which included the green water in school pools 50-odd years ago; earthquakes; a hairdresser in common for a couple of us (in New Zealand we do two degrees of separation); and penguins. The others had traditional roast turkey but we were again sucked into ordering Maine lobster, and straight away regretted it, because NZ crayfish is infinitely superior.

The evening concluded with opera favourites, nicely performed by the show team of six. That was no match for Explorer Dream's cast of thousands - well, 50 - but it felt perfectly fine in the intimacy of the Venetian Lounge. And that was Christmas Day 2019. No complaints.

2 comments:

the queen said...

650? Charlize Theron. Annnnnd Agra?

Pamela Wade said...

Yes; yes; and no, Madrid apparently. 2/3 for us as well.

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