It's getting cold out there

Feb 6

Another sea day. This one began as usual with breakfast at Sabattini's. Glen went in while I went to get my medicine and when I got back, or regular juices, including the water glass of cranberry I use to mix my medicine with were brought to the table as soon as we sat down. Today, the manager, Pedro (we think) from Portugal, chatted with us during breakfast. He has very good crew there, and it's always nice to eat there.

From there we went to the already in progress waltz lesson. Ben had already taught the basic, and was in the middle of teaching an outside turn (we think - I had a hard time following what he was teaching). Carol was there and tried to show me, but it didn't help much. He then taught a semi grapevine step that we thought was almost unleadable. After the lesson, we taught Carol and Eric a traveling grapevine and helped with their waltz generally.

We'd seen the menu for tonight, and nothing much appealed, so we decided this would be our Crown Grill night. I called the dine line and was given a 7pm reservation, a bit earlier than I would have liked. I read in our suite perk book that we should have a "dedicated maitre'd hotel to take care of our specialty dining preferred reservations". No info on how to contact this person was given, though. We asked the pursers, and they didn't know anything about it either.

We then decided to take our foxtrot routine practice sheets to the promenade deck. We hole punched them and tried to figure out a way to weigh them down. We ended up rubber banding them to my neck wallet. It was very windy on the deck, so we gave up and went to lunch.

On our way to lunch we ran into Beppi, the Maitre'd. We chatted for a moment, and I asked him about it. He didn't know either, but he did call and got the reservation moved to 8pm.

We had lunch with three very pleasent couples from England. There are a lot of brits on this trip.

After lunch there was a tango lesson taught by the performing couple. The turn out was huge, probably about 4 times the size of the normal ballroom class. They began with some concepts, including that the posture was like walking. Then they taught the basic, and invited everyone to the floor to try it. It was a zoo. I was assisting a couple of my CC friends, since I know the basic. When we joined as couples, it was too crowded to even do a basic, so we moved to the back of the lounge and practiced there.

Following that, we went for coffee in the patisserie, and I web surfed for a while.

After that, we dressed for dinner, and headed up to Skywakers to enjoy the lounge - we chatted with Terri and Rod for a while.

The band apparently did not join the ship in Stanley (no big surprise), so there were several times were there were breaks in the entertainment at the dance floors. We decided to bring down the ipod and splitter system. After setting up the bluetooth, we realized we didn't have the splitter. Fortunately, the Explorers lounge was still playing dance music - so we did some dancing there until the band started. Danced to them for a bit and then went to our dinner at the Steakhouse.

The dinner was very, very good - much better than the steakhouse experience on the Dawn. I started with a great Carpaccio and then we both tried their black and blue onion soup - so called because the crust is blue cheese. Very good and very rich. My filet mignon was perfect, as was Glen's porterhouse. Our desserts were also excellent, and we were well taken care of by our servers Anna and Goshia. During dinner the Maitre'd stopped by to say hello and to see the page from the suite perks - he was somewhat surprised to see it.

After dinner we stopped by the sock hop party, we arrived as they were having the twist contest, so we didn't have a chance to get picked for it. After that we did a couple of dances, but it was very crowed, so we left and went upstairs. Tomorrow is a big day - we arrive at our first Antarctic stop, Elephant Island tomorrow.