World Cruise 2020

This morning's lecture by Terry Bishop was all about big things that have happened on Valentine's Day - sort of fun.  The second was "Everything You Thought You Knew is Wrong".  Mitchell Symons debunked a lot of old wive's tales or urban myths.  I decided to skip the afternoon talk about Images of Ships on Early Maps by Chet Van Duzer.  Had enough of the sea monsters yesterday. We got a bit of good news from Captain Palm at noon.  We are cleared to arrive in Fiji (after skipping both of the Samoan islands) so we'll be in Lautoka a day earlier than scheduled at 7:00 am, but their health authorities will be doing a thorough inspection that is expected to take 6 hours!  If all is good, which I'm sure it will be, we'll be allowed to get off.  Then that night we will move over to Suva, Fiji for a full day.  After that, if all goes well, we'll be returned to our regularly scheduled programming, as they used to say on TV.  Fingers crossed.  T...

Back to our usual routine for sea days, but this time Jan and Tom met us for coffee and breakfast.  We are introducing them to some of the friends we've made and the staff we've come to know. This morning's lecture by Terry Bishop was about Rugby Union football, which is almost a religion in this part of the world according to Terry.  He explained a bit about how the game got here, how it is played and the rules, such as they are.  My favorite was when he showed the All Blacks from New Zealand who perform the Haka dance before every match to intimidate their opponents.  And then to teach it to us, he showed a film of a NZ dad teaching his kids.  You could hear a young one laughing loudly in the background.  Guess s/he wasn't intimidated by dad. We had a second lecture by Mitchell Symons, a British author (among other things) who was involved with both Trivial Pursuit and Who Wants to be a Millionaire since he researched and wrote many of the questions t...