We started the day with our walking a mile round the decks but my goodness was it hot! JL then continued walking and went to the gym while I did stretch class. We went and had breakfast, then I was planning on going to line dancing as usual. However I decided to get out the bag of dirty washing ready for the afternoon's laundry (yay), and as I lent down to do so I somehow managed to whack my forehead on the hinge of the wardrobe! I screamed. JL was a very good first aider and got me a cold flannel to put on it, and then the box of plasters when it started bleeding. I took the largest one out of the packet, expecting the worst, but he laughed at me and chose the smallest possible one. When I was brave enough to actually look in the mirror, rather than the huge bump and gushing blood that I was expecting, there was just a tiny cut! But it hurt a lot more than that!! As I am such a wimp, and prone to fainting, I decided to give line dancing a miss and just start early writing the previous day's blog! JL went to find out about more drugs trafficking, then came back to check I was still alive!
By 11.00ish I had decided I was probably not going to bleed to death or faint, so I went down to the atrium to see the exhibition they had put on today called 'Aurora Uncovered'. There were lots of stalls giving information about the various departments of the ship, and crew members answering questions. I had a chat with some of the navigational team about their job - I'm not sure I'd like to do it - they have a 4 hour night shift, then 8 hours off, then a 4 hour day shift, then 8 hours off, so sleeping must be a nightmare! They all seemed to enjoy it though. They told me how their training involves learning morse code and semaphore and hand operated navigational equipment and the meanings of different distress flags (one of which means "my vessel is on fire and I am carrying explosive materials" - we joked that any rescue boat would probably speed off in the opposite direction if they saw this one!). But they said that in reality they have never needed to use any of these things as computers do all the work!
I also visited stalls by the house keeping team who were running a competition where passengers could try and beat the cabin stewards at making a bed (they couldn't!), and displaying their towel animals, the pastry chef who was making intricate roses out of icing, and the waiters who were doing napkin folding (my favourite!). I picked up a leaflet from the engineering team with various facts about the ship. I learnt that the water production plant can make 1280 tons of water a day, and that the ship consumes 330 litres of fuel per nautical mile (which if I've done my calculations correctly equates to about 0.014 miles per gallon!
We met for lunch and then it was laundry time! Again it was problem free, until I got to the end and there was a queue for the irons - JL will just have to have slightly crumpled shirts!
After that I made my second ever trip to the pool, and as the sun sets quite early in the time zone we are in, it was actually relatively cool with the sea breeze which was perfect for me and my wimpy skin! I swam 25 lengths of the pool (which sounds quite impressive until you learn that the pool is only about 8m long!). I then went to the gym to brave the unlabelled weights and do an exercise routine from the selection I had stored on my iPad before I left the UK. It was a good workout but had a number of exercises which involved standing on one leg - I don't think it was designed for wobbly cruise ships! Still, I did my best!
It was another formal night, but due to the big gash across my forehead I didn't bother getting particularly made up for it - tonight was definitely not a photo night!
We had an early dinner and then came back to the room to watch the port presentation about Rio. These presentations tend to be on at 10am which clashes with line dancing, so once we discovered they showed them on the TV too we gave up going to them live. Rio looks amazing - I'm very excited to be going there in a few days!
We had a bit of time before the evening's show so we went to one of the bars so I could have the mocktail of the day - Bananaberry Crush, with lots of blended strawberries and bananas - divine!
The show this evening was really two mini shows by two acts who will be doing longer shows later in the cruise. First was a Paraguyan chap called Francisco Yglesia who used to be in a group called Los Paraguayos - he played a Paraguayan harp and was accompanied by the orchestra playing some Latin American songs - it was interesting! He was followed by a group of British singers called Virtuosity who sang some songs from the musicals and other love songs.
We then went straight to bed, as we had to put the clocks forward an hour tonight (confusingly - it appears that although Recife and Rio are in theory in the same time zone, Rio has daylight savings time whereas Recife does not!) and I was going to miss that extra hour of sleep!
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