At Sea

 We're on our way to Copenhagen, which is a welcome day of ease.  Hard to believe that it's the mid-point of our cruise already.  

We turned the clocks back one hour so we were able to sleep in a bit longer today and we just grabbed a quick breakfast at the Coffee Connection.  I finally had a bagel and it was really good, which could be dangerous.  I'm doing so well at having no breads (or almost no breads) at breakfast and lunch, but this could become more of a challenge now.  This morning was the second lecture by the NBC director.  I sat by the door in case I wanted to make a quick getaway but ended up staying for the whole thing.  He explained a bit about what a producer and a director actually do, which was interesting.  And showed examples of the different types of cameras used for different shots.

Lunch at La Veranda was an Asian spread and everything I had was really good.  Hope they do that again soon.  This afternoon was Andrea's last lecture on "Impressionism and Music and Art" which was interesting and educational again, as always.  She is getting off tomorrow on the changeover day in Copenhagen and will be missed.  But we should be getting Terry Bishop back again and I'm very happy about that.  Trivia was a complete bust again.  Talked ourselves out of David Niven as playing James Bond in the 1967 version of Casino Royale and who knew that a parliament is a group of owls?  But I did contribute "We are not Alone" as the tag line for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and blue/white as the colors of the BMW logo.

In the comments, someone asked about Covid on board.  Sorry whoever that was; I just saw it.  We know several people personally who have had it and have heard of a fair number of others who also have had it, none had a serious case as far as we've heard.  We've heard conflicting reports on how long you have to quarantine.  At first we heard it depended on whose waters we were in, so it could be 10 days.  But others have only been quarantined for 5 days assuming they test negative at that point.  If you are identified as a close contact, you are tested for a few days and asked to wear a mask for a number of days.  I mentioned we had one death (the husband of Carl from my trivia team) but that was from a heart attack.  And apparently one couple got off in Helsinki so that they could return home for medical care for the wife who was experiencing deteriorating neurological symptoms.  Very few people are regularly wearing masks, except for the crew who are always masked.  We haven't bothered since we feel that being unmasked in the coffee shop or restaurant sort of defeats the purpose.  We have occasionally worn them in enclosed places on tours if there were "others" there also.  But we don't bother on buses since it's all cruise passengers.  We certainly have exposure when we get new passengers at the turnaround ports, like Copenhagen tomorrow, but again, it seems to be a risk that is almost impossible to mitigate to a meaningful point.  

Maureen and Jim are getting off tomorrow so we all had a last dinner tonight.  They live in Silver Spring, MD so perhaps we'll see them again on a cruise or somewhere.  The seas have been very calm pretty much since we left the North Atlantic and we can't complain about the weather either.  The next segment is mostly in Norway so we'll see if that continues.  We came back to the cabin tonight to find another nice gift from Regent of a fold away blanket.  Might come in handy in Norway.

We decided not to see the second performance by the violinist tonight.  Off to dreamland early.