Arrival in Bangkok

This is my first real blog of the cruise and I am hoping it will be much easier for you to see without having to download pictures.

fter enduring 16½ hours in the air with the addition of 11 more hours of layover and ground transit time, we finally arrived at the ship. We had flown Cathay Pacific and were very pleased with the food served and the flight was so quiet that even I was able to catch a bit of sleep. They had a complete selection of current releases and older films for viewing on our individual screens. I was able to see Crazy Heart, Up in the Air, Grand Torino and an English film called An Education. I missed seeing The Blind Side but that is being shown on the ship today.

We got to our cabin and then totally crashed. Bill slept while I went to wait in line to make sure the Maitre de had received my email requesting a corner table for Bill to be able to hear at meals. That taken care of, it was time for the Lifeboat Muster. We stayed up long enough to have a bowl of soup and a salad and then went to bed for the night. Unfortunately, we didn’t take the time to get our cruise cards punched so that Bill could wear his to bed around his neck on his lanyard. I had taken a sleeping pill so that the jetlag wouldn’t wake me during the night. So, when Bill locked himself out of the room while trying to go to the bathroom, I never heard him banging on the door to get back in. He had to go down to the purser’s counter at 2 AM in his underwear. He says, “You know, there are a lot of people around at the hour and they were all snickering behind their hands.”

This morning, I had an early morning leaders meeting over breakfast at 8 AM, but immediately after that I went down and got a hole punched in the first of the two cards he now has. So now he has one card to use during the day and another to put around his neck at night. Hopefully, we won’t have a reoccurrence of that event.

In a few minutes, we will have a Meet & Greet for our Cruise Critic group where we will meet the folks we have been conversing with for the last 6 months. It will be a chance also to have some of the 51 folks on the tour to pay me the remainder of the money I owe them and for me to pay for the tours that others have arranged in other ports. We also will get our group buttons and shirts, cups or whatever we have already purchased with the logo on it. I didn’t buy anything else because their official color is red and I hate the color red.

Then this afternoon, from 2-4 someone from Hawaii has offered to start teaching me how to play Mah Jung. The ship has set aside one of the dining rooms for us to use each sea day for those 2 hours.

Tonight is formal night with the Champagne Waterfall, so we will be in the laundry room this afternoon trying to get wrinkles out of Bill’s suit & my velvet pants and formal top.

And hopefully, we will get our act together to get things unpacked. The first out will be all our warm weather clothes. Yesterday it was 38 degrees C., whatever that is, and very, very humid. The air conditioning doesn’t seem to be up to really cooling everything off.

Tomorrow is our first port, Singapore. We will be going to the Botanical Garden with another couple and then will decide what happens after that.

Barb