position at 7:30am: N15 53.58 latitude E119 05.501 longitude
(in the China Sea about 560 E of Hong Kong, our next port)
temperature: 81F, 91% humidity, mostly sunny
distance since FLL: 19,952 miles
The Filippine folk dancing last night was exceptional. It was the National Folk Dance Company of the Philippines and was definitely a class act. They were even better than Debbie when they did the bamboo pole dance.
The ship had lots of visitors yesterday when we were in Manila. A lot of the crew is Filippino and the crew members were allowed to have their families visit the ship so they could see it. Lots of children, wives and parents onboard. There were a lot of smiling faces about. It took some conjoling and arm twisting by the ship to get approval for the family visits. The story we heard was that the port officials just would not allow it. But in the end, it was worked out.
Clay's morning walk went well. He did three miles at about 80% of his pre-injury pace. It was enough of an improvement that his fellow walkers commented on it.
This morning we are seeing ship movement due to swells. The ship is lurching back and forth but not anything close to the Australian Bight Standard Measure. The captain in his 9 am vords of visdom said he expected the swells to increase through the day. Debbie was able to do two exercise classes before 11 am. After that, the ship movement made her take to the bed for the rest of the day, skipping lunch and her afternoon classes. Freddie, in his noon announcements from the bridge, put the swells at 6-8 feet. Clay ate lunch at a Chinese buffet that was given on the pool deck. The ice cream flavors for the day were Vanilla and Malt Whoppers. It is the first time we have seen the Malt Whoppers ice cream. When Debbie learned this, she dispatched Clay back up to the pool deck to bring her a Malt Whoppers serving back to the room.
Clay tried to sign us up for a walking tour for the second day of our first stop in Vietnam on our next segment in about 5 days. He was told at the tour desk that we would have to wait-list as the tour was sold out. Later in day, we got a copy of our bill to date delivered to our room. We get one at the end of each segment just to keep track of things. On this bill, they have already included the walking tour we were wait-listed for, so we assume we have cleared the wait-list.
Theafternoon and evening was spent reading up on Hong Kong and trying to lay out a plan for our 2.5 day visit. We should be there at 1 pm tomorrow if we make the published schedule. This evening is a formal night, but we skipped it, choosing instead to eat up in the always casual LaVaranda restaurant. Debbie had fillet mignon and Clay had a veal chop from the 'steakhouse' menu now being served in LaVaranda.
Hong Kong is the end of a segment so people will be leaving the shipday after tomorrow. Roger Condon in his port talk today mentioned we would get about 225 new passengers coming aboard in Hong Kong. This 225 plus the 275 world cruise passengers would bring the next segment's passenger count to about 500.
Sorry no pictures today. So far, we have 11 CDs full of pictures but we can only post a few online at this point. (This means we have used 22 of the 100 CDs we bought in Acapulco.) We are just under half way through our trip.
