January 8

OK, we may have solved the problem of composing a blog entry offline to save precious online minutes. One of my tablemates also blogs, and told me I can send an entry via email. Let's see.

There were a couple things I wanted to blog about. I wanted to brag about today's schedule, which offered a guided meditation, a Protestant worship service, a tai chi session, a knitting group, a talk about waves from a professor of oceanography, and a qi gong session, and those were just the activities I found interesting. They also publish a compendium of the current New York Times plus daily sudoku and crossword puzzles.

On the other hand, there are some things about this world that are already making me a bit cranky. They keep giving us things. Tonight my room steward Achmad handed me a brown canvas carryall imprinted with "2012 Grand World Voyage ms Amsterdam". I already had one the travel agency gave us, black with "2012 GRAND WORLD VOYAGE Cruise Specialists" embroidered on it in green and white. The Holland America one had inside it a world voyage sticking, a leather card case, a mini first aid kit, and a leather-bound journal to write in with world maps in the back and pages numbered Day 1, Day 2, etc., with "Voyage Log" at the top of each page. That last one, of course, completely won me over.

But I still needed to dispel a certain degree of emotional indigestion, so I went for a walk around the deck. Turns out after supper is a great time to walk the deck. Far fewer people, and the ones there are aren't grimly slogging out their daily exercise prescription. Instead they, like me, are enjoying the full moon on the ocean and the feeling of the sea wind in their hair and the sound of the ship's wake churning past the hull.

Well, there is another qi gong session tomorrow morning I'd like to wake up for, so I'm going to mail this off and see whether this way of posting works.