First itinerary revision

I just got email saying that for "operational reasons", the first day of the six-day China excursion I'm signed up for has changed. A museum in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, that we were originally scheduled to see before lunch, we now see after lunch; a temple set atop a cliff near a famous surf beach and attended by a family of macaque monkeys, is no longer to be visited, and we're now on our own for dinner, for which we will have an hour inside the airport. I have to wonder whether Balinese airport food is any better than American airport food. I suspect not.

I know sometimes changes are necessary, and I trust Holland-America to protect us from untoward occurrences. But "operational reasons"? Come on, people, inquiring minds want to know. Is there a plague of crazed komodo dragons loose on Bali? Is the surf beach overrun by predatory Balinese surfers who have started kidnapping tourists and holding them for ransom, to be paid in boards and ganja? Has the tour guide broken up with his vindictive long-time girlfriend, who manages the temple macaques, to the extent that macaques can be managed?

This is a world cruise! We have signed on for adventure! "Operational reasons" is something we can get from any bureaucrat at the local city hall. We want details! (And if it's something boring like, "In the past, we've found that we overloaded that first day, something had to be cut, we're sorry about the macaques, but we need to be realistic here," you might consider making something up. We'll go where you tell us, we might as well have some imaginary romance to chew on with our airport food.)

One down, one to go

OK, I've got one suitcase packed, closed, labeled with the yellow plastic Cruise Specialists luggage tag and the red paper ms Amsterdam tag and the white paper FedEx tag with collections of laser-readable black lines that will bring my suitcase from my condo in Portland to my cabin on board the Amsterdam. Or so I hope. (Can I survive for four months with the one set of clothes I wear on the plane to Florida if all these labels fail? Might make doing laundry a bit weird, though I could probably wear my terrycloth onboard robe and borrow flipflops from a neighbor.)

OK, so you are probably wondering why there is a stuffed penguin atop this blog entry.

My daughter Anne and her friend El came down to Portland from Seattle this weekend for a Merry Christmas and Bon Voyage visit. El suggested that I might want to get a garden gnome to take along on my cruise so I can take pictures of him in all the exotic locales I'll be visiting to prove that any photos I publish aren't just postcards or stock shots cribbed from the Internet. "Garden Gnome" didn't speak to my condition, but then I remembered the penguin.

The individual you see in the picture has been with me since freshman year of college -- 1961. He is the sole survivor of a set of three or four that I acquired for the inscrutable sort of reason young women acquire such things. One of them I named after a young man I was secretly in like with -- it felt like "in love" at the time -- but I gave that one away. The other ones disappeared as I moved from college to marriage to motherhood to career. But this one has stayed with me throughout and so has probably earned a world cruise for loyalty if for no other reason.

He had not, however, earned a name until this morning, when Anne asked what his name is. He is now officially Dmitri. Anne objected that there are no penguins in Russia, but on that point she's wrong, at least in a literary sense and if you're willing to count Ukraine as part of Russia. I recently read a book called Death and the Penguin by a modern Ukrainian author named Andrei Kurkov. Good book, even in translation. That penguin (fictional, but very clearly personified) lived with the hero of the book after a zoo in Kiev closed down and gave away its animals to anyone who wanted them. He (the penguin, not the hero) became a popular fixture at the funerals of (fictional) Ukrainian mafiosi. 


We'll pretend I'm not naming my penguin for my favorite Siberian baritone, because I am clearly beyond such adolescent behavior. 


You can look forward to seeing him (the penguin, not the baritone) admiring famous sites around the world and various locations on board the good ship ms Amsterdam over the next several months.

I only hope he's strong enough to complete the trip with me. After 40 years, some of his felt is a tad moth-eaten, and I'm not sure how the salt sea air will affect him.

inspiration from Maureen Dowd

I don't usually like Maureen Dowd's NY Times columns. She has an annoying tendency to string smart-aleck phrases together without having any actual interesting thought tying them together. But in today's column, she talks about the values of silence. And the reason this is relevant to my upcoming cruise (30 days, 3 hours, 9 minutes, 11 seconds from now) is that the cruise is going to require me to fast from electronica. No more constant smart-phone/tablet/laptop distractions, which in my "normal" life take up hours and hours of my days. Access to the internet will be severely rationed by its cost, slowness, and relative inconvenience -- no wireless connectivity in my cabin, and, after schlepping the tablet up to the public rooms where I can connect, each minute will set me back at least $0.25. I've pre-ordered 1000 minutes, which seems like a lot, but the cruise lasts 112 days, making that less than 10 minutes a day. I'll have time to check email and post any blog entries I've written offline, then I must re-engage with external reality. And my choice of external reality will tend to be, not the ongoing carnival of bingo games and stage shows the cruise provides for its clientele, but sitting watching the ocean going by, walking around the promenade deck, reading books about the sea, or knitting. At least I hope it will. I expect to return transformed.

paperwork in place

I've now got my passport with spiffy new visas for Brazil, India, and China. It cost an arm and a leg -- over $700 going through the visa service. But there they are. I can bop in and out of India until October 2016, China until October 2012, Brazil until -- yikes! only 90 days from last Monday! OK, that's nine days until the end of November, plus 31 days of December, 40 days, plus 31 days of January is 71 days. Whew! I'm OK, we'll be done with Brazil by January 20 unless I get kidnapped by curare-dart-wielding tribesmen from the depths of the Amazonian rainforest. Even then I'll be OK as long as the ransom gets paid before February 20 or so. I wonder why Brazil is so stingy.

And the welcome packet from Holland America arrived last weekend with the information that there will be 18 formal nights, about one a week, plus offers for beverage and spa and internet packages. I've already ordered a glass of "house wine" with each dinner, 1000 minutes of internet access, and the cheapest of the photo packages -- I am a dunce at photography, and if I want to remember how I looked on this cruise, I'm going to have to pay for someone else's version of me. And there's a deal whereby I get a liter of water delivered to my cabin every morning. Probably a good idea, since we'll be in hot, humid tropical places most of the time. I can put my liter of water in my knitting bag with my tablet* as I wander about the ship looking for a place to sit where I can watch the ocean go by. **

*Yes, I've ordered a tablet, a Toshiba Thrive. My friend Nanette got one, and just twiddling with it for a few minutes was all it took to overcome my feeble resistance. It arrives late next week. I had all sorts of very valid rational reasons not to get one. But Nanette's was all shiny and colorful and had all these neat apps on it and I swear I was a grownup once, I really was, I did deferred gratification and everything, I really did. I have the image of the fallen woman crooning, "I was not always as you see me now."

**It will, of course, be nothing like this when I'm actually on the ship. There are people who plan out their adventures to the last detail, then go and march triumphantly through their plans, point by point, and return having done exactly what they expected to do. That sounds to me like a total waste of time. Why have an adventure if you already know how it's going to turn out?

letter from the Captain

Yesterday I got a letter from the captain -- from two captains, actually.

The man who has been captain on Holland-America's world cruises for several years is unable to continue this year due to family medical situations. He wrote to apologize to those with whom he has sailed before, saying how much he had looked forward to sailing with them again and wishing them a good voyage.

The man who will be captain wrote to say how delighted he is to be sailing with us and how much he's looking forward to, yada, yada, yada.

But the exciting thing is the information about the new captain. He's British, for one thing, but the really cool thing is that he's been a seaman for 43 years and a captain for 25. He's sailed on British Merchant Navy vessels, cargo ships, and ferries as well as several Holland America line ships. I am entranced with the fact that he didn't just enroll in cruise ship captain school and graduate with arrogance and class entitlement. (Occupy Portland is only six blocks away, the spirit is getting to me.) I (unrealistically) imagine him hauling ropes and clambering up masts to unfurl sails and maybe even occasionally saying "Arrrh" -- no, wait, that's pirates. But you get the idea.

"Any mariner would be delighted to sail in such a great variety of waters -- Antarctica, Polynesia, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Suez Canal." This is a man after my own heart.

Can it be that this is actually going to happen in just 54 days, 5 hours, 26 minutes, and 48 seconds?

"Don't drink the water, and don't breathe the air"

If you're old enough to remember Tom Lehrer's satirical songs, you'll recognize the title of this post from his song "Pollution". It comes to mind because of the following:

Readings today from the indispensable (and highly controversial) @BeijingAir feed:

For explanation of the readings, see this chart from the EPA and other government health agencies. Take-home message: air quality readings in the high 300s, like those prevailing in Beijing recently, are defined as "Hazardous" and only rarely occur in North America or Western Europe:



In case you can't read the "Hazardous" description, it says that readings over 300 "would trigger a health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is more likely to be affected." For real-time reading of comparable US AQI levels, see this map.

I'm going to be in Beijing for two days as part of the overland China excursion that leaves the ship in Indonesia and rejoins it in Hong Kong. I hope I will be able to see from one end of the street to the other. I'm pretty sure two days is not enough time to do serious damage to me, but I do wish my Chinese hosts had a choice about what air they breathe over longer periods.

Maybe I'll add "BeijingAir" to my Twitter feed. It's published by the US Embassy based on measurements taken by equipment on their roof. The Chinese government wishes quite emphastically that they'd shut up about it.