September 22

First of all, here are a couple of pictures from the gala dinner at the Emirates Palace Hotel. Inquiring minds wanted to know!

Rodney, Owen, Candice, Norm, Pat and Judith at the Emirates Palace Hotel

Part of our table at dinner

And here are a few from Tom’s 101st birthday party.  They served everyone champagne, the cruise director and the general manager made toasts, and then they surprised Tom with 6 of the women from the staff, dressed to the nines – one at a time – to be his dinner companions for the evening, and, as the topper to that, Claudia, the social hostess, came out dressed as Marilyn Monroe and did the “happy birthday” song that was done for JFK, and sat on his lap – and was his surprise 7th dinner companion.  Then we all had cake. Oceania made it a special event for him – for sure.  And his comment was “this was the best birthday I ever had – and now I can’t wait for 102!”

Claudia as Marilyn at far left!

The beautiful cake and terrific servers

Tom’s “necklace” said 40+60+1

At sea today and enjoying it – the temperature is in the high 80’s which is a cooling trend! We left Fujairah 4 hours late due to “bunkering” – taking on fuel – the tanker was late to arrive.  I am sure the captain was not pleased, but today he said that we would make up the time and arrive in Mumbai on time on Thursday.

We have a new lecturer on board from Harvard, Adam Tanner.  He is a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.  He has spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent for Reuters.  We have attended two of the four lectures he will do on this segment of the cruise – on India’s history – Gandhi in the first one and “India since independence” in the second one – both excellent.  Tomorrow he will talk about the big export for India – Bollywood – and show film clips, and then one we might miss while we are off the ship  – based on his book “What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Business – and the End of Privacy as We Know it”.  The Washington Post named this book one of the 50 notable non-fiction books of 2014. They do record these lectures, so if it is while we are off, I really want to watch that one.

Continuing with bridge and doing some social playing, having my third hot stone massage today, taking an art class and basically relaxing, reading and enjoying the balcony, walking the deck, lectures and the spa terrace.

This morning, they delivered another gift for the world cruise travelers.  We each got a beautiful white Oceania windbreaker jacket which is waterproof, breathable, etc. Very nice.

We’re told to bring a jacket or sweater to Agra when we fly there on Friday, they say the mornings and evenings will be about 50 degrees.  What a change. We got all of our documents, etc, for the trip.  Wow, is India complicated to visit.

Looking forward to another sea day tomorrow.