Day 17: Indian Ocean
I learned a couple of things this morning:
[1] How to play Viking Baggo
[2] I suck at Viking Baggo
I’ve seen Baggo played on every Viking cruise we’ve taken, but I’ve never played. Seeing some of the other players, especially the crew, you can tell they’ve played lots of times. If you’re looking at that picture and thinking, “oh, it’s just cornhole” then you’re probably from the US Midwest. If you have a very, very different ‘game’ come to mind when you hear ‘cornhole’, then you’re probably from the Southern US.
Do not google that.
Anyway, there are two teams and round one involves each player tossing 4 beanbags at a slanted board. If your bag stays on the board, 50 points. If it goes in the hole, 100 points. So far, exactly like cornhole (although I’m not sure about the points). Then after everyone has had a turn, it gets interesting. Each player just gets three bags and the points are 100 for the board and 200 for the hole. Also, you have to shoot the bag from the first landing on the stairs.
The different tossing styles were interesting to see. Most held the bag in their upright palms and tossed them underhanded. A few pinched the edge of the bag and flung it so that it pinwheeled. The Captain, who was on our team, turned his hand palm down and gripped the bag like a claw, flinging it with his wrist right at the end.
I did OK on round one, adding 150 points with three out of four bags on the board. In round two, I got zero points. Then round three gets ugly. Not only do you have to launch the bags from the top of the stairs…
…but they put the two boards together. If your bag falls short of the boards, you lose 100 points. If your bag lands on the board or goes in the hole of the other team’s board, then you score those points for their team. Also, 200 points for a board and 400 for a hole.
I scored zero points in round three as well, but I didn’t cause any points to be lost, so yay. One lady got 100% of her bags in the hole on both rounds one and two, but cost us 200 points in round three. It’s brutal from up there.
After lunch, it was trivia time and our team killed it. We got 15 out of 15 correct! So did three other teams, though, and we blew the tiebreaker question, so oh well. Still, we were pretty stoked about 15/15 and didn’t really care about not knowing how long the original LP version of “American Pie” was.
Choir practice went well. You might recall I had moved from the baritone section to the alto section to help them out with their trickier harmonies, but lots of the alto parts are unison with the soprano and it’s above my range. So now I’m going to be transectional and sing the baritone until the alto part has tricky harmonies. Then I’ll sing those measures in the alto then drop back down into the baritone. Should be fun, but a vocal workout.
Met Doug and Heather for dinner - the menu at The Restaurant was really good tonight, which might be due to some VIPs on board. We saw the captain escorting an older gentleman to a table in the back and I’m pretty sure it’s Torstein Hagen, the Chairman of Viking, even though the crew all said, “oh no, that’s not him, it’s someone else” when we asked. But they wouldn’t say who. All I know is the cleaning crews were extra diligent today.
The above is butterfish tartare with crispy onions, corn, and coconut sauce. Delicious. I also had a chicken and corn croquette with butter chicken sauce that was very good. The other three all had pear and parsnip soup, which they all raved about. For the mains, Rob had beef tenderloin…
…and I opted for scallops and prawns. It was all very good, and finished off with an espresso mousse covered in a white chocolate mousse that was better than it had any right to be. The disc on top is also white chocolate, but I thought it was some kind of dried fruit.
After dinner, we decided to skip the return engagement of the comedy magician and Heather and I played a couple games of Scrabble (one win each). It was fun - I haven’t played Scrabble in ages. Two more sea days after this one.