I literally just finished writing yesterday’s entry, but I think I’m finally completely over the jet lag and so I’m not yet ready to go to bed. And you might be thinking, “hold up - you can’t start today’s post when it’s still yesterday” but HAH! It’s after midnight, so it’s already today. Take that.

Anyway, I’m sitting on the balcony of our cabin and this might be my favourite time on the ship. Late at night when everyone is asleep (except for the cleaning crews) and out here on the balcony, there’s no sound aside from the gentle hum of the ship’s engines and the sound of the waves the ship makes as it cuts through the sea. It’s not an eerie silence, but a peaceful one. The light from the ship affords me a view of the seawater churned up by the ship, but beyond that, the sea is black as ink. The cloudy skies remove any natural light and it’s not difficult to imagine that I’m the only person on the ship, sailing across the void, unencumbered and unafraid. As a person who is living with two kinds of cancer, I can tell you that these moments of solitude and peacefulness, when it’s difficult to imagine that anything could be wrong in the world, are pure bliss. Occasionally, the clouds part just enough to allow the nearly-full moon to have a peek at the world and the reflection of the moonlight on the briny briefly illuminates the clouds from the bottom, revealing a rippled, cotton-like pattern that disappears almost as soon as it appears. I did manage to get a photo of one of those brief shows.

Alas, I should probably head back into the cabin soon and get some sleep. It’s right around 1 AM, my usual bedtime, and I’d like to keep my sleep/wake schedule on track now that I’ve finally conquered the jet lag.

Woke up, had a quick brekkie, juggled some restaurant reservations, then it was off to a lecture on Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing. I’m telling ya, Viking cruises are just different. Now, Rob and I both thought that a lecture on quantum computing would be sparsely attended, especially since it cut into the lunch time, but have a look at this:

Most of you know what Artificial Intelligence is, but quantum computing might be unfamiliar. In the simplest terms, a computer as we know it works by flipping “switches” either on or off in patterns. The faster the computer chip can flip those switches, the faster the computer is.

Quantum computers take advantage of the fact that physical matter at a very small scale exhibits the properties of both particles and waves. This allows the computer to operate a little like Shrödinger’s cat, in that the switches are both particle/wave (off/on) at the same time. Since the on/off patterns don’t have to happen in sequence, they can basically do all the computing simultaneously and achieve results exponentially faster.

That was still a not-very-clear explanation, sorry. The lecturer did it much better. He’s giving another lecture later on the properties of time - I hope it’s before we get off the ship.

Lunch included a South African dish called “Bunny Chow” - basically a bread bowl filled with curry. I got the chicken version, as I’m not a big fan of lamb.

The green stuff on top was minced chilli peppers you could add on yourself. Before mixing them in, I tasted a tiny bit on my spoon. Then I removed most of them onto the plate and only stirred in about a fourth of what you see in the pic. I don’t know what kind of chilis they were, but they were OMFG hot.

(Those who know me know that if I say they were too hot to add them all in, then they were seriously freaking hot.)

Late afternoon, there was a get-together for the Canadians on board. Sixty-six of us!

The cruise director introduced everyone to the event, then asked the lady whose idea this was to propose a toast. She said, “Elbows up!” and there was a rousing cheer and glasses raised.

The crew had absolutely no idea what that meant and the looks on their faces was pretty funny.

Dinner tonight with the Aussie besties Doug and Heather at Chef’s Table for the “Asian Panorama” menu. It opened with a crab/ avocado/ coconut foam appy which we all found to be quite salty. The next course, a lobster and chicken dumpling was quite nice, though.

The granité palate cleanser was lemongrass, ginger, and chilli - in previous cruises, this was my favourite course of the meal and that was true again tonight. I love the dichotomy of ice being spicy. In previous cruises, I thought the spiciness level was higher than it was tonight, but this one was ‘sneaky spicy’ in that you enjoyed the lemongrass and ginger flavours, but a few seconds afterwards, it was “why is my mouth all tingly?”

Main course was peking duck with an egg crepe and a delicious hoisin sauce.

Dessert arrived as a trio: a fried spring roll filled with chocolate and banana (it sounds better than it actually is), a yuzu crème brûlée, and a delicious green tea infused cheesecake. My fave was the cheesecake, by far.

After dinner, we headed to the Star Theatre for a show by Lloyd Hollett, a “comedy wordsmith”. I was pretty excited by this, as I love standup comedy and I also love wordplay. I was expecting something along the lines of George Carlin, Demetri Martin, or Bo Burnham, or maybe Victor Borge without the piano.

What we got wasn’t anything like any of those people - in fact, I think “comedy wordsmith” isn’t the best label for his show, BUT we were entertained, we chuckled several times, and we’ll go back to see his second show in a few days.

Now, in the list of comedians above, everyone knows George Carlin, and you probably know Victor Borge even if you don’t know him by name. Demetri Martin might be an outlier, but he’s very clever with his wordplay and his humour is quite dry. Bo Burnham, on the other hand, is a tour de force of wordplay. He mangles, twists, flips, and skewers the English language into his routines in ways that I’ve not seen since the glory days of George Carlin. He also incorporates songs and music into his act. One particular bit that I’d like to call your attention to is the end of his one-man show called “what.” Backstory: he was a nerdy kid with a keyboard who made some songs and put them on YouTube and became a sensation. The end of his show begins with some recordings about how people treat him now vs how they treated him before he was famous and he… oh, there is NO WAY I’m going to spoil it. It’s clever, it’s uplifting, and as someone who has dabbled in music production, the manipulation of the sound samples is absolute genius. In this point in time in the world, it seems like we’re being bombarded with negativity. This is an inspiring, brilliant, wordless metaphor about taking that negativity and using it to make something better. I think we can all use that right about now.

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