I'll give you a piece of my mind: Oct 1, 2018 and it's Saturday in Russia

Woke up in Petropavlovsk, Russia this morning. It’s a bright beautiful day and the view from our cabin is of snow covered mountains in the distance, boats in the bay and we are on the wrong side of the ship to see the town so will make sure to sit on the starboard side in the buffet. We will be called floor by floor to go and collect our passports and then our tender tickets. I’m sure everyone will debark today as we’ve been at sea for 6 days. Some have excursions and they’ll have priority. I actually hadn’t planned to debark but now i want to.

I had a problem with my camera when i found that it hadn’t charged overnight although the light had been blinking something went wrong. When i attempted to remove the old battery and put a new one in the lens shot out and made a terrible sound for about a full minute. This has actually happened before when i had it in my jeans back pocket and sat down on it so i’ve been very careful to not do that again. So now it’s charging, hopefully or i might have to buy a new camera either when we get to Japan or here on the ship. I know they have a similar camera onboard. So time will tell.

I went for brekkie then returned to the cabin just as Li came by and our deck was announced for the tender. I wore 2 sweaters and a warm jacket with a hood and a scarf as well because i’m still having flashbacks of the tender ride from hell i experienced in 2014. I hadn’t worn enough warm clothes, got way too cold and within a day or so had a horrible case of pneumonia that robbed me of a whole week of my cruise. I sure don’t want that to ever happen again.

We went and picked up our passports which had been confiscated and then to another location to get our tender tickets and in about 30 mins our number was called. The tenders (lifeboats) on this ship seemed awfully small to me and Annie counted passengers and said there were less than 100 people on ours. I could be wrong but i think the tenders on Regal Princess carried 250 so quite a difference. However, thinking about that stormy day now it was raining, windy and waves were very large on that day in 2014 so maybe they bring out the bigger tenders if the weather conditions are real bad. But then again you can see them on the sides of the ship and they all look like the same smallish size. Whatever, like i said that was the tender ride from hell and i hope to never have another like it.

Russia was lovely and it was a beautiful sunny day. On shore there were just 2 small tables of souvenirs at the dock and apparently a long walk to find shops, WiFi, restaurants etc. It’s often like this if you don’t buy an excursion. I’ve always noticed cruisers are not against long walks and many passengers will walk for miles and miles. I can’t do that with my bum back and knees and difficulty with breathing so i just do what i can and it’s very little in comparison. I went one way on a very nice new tiled path down the beach and Annie and Li went the other. The reason i chose the opposite was because i noticed a cement wall went all the way down as far as i could see so i could sit when i needed to sit.
Eventually i knew i had to turn around and go back but this little walk told me a lot about the people here. I saw lots of parents walking with a child or two and sort of thought maybe they had just picked up their kids from school or their daycare or maybe on their way home from church. One little boy was riding a motorized little red vehicle with a lot of chrome that looked pretty skookum and every boy in the world would be envious of it. They were dressed warmly and all appeared to be happy. One mother was talking on her phone as she walked with her kids and it was a very lively conversation she was having. I noticed the guy riding the big kite like thing, not sure if it was something that could be arranged there on the beach. Not that i'd want to go for a ride! Everyone i passed that i thought were Russian citizens looked neat, clean, healthy and happy. Then i spotted the vodka bottle tossed aside in the place that I think will be a future flower bed, and it just seemed typical of any beach town. I stood it up to take its pic as i thought it was cool to see a genuine vodka bottle in Russia. Several passengers caught the drift and started taking pics of each other pretending to drink from it with the background of the city or of our ship. Well it was funny to me, lol. I decided to turn back and bumped into Annie and Li and they hadn’t found anything where they had walked and they decided to go the opposite way. I was then on my way to the tender and rode back to the Jewel with 18 other passengers. My timing was perfect and when i reached my cabin our attendant Alex had just finished vacuuming it.

I went to the buffet for a lunch of i can’t remember what and then the Fyzz Lounge where I sat with a couple from Darwin, Australia. Trivia started after a while and omg, the questions were hard! In the end our team had 6 correct which was nowhere near getting a prize. As it turned out my one answer re what year Queen E had become the queen of Canada was correct (1952) however that wording was actually wrong because Canada really doesn’t have a queen. Whatever, as a member of the British Commonwealth we did sing God Save the Queen every day at school and i always thought of her as our queen, well, still do! Anyhow as it turned out the Aussie man writing the responses for my team put 1953......guess he had no faith in me being as i didn’t offer any other answers, lol. So we would have had 7 which wouldn’t have been a win anyway. Actually sometimes in these trivia things some answers are either wrong or there could be more than one answer such as one of today’s questions was “what fertilizer makes plants grow” my team said manure and many others did too but it wasn’t accepted as she said the correct response was phosphorous. But the person in charge insists that we have to accept her answers as she had Googled all of them. Well, i Google a lot and i and many others do too and know that Google isn’t always right but usually it’s the question that is messed up.

So i took off to Spinnakers to see if anything was going on there and there wasn’t so i went out on decks 12 and 13 to take pics which didn’t turn out great because the sun was in the way. No I’m not complaining about sunshine! There was an awesome mountain i wanted a pic of and none of the pics turned out very good. On my way back to the cabin i tried my luck with the machine that squashes a penny but again i didn’t have any luck with getting a lucky penny. One of these days.........…

I went to the buffet for my dinner and a chef was carving a turkey so i got some along with a lot of cranberry sauce, mash, stuffing and gravy, salad, corn and can’t remember what else. My Chinese lady friend came in and asked to sit with me and that was cool. I learned tonight that she was actually born in India and knows the language and although she attended only Chinese schools she speaks 5 different languages! Her husband was born in Beijing and they moved to Vancouver in the early sixties where they had 9 children! Now the husband is 95 and doesn’t like to cruise because he worked on ships all his working years. In the past they visited Beijing once a year but now he can’t anymore and so he keeps the home fires burning, just like my husband! We even discussed casino playing in the Vancouver area and it turned out we have very similar tastes in casinos and machines and the fact is that we are both pretty much holding our own in them but are losers in ship casinos. It was fun talking to her and i hope we meet again in the buffet. She is on this cruise with her sister who was sick in bed today and she herself said she has to be very careful to not get sea sick. Hopefully we don’t run into the typhoon that is nearing Japan at this moment as we’ll be arriving there in a day or two.