Wednesday evening, salsa and pyjama - part 1: Salsa

By popular demand - here is a cartoon of the trip with ports-of-call.

Back on the ship, we nap. It's really exhausting all this planned doing nothing. We are hungry at 4 pm, and the one thing they are not good at on the ship is tea time. No towering display of cucumber sandwiches. No scones with Devonshire cream and strawberry jam. The cute three-bite croissants and pains au chocolat we have at breakfast are not served for "goûter". Apart from unappetizing pizza slices sitting under an infrared lamp and pool-side burgers, there's nothing available in the middle of the afternoon. The lunch buffet closes around 2:30 and dinner will reopen around 5:30, but in between the various stands of the food court are open only to the 900 employees of the ship. Can you believe those people eat too?... And not in the galley either...

I see a lonely croissant, sitting in a basket behind the curtain of a closed stand and charm a guy there to give it to me. That'll do very nicely. We enjoy the croissant in the descending light on the Lido deck. Then it's ping-pong. The two tables on a corner of the deck serve as drink tables at night so they're not particularly clean, but we have fun.

Then it's time again to dress up for the 6:30 pm concert. Tonight, Poncho Sanchez on congas and his crazy band. In between the rows of bolted seats of the concert room, the organizers have regularly added folding chairs to accommodate the potential 9oo attendees to the concerts (half the number of passengers - the other half is having dinner). Tonight, with salsa in the air, people start folding the chairs that are foldable, and everybody is dancing in the aisles. Doesn't really look like a concert anymore. And toward the end, we just jump from our comfy white pleather seats and join the dancing crowd in the lower row. One of the party animals - a loud, friendly, tall, overweight Asian woman in her fifties, with a diverse group of friends and a ton of energy - tells me that my husband can dance. When I let her know it's my dad, she needs to know how old he is, and her jaw drops. Dad glows.