“We're still sleeping”

We woke up just after noon, so we got 14-15 hours of sleep overnight.  Crystal actually had to wake up for 1 minute sometime earlier in the morning (not sure what time), to let our stewardess Melanie know “we’re still sleeping.”  The boat was still rocking and rolling, and the Bonine we’d taken probably contributed a bit to some of the extra sleep.  We went straight to lunch at The Restaurant, figuring it was in the middle of the lowest floor and would be least likely to be moving a bunch.  They had a relatively limited menu instead of the buffet offered at The Promenade (where we’d eaten just after boarding yesterday). 

The Restaurant was fairly empty, and fairly quiet, but the woman next to us was dictating her entire life in real time (“this is too salty” “this spoon doesn’t seem right” “I wonder what we should do after lunch” “should I have them bring my wheelchair now or in 5 more minutes” and on and on).  Meanwhile, her husband was fighting to stay awake and actually nodded off a couple of times.  We’re hoping this was because of jet lag and not out of boredom from his wife’s constant commentary.  We didn’t stay very long, leaving almost immediately after we finished eating.

Our next stop was at The Club on the 5th floor at the back of the ship.  We both wanted to read, but after 2-3 minutes we realized that was a bad idea because we were getting seasick doing that.  The next idea we had was to use the ship’s internet (we’d each gotten a package that included 200 minutes), but it was really unusably slow and we didn’t want to burn through a giant chunk of our minutes on the first full day.  So we ultimately decided to just listen to podcasts instead.

Just before 5:30 a bunch of people came in, and then at 5:30 the ship’s tour director Claudio gave a talk about what solo travelers could do in Madeira the following day.  Someone asked about the bus crash from the day before (which Justin’s friend Carl had texted him during the night), and a good chunk of the passengers were not aware this had happened.  We all hoped we’d have better luck tomorrow.  After the talk ended, we went back to our room to change, because at 6pm the evening curfew kicks in.  No jeans, shorts, t-shirts, etc. are acceptable in the evenings anywhere, and at The Restaurant sometimes there was a requirement of a suit or tuxedo.  We did not pack any of that stuff, and frankly The Restaurant didn’t seem like our sort of vibe anyway, so we didn’t feel like we were missing out on anything.

We tried to get a pre-meal drink at the Observation Bar on the 10th floor, but it was absolutely packed, so instead we went to the Patio bar (in the back right on the picture above) and chatted with Matias again.  We tried to get a Pisco sour, but Matias told us that his bar didn’t have any Pisco; the only bar with Pisco was at The Grill By Thomas Keller.  We also chatted a bit with a couple from Perth, Bernard and Rita.  At 7, we moved about 20 feet over, to the table of Earth and Ocean that was closest to the door to the interior, and also closest to the heat lamps.  Sometime in the past hour or two the swells had finally calmed down.  For dinner, Justin had pasta and a good ribeye steak, and Crystal had prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and bouillabaisse.  As with the day before, the meal also started with bread and a number of spreads – an olive tapenade, a tomato tapenade, butter, and a smoky chicken rillette. 

After dinner we went back to the Observation Bar, and this time it was empty.  Perhaps everyone was at a show or something, or maybe asleep.  We sat at the bar and chatted with Helder, the bartender, who was from Portugal (specifically, the Azores).  We liked him, he had a good wry sense of humor.  We just shot the breeze for a while, then headed to sleep at a reasonable hour.

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