Cruise continued

This morning, Mang-Git woke me up by claiming he saw whales outside our window so I bolted up immediately to have a look see myself. I was really disappointed and pissed for about 5 minutes though when I found out he was lying, but I have to admit that I’ve never actually woken up so quickly before.

We went to a beginner's bridge class after breakfast, which was taught by this ancient guy who felt it necessary to hold a round table discussion about the differences in playing bridge across different countries ...before he even explained what the point of the game was! I shared a table with Mang-Git, an old lady from California, and a high-energy New York executive who was clearly agitated the entire hour (she was probably drowning in ideas of more efficient ways to teach bridge). Apparently the bridge class thing is a series during the entire cruise though, so during today’s session, all I did was re-learn how to play hearts and arrange my cards vertically and horizontally in a row.

On cruise dinners, your seating arrangement is usually the luck of the draw. You could end up with some really weird characters, or if you're lucky like me, you can end up with some really interesting, genuine people. Me and Mang-Git were pleasantly surprised when we sat down at the Britannia Club for our first formal dinner on Friday night because 1) our tablemates weren't 70+ years old 2) they spoke English and 3) they were really cool. Kim and Sue are from Manchester, UK, and have children our age, but you couldn't tell. They're young at heart and really easy-going. Best of all, they throw around things like "he was the bee's knees", "would you fancy that" and other such phrases that I thought only existed in Geico commercials.

The Queen Mary 2 has the largest library at sea to date - supposedly there's something like 8,000 books on board.

I wandered up to the library yesterday, judged books by their covers, and picked out a pretty pink one that had a picture of a woman carrying a platter of cookies. The book was called "The Cookie Club", and from reading the inside flap, it sounded like a rendition of Sex and the City. It basically just talks about the whereabouts of a group of women and how they're all brought together despite their different walks of life.

So what's really interesting, is that the author and the characters in the book are all from Ann Arbor! It's been entertaining because while reading the book, I'll occasionally come across the author's accounts of the Tea Haus or Zingerman's. It's such a coincidence it is that I picked this book up out of the 8,000 books that were available to me.