October 27, 2018 – Sea Day

This was a quiet sea day with more of the usual activities onboard. The weather outside was warming into the 70’s with sunshine so that was nice.

Indoors we attended a lecture by Ian about the upcoming port of Shanghai and what to see and do. Then the cast of singers and dancers gave a presentation about the work they do on the ship. This cast has an eleven-month contract including the time they rehearsed in London prior to boarding the ship. They have been onboard since mid-July and with stay on through the world cruise from January to May of 2019. There are four singers, two boys and two girls and six dancers, three boys and three girls. After the talk we went on a behind the scenes tour of the stage, dressing room and storage area for all of the costumes where we were able to chat with the cast. This cast has a total of eleven shows in their repertoire to perform during our stay.

After lunch India’s Ambassador Krishna Rajan lectured on whether the dragon and the elephant will dance together, meaning will China and India get along. His sense of things is that they would do their best to get along even though they have disputes over territories and that they need each other. His final synopsis was more a feeling that they would prefer to watch who each other was dancing with but would not dance directly with each other at this time. They would each prefer to wait until times were hopefully more favorable to themselves to interact more.

The evening’s entertainment was a joint show between the violinist Patrick Roberts and the Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalist Lifford Shillingford.