Day 8: Black and Silver Ball

Travel Diary:  Amsterdam Asia Pacific Cruise 2012

Day 8, Saturday (9/29/2012) At sea

This evening was the Black and Silver Ball.  I didn’t go, but dinner was formal dress and we had a ship’s officer at our table.  Actually, we had one officer, Graham the Manager of Engineering originally from Scotland, and his fiancée, Rebecca, a young woman from the Seattle area who works with shore excursions.  We had a wonderful dinner with them and got to ask them all kinds of questions about their lives working and living on a cruise ship.   Their lives are definitely an enviable form of international living.  After New Year, they will be celebrating their marriage at the Chihuly glass garden at the foot of the Space Needle and will be making their ashore home in Seattle.  It is so great to see young people following their dreams in this way.  Apparently, it is possible for couples to live aboard and even raise their children in the cruise ship environment until they become of school age.  Holland America Line certainly seems to be an enlightened employer in this way. 

Today I applied for my visas to visit Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia and Papua New Guinea.  I won’t need visas for Japan, New Zealand, Fiji or Samoa—and definitely not Hawai’i.  I also got a cash advance from my HAL Visa card and bought some yen for shopping in Japan.  We will arrive there on Monday and the whole time we are in Japan we will not be able to use the internet from the ship.  The Japanese government prefers that everyone in the country use the central internet provider so if we want to get online, I’ll have to bring my laptop ashore to somewhere where I can catch a signal.  That will be another adventure.