The text and the pictures on this post are a complete disconnect. The pictures are from all of our stops in Hawaii. I had no other way to put them into the context of past blog posts, so here they are in a gallery. I like taking pictures of flowers. The text has no particular pics to go with it so I arbitrarily matched them.
When we left Hilo the captain’s announcement was not the Dutch accented voice we had become accustomed to. Our original Captain was called away on a medical emergency and Captain Paul Adams, an Englishman from Yorkshire, replaced him. Captain Paul likes to mingle with the passengers. I had just finished my lap swim in the aft pool and was sitting on a table by the pool with chatting with two Canadians when a man with a lot of gold on the shoulder boards stopped by and asked us how the cruise was going.
Captain Paul is usually on Volendam but was called back to sea early from his break. He had just spent 36 hours on a plane, London to Las Vegas to Honolulu to Hilo to take over Koningsdam.
We talked a little about the ship. He explained that while all the rooms were occupied, we had, perhaps, only 2500 of our 2650 lower berth capacity. Lots of older singles were on board. Plus, there were not many third or 4th persons in rooms because this was a “long cruise.” It’s all relative.
We got into a discussion of language. He is from Yorkshire, inhabited by people with a distinct and hard to understand dialect of English. His English is fairly standard and completely intelligible, but he says that if you drew a small circle on a map with the center being his home you would find three dialects of English, Yorkshire, Geordie and Scotts, all English and all largely unintelligible to each other.
Geordie is closer to the original Anglo Saxon, the language used by the Venerable Bede in his poetry. Yorkshire has more Scandinavian influence, and then there are the Scotts. On my team in Serbia, I had one member from each of those groups. Each had tempered their dialect to be close to standard English. But despite that, sometimes finding translators for their English into Serbian was a challenge.
But this Captain is very understandable and approachable. We ran into him several other times in these final few sea days and he has always been a delight.
OK, here are the flowers.
