Into the Red Sea

 The Red Sea was calm and we ploughed through it smoothly withour further incidents. We see no land on either the Egyptian or the Saudi side. On the map the Red Sea seems like a narrow passage between two continents, but for all we could see we could just as well be in the middle of the Pacific. We were told we would be passing Jeddah on the  Saudi Arabian by 9 in the evening. Good news for any Muslim passengers or crew as they will know in which direction to pray to reach Mecca.

The management called us about our complaint about the inaccessibility of  our safe for Albina. To my surprise they offered to send an engineer right away to bring it down lower for her. We told them that we were impressed by their response, but moving the safe down would only complicate rearranging our wardrobe. We thanked them profusely all the same. Obviously Fred Olsen Cruises likes to have their customers satisfied and their complaints responded to.

Albina stayed in her room making phone calls on What's App. She lives on telephone calls to her friends in England and Poland, as she has given up any kind of writing, to the extent that she does not even text. As these calls are inrmittent as she frequently loses contact this is very frustrating for her. She finally made contact with Sandro in Finland after many attempts, helped perhaps by the fact that Finland and Egypt are in the same time zone. 

After lunch I went to two lectures. The first on the history of the Moghul Empire, which was highly relevant in relation to the coming visit to Agra and the Taj Mahal. The speaker dwelt on the history of the key 7 emperors and descibed their cultural achievements, particularly in architecture. The second talk, on the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific Region, a new concept, was given by Paul Madden, a former UK ambassador to Japan. I listened to it spellbound and only dozed off once for a couple of minutes or so. Unfortunately for an old fart like me a little dozing off in the afternoon is a requirement, especially while hearing the same voice drone on for forty five minutes. Sorry, Mr Madden, no offence.

After dinner Albina and I attended a concert by vocalist Simone Kay singing musical tribute numbers of female artists like Tina Turner and Lulu since the sixties. She joined us in Sofaga and will give one more concert with soul music next week before she leaves the ship in Mumbai. After the concert Albina joined me for a session of the quiz night. She was a useful mascot. We got 15 out of 16. In fact four teams got the same score. As we were joint winners, we had to have a tie breaker between the four of us. The question was: how many minutes does The Godfather film last? We said 200. Apparently the answer was 175 minutes, and one of the other teams had that answer down pat. Obviously they must have heard that in an earlier pub quiz somewhere.