December 7 - Sailing on the Amazon

 We woke up to the water being a very different color this morning.  We entered the area outside of the Amazon River where the silt is being washed out to sea.  And the waters were noticeably calmer as well, which was welcome.

Ed gave two lectures today, the first on the Amazon River and the second on the Amazon Rainforest, both were good.  And Bill Lee gave a talk on TV/Movies: Science Fiction, Fun, Fact and Fantasy.  He isn't the best speaker we've ever had, but he has some fun moments.  He had a pretty high opinion of Big Bang Theory, mostly because it made science seem fun, and also Back To The Future because the science was mostly right.

The ship is having a sort of treasure hunt to find artworks around the ship.  We're given little snippet photos and we are supposed to find the corresponding piece of art.  Most of the art on the ship is very nice, or at least attractive.  However, here is a painting that is in the Grand Dining Room.  I hadn't paid much attention until Jan pointed it out, and now I can't seem to tear my eyes away.  I don't know what it is - sort of like an oversized head on a baby body that is floating in space?  Tom says it looks like he's being propelled by gas coming out of his backside.  Now that I've seen that, I can't unsee it.

The Amazon is huge as evidenced by all of the cargo ships going by.  

The ocean yesterday

The Amazon River today

One of many huge ships on the river

The ship got a little behind on our schedule today.  We had to make a "technical" stop to get clearance for the river.  For some reason, that took much longer than anticipated so our arrival tomorrow will be delayed by a few hours, but they've adjusted all of the tours.

We got an invitation to have dinner with Cruise Director Peter tomorrow, but we'll see if that gets changed due to the schedule adjustment.  Today was our best day yet at trivia with 13/15 right.  We didn't know what French city is HQ for Interpol (Lyon) and the first city to reach a population of 1 million (Rome).

The Humphrey Slocombe ice cream flavor today was Sweet Corn, so I had to try it at lunch.  Not as bad as it sounds, but I wouldn't order it again.  We managed to finish the 2 small scoops we shared.

Now that we're in the Amazon, the 25% tax/service fee is being enforced.  The shops are open, but I can't imagine they're doing much business unless they'll let you set something aside for later.  And now that the already marked-up wines will have a combined 45% additional tax/service charge, we'll be having water or soft drinks for a while.  It seems we could have pre-ordered (and paid for) wines to avoid the Brazilian tax, but we weren't aware of that until it was too late.