Thursday, May 19 was a day at sea. The M/V Corinthian II sailed at 13.5 knots (15.5 miles per hour) toward our next destination, Barcelona.
The main activities for the day were three lectures by our Guest Lecturers.
In the morning I watched four people play bridge (the card game). I've been trying to learn to play bridge and playing online on Yahoo! The four people were much more congenial toward each other than some of the anonymous people I've played bridge with online.
Bruce Loeffler, representing the American Museum of Natural History, gave the first lecture of the day, titled "Gods, Warriors and Athletes: Polytheism and the Classical World." This lecture covered a lot of ground, from Greek gods to polytheism to monotheism to Islam to Christianity.
Hmmm. The trip brochure didn't mention that we might see white caps on the Mediterranean Sea.
Every day, in the ship's Library there were several copies of TimesDigest. It is a four page (eight sides), 8½" x 11", digest of articles appearing in The New York Times. There were also copies of The New York Times daily crossword puzzle. Yes, some people did the puzzle in ink. There were televisions in our cabins. Our choices were: Fox News, Al Jazeera, EuroNews (in German), or BBC World.
The second lecture of the day was given by Jeff Greenfield, titled "The Influence of Domestic Politics on US Foreign Policy." He started out by saying that we are a nation of immigrants; we are not an homogeneous population. Ethnic groups do have major influences on foreign policy.
I visited the ship's bridge. Near the center of the photograph at the top of this blog entry you can see the ship's main radar, the Sperry Marine BridgeMaster. The ship's position is at the center of the screen. Other ships and low clouds also show up. It uses GPS information. The autopilot programmed course and the actual course were shown as lines on the screen. One of the ships on the screen had a triangle around it, indicating that it was using the Automatic Identification System. The Chief Officer moved the cursor over to the triangle and pressed enter. Several items of information were displayed, including: the ship's name, type (passenger), and distance of closest approach.
The third lecture of the day was Bruce Loeffler's "The Triumph of Monotheism: Early Christianity and the Late Classical Period."
For dinner, all the AMNH participants ate together. I brought the bottle of champagne that was in my cabin, with a note "Thanks for traveling with us again." It was a two sparkler dinner! One couple was celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary; another couple their 60th!
On the final day of the expedition, as we disembarked in Venice, our passports were returned to us and we were handed a CD with the daily programs, a database with names and addresses of our fellow travelers, and the truly excellent pictures our Tour Managers had taken of the people on the tour and the sights we had seen. This is one of their pictures. Here we are sailing into the sunset on our way to Barcelona.
