Back in the Med!

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Friday 20^th April 2012:

We left the Suez Canal yesterday evening and on our first day in the cooler water of the Med, we’ve seen the first dolphins we’ve spotted for quite a while. Unfortunately when you’re 8 floors above the water, they look small through a camera’s view finder so we still don’t have any great photos of them but at least we’re back in their territory. We also got a good view of Crete in the late afternoon but quite frankly neither of us could bother getting up to get the camera so no photo of that either!

Our clocks went forward an hour last night so we had a late start to our day which left us little time to kill before this morning’s lecture. This was Richard Farleigh again and today he talked about investments and how he used to run his trading desks. He’s still clearly very involved in the stock market and it was quite a technical lecture with lots of shorts, longs, bulls, bears, futures and derivatives. It must have been good though because I understood it and enjoyed it. It was clearly a cut-down version of a much longer lecture and we both came away wishing we could have heard the whole thing. He really is a very good business speaker. Besides, who else do you know who can litter his conversation with “I made” or “I lost several millions on that deal”?! Our biggest gamble is a quid on a horse sweepstake or about 3 lottery tickets a year. I think that clearly puts us in a different league!

The rest of the day has been far less cerebral: a long chatty lunch with a couple we’ve made friends with, lots of reading which caused me to be woken by my own snoring several times. Richard has also discovered a new condition. It’s called <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">iPad arm and can be used to describe the deep gouges made in his arm by the edge of the sofa from where he’s cradled his iPad for several hours!

Now that we’re in more northerly areas, we get evenings again. Once you’re anywhere even close to the Tropics or Equator the sun is like a light switch; it’s either shining or shot round the other side of the planet. This evening has been so pleasant we took a lovely long stroll round the promenade deck before getting ready for dinner. It’s formal night again on board which is a bore for having to dress up but is great ‘cos it’s fillet steak for dinner … again!

We’ll be in Athens tomorrow with a very pleasant forecast of 21º. It will make such a pleasant change to be cooler whilst trying to clamber over the Acropolis. Neither of us has ever been to Greece before and we’ve abandoned Cunard tours for the day. They’ll bus us in and out of the city but then we’re on our own to explore whatever takes our fancy. It should be a good day.

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