St Pat's Day on the Mediterranean

3/17/09 Tuesday Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!!
I thought Bruce & I might be the only ones who remembered to pack green clothes to wear & green shamrocks to decorate our cabin doors. But nooooooo. The ship is all a-flutter with shiny green shamrocks and green balloons. Even the elegant grand piano in the atrium is covered with in-elegant shamrocks.

They are serving green beer, and all the bars offer Guinness, Jameson Irish Whiskey, Bailey’s Irish Cream and Irish coffee.

It looks like most of the cruisers remembered to pack green – even people who don’t seem to be Irish. Today in the elevator we met people from Spain, Scotland and Germany – all in green shirts. Except the German guy claimed it was just a coincidence.

One of the delightful side benefits of a cruise like this is meeting fascinating people from all over the world. At least once a day we connect with someone at breakfast or lunch from a different country.
Our long dinner table has eleven people – 7 from England and 4 of us from the US. Every evening we switch seats so we can all have a chance to chat with one another. The other night, we ended up with all the Brits at one end of the table and us "yanks" at the other. So we told them we were planning a revolution – had to do with Boston, tossing tea over board and overthrowing the king. They told us they’ve had a queen now for the past … um … couple of years. We scoffed and bellowed "On with the revolution!!" One of the women said if she didn’t know us better, she would think were’ daft. See what I mean about interesting people? When’s the last time you were called "daft"?

Another secret benefit of a cruise is that – to me --- it is a writer’s retreat. I feel that one hour of writing on a cruise equals four hours of writing at home. There’s no laundry screaming to be done, no grocery shopping, no worry about what to cook for dinner, no phones interrupting. This must be what it feels like to be a full time writer. It’s magnificent.

Each afternoon that we’re not touring, I write for an hour or two and Bruce curls up with a book. On our last cruise, I wrote an entire book proposal and it was accepted. By the way, if you want to write a book, don’t let yourself get all anxious about writing book proposals. In "The Procrastinator’s Guide to Authorship" (www.helpwritingbook.com) we give you the same step-by-step "recipe" that I used for all four of my proposals that have been accepted. It’s not scary and doesn’t take long to do. I think sometimes people read a whole book about writing a proposal and get terrified that it will take longer to write the proposal than it took to write the book. Nope, not at all.
Anyway, writing for a couple of hours in the afternoon doesn’t take any time away from us doing all the ship activities – touring, swimming every day, going to the ship’s shows, meeting fun people, eating (did I mention that they feed us every 14 minutes???) dancing together in the late evening and – of course – presenting my programs. And there’s still time to relax and even nap.
We would love to take some of the other speaker’s programs but they’ve been scheduled at the same time as mine. I’ve met two of the other speakers (both are cool guys), Dr. Ted who gives destination programs and Dr. Don who talks about "Black Belt Haggling at the Market On Shore". I really wanted to learn about that but the timing doesn’t work.

Interesting coincidence. Ran into Don yesterday and he said, "I just connected the dots. I was reading a blog that mentioned ‘Brilliance of the Sea’ and thought it was a coincidence that I was on that ship. Then I noticed the dates and realized the blogger is on THIS ship on THIS cruise. It’s YOU!!"

So Daniel, two out of the 3 of us speakers on this cruise are part of your program. Isn’t that awesome? Life is good. And now, 14 minutes have gone by. It’s time for them to feed us again.
Cruising along,
Rita