Our first day at sea was, as usual, pretty uneventful. A and I woke up very early, and I had my dislike of freestyle dining confirmed by being sent on a wild goose chase looking for breakfast. I wanted table service, not the buffet, but it was nearly impossible to find. We finally got squared away in the Summer Palace dining room, which has traditional dining, the way I like it. Breakfast was fine.

After breakfast, A and I did some reading in the Bliss nightclub, which has really cool Asian-inspired decor and plays 80’s music videos on big screens. We went back there later in the day and played bowling for $10 total for one game. I think A bowled a 61 and I bowled a 44. I also got to play a single hole of Wii golf around lunchtime. I could have played more but there were lots of eager kids waiting so I kept my turn short.

When it was time to get ready for formal night, I discovered that I left my dress at home. I quickly ran to the gift shop but they didn’t have black slacks in exactly my size. I bought them anyway but they really were too small and I tried to return them. Unfortunately I could only have store credit, and only on the spot! I ended up with a bottle of DiSaronno amaretto, which you can’t even keep in your cabin; a nail kit that I thought was a wallet; and a 3 Musketeers bar.

I was unimpressed with Mambo’s, the tex-mex place we tried for dinner. I had really been looking forward to it, and the salsa before the meal was great, but the entree wasn’t any good at all. Even the margarita was barely passable. After dinner we went to the onstage show, Garden of a Geisha. A and I agreed that it was unintentionally hilarious. One of the geishas was played by a man and he smirked the whole time. The show wasn’t very realistic - I’m sure real geishas, and any self-respecting Japanese person, would have fled the auditorium immediately. It didn’t help that one of the male characters was wearing the obi of an unmarried woman, or that the acrobats did little more than voguing in midair. After all this we tried to go to the Friends of Dorothy meeting again, but we arrived 20 minutes late so who knows if anybody had shown up. We had fun with the bartender and server again, we had a lot of drinks and tipped them well.