Zumba

November 14, 2012

Every year the Celebrity Line runs a Captain’s Club Reunion, with special perks going to anyone who has every cruised before, which on this ship, includes just about everyone.  There is a trip for everyone in India.  Now we are resolved to our fate of not getting into India.  Eleven days before sailing we realized we didn’t have our visas to get into India.  Not having one to get into Dubai, either, was another kicker, but that was solved.  We are taking full responsibility even though we would like to blame someone else.  As we heard one man say, I got emails galore from you about buying the drink packages, and about buying tour packages.  Why couldn’t I have had one reminding me it was my job to get the visas.  Now there is a slim to no chance that we will get one, depending on how the ship and the Indian government negotiate on the day before we arrive.  Still we are perfectly at peace either way, since it is hard to have a bad day on this ship.

The Captain’s Club Reunion has been running classes:  zumba, jewellery making, decoupaging plates – and those are the sign up classes.  There are others which Greg has been l ourselves in the Sky Lounge with an instructor who looked like he was 6 foot 6 inches, teaching us how to do this.  Wyona has the advantage for she has purchased on-line zumba lessons.  The disadvantage is that she has only tried them a few times with Charise, which is still an advantage when it comes to the skill level of Moiya and me. I am pretty sure most of the women there are already at a level past us – some of them even sporting t-shirts that say Zumba.There is a lot of stepping from the toe down to the heel, hip gyrating, shimmying of the shoulders and arms and movement – small in our case, but the instructor could leap around the circle when one was formed, about two steps every quarter of the large circle.  I was glad when he came down from the stage, showing us to make that circle and then getting to see him leap around it.  That is when I saw that he is probably only 5 foot 6 inches which made me laugh.  The first time difficulty of the zumba steps, the pulsing music and his wide movements made him look like one of the tallest men on the year from my beginners stance.

I am stiff this morning from it.  I don’t think those muscles that I danced with are the same ones that I use when I walk the deck in the morning, which I did again this morning.  We had to put our clocks ahead a half the day before yesterday and an hour ahead yesterday – trying to catch up on the time it will be when we arrive in Chochin, India (which word Greg is telling me everyone is saying as Chochi). 

I was on deck at 6 am.  Four others were there ahead of me though it is no face.  By 7 am there are many walking the track.  This may be why so many of the old people are on the boat – the ones I am seeing now are a fitness bunch.  Yesterday a man said hello as he passed me.  I yelled after him, “I hate it when someone who is older than me gets ahead of me.”  He laughed and yelled back – I am 81.

 I finish my walk and go to cool down one deck up where I get a good view of the sunrise from the front of the ship   “I don’t think we are going to see it,” I said to another man who is always there but who doesn’t engage in conversation. “Are there days when the sun just doesn’t rise?” He pulls out of his camera bag serious equipment as opposed to the small camera I have in my pocket.  “The sun always rises,” he says, “sometimes more spectacularly than others.  You always have to be there, in case you miss the good one”.  But I have waited from past the time the ship says will be sunrise and I begin to go down the stairs.

“There it is,” he calls after me, so I return, but I am seeing the sun today through different eyes.

That Watercolor 101 class I had yesterday has me thinking about three basics of working in that medium:  large to small, light to dark and wet to dry.  Large to small is about doing the large washes, before the small paint is applied.  Light to dark is about colour – first the pale washes, and then the darker ones.  And then first the wet brushes and then the dry ones.  There was a glitch in the hand-on component of the class yesterday.  Someone had taken the chairs and tables out of the room that the class is held in, so the instructor took out a DVD of his favorite water colour artist, and had us watch and learn.  “People aske me what is my most important art tool and I tell them this,” he says, pointing to a pocket-size DVD player that his children gave to him. “I can pull this out anytime when I am stopped in an airport, for example,” and have an art lesson.  And people in the class were saying, “Can you get us one of those.”

Weird, I thought.  This instructor has a cult following on the boat.  

Arta