7 Samurais

Day 7: Life on a ship is not nearly as funny or exciting as a day in Shanghai. But we do keep laughing about our day yesterday. Three times already this morning, just out of nowhere, Dad starts laughing out loud, “just thinking about Ed haggling with the watch sellers yesterday.” By the way, the new watch doesn’t keep time. (The lady told Ed is was self-winding.) Ed wears it and keeps setting it to my watch, then an hour or two later, tells us what time it is and it has only run for about an hour or so. Then we all start laughing again. Well at least we won’t be late for anything by Ed’s watch.

They just brought in our fresh flower vase for the day. Again Kriss says as she plops down on the 9-foot sofa, “Thank you Adam!” She said that if she was with the same people as her last cruise; she would have been to the Trivia hour, the Game Shows, and the Bingo. But instead we choose to hurry back to the peace and quiet of our deluxe veranda and enjoy our own private reading time, which is especially nice after the noise and high energy of the last two days. Hard to believe we have just done one of our port stops.

Kriss is setting up our recorder to tape Ed as she is trying to record his life history on this trip. Ed and Dad are both on their second book. I just finished reading my second tour book on Japan in preparing for the week ahead. So far the Train Game and Cards sit in one of our many cupboards, unplayed. The first few days we had to keep hunting for our own things as we had so many drawers we couldn’t remember where we had put things….in our drawers, cupboards, closets, there are even huge drawers under the beds.

We went to another great lecture this morning on Japan. Explorations Speaker series—From Samurai to Salaryman: Where did Modern Japan come from?

At 2:00--the Highlights of Xingang, our next port of call, but we won’t be staying there but a short time, just passing through, as our small group of 4 head inland to Beijing in search of the Great Wall. Stay tuned! Looks like another adventure ahead.

I will be going to the “The Art of Asian Flower Arranging” class this afternoon, but already memories of a summer term class I took at BYU 30 years ago is coming to mind. It was a class on Flower Arranging and I remember basic principle is a few long twigs sticking out, one long one in one direction and two shorter ones in the other direction to balance. Very Zen like!

Good Karma ahead.

Love to all,

Pam, Dad/Gpa, Kriss and Ed