Janet's Diary - 27th December 2012

La Palma

We've been in La Palma for the whole day today, which would have been fantastic if a) it wasn't a one-street town, and b) the sun had made an appearance. We decided to walk through the town to the Museo Insular, which we'd attempted to visit last time we were here but mistakenly had gone into the adjacent Convent chapel. It's a sweet little museum/art gallery, with lots of exhibits relating to local life, and a Natural History gallery with stuffed birds and animals, jars with pickled snakes and lizards, glass cases full of seashells from all over the world (though we could see no Lytham cockles) and a most impressive row of mounted stuffed shark's heads!

 

We like this ship, it seems to be able to absorb the passengers really well, we've not had any problems finding somewhere to sit wherever we've been. There are maybe 15 children onboard, but we've hardly seen them at all, apart from one delightful 14year old with whom we share our dinner table. Hi Ashley if you read this when you get home! Santa visited the ship on Christmas Day and gave a gift to each of the under-16s, it was lovely to see the tiny ones but, unsurprisingly, most of the teens failed to make an appearance to collect their presents!

There's a really interesting selection of art on this ship, much of it in a gallery on Deck 6. On Christmas Eve the crew's 'Lantern Competition' was on display here so that passengers could vote for their favourite. 9 teams had competed to construct a lantern from various bits of waste material found around the ship – a similar competition to the Ship Building contest on Aurora last year when we built our giant octopus. The crew had come up with some amazing and extremely intricate designs. My favourite was one made from hundreds of expired cruise key cards, but I also liked one which had used several Quality Street jars. We were supposed to vote for our favourite three lanterns, but late in the evening I felt sorry for the six I'd not voted for so went and cast votes for them too!

This one appeared to have been inspired by one of Ikea's current lamps – it was mainly constructed from the sticks from the plastic flags we wave at sailaway.

The Assistant Cruise Director told us that the prize for the winning lantern was $150, so it's worth winning!

Right... time to sit on the balcony for a bit... it's still very cloudy, but at least it's not cold or raining!

Janet

xx