Busy last few days of the 21 day segment Dubai to Singapore. Our trivia team crashed and burned; but we still were all invited to dinner with Margaret and Elda day of Captain's Farewell. Poor excursions in Phuket (basically nine hours to see James Bond Island) and Langkawi (cable car cancelled due to winds). Fantastic Gold Platinum Titanium event starting off with duet by Margaret and Ray and then a great show of puppets and singing by Ray.

Large turnover of personnel in Singapore. New Staff Captain, Destinations (Katja), Cruise Consultant (Gudrun), and, of course, Ray. These next two segments are only twelve days each so don't know how it will work out for meeting new people, Signatures party is tonight after block party. Trivia team needs to be recreated; will see how that goes (I have been studying Harry Potter trivia for over a week). Actually, hardest adjustment will be rotation of bartenders. You get into a pattern of certain bars (and bartenders) certain times of the day and this rotation pretty much screwed that up (i.e., bartenders had a natural fit to the bars where they were previously located). I am sure by tomorrow, though, I will forget the previous rotation and be back to normal.

Biggest hiccup is that Luggage Free is strongly recommending that we not ship luggage home from Beijing. Only choices are taking five suitcases to Harbin (we don't return to Beijing from Harbin) or shipping from Hong Kong; we will probably ship one bag from Hong Kong and hope it doesn't arrive too soon.

Even though we have sailed these next two segments before, we have a number of new ports: Ko Samui, Nha Trang, Sanya, Kagoshima, Kochi, and Miyazaki. We are also looking forward to cooler weather, hopefully by time we reach Sanya. These 90 degree temps with high humidity wear you down.

More later . .