Woke up at six. It was completely dark outside, except for a number of ships. We were in the English Channel, being one of the busiest seawaters. No one was up eating breakfast with me.
Woke up at six. It was completely dark outside, except for a number of ships. We were in the English Channel, being one of the busiest seawaters.
No one was up eating breakfast with me. I guess they were all up at night and watching us leave Le Havre. On a ship, leaving and entering harbours are among the most exciting things to see. Personally I prefer to sleep at night.
I found a picture gallery of all passengers on the wall. ”Knut” is my middle-name. It was my grandpa’s name, who gassed himself on my birthday, so I got his name. I’ve never seen the Marquand couple. Maybe they’re locked up in the basement? Or maybe they eat on their own times, avoiding contact with the outer world?
I LOVE having a mystery on the boat. Ever since I read ”Smilla’s sense of snow”, I’ve dreamt of being on a very mysterious ship with no help from outside accessible. And then comes the mysterious Marquands!
I fell asleep and dreamt that I met a truck driver. He took me south in Europe, and would continue in Asia. However, I needed to go home and put something somewhere, something that I had fixed in Europe. A paper, or a fishing net, something. So I couldn’t join him to Asia, but he took me North to the Baltic Sea. Around there it was time for me to learn how to drive a truck, so I could drive to Stockholm with it. Obviously, it was cheaper buying a new truck than buying a train ticket. Then I started feeling like what, why do I have to go home? What’s so important with this paper/fishing net? Can’t I just mail it to someone, and have this nice guy drive me Eastwards? Then he started talking some funny dialect that I did’t understand at all.
Then my alarm rang. It’s 10 am and time for the gym! Today I’m doing ”Pull exercises”.
There is no rowing machine, so I laid on a bench and lifted weights up. There is no pull over machine or bar, but in the roof behind the boxing sack there was some kind of metal bar to hang on to. It hurt my hands, but I found thin boxing gloves. It was really tight behind the boxing sack, which sensually swayed with the movement of the ship, rubbing my stomach as I tried to lift myself, which I couldn’t. I could in a better gym, after not drinking beer on trains for three weeks, but here I was just moving my legs around the boxing sack as if I hadn’t made out for a long time. Which might be true, but anyway, instead I ended up lifting my upper body on the bench press. That was super-light because I didn’t lift my legs, but I found a rope and could tie some weights to my upper body. Not as heavy as my legs, but good enough for me.
During the last exercise I stared at the swaying boxing sack that moved right, left, right, left and I started to feel a bit sick. I’d hate to get sea sick on day 1. Once upon a time I ate medicine not tested on humans before, in order to make money. I really needed to work in there, making the graphics and rules for the StreetSmart board game, so I went for a ”placebo placebo”, that is, eating the drugs and pretend to not feel anything. I gained a lot of weight and passed out now and then, but that happens normally as well, so we all – including me – thought that I had placebo, so while the rest of the group were sleeping in their beds with drool from their mouths, I finished StreetSmart. One guy, we can call him Waldemar, kept talking about how he felt like the ground rushed towards him as he walked, and how he kept trying to read the same page over and over for weeks. At the end of the experiment, it turned out that he had the placebo, while I had the pills. My placebo placebo worked! Too bad for Waldemar though, who looked a bit ashamed for placebo losing a month of his life.
I tried the same here – pretending to not feel anything at all – but it didn’t work. So I unpacked my Postafen pills that a good friend in Sweden told me to buy. I read through the instructions, and it turned out that you couldn’t mix it with alcohol. No red wine for dinner! What would the French say? I immediately felt well again. Not seasick at all. Alcoholism always work, like Captain Haddock would have said.
Then we had lunch. A man came and told that there was a storm tonight, holding on for two days. So he recommended that we lock everything up in our lockers. I finally understood why all the lockers in my room had ”child locks”. It’s not for children, it’s for the storms! He asked us to please not go outside during the storm. The best would be if we are locked in our rooms the whole time, lying in bed. I wonder if we are allowed at the bridge? The view is great up there, the waves must be so nice to see!
I asked about the Marquands, the mysterious couple. I know I shouldn’t, since it’d take away the whole mystery, but on the other hand I was too curious. It turns out that they’d enter the ship in St Martin and exit it in Brazil. So between St Martin and Trinidad we’ll be five passengers! Untz untz untz.
In the afternoon I slept. Woke up and started studying Spanish. In Portuguese I’m listening at a chapter to get the pronunciation, and then using a proper old school book with exercises. In Spanish, I apparently didn’t find such a book, but am listening to an old guy called Michel Thomas who simply talks about Spanish in a very amusing and – according to himself – very effective way. I wish I had some kind of book too though.
16:30 it was time to run. I ran barefoot to not make my only pair of shoes all sweaty. It was super tiring, so I ended at 6.1 km. I think that I in the future will not go above 11 km/h. The doctors have said that I can run as much as I feel like and that my brain is 100% ok and won’t bleed unless I don’t run, eat shit and live another 20 years, but still it feels a bit bad to run too much on a ship in the Atlantic when one year ago I fell on the treadmill and woke up like an idiot in a hospital two weeks later. After running, my feet were full of blisters. I’ll run with socks until the feet are 100% good again. Sorry planet to use socks like that, but my body first and the rest later.
Then we had dinner, and talked about alcoholism, since I explained my periods of being sober in order to not become an alcoholic. I think that this somehow forced them to drink more, because after finishing our bottle of wine, we asked for another one, and then we went upstairs to watch ”Papillon” together. It’s a long, sad movie about French prisoners being sent from France to the prison colony of French Guiana. It was great to see them on a ship while we were on a ship on the very same route. Although ”a bit” more middle-class with more free wine and less knife fights. Before watching the movie we had to tie up all the furniture since the staff had knitted all the chairs and tables towards the walls because of the storm. But the storm never really came.
