During breakfast today, the mysterious Marquands finally showed their faces. A French couple, as the images had promised. They spoke French to Daniel and Chloe, while sometimes asking me polite questions in English. They had
During breakfast today, the mysterious Marquands finally showed their faces. A French couple, as the images had promised. They spoke French to Daniel and Chloe, while sometimes asking me polite questions in English. They had earlier taken the ship from Tokyo to Los Angeles.
We’re travelling straight from Saint Martin to Trinidad. That means not seeing any islands, since the lesser Antilles make a bit of half an ellipse here, with us as the middle line. I like to think of this as in Pirates!. Why would anyone go straight from Saint Martin to Trinidad? I guess that is someone who has toured the lesser Antilles in order to sell goods and recruit crew, and at Saint Martin – the last island – it was time for battle, and they needed to go to Trinidad as soon as possible to not piss off the crew. And why Trinidad? Because it’s a small city, and ready to change the governor if attacked by enough sailors. So what we were doing was an invasion.
I ran ten kilometres. Then lunch. Today is a special day: a party day. We got ice cream and wine for lunch. Most people only work half the day on Sundays, and the French staff had all shaved and showed up in polished moustaches. The Filipinos partied too, and invited us for karaoke, drinking rum and coke as one of them celebrated his birthday. We sang and had a good time.
At five I said goodbye, and promised to look for ships that go to/from the Philippines. They got a bit angry when they heard that I would travel the whole planet, but not visit the Philippines. The reason is simply that I haven’t found any passenger ships, but they claimed there were. I’ll ask for all information they might have. Because this is definitely not the last time I sing karaoke with Filipino sailors.
We were at what I in Pirates! call ”the French middle”. In the middle of the lesser Antilles, there are two French islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique. And then the motor of the ship suddenly stops. It goes extremely quiet, and we’re just fleeting in the French Caribbean sea. And we were all drunk (except for me, and I guess a few others) so there weren’t that many engineers to fix the motors. It took us half an hour to get them working again. I’m glad I was not still at the karaoke party. It must be shocking to not have a functioning motor, since we are in fact a transport ship loaded with European goods for the new world. Maybe on a non-alcoholic English ship this would have been 27 minutes instead of 30. Worth it?
In the evening we played Scrabble with the new, hereby less mysterious, Marquands. We played it English-French, as in you could build words from both the languages. The score was still in English, so the evil Frenchies could use this with words such as “Je”, and so on. But it was nice to play a game that Chloe could win. I came number 2 the first time, and number 3 the second. I blame it on the languages #(/T#()#=”&%€&. But the male Marquand does seem like a Monopoly guy. Urban planner etc. I’ll start to massage Chloe with arguments such as “including the new people” etc.