We had hung out our breakfast order the night before so at 8:00am we got a nice tray of coffee, bread, pastries, juice, fruit and cereal delivered to our room. A great way to wake up! We watched a little TV (Addicted to Love) and went to the shore excursion desk and cancelled our Kyongju tour in Pusan as we’d heard from the Port Advisor that we dock very close to town in Pusan and can walk to town so we decided to save $338 on that tour and explore on our own. We also booked the Chinese Acrobat tour in Shanghai as we’d heard that was very good. We also found out that we are leaving Shanghai at 10:30am on the second day instead of at 1pm as originally planned due to tidal conditions (can’t get under the bridge). We had a ½ day Shanghai tour scheduled on that day that was cancelled since there wouldn’t be time. So we decided to just go into Shanghai on our own rather than reschedule the tour. The Bund is only about a 25 minute walk and Nanjing Road is a great road to walk down and go shopping. Then the YuYuan Gardends and Old Town is about a 40 minute walk from there. It should be quite a busy day of walking but that’s a fun way to see the sights and we should be able to find the Bund and Nanjing Road easily and hopefully the YuYuan Gardens too. The only thing we may have to miss is the Shanghai museum which is supposed to be one of the best, but is a bit far to walk to. Then at 6:30pm we go see the Chinese Acrobat show.
Anyway, after going to take care of the excursion business, we went back to the cabin for the life boat drill. It went quickly which was good since it was quite brisk on the deck. We wore jackets and were fine, but some people had shorts on and were freezing. It was a bit disconcerting that our "leaders" didn’t call roll call during the drill even though they were supposed to. I’m not sure how much confidence I’d have in them in an emergency. I also tried to find the boxes with extra life jackets (I just like to know these things) and could only find one box at the other end of the ship. I even asked an officer who was rather brusque and just pointed at the end of the ship. Well, hopefully we won’t need to find them.
Then we changed and went to the gym. Sean did the bikes and the rowing machine and I stretched, did some weights, situps and pushups, tried some of the machines and biked for a while. Then off to the Lido for lunch. The we went to the port talk on Shanghai and changed some money on board to chinese yuan. Of course, as we found out later, we would have been much better off waiting until we got to Shanghai and changing it at a hotel. The interest rate on the ship was like 7.1 yuan to the dollar with a $3 service fee. The hotels were giving about 7.3 per dollar and no service fee. In banks it was about 7.7 per dollar, but banks are hard to find and sort of a hassle. Still, a hotel would have been a better choice, especially since we’ll be going right by several in Shanghai. Oh well, live and learn. The Orient Line’s Marco Polo cruise had a really decent exchange rate on board and it was handy with them. But Holland America doesn’t and I’d make every effort to avoid changing money on board HAL.
Then we watched part of The Rainmaker and got ready for formal night. We got dressed up (I wore my black and white formal with jacket and Sean had his tux with black cummerbund and tie) and headed off to the pre-dinner cocktail party. We danced a little and had a few glasses of champagne. Unfortunately, the champagne hit my stomach hard and I was not at all well. I threw up a few times and had to go back to the room and lay down. Sean went on to dinner and then came back and fell asleep too. I went to bed at 6pm and he went to bed at 8pm. I was bummed because they had surf and turf at dinner and I was really looking forward to it. But every time I thought about it I got a little queasy so it just didn’t happen.
And we talked to several other couples who said they danced until after midnight and had a great time. Well, what can you do? There’s plenty of time for more fun. I woke up about 11:30pm and went up to the Lido to get a pot of hot water for some tea and then wrote in my journal for an hour or so and then went back to bed. We put out the breakfast order for 6:30am so we’d get up early.