Stockholm Friday 22 August

I'm down on the dock this morning; it's very cold. You have to sit outside the pavilion to do wifi but it's free. Quite a few of the crew are out here having very non-private conversations with their loved ones on Skype.

Today I'm not going on an excursion, just relaxing around the ship. This arvo I'm having coffee with Betty from our table: she's travelling alone and would be in her 70's. She wants to know how to access the free wifi, so I'm going to bring her down here. She's paid $US55 for 100 minutes on the ship and so far has wasted more than half trying to log in! So after lunch I took her to the wifi access at the end of the pier and helped her to get connected; took a while to sort it but we got there. She was over the moon to finally be able to get her mail.

I also helped Karen from Brisbane by giving her a USB to take home with pictures because she couldn’t work out how to download them to her tablet: it feels nice to be able to help because I know it would drive me crazy if I was in this position!

This afternoon I spent quite a while sitting on my balcony watching a ballet on the dock: the container terminal was operating and it goes like this:

·        Big Crane (on pulleys and tracks and stuff) reaches deep down into container ship; comes up with smaller size container – maybe 2 tonnes?

·        Big Crane moves the container till it’s dangling over the dock and drops it deftly without a sound.

·        Little Crane 1 comes scooting around and picks up the container like it’s an empty matchbox and then scoots off to what is obviously the designated spot for this brand of container.

·        Meantime Big Crane has repeated the process; no sooner does Little Crane 1 scoot away from the spot than Big Crane drops the next container in the same spot.

·        Here comes Little Crane 2, picks up the container and scoots off to a different section.

·        By the time Big Crane drops another one, Little Crane 1 is back. This time Big Crane has a huge double-size container; by the time Little Crane 1 gets to the spot, he’s already extended his clamps to the width of the big container and again picks it up as if it were a feather.

How long for each container – approximately 2.5 minutes! Then after about 20 minutes, they all take a break. The precision is exquisite to watch but I believe they can only do it in short boosts because it’s such high pressure work.

I love watching this sort of thing – no wonder I love LEGO!!

My towel teddy - cute!

I went up to the Lido for the Aussies and Kiwis get together which had been arranged for after dinner. However, it was just a bunch of people standing around drinking and very noisy, so I went for my walk around promenade deck. I’m up to seven times around the ship, which is approximately 4km, so that’s not bad. I was thoroughly distracted with taking shots every half circuit: sailing through the archipelago is very pretty and sunset to dusk gave some lovely light shows; we sailed at 5.30pm and at 9.00pm we’re still not quite through the archipelago of about 27000 islands. I went down for my first showtime this cruise. The singers and dancers were very good: all 60’s music; just half an hour – long enough and fun to see and hear.