at Sea
Today we spent quite a bit of time with upcoming ports. We plan on golfing at the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. It’s time to make a tee time and determine distance and travel time to the course. We also received a notice that one of tours through Viator was cancelled because no guide picked up the tour. I’m not sure why this happened but Viator did offer to book another similar tour. That has been taken care of.
Our next port is Ishigaki. Ishigaki is an island that contains Japan’s southern most city, Ishigaki City. Ishigaki is part of the Okinawa prefecture. We have a tour scheduled to do Blue Cave snorkeling. It looks like Blue Cave is on the northern side of the island and the cruise port is on the southern side. We will be picked up and dropped off at the cruise ship port.
It rained a good portion of the day and it was very windy. Another challenging day walking on the ship.
We were able to book a tee time at the Metropolitan Golf course in Cape Town, South Africa today. Email is the preferred method as time zones make calling difficult.
The evening entertainment was violinist Venus Tsai. Venus is 37 and has been playing violin since age 6. She is Taiwanese and currently lives in Seattle. She flew to Guam to get on the ship to entertain us.
Her show started with pictures of her on the big screen. More and more artists seem to be doing this. Many, many pictures of Venus were displayed in many different outfits. The pictures were displayed with her music playing in the background. The house band was already on stage and was waiting for the display to end. I had to check my watch. It was way too long. She is very pretty and looks like she is about 22 but this was about her music. Maybe it wasn’t.
The band was getting bored. The drummer was drumming on his leg and the guitarist was air playing licks from the chart.
Venus finally entered. Tall woman with very long hair. Maybe down to her knees. Very thin and a very nice smile. If the show was about her looks, I would have already given her a 10.
The musical performance.
She says she is on YouTube so you can look her up if you wish. Her musical style was very aggressive. I don’t think her bow moved in one direction more than 4 inches the entire performance. Back and forth it went. Faster and faster. Some of the runs were rhythmically solid. Others, not so much. If it was one number in this style, great. It wasn’t. This was the style. Every entrance was made like Elvis just entered the building. After a few tunes she grabbed the mic and sang a song that she wrote. She sang in Mandarin. Beautiful voice. Not that I listen to words but if it was in English, it may have helped. At one point Venus left the stage and more pictures were shown. After another long period watching her, she came out in a different costume and sat behind the piano. Her skills are definitely better than mine but as a performer they were medium. She played one number on the piano and grabbed her violin again. She finished the show with Evard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt. Her aggressiveness would have been best if she finished the tune with it but she started and finished with it.
Obviously very talented but could use some help arranging a performance for a cruise ship. Performance 3, looks 10. I give her 6.5.
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