Time changes

John: We remain at sea, making our way at a stately ten knots or so to our next destination of Manaus, Brazil. The television in our cabin has a schematic view of the ship's position, which is currently off the coast of Venezuela. That coast remains something of an abstraction, as we cannot see any land, just the wide expanse of ocean in every direction. For landlubbers like the four of us, that view has not lost any of its novelty; indeed, the sight of blue seas in all directions serves for me as a pretty good illustration of the sublime. If I read the schematic right--and give the odds at 50/50 for that--it also looks like we're staying above the continental shelf, avoiding the deeper waters of the Atlantic, which are bound to be choppier. So far, so good on the seasickness front for all of us, but my sense is that we haven't really faced a rigorous test yet; the ship's rocking remains mostly gentle, posing some modest challenges to balance and manners (you have a tendency to bump into people unexpectedly in the corridors), but nothing too dramatic. We're still wearing our Sea Bands, and maybe they're helping. We start taking our malaria medication today, preparing to enter the malaria zone, where we will be for many weeks to come.

We set our clocks ahead another hour last night; we're now two hours ahead of US Eastern Standard Time. We will of course make many such advances over the course of the voyage, and it's going to be grueling, surely, when we're doing this every other day or so on the ocean crossings. This morning, I neglected to set an alarm to wake us up, and we got up just in time to get ourselves dressed and off to breakfast before it closed. Grumpy as he was at being awakened this morning (though from my point of view, this kind of turnabout is pretty much fair play), Aidan knows that he is the great beneficiary of all these time shifts, since it means that he has two birthdays.  We cross the international date line on his birthday--April 20--which means that he gets to experience it twice, once on each side. I imagine that he also thinks that this means he gets two cakes, two rounds of presents, and so on. We'll have to see about that.

It rained last night, soaking the outside decks, the first rain we have had since departing a week and a half ago. And at this writing, it looks like we're head into into more rain. When I mentioned this to a waiter at breakfast, he said "Brazil." The ship was there a month ago and it was raining; it's still raining. I guess we're putting the rain part in "rainforest."