Juggling Bartenders

Day 13  Monday, March 25, 2019   At Sea

About the only photos I took today were of the juggling bartender show. Juan Carlos is not juggling in this picture, but he still amazed us by pouring three stacked drinks balanced on his forearm.

Janet felt better enough to do several things around the ship. But she did stay in the room to rest while I attended a 10 am entertaining show in the theater - Chef and Bartender Challenge. They had the theater set up as a kitchen, and they selected four audience members to go up and be the judges. One of the ship's chefs made four dishes, and Juan Carlos made four cocktails. The judges ate and drank each of them and rated them on a 1 to 10 scale. (The chef won by a single point, after they joked the entire time that Juan Carlos had always squeaked out the wins on previous cruises.)

The cruise director (who had a made-for-cruise-director name - Andrew Cadillac) was the emcee, and the whole thing was great fun. They passed along trivia about the food and bar service on the ship, such as: they prepare 30,000 meals a day, 7000 eggs/day, all their breads and desserts are homemade. One of the judges (named Chubby) kept cracking everyone up because all he cared about were the cocktails, and he kept asking for more booze to be poured in his glasses. Juan Carlos obliged, and by the end, Chubby became even funnier as he got drunk. I was sorry Janet could not have watched all of this.

Our lunch was the British Pub special in the Crown Grill. I had something called Scotch and Egg Salad, and Janet had fish n chips. My beverage, appropriately, was a Boddington's Pub Ale. All very nice.

 Time for booze juggling! Two bartenders put on quite a show. They really did toss the bottles in the air, but most of my pictures failed to capture them airborne.

 

Juan Carlos had this bottle in the air, and he caught it in the metal cup.

 They did much more than juggling, but my pictures didn't come out (although my many videos did). For example, they stacked 10 cocktails high in their mixing cups, held them tightly from both ends, and poured them simultaneously into 10 glasses lined up.

Here he is putting a coaster on top of drink #2 to get ready for drink #3, shown in the top photo in this posting.

We then went to the theater to watch the re-showing of "Encore", and it was incredible - our favorite show of the cruise. We returned to the room to let Janet rest, and there was a note under the door about all the colds and flu going around the ship. Yikes, but it turned out that was not what Janet had.

I decided to go watch the Princess Pop Choir performance in the Piazza. Ha! This was a group of about 30 guests who practiced during the cruise for this one performance, and I had a hard time not laughing because it truly reminded me of a 6th-grade class performance. And to see the spouses acting like proud parents, waving to their spouses and moving up to take their photos and videos.

We watched the theater show in the Princess Live! room in case Janet might need to depart early. It was a young NZ kid (Will Martin) who sounded like Josh Groban. Right in the middle of one of his songs, there was a medical emergency announcement that put everything on hold. Strange.

After the show, Janet returned to the room and I decided to try again the Bellini Bar while listening to more Piazza music, followed at 9:30 in the theater by the ship's crew "talent" show. It was mostly a tough go -- the ABBA song "You Can Dance" was painfully off key, and the juggler kept dropping his pins. Farewell Majestic Princess!

Then I had to pack, although Janet had dutifully already done hers. I threw away the suit and shoes I brought for Formal Night's lobster. Finally we went to bed, hoping Janet would have a sound sleep and wake up ALL better. We would be getting up early to begin our Australia touring.