Today we have been at sea travelling from Naples to Santorini in the Greek Islands. I checked out the Princess Patter which is the daily newsletter and noted the things I wanted to do.

First up a talk on Pain Solutions with Acupuncture. I was the only one that turned up so had a one on one with Carly who is a registered acupuncturist. She is from Canada and had spent a lot of her life in pain and not knowing what caused it. Someone suggested acupuncture to her so she tried it. That inspired her to go and do a 4 year degree in acupuncture and herbology. It turned out she had celiacs disease and the doctors had been pumping her full of drugs for years without really knowing what was wrong.

PS – I’m not personally in pain – I just went along for general interest.

Next up was a talk on Detox for Health & Weight Loss. The presenter was none other than a Kiwi boy from Queenstown. He is the only Kiwi staff member on board the boat which has 95 different nationalities working on it. His name was Chaz and he had studied in Christchurch before furthering his study in Melbourne and then the UK. He was only a young guy and had a great interactive style. It was really interesting and a good refresher on clean living.

I then decided to go to a talk entitled The Birth of a Cruise Ship which was being presented by an engineer called Chris Jolly. It was really interesting and Chris had a lot of knowledge having been involved in the build of 57 cruise ships over his 15 years in the industry. The main places that cruise ships are built are Italy, Germany, Finland and Japan. Princess Cruises are part of the group that also run 10 other cruise lines like Holland America, Seaborne & P & O Australia. They have 101 boats in their fleet and it takes approximately 2.5 years from start to finish to build a cruise ship. Their annual fuel bill for the entire fleet is USD2.63 billion per annum. It cost USD640 million to build the ship we are on.

Next up was Zumba – a first for me. It was cool doing Zumba on the 17th deck overlooking the ocean going by. I was pretty uncoordinated but it was good fun.

Tonight was the first of the two formal nights on the boat so we donned our glad rags and had some pictures taken by the professional photographers on board. The piazza area on the boat is quite stunning so it makes an awesome backdrop for everyone dressed in their tuxedos, suits and evening or cocktail dresses. There is a real festive atmosphere on board and if you enjoy people watching then it is very entertaining. We had booked into one of the two speciality restaurants on board – Sabatini’s, which is an Italian restaurant. We had a table right by the window so it was great to see the water rushing by. The food was delicious and with Italian being a favourite of mine it was a great night.