Thursday – January 16, 2025
How does this title apply to today? We found that we must surrender our passports while in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The boxes you see on the table in the featured photo hold passports for all the passengers on MSC Magnifica. We were told the primary reason for doing this is to speed the immigration process as we travel in each of these countries. If needed, the ship will make a photocopy we can take with us. We felt strange giving up our primary source of identification so many miles from home – but this process is one that has been in use for years so we’ll go with the flow.
Today was the second of four days as sea as we travel from Mindelo to Salvador. In the morning there was another World Cruise game. This one was similar to shuffleboard. Contestants from each of the four teams were to given 6 minutes to push discs to a grid that had numbers. The numbers were added and after all teams had finished the winner was announced – AIR. Air has 37 – other teams had 22, 17 and 7. So we won by a comfortable margin.
Following the game we went to the L’Ametista Lounge to surrender our passports. We stayed for a few minutes and Jan had a chance to email someone who has offered to coordinate her medical care when we return in May. I went to the IT desk to ask how to upload photos for a show called PAzz. This includes musicians with a background of photos taken by passengers. We’ll see if the judges feel any I submitted were acceptable.
In the early afternoon we went to the theatre to learn about the opera “Carmen”. I’m sure many of you, like us, have heard music from the opera but we didn’t know the plot and how the music with which we are familiar is connected to specific characters. The instruction provided was very informative and will help us when an abbreviated version of “Carmen” is presented on Friday evening. A couple things were quite interesting. One is that the composer – Georges Bizet – wrote a piece that was initially unacceptable to the singer who played Carmen. That piece is titled “Habanera”. If you look that up on Google and play it I’m sure it will be familiar. To modify the piece for Carmen, Bizet plagiarized a piece by another composer because he didn’t have time. The piece from which he copied is El Arreglito. Look that one up on Google, play it and you’ll see the similarity. Another thing that was interesting is that contemporaries of Bizet’s – Wagner, Verdi, Debussy – thought the opera was a great work of art. The public, however, was not as accepting. A couple reasons for lack of public acceptance were that in the end Carmen is murdered. Another is that in the opera women are smoking (they work in a cigar factory). We learned that Bizet never lived to see the widespread acceptance of his work – he died on June 3rd, exactly 3 months after the first production on March 3rd. He was 36. Finally we learned that within the last 10 years a producer modified the ending so that it was not Carmen who died but Jose, the man who stabbed her in the original production. In this change of plot, Carmen shoots Jose with a gun. We are anxious to view the abbreviated Carmen on Friday.
Dinner was, as it has been every evening, interesting and we included a few photos of items we ate. The beef tornados were very tender and prepared expertly. Even Kelsey consumed all of hers.
The theatre show for the evening was performed by the large dance/singing group – 4 singers and around 10 others who either dance or perform acrobatics or some other specialty. I especially liked the juggler. Songs were easy to recognize – we have included short clips of several.
In today’s photos we have included views from our cabins (Kelsey on deck 8 and Jan and I on deck 9) and a couple others I missed in Wednesday’s post (Medical Center and a couple views from our restaurant on deck 5).
Hope you enjoy the videos and stills. You’l find them here.
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