Cruise Day 11 At Sea

Having a sea day means we could sleep in, so we slept in. We were both quite footsore and achy from the previous day. Woke up to go to the Port lecture for Zeebrugge, Bruges and Brussels. It seemed that Bruges would be another historic town but much busier with tourists than our other stops. As usual getting there would be the tricky bit with only vague information available on ship. The at-sea days allow us to do our clothes washing. We'd taken our own laundry powder to put into the industrial "maytag" machine, which we fed with American quarters. After the previous night's poor service at Dinner we had booked ahead for the following Formal Night and asked to be placed in a different area - in our minds to avoid a repeat and any comfortableness. So we were quite surprised to be taken back to the same area. I suspect their approach was to force the same staff to get it right this time. I understand this idea but don't appreciate that our request was thus silently denied. This kind of disregard has been the default on this cruise. In general all was fine this time, although we were never asked if we wanted wine. This didn't matter as  I had already decided not have a wine at dinner but of course they couldn't have known that. After dinner we caught two of the onboard entertainments. One was their major song and dance troupe, doing a sequence of disco numbers in "show" style. It was fun enough to outweigh its kitsch. It did set me pondering the standard age of people for whom disco was their generational "thing". Is it my age? A little older? Hmmm. Is disco a style to keep in your silver years? We skipped out of that before the end to move over to another venue to catch a second type of site by Paul Stone. This time he was doing a "jazz" set rather than his theatre-space "swing". I liked this much better. He and the house band did a killer rendition of Summertime from Porgy and Bess, which gave it a blues edge as I imagine was more authentic than the smoother versions that are normal.