The Grand Asia & Australia Voyage, part 52

The Grand Asia & Australia Voyage – Holland America Amsterdam, September 19-November 23, 2008

Text by Snookums, Pictures by Filbert

Part Fifty-two

(November 18 (Tuesday, Day 64, Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, Continued) –

After a nice dinner with our tablemates, we went to the crew show. There are two nationalities of crew: Indonesian and Filipino. Usually one of them performs a crew show towards the end of the cruise and then the other nationality performs at the end of the next cruise. Since this cruise was so long, both of them performed. The Filipino show was more ‘serious’ and cultural and Snookums preferred it while the Indonesian one was silly and Filbert preferred it.

Crew show:

More crew show pictures after the jump . . .

The Filipino one started with a Castanets dance (from the influence of Spain on the Philippines) of four men and four women and then a romantic duet song and the finale was a Tinikling dance which is where two men hold long sticks and bring them together and a man and a woman jump over them. It’s similar to double Dutch but with wood on the ground instead of jumpropes. Snookums is sure that there are lots of ankle bruises as the dancers learn to do it. It is definitely a high aerobic activity!

The Indonesian show started with a Saman dance (Welcome dance) of 15 men kneeling on the ground doing synchronized hand slaps and floor slaps and other body movements. They goofed up several times (not intentionally) and that was funny but no one got hurt. The next act was a monkey dance. The finale was the Angklung orchestra. Our waiter, Wawan, and assistant maitre ‘d (Juergen from Austria) were in it. As best we can tell, the angklung is a simple bamboo instrument that is shaken to create a certain sound. It was similar to a hand bell choir in that different parts of the group shook their angklungs at different times to make slightly different sounds. Music accompanied the angklungs and the last number was ‘God Bless America’ but it took us many beats to recognize the tune. The show ended at 11:30 and we went to sleep but not before moving our clocks forward one hour.

Next: Flea market at sea?