All About the People -- Part III

(First, Hattie asked a while back if all the photos from my French trip were mine and they are!   I am a little flattered.  As a copyright freak, I always clearly provide a link to photos that are taken from elsewhere or by someone else.)  ( As another prescript you will note that the demographics of these cruises is elderly, upper-middle class, white (except for two Asian women) and therefore, not as interesting as it could have been in other ways.)

I did not get many pictures of the passengers on the ship because I am not one to store these away and try to remember who was who (or is that who was whom)?  There were close to 190 passengers on each of the two ships that I took.  I must have met about 40 on each due to guided tours we took together or eating at the same table.  (Photos included below are street shots of the French and tourists and no one I met.  You can tell the French, as they are in great shape!)

We never talked politics or religion at meals, but with our country as politically divided as it is and with some groups making subjects more politically argumentative than they need to be, we found ourselves tiptoeing around subjects such as the environment, the weather, education, French protests, French labor, French socialism, French economy and even the global economy and  ship labor.  Yet we seemed to find that most of the passengers regardless of the state from which they hailed or the career they chose were in philosophical agreement with us, and thus we were able to be more honest in sharing and learning about others ideas for solutions to problems. 

It was easy to be in agreement with the University of Wisconsin young (50s) professor who was devastated by his governor's cuts to education and then seeing the gov applying the same amount of money as in the cut to a new (unneeded) sports venue and as we later learned selling the public land valued at 9 million to the billionaire sports owners for one dollar.  At the next dinner it was even more interesting to find that the retired geologist, who had worked for decades for most of the big oil companies in the U.S., was very much in agreement with our ideas toward the environment and also our hope to move toward more sustainable energy.  He also had a hobby working archeological digs in the U.S. and encouraged us to contact the Forestry Service to volunteer on one of their expeditions!

No one seems happy in this photo, neither the tourists in the background nor the Frenchman in the foreground.  I can see where this could lend itself to a story.

We were energized by the 80-something British couple who had many grandchildren.  We loved that the male part of this duo was able to walk on all the tours after a double knee replacement surgery a few years ago.  There were at least two other gentlemen with canes that did not let some of the more challenging walking tours up the hills on cobbled streets slow them down.

We enjoyed the couple from California.  The wife was originally from Georgia and we both loved the gentility of the south and the southern authors that we read and mutually enjoyed.  She was the gracious lady that made sure one of the passengers got a birthday card signed by many of us and was also a help with her command of the French language.

It is the same everywhere.  Wouldn't it be funny if they were talking to each other?

We enjoyed the Arizona couple who were not deep conservatives as we expected and fully on board with funding more science research and supporting socialized medicine.  Their son has been working on both an Ebola vaccine and a bird flu vaccine and now so close to success trying to get funding for both projects.  It was fun listening to how much work raising the boy was as a rebellious teenager and then evolving into such a success.  The other son, more conservative and less difficult to raise, was a success on Wall Street.  Proud parents they were.

Must be a new mother model.

We did find one gentleman our age that seemed to be on the verge of a heart attack in the middle of each walking tour.  His face was flushed and he sometimes seemed disoriented.  On the way back from a castle walk up a reasonable hill he actually collapsed just as he was going to go onto the gangplank of our ship.  They put him in a wheelchair and rolled him on in. Later on the second cruise he got lost and was left behind on one of the tours, missed the departure of our ship, and stayed two nights in a hotel in the French town before he contacted the Viking company and finally was reunited for the last two days.  We (the whole group) worried about him until we noticed he did a lot of drinking as well as taking pain pills on this trip.  He was wealthy, traveling alone, and we just shook our heads and felt sorry for the crew who were responsible.

One of our last dinners was with an 80 something woman traveling with her unmarried 40 something daughter.  The daughter was beautiful and wore expensive clothes and jewelry to dinner each evening, good taste stuff, not the turn your head stuff.  She was in real estate in Seattle and seemed to be very successful.  She was strong and opinionated and plotting about her future and search for a marriage partner.  She was trying to date online, but the questions she posed to possible candidates were pretty incisive and like a scalpel cut to the heart of things.  I am sure she was way over the head of most candidates that approached her.  She also seemed concerned about some woman in Seattle who had been on welfare her whole life who wanted her wedding paid for by the government.  I had no real comment for this, as I felt very strongly no one was going to pay for this welfare wedding!

I will let you add your own caption here.

Her mother was also very strong and outspoken and with some quiet "under her breath" comments, made it clear that she did not like the service in the dining room.  (In all honesty they did get my order mixed up twice!)  I later learned from another Seattle resident that this elderly woman lived in an area of multimillion dollar apartments.  Clearly they both were used to much higher standards.  Yet, even though both were strong headed, they seemed ever so supportive and polite and loving to each other and disagreements were quickly brushed aside.

In one of the conversations, the mother ever-so-lightly mentioned she had won a number of medals in the Olympics for Alpine skiing many years ago.  She did not brag, did not elaborate, but it fit into some part of the conversation, some yacht racing story, so she dropped it like a little diamond.  When I got home I researched Olympic medal winners and I am pretty sure that one of the biographies I came upon was her!  The photo was a dead ringer, although taken decades ago.  I now understood her so much better as she has always set high standards for herself and for others.

This post is too lengthy so I have to leave out the details of the Nigerian brother, a business man, and the Nigerian sister, a nun, who were leaving our airport going back to Nigeria with the body of their father who had been honored with an Army military funeral in Washington, DC.  He had been a chaplain. There was the robust engineer with the terrific laugh and his quiet wife who used to teach school that told the story of how they met in the elevator of their apartment building.  There was also the funny lawyer who let his wife do all the arrangements on the cruise, the Jewish history teacher who was so soft and inspiring and such a fount of knowledge for us along with his Catholic wife who had been a high level administrator for some state education office, and I will even leave out the fun wine tastings/map readings with my sister and brother-in-law or my sister's too much wine conversation scolding the Brits (gently) for their support of the "expensive"' monarchy and the Brits explaining to her how the Queen pretty much gave more than she got.  Oh well, just shows I had a great "people" time.  But I do love people and their stories.