16/4/2016 Day 6 of 7 Sea Days to Cape Verde

I have now forgotten what being in a port feels like, honestly.  When you leave the ship you have an ID card to swipe. As you swipe there's a beep and a voice from the technology as you leave the ship saying "goodbye" and when you return "welcome" - it recognises you by bar code and displays your photo. (A possibility for the future of ID's and passports I imagine)  I was just thinking about this and it seems ages away since I heard these sounds just before exploring the sand dunes in Namibia - did we really do that? Yep. That was us :).

 But happily for us in this last week a whole new world opened up, so many things to read, listen to, speakers to engage with who have made us think hard about the meaning of life. So much to look up too when we get home.

With our extra hour we just had an extra hour in bed before breakfast and art this morning. We painted "Arch 22 in Banjul" which we might have visited if we had had Yellow Fever Vaccine, and if the Gambia port stop hadn't been cancelled. We don't mind, by the way. We were going to stay on the ship that day so that we could get into Cape Verde unvaccinated, as we don't hold Yellow Fever Certificates.  Quite a satisfactory outcome for us. Anyway, back to Arch 22 where today we used a fresh technique - negative painting where a huge part of the paper was a white building, and its shape was created by leaving it blank and painting everything inside around it. Really effective.



Then after lunch, because it's Saturday Khachik was watching footy on telly, I went on my own to "Virtual Planetareum - Guided Tour of the Night Sky",for a talk given by Leon,a fellow of the Royal Astronomical society.  He used computer modelling to describe the galaxies and their relationships, including all the ancient mythology.  It was riveting, although I have to admit that there was so much new information for my brain that I think I need to listen again.  Hopefully it will be available on Channel 2 of our telly tomorrow!

So now for my daily update about where we are and what the weather's like - 28C today, so a bit more comfortable to sit in at breakfast time. A light breeze too.  We are degrees 9 degrees north and  17 degrees west, passing about 150 miles off the coast of Sierra Leone roughly level with Freetown. Still very excited about covering all this new ground.

Goodbye for tonight. Back tomorrow. xx