Another day at sea - sorting out problems, and a quirky tale

I am writing this early in the morning of our second day at sea on the way to Sri Lanka. 

I spent much of yesterday trying to sort out big problems I have had with my iPhone. About a week ago it simply stopped receiving or sending emails and texts and cut off my Skype connection, though I had only sent a couple of messages via that. Fortunately we have an IT support service on the ship, but even the staff member who helped me took ages to work on it, the problem was so obscure. He still cannot explain why it all broke down, when I had not done anything different. But I hope it will work today. So if any of you have sent me texts over the last week or so, I do apologise for not having answered them. I simply did not see them. Thank goodness I had this computer with me, so I was able to respond to emails. 

I am afraid I am simply not a technical person, so I will be in big trouble if anything else occurs  when travelling around where there is no-one to help me or time to seek help because of our schedule. It always completely frustrates me when technology does not ‘behave'.  

   

I also had another two sessions on a nebuliser down in the medical centre trying to get this chest back to health. If it improves significantly over today and the doctor agrees tomorrow morning, I may try going on a shorter shore excursion in Columbo tomorrow afternoon. The long 12-hour trip I had been going to take to see the tea plantations and so forth was cancelled just a day ago. As it included a train trip and is the Tamil New Year, the Sri Lankan tour company could not guarantee the Tamil train drivers would go to work. The ship personnel did everything they could to sort this to for us, to no avail. There were a lot of very disappointed passengers, as a result. Most of us had booked the trip weeks or months ago. But in my case I could never have done that trip anyway, as it has turned out. As it is, we have received dire warnings about the fact the buses are likely to be in very poor condition with no air-conditioning and about the crime rate and so on. Not a very enticing introduction to this island. 

Now a quirky little tale that may interest some of you. There is a huge amount of art around the ship, and word was that when the ship was recently refurbished, one of the artists commissioned to create the set of large bronze sculptured panels depicting different continents and the story behind them had hidden Homer Simpson in one of them. The hunt was on, and I was shown where it was by one of my delightful friends from our dining table. I have passed the secret on to a couple of young boys on the ship as well, who were really tickled to see it too. The photos below of the panel depicting America and the close-up of Homer show this little secret. (Of course it is no surprise it was on the American panel.) I vaguely remember learning that one well-known artist always hid a little hook or similar icon in every one of his works of art. But what a fun idea!     

Can you see Homer Simpson?

Part of the American panel