20251022 Viking Gems of China and Japan Day 18 – Sea Day - East China Sea

Viking Gems of China and Japan Day 18 – Sailing the border between the Yellow Sea and East China Sea

We sailed out of Shanghai overnight, as planned. We awoke on the boundary of the Yellow Sea to the north and the East China Sea to the south. A strong cold front in the area was whipping up the waves, and the 15-foot waves were having their way with the ship. Not a big deal for us, but we saw a bunch of folks wearing Scopolamine patches or getting Dramamine from the medical center.

We had breakfast in the World Cafe, watching the huge amount of marine traffic we found ourselves in. It appears that this is a major shipping channel. This morning, we passed several channel marker buoys. We had ships on both sides of us for most of the day.

The sun really accents the lovely dirt-brown of the water here

We played Baggo against the officers again. The guests didn't just lose today. We lost in such an overwhelming way that it was one for the record books. The first round was standard. The second round involved sitting on the middle landing of the stairs and tossing while seated. The final round was from the top of the stairs. The boards were placed next to each other, and they added a wine bucket behind the boards. Landing on the guest board (left) scored for the guests, regardless of who threw the bag. Landing on the officer board (right) scored for the officers, regardless of who threw the bag. Scoring in that round was silly with 10,000 on the board, 100,000 in the hole, 1,000,000 in the bucket, and 5,000,000 if you hit the bucket and hung your bag over the edge - something nearly impossible to do. Or so we thought. The second or third officer did just that, setting an impossibly high bar to get over for the guests. The officers then continued to toss multiple bags into the bucket, adding millions to their total. It's almost as if they had practiced this before. Hmm...

As always, it was all in good fun, and everyone was laughing and having a good time.

We went from there to the Star Theater for a lecture on Giant Pandas given by Cruise Directors Wan and Arann, or as Wan said, Cruise Director Wan and Cruise Director Two.

It was educational and informative, and of course, there were plenty of cute videos.

We met our team for Arann's 12:15 trivia. It was much easier today. The picture round had us identify brand logos with wording/lettering removed. They were all pretty simple - Taco Bell, BP, Shell, Amazon, Adidas, KFC, Pringles, and Pepsi. Almost everyone got all those. We only missed one question today:

• What African country is known as the land of 1,000 hills?
• We visited the valley of the 1,000 hills in South Africa, so we figured that was it. It wasn't. It was Rwanda.

There were eight teams tied at the end, so that meant another tiebreaker. The closest team without going over would be the winner.

• What is the length of the song, Paradise by the Dashboard Lights, by Meat Loaf, in seconds?
• We knew it was longer than a typical song, so we guessed 4:30, or 270 seconds - it is actually 8:55 or 535 seconds long - we weren't close enough

So for the third time, we were second-place finishers. At least we're consistent.

Viking served a Taste of China lunch on the pool deck today. Nothing grabbed our interest, so we got food in the World Cafe. This afternoon, we had nothing on the agenda, so it was just a relaxing, bumpy, wavy, rocky afternoon in the Pacific.

We caught the sunset from our room as the day said goodbye for the evening.

After pre-dinner cocktails in the Explorers Bar, we hit the World Cafe for dinner and returned to the room to watch the recorded port talk for tomorrow's port, Jeju Island, South Korea. After that, we watched the live stream of tonight's Star Theater performance from the acoustic duo.

Tonight, we move our clocks ahead an hour to UTC+9 or 13 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast. We will remain on that timezone for the rest of this cruise. When we disembark and fly to Mongolia, we'll drop back to UTC+8 or 12 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast. Tomorrow, we'll visit Jeju Island in South Korea, the second new country for us on this trip.