Today we are in Roatan, Honduras, which is a very poor place, not unlike Samana. 

Yesterday we backed up a Celine Dion tribute singer, which surprisingly to me turned out to be a fantastic show with great energy. It turns out that Celine Dion's songs actually are pretty fun to play on stage, and everyone appreciated the humour of playing "My Heart Will Go On" on a cruise ship in the atlantic.

The last three days of this repo cruise are extremely relaxed for the showband with very few shows and a lot of free time, which is nice although also means having to find ways to entertain myself. 

I've been noticing a lot lately how important it is to find time to be away from crowds of people, which can be difficult on these ships. I really love being around all of the people here, but being an introvert at heart, I really need to have quite a few hours in a day to myself to just relax and recharge. 

That's enough musing for now. I have posted a number of Caribbean photos and will continue to post more as I accumulate worthwhile amounts.

Here is another post from two days ago:

October 17th

Today was a sea day. This morning we had a soundcheck at 12:30 for our Neil Diamond tribute shows tonight. I spent the day doing laundry, playing ping-pong, sleeping, watching tv, eating and reading - very relaxing.

 One of the guest performers on the ship during our repositioning cruise is a hypnotist named Brenda Kaye, and she put on three shows tonight - two passenger shows, and then a special crew show at 11:30. I checked out part of one of the passenger shows before going to play my two Neil Diamond tribute shows. 

The passenger show was pretty funny, but the crew show was absolutely hysterical. Brenda had a group of volunteers (for someone to be hypnotized they have to be completely willing and wanting) come on stage and slowly put them into a trance, which was ultimately effective on all but two out of about eight people. She had them playing imaginary pianos and guitars to start, and then got progressively more ridiculous as the night went on. She had one person shouting "man overboard" whenever the acronym "NCL" was said (Norwegian Cruise Line), which in turn would trigger two other people to feel that someone had pinched their butts. 

One girl was convinced that her belly button had disappeared, while two others were given imaginary m & m s which would pleasure them. One guy was made into the laughter police and he started to get quite upset with the audience whenever they would laugh. Another guy was speaking in his perception of a martian dialect while another girl was told she could translate it, which she did. She had them believing a number of other hilarious things, before snapping them out of it, with a parting shot to one guy of having him convinced that he was stuck to his chair until the cruise director came up and shook his hand, which he did. Another was told that she couldn't leave the stage before doing three jumping jacks, which she performed, and finally another girl was told to bark three times whenever she went through a doorway on her way back to her cabin, which I found out later that she did.

I've never seen anything like it - I spoke to several of the hypnotees about it afterwards and they said they felt extremely relaxed, and most of them remembered everything and felt conscious during but also said that they felt compulsed to do what the hypnotist asked or said. It was fascinating and really good-natured fun for everyone involved, and they all enjoyed themselves immensely. I spoke to the hypnotist about it later and she said that people who are hypnotized will not do anything they feel completely uncomfortable or unethical doing, and that they still ultimately can prevent themselves from doing things if they are very much against them. She also spoke of how it can be used to help people quit smoking, help with weight loss, and a number of other things. She is doing  a few seminars on it this week which I will try to check out if I get the chance. 

Afterwards I went out on deck to check out a a thunderstorm. Lightning looks amazing from the deck of a ship in the middle of the night, since you are surrounded by complete darkness, and when a sheet of lightning darts across the sky the entire world around you is illuminated in an awesome bright light and you see everything up to the horizon for many miles. It is a spectacular sight.