Today we met up with our son in law’s parents who live in Portugal.  They met us at the port terminal where our ship was docked first thing this morning.  We had previously gotten them approved by Holland America to come aboard the ship and they presented their ids, the list was checked and we got them through security.  At the ship, they received a visitor’s pass and the ship kept their ids until they left the ship.

We went into the main dining room and had breakfast.  I had worked on a way to translate between Portuguese and English using Nana’s and my iPhone and our airpods.  The technology is not quite there for live translating and Nana would get frustrated and didn’t like using the AirPods.  So we reverted to using Google Translate. You would select which language to speak, the iPhone would listen and then type out a response in the other language.  This process worked fairly well.   This was important because Jose and Isabel do not speak English and we speak only a little Portuguese.  The biggest challenge of the day was ordering breakfast.  The menu is in English only and was really an American style breakfast, not a Portuguese style breakfast.  It was great breakfast after we got through the ordering and we were able to talk with them about our common grandchildren.  

After breakfast we went on an extensive tour of the ship and showed them the entertainment areas, the pools, the Lido Cafeteria, where we play basketball, the Crow’s Nest, and the exercise room.  We then went back to our room where they gave us some gifts and we gave them some gifts.  

We then decided to head off the ship, walk to the city center for lunch.  It was a very nice sunny day and it was great walking around the city.  The city center was very busy with a lot of restaurants and shops.  

On our way to the city center we heard several bugler alarms which we did not know for.  Also two trolleys were completely stopped in the middle of the street and no traffic lights seemed to be working.  We didn’t think much of it at the time but when we sat down at a restaurant to eat the waiter said no food or drinks as the power was completely out.  We originally thought that the power outage was just in the city center but we soon found out that all of Portugal and Spain were down.  We eventually found a restaurant that would seve us water and beer and even had bread and cheese too.  After our lunch, we found another shop and had some Pastéis de nata.  Everything was selling out fast as nobody could cook or bake so what they had made in the morning was all that they had.  In addition, most places were only taking cash and you had to have exact change.  As we were heading back to the ship, it looked like most restaurants figured out how to serve some fruit bowls, bread and cheese and other items that you did not need to use electricity for.  Most ATMs were not working but we found a long line at an ATM that seemed to be working (must have had a generator in the building).

Back to the ship if the outage was going to cause any more problems.  We said our good byes to Jose and Isabel and told them we had a fantastic time visiting their country and thanked them for meeting up with us.  We were supposed be all aboard by 3:30pm, we got back around 2pm.  We were on our friend’s balcony for the sail away but we kept seeing people coming back to the ship over the next several hours.  

At 4:30 the captain spoke and said that the electrical outage caused huge traffic jams and a lot of the excursions were late coming back.  In addition there were 10 people not on excursions that were not on board and some were able to phone in and were not sure when they could be back and some could not be talked to because the cellular network was up and down.  At 5:30, the captain came on and said everyone was on board.  If we had left on time then most likely these 10 people would not have been able to join the ship for the rest of the cruise.  Tomorrow we are in Tangiers and then 6 sea days.  So if they missed the ship, they could not get to Tangiers (no planes were flying and ferry was not possible). But then since we were delayed the pilot had left to escort another ship out of and we had to wait for him to leave the port.  Finally we left 3.5 hours late.  The captain came on and said that he wasn’t sure what was going to happen for tomorrow. We were only in Tangiers for 6.5 hours tomorrow and were already late by over half that time.  The ship could not make up any time due to already planning fast speed and heavy weather tonight.  We will see what will happen tomorrow.