Welcome champagned on Formal Night. Then dinner at Sabbatini's. Frescobaldi wine from Tuscany was featured.  But we instead had Bertani Amarone from the Valpolicella region of Verona, Italy. With white wine and gin martini. Appetizers. My  grand soup. A misti assortment. A couple of shrimp dishes, My dinner of mushroom risotto and ossobuco. Panna Cotta dessert. On to karaoke. Final stop at Skywalker's Night Club Only 3126 steps on Day 2 of cruise. We arrived in the Port of Osaka the morning of Day 3.  We are berthed almost alongside the largest aquarium in the World, Kaiyukan.  I've been to Osaka at least 50 times.  Here is  my posting of almost exactly two years ago , which described this city, and showed a photo of whale sharks in this aquarium.  They are today called Kai and Yu Went early for lunch, so breakfast was still being served.  A concoction of rice, miso soup. hash, sunny side egg and natto. to start, with a Bloody Mary. Second c...

The Israel-Hamas War seems to be escalating.  However, Egypt is beginning to allow foreigners to enter from the Rafah Gate in southern part of the Gaza Strip.   Updates here,   From the morning  New York Times: That is the conclusion of   a new study   by Patrick Sharkey and Megan Kang at Princeton. Stricter gun laws passed by 40 states from 1991 to 2016 reduced gun deaths by nearly 4,300 in 2016, or about 10 percent of the nationwide total. States with stricter laws, such as background checks and waiting periods, consistently had fewer gun deaths, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows: But on to our cruise.  Aomori is the the capital city of Aomori Prefecture.  Means Blue Forest, with a current population of around 265,000, the northern most of Honshu Island.  There were 319,000 people living here in 2000, and this number has since then been declining, as is the entire country, which was up to 127 million in 2007, but is today d...