Just sitting in one of the lounges during the day happily knitting gives me a great opportunity to meet people.

There is the woman (and her husband) from Minneapolis. There is not a yarn store that she has not enjoyed exploring on her travels. Not quite retired yet, she and her husband take a couple of cruises a year to get away. With the front and back of a sweater complete, she is half way down the first sleeve.

Then there is the young waitperson in the Champaign Lounge. From Brazil, her family is involved with production of machine knitted garments. As a result, she loves seeing what people are making but has absolutely no interested in knitting. The other young woman working the same area is from Malaysia. Her grandmother attempted to teach her knitting when she was about 10. Being worried that she was not knitting tightly enough, she managed to rub her finger tips raw from the metal knitting needles.

She used to knit a bit, but mostly crochet explained a Costa Rican woman. But then when all of her family and friends started asking for things, it ceased to be fun. For the past 30 years she has been doing intricate cross stitch just for herself and her home. Not portable, as the pieces are fairly big plus, she notes, she needs more light as she gets older.

Additionally there is the lovely German woman I met at the silliest craft class. The plastic beaded lanyard was stupid, but we struck up a nice conversation. She and her husband live in Wiesbaden. As it turns out, they were also on the same Costa Atlantica trip as Mole and I in May 2010. (I found the yarn shops. She didn’t but celebrated her birthday in NYC – so that probably trumps).

I have also met a woman from Oklahoma who does needlepoint. Her oldest has just finished a peds residency and is about to embark on a couple of years with Doctors without borders. An Italian woman I met one morning (explaining to her granddaughter that the soft-ice machine did not work for breakfast) is needlepointing a large floor covering. She doesn’t expect to accomplish most of it before we dock – but already has the spot picked out on the floor of her home in Ecuador where it will reside when completed. Meanwhile, her son is running their travel agency while the rest of the family is cruising.