Today was our first full day at sea. The night went fairly smoothly, apart from listening to Sarah and her dad both snoring for 8 hours. At times I thought it was the ships horn sounding. Thank goodness for earplugs! With the earplugs in the only one he could hear snoring was himself.
We were up by 9am and headed down to The Colonnade on deck 8 for breakfast. There’s a huge selection of food on offer, and we all ate plenty. Sarah and I enjoyed our pancakes. Yum!
We came back to our room after breakfast, but our room cleaner chick, Marlena, hadn’t finished yet, so we took a wander around the ship looking for power points. As some of you may be aware from our facebook, the internet out here in the middle of the sea is quite dodgy because it’s a satellite connection, and we’ve been finding it difficult to get online at times. The girl down at the guest internet stations said it’s due to our room being located in the middle of the ship and the two radar beacon thingys being at the front and back of the boat. We did, however, manage to figure out for ourselves that the problem was that they had forgotten to give us a passphrase to gain access. Anyway, we now have access from our laptops here in our room, although the speed isn’t wonderful.
At midday, Sarah and I ventured down to The Club on deck 5 to check out the trivia competition. We must have been looking a bit lost, because a couple of Americans invited us to sit down and join their team. In all there were 6 Americans along with us and our team name is Mixed Nuts. It’s run each day we’re at sea and points accumulate each day with the winning team awarded some prizes at the end of the cruise. The questions are very hard and obscure. Unfortunately, neither myself or Sarah knew the answer to the Australian question which was asked. How embarrassing! Oh well, hopefully we’ll improve. And at least our team isn’t coming last. Not yet, anyway.
Back to our room for an afternoon lie down, before getting into our good clothes for dinner. We went to Restaurant 2 for our degustation dinner, which consisted of 9 courses. They were very small servings, but we ate a lot of stuff that we’d never had before. Crispy foie gras. Lobster roll with black caviar. Bacalaito fritter. Seared panela salmon. Shiraz braised oxtail. White asparagus vanilla cappuccino. Drunken turbot, porcini and swiss chard. Mushroom toast. Tuscany braised veal with mascarpone mashed potato. And for dessert, dark chocolate ganache, espresso citrus panna cotta and condensed milk ice cream.
Dad was sure the waitress was mocking him when she bought our the wine and it was called Fat Bastard.
It was all very good, although most of it I wouldn’t go out of my way to order in a restaurant. The veal was my favourite, except that I ate the lavender garnish. That did not taste good!!!
After dinner, we went to the Grand Salon on deck 6 to see the show. It featured swing singer Ned Rifkin and the band doing a selection of songs from the dark ages. Not really my thing, but it only went for about 45 minutes.
After that, we went up to the Observation Bar on deck 10 for the Name That Tune game. We met up with our American friends from trivia, so once again we joined their team. We were positively brilliant at trivia compared to this debacle. The chickie on the piano plays a small snippet from a song and we had to try to figure out what it was. Had they played something from within the last 50 years, I might have had a chance. As if I know any Col Porter stuff! Our team managed to get 5 out of 13 right, so that’s almost respectable, I suppose. I contributed 3 of the 5 songs we got which was much better than my one trivia contribution.
By the time that finished, it was about midnight so we returned to our room for some sleep. We did gain an hour last night though. We must have crossed a time zone somewhere along the way. Zzzzzzz…….
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