Day 29
On the Waves
We’ve got a few sea days coming up, so there was no hurry to get out of bed this morning. Apparently, I missed a spectacular sunrise with lots of colours. Another passenger showed me a couple of his photos of it and it looked very similar to the kinds of sunrises we have in Calgary in the fall and winter. Since I slept through this one, I’ll show you one of the Calgary ones instead.
Since it’s a sea day, there was a Viking Baggo tournament. Our blue team trailed the red team for two of the three rounds, then staged a comeback and won by 1000 points. The crew managed to talk the ship’s chef into playing one round, apparently something that he almost never does.
He climbed up the steps and put all three bags in the hole, much to everyone’s astonishment.
As he passed the team, doing fist bumps on his way back to the kitchen, he said, “not so different than flipping omelettes.” I think I’ll start calling him “Chef Boy-howdy” (in the southern US, “boy-howdy” is an expression that roughly translates to “wow”. It’s a play on words for the canned pasta brand, “Chef Boy-ar-dee”) Also, I just learned that Chef Boy-ar-dee was a real guy (!) whose name was Ettone Boiardi, pronounced like Boy-ar-dee.
After baggo, Chef and his team put on a ‘Sicilian Lunch’ that was really good. Rob and I both had the spaghetti with shrimp and pistachio creme sauce, which was as good as it sounds. There was also a Leaning Tower made of sugar (not for eating).
No, of course the items in the photo aren’t fresh pasta, the sign there actually goes with the photo before it, which was fresh pasta. It was all good.
Triva was BRUTAL. On most days, there are at least one or two teams with a perfect 15 out of 15, but today the winning team only has 13 correct. Our team had 10, which is lower than our usual 12, but we felt pretty happy to get 10 right.
Choir rehearsal went fairly well, comparatively. It’s a volunteer choir made up of absolutely anyone who wanted to sing, and you know how that can be. On one of our songs, a ukulele group on board (not sure how that happened) will join us. All but two of them are women, so they call themselves the “Uku-ladies Plus Bob and Jeff”. I suppose it says something about your choir when you add ukuleles and it makes the song better.
Dinner at Manfredi’s, which is always good. New-to-me dish was some kind of ravioli stuffed with bolognese and ricotta covered in a sauce that was similar to gravy. Odd, but very tasty. I would have it again.
After dinner, Rob - knowing my love of absinthe - suggested I try sambuca. It arrived in a funky little glass with three espresso beans floating. The beans provided an aroma as you sipped, adding a delicate coffee flavour to the anise-heavy, thick liquid. It was like the world’s most delicious cough syrup.
The evening show was called “Coast to Coast” and featured American artists from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It was a good show. It was also hard to get clear photos of the performers, having that bright screen background behind them. A few turned out nicely, though.
Then I sat down to write this, but I kept dozing off, waiting for the photos to load. So I went to bed and when I woke up around 2 AM, I got online and took advantage of the faster wifi, since everyone else is asleep. Now it’s 4:30 and I’m going back to bed. See you all tomorrow.