Wednesday, September 21, 2016.
The Sixty-Six-Dollar Continental Breakfast. Strawberry Field. Natural History.
Lynn and I go downstairs for breakfast in our hotel. The place is full, mostly with business people. The conversations are all about Donald Trump. The group sitting immediately adjacent to us are hispanic businessmen who are astonished that Trump has lately scored a distinctive potential to become President of the United States. I tune it out, but Lynn continues the conversation with these fellows, whose feelings are fully opposite.
The hotel mustn't want to serve breakfast, because the selection is as laughable as it is expensive. $66 buys two dry pastries, juice and coffee. Tomoorrow we will walk halfway up the block to a Greek diner that will serve us four times as well for half the price.
Plans under consideration for the day include a walk around and through Central Park and a good look around the Museum of Natural History. I broach the idea of going to Ground Zero, but Lynn says that she is not emotionally ready for that. I'm not sure I want to see it today, either. I was affected by 9/11 so deeply that I remained disturbed by even the thought of the event for months and years. We decide to just get a close of the new tower that stands near where the twin towers were.
Lynn is a sensitive soul and the right age for the Beatles ethos to be a strong energy in her heart even now. So we take the subway to Central Park and Strawberry Fields. The latter is a memorial to John Lennon, across the street from the place where he was assassinated, in front of the striking Dakota apartment building. There's a guy playing the guitar and singing a mix of Lennon and McCartney songs. I start singing along with him, but we are both told that making music here is not allowed. Lynn would have been the one to say that, but she is already so stricken by the significance of the place in her worldview that she backs away to let the tears flow freely.
It's another eight or ten blocks to the museum. Most of what we find are exhibits of the many noteworthy plants, animals, and human cultures that verge on extinction. That's interesting, but Lynn wants to find the stuff about outer space and planets and asteroids. I was heavily into astronomy when we both were kids, although I don't know how much that affected her. It's certainly easy enough to become fascinated by the stars and planets on one's own.
We walk around for hours, then get tired and head back to the hotel for a nap. One thing's for sure: I am getting all the walking exercise I am missing back in New Orleans.
We don't have to include the Eat Clubbers in dinner tonight. They have no trouble amusing themselves, which is fine with me. Lynn and I decide to get Indian food, but we can't find an Indian restaurant within easy walking distance. The streets are still jammed as they were yesterday, with no end in sight. (Yesterday, we had such a hard time finding a taxi that we pay twice the fare of a cabbie for a car.)
Lynn next suggests that we dine at John's Pizzeria. This is a much-praised hangout, popular among New Yorkers. The building is striking and spacious, having been a church in the round in its first incarnation. The stained-glass skylight is divided into eight wedges that resemble standard pizza slices. This is pure coincidence; the slices were there when the owners first took over the church. The actual, edible pizzas bake in coal-burning ovens in the four corners of the restaurant.
We order a large pizza under the name "bruschetta," containing in itself marinated tomatoes and garlic with herbs and mozzarella. We note that the large pie is only two dollars more than a small one. The large one, when it appears, shows itself easily big enough to serve at least four people. We wind up giving the leftover slices to a beggar on the sidewalk outside.
Lynn wants to tour Times Square after dinner, if only to walk off that pizza and the enormous and good salad that came with it. When we make the turn into the square (which, of course, is not a square at all but an tall, vertically stretched letter X) the lights are so bright that it comes very close to daylight, wit the addition of more blue than you'd see in sunshine.
Lynn wants to stop at a pastry ship that is making black-and-whites. They are expensive but not very good, ha ving the texture of cake rather than cookkies. Lynn also stands waving a pair of subway tickets. We are finished withh them, and there's still about three-fifty left on their electric record. Oddly, everyone she offers the tickets ignore here or say no outright. What's so suspicious about something like that? She finally passes them off to a girl wearing a school uniform.
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Thursday, September 22, 2016.
To The Ship!
The lobby of the Hotel Inter-Continental on Times Square is jammed with passengers en route to the Caribbean Princess, which will be our home for the next nine days. Our turn to climb aboard the bus is validated by index cards of varying colors. We are on the Pink Bus. Later, we will see any number of London-style buses in that same color in many of the port we visit.
Like all the other vehicles that drove us around for the past few days, this one is mired in traffic. It finally manages to cut loose as it rides along the East River's many docks. Shortly, we find ourselves in the December 11 disaster area. As high as it is (the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere), we can't catch a good view of the Freedom Tower from there, but even the glimpses are inspiring in the Freedom Tower's size, perfect proportionsm and impressibility.
Although the two are not really comparable, our ship seems to be as impressive as the Freedom Tower. It seems bigger than any other I've traveled upon, although it isn't.
We enter the embarking warehouse and find it jammed with hundreds of people. We fill out the form in which we declare freedom from runny noses or diarrhea. We get our pictures taken, then begin the struggle to find our staterooom.
As is usually the case, the elevators are largely shut down, pressed into hauling the suitcases up to their owner's cabins. This makes the ship hard to figure out. leaving me and most others in in a state of confusion. I am writing this nine days since boarding and there are many parts of the ship in which I am utterly lost.
We check to make sure that the room has twin beds. I still feel funny sharing a bedrooom with my little sister Lynn, even though both of us are too old for sibling revelry.
We have lunch in the buffet. The selection of food is about what I remember from my last cruise on a Princess ship, which is to say a paucity of entrees but a lot of little nibbles. I also remember that the movement of traffic through the buffet is strictly one-way. The Marys loved this quality in their last voyage on this tub. I always found myself going the wrong way, and being tripped up repeatedly.
The emergency exercises are announced. The lecture from the loudspeakers is the longest I've ever heard, much of it heard in tight premises in rooms that will shortly become bars.
The drill complete, Lynn heads out to look around. I wander into the spa, not a place I frequent on cruises. But I remember that a few years ago I got a much-needed haircut from the spa. Indeed, this ship also offers that service. A beautiful, tall, dark-haired woman whose home is Ukraine is summoned to perform the tonsorial task. She uses only scissors to create the best haircut I've had in a long time. Maybe I'll make getting a haircut part of my cruise ritual from now on.
Shower, then a nap. I write a newslettter for the Eat Clubbers, then struggle to get it printed. The internet on the ship is, as it always has been, abysmally slow. Using it for my purposes requires a lot of patience and expensive minutes of service.
My newsletter specfies the Caribbean Princess's Crooners bar as the pre-dinner gathering place for us. It works out well, but the place is soon full of other people. I begin my own cocktail program wiyh a Negroni. I have sipped down more Negronis than any other drink in the repertoire while I am on a cruise. For some reason, every cruise-ship bartender in my expereince knows exactly what a Negroni is, and makes it without having to look up the formula. That I is no big deal, now that the cocktail has developed a following. But when I first took a liking to Negronis, I almost always had to explain it--with the exception of cruise bartenders. (I guess I'd better say that the drink is a shot of gin, half a shot of sweet vermouth, half a shot of Campari liqueur, a splash of club soda, and an orange wheel. It's a standard-setter for me.
Vic and Barbara Giancola are among the most regular attendees at Eat Club dinners, and they've been on a couple of cruises before. They are the first to arrive at the Crooners bar, and they create a certain style to our get-togethers. They also set the chairs up in a circle so we have lots of room for Eat Clubbers. All of us take full advantage of a beverage card that gives its wielders nearly unlimited things to drink--not just Cokes and tea, but also beer, wine and cocktails.
Dinner follows at eight. As usual, a few people in our group opt to dine at the early seating, despite my telling them that the time zones make the late seatings run at around six p.m. New Orleans time, not eight.
We have some forty diners spread around five or so large round tables. The first dinner is better than I expect. I have a cup of artichoke soup, a salad, and a small order of fettuccine Alfredo (neither Alfredo's of Rome nor Impastato's have anything to worry about). The pasta is interesting, still. Every night's menu includes three possible pasta dishes and three soups, some of them chilled.
A filet mignon is featured today. I have sliced roast pork instead, and find it very good by cruise ship standards. I am astonished that one of the desserts is a hot chocolate soufflee. We hardly ever see that wonderfully light dessert in restaurants anymore, let alone cruise ships. It's terrific.
