Friday, October 23, 2009. Halifax. Is Anything Non-Ethnic? Chin-Chin. The coffee on cruise ships gets better with each cruise. The first one I made in 2002 on Carnival had coffee so uninteresting that on the second trip I brought my own. Then ships opened coffee bars with espresso and the like, but you had to pay for it. Now the NCL Jewel has coffee machines in the boofay that dispense a cappuccino close enough to my thick café au lait home brew that it brings me close to full satisfaction. The coffeemaker in the stateroom keeps the stuff warm while I write and sip.
Halifax had peculiar weather. It was in the low forties and windy when I hit the ground at around noon in search of a lunch spot. But it was sunny, after a morning of clouds and mist. I walked the boardwalk along the waterfront through the chill, shopping the restaurants and looking over the trees, which were very much in fall colors. I was five or six blocks away from the ship when a dark cloud hove in from over a hill and began a light drizzle. I climbed two steep blocks into what looked like the business district, so I could duck inside if it started raining.
I was looking for local cooking and local ingredients: lobsters, scallops, clams, mussels. If I'd found a Scottish restaurant, I would have been very pleased. None of that. Quite a few restaurants served the indigenous fare. Problem was, none were open for lunch. Those eateries that were open for lunch were, without exception, ethnic. Japanese. Korean. Mongolian! Lots of Italian. Middle Eastern. Spanish. (No Mexican, though.) But I can eat all that stuff anywhere.
Meanwhile, the clouds parted, the sun came out, and it got a lot colder all of a sudden. I trudged on. Here was a steakhouse called Cut. Open for lunch--but with burgers, steaks, and some Italian and Spanish food. No mussels or lobster. And expensive. Now a Chinese place. It felt as if it were getting warmer. A cloud blotted out the sun and it started raining again--not hard enough to worry about, although I tucked my camera inside my jacket. (My last camera got killed by one big drop of rain.)
Sandwich shops. Pizza. A great-looking place called Chives with a fascinating local menu, gourmet bistro style. But no lunch hours. The sun came out. A wind came up from the north. The temperature dropped ten degrees.
I walked until the business district played out. Another cloud, a bigger one, with a more serious admixture of rain in its warm front, hit me in the back. I turned around and headed into it, and found a row of sushi bars and more pizza. More hummus and chicken shawarma. More sandwiches. Breakfast! No mussels, lobster or scallops. The rain picked up. I saw a sign--"Dim Sum All Day"--and ducked in.
It was very ethnic. The menu was largely in Chinese, but the owners and staff (and customers) were young and conversant in English. They didn't have much dim sum, but enough to make a lunch out of. The first order was fried gyoza stuffed with shrimp. Then shu mai in a steamer basket, with a cabbage wrapper, chunks of pork inside, and a shrimp with hot sauce on top. When I splashed some soy sauce on it, I realized there was no bottom to the basket, and the sauce flowed all over the glass tabletop. Dessert: coconut bean curd with fermented red beans. That was as close to cold bread pudding as anything I've ever had in an Asian restaurant. Fifteen Canadian dollars. Not bad. But eating dim sum in Nova Scotia? For a visitor, that's like eating Amish food in the French Quarter.
It's a good thing I didn't rent a car and drive to the town of Lunenberg, as we did the first time I visited Halifax. A few people who went there said the town and the restaurant I loved there were all closed for the season. Yes, I suppose that happens in this part of the world.
The ship would sail at four, so there wasn't much left to do. I was back aboard at three, and was napping when we left the dock. I wrote my Cruiseletter to the Eat Clubbers to let them know where we'd be eating and drinking for the next two days, then went down to the Spinnaker to commence this evening's intake. It was a Negroni night for me, with the waiter Sandi bringing them up instead of on the rocks. I think I may prefer them that way. There was a good band in the Spinnaker, playing Big Band music, and featuring a guy who played a number of wind instruments. He was the first person I've ever seen playing a melodica--a sort of hybrid between a harmonica and an accordion. (He's the guy on the right, below.) Very good!
Dinner was in Chin-Chin, which is four restaurants in one. There's a teppanyaki room with that hibachi steak foolishness. A Mongolian grill section, where they present shabu-shabu and sukiyaki in a pan that goes on a small stove in the center of the table. A standard sushi bar. And a pan-Asian restaurant whose menu is mostly Chinese.
The Eat Club's official dining spot this evening was in the latter. But not many people joined in. I guess not many had a taste for Chinese that evening. And one definitely must be in the mood for that. Also, at least half the group has decided to dine early, even thought he time change alone (we are two hours ahead of New Orleans) turns an eight o'clock reservation into a six o'clock as far as internal rhythms are concerned. But I don't question other people's tastes.
The ten-dollar upcharge entitled us to whatever we wanted from the menu. I began with a lettuce wrap of chopped-up chicken morsels and whatever else was in that mix. Very good. Then hot and sour soup. The entree that caught my attention was ma-po bean curd, a vegetarian dish. I asked whether they could make it with pork--the classic version. They agreed, but the pork wasn't in there when it arrived. No big deal. The waitress also thought that we should all have a noodle dish in addition to the entrees. We had a few plates of the curry-flavored Singapore noodles sent out. They did indeed go well with the entrees, better than rice would have.
Not a brilliant meal, but for ten dollars extra it was good enough. And different from the food in the main (free) dining room, which practically defines ordinariness.
Our table was near the sushi bar, and I could see everything going on there. Which was nothing at all. It received not a single customer during our two hours. I felt sorry for the two chefs back there, and resolved to have a sushi lunch tomorrow.
Then I found I had nothing to do. Any more drinking would have been too much. There is no jazz club like there are on other ships. But on those other ships, almost nobody is ever in the jazz clubs at the times I would be there. Dinner always pre-empts the big show in the theater, but it's just as well: the seats in there are too small.
So I walked around the ship throwing my paper route. I deliver a newsletter to everybody in the group every couple of days, and they're scattered all over the ship. That done, I returned to my room at about eleven. Looking for weather info, I found a movie with Hilary Swank in progress. I never quite got the plot, but I find Hilary Swank riveting. She's not a classic beauty, but she is unambiguously sexy. Something about the way she looks at the men she's interested in. I've hardly ever received a look like that from a woman. I wish I would. From Mary Ann, I mean.
Speaking of: I did not find this tempting, but one of the items on the ship's entertainment agenda was a party for those "Sailing Solo/Single/Left Husband or Wife In Cabin." I don't want to know what went on there.
