Yucatan Cruise Journal, Aboard The NCL Spirit. Day Two.
Monday, February 8 2010. At Sea. Relaxing Everything Except The Drinking And Eating Schedule. This cruise begins and ends with sea days. That puts relaxation time at the two moments when it's most welcome. The day got off on the right foot: I slept late. The one and only advantage of an inside cabin is that, with the lights off, it's pitch black in there, even at noon.
Walking out onto the deck, I found no vestige of the cold in which our ship departed New Orleans. The sea was rocking the boat a bit, but not enough to bother me. I had a brief breakfast of fruit and bread with juice and coffee from the boofay. But where were the espresso-cappuccino machines that were on the NCL Jewel back in October? I thought that was a great addition, making it possible to have coffee with the oomph I'm accustomed to having at home.
I spent most of the morning writing and publishing the Menu Daily. I must keep going through semi-vacations like this, if I am going to take so many of them. The internet on the ship moves at its usual sluggish pace, but at least the price hasn't gone up. Still, it will cost $100 by the end of the cruise.
Lunch in the sushi bar. Last night, while dining on the flying food at Teppanyaki next door, the sushi chefs had not a single customer the entire time. This may prove that all sushi eaters are Saints fans, because the game was on then, too. I talked with them about this on my way out. They told me I really had to come back to try them today. The repast started with the same three preliminaries as last night. Then some hamachi and salmon nigiri, and an interesting small roll made of seared, peppered tuna. All that went down with a Kirin beer.
The chef wanted to show off his dragon roll. I was about to tell him he should be more careful making offers like that in public, but then it hit me he was talking about a menu item. He took a long time making it, and from those pains came a striking presentation. The head and tail of a large fried shrimp served as the front and back of the dragon. Inside and outside were barbecued eel, avocado, tuna, and cucumber. It wouldn't impress the habitues of the best New Orleans sushi bars, but I thought it was good enough for the $15 upcharge.
I need a haircut badly. I thought I'd get one in my spare time on the ship. But the day before I left New Orleans Harold Klein--my regular barber, at the Royal Orleans Hotel--called to ask when I'd be coming in. He must keep records on his regular customers. Well, then. I'll just have to go around the ship looking like a castaway. That's the way my hair is. One day it looks all right, the next one I look like an unusually well-fed street person.
This trip's first convocation of Tom's Six-Thirty Martini Club was attended by eight of our fourteen travelers in the Galaxy of the Stars. The servers were not quite as good as last year's, who remembered my Negroni order after the first day. Here, we had a hard tine being served at all. I bought the first round, and since we had such a small group I covered the seconds, too.
The most fascinating attendee was Captain George Peterson. He is a retired bar pilot. For sixty-three years, he piloted ships in and out of the Mississippi River--across the bar, as the exit is called. He is the son and grandson of pilots, and his son and grandson are also in the profession. Indeed, his grandson was the bar pilot for the very ship we were traveling. The Captain, as we came to call him, took up cruising after he retired. This is his twentieth cruise. He says he will be coming with us on the maiden voyage of the Epic in June. The Captain is ninety-three. He doesn't look it, and he surely doesn't act it. He showed up for everything through the entire cruise, and I encountered him just strutting around Cozumel when we arrived there.
Dinner at the end of the first full day is always in the main dining room. The entire group showed up for that, requiring some reassembly of tables to fit us all. It was the usual main room dinner, with its nice surprises and disappointments. The great dish today was the half-order of pasta or risotto I always get for a preliminary course. This night it was spaghetti carbonara, made so well that I urged it upon everybody else as a side dish. I'm writing this near the end of the cruise, and still the carbonara makes the list of the two or three best dishes I had anywhere on the ship.
The entree was the disappointment. It was billed as monkfish. However, fish nomenclature is anything but uniform, and this was like no other monkfish I've had. Spongefish is what I'd call it. Yuck. But the dinner ended with another unexpected nicety. The bread pudding--a dessert that's almost always terrible outside New Orleans--was very rich and moist, with only the cinnamon component of the Creole version missing.
To karaoke. The song selection was better than on the last ship, and I compiled a long list of songs to sing. But the second one sent me back to my room. It was "Maria," from West Side Story, sung in the style of Johnny Mathis. But it started out on such a high key that I could only have pulled it off with falsetto, which would not have done the song justice. The host knocked it down two tones, but he wouldn't let me start over.
I was in bed at eleven as we plied calm seas toward Costa Maya.
