Eating and sleeping onboard

Probably the most important room on the ship to us other than our cabin was the "messroom", which is ship talk for dining room. And high class dining it was! Breakfast was simple, mostly rolls, pizza, and coffee, with occasional yogurt and fruit. But lunches and dinner were four-course all the way. In this picture Boc Noly, the Filipino "messboy" (waiter) is serving us the first course of soup or pasta. At the table on the left are a German couple from a village near Hanover, Eberhart and Gertrude Braun, who joined the ship in Antwerp Belgium. And across from Linda are Joan and Ken Hughes from England who joined us in Southampton and who were emigrating to Cyprus with all their belongs including a car that was safely stowed on deck #5.


The second course was always a seafood course, although occasionally the pasta course had seafood mixed in with the spagetti or soup. This particular dish was boiled octopus, and Linda is having some difficulty trying to figure out if she is brave enough to try some octopus along with the potatoes that Boc is putting on her plate. In fact, she passed on the octopus, but I had one and it was really good, tentacles, head, and whatever else and octopus is made of. Over the five weeks we had clams, squid, cod, sole, sardines, mackrel, and a number of other fishes that no one on board knew the names of.



Fortunately for Linda the fish course was always followed by a meat course, in this case veal cutlets. As you can see in several of these photos, at each meal we had a small bottle of wine, some times red and sometimes white. At lunch on Easter Sunday we shared several bottles of champaign with the Officers table.




















After all that food, it was time for a nap, and the bunks in the cabin were very comfortable. We were supposed to have an inside cabin with just an upper and lower bunk, but because the ship we were supposed to be on was in drydock in Italy when we arrived in England, they gave us a three-bunk cabin and didn't charge us the $1400 difference if fare. I suppose that made up for the extra money we had to spend because the ship was so far behind schedule, but the real economic boost came when the German couple told us that the kinds of lunches or dinners complete with wine and bottled water that we were being served on the ship would cost a least $40-50 in a modest German restaurant, and we only paid $70/day for food, cabin, and more than 8,000 miles of sea travel on our way to visiting 14 ports in 12 countries. Such a deal!

More photos to come in a few days,
L&L