Three days at sea

Sunday, March 24, 2019
Monday, March 25, 2019
Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Three more sea days, as well as setting our clocks back 1.5 hours all adds up to more sleep and more relaxation.

Now, let’s talk about food.

Where am I?

SO, WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

The main dining room serves dinner every night. That should not surprise you. However, every 10 days or so we have a Gala Night. Gala nights are dress up affairs, and for that very reason I have avoided them for the entire trip. I’m in Matt Danger Tolle mode. Always.

Except for now.

One of the ladies at our dinner table on the night before the gala night announced that she would not be attending because she was just getting tired of them. I announced that I had never been to one, but that I would get dressed up and attend if she did. It was really just peer pressure to get her to join the rest of us for dinner, but it worked.

Damn it.

Each gala night has a theme, and the gala night theme this time was Secret Garden. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant but since I had a very limited amount of dress clothing with me I guess it really didn’t matter too much.

So, when we (the Table 64 crew) arrived at the dining room at our appointed time, we were greeted at the door by a very attractive and creative floral arrangement.

If you look closely you’ll see the arrangement has some of those crab claw flowers like the ones I saw in Darwin on my Segway tour. By the way, the floral department on the ship is exactly two people and they did all of the decorating for this night. So, after stopping for a minute or two to admire their work at the entrance to the dining room, we ventured off to our table to see what awaited us there.

Our table, and every other table in the dining room that seated more than four people had the most amazing flower display that I’ve seen aboard ship so far. I really couldn’t capture this in a single photo so please bear with my attempt to portray what I saw.

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And those are all real flowers. There’s nothing artificial in that arrangement. Beautiful, no?

So besides dressing up and having a theme, what makes a gala night so gala? Well, the menu is also kicked up a notch. For example, one can have lobster any night, but it comes with a $20 additional fee. On this gala night, lobster was an entrée choice and there was not additional charge at all! So, of course, I had two of them!

Another feature of gala night is that tables of eight can ask for a member of the staff to host their table. This is very nice as it gives those at the table a chance to get to know a member of the staff a little more personally. For our table, we were hosted by Doolin (remember that fish kissing photo?) Now, not only to we get the entertainment benefit of Doolin’s sparkling repartee, be we also get free wine with the meal. Score!

After a nearly 2 hour meal, we left to go to the MainStage theater to see a Karen Carpenter tribute (that was really good!) But before we left the dining room, the ladies just had to pose for photos. In these photos you can see Kathleen (left) Beth (center) and Mary Lee. I’m not sure who that damn photo-bomber is.

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On the way to the MainStage theater we walked by the customer service desk which is right in the middle of the ship. There, in front of the desk was this:

It looked like there were little secret gardens popping up all over the ship. How do two people pull this off?

Anything else?

Well, yeah, ok, there is this one thing. A new towel animal popped up on my bed during these three days. Personally, I’m not sure what it is. Before I ask its creator to reveal its identity, I’ll let you take a guess.

What is it?

Leave a reply for me with your guess. I’ll ask Wayan (this thing’s creator) tomorrow when I see him.

What’s coming up?

Tomorrow, Sri Lanka!