It’s Friday afternoon. This is my first blog since Wednesday so that I have some catching up to do. I will post some photos, so if you read only the blog emails sent directly to you, you should also click on the link to the actual website so that you can view the pictures. It’s a somewhat dreary, typical North Atlantic day, but the captain will be taking a slight detour this afternoon so that we will sail close by the northern shores of the Azores, and at least see some land after so much expanse of water.
Wednesday Evening: Indonesian Crew Show
The crew show is quite a hoot; it’s nice that some people don’t take themselves too seriously. It is well worth staying up after midnight! The costumes are quite colorful and the choreography can only be described as comically complex.
Thursday: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997)
The weather has turned overcast and the seas are a little higher, but there is still no need for any kind of motion medication. After another room service breakfast I spend a quiet day, mostly reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.
As most of you know, I tend to read more British and Anglophone than American fiction, and I have previously read only one or two novels by Roth. But American Pastoral really defied all my expectations of what late Roth is like, and I was both impressed by the structure of the novel and deeply moved by its central characters. I have read a number of works in the past few years that focus on the political and cultural dimensions of the ‘60s, mostly from the point of view of the young rebel growing into maturity. Jay Cantor’s Great Neck (2003) gives an epic and cogent analysis of a group of privileged Long Island youth (hence the title), led into the extremes of the SDS and Weathermen ironically by the Holocaust survivors of their parents’ generation. Susan Choi’s American Woman (2003) and Diana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) look at former dissidents trying to return to a place in society and raise their own children. Roth, however, views the violence of the age and its effects on American culture through the lens of the father of a 16-year old girl who blows up a suburban post office and inadvertently kills a passerby. Roth succeeds in making Swede Levov’s parental situation both intensely personal and nationally emblematic in a way that much American first-person narrative fails to do.
Thursday Dinner:
After that heavy reading I am happy to finish off my bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from last night along with:
• Escargot between layers of puff pastry in a creamy garlic sauce
• Greenhouse salad with balsamic vinaigrette
• Grilled tuna over haricots vert and mesclun greens
• Chocolate chip ice cream and decaf
I skip the evening’s entertainment and opt for a good night’s sleep.
Friday: Kitchen and Engineering Highlights
Today I get a further education into the workings of the Eurodam with a morning tour of the kitchen and food preparation areas. Something new is added to the tour this year—tasting samples—as as we move through each part of the kitchen, including the staging area for the Pinnacle Restaurant (where I will dine on Saturday). Some weighty statistics: on a seven-day cruise, passengers will consume 11,830 lbs of meat and meat products; 3,814 lbs of poultry and 1,875 pounds of fish; 1,675 lbs of butter and margarine; and 137,500 lbs of fresh vegetables. And, of course, that’s not to mention 23,040 eggs. And that's just seven days.
After the kitchen tour there is a sit-down question and answer session with the Chief Engineer, who actually oversaw the building of the Eurodam outside of Venice in 2007 and 2008. He begins with a slide show of the construction process and then answers a lot of technical questions (it is amazing what some people want to know). It’s interesting that on an Atlantic crossing the ship sails at high speed for the first two days (about 22 knots) and then slows down to a normal cruising range of 18-19 knots. This is done to build in extra time in case of emergencies—sometimes passenger medical conditions or changes in weather will demand re-routing. Last year we made a slight detour to Bermuda to disembark a sick passenger (you can check out the details on the blog entry from then); today we are making a slight detour to get a closer look at the Azores. The extra speed on the first two days allows us to do this and still reach Lisbon on schedule.
Chief Engineer Jan Koller and
Cruise Director Jason Venner
The ss United States still holds the speed record for crossing the Atlantic in five days—but to accomplish that she had to sail at 40-42 knots. It’s shaky enough at 18 knots; I would hate to be on board going over 40.
Final Fact of the Day: There are 18 children on board this cruise (there weren’t any last year) and I had lunch with two of them (and their parents) today. They did, in fact, ask if it was okay to share my table—a good-looking young couple returning to their home in Germany after having spent three years in Wichita Falls, TX, with their two beautiful blond sons, Max (4) and Ben (2½), who are very popular with the crew, high-fiving everyone they meet.
Time now to don my formal wear for dinner; I’ll report on that in tomorrow’s blog.
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