You can see some photos of our days at sea here.
We lost another hour overnight. That makes two nights in a row that we’ve set our watches ahead, so we are now 6 hours ahead of Indiana time. While we’ve done a lot of relaxing/napping the last couple of days, it still doesn’t feel like we’re caught up.
We continue to see lots and lots of water out our balcony window. That’s been the case for the last two days. Today, it’s a little bit sunnier than yesterday, but there’s still a lot of clouds.
We got up a little later this morning. After showers, we headed up one floor to the World Cafe for the breakfast buffet. It always seems like our plates get full before we get to the end of the long line of options. Even when we plan to eat lighter because we will only be around the ship, it still seems like we eat too much.
After breakfast, we headed back to our room, but Muhammad and Lester were still working there, so we wandered up to the front of the boat to Mansen’s and the Explorer’s lounge. We went upstairs there, and largely had the place to ourselves. Alan sort of caught up on the news of the day, while Joyce sort of caught up on some napping.
We went back to the room from there to brush teeth and take care of some other needed activities.
Our first event was the Order of the Blue Nose Ceremony. Apparently when you cross the Arctic Circle, you become a member of this society. A part of the initiation, necessary to gain permission from King Neptune to enter the icy waters of the Arctic, is to plunge into the icy waters. While we entered the Arctic Circle earlier, apparently King Neptune was on holiday, so the ceremony was delayed until today. The hot tub by the main swimming pool was filled with many bags of ice for the event. Another ‘tradition’ on a Viking ship is to sacrifice a pianist first, so the lanky ship pianist dove into the ice-filled pool, exited to a nice towel, received a dollop of blue icing on his nose, as well as a cold beverage meant to warm the innards. There was quite a line of new passengers to participate. We elected to just watch.
The ship always plans an extensive set of activities for the sea days, so today we went forward and down to Deck 2 to the Star Theater for a Cooking Demonstration by the Executive Chef, Shane, and the Executive Pastry Chef Karu. Shane demonstrated how he makes Porcini Mushroom Risotto, while Karu was making Classic Tiramisu at the same time. While Karu was a little difficult to understand, Shane was entertaining and fun. Alan’s favorite quote was that the recipe is just meant to be a suggestion about how to make the dish.
Did I mention that we are still seeing a lot of water?
We went back to the room for a while of more blogging and sorting out how to preserve and manipulate the pictures and video we’re taking.
Of course, that caused us to work up quite an appetite, so back to the World Cafe for lunch. Joyce was looking for the special Risotto station, but apparently it was on the other side of the Cafe (yes, there are two long lines of food, and a dessert/pizza/breads section at the end between the two!). Nonetheless, we both were able to fill plates with carved sirloin steak, shrimp, cheese and spinach ravioli, salads, vegetables, breads, swordfish, …. You get the idea!
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the room: Alan doing his best to tackle the picture preservation problem with limited WiFi, Joyce doing a good job of capturing what we’ve done so far with voice to text and text, both in the room and on the balcony.
We skipped afternoon tea, but walked back to the Star Theater for the Port Talk on Longyearbyen, Norway. We were advised to watch it from our room by the Vela staff, since the theater was very full. We need the exercise, so we made it back just in time for it to start.
We followed that by watching one of the lectures on volcanic activity. We’ve become a lot more interested in volcanoes since our time in Iceland.
When we looked out of our balcony, we saw this:
Tonight we had dinner at our favorite specialty restaurant, Manfredi’s. This is a high rate Italian restaurant, and we’ve eaten at Manfredi’s on our other Viking ocean cruises. We were looking forward in anticipation!
We each chose the Fritos Misto Amalfitano, and our waiter told us we would get 2 shrimp (3 if we ere lucky), along with the calamari. We were going to share the Insalata Primavera, but he told us they were small, and we should each get one. (Hey, it’s already paid for, right!). We also both got the Pasta a Fagioli. For our first plate, Joyce selected the Risotto ai Funghi Porcini, and Alan the Ravioli Freschi all a Caprese e Pesto al Basilico.
That would seem like enough, but no! For the second plate, Joyce ordered the Filetto di Manzo e il Suo Midollo Arrosoto, and Alan took his favorite, Viking Bistecca with Salsa ai Gorgonzola. If we would have taken pictures of our plates after the fact, you would have found them empty.
We each selected a desert: Joyce got Mille Feuille with Tahitian diplomat cream, while Alan got the Caramello. (We didn’t take pictures of that menu). Both were very good, like the rest. Thankfully, neither were huge portions!
We then rolled down to the other end of the ship to the Theater to see Great Britain’s The Voice singer, Karl Loxley. He’s a young classical-style tenor with a lot of vibrato in his voice. He sang a number of contemporary ballads. Here’s a link to the song that he used to close his show.
When we returned to the room, we decided to watch a couple more episodes of Downton Abbey, a series that we missed the first time around, but now we’re kind of invested.
We’re not quite in the land of midnight sun (yet), but tonight we have a 12:30 am sunset; sunrise is at 3:00 am.