Steve and Cathy's Blog

One of the many sitting areas; this one on Deck 4

This is the first of three straight Sea Days needed to get us from Sao Tome to Walvis Bay, Namibia. We are heading practically due south, and the fact that it will take three days to reach our next destination is beginning to give us an idea of how large the planet is. I confess that these multiple Sea Days are all starting to run together in my mind. Not that there isn’t anything to do, mind you. It’s just that we get into a routine just like at home, and recollecting two days later what special thing you did two days ago is a challenge. Was it yesterday we talked to the concierge or was it two days ago? Did we eat breakfast at the main dining room two days ago or did we go to Terrace Café?

Well, let’s say that it was today (two days ago as I write this) that we paid a visit to the concierge (one deck below the photo of the Upper Hall on Deck 5 that heads up this post). Both of us are very, very interested in the operation of the ship. While most passengers are satisfied to participate in activities, be waited on in the dining rooms and not give a thought as to how all this comes together, Cathy and I are just the opposite. A cruise ship is a small city, a small city moving at 20 miles an hour through the water. It is both a hotel (which we can see) and a complex machine. We are experiencing the hotel part, but I truly believe that the cruise line purposely separates us from the complex machine part so that we feel like pampered guests and not seafaring passengers.

So we went to the concierge to see what if any opportunities there might be to witness the inner workings of this very complicated machine, this organization with thousands of moving parts if you will. We wanted to visit the bridge, see the kitchens, look at how the heck they process so much laundry, understand how they put together all the printed materials for us each day and so forth. [From Cathy: We had asked our steward Slavi (he is from Russia and his real name is Viacheslav) how they kept everyone’s clothes separate and he said “They do the sheets separate from the towels.” Yes, Slavi, I figured that part…sometimes his English isn’t great. But we did find out from the concierge that they do the underwear in little bags like we all use at home for our delicates. And tiny little tags with our stateroom number for the larger things.] [An aside from Steve: The conversation with our steward was just one of several we have had where Cathy asks a question about some detail of housekeeping that no other guest would think to ask, and it really throws Slavi off.  You can tell from his expression that he is thinking “Why is she asking me that?” and tries to determine what the appropriate polite, guest-centric, response would be.  I have nicknamed it Cathy’s Stump the Steward game, and she is definitely ahead.]

Well, there aren’t any ship-touring opportunities. Period. Concierge Ricardo Gomez tactfully explained that the days when a passenger could do this very much ended on September 11^th. This terrible event prompted every cruise line to scrutinize every aspect of ship security in order to prevent the nightmare of a terrorist act being committed on one of their ships.

Apparently one of the obvious places to start beefing up security was to separate the passengers from the operation of the ship. If you couldn’t completely screen every single passenger prior to boarding, at least you could keep all of them away from the most sensitive parts of the ship. Isolate them in the hotel, so if there’s a troublemaker among them, at least he can’t access the bridge or the crew sections easily. Minimize the exposure. It all makes sense, but it is a shame.

With that task completed, we then hung around Destination Services knitting and writing. Cathy went to the needlepoint chat session and we met in Insignia Lounge at 11:00 to hear Angela Schneider’s lecture The Flavors of Africa. As usual, it was riveting. As she explained at the outset, she is a culinary historian (among other talents), so “if you have come to the lecture thinking you would get a bunch of recipes, you will be disappointed.” The history of food for a given area is a reflection of the entire history of the people of that area. What crops were raised, how they were raised, what was indigenous to the area (in other words, what would grow well). All these and other factors determined the rest of the history of the area and its people. I’m not explaining this well, but suffice it to say that her perspective on the history of Africa seen through the lens of how the people sustained themselves was fascinating.

As I said above, the rest of the day must have passed uneventfully, as neither of us can remember a damn bit of it. Eat lunch, nap, knit, write, eat dinner, go to bed. Tomorrow is another day.