Day 3: Letter from Hawaii

-

It wouldn’t be a trip to Hawai’i without this classic from the Surf Punks.

Pretty much verbatim what I’m writing on all my postcards.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 5: News from the Cruise

-
Image
"How do you market a cruise to people? That seems kinda hard. Do you know what I mean? Like, 'Hey, do you like hotels?' 'Yeah.' 'How about one that could sink?'"  -- Demetri Martin So, obviously, we made it onto the ship. And here I am, late at night and all alone, window howling around me, finally providing an update. On the ship there are port days and sea days. As you might guess, the port days are spent in port, and the sea days are spent SEAsoning french fries with many different and exotic salts. No, wait-- the days are spent literally at sea. This is a repositioning cruise, going from Hawai'i to Australia, to take advantage of the southern hemisphere's warm weather (or maybe to avoid the northern hemisphere's cold weather). And as such, there are A LOT of sea days. Of the 19 days we're on the ship, something like 13 of them are just us at sea, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and not a whole lot else. The point I'm trying to g...
Read more

Day 7: The Galley

-
Image
The first day of the cruise, Steve from Canada said that people have been known to gain a pound a day on the ship. It's me. I'm people. We went on a five-day Carnival cruise to Cozumel in 2015, and I gained five pounds. We then went on a seven-day cruise to Alaska in 2016 and I gained seven pounds. This is an 18-day cruise. Losing a day at the International Date Line never came at a better time. We decided to spend some money and go on a galley tour yesterday. Not too different from any other industrial kitchen, but it was interesting to get behind the scenes and talk about the process of serving meals for 3000 passengers. Not surprisingly, a lot of time was spent talking about cleanliness and how they avoid contamination -- incredibly important, as it's probably ridiculously easy to spread food-borne illnesses across the entire ship if you're not careful. But we also learned about the crazy scale the galley staff has to deal with. The main four dining areas on the ship...
Read more

Day 15: This Post is Bananas

-
Image
About those bananas. Way, way back on Day 11 we were on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia. We bought a T-shirt, mailed some post cards, hung out at the beach. A stingray the size of an oven door swam lazily past us while we were in the water. I got sunburned, and was subsequently told this by literally everyone we knew. We talked to some people from the ship who rented some scooters, and while there's a perimeter road around the island, there are few, if any, roads into the interior. But there are a number of fruit stands dotting the main road, and we passed these on our way to and from the beach. Each one appeared to have a healthy selection of fruit. I didn't see any fruit in the trees, but this was probably because the low-hanging fruit (heh) was already picked by the locals, leaving only the difficult to reach stuff. (I did find some mangoes smashed on the ground during my run the next day, making me think these might have fallen from higher up in the trees.) On our ...
Read more