NOTE: WE WILL HAVE VERY SPOTTY INTERNET CONNECTION FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS

Yesterday, a sea day, I attended a talk by the Princess Master Chef, Commendatore Alfredo Marzi. Commendatore is an honorary title in Italy similar to Sir or Lord in England. He is onboard for about half our cruise training the staff. He is quite a character. He will be doing 10 cooking demo classes and I’m planning to attend if I have time.

At noon we had a special luncheon for the CruiseCritic members. I had set it up several days ago and it was to be just a section of the main dining room, but on Friday the Maitre d’ called me to meet with him again and said the Master chef wanted to move it to Sabatini’s and he was going to prepare a special menu for us. Judy (another CC member) and I did all the invitations and all 28 members attended. It was the best meal we have had; they even included wine. For desert we had a wonderful cake (Italian Wedding cake?) with CruiseCritic World Cruise 2009 on it with ice cream and strawberry sauce for desert. At the end of the meal the placed the plate of little candies (there is a name for these, but it’s not coming to me right now) on the table… they were to die for but we were already too full to enjoy them. The First Purser for Food and Beverage, Melania Parnisari, was seated next to me and I commented that I wished I had a doggy bag to take all the leftover candies back to my cabin. Within 10 minutes of returning to our cabin there was a knock on the door “Room Service”; when I answered it was a plate of the goodies. They are so rich it will take us a couple days to eat them all.

We are attending far more onboard activities than any of our past cruises and finding them to be really enjoyable. We gained another Trivia Player so yesterday we became an official team for the first time.

I’ve also put up a picture of some of the dolphins we saw yesterday- there were hundreds in this pod racing along side the ship.