12000 Meals

A day at sea so, in the absence of much excitement, how about I dazzle you with facts and figures.

One of the many activities scheduled for the day was a tour of the kitchen area where over 12,000 meals are prepared each day. Now bear in mind that we are a reasonable small ship, so I'd hate to see the numbers for the QEII, but the stats are impressive enough nonetheless.

There are 540 crew on board, and over 250 of them are directly involved in cooking, serving, and cleaning up after our meals, and judging by what the Americans put away, it must be the most important aspect of their cruise. Meals are served continuously from 6am till 11pm, and there are 95 serving staff covering the 5 restaurants and room service, and 80 cooks and chefs of various rankings. All the breads are baked freshly - that's 200 loaves, 5000 rolls, and 1000 danishes and pastries. There are 20 poor souls who do nothing but wash dishes, pots and pans - some 20,000 items a day. Everybody agreed that the only job they really wouldn't want was the lot of the 2 dedicated pot scrubbers.

It takes 5 storemen to get everything on board and kept organised, and 5 people do nothing but crush, recycle, sort, mulch, decant and shred our waste and refuse. In terms of food, the cruise uses half a tonne of butter and margarine, and we consume more butter and margarine than we do fresh vegetables. We also go through half a tonne of sugar on top of the 20,000 small packets of sugar, and several times already I've heard a loud voice say "I'm going to need more sugar than that". No, you don't!

If you add to that all of the people who are cooking and clearing up after the 540 crew, including dedicated Filipino and Indonesian cooks to satisfy the crew's palate, it ends up being a huge operation - and it's continuous for 17 hours a day.

Also went to the presentation by the lumberjack who is on board, and who wanders around the ship in his lumberjack clothes complete with hard hat and throwing axe. Trying to drum up business for the lumberjack show in Ketchikan tomorrow of course, but he was very interesting and articulate, and actually lives in the town when not competing globally, so it was a very interesting introduction to the town and it's character.

Before dinner we went to the early show in the Showroom, a 30 minute song and dance review called Northern Lights. Some great voices and dancers amongst the ship's entertainers. Then after dinner it was off to one of the lounges to enjoy a piano and violin duo called Adagio. Very talented, and a nice way to round off the evening.