A Day at Sea

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Today we awoke to find ourselves with no view but the sea. The weather is grey and dismal. I think the northern summer has come to its end!

We took ourselves to the restaurant for breakfast and found there were not many other passengers. After a lovely breakfast we went upstairs to reception and booked ourselves on the champagne and prosecco tasting this afternoon, and a complimentary orchestral concert in town on Monday night. After that we waited 10 minutes (until 9am) and booked our cruise for next year.

On returning to our suite we gathered our laundry and took it down the corridor to the guest laundrette - there is one on each floor and it only has one washer and one drier, but we were lucky to find it available. We then went up to the theatre to listen to the enrichment lecture about St Petersburg, which was reallly more about Russian History.

At the end we returned to the laundrette, retrieved our washed clothes and took them back to our suite to dry them on the clothesline in the bathroom.

We then decided to watch a movie on tv. Peter Rabbit was hilarious! We really enjoyed it before going up to have lunch on the pool deck. We both decided on the lemon sole for a nice light lunch. We may have had a mango mojito as a pre-lunch cocktail, followed by a glass of champagne with lunch, and then an espresso martini for dessert! this, strangely enough, was followed by an afternoon nap. We awoke from our nap in time to go to trivia in La Dolce Vita (that lovely salon which was added when they cut the ship in half in July). We did okay with just the two of us, but certainly not in the top 3!

Trivia ended just in time for us to go to our champagne & prosecco tasting which was run by Caroline, the sommelier from our Panama cruise. Prosecco had been around for a long time before our fine French monk, Dom Perignon, discovered how to make the bubbles in France. Prosecco is not set in oak casks, however, hence the clearer appearance. Caroline also told us it is okay to leave champagne standing. The corks are dense enough to keep the air out and if you lay it on its side you will lose the action of the bubbles.

Tasting finished just in time to rush back to our suite for a shower and shampoo to prepare for our captain‘s cocktail reception and first formal dinner. I wore one of my lovely new cocktail dresses. We met a lovely couple, Harris who is in charge of the bar service on the ship, and his lovely partner from Denmark.

After the cocktail reception we adjourned to the dining room for dinner. My entree was a fillet of salmon which was not cooked but had been marinated overnight with something - served with caviar. Wonderful. Followed by seafood chowder, then a lovely, most tender fillet Mignon (without the bacon, but that’s okay, after the last experience I didn’t expect bacon). Dessert was pavlova! In a subtle, deconstructed form. Tom had an Angus tartare entree which he really enjoyed, followed by an Italian soup with meatballs in it, and then the fillet Mignon and pistachio and vanilla bean gelato for dessert. We drank champagne to begin with and then Caroline came along and told us that they still stock Billi Billi, a delightful Shiraz from Victoria, so she opened a bottle of that to breathe on our table until needed with our steaks. After all of that we also had a glass of Cadillac, the dessert wine we’d enjoyed going through the Panama in 2016. Then it was time for bed!!

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