Silversea Water Cooler: Welcome! Part Four

[TLCOhio]

Hi Terry, thanks for the input, as always:)

 

Are you, Lois, looking at doing Viking's April 25, 2019, Bergen to Stockholm, sailing? Super loved Bergen!! Plus, having St. Petersburg for two days can be totally spectacular. Many other wonderful potentials with this routing. Happy to share more, answer any port option questions, etc.

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

From our Jan. 25-Feb. 20, 2015, Amazon River-Caribbean adventure that started in Barbados, here is the link for that live/blog. Many visuals from this amazing river and Caribbean Islands (Dutch ABC's, St. Barts, Dominica, Grenada, San Juan, etc.):

www.boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2157696

Now at 57,245 views for these postings.

[UKCruiseJeff]

Potato salad !

 

An interesting and sensitively written article in The Times on the topic we recently discussed on The Cooler.

 

A time to die

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-neurosurgeon-henry-marsh-on-why-assisted-dying-should-be-legalised-d0qm3wrl8?shareToken=51faae4a4e12700216a4ab1c98d11cb8

[mysty]

Excellent article J! Thanks for posting the link. The arguments presented against assisted dying are very familiar. They were bandied about here before the law was passed.

[philw1776]

We took Viking Homeland's excellent Nordic/Baltic cruise last year at the end of May. Great weather. April might be too cold. Search temps on the net. Gorgeous area. Terrific cruise.

As to Viking alcohol, wine & beer included at mealtimes. Different dark beer featured each lunchtime. Pours are frequent & generous and many walk away to other venues with full wine glasses. For cocktail drinkers, my occasional Bombay gin martini was $9. People seriously into cocktails buy their Silver Spirits package, any drinks, any time for twenty something dollars per person per day. Folks love it but even that cost is way more than we drink.

The Viking Ocean ship is like Silversea Silver Spirit/Muse with even more space despite 930 persons. We hung out in the forward top floor Explorers Lounge with its spectacular 2 story glass views, a bar and comfortable seating. Never crowded. Ship seems empty EXCEPT for afternoon tea in the Wintergarden. Jammed. I busted their chops lamenting that one obviously needs a British passport for that venue.

Has a main dining room and a topside buffet restaurant. Main restaurant service is good but a notch below Silversea standards in my experience.

Thought my wife who likes fine dining would hate the informal 7th deck World Cafe buffet dinner option but she loved it. Same choices as the table service restaurant plus lots more all the way down to pizza & gelato. A sushi bar too. Excellent. Even though World Cafe table service is beer & wine only they go get you anything if you ask. Made my wife a batch of cookies she casually mentioned she liked. There are also two specialty restaurants requiring reservations. Free, included.

We love the smaller ships and are on Viking Ocean this fall and on Silversea Silver Muse a year from August. We'll see how each are doing.

[Tothesunset]

It isn’t even “walking” weather here M! Very hot. My gauge says that it is over 40 but can it really be?!

Not unless you're particular area has beaten the highest temp ever recorded in the UK by 3 degrees.:cool:

 

The high in Aldershot (you're in Hampshire, no?) today is 29. I think you need a new gauge or reposition the current one.;)

 

Incidentally, my father is always keen to have exaggeratedly high temperatures on warm days. He takes his thermometer into the sun and waits until the little red line gets to its highest then claims that North Yorkshire has a temp of 35 when it's really struggling to get over 20! His other thing is to look at the car temp gauge when it's been sitting in the sun then he says something daft like ''It was 34 outside when I went into town but after a couple of miles it had dropped to 22.''

 

We get similar from him in the winter - outside temp -2, claimed outside temp -12.

[UKCruiseJeff]

Official temperatures are normally air temperatures and shaded. That particular sensor is in my garden in a spot where it is sometimes shady and sometimes in full sun. I sometimes sit there when I don't want to sit in the shade. So when it is in the shade it gives me the temperature in the shade and when it is in full sun it gives me temperature in the full sun and in that way it's perfect for it's purpose. I have other temperature gauges ie in La Cucina where it is permanently in the shade. :)

[Daveywavey70]

Good Evening all from a still very hot and sticky Wales

That was an excellent article Jeff, it.certainly gives us food for thought.

Counting down to the Kleftiko! How long does it need to cook for in your garden oven?

[mysty]

That article did indeed provide food for thought and I have been chewing on it since reading it. It's not death I am afraid of. It is the pain and the lingering when it is obvious that my number is up. I have a high tolerance for pain (natural childbirth and dental fillings with no numbing) when I know that I am not in critical condition. I think that if I knew that death was coming I would have much less patience with it. I would want to say my goodbyes and check out. Ideally I would like to die in my sleep unaware that I would not greet a new day. That may be selfish though. :(

[UKCruiseJeff]

Hi,

 

I agree with both of you. The key issue is that we all hate talking about the subject so much that the topic and arguments are not really being aired and debated and concluded. We need to have courage and make our politicians confront these issues.

 

Dave, the problem is that on a purely practical front, as kleftiko is completely sealed the beehive adds no taste or genuine flavour contribution other than the romance of cooking in it. It’s great for open cooking and I add flavoured woods. So it will cook in my new and much appreciated Sage cooker for I reckon 4hours. It’s just a half shoulder. It will then have some time cooked open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[mysty]

Agreed J! And on the other note I am looking forward to your finished dish tomorrow!

[UKCruiseJeff]

M, I fear that this is one dish that will taste better than it looks.

 

:)

[mysty]

J...not to fear! I have an excellent imagination! :)

[UKCruiseJeff]

Dave/M, I wonder whether it will be too smoked in flavour if i cook it in my hot smoker?

 

What do you think? If so what wood type?

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Daveywavey70]

I think lightly smoked would be ok? Maybe a few applewood chips?

Our Kleftiko was done in the normal oven. 13 hours sealed then the last 1/2 hour ish open.

It was lovely.

And you could believe you were sat out at the foot of Troodos while the weather is like this.

[mysty]

DW..that sounds like a wonderful experience. J...I am useless with any question relating to food! I say go with your gut! :)

[Daveywavey70]

It is M, My first ever Kleftiko was a restaurant (my friends reassured me it was a restaurant not just a couple of tables in someone’s garden) somewhere on the cliff tops to the east of Limassol. It was cooked in the large white oven in the garden for 24 hours. We sat there on a beautiful day looking out to sea enjoying the most amazing meal with some beautiful local wine. Perfection. I’ve never been able to replicate it exactly but I’m a huge believer that recipes never travel well.

 

 

I Don’t know what your thoughts are J on the accompanying salad but I always think feta is a big no no with lamb, hence the halloumi skewers. I Think my relationship with halloumi is becoming slightly unhealthy. Well at least we can’t get real loundza here or I think I’d eat halloumi and loundza all the time. I found a great cafe in New Southgate that used to have real halloumi and loundza. That was a real treat.

[mysty]

DW...was that a poke at J's crashing of a family home in Cyprus? :) Funny! :)

[Daveywavey70]

No, honestly M.

No poking. That’s just the way things are over there. It was a few patio tables in a garden. It was the sort of place any tourists would never find but my friends actually lived there so knew these exactly where to go.

That wasn’t as funny as the old lady at the top of Troodos mountain selling Lefkaria lace. I said it was beautiful but I had no money. She promptly produced a click clack machine from somewhere amongst her skirts and said with a toothy grin “ we take Visa”. I was rolling on the floor.

[mysty]

A true entrepreneur DW! :) Did you invest? I did find the reference to the "garden restaurant" funny after reading about J's experience in Cyprus.

[UKCruiseJeff]

Hi Dave, no I'm not really a salad and kleftiko man and I don't like haloumi. Feta - I like! But for us it will simply be spuds, onions and some carrots.

 

There is a village a drive North out of Limmasol that is traditionally where locals go for evening meals because it get's a bit of breeze that is missing in Limmasol! It is well known as it has a few tavernas there. In fact it is the main trade of the village. It's called Germasogeia - sometimes spelt with a "Y". Was that it?

 

I have so many memories and stories about Cyprus and the people I worked with there. We started holidaying there and then when I worked for "The Corporation" I based a lot of our operations there as it was seen as being easy to get to for some of our partners in The Middle East and Africa. We had business partners in Beirut during the difficult years and once had to mount a very interesting "operation" when some of my staff got stuck in Beirut and were in danger. Working for American corporations in Beirut suddenly became very hazardous particularly for the female members of my staff. They arrived when there was no war and then a week later they were in the middle of it and we had to get them out. That was an extremely interesting operation. It was also interesting later to meet our partners based in Beirut who made their way to meet us In Larnaca. In Larnaca you could hear the pounding from Beirut when the wind was blowing in the right direction.

 

Dave a lot of Lefkara lace was made in China ....... ;)

[mysty]

Sounds like staff needed "hazard" pay J! Crazy world we live in.

[Daveywavey70]

I really can’t remeber Jeff sorry, it was 23 years ago! A lot of water has passed since then.

 

The Kleftiko experience was a little house up a dust track a few hundred yards from the sea to the east of Limassol.

 

The place they took me for the Meze was a little village somewhere on the slopes of Troodos. It looked like a wooden shed from the outside. On the inside it was plastered with photos of celebs that had eaten there. There were certainly a lot of locals in there that night.

 

The “operation” sounds awful, I can’t imagine being in that situation. It got me to thinking about one of one of our Employees here, he and all of his family were on the Romantica when it caught fire in 97 doing the 3 day cruise to Egypt from Cyprus. Luckily everyone was rescued. That was no consolation though to his rather ascerbic Belfast born mother who still has some rather choice comments to offer about the jewellery that she lost that night. I love her to bits but i’m glad I wasn’t in a lifeboat with her that night.

[UKCruiseJeff]

That sounds stress full Dave ... and yes it was awful. Two females and a male stuck in Beirut and absolutely terrified.

 

This is the sort of thing you look back on and wonder how it all worked but it did. When I got the call I contacted our security department. I was unaware of the sort of stuff they could do but because it was a high profile American corporation execs were at some risk in those days and in some parts of the world.

 

I called them and they asked to meet me at Farnborough airport late the following day. I met them and we sat for several hours trying to work out what we could do. At that time the corporation was extremely cash rich and operated a fleet of 9 Falcons for European execs, and the planes were serviced over each weekend at Orly. This being a Friday I noticed one of them on the tarmac disgorging a group of UK execs, and I noticed that it was registered in Switzerland and had the white cross of red background on the tail. (I just found the piccy of me getting on it on a much better occasion) ... and it sparked a cunning plan.

 

Well the plan was rather imaginative and you need to understand how desperate we were to get them out and to cut a long story short we changed the tail from a white cross on red background to red cross on white ie to look like a Red Cross plane and took two seats out of the inside out and kitted so it could passably look like a medical plane. We contacted our people in Beirut and got them to hire a private ambulance and kitted the chap out as a casualty. Our story was that he had had a "heart attack" and the females were nurses. Our contact in Beirut escorted them through loads of road blocks to the airport with the story that they had flown in on an air ambulance to collect and care for a seriously ill British subject and were taking him back to the airport to get him home and that the ambulance was flying back in from Larnaca where it had been sent once war had broken out. A combination of bribes and smooth talk did it. By the time they eventually got to Beirut airport it was barely usable by large planes because it had been bombed but the little Falcon was fine. We got them home safely and very few believed the story of how we did it. I met them at Farnborough and they were extremely pleased to be home.

 

[Daveywavey70]

That sounds like a very very cunning plan indeed. Well done for getting them back safe Jeff.

[mysty]

Greetings Coolers!

 

Today's funny.....

 

 

 

Have a great day all!