We had breakfast in our room today. We’ve just arrived at Sydney. The name sake of my home town. But this one is in Nova Scotia. We are a long way from home.
We are currently 17,028 kilometres east from Sydney as we know it.
We enjoy a quick breakfast. I have an egg and sausage muffin while Mardi has egg and sausages.
We head out to explore a little while late. We are first greeted by the world’s largest fiddle.
We then walk along the promenade of Sydney harbour. It wraps around for around a kilometre. We then circle back to explore the town and walk along the esplanade. It looks a little worse for wear and a little unloved.
There are monuments and statues. All a little overgrown and many of the houses are in need of repair.
As we walk the Atlantic wind cuts through us. It’s around five degrees. But with the wind it feels sub zero.
We decide to head back to the boat. We’ve walked the length of the esplanade so have seen pretty much everything.
We sit in Baristas and warm up with a hot chocolate. Read and complete our daily Mensa quiz. They are very hard. But with a little bit of time and some thought we work through the answers.
We then wander the entire ship and shoot footage for our YouTube channel. We go from deck to deck and film each area. We also record a short review of our first week in board. Subscribe to our channel to see that review soon.
We then go to the buffet for lunch. We arrive quite late as lunch is almost concluded. We have some pizza today. A burger. Some chicken, pasta, seafood stew, salad and dessert.
After lunch we spend the afternoon relaxing. Cruising gives you a lot of time to unwind and relax and we are certainly enjoying that. I’m reading Glenn Maxwell’s biography at present. it’s fascinating and answers a lot of questions why this freak of a batsman has had such a tough run.
We break from reading for our daily trivia fix. We score 11 out of 17 today and rank third. We score 5 out of 5 for our Mensa quiz each. No prizes but we do earn thing called O points. O is for Oceania. Our cruise line. If we collect enough we can use them to “buy” a key ring or something like that.
We then dress for dinner and sit in the bar for a couple of hours chatting and taking in the sights around us. The cruise crowd is largely older Americans. Many sound like Trump supporters. Which is a worry. But many from LA who aren’t so blinded by stupidity. We chat to people here and there but largely keep to ourselves. Some people have noticed us at trivia given our success in the last couple of days.
Dinner time arrives and we head off to the speciality Italian restaurant, Toscana.
We are wowed from the get go. Gorgeously appointed and the staff are just so friendly and chatty.
Immediately we are offered bread and a choice of ten different olive oils and three different vinegars to enjoy our bread with. Who knew there was something called peppered olive oil. But it was yum.
The maître de asks us about our mid cruise survey. We felt a bit unsure at first about tipping staff so felt a bit awkward knowing the North American culture of tipping. He explained we don’t need to tip staff during the cruise.
With that settled we explored the menu. A delicious selection of Italian dishes was on offer. Mardi started with a caprese salad. I started with calamari. For mains Mardi had a half Atlantic lobster with taglioni. I had lobster risotto.
Dessert forced a difficult choice for me so I had a quintet. A tasting plates of all five deserts. Mardi had peaches and custard.
We were pretty knackered after dinner. So called it a night. We have an early start tomorrow as we have a shore excursion booked.
