Australia Edition - Day 6

 Day 6: 2/17 - Tasman Sea Day 1

Good morning from the Tasman Sea! It’s a slow day today, we lost another hour last night, so now we are only 3 hours behind home. The frequent time changes are starting to have an impact. I had a hard time falling asleep last night and was woken up at 9:00am by the cruise director blaring announcements of all the fun things to do at 9:00am on the ship. I think it might be a heavy caffeine day today.

Yesterday was our first full Fun Day at Sea. It will take us 2.5 days to cross the Tasman. We aren’t going very fast, only 12 knots, half the max speed of the ship. Yesterday was beautiful, clear and sunny, and today looks to be more of the same. 

Yesterday morning, we had a lazy morning, got cleaned up and headed to lunch. Lido wasn’t as busy but we still had to fight for a seat. It’s fascinating how Carnival changes their ships to better cater to their primary customer base. One of the buffet stations is called “Snags and Pies”. Snag is Australian slang for sausage and one of the foods Australia is known for is their meat pies. We decided to check that out, having not experienced the meat pie or snags yet. I grabbed some grilled broccoli salad, a couscous, arugula, and guanciale salad, some pasta bolognese, a cheese sausage, a sausage roll, a potato, leek and cheese pie, and a steak pie. The salads were boring and the pasta had been sitting under the heat lamps so long the noodles were dried out. The sausage was pretty tasty, the sausage roll reminded me a lot of the keto sausage balls Valerie makes; ground sausage in a puff pastry with some cheese and spices mixed in, pretty good. The steak pie was ok, probably sat under the lamps for too long, but the potato, leek and cheese pie was really good. 

I did a lap around the Lido deck to see if there was anything I couldn’t live without and didn’t find anything, so I grabbed a cup of coffee and we played our first game of Bananagrams. It was close, Valerie called out Banangrams a fraction of second before I could, but she won. About midway through the game, I started feeling the effects of the cruise food, so after the game we headed down to our cabin. If you know, you know.

I’ve been wanting to learn more about the Rust programming language so while taking care of things in the cabin, I started reading up on it. When I was done with my business, Valerie had her own to attend to so I downloaded the Rust compiler and tooling onto my laptop and wrote a number guessing program where the computer randomly selects a number between 1 and 100 and you have to guess the number with the game telling you if your guess was too low or too high. It’s one of my favorite programs to write when learning a new language because it outputs to the screen, takes keyboard inputs, has conditionals, loops, variables, and requires library references for things like random number generation. It took about 15 minutes and I had a working program. 

Initial thoughts; Reminded me a lot of C, which isn’t surprising given they are both low level languages. The compiler’s messages are pretty fantastic. I really like how memory is managed; garbage collection is expensive and having lower level control over memory is nice but dangerous, but the guard rails the Rust language puts in with their ownership concepts adds a ton of memory safety that you lose with manual memory management. I don’t know that I’ll have a ton of use for Rust right now, but if I do need to write some system tools or something super performant, it’s nice to know I won’t need to deal with C or C++ and can get the benefits of a modern language with modern tooling.

After our business was completed, we decided to hang in the cabin for a bit to do some reading. Around 4 we got hungry again and decided to head up to the deli for a late afternoon sandwich. I ordered the Cuban and Valerie got the buffalo chicken sandwich. Valerie also hit up Guy’s for some chips (fries) and I tried my first Australian beer, a Carlton Dry. Note: Foster’s is not on the ship and I don’t believe Foster’s has anything to do with Australia. We’ve all been lied to by false advertising.

The cuban is my favorite Carnival sandwich on cruises from the US, and the one here was lacking. The pork wasn’t super flavorful, the ham was sliced too thick, there wasn’t near enough mustard, and the pickles weren’t acidic enough. Kind of a mess. Valerie’s sandwich looked ok, but definitely wasn’t the same as what we have at home. I’ve said it a few times in these recaps, things are the same but different. One of the big differences is what we would call mustard or yellow mustard is called American Style Mustard here, with mustard being more akin to a stone ground mustard at home. 

The fries Valerie got were good, but the home run of the trip continues to be tomato sauce. Australians shorten it to just “sauce” when talking about it and they put it on everything. I get it. It’s very similar to ketchup but it’s not sweet. It’s really delicious. We found one that can be purchased from Amazon at home, but it looks like it is a Kiwi brand sauce, not Australian. Probably worth a try. We did find a recipe for tomato sauce so we will likely try making it when we get home. 

The Carlton Dry beer was the first beer I have had in a long time. It’s low carb, only 8 carbs per can and they have other low carb beers on board as well. Australians seem to be pretty carb conscious which is super helpful. It was a nice, light, crisp lager. I enjoyed it but am excited to try the other options on board. 

After our second lunch we decided to try something on a cruise ship neither of us had ever done before. We went to the sports deck and did 15 laps on the jogging track. Each lap is 1/10th of a mile, so we walked a mile and half. We’ve done so much walking over the past week and we don’t want to lose that momentum. It was pretty cold at first. The sun was high and warm, but the winds were strong and chill. It took a few laps but we eventually warmed up and got our step count up.

After we finished our laps we headed back to the cabin to get ready for dinner. We did some reading for about 45 minutes, got dressed and headed down to our table for 2. It was an island themed night so the food was Pacific island and Caribbean. I had a chicken and pumpkin curry spiced soup with dumplings, Jamaican beef patty, and roast pork with green beans and coconut rice. Valerie had chicken tenders, caesar salad, and huli huli chicken with fried rice. Everything was really good. Finally we had dessert, I had a Tahitian coconut cake and Valerie had a Caribbean rum cake. They were both fantastic. We had more coffee with our dessert. The coffee again is really strong and bitter. Not in a terrible way, but I’m still trying to figure out how to tame it to my liking. Some like their coffee black and strong, but I like my coffee white and weak. 

After dinner we were going to go to the show, but it was a variety show performer who did comedy and juggling so neither of us felt that was a must see. We went up to the promenade and as we passed the piano bar we saw something we had never seen before. The piano bar performer was a woman. On all our travels, the piano bar performer has always been a guy. We decided to check it out and were glad we did. Genevieve was quite entertaining. She spent a lot of time talking between songs and the songs were different from what we would usually hear but it was a lot of fun. The Aussies on board are also really entertaining, and they have a lot of songs that are almost like inside jokes; they all think these songs are hysterical, and the foreigners on board are just left with puzzles looks on our faces.

We sat next to 2 couples from Sydney who have been neighbors for 40 years. They joked that most people go on holiday to get away from their neighbors but they bring theirs along with them. They were fantastic, joking around with us. We talked with them for over an hour. 

I am really happy to announce that Valerie and I are proud supporters of the West Tigers Rugby Team. We have a team to root for now, we know some of the players, now we just have to learn the rules! One of the couples, John and Lauren, are huge West Tigers supporters, being members of the team. John offered us a spare hat he brought on board. We’ll be meeting up with them later tonight at the piano bar. 

Around 10:45 we decided to call it a day and we headed back to the cabin to get ready to attack our second day at sea. 

When I got up this morning, I saw I had an email from Tim Curry, the trumpet player from my old band, The Jazz Sojah’s. He was reaching out to see how everyone was doing. It would be great to reconnect with everyone from the band. I have really fond memories of playing with everyone.

The trip to date has been incredible. We have packed so much into the trip so far and it’s been less than a week! I’m sorry I keep lying to you all about my updates getting shorter. I guess I just have a lot to say!

With all that said, it’s almost noon which means it’s time to head up to the Lido for lunch! Love you all and I hope you all have a wonderful Saturday!