Wednesday, November 8 – Gala Night

Since we were at sea and have stopped playing trivia, there is little to say abput the day, but the night was memorable.

Several days ago, we struck up a conversation with the couple at the next table during breakfast in the MDR.  Costa and Ann are currently Canadians but he, at least, has lived all over the world.  Greek by birth [hence his real name of Constantine], he has lived in Germany, Italy and Great Britain at least.  He has a larger than life persona to match his larger than life physique.  He is irrepressible and a great story teller; most of them, naturally, are about himself.  He takes pride in his modesty.

We have seen them several times around the ship and decided to invite them to dinner in the Pinnacle Grill, HAL’s extra-cost steak house.  As 5-Star Mariners, we are given 2 meals apiece in Pineapple, as we call it, but don’t always use them because MA is not fond of beef.  However, she has become enamored with the planked halibut served there.  Anyway, once per cruise is usually sufficient, so we were doing the and ourselves a favor – they got a free meal which would have cost $35 normally and we got rid of the free ones.

It was formal night, the fourth of the cruise, and MA was all spangle-y and D once again looked like a Swiss banker in his tuxedo; it still fits, so he continues to wear it, but some day….

We met at 6.  Ann looked lovely and Costa looked like he had been stuffed into a sausage skin and put on the grill; he was bursting the buttons on his shirt and jacket.  However, he was still Costa and the conversation never lagged mostly because he never stopped talking.  At the same time, the people at the adjacent table also never stopped and they were even louder than Costa.

Costa had brought a bottle of red wine to the table, and he, Ann and MA proceeded to have a glass and, later, a second.  In the meantime, the neighbors finished their second bottle of champagne.  We placed our orders and continued merrily as we waited for our appetizers and entrees to arrive.  That’s when the trouble began.

Costa steak was undercooked, rare instead of medium rare.  Conversations with the waitstaff and maitre’d followed after which the offending steak was removed to be re-fired to the proper degree of doneness.  And that might have been the end of it.  We waited for Costa’s beef to return to the table before we began eating.  When Ann tried her salmon, it was completely raw; rare is one thing but raw fish is another. More back and forth with the staff who insisted on cooking it properly and Ann who wanted something else, more appetizers to be exact. Finally, we could eat our dinner.

The boisterous neighbors made conversation difficult, so Costa finally asked them to be more quiet.  That incensed them for some reason and they became quite abusive, claiming that we objected to their use of Spanish when all we wanted was to able to hear each other.  One accused Costa of insulting his wife.  At one point, it seemed that pistols at 40 paces would become the only solution.  When we were ready for dessert, we moved to a quieter table and finished our meal. 

Costa had been talking in Greek to the Pinnacle manager, a Serbian who understood him even though we did not.  The manager had eventually talked to the diners at the other table, but it was a waste of his time.  They paid no attention.  When he came to see us in our new location, D told him that we had never had such a disappointing meal at the PG – not one but two improperly prepared entrees presented to our guests, first-time HAL cruisers.  What impression were they to take with them?  As 5-Star Mariners, we expected better.  Never angry and always polite.  The manager said he had only been with HAL for 3 months and apologized profusely, offering to let us have dinner at no charge and asking us to return at a date of our choosing to use our free dinners. 

And that is the essence of Formal Night.

TOMORROW – Finally Firenze