Gilligan's Extra

Day 7 extra – A 3 hour tour. And the weather was even a little rough.

A fun thing about going to the bridge is that they seem to deliberately leave one of the doors to an officer’s cabin open so you can look in. They are big and very nice. The bridge itself in some ways gets less and less interesting as things get more and more automated – fewer buttons and switches and dials, more keyboards and screens. One thing that stood out to me  is that they still plot the course on paper, by hand – even though all the computers have backup systems (and some of those systems have backup systems), this one piece of information is available even if everything electronic goes down. Another thing I liked was that the ship still has a steering wheel, but it is tiny – like some little sports car. Also we found out that the ship’s call sign is PBKH, which explains why all the tenders have those letters stenciled on them. The bridge tour was given by the 3^rd officer, Liam, who looked about 15 years old.

Next stop, backstage. Two of the singers sat in the women’s dressing room with us and talked about putting on the big productions. Two things I learned: the productions are very expensive to develop and stage (with costumes by Bob Mackie), so each one run for 3-4 years, and may run on more than one ship. So if you cruise often, and especially if you do it on the same ship, you will see the same shows. Also, we already knew the singer/dancer contracts are for 8 months, but what I didn’t know is that when they are looking for replacements they aren’t just looking for talent, they’re also looking for a particular size and shape of person, to limit alterations. What a bummer if you were just what they were looking for, only too short? Mark, the singer who gave this part of the tour, had the unnerving intensity that you sometimes see in professional actors, but his female counterpart was unusually quiet.

Once we’d finished with the bridge and backstage, we headed down to the bowels of the ship (deck C) to see the less glamorous parts of the ship. Our next stop was the laundry, where hundreds of sheets and towels and pillowcases were going through the giant washers, dryers, and irons. Highlights from the laundry, aside from the sheer volume, were that the linens for the pinnacle grill are laundered separately with banana oil to make them feel softer and smoother. And the demonstration of the the pants steamer. You attach the waistband to a stretcher which opens them out, and put the bottom cuffs into clamps. They you push a button, the pants are drawn tight and whoosh, filled with steam, then hot air. It’s quite fun to watch. I especially liked the parallel between the action of the pants steamer and the cruise on the pants – they started out hanging loosely, but as time went on got fuller and tighter.

After the laundry we stopped at the tailor shop, where 3 guys make all the uniforms for all crew members.  3-4 uniforms per crew member. When you realize that they’ll sometimes get 60-80 new crew at a time, it’s a mind boggling task. They even make the beanies that the bellboys wear. It kind of changed how we looked at the clothes the crew was wearing when we got back out on the ship. Oh, and they also do the monogramming on the HAL bathrobes if you order one on the ship, so now we’ve seen where that happened to Dave’s. Also in this section of the tour we went through the crew dining area and the petty officer dining area, but I don’t remember exactly when. Officers and staff eat in the Lido.

Next stop, possibly the best on the tour: garbage room. Industrial sized disposer (with a vacuum so powerful we thought the crew members operating it might be sucked in). Glass shredders. Compactor. Here’s what we learned that was interesting – HAL doesn’t dump anything overboard – garbage is containerized on the ship. But they also have contracts at different ports to get rid of different garbage, and apparently Victoria is a big garbage offloading port. If you think about it, the ship has limited storage space, so baggage is held for loading & unloading where the garbage is also held (safely containerized) for unloading. So if we don’t stop at Victoria and get rid of the garbage, where will the baggage go? Norman, the health and safety and something else officer who gave us the tour (he was Scottish and one of the best guides) was a little preoccupied with moving things around.

Onward through the storage areas, including the place where huge replacement parts for the azipods are kept (the azipods are the giant propellers in the back that can swivel 360 degrees and actually pull, rather than push, the ship through the water) to the food area, the largest section of the tour. Here we were picked up by the assistant culinary manager, Jurgen.  First stop with Jurgen was the bakery, where they had fresh cookies for us and were making rolls with one of the roll shaker machines that they have at grand central bakery.

Next, off to the food storage areas, where we came to understand why the tour is at the end of the trip – there wouldn’t have been anywhere for us to stand. Here we learned so many interesting things it’s almost too much to write about. Let’s start with when they get food. Apparently frozen food and staples are picked up every 2 weeks, even on the one week cruises. Fruits, vegetables, and dairy (including eggs) come in weekly. This stop in Seattle was a big shopping week – the full 2 weeks of staples plus the weekly allowance. Combine that with having to offload all of the garbage from the same holes in the ship where the food would be coming in, and Jurgen was also somewhat preoccupied. Another thing you wouldn’t think of is that the beef comes in frozen and uncut. It’s thawed in a giant refrigerator, and takes about 3 days to thaw. So you can imagine that they have to be very systematic about remembering to get it out in time to have it ready to cut and cook – a problem we sometimes have at home, only they can’t just order pizza.

We stopped in the alcohol cooler, where all the beer and wine and spirits live. They gave us each a glass of champagne and here we learned more about demographics. We’d learned at the meat freezers that the average age of cruisers changes based on the length of the cruise – the 7 day cruises skew much younger. From a meat perspective, that means more beef, less chicken and fish. In the alcohol cooler we found that it means more beer. Also we learned that you can call ship services and have them stock your favorite local brew – this made Dave pay attention. Then it was on to the nearly empty dairy locker, with one lone wheel of Gouda sitting on a shelf and just a few of the 23,000 dozen eggs that they’d use in a week. Jurgen said that sometimes at Christmas they would decorate that particular freezer so they could have a cold place to celebrate.

Now we’d been where the raw materials were stored, so it was up the garbage elevator to the food prep areas, which we’d seen already on the standard kitchen tour. Jurgen pointed out the soup kettles (at home you’d use them for hot tubs, he said). The sheer size and amount of work is amazing. For example, for dinner there’s one kitchen for the open seating for about 600-800 people, which is mostly like a regular restaurant except the menu changes every night. Then there’s another kitchen for the two fixed seatings, in which 400 people per seating need to be fed more or less simultaneously. The Lido, Pinnacle, and Cannaletto restaurants have their own kitchens. All the food is prepared as ‘a la minute’ as possible, with line cooks doing the final cooking. Each entrée is prepared at its own station, and the waiters have to stop at each station and pick up however many they need. It’s controlled chaos. Maenwhile the executive chef is sitting in his office watching all of it through multiple remote-control cameras that let him zoom in even on a particular plate to make sure the “product” is all up to standard. One thing we have been frustrated with on this trip is that (with the exception of the fish), the meats (including shellfish) have generally been overcooked; we wonder if this has to do with the kitchen crew all being new, and if the open seating dining would be better since it’s not quite as mass-prepared? (Dave points out that breakfast and lunch in the main dining room are also open seating and the cooking wasn’t any better, so maybe not.

Also in this area on the wall they have the plating charts, which come from headquarters and have all the menus with pictures of how everything is supposed to look, which is how I found out that night’s dinner included my beloved espresso-date pudding for dessert. Yay! We finished our walk through the kitchen and came out in the dining room. This is one of these “well, duh” moments where you realize that of course the kitchen comes out in the dining room, but you’re completely disoriented anyway.

Last stop was back to the piano bar, where we got Holland America bags filled with goodies – our group picture with the Captain, a signed menu, one of the HAL cookbooks and a set of HAL shot glasses (about which my first thought was oh, crap, our suitcases were already almost at 50 lbs – where are we going to put those?). They also had drinks and appetizers for us (not in the bags), and soon we were joined by James Deering, the hotel manager, who knew absolutely everything and was happy to talk about it. James had just returned to the Oosterdam after a stint with Princess cruise lines (also owned by Carnival, but he had to actually resign from his job before he could talk to the other cruise line – they discourage inter-line transfers). He told us about everything from having to remove passengers from the ship for stealing or fighting or throwing furniture overboard, to how to choose the best cabins (not near the bow thrusters, or over or under where the music is, or near the cleaning supply closet, or…) to the difference in demographics between the shorter and longer cruises, and how there’s even a difference between Alaska cruises that leave from Seattle vs Vancouver (Vancouver has a higher percentage of international passengers). We learned about the training facilities in Indonesia and the Phillipines – the one in Indonesia, he said, is “a building on the outside and a ship on the inside” – basically it has replicas of everything on the ship, since the crew has to hit the ground running. No time to learn to make towel animals or clean a cabin once you’re on board. The Filipinos are primarily in the dining room and bars, so their training facility is smaller and more specialized. He also told us that many of the cruises are sold as charters, including the nude charter, which is an interesting idea given how cold they keep the ship. James was very forthcoming and engaging (Edith and Stacy Ann had been delighted to have him back on board, since he throws very good crew parties) and we would have asked him questions all day, but his cell phone rang again and he excused himself, saying that it was the captain and he had to go deal with something.

And that was the end of the 3 hour tour. It exceeded both of our expectations by quite a bit – we learned so much and felt like we’d gotten to talk to all sorts of people and had a better idea of how the ship worked. Plus we got to walk around in all sorts of back passages that passengers don’t usually get to see, and also we had been fed – always a concern on the ship, since you get used to eating every 30 minutes. The only place we didn’t get to go that I’d like to have gone was the engine room, but since you have to go down a ladder to get there they don’t let people do it. If you’re ever on a HAL or Princess ship, I would definitely recommend this tour.