August 24, 2012 Breakfast – Salmon salad and herring, Lunch – Rainbow trout, Dinner – Sauteed Plaice and vegetables

August 24, 2012 Breakfast – Salmon salad and herring, Lunch – Rainbow trout, Dinner – Sauteed Plaice and vegetables

I have finally gotten over my smoked salmon and salad breakfast fascination after three days.  I promised Suzette to eat in the dining room tomorrow.  I could not sleep well last night so, since the weather cleared, I walked the deck this morning and watched the sun rise off the stern of the ship.  Beautiful.  We then took two deck chairs but the wind was blowing so fiercely, that we needed to cover up with a beach towel from the pool area at the stern of the ship, where we had watched the sun rise.  Still it appears I got a chill and am suffering from a sinus condition.   Suzette was wonderful to recall that I had said how much I enjoyed having a cup of beef consommé on board the U.S. United States in 1960.   

At 6:30 a.m. I had a glass of fresh squeezed orange and carrot and a bit of ginger juice.  Then the salmon salad fix.  Then we went to two lectures.  The first was on cultural diversity by Ambassador Peck and the second by a British astronomer on Saturn.  The most interesting thing I read on the subject of the middle east was in my The Viking Age by Ferguson who said that the historical records shows that the Christian Europeans have been fighting back the Muslim tide in Europe since 775 when Charlemagne held them at Vienna and just north of the Erbo River in Spain.   So for over 1300 years the Christian/Muslim conflict has not been solved.  We as Americans are not used to seeing situations that are intractable.  We like teleological resolutions, but I suspect that this one will not resolve itself between the east and west, but instead within the Muslim world.  Much like the Viking invasion of England.  If you forget that the earlier invaders of England, the Angles and the Saxons were not heathen and were Christians, then the resolution of the conflict between the Christianized Angles and Saxons in the 800’s by Alfred giving the invading Norsemen East Anglia in exchange for them accepting Christianity was a kind of resolution that we can probably see work in the Middle East.  Let them keep the lands they control and we will say nothing about their conservative and oppressive social rules, if they suppress the Jihadi extremists who threaten us both.  

Lunch – We went to the Britannia Grille for a seated lunch and were seated on the sunny side of the boat.  We each took grilled rainbow trout amandine and vegetables.  It was delicious.  I took an apple tart, the thin flat French style one on puff pastry with a dab of custard under the thin slices of apple. Suzette took the red plum pie.  My tart was fabulous served on a bed of warm stirred egg custard.  Suzette’s red plum pie was not so good, because it had canned cherries mixed I with the red plums. 

For dinner I ordered lightly, a bowl of beef consommé with barley and root vegetables, a battered and sautéed plaice, and for dessert an apple tart, but this time cooked in a pie crust with a crumble on top and served on a bed of warm custard.   We then went to a wonderful show of acrobats and to bed.