sea food

It is, unsurprisingly, very difficult to eat well on a cruise ship. I don't mean "well" in the sense of heartily or satisfactorily. I mean "well" in the sense of enabling good decisions. You're not SUPPOSED to make good decisions. You're supposed to be on a seafaring vacation, enjoying the luxuries and excesses provided to you, and that includes what you put in your mouth. And I am here to tell you that you could easily spend an entire Carnival cruise doing nothing but putting food in your mouth for twenty-four hours a day. For one thing, the pizza and ice cream stations are open twenty-four hours a day, so that's not even an exaggeration on my part. I think the easiest way to explain the food layout is to go through a day based on meals.

BREAKFAST
For breakfast, you can do any (and if you are extremely ambitious/a family of seven, all) of the following:

Room Service--The housekeeping staff leaves you a menu of room service selections in your room every night. You check off what you want, and hang the little menu outside your door. In the morning, a nice man in a snappy vest knocks on your door and hands you a tray piled high with everything you requested, which is approximately enough to stock a hotel's continental breakfast bar. You immediately regret your enthusiasm the night before. We never ordered room service for any meal but breakfast, so I'm going to just leave it out from now on. I assume it'd be like any hotel room service. Meh.

The Mermaid Grill(e)-- (I hate hate hate when extra vowels get slapped on to names. That should be a taxable commodity--extraneous e's, and multiple c's-turned-into-k's for places like Kristine's Kotton Kandy Korral. GOD. Ok, what? Breakfast. Yes.) Deck nine of the ship was mostly taken up by an upscale cafeteria with multiple hotlines where lines of people could form every morning and pile their plates with pancakes and waffles and hash browns and scrambled eggs and sausages and bacon and toast, all drizzled liberally with syrup and ketchup.

The Dining Room--This is where you could go if you wanted a sit-down breakfast. Generally, I was much less impressed with the dining room, mostly because since they had to churn out individual breakfasts for about 2,000 people each morning, the food often arrived cold, and portions were on the weeny side. Also, while I usually enjoy interacting with strangers, I like to view my breakfast as part of my sacred quiet morning time, and you just can't do that in the dining room.

LUNCH

Grille--The same place that had hot breakfast provided tons of food at various different stations from noon through the rest of the day. There was a pizza station, a deli station, a burger station, a salad station, an "ethnic" station...and several more. The food was tasty, there was plenty of it, and you could play a game with the labels called "count the typos."

The Dining Room--Honestly, I don't recall ever eating in the dining room for lunch. So I'm going to take a pass on this one. I'm sure it was great.

DINNER

Grille--The same food as lunch. If you liked it the first time, sweet! Have some more. If you didn't, then eat it anyway. It's free! You're on vacation! This is all make-believe fat!

The Dining Room--We had a sit-down dinner every night. Our waiter was a youngish guy from Serbia named Dejan (rhymes with "lay on"). He was tall and kind of goofy-looking, but not in an unattractive way, if you can visualize that. Amanda and her mom loved Dejan. LOVED HIM. LOOOOOOVED HIM. That's all I'll say, but I'm pretty sure that some Dejan Fan Club shirts are in order. TEAM DEJAN!!!!!1!!11!!
Anyway, the menu changed every night, but it was all sort of heavy food in weird combinations. Grilled shrimp  paired with mustard potatoes and a bowl of corn niblets topped with an olive--that kind of thing. It was all very tasty, but very heavy, so after a week of that I feel the need to eat leafy greens for a while and get some cleansing goin' on.

So that was pretty much the food situation aboard the Carnival Pride. I really wanted to get up one night at 1am and go to get pizza and ice cream just because I could, but I always slept right through the night. Oh well. It is now time for me to go and find some roughage. Pictures from the Bahamas tomorrow!