Day 12 Monday 25th August, 2025 - At Sea
We got there by 7.00 and to our surprise everything was relatively calm and orderly. It was much more enjoyable. The behind the scenes tour included visiting the ship's laundry, kitchen, storage areas, crew mess and bar, and sound, lighting and back stage of the Delphi Theatre. I 95, named after the longest highway in the US, was the central corridor on deck 4 which ran the full length of the ship giving access to all areas by the crew.
In the laundry area, which runs 24 hours a day, they had a washing machine that could take a load up to 300 kg, a dryer up to 110 kg, people folding towels, and a massive automatic ironing and folding machine for the sheets.
The kitchen is huge and very orderly, with areas well separated for preparing and cooking the various styles of food, allowing little chance for cross contamination. The ordering system is so efficient that from the time the waiter takes the order, it is ready for collection by the waiter when he makes his way from the restaurant to the kitchen. There seemed to be also a huge amount of food wastage, the soft food gets pulped and pumped into the sea, the hard bones and cartilage gets packed and dumped back in port, and other waste items are sorted, compressed and packed ready also for dumping when back in port.
Supplies are stored in 8 different storage areas, including refrigerated storage. They get over 300,000 kgs of goods delivered when in port (Kiel) for a week's worth of food. The menus are based largely on the countries the majority of passengers originate from, and some of the provisions for this cruise included 3,800 dozen eggs, 2,077kg liquid eggs, 30,333 assorted teas, 485kg chocolate, 1,530kg dry pasta 1,364kg cold cuts & sausages, 21,555kg fresh vegetables, 8,901L milk, 8,820L draught beer and 13,382 bottled beer, 11,572 red & white wine, and 48,164 bottled water...the list goes on.
We finished the behind the scenes with a look at the theatre, seeing the dressing rooms and the technical operating desks for lighting and sound.
We also visited the bike store, where the bike tour manager Raj, talked about the bike tours. It happens we are already booked on a bike tour for Thursday, and we had to see the bike tour people anyway. We did that after the tour and it turns out we had booked only normal bikes, so we upgraded to e-bikes.
Sorry no photos to share as cameras were prohibited behind the scenes today.