The cellist

Welcome to fucking Belgium!

You know the movie “Top Secret”, one of Val Kilmers first. There’s a scene in Fluergendorf prison where Dr Flammond says to Nick “If they catch you here your life will be worth less than a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory!”. I’ve never understood what that meant until now. Because that’s just how I feel. I’ve got a bad case of the Belgian Blues and I’ll tell you why:

Yes, I’m in Belgium, the land of monster cows and pedophiles. Traveling up the river towards Antwerp a thought strikes you. Look how wonderful the sewers run straight into the river. And oh, look over there, what a nice pile of gravel. What’s that? Why it’s a chemical factory! So on and so forth. It’s so beautiful here. And here we are waiting, waiting for pilot, waiting in locks, waiting to moor. In 72 hours I’ve had 12 hours sleep.

The last port in Belgium is Zeebrügge. My friends onboard wanted to go ashore to see the village next door called Brügge. I decline because I’m dead tired. When they come back they go on and on about how wonderful it was. As they tell the stories of the beautiful old buildings and delightful atmosphere it becomes clear that Brügge is the village from the movie “In Bruges”. Brügge in English is Bruges. Do you understand? I could have been In Bruges!!! I had an opportunity to be In Bruges and I let it slip for a few hours of pillow time. Normally I love seeing new places but I don’t want to anymore. I’m sick of new interesting experiences. I want to see something familiar. It is time to go home. I’ve been given a date. September 18^th. That’s when I go home. That is all I think about now. When I first came onboard I beat my fellow cadets at ping-pong. I not only beat them. I sent them home to mama. Actually first I took ‘em to school, then I gave ‘em a good slice of humble pie….and then I sent them home to mama! Crying! Yeah that’s how I roll. But in the following months their game has steadily improved, better offense, tighter topspin, the whole sha-bang. And today one of them almost beat me! I am glad I’m getting of this ship soon.

I’ll be home in time for my cousins wedding, thankfully. Sometimes I think I should get married too. But I can’t seem to find the right girl anywhere. And despite what you think, my standards are not too high. I can’t be the only one who want a Nobel prize winning cancer-researcher slash hiphop-video-girl that plays the cello, right? …right?

…

Dear reader, I regret to inform you that this bloggin’ business is on hold until further notice. You see, it’s not hard to come up with interesting material when interesting things happen around you. I am home again and have fallen back into comfortable routine. It’s nice. I like it. But I can’t write about it. Perhaps I will continue on the next ship, Cinderella, on which I am boarding on the 15^th of October. Let me put it this way…I’m quite certain that life will get interesting again. 

Thank you all for reading.

The sextant

There are talks of removing the celestial navigation parts in the education for people like me. I’m glad I learned it before they did. Here’s a short description of how it’s done.
Step 1. Try to collect yourself and have a coke or something. It’s going to take a while and you know you’ll feel older after.
Step 2. Take out the sextant and blow away the dust. 
Step 3. Go outside and measure the angle between the horizon and the lower limb of the moon. At the exact second you feel good about the angle, click start on the stopwatch. This gives you time to go inside and write down the log. The correct time is very important.
Step 4. Repeat step 3 after an hour.
Step 5. Repeat step 3 after another hour. 
Step 6. Do the exact same thing except instead of the moon, use a star. I chose Vega, because it was visible and in a good angle. The problem here is I don’t know any stars so I had to use a star finder. And in order to know what star you’re finding, you have to know your position. So I cheated there. You gotta problem with that?
Step 7. Step 7 is a real pisser. It involves math, looking up stuff in tables, scratching your head a lot. There’s a lot of writing erroneous stuff on papers, erasing all of it, and then writing correctly. Cursing is also essential.
Step 8. Step 7 gives you a bunch of LOPs, Line Of Position, and if you transport them along the course line they should cross in the same position. Your position. Compare with the GPS and you know your accuracy. My first moon angle and the star was really good. Maybe 2 nautical miles from the correct position. The other moons where maybe 8nm away. Still pretty good, I think.
Step 9. Step 9 is all about feeling good about yourself. Savor it, because it will only last until… 
Step 10. …where you realize Step 7 thru 9 took 2 days to figure out because your brain has turned into moosh after 14 weeks at sea. Which means you have very accurately pinpointed the position in the Mediterranean 2 days ago. After which you’ve passed Gibraltar and are halfway up the Portugal coast already. So yeah, it was a completely useless. But still pretty sweet. I dunno, I have mixed emotions about the whole thing.

Now the exotic parts of the journey is over. We’re on our way to Antwerp. “Antwerp”! It sounds like some kind of cruel animal trapping device. “Yes zeh teddy is trapped in ze antwerp by zhees razorblades and is zhen zloooowly strangulated wihzz piano wire for minimum damage to zhe furr”. Anyway it’s going to be tough up there. It’s Antwerp – Ghent – Zeebrugge, all within spitting distance of each other. We’ll be up day and night going thru locks, mooring and discharging. And if you followed my blog you already know that these ports are the worst ports in the world!

Finally, I wish to recommend the movie “Hamlet 2” starring Steve Coogan. It starts real mellow like, but the show at the end is deeply, deeply funny. There is also brief nudity although not the good kind.

The versatile sauce

Here’s a list of things that goes well with béarnaise sauce:
1. Everything.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I switched back to English again. It’s just not workin’ out, the damn words get stuck in my elbows or something. I’ll try to evolve the Swedish thing, I promise, but I’ll do it on my spare time so that no one has to suffer. 

Voltri, which is right next to Genoa in the north, is next. We have been awarded some shore leave and we intend to use it. As I see it, I have to eat at least one pizza and buy at least one pair of shoes in this country. And those shoes can’t be cheap and plastic either. Some kind of animal has to die. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day, and not too hot either. That’s a new experience for us now. I might even get cold, how did that feel again? When we came in I do believe we were subjected to the meteorological phenomenon known as “Mistral”. When conditions are right, warm fronts are pushing on the back of the Alps, the air gets cooled and falls down along the mountains on the south side causing a strong cold wind from the north. It died completely when we came close to shore because of ground friction. It’s nice when you see things in reality that you’ve learned in school. 

You know the feeling you get when you enter a clothing store and instantly know everything in there will look delicious on you? Of course you fucking don’t. Cause it never fucking happens! But it was damn close this time. I’m back from Genoa and the shoes-thing unfortunately fell through. But I did buy an all too expensive jacket. A jacket which looks so good I want to sleep with it. And I don’t mean I want to wear it in bed. I mean I want to meet it for drinks somewhere in a nice dark and cozy restaurant, chat for a while, find out what kind of music it’s in to, drink some wine, hold its..eh…sleeve. Then take it back to my place and sleep with it. Actually that’s gross, I just got a picture in my head of me rubbing my…..Listen, forget I even said anything, ok?. It’s a very nice jacket, let’s just leave it at that.

Genoa is so incredibly beautiful. Riding into town in a taxicab is like going on a roller coaster ride. The roads go up and down and left and right. It’s clear that either the city planner was drunk. Or he was just Italian. 
“Sir aaaah, how are we-ah going to build-ah a road to go passed this-ah building?”
“Can we go around-ah?”
“No”
“Can we go-ah under?”
“No”
“Aaaaah si si, we go-ah over it-ah!”
Maybe it isn’t exactly like that. But, I mean, the buildings are put there first, there’s no doubt about that. Then they start figuring out how to get into them. The town is from another time when people were walking, not riding around on a million scooters. I guess they are just adapting to that. The old part of town is straight from “Lady and the tramp” (Lady och Lufsen) with clothes drying on racks between the buildings, in every corner some older gentlemen stand around talking and waving their arms. I wish I spoke Italian.