South African food

Hello!

I have been meaning to sit down and write up my impressions of Cape Town, but the ship had kept me super busy. I managed to get two travel days - a visit to the Table Mountain and Botanical Gardens during my first day here and a drive to Cape of Good Hope on the second. I covered those days already in terms of sights visited. Today I will talk a little about food.

The only touristy thing that I managed to do after the work on the ship started was visit a couple of very touristy restaurants at the Waterfront. I was mainly interested in local dishes.

This dish is called bobotie, it is from Cape Malay. There is minced beef in curry that is covered with egg-based topping and baked. Served with rice and a couple of sweet sauces to mellow the spicy beef taste. I really enjoyed it.

This is a carpaccio (raw meat) dish of exotic animals: ostrich, crocodile and springbok. I liked crocodile the best.

I am going to miss this variety of exotic food at hand, summer fruits and the craziness of people shopping for Christmas gifts at the mall...

***

We are scheduled to leave port tomorrow, our meal schedule and structure is identical to what my grandfather journaled about in 1959; I mean the timings of all meals are exactly the same:

1959

Судовые порядки строги и целесообразны. 

Подъем в 07:00 по-местному (судовому) времени. 

С 7:30 до 8:30 - завтрак (это обычно вволю свежего чудесного хлеба с маслом и чем-либо ещё вроде сыра или колбасы и сколько хочешь сладкого чая или кофе).

Обед с 11:30 до 12:30. Пища очень вкусная и сытная.  Первое - от пуза, второе – мясное или рыбное обязательно, третье – фрукты.

В 15:30 до 16 30 – чай, опять же с обилием хлеба с маслом.

А в 19:30 – 20:30 уже ужин. Это по существу второй обед из трёх блюд и опять сколько хочешь супа или щей.

2016-2017

This is the planned timing of meals for the ACE expedition:

Breakfast: 7:30 – 8:30; Lunch: 11:30 – 12:30; Tea: 15:30-16:30; Dinner 19:30 – 20:30 

Hot water, tea, instant coffee, sweets will be provided around the clock in the room outside the mess. 

Some things just never change I guess ;)

The food is plentiful, but not exotic and according to my grandfather's journal it gets too repetitive too soon. The quote above was made early on, Vitaly's later comments referred to being rather bored with food and wishing for something different...

I am going to miss that crocodile meat I tried at Cape Town Waterfront!

A short update while still in port

Hello, everyone.

I haven't updated for a while, cause I was super busy trying to get ready. It is not easy in so many ways. I am also spreading myself way too thin trying to organize my own program while helping out my colleagues.

The ship was never meant to have a large science group like ours and even the small amounts of space they have have not been properly maintained. Science instruments the ship nominally has are mostly in a very bad condition. Again, cause there is nobody to take care of it and somehow when people do use them they don't clean up after themselves, don't drain salty water off to prevent rusting and so on. 

The crew for the most part are extremely accommodating, I have a lot of THANK YOUs to give and need to seriously stock up on thank you bottles and thank you cigarette packs ;). But unfortunately sometimes there is a limit on what they can do... The ship will not magically become bigger and the hold is not going to magically get an inside door.

The best word to describe the whole expedition is "opportunistic". I have to say this word worries me. It might result in good science, but most likely it will result in a lot of lost opportunities. Something we could have done along the way, but did not have enough preparation/planning to make it happen. Normally such cruises have a few years to prepare, this one was put together under an extremely tight schedule. Oh well...

NOTE TO MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY: Please don't be worried about safety, I am talking about lost science opportunities. We will be keeping as safe as we can in the Southern Ocean and I do have trust in the crew/operations people.

Another point I wanted to make is a language/cultural barrier. I tried to be really helpful to many-many people, but I am just one and somehow a lot of times I'm getting ignored by some important people, who should have listened. One thing I'm trying to explain over and over again is a cultural difference. In Russian culture we all grew up to answer NO to a question we don't quite understand/know how to answer. So my fellow colleagues and upper management have been getting a lot of unreasonable NOs. I can see how frustrating it can be, I just wish some of them would have taken my advise earlier. Knowing how to ask "but why" is a skill, which I have been offering to share for a few months now. However, I am a single person running my own science project, I can not solve too many issues at once. I could have solved a lot more early on. Another oh well... 

What I am trying to say I guess is this. On a Russian ship sometimes NO does mean NO, but sometimes NO can be negotiated to a YES under specific conditions. We can not risk the safety of people, but we are willingly going to the Southern Ocean to do science, so might as well try to negotiate getting the largest return possible. I am working really hard to make it happen.

On that note, I have to stop, cause we are leaving tomorrow and there's too many things to do.

Thanks for reading!
Masha

Syncing my fb account with new posts

I'm trying to figure out if I can automatically sync my new blog entries to my facebook account. So this is a test post, but here's a picture of me trying on a mustang suit. Just to see how fb deals with pictures in my posts:

Running around and trying to be more prepared

Hello,

I am in the middle of running around, getting ready to leave for more than three months. It is amazing to realize how much we rely on always staying connected nowadays. Always finding manuals, answers to error messages on various equipment, writing emails and messages to the loved ones and receiving their supportive answers. And streaming, don't forget all the streaming we do. I realized a few weeks ago that I don't have any music/movies downloaded anymore, I subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora and various podcasts. All of it requires internet. I am surrounded by the web!

First of all, I want to say the biggest THANK YOU to my friends, who shared/downloaded their music and movies for me. Thanks to all of you, I now have a small music and movie library that will keep me going during my downtime on the ship. I mean I'm not sure how much downtime I will have, but it is good to be prepared. And also a big THANK YOU to those who helped me deal with multiple software issues. I really appreciate your time!

Secondly, I am amazed at the amount of information I downloaded over the last few weeks. Various manuals for equipment/procedures on board; many-many libraries for Python (and I'm sure I forgot a lot and will suffer because of that ;). Datasets. Again, hard to predict how much time I will have to write meaningful code and process data, but I need to think in advance and be prepared. Related to this notion of being prepared and learning about equipment failure the hard way, I am buying spare cables, connectors and everything to take on the ship with me. Things break. Somehow this concept is very hard for me to process in my normal life, so the Universe has been sending me hints in advance. First, my laptop died while I was in Germany. Then my car died as I was planing to drive to the office upon my return. So things break - I accept it now. And there's no Amazon prime to the rescue. All I can do is to prepare as much as I can now and to learn to be creative/ to live without this piece of equipment while on the ship.

My post is very indicative of what my life is right now - I'm constantly making lists, prioritizing tasks and trying to squeeze too many things into an hour, a day, a week. And e-mails! I'm writing and replying to way too many e-mails. I'm really glad that I started reading my grandfather's journal, I can totally relate to the atmosphere he describes, even though he did not know about e-mails, cell-phones and such. Here's a quote from his first entry:

Борт дизель электрохода "Обь". 

16 ноября 1959г. 

Северное море 

Вряд ли стоит теперь восстанавливать в памяти суматошную и безалаберную атмосферу подготовки к отъезду в экспедицию,в которую мы попали сразу по приезду в Ленинград. От всего этого промежутка времени (начиная с 30 октября) осталось тяжелое впечатление бессмысленной неразберихи, нераспорядительности и безответственности начальства. Только большое желание и добрый характер подавляющего большинства участников экспедиции так называемый "трудовой энтузиазм" позволили все это преодолеть.

Wish me luck and "трудовой энтузиазм"

Masha

PS
Let me know if google can handle non-translated quotes...