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Ice Carving on the Island Princess 4-18-08
By Milt Abel | May 23, 2008
| May 23, 2008My path to a cup of coffee can vary on ship. Sometimes I treat myself to a genuine brewed cup that, for here on the Island Princess, can be found on deck five in the central atrium. Other times I go for the faux coffee poured out of a spigot in the Horizon Court buffet which waits on the opposite end of the ship and eight decks up from my cabin. I call it faux coffee because I’m not exactly sure how it’s made; I know it doesn’t involve ground coffee beans, a filter, and hot dripping water. As much time as I spend in the buffet, chatting with other entertainers, reading –just to be somewhere besides my cabin, or actually eating; I’ve never seen a complete resupply to those coffee spigots accomplished. I’ve seen them open the wood and Formica cabinetry underneath and place an opaque plastic cartoon filled with very dark syrup, which must be… condensed coffee? But I don’t see them hook anything up to it, and invariably the cabinetry is closed and a small, brass ‘not in use’ sign is hung from the spigot and then, also invariably, later in the day the sign is gone and the tap pouring.
I suppose if I had the patience of a naturalist photographer I could see the entire process. It would be easy enough to plop myself in a line of sight of the coffee station, supplied with plenty of food and drink (I’m at the buffet), and wait. But I’ve never attempted this for two reasons; the first, as idle as ship life can be, I just don’t want to see myself watching a coffee station with anything more than a daydream on my mind, and second, I’m not sure I want to know the complete process of how it’s made; like sausage, better to naively enjoy it than do a background check. And I do enjoy it; as I type this I’m slurping from a cup next to me that, as I fetched it from eight decks up on the other end of the ship, caused me to pass the ice carving demonstration being held poolside.
The Island Princess is at sea today. In fact, we have three consecutive sea days before arriving into Los Angeles and the termination of this fifteen-day cruise. Sea days are burdensome to the cruise staff and entertainment department, all the passengers have nowhere to go and there is a compulsion to entertain them, somehow. Ice carving fills thirty minutes.
It really is worth seeing. A block of ice half the size of an upright piano is stood lengthwise and chiseled away until a swan, or fish, or some other surprisingly detailed shape presents itself. A couple galley workers are furloughed to accompany the block, and they arrive squinting in the sun holding chiseling tools that could arm a coup were it carefully planned. As one of the two gallery workers begins chiseling away a cruise staff member with a microphone emcees a guessing game about what the eventual shape will be.
After the very first chip he stops the sculptor and asks, “What do you think it is?”
“A block if ice!” is what I want to yell out. But I don’t. I’m more of a background type of guy when I’m not on stage, and besides, maybe someone else with come up with the joke. I wait and no one says anything. The carver starts up again and after a few more pieces fall away the joke won’t work nearly as well because it’s no longer a block, now it’s suggestive of an angel or a bottle opener, so I wait with everyone else and listen to the guesses. Some are so far off from what I, and most everyone else is seeing, I make a note to avoid teaming with any of those people in Pictionary.
Surprisingly it’s always someone from the Philippines, a hot and expiring environment for ice, performing the ice carving demonstration. You’d think an Eskimo would be a natural. Perhaps it was tried once; but he had to be sidelined when the northern native saw the ice and hacked it into smaller blocks and began constructing a residence. Better to give the job to someone who would treat it as the novelty it was meant to be.
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