Trish Berry, January 5, 2025
Art can come in any form. It is beauty expressed in words. It is creativity in imagination. It is skill in dancing. It is skill with a paintbrush. Art is in the way we dress. Art is in our smile. We can make art in our head by having good thoughts. Art is all around us and inside of us.
The dessert chefs of Royal Caribbean display their art in the form of fabulous sweets. Since we only sail with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, I can safely say for us that nobody does it better in the food department than Royal Caribbean. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and any snacks you want during the day.
The Windjammer is a restaurant/buffet that is open morning, noon and night. If you don’t go to the Main Dining for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the Windjammer is there to offer delicious foods. It’s usually located up on the top deck, or near the top deck, and you have a splendid view of the ocean while you dine. The photos I’ve shown here all were taken in the Windjammer.
(In that top photo, those are chocolate dessert creations at the very top shelf. Wow!)
There is a main chef. He does not cook. He walks around with a very tall white hat on his head and supervises, looking around, making sure everything is in order. The tall white hat matches his white coat. He is usually tall, authoritative looking and very kind and smiley. He oversees all the other chefs who actually do the cooking. There are many many chefs, there has to be to feed 6,000 or more passengers.
The dessert chefs are master artists in cooking. They are creative in their designs. I don’t eat many sweets, but I do take a whole slew of photos of them because they are art, pretty art, to me. I am sure the desserts are as delicious as they look. I’ll have to ask someone.
These photos were taken on Harmony of the Seas, a great big ship. We were so busy enjoying the ship that we hardly ate.
Below is a photo of a tidbit plate that the chef sends to our room on each cruise we take. The chef doesn’t know us personally, except to smile at us in one of the restaurants, but he always always sends us this cute little plate. And each ship has a different chef so he definitely doesn’t know us; it is just something that Royal Caribbean does as a reward for those who cruise often with them.
I do eat the chocolate-covered strawberries. It is dark chocolate (good antioxidants and many helpful minerals for the body), and the strawberries are always fresh.
The ships always decorate for holidays. Below is one of their Halloween displays.
Cruise ships have notorious reputations for people overeating and gaining weight. We usually lose a pound or two when we cruise because we are so aware that this could happen. As a result, I guess we undereat. We exercise a lot, going up and down stairs, walking around the exercise track and going to the gym. On a big ship, you get in a lot of steps every day. When you are in dock and get off the ship, you get in more steps. Thanks for reading. Enjoy the fresh pears, apples, bananas, watermelon, cantaloupe and other delicious fruits available on every cruise ship.
Trish
(I’ve shown pretty photos of dessert, but I am 76 years old and do not eat sugary products, no matter how lovely they are.)
Below is how I feel about sugar.
Diabetes. If you go to diabeticlive.com and type in any question on this horrible disease, it will take you to an article on the website that will answer any question you might have.
Here’s my short take.
People are under the misconception that eating sugary foods causes diabetes. This is not true. With a diagnosis of diabetes, you will need to limit your intake of sweets and carbs, but they didn’t cause you to get
diabetes.
Type 1 Diabetes (formerly known as Juvenile Diabetes Mellitus) is an autoimmune disease that causes the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas to go kaput. The pancreas just stops producing insulin. The only way to survive is to take artificial insulin by injection or insulin pump the rest of your life. Scientists have yet to discover why a person’s own immune system attacks and destroys its own Islets of Langerhans, those powerful cells in the pancreas that should produce insulin. That immune system just kills those islets.
If you eat anything with sugar in it or something that turns to sugar quickly, like a carb (once called ‘starch’), always eat a protein at the same time. The protein keeps the carb under control. You are less likely to have a spike in your blood glucose level when a protein is combined with a carb.
Diabetes is an insidious disease that damages every part of your body. The longer you have it, the more damage it does, even if you keep your A1C at or almost normal. Diabetes just eats away, destroying, destroying, destroying.
Type 2 diabetes is just as bad, only it takes longer for the disease to strike one of your organs. Type 2 Diabetes is caused by your body’s inability to properly use insulin, or your pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin. Type 2 Diabetes is not caused because you ate a piece of cake or two pieces of cake or even three. Type 2 diabetes is a malfunction in the way your body processes insulin. It just doesn’t do it the right way. Why? No one knows. (If you do get diagnosed with Type 2, that’s when it’s important to stay away from concentrated sugars.)
Diabetes causes heart problems, kidney problems, nerve damage to the outer extremities, eye problems. You name it, diabetes will do its best to damage/destroy the body bit by bit.
You might want to exercise a lot and drink a lot of water (dehydration leads to kidney damage). This is the chicken soup advice for diabetes. Drink water, drink water, drink water.
I see many people on our cruises with a round white circle patch, the size of an old half dollar, attached to their upper arm. Most of these people are slim and young. This is a CGM, Continuous Glucose Monitor, one of the greatest inventions in my lifetime for help in managing Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.
You attach it to your arm, connect it to your phone with an app, and it alerts you if you have a blood sugar spike or if your blood sugar level goes too low. You learn from that what foods to steer clear of, or if you need additional insulin, or have too much insulin in your body, so you need to eat in order to prevent an insulin reaction (too much insulin in the body that can lead to death and coma).
Some insurance companies do not want to cover the cost of a Continuous Glucose Monitor for those with Type 2 diabetes. Fight that insurance company. Have your doctor fill out the forms and get that CGM. If the insurance company still does not cover the cost, then buy a CGM for yourself. They are available for purchase. You will learn so much about what the foods you put in your mouth do to your body. You will also learn what stress does to your body because stress can increase blood sugar levels.
I hate diabetes. I don’t have it, but I know those who do. I see their battles.
Diabetes is a sneaky disease. Once upon a time it was called the silent killer, but high blood pressure is now the owner of that phrase. Statistics, facts, analyses, must have created the change. I don’t know.
I thought the ‘sneaky disease’ phrase was appropriate for diabetes. It’s there, you don’t know it, much like cancer. There are symptoms – extreme thirst, weight loss, blurred vision, breathlessness — but you’ve often had the condition for quite a while before these symptoms appear. Eat what your heart desires but listen to your heart while you eat because your heart is the thing that is keeping you alive. Your heart doesn’t like all that sugar. Your heart wants to beat to the rhythm of wellness. A smooth beat, a steady beat. Your heart wants you to exercise, drink lots of water, skip an excessive amount of sweets. Your heart wants you to stay strong and healthy.
If our eyes and stomach would just listen to our hearts!!
Happy traveling and thanks for reading this rant.
Trish
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