Another lockdown… another commute

[Mendip]

Anyway... let's move on from BMI... I don't want to turn this into yet another failed weight loss thread!

I think we can all agree that BMI doesn't reflect your true body type.

What's the food like on your vessel Mendip?

Yup, mendip - how's the food? Food pics are appreciated.

Btw, are the kitchen staff also Filipino? Or other?

More words for you:

Magandang umaga = good/ beautiful morning

Magandang hapon = good afternoon

Magandang gabi = good evening

And if you want some giggles:

Maganda ka pa sa umaga = you're more beautiful than the morning!

Slow down Katie, I haven't tried out 'Salamat' yet. I think if I try out 'Maganda ka pa sa umaga' on my favourite stewardess this may end up being a very short trip. I need the work.

The food is always pretty awful on Norwegian vessels, but luckily we have a Filipino night cook as part of the galley staff... this is a boat Katie and you have to get more nautical.

There is a meal every 6 hours to cover all shifts and on this boat each meal is very much geared up to the day shift, ie. a breakfast, lunch and dinner at 6am, midday and 6pm. The midnight meal is usually a rehash of parts of the dayshift meals.

All Norwegian boats do a fry up for the 6am meal despite work carrying on 24 hours a day, and Randy (our Filipino night cook) has no choice but to make this (as instructed). As I'm on a midnight to midday shift, the 6am meal is my main one and I don't really want a fry-up. Randy also puts together Asian soups and stuff, mainly for his Filipino colleagues but I generally go for that. Not only are Norwegian style fry-ups awful but I don't want to get into that habit if this is going to be such a long trip.

I also get my fellow dayshift geos to plate up the evening meal (6pm) if it's half decent so that I can microwave it later. There should be no difference between day shift and night shift food, and there isn't on larger construction vessels, but on these smaller ROV/survey/inspection vessels there always is, especially in Norway.

So breakfast for me is usually a re-heated midnight meal (if it was nice) or a re-heated evening meal if one of my colleagues remembered to put a plate aside. I've told them anything with fish, lamb or peas should be plated up for me.

In addition to the breakfast fry-up there is always a salad bar and they also put out some cold fish and meat cuts. With some soup this can be OK. I'll try and get some food pics but there's a fine line between posting interesting content and having the piss ripped out of me for photographing my food.

Some cold cuts from yesterday's breakfast... but tbh I took this pic more to show Heidrun's old concrete hull and the myriad of risers ( vertical white pipes). Each riser has ascended from the seabed 350m below where it had connected to one of the many flowlines from the many satellite production wells in the field. Some degree of processing occurs on the platform before the product returns to the seabed via an export riser and is then pumped ashore via export pipelines.