We’ve been here before, mid-October 2019. It was cold and damp that day and we were all bundled up, bracing ourselves against the icy wind coming off the harbour. Not so today!

We were both a bit lazy today and since we’d seen the sights last time we were here, we just walked into town a bit and enjoyed the architecture.

Halifax is a wild juxtaposition of old and new. And while I’ll admit that the two don’t always live together here as well as they do in, say, Copenhagen, at least they’re keeping the old buildings. I always love to see that.

Lunchtime was fast approaching and because we’re in Halifax, that means donair. For the uninitiated, a donair is a Halifax invention that’s similar to a doner kebab - spiced meat in a soft flatbread, but a donair is drizzled with a sweet sauce made from condensed milk, sugar, vinegar, and garlic powder. Throw on some raw onions to cut the sweetness and it’s delicious.

But we can get amazing Halifax donairs at home in Calgary at a place called Blowers and Grafton - named after an intersection of two streets only a few blocks from here .What we can’t get in Calgary is a lobster roll from a seaside shack called Dave’s. We’d had it here before and no way were we going to skip it in favour of some old donair!

They offer two types, typical of a lobster roll joint. A cold version, dubbed ‘the local’, with chilled lobster, mayo, celery, and chives.
Or the ‘some fancy’, which is just lobster with lemon garlic butter on a buttery toasted roll. The latter is the only way to go, as far as I’m concerned.

During our stroll back to the ship, we passed a swimming race. It was a fundraiser for the Leukaemia Society, but I’m not sure I’d have been able to swim across the harbour in that icy water! But hey, they raised just over $56K, so yay.

Back on board and we met for dinner, where the theme of the night was “Dutch Dinner”, so of course I had Bami Goring, an Indonesian noodle dish with chicken sate and shrimp.

Afterwards, it was nightcaps at Mix Bar, but Grace wasn’t playing yet tonight. Instead, we had team trivia (we didn’t bomb, but we didn’t finish near the top, either) and then everyone else bailed out and I went up to the Crow’s Nest for the music trivia. It was “Movie Music” trivia and our team won(!) There were two main contributors to that: [1] you got bonus points for acting out a scene from the movie and the young couple from Malta on our team brought down the house with their re-enactment of the ‘pottery scene’ from Ghost. The other thing that gave us an edge was they played a snippet of music and everyone put that it was from Star Wars, but I pointed out that the snippet was The Imperial March, which didn’t make its debut until The Empire Strikes Back, so yay. We didn’t win anything, other than the fame and admiration of everyone there, who were all decked out for the Orange Party.

I don’t have any orange clothes, but I did have an orange G&T made with Beefeater Orange Gin, which was actually pretty tasty.

And that was that. After trivia, I bailed out to let the Orange Party revellers do their thing. Absotively, posilutely not my cup of tea. But hey, I’m glad everyone had a good time. There will be lots of hangovers happening at US immigration tomorrow!

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