Lunchtime entertainment

We arrive in the atrium to find Bob and Linda seated in some chairs talking with our concierge Lars. They’re talking about the two new ships being built for the Disney Cruise Line, both of them significantly larger than the Wonder and Magic. Lars says that the ships are actually being built near to his home in Germany. I can't wait to see them when they sail in a few years.

Lars moves on, to perform other tasks of conciergery, I’m sure. Our group enters Triton’s, where we are quickly seated at a table near the entrance. Hey, Sutas and Nino, our dinner wait staff, are here! Since there’s no assigned restaurant or seating for breakfast or lunch, we don’t necessarily get the same servers, so it’s a nice bit of luck to have these two guys again. I wonder if they’ll be as entertaining.

We ask Sutas what’s good on the lunch menu, and he recommends both the broiled tilapia and the hamburger. I love a good piece of tilapia, but my taste buds might be bordering on “gourmet overload.” The burger sounds like it might be the cure for that. Bob apparently feels the same, so we both order hamburgers – but with a shrimp cocktail appetizer. Hey, we still gotta have a little gourmet in the meal.

Nino’s apparently working at a serving table, not actually waiting on our table, but he’s close enough that he still comes over to interact. That’s pretty cool. And yes, he and Sutas are still finding ways to entertain us. Nino starts by handing Benjamin a little metal puzzle, a ring “locked” into a short spring, with the instruction to find a way to remove the ring. Brandon and I immediately know the solution, as this same trick was in a magic kit Brandon received years ago, so it’s perfect that he gave it to Benjamin.

After we’ve figured it out, and another metal puzzle after it, Nino returns with a show stopper. It’s a seemingly gravity-defying arrangement of two forks and a toothpick. It’s not easy to picture with words, so I snap a picture, but basically he’s taken two forks – and mind you, the shipboard silverware is not lightweight – and jammed them together at the tines so that they are locked in an inverted “V.” Then one end of a toothpick is inserted at the intersection of the two forks. Then – and this is the amazing part – this entire unwieldy combination is suspended from the corner our table number sign by the other end of the toothpick, so that the forks appear that they are practically weightless as they dangle in the air, balanced precisely on the tip of a toothpick. Wow.

Okay, intellectually I understand that the center of gravity is below the tip of the toothpick, so it is stable and breaks no laws of physics. But even with that understanding, it’s hard to make my eyes go along. It sure looks gravity-defying!

Oh, yeah, our food is good – I have some tasty key lime pie for dessert – but most of our meal time is spent trying to replicate the fork contraption and dangle it from the sign and our drink glasses. While the configuration is easy to understand, actually creating it is something of an art, and more difficult than it appears.

Nino helpfully keeps us supplied with extra toothpicks for all of our attempts.