This was our first time on a cruiseship. Given that we like having flexibility in our travels and exploring, cookie cutter tours are already something we avoid, although sometimes they can make sense. I was however not very hopeful about an entire week or more or a cruiseship where most people's goal is not to see as much as possible, but maybe optimize their time on a city at sea that happens to bring them to ports from time to time where they might go look at for a short while before quickly getting back to the sanctity of said ship (or am I being unfair? :) ).
Given my expectations, things were mostly in line with what I was prepared for. While the boat seemed big to us, being our first cruiseship, the boat we were on was actually not that huge by cruiseship standards, but honestly it was big enough for us and getting lost in during the week we were on it :) It had:
one big enough concert/showroom on 2 floors with live orchestra and performers
a 2nd show/movie room on the other side of the ship
very bright and huge outdoors screen for movies under the stars (sadly the sound was often not high enough to properly enjoy a movie there)
enough restaurants (although more is always possible)
a few hot tubs for Arturo :)
and more I won't list here
This was probably an average cruise (not cheap, not high class), and honestly, I found that we got good value for our money: room with partial view for about $600 per person. The food wasn't best ever, but it was more than decent, especially for the price.
This was the obstructed view we had outside our window. Not great, but enough to see still, and enough for my GPS :)
Thankfully it also had no waterslide and therefore hardly any kids, which was good. On the flipside it did have many older people, some had a hard time getting around and made it difficult at times for us to get around them, given that we were walking twice as fast :)
movie under the stars, except it was pretty cold and the movie volume was a bit too low
one of the two performance stages
it was a decent room
Tech-wise, there was overpriced satellite internet (50c/mn or so). The room had a satellite map for those who didn't have their own GPS :)
and low resolution picture of the front of the ship
It felt like 2/3rd of the staff was either from Malaysia or the Philippines. A few were also from eastern Europe. All from countries were money was worth more. The chefs were good and did a pretty fair job given the food they were given for their menus. They also did carving competitions:
high tea in our dining room (several on the ship, this was the closest one to our cabin)
outside of our assigned dining room with servers, there was a buffet that was just above average
but it was fun to see at times
leaning tower of pisa
they were quite good about trying not to spread germs and get everyone sick
we also got a tour of the kitchen
it was big, over 2000 people to feed
not sure if we were supposed to see this
The boat tried its best to sell you stuff while you were onboard, from jewelry, to art. They did an art expo for us and tried to auction off some pieces:
A few random boat pictures:
wine tasting, not sure how good it actually was, though
they had a good live band
During the evening activities, some were gameshows, and Jennifer also sung karaoke:
I played the yes/no game, went first like an idiot and got close but didn't quite make it
another night, some boat staff gave us true and wrong definition of words and we had to guess who was who
