World Cruise - Day 3 - Jan 15 - At Sea

So in follow up to the news about the Costa Concordia sinking near the coast of Italy, we were just plying those waters in late November on the Celebrity Solstice.  We honestly never thought that a cruise ship that big could be taken down.  But I guess they said that about the Titanic.  There is always a lifeboat drill on the embarkation day and most of us (myself included) don’t really listen to the instructions.  Pretty similar to the safety announcements onboard airline flights.  I wonder if we will listen more closely next time?

Patti (my sister) asked in comments on a previous post if we are the youngest passengers onboard.  The answer is yes and no.  We are the youngest passengers doing the full world cruise, but there are younger passengers who are doing segments (such as the first 15-day segment from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego through the Panama Canal).  The average age on the last world cruise was a little over 70.  So the crowd is older, yes, but it is a very active crowd.  You are only as young as you feel.  And this is a very young feeling ship.

Can someone please comment on whether the pics are coming thru OK on e-mail (if you are using that option)?  I switched to a larger pic size a couple e-mails ago (I submit my blog posts via e-mail) and they appeared to work fine, but they aren’t loading into my e-mail (yes, I subscribe to my own blog).  Perhaps this is due to the limited Internet connection I have when downloading the e-mails, not sure.  I just want to make sure they are hitting correctly for you.  If you don’t want to post to the blog, you can just send me an e-mail directly to let me know if the pics are coming thru: Brian at Krueger dot com.

Sonia, you commented on Krissie’s paintings, saying both you and your Mum thought they were very good.  I agree!  I am surprised that with basically no training and preparation, Krissie was able to do three paintings of that quality so quickly!  Rebekah took art classes when she was doing a semester abroad in France and painted some really beautiful pictures.  Now we all know where Rebekah (and Jacqueline and Brandon) got their talent for art.  Krissie says that she hadn’t painted since grade school.  She took private art classes with her sister when she lived in Wauwatosa.  They went to a lady’s house for their lessons and once a year, the lady would have a garage sale and all of the kids would exhibit their art in her garage and sell it.  Once, when she was 8, she even got to go to War Memorial Museum to exhibit her paintings.  She said her two favorite things to paint were flower pots and the sun.  So I guess we can see her attraction to painting the sea, clouds and sun.

The entertainment last night was “Matinee Idol” which was three young (mid-20s) guys singing classic love songs.  Kinda like Il Divo with three guys instead of four.  They were decent, hit most of the notes, what more can you ask for in cruise ship entertainment.

We have a world map hanging on our wall that I bought ahead of time and used to mark our route and the days we would be in each location (you can see the markings on the map below for our route, although the plane routes are marked with a heavier pen, so easier to see in the pic than the cruise route).  It helps both me and Krissie visually see where we are in the world at that time. 

Krissie was looking at the map to see which new countries we would be visiting in South and Central America.  She has been to Columbia before (I have not) and it will be the first visit for both of us to Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

It’s already starting to seem a little bit like Groundhog Day with a repeat of our morning breakfast on the balcony.  Routine is good, although I’m not sure I can do 107 days in a row of All Bran.  I think I might have to mix it up a bit somewhere along the way.

Krissie and I are planning to go to the gym on sea days and on port days, we will typically get enough exercise walking around.  I also like walking on the walking track on the 10^th deck, although it takes 13 laps to a nautical mile.  I forget exactly how long a nautical mile is, but I know it’s longer than a normal mile (something like 1.2 miles)?  Not sure why they list it in terms of a nautical miles.

So I know that the fans of “Brian and Brandon in Europe” are waiting for one of my now-famous toilet comments.  Let me just say that if you have never been on a cruise ship, the toilets here are like nothing else in the world.  They look rather normal and unassuming, but just wait until you flush.  They do a soft startup, but then have this giant sucking sound.  Something like: “waaaaa-WHOOOOSH!”  Kinda scary if you’re not ready for it.  Here’s a pic of our toilet:

Note the sign not to throw anything in other than toilet paper.  If you clog your toilet, it clogs the entire row of cabins, since they are all on the same vacuum system.  So trust me, on a 107-day cruise, you do NOT want to be known as the person who rendered all of the toilets in your row unusable.

We had a port meetup today for the Cruise Critic members to discuss Aruba and Cartagena.  In most cases, we already know (or at least have general plans) what we want to do in a port.  Cartagena was substituted at the last minute for Santa Marta, since there was apparently drug violence there last week.  So we were all listening intently to those who had already been to Cartagena for tips on what to do and see.

I said that I would take you on a little tour of the ship with a pic or two each day, so here are a few entries for today:

When you are coming into the Club Restaurant (back right entrance in the pic above) is the Club Bar, which is a convenient place to wait to meet people before going into dinner.  It’s also where you can get specialty coffees in the morning.  If you have a coffee card (we have two, cost $31 each for 15 specialty coffee drinks), you can get real coffee without getting your card punched.  The normal coffee onboard is apparently a coffee syrup which is reconstituted into a coffee-like substance.  So I have a confession to make: even though I am from Seattle and therefore should have some level of coffee snobbery, the reality is that I can drink really bad coffee and not know that it’s bad coffee.  Yes, this coffee does taste better, but I can put a dash of cream in just about anything and call it coffee.

They have an area onboard where you can buy “fine art” from the art gallery.  I’m really not sure who actually buys this stuff, but it seems to be a cruise ship standard.

During the day, we have several lecturers who are part of the Scholarship@Sea program.  Today we heard from Dr. DJ Heinrich, who wrote a book about The Red Baron.  He gave a very informative lecture about The Red Baron, including showing some documentary footage about his life.  He had 80 confirmed victories, more than any other pilot in WWI and he died at the age of just 25.  How he died is subject to some dispute, but the generally accepted theory is that he was shot by a very lucky machine gunner from the ground.

There is a casino onboard, another cruise ship standard.  Today is a sea day, but as you can see, these casino dealers are not very busy.  It doesn’t seem like much of a gambling group.

The area near the casino is the Casino Bar, where they host a variety of events.  When there is a football game going, they will show it here (although the Super Bowl will be in the main lounge area) and in the evening, David Crathorne is at the piano, playing and singing.  I love that we have a great piano player onboard.  Plus, David is the leader of the Princess Choir (yes, we have our own choir).

This is David, playing later in the evening.  He also hosted the Broadway show tune trivia, that our trivia team competed in this evening.  People take their trivia very seriously onboard.  You are playing for marvelous prizes like keychains and lanyards.  We have a regular team of six from Cruise Critic members, including Rosemary, Roz, Lenny, Arnold, Bill and me.  I love trivia, but they are all way better than me.  I love that they’ve included me on their team, since they are all excellent.  We all have our categories and sometimes I can help out as well.  In the first few sessions of trivia we had respectable scores.  One time we tied for first with two other teams, but lost on the tiebreaker question.  Other times we have been second or third.  There are usually about 10 or 12 teams playing, so we’ve been in the running, but hadn’t yet won.  There is trivia two times a day, morning and afternoon, then David will sometimes host a music trivia in the evening.  Tonight we won for the first time.  Rosemary, Arnold (who was a professional musician) and Bill were all outstanding on this one, I was just along for the ride.  We got a total of 50 points out of a possible 51 points.  Or actually 50 out of 50, since we got the extra credit question and missed one question.  Remember how I said it was competitive?  The second place team got 48 points.

An example of a trivia question earlier today that I got that no one else on the team got: first question was to name the singer that had the wardrobe malfunction in the Super Bowl a few years ago.  So everyone on our team knew that it was Janet Jackson.  The next question was who was she singing with?  Some of you may know the answer to that question?  That’s the question that I knew that no one else on our team knew.  That’s the key to trivia, is to have at least one person on your team who knows the more difficult questions.  Yes, I know, that really wasn’t that difficult.  Some of them get pretty difficult and very obscure.  That’s what makes them trivia.

Tomorrow is our first port of call, Aruba.