You’ve seen all the highlights of the cities we visited in our cruise. But just being on a cruise ship, we can now tell you, is an experience within itself. So here is what was happening on the ship while we were heading to all these places.
As Adam has told
you, we were the youngest people on the ship by a good two decades. We were also the only Americans. In fact, we were one of probably 3-4 non-EU
couples on the ship. This combination
caused a constant talking point with anyone who came near us. The questions usually began with ‘did you
know that you’d be significantly out of the average age?’ ‘Did you fly from
America just to take this cruise?’ ‘Would you ever do this again?’ Yes. No.
Yes.
A couple of days
into the cruise, word got out on the ship that a couple on board was
celebrating their honeymoon, so then we started being asked all about our
wedding. It took us a day or two to
figure that one out. Then, when we told
people that we’d been married for 8 years and this was in no way our honeymoon,
they were even more confused!
An advantage of
being from the EU when you travel in the EU is the open borders. When you are not from the EU, everyone would
like to see your passport. When we first
boarded the ship, they told us as non-EU passport holders, we would need to
surrender our passport to the concierge for immigration checks at each
port. We became great friends with the
concierge’s desk over the two weeks.
Every morning when we would pull into port they would discuss us with
the country’s immigration authorities, then call us (and the other 3 couples –
an Aussie, and two from Canada) to pick up our passports and any other relevant
landing cards we needed so we could go onshore.
Whenever we returned from the ship, we had to return our passports back
to the concierge so the whole process could start again in the next port. One night, we forgot to turn ours back
in. They sent a steward to our cabin to
pick them up from us. We are apparently
not kidding around with these procedures!
We asked our dinner table partners (all British) if they had to do
anything at any of the ports. With the
exception of Russia, all of them left their passports in their cabins for the
entire trip.
As cruise ships
go, ours was small. It held just over
800 passengers and had about 250 crew members.
So instead of the quite large ships my parents have told me about with
six or so restaurants, ours made do with two.
This seemed to be okay. One was
casual, buffet style – we typically went there for breakfast and lunch. The other was a sit down, formal two or three
course meal regardless of the time of day you went. The dinner seating was at assigned tables and
a set time, but lunch or breakfast you could sit at any table.
Like I said, it
worked okay. Until it didn’t.
I mentioned in a
previous post that a few people on the ship started feeling ill while we were
in St. Petersburg. Well, by the next day
it was more than a ‘few’ people. It was about
30. Then the next day, the guest
services manager came over the intercom and reported that it had been
discovered that the illness was due to the Norovirus (google it if you don’t
know – I’m not ruining my blog to explain the symptoms!). As a ‘precautionary’ measure they closed the
game room, workout facilities, library, swimming pool, whirlpools, public
restrooms, and the buffet restaurant.
So now all 800
(old, cranky) people (okay 798 old, cranky people and two spry young things)
had to figure out how to coexist in just one restaurant and reduced activity
centers. It didn’t go well. In addition to passengers falling ill, crew
were also susceptible. We looked around
at dinner one evening and noticed that two of the four assistant waiters in our
section were missing. When someone was
suspected of having the virus (passenger or crew), they & their bunkmate
were quarantined into their room for 48 hours until the test could prove they
didn’t have the virus; though the virus only lasts 48 hours so by the time the
medical tests come back to tell you you’re sick, you’ve pretty much gotten over
it.
Also as
precautionary measures, the crew also had to clean the walls of the ship with a
sudsy, bleach solution twice a day. So
you then had to be very careful not to touch any walls as they dried. They used the same solution to clean tables
anytime you moved throughout the ship, so caution again had to be used when
sitting down somewhere that had been recently vacated.
In total, by the
end of the cruise there were about 200 reported cases from the passengers plus
about a third of the crew. Luckily
nobody on our table (including us!) ever showed signs of illness, so for us it
was just an additional talking point at dinner.
Thank goodness we’d moved on from our age! The waiters had been told to be on high alert
through. One evening I ordered something
that, when it came, I didn’t particularly care for. I picked at it for a bit but ended up not eating
any figuring I could make do with the chocolate cake that was coming in the
next course. Within a few minutes of our
waiter picking up my plate, I had two other crew members beside me asking if I
felt alright and if there was anything wrong with the meal or my appetite. She even wanted to know if I was running a
fever. I felt horrible having to tell
her that I felt fine, the dinner was just bad – but I did out of fear of being
locked in my room!
Okay, that was
the downside of our trip. I think it
affected everyone a bit differently; obviously if you were actually ill or if
your spouse was and you were bored to tears sealed in your cabin you probably
think the virus was a much bigger deal than we did. The part which annoyed me the most was the
library closure. I only brought two
books with a plan to pick something out of there. By day six I’d finished what I had and was
seriously contemplating having to read one of Adam’s (he’s been into very
serious WWII historical analysis lately, which is not my cup of tea on
vacation!) when one of our dinner table friends shared some light mysteries.
Speaking of our
dinner table friends, they were much more fun than I expected. We had booked the late dinner setting (7pm by
the way – late? I’m rarely home, and
never eating by 7pm!) and the largest table option they had. We figured with a bigger table, there is a
better chance that you’ll find someone you like or at least can hide from the
people you don’t like. It turned out to
be great. We always had something to
talk about (and not always our age or nationality), we were able to fix a
couple of digital cameras, and they were able to decipher the menu for us some
nights – seriously, you can’t take these backwoods Texans anywhere!
After dinner
every evening, there was a variety of shows ranging from Abba to Joseph’s Dream
Coat to a comedian and just about everything in between. It always seemed like the perfect way to wrap
up the evening.
I guess to answer
one of the questions that we were asked frequently… Would we ever do this
again? Well, yes. We’ve already booked with the same cruise
line to do a trip through the Norwegian Fjords in March.
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