Cruisin' III- Day at Sea

*This is a series of posts about our Christmas Cruise to the Mediterranean Sea. If you want to read them all, click on the "Cruise" tag on the right. If you don't care to watch AND read a slide show of "My Family Vacation" feel free to skip these posts. :)*


Around 5am I heard a huge BANG (it really could have been anything- door slamming, engine room, dolphin in the propeller) and started freaking out. There was no more sleep to be had after that. We had not had our muster drill yet so I didn't know where to go in case of emergency and didn't know how we would be notified in case of emergency. I really should not have read that story about a Costa ship hitting a pier last year and also should not have watched Titanic weeks before we left. 


To make my panic worse, I kept hearing announcements but could not hear them in our room. 


What I was sure the announcements were saying:


"OH SHIT! THE ENGINE THREW A PISTON! It hit the hull of the boat and she's taking on water and we need everyone to evacuate to the lifeboats immediately!"


What the announcements were probably saying: 


"Crew member Kumar Patel, you are needed on Deck 3!"


We all got up around 9:30 (the best, best, best part of this 10 day cruise was that there were only 3 days we needed to be up and out of the room pretty early) and as soon as I got out of the shower an announcement came on in our room in Italian and I was pretty sure it was telling us about our mandatory emergency drill. After hearing the whole thing in French, then German the announcement was made in English (then 4 more languages) so we had plenty of time to get dressed, gather our life jackets, and head up to the proper deck.


The last cruise I went on in 2007 was without a child and with my best friend Heather, and the muster drill was the night we left port. I was cracking up with a drink in my hand, taking pictures, and joking. This time I was feeling sick, wrangling a starving baby, and unable to understand anything anyone around me was saying. Things were a bit different.


Maggie looked at her infant life jacket like it was a chastity belt so I didn't dare try to put it on her. She was wailing through the drill so the crew members weren't going to make her put it on either. The good news is they did the lines in height order so Maggie was first and I was second and I'm pretty sure if (WHEN, I was sure) our boat crashed I'd be first in line. I will shamelessly use my baby to save myself.


(If I sound like I didn't enjoy myself up until this point, it's because I didn't.)


We finally made it to late breakfast with a starving Maggie after 11am, where we fought Europeans for a spot at the buffet. It was our first breakfast and I was still trying to get the hang of everything so I must have made 1000000 trips to the buffet while Matt held Maggie in his lap and let her pick at her plate. 


Some awesome things about the buffet:
*Milk was free, along with tea, coffee, and juice. It may not have been whole milk, but we took cups and cups of it for Maggie.
*The coffee stirring spoons were perfect sized for Maggie and she used them.
*There was a wide enough variety that we could always find something she would eat, even though the buffets has the exact same thing every day.


The only thing I could stomach was a Sprite, which cost us 3 Euros, or about $4.50. Yeah, that was the last one of those I had.


Not much else happened this day. We were just trying to figure out the layout of the ship and find what was there. They had a baby play room set up for days at sea, and we spent a couple of hours in there with Maggie and about 5 other kids right around her age. It was interesting to see parenting in other cultures. When the little Italian kids fall down their mom would say "Bravo!" and clap just like we do for Maggie!

Making "friends" in the baby room.

I almost didn't go to dinner since I was still feeling bad and it was a formal dinner, but I went anyway and I'm glad I did. It was nice to catch up with the other families and see what they had done that day, and the kids took Maggie again so we could have some peace. After dinner Matt was so kind enough to take Maggie back to the room for bath and bed so I could go to that night's show with the grownups.

Playing in our room.

Maggie learned to talk a lot while we were on the trip.

The word this day was "hat".

"At!"

 It turned out there was a "Captain's Cocktail Party" before the show so we were treated to free champagne and watching the captain walk up the aisle of the theater to Katy Perry's "Firework." (???? I have no idea why.) The whole crew was introduced and I clapped really hard for the Chief Engineer because I suspect he knows a lot more than the captain does about keeping the ship afloat.

The show was terrible, as can be expected on a cruise ship. It was some sort of interpretive dance deal based on Greek mythology. The costumes were cheap and tacky, the dancing was mediocre, the music was cheesy and contrived, and I didn't learn a damn thing about mythology.

But the hot dancers mostly-naked dancers pretty much doing it in the hamster ball thingie was pretty awesome.

Hey, it's Italy!