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Published: September 24th 2013
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Sunday-Day Two of Cruise sailing on the Yellow Sea and into The Korean Strait.
Royal Caribbean line run many ships and Voyager of the Sea is one of the biggest.
We have 1165 crew on board from many countries. Most of the staff seem to be Chinese, Indian or Pilipino, but as the clientele come from all over the globe so too do the staff.
Our room attendant's name is Hitesh and he's from Bombay. His job is to wait on us hand and foot, keep our rooms clean, basically our own personal butler albeit shared with 9 other rooms. This is the closest I will get to feeling like royalty.
At tea last night Jun Jiang was our waitress, an English master’s graduate from the north of China. She had spent 6 months in Australia on another cruise boat, impeccable English.
The captain is Norwegian, ships director Chinese, most announcements are made in Mandarin, Japanese, Korean and English.
This ship has no laundry, Hitesh is in charge of organizing this for us, with a 24 hour turnaround. Quite expensive,US$1-95 pair of socks, $2-95 Tshirts, so think I will be
doing quite a bit of hand washing, there is a small line to hang things in the shower.
We have an interior state room, which consists of two singles converted into a vey comfy King bed, tiny 50cms gap on each side, then a lounge area which you can close off with curtains from the sleeping area with couch, desk, chair, fridge, tea making facilities, TV, heaps of cupboards, and quite a roomy ensuite off this.
We had been informed in the cruise booklet that the plugs were European (2 round plugs) and there is one of these in the cabin as well as the American plugs which are the two thin blades at bottom and semi circle top (up side down smile)
Each day the ship issues "The Compass" which details what activities are available on board. These range from paper napkin folding to rock climbing to Karaoke to ice shows and anything in between.
Today's first offering for me was Tai Chi at 9am deck 13 on the basketball court. This was taught by Fang who is the cruise director. We are being taught a simplified system comprising 12 steps,
and today we learnt 3 of them. A great way to start the day, followed by breakfast in the The Island grill which is the casual dining place on board.
Trivial pursuit is a favourite pastime on cruises and with the average age on this cruise being around 65 year old, this is an ideal low impact activity. We are keen trivial pursuit people too so we played it 4 times today with a progressive game of general knowledge where your total points over the cruise are added up, music trivia name that tune, name that flag, and a music name the movie. Mixed results!! Not good, not bad, all fun.
And just for fun we did origami, little bit of culture thrown in.
We had a formal dining night in the main dining rooms, and that means suits for the guys and long dresses for the ladies. The Magic Flute was our dining venue tonight and we had a shared table with 3 other couples with some lively conversation re the recent change in government, politics in general and the usual what do you do and where are you from. We were all
Aussies; there are 680 of us on board, the largest group in a total passenger quota of 3480.
Formal dining is silver service 5 star dining, complete with all the aspects of this, hovering waiters, elaborate menus, a wine list featuring wines from the world including a Kosher wine!
Each night in La Scala Theatre is a professional show, tonight's was a tribute to Broadway with an all dancing and singing spectacular complete with live show band. 9piece band, 4 lead singers,10dancers. Fantastic, with a black female lead singer that could SING!!
And to finish off the night some ballroom dancing with a live band in Cleopatra's needle.
Phew Day 3 tomorrow, another sea day.
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