As predicted and hoped I slept well, a solid seven hours sleep then another hour or two drifting. I started the day with an unpleasant task: Telling Guest Services to reverse the service charge they’d added to my bill.
She told me that she couldn’t do that on a per day basis, that I’d have to return at the end of the cruise. I pointed out that I was hoping not to have to reverse every day’s service charge but her response was strange, “That’s why you need to wait until the end.”
Fine, I’ll wait until the end. I’m refusing to pay for service while waiting for their head office to respond to my complaint from a previous cruise. Customer service is company wide. That’s cruel on the individuals working hard on this specific ship but they can choose to work for a better company.
Curiously the lady in Guest Services didn’t ask why I wasn’t happy, even after I’d intimated that a failure in providing the expected levels of service was the cause of my request. That’s poor customer service in itself, although merely noteworthy rather than actionable (for me; her manager should probably be appalled).
By 10.30 I was in a queue with half the passengers on the ship. The morning’s kitchen tour was popular. It lasted just 20 minutes, gleaming metal throughout, lower grade chefs scurrying around, chopping, stirring, preparing lunch. The Executive Chef stood beaming at the passengers, grabbed a female chef and forced her to stand with him, get some recognition too. She seemed shocked then delighted, big smiles as we passed.
The men doing the washing up work 10-11 hours a day, elbow deep in dirty water. It makes sense that they’d have people in that role but it’s a grim way to spend your life.
On sea days they do lunch in the main dining room, today tables allocated to ‘solo travellers’. A couple of divorcees, a widow, two widowers, the interesting ones kept quiet by a noisy woman from San Diego, keen to share her life with us. We tolerated her but I passed when she demanded that everybody share their best experience from 2017 and their plans for 2019. I didn’t even point out we’d had 2018 in between.
The lady next to me took advantage of a pause in conversation to ask an unlikely question of me. “Are you wanted by the police? All this travelling..”
I decided to delight her by avoiding a direct answer, merely commented that entering and leaving the US would be unwise if I were.
The guide to the next port was useful: Catch a bus, walk a mile, climb a hill, take a photograph, do some shopping, head back. Ok. Shame that she assumed her audience were all American, but so was she, her attempts at emphasis on certain sentences becoming a nasal screech.
Following that was a brief history of Mexico. Interesting, well presented, some good humour. He also threw in his personal politics, asking us to reverse climate change, but I was kind, didn’t ask why he was supporting unsustainable global travel by working in the tourism industry.
Sadly after that the Merengue class was a shitshow. The couple teaching didn’t do a demonstration before we started, spent half an hour teaching various basic steps: step on the spot, step sideways without weight change, step sideways with weight change, step forwards then backwards, take 8 steps to do a turn, a simple mambo and one new to me, step forward left/right into an open stance, then backwards left/right into a feet together one. The moves for the ladies were the same, but mirrored. After four minutes of practice to fast beat beat music they stopped and partnered us up. They weren’t rotating and I ended up with an old woman that refused to put down the purse she was holding in her hand, making it impossible to hold her hand or lead her. Not that she cared, badly mimicking the female teacher irrespective of my movements or lead. I gave up, left the floor, left the room. Half an hour getting hot and screwing over my knees and I didn’t even get a dance out of it. The music was awful anyway, bad even by latin dance standards.
I’m thinking of adopting a new dance rule: Never learn any form of partner dance that requires teaching as solo steps first. Even WCS suffers from this, but that’s also one reason I can’t dance it with beginners: They’re busy doing the footwork they’ve learned and don’t ever actually follow the lead or remember to actually dance.
It’s a good job I had lunch. The dining room opens at 5.15 and when the lift doors opened at 5.20 I couldn’t actually get out: The lift lobby is 20 yards from the dining room doors and the entire space was packed with people waiting to be seated. I gave up, returned to my cabin, call Guest Services to find out when I should be trying to get fed without standing hurting my knees for 20 minutes.
Eight minutes later they still hadn’t answered so I hung up the phone, wondering if their call system was sophisticated enough to track missed calls. I rang the number for reserving a table in the premium dining rooms, the ones that charge you extra for dinner, and asked for a table in the main dining room. The earliest he could offer was 7.45, or 8.15. I went for the 8.15 slot, something on at 7 that I wanted to go to, but a three hour delay in dinner.
The ship is smaller, carries fewer passengers than the other two I’ve been on, has more staff per guest than they do. Strangely its service seems to be worse, the queues for the dining room on the other two caused only by the need for the maitre’d to individually allocate tables rather than a shortage of them available. I guess I’ll have to get used to eating at the Lido on this cruise.
The 7pm activity was in the schedule as ‘Encounter: The Legend of X Marks the Spot”, tagged with the shore side excursions logo. I’d anticipated some form of pirate history or mythology, a talk or lecture of some kind. I hadn’t anticipated story time, the lady that had briefed us on the next port this afternoon inviting everybody to sit and listen to a 20 minute short story, her narration intentionally leaving gaps for audience participation, encouragement for people to make pirate noises or speak a character’s lines.
It was weird. I was the youngest person in the room but we were all treated like pre-school children, quite disconcerting but also done sufficiently inoffensively that you could let it slide, sit back and listen to the story anyway.
The story was relevant to the port we’re visiting but otherwise quite flat. Ostensibly the tale underlying the name of one of the places there it had holes a mile wide, but also included non-obvious factual elements, an interesting blend of fact and fiction. I’m not sure if I’ll attend another, but the opportunity will be there.
Dinner was good, food and company. The chicken noodle starter was a tad bland and the rack of lamb mostly bone but I enjoyed them. There were only four people at the table, a couple that split their time between Dorset and Spain and a lady from Florida. She’d been on the ship since it left Fort Lauderdale to come through the canal to San Diego and enjoyed it so much she stayed on board for the trip back home.
I went to check the dancing after dinner. The usual mix of couples doing shared shuffling or dancing solo next to each other, one couple that primarily did ballroom but changed the style for each song, a couple doing terrible WCS and one couple interestingly doing modern jive. In a way it was fascinating, like watching dancers from a decade ago, none of the moves he led has been taught in a class for at least seven years.
That was still newer than the music. I was there for a dozen tracks, only two of which were younger than me, both of those from the 70s. I had one dance, a lady that told me she knew multiple dance styles. One of them appeared to involve gripping the hand of the leader rather than following him, so when the song ended I bid her goodnight and fled.
In my cabin I instinctively got ready for bed and only then thought about getting a drink. I’d brought five litres of water aboard, bought in California and no flight based weight limits forcing me to throw it away, so took advantage of those supplies instead of getting dressed again.
My phone told me I’d walked 5km today, a lot for a sea day but that included a dance class full of tiny steps that the phone would’ve misinterpreted. I’ll avoid that problem tomorrow, the dance class is the Cha Cha which from previous experience I know my knees can’t handle.
The ship was still humming, whirring, vibrating and making too much noise but it was impacting me less today for whatever reason. Optimistic of sleeping through it I was in bed with my book by 11pm, except that the clocks go forward for a second night in a row which means effectively midnight, and on Sunday our 7am arrival in Mexico would be the equivalent of 5am in California.