Wanderings and Ramblings : Halloween on Serenade of the Seas 2013

I am not going to type out a day by day account of our most recent trip. I feel like, with many similar things to other recent cruises, and a few just wander and soak it all in days, that doing so would become tedious to read as well as to write. So, please forgive me for taking a bit of an alternate approach and jumping around a bit.

I am going to write about Halloween today, because that is still very fresh in my mind and we had a lot of fun. Then I will go back and write about our precruise days (probably as one post), make a post about the ship itself (she was really lovely), and some posts about ports (Venice and Dubrovnik will get there own, picture heavy posts, no worries). I hope that will be okay.

So, today I want to talk about Halloween. It is a holiday that our family has always enjoyed. We love dressing up and seeing all the decorations and whatnot. While Halloween is rapidly makings inroads as a celebration in many countries (we had a great time trick or treating on the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta several years ago on a visit to my parents), it still has not caught on in Germany. Several amusement parks do have special Halloween parties and decor, but that seems to be the only place for it--and that bit that there is is all heavily geared towards the grotesque and macabre--which is not really what we enjoy anyway--"creep light" is all fun and good, but really gross/scary/violent is not my thing. I find it odd that Germany, which by and large is much less fascinated with violence than the US, and which often rates movies that get only PG or PG-13 rating in the US, much higher if they are violent (conversely, sex, nudity and language tends to be rated lower) has pulled this part of Halloween to celebrate.

So, an extra perk of cruising during Rio's fall break from school (on top of the low, off season prices, lighter crowds in ports, and cooler weather) is that the cruise line celebrates Halloween, giving us the chance to do so as well. Last year, the Splendour did a nice job with the holiday--and we found the heavily Spanish crowd really got into it, many brought costumes from home. But this year, wow, the Serenade really went all out with decorations, threw a big party, had the dance cast learn the Thriller Dance and come out to perform, brought on a professional facepainter (she also did faces for the Venetian Ball a few days earlier--I loved that!), etc. It was a heck of a lot of fun--we all four had a blast.

So, I thought I would share some photos of the ship all decorated, the kids in their Captain America garb (they had had other plans, then decided at about 6:00 pm the night before we left to make Captain America and the Captain America show girl costumes and ran out to the store for duct tape--they are a creative pair!), the Thriller Dance, etc. I hope you enjoy them.

Jack o Lanterns at lunch time in the Windjammer Buffet

A couple shots of the Centrum with all the decorations up (they went up sometime after midnight but before 9:00 a.m. and were all down by 9:00 on the first).

Captain America (WWII era):

And one of the show girls from the ads he was in, with her awesome eye make up done by the face painter RCI had on board just for the cruise:

Here they are together--pretty cute for costumes pulled together in very little time and only purchasing Duct tape, don't you think?

Dave and I coped out and went as Bavarians

Some photos of the Thriller Dance as performed by the dance cast (narrated by one of the singers as seen in the first photo)

The Cruise (activities) staff dressed as KISS

And a variety of other cruisers in costume to give a feel for what the atmosphere was like (we thought the Chip N Dale dancer was a great spur of the moment pulled together costume)