Serenade of the Seas ship photos from fall 2013

This post is pretty much just what the title says, photos of the pretty ship.  It was the prettiest RCI ship we've been on, by quite a lot.  I really liked this one.

The Centrum

The Main Pool

The Solarium (covered, adults only pool)

The waterfall behind the bridge was just right--a gentle soothing noise all day long.

The Solarium Bar and Park Cafe (serves snacks and light lunches, it is around the edge of the Solarium pool)

The Windjammer Buffet, there is indoor seating as well as the nicer covered outdoor areas in the back.  It was wonderful to have an outdoor option away from the noise of the pool.

The R Bar, on the lowest level of the Centrum (deck 4)

and Vintages, also along the Centrum, but higher up

The entrance to Schooner bar (meet the captain was held in here, morning shows filmed in this, etc)

and Schooner Bar itself.   Schooner was much bigger on this ship than on other classes; very comfortable and roomy--with lots of floor to ceiling windows showcasing the ocean.  

The entrance to the Safari Club

The self leveling pool tables in the Safari club (very fun)

Safari club also has permanently mounted chess, checkers and backgammon games.  This was a great place to wander to when not much else was going on.  You could always find someone to play or a game to watch--the group of teens Marika and Rio hung out with spent a lot of time playing Chess and Checkers here.

Various seating areas in the Safari Club

Cafe Latte-tudes (specialty coffee, for a price, and snacks at no extra charge.  The small "library" is here as well)

The Movie Theater

Some of the dishes from Chops specialty restaurant (for those of you who do not cruise, specialty is code for "extra charge to dine here")

and Chops itself

Rita's Cantina Specialty Snacks 

Giovanni's Table Specialty Italian Restaurant 

 The Casino 

A Sampling of stairwell art

The Crown and Castle Pub (with dart board) 

Sports court 

Kid's pool 

Mini Golf course 

Viking Lounge 

Vortex Nightclub (in the Viking Lounge) 

The Fuel (teen club) 

Adventure Ocean (club for kids 3-11)

Rock Wall 

and, last but not least, the Chef's Table dining room 

I hope you enjoyed this little pictorial tour of the Serenade of the Seas.  I'll be back tomorrow with a post that shows a variety of staterooms from our cabin crawl (lots of us who met online ahead of time looked at each other's cabins to see the variety).  These include a single cabin, family cabin, etc.  

--Hadley

#serenadeOTS

#serenadeoftheseas

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)

Clearly, a good time was had by all!

Happy (late) Halloween,

--Hadley

Mind Your Own Business or It Takes a Village?

I promise to get some good travel blogs, with photos, up soon.  In the meantime, a little incident on the way home yesterday brought to mind a big cultural difference we notice between the US and Germany.

The US seems to have taken the "mind your own business" philosophy to an extreme (in many cases, obviously never all).  Often, people seem to not want to intervene even in cases where someone's safety is in serious jeopardy, or in which someone else's behaviour is negatively impacting them.  I think sometimes this stems from fear of hurting someone's feelings (and the reverse, a tendency to take any criticism very personally ourselves) and partly from fear (or being sued, or shot, or who knows what else).

Completely on the opposite extreme is the German attitude.  Germans tend to comment, and make things their business, whether is impacts them in any way or not.  Case in point:

Yesterday it was in the high 70s when we left Barcelona.  We knew we would be spending most of the day in the car, and the largest chunk of time OUT of the car would be the 10-15 minutes of waiting in line for a taxi after disembarking the ship (and the 5 or so needed to load luggage into our car once we got to it).

Marika always feels warmer than the rest of us, and opted to wear shorts and flip flops (with a hoodie for when we got to cooler German weather) knowing we'd also keep the car a bit warmer than she'd be comfortable wearing jeans in.

About 8:30 last night, we stopped for a quick dinner at a roadside Burger King here in Germany.  It was about 55 degrees out.  She was stopped as she walked into the restaurant, from eh car (less than 45 minutes after crossing the German border, and less than one minute after leaving our car once in Germany!) and lectured by a German couple about how inappropriate it was to wear shorts and flip flops in "winter weather", how she was likely to get sick, etc.  Of course, she would have been inside the warm Burger King eating area in under a minute had they not way laid her in the doorway to express their disapproval of her attire.

No worries--we have gotten very used to the Germans expressing their disapproval of a great many things, with no thought about offending--Marika just laughed it off an said "Welcome to Germany!"