Some good, some bad

The good part, marvellous in fact, were the shore excursions and local guides who took us to incredibly interesting places, giving us fascinating facts about the history and culture. We learnt a lot. Good also was our cabin and balcony; also the food at the self-service restaurant.

The bad part were several aspects of the ship we did not like. Dawn had informed us that the majority of the passengers would be Italian. We were, therefore, prepared for the length of time announcements take in several different languages. However, we were surprised when the captain, at the cocktail party prior to the Gala Dinner, spoke at length in Italian resulting in the guests laughing, clapping and cheering loudly. We felt extremely ignorant.

Worse though was something that affected us every day. There were a great deal of chairs in public places, by the pools and in other areas looking over the pool areas. About 90% of them were for reclining, the back rests were not designed to raise to enable a person to sit and read. It was extremely noisy and very crowded. So we went to one of our favourite places on other ships – the promenade deck. It was exceptionally wide but completely chairless! When I asked an officer why, she informed me it was because of “health and safety” as that deck is below the lifeboats (position is the same on every ship we’ve ever been on). To me this explained why there were so many chairs everywhere else, closely packed together. We spent one whole day at sea and other days we spent the afternoons on the ship. Forunately we had our balcony to sit on but his wasn’t always possible due to the position of the sun and wind.

Another health and safety” aspect was that the Safety Drill would take place as we sailed at 11.00pm and at 5.00pm the following day. I decided on the latter as we hadn’t had any sleep the night before and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep awake a second night until midnight. I was fast asleep when the fire alarms sound extremely loudly in my cabin followed by shouted urgent instructions telling me to attend the drill. I initially decided to stay in bed but as the bells and announcements followed another twice at fifteen minute intervals and I couldn’t get back to sleep I reluctantly did attend. It was about midnight at this time and the area was packed with tired, disgruntled passengers with crying children and babies.

In my opinion this is due to the Costa Concordia disaster which had made this Italian shipping line tackling safety aspects in a way no other cruise lines do.

The shows displayed lush costumes and clever magicians, jugglers and highwire acts, as in a circus, similar most nights. The lighting was poor. As we prefer singing and dancing we didn’t enjoy the shows so didn’t go.

Oh dear all this sounds very negative doesn’t it. In over 30 years of cruising I’m saying something I’ve not said before and that is that I’ll never go on another MSC ship.

But of course I’ll cruise again via Bolsover because you are all excellent at what you do and the way you help us. We loved flying Emirates and the Air Bus A380. Thank you Dawn for arranging it all for us.