Eclipse Diary 5
Updated: Nov 5
Days 1 and 2 of the Cruise
Day 1: Southampton, England
Before we got on the cruise, we had access to the list of activities through the Royal app on our phones. As is the custom on all Royal Caribbean cruises, there was a Friday night Shabbat service at 5pm. On earlier cruises that service had been at the top of the ship in the Starlight Chapel. On this cruise, I noticed that the service was in the Windjammer Café, the enormous buffet on all Royal Caribbean ships where you could take all your meals, if you so wished. We went to the lobby of the café and remarked that the doors were closed. The services were scheduled thirty minutes earlier than the buffet opened for dinner.
I got proactive and tried to see if the doors were unlocked. They were, and a worker showed me to a set of tables at the front of the space where a tablecloth had been set with a challah, a couple of bottles of Manischewitz wine and three prayer books… one Orthodox and two Reform. The prayer books or siddurs, as Jews call them, were fairly useless. Other people began to arrive. One man, who called himself ‘Saba’ or grandfather, carried a large envelope and removed about twenty photocopied sets of Friday night prayers from an old Conservative prayer book.
Those photocopies saved us. They weren’t complete, but the texts could be passed out to a lot of people who could share them, and we could sing together. The Friday night service has a section, the Kaballat Shabbat, which is only chanted on Friday nights. I feel it is the most melodious service of the week, and I have led the singing on a number of occasions at my synagogue in Montreal. To my surprise, people kept on coming into the Windjammer to attend the service, and by the time that we started, there were about fifty people. One of those people, Steve, said he could lead the service. I asked if I could sing the Kaballat Shabbat service and Steve, who really knew a lot more than me about chanting services, said he would do the evening service that follows.
We began. As I chanted the Kaballat Shabbat, I realized that there were pages missing and filled in as best I could from memory, leaving things out and possibly not doing everything in the right order. Steve had a text on his phone and sounded a lot more polished than me. As Rita observed later, most people were at those services to meet other Jews and weren’t particularly observant. They were reaffirming their identity as Jews and looking to connect with other Jews. Some people were knowledgeable and made their accommodation with what we were offering, but everyone was excited and happy and the cruise got off to a wonderful start.
Kaballat Shabbat service was where we met Alex and Jackie from Manchester England. We would also see more of them during the cruise. We also met the Warencline family from White Plains, New York and Robin from Baltimore and quite a few others, whom we didn’t socialize so much with but with whom we shared a common link whenever we bumped into each other on the ship.
The services finished, the schmoozing afterwards coming to a close, Rita and I went down to the main dining room. In earlier cruises, when you selected My Time Dining you got to eat with different people every night depending on when you arrived. Things had changed since the last time we had cruised, however, and we discovered that our 7PM entry for dinner that evening was extended to the entire cruise. We could change our reservation, but there was no guarantee that there would be a table available.
We met our waiter, Francisco, who I think was from Chile, and our busboy who had an unpronounceable Indonesian name. Their service was hyper-polite. They memorized our beverage preferences, kept track of what we had ordered earlier and in general, obsequiously looked to make our dining experience as perfect as possible. I couldn’t help feeling that there was some pressure being put on them to perform perfectly, but I can’t complain about the meticulous service that was lavished upon us.
It’s time to write about the food. The food on Liberty of the Seas, as had been the case on all of the cruises that we took with Royal Caribbean, was varied and tasty. There were always at least one vegetarian and one fish choice. To my surprise, when we got home and weighed ourselves, we had both lost weight. I attribute this miracle to a number of factors. First and probably most important, the portions in the dining room were elegantly plated and beautifully served… but were small. There were always three courses and because the meal was served and not heaped upon one’s plate as one did at the Windjammer, one had time enough between courses to allow the food eaten to register that one was no longer hungry. The other fun thing about the dining room was that there were themed dress-up days. It was always challenging to put together an outfit to meet the theme and interesting to see what other people had concocted.
Another factor that would come into play for weight loss was that most days were spent in ports. We would get off the ship and take an e-bike tour or walk miles. On days at sea, I would work out in the gym, and although excellent food was always on offer at the Windjammer and at small cafes on the Royal Promenade, Rita and I were smart enough by this cruise to realize that we shouldn’t eat everything.
Our dinner finished, we left the elegant three-story high dining room lavished with ornate fake plastic décor and crystal chandeliers, and made our way to the ice-skating rink, Studio B, to see the ‘Boots and Blades’ Ice Show, a salute to Country and Western music. Although I was dressed for dinner, I hadn’t counted on the fact that the rink would be so much colder than the rest of the ship. Rita and I got there early and got a good seat, but waiting for the show to begin, I realized that I was going to need another layer of clothing. I raced to the room and got my green sweatshirt and made it back before the show began.
What an amazing production!
I don’t know what the ‘B’ in the name Studio B stands for, but it could be bantam or maybe even babyish. The space for skating is miniscule compared to a ‘real’ municipal facility. What the performers who gave the ice show on that space did was miraculous. They celebrated the genre of Country and Western with an impressive amount of skill and ingenuity. The choreography was a real challenge in such a small rink. The sets were imaginative, and they even managed to disguise the Zamboni as a wagon.
By this point, I was feeling very happy over having navigated all of the connections that day and winding up on the cruise with all of our luggage. I think Rita was ready to crash, but I wanted to see the adult karaoke which was scheduled for ten p.m. in the Olive or Twist Lounge on the 14th Floor. The room projected above the swimming pools and water slides; the view was dramatic particularly when the room shook as the cruise hit a rough patch of water. In any case the place was mobbed. There was no way that I was going to get to sing. The two of us sat at a table so far back we couldn’t read the lyrics on the screen. I stayed there awhile and listened to other people sing. One thing I have realized about karaoke is that most people who get up to sing are doing so because they think they have a good voice. Most of the people who got up to sing were excellent. Those who couldn’t sing, however, provided a lot of comic relief. After a while I got tired of listening to other people sing well or poorly. Rita was ready to go at any time. We went down to our cabin.
Day 1 of the cruise had come to a close.
Day 2 of the Cruise: At Sea
The bed in our stateroom was deliciously comfortable, particularly compared to the mattress in our apartment in Portsmouth. Bathrooms in cruiser staterooms are often petite, but once again, the design in these spaces maximizes functionality. Even the shower in the tiny space allotted was a pleasure and there was just enough room for me to bend over in the shower and pick up a bar of soap fallen to the floor.
I got up ahead of Rita and decided to have breakfast without waking her, at the Cafe Promenade which was almost visible from our stateroom’s window. I wandered down the stairs to the Royal Promenade and had a small lox sandwich and poured myself a cup of coffee without waking Rita. My idea here was not to go to the Windjammer where I would be regaled with an amazing variety of breakfast options.
Rita was awake when I returned to the room. She saw that there was a free skate in Studio B that morning at 10AM. I figured this was the perfect opportunity for me to workout at the gym, which on Royal Caribbean ships is known as the Vitality at Sea Spa. The name reflects the management’s desire to monetize exercise with massages and personal trainers. To be fair, however, there were free fitness classes, and the gym itself was quite good. The inescapable fact about gyms on cruise ships is there are not a lot of free weights. The few weights were much larger than most of the weights in a gym on dry land. The fear is that if someone is lifting heavy and the ship rocks, the weight could fall on them. Therefore, the focus in the exercise room is in favour of equipment and not free weights. I could see some people being bothered by this, but my days of training hard are behind me. There was a wide variety of equipment, and I really enjoyed figuring out how some of the machines worked. After using enough of the machines to get a full body workout, I did twenty minutes of running on the elliptical trainer to get some cardio training. I felt pretty good about myself!
When I got back to the room, Rita had already returned from the rink. She was a little disappointed by the condition of the ice and the number of kids and adults who had no clue about what they were doing. She also discovered that she could not reserve further sessions on the ice through the Royal app.
We went to the Windjammer for a quick lunch. The advantage of the Windjammer is that if you are trying to get to an event on time and you’re hungry, you can pick up a quick meal in a very short time. And we were in a rush! At 2PM, we wanted to attend the lecture ‘A Diamond in the Sky – Viewing Your First (or Fifth) Solar Eclipse’ by Amy Oliver, the astronomer hired to give enrichment lectures and to advise the crew about how to best position the ship for the upcoming eclipse.
Amy was very personable and knowledgeable. She was an experienced academic and gave a wonderful lecture about how eclipses happen, which I sort of knew about, and how often and in what pattern they repeat, which I had had absolutely no idea about beforehand. She also spent a lot of time discussing the natural phenomenon that, viewed from earth, the sun and the moon both appear the same size, although the sun is vastly larger but vastly farther away. In every lecture we attended about the eclipse, there was one message that stayed constant. You had to wear special glasses for the eclipse during all but the phase of totality. Amy repeated this message ad nauseum, but I realized how dangerous viewing a partial eclipse without protection could be. After the event, I also realized that besides glasses, you needed sun protection. A number of people walked around the ship with sunburnt faces after the event.
The lecture was in the Platinum Theater which seated hundreds. On other ships, the main theater often had a beautiful curtain in front of the stage. I was a little disappointed that the curtain here was rather plain. The theater was full, including the balcony seating. This was the first time that I remarked upon the level of excitement among the passengers over the eclipse. It would not be the last.
Following the lecture, we had a nap and read our books. I stretched across the window seat in the stateroom and people-watched on the Royal Promenade while Rita read her book on the sofa which was at right angles to the window seat. We got to dinner and discovered that we were reserved in a permanent slot at a two-person table at 7PM with the same waiter and busboy. I was hoping to be seated at a larger table with people whom we could meet. We did have neighbours, however. We spent a few nights talking to a mother and son from Kent who were very nice and, on our other side, two young adults. They were too young to be a couple, maybe a brother and sister? They were very polite, but where were the parents? We never found out.
Afterwards, we returned to ‘Olive or Twist’ for the Adult Karaoke. The theme was Superstar Round 1, a competition. Although we got there early, the lounge was full, and I hastily participated in a sign-up to ‘compete’. Potential Carusos registered with the DJ and there was a crowd in front of his station. There were books of songs that they had available. You could only register if you had the number of the song that you wanted to sing. I felt very rushed and chose Leornard Cohen’s Hallelujah because it was on the list, and I knew the song. I got to sing.
When I got back to the table, Rita was sitting with another woman about her age and a young man. She had offered our extra seats to Nicole and her son James who were from London. Rita had been talking to Nicole while I battled to register. James seemed to be a very mature adolescent, really a great kid. Nicole was raising him alone, and that story had been told before I arrived. That night, she appeared to be one of the few people on the ship who was going to come out ahead and get her money’s worth on the drink package.
The soundtrack could not be adjusted for the key of the singer, and I was stuck singing to a back-up recording that was out of my range. In any case, it was not my best performance and at the end of the night, I did not get selected to move on to the next session. To be totally honest I was not crestfallen. I didn’t go back to sing more karaoke during the cruise. I didn’t like the equipment, and I didn’t like that it was turned into a competition. Maybe my ego was bruised?
Defeated and deflated, I returned to our stateroom and went to sleep. Our day-at-sea was over and tomorrow we would be docking at Bilbao, Spain.
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