First Day at Sea

Today (Monday) was our first day at sea. After having taken walking tours around Europe for the past week, a day of just lounging around a cruise ship sounded absolutely amazing. Granted, many of us managed to fill up the day's worth of activities, but at least we weren't walking everyone along cobble stone roads.

We woke up relatively early (8) so that we could eat breakfast an make it to morning trivia. We didn't do too well. Let's leave it at that.

Chris, Jimmy, Chabba, and I did a morning mile walk before several us played dodgeball for an hour. I discovered today how bad I am at that game, but the balls weren't really great throwing balls. That's my excuse, at least. Nevertheless, there definitely was a pattern and I think with about three exceptions, I was on the losing team for almost every one of the games.

There was some aimless wandering for a while, before we decided to eat lunch and then go to the little gathering for people who've cruised with NCL before. It involved free alcohol and prizes, so we were in inclined to go. Also, you get to meet the captain of the ship, which is also pretty cool. The most memorable part of the meeting, was seeing Chris run onto the stage, knocking over several elderly people in order to win entrance to a free Blackjack tournament. That was fun.

Hung around the casino for a while, with hopes of seeing Chris in his Blackjack tournament. We ended up gambling away a good ten dollars or so before discovering that there was Name That Tune at the same time as the tournament, so we ditched him. Name that Tune wasn't great. There is definitely an older clientele on this ship, and that Name that Tune definitely catered to that clientele. The most modern songs on there were Beatles and Queen. Ragtime music was involved.

There were two alcohol tasting events scheduled for the afternoon. One was a martini tasting and one was a "global beer tasting." We all thought the beer thing would be more fun. Both of them are paid activity. When Chris and I got to the beer tasting and found out that we would have to pay $15 to taste the likes of Guinness and Stella, we decided the beer tasting wasn't as cool as we thought it would be. Unfortunately, this also caused us to miss the martini tasting. Oh well.

There was also an evening trivia. Since the first day, trivia's become a very popular event. There was hardly space left for us to sit, and even then we were in the back of the room and not where all of the jokes were being made. We actually did relatively well today though, even though none of us won.

Tonight was one of the ship's formal nights, so we all had to fancy it up for dinner.

After dinner, I went with Umma to see the evening's performance, which was a medley of Broadyway circa 2003-2006. Many of the performances were really fun. Others, not so much. It was a fun performance though. No Cats :p

Other highlight of the night: losing Mia. At around 11, when many people decided that they wanted to go to bed or, in my case, wanted to blog, we decided that no one knew where Mia was, so we decided to create search parties for her. I went with Chris, who spent the whole time trying to perfect his Russian accent. James and Jimmy were pretending to be the Mystery Team. By the time we found her, it was almost midnight and apparently the search was must have exhausted us nutritionally, because we all needed hot dogs.

Tomorrow is Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Hopefully, we will have time to find Internet there so I can post a few days' worth of blog entries.