NYC

The very next morning we all boarded the busses at around 8AM and were headed to New York City! This next part for me was unexpected; I didn’t realize that they would be taking us to the Rockefeller Centre, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and Times Square. I honestly thought that we would just dilly dally, have breakfast and make our way towards the cruise ship, but leave it to Asian bus tours to cram every little minute in. In New York I bought a Jay Leno coffee Mug and a Heroes T-Shirt and it took me awhile but I finally managed to find a NYPD shirt for a suitable price.

Boarding the ship was an interesting but long process. Who knew that there would be 3,000 passengers onboard a 3,000 guest passenger capacity cruise ship? Oh and did I forget to mention that it was Spring Break 2010 as well?

They let us board the ship beginning at around 1 and the ship wouldn’t set sail until 4, but none of the rooms would be ready until 2. So our only options were to either explore the ship or go eat at the buffet. So naturally like everyone else we all chose the buffet. OMG it was like P Mall on Christmas day, you could barely walk. Miraculously most of the trays of food remained full, and once you got food, it was impossible to find a parking spot, or in this case, a table.

By the time we finished eating, our rooms were ready, so it was time to go check that out. Once we walked in, we were in for a huge surprise, it wasn’t dirty or anything, it was just really really small. I mean we all knew that it was going to be a small room; we just had no idea how small of a room it was going to be. I mean it was smaller than my first year dorm room, and we had to fit a family of four in it. After that our next concern was, where are we going to sleep, there are only 3 beds, after asking our housekeeper, they informed us that there was a pull away bed tucked under one of the beds and that it would be pulled out and set up for us at night.

We had what they called an inside cabin, my mom’s friend upgraded and paid $50 more per person to have a little window in their room, their room was a bit bigger, but only by a couple of feet.

The first night was very rocky, there was a storm in NY when we left and we probably had to sail through it in order to maintain our schedule. It was so rocky that the tableware in one of the specialty Japanese restaurants started sliding off and broke, people were sliding all over the place.

We started dinner with 11 people, and before the food came we were already down to 8 people. *Sigh* the rest of us just had to pick up the slack and eat their food.
If you went up Deck 7, you would see a cluster of people just sitting by the stairs and holding on, looking really pale, having just consumed some sea sick pills.