We are onboard our "home away from home," the newly refurbished Legend of the Seas. We caught our first glimpse of her from the balcony of our hotel room. She was in "HarbourPort" (there are 2 cruise ports in Singapore) next to the Pacific Princess, one of our favorite ships. At first blush, they looked about the same size, but upon closer inspection the Legend is a bit bigger with 2000 pax vs the 700 on the Pac. We generally sail on Princess ships, so it seemed strange to not get onboard an old friend.
We are very familiar with the Princess boarding process, and Royal Caribbean does it much the same way. But that's where the similarity ends. Princess believes that cruisers need a guide to show them to their room and the ship. RC believes it's best to discover on your own how to find your way around the ship. As an educator, i know that "The Discovery Approach to Learning" can lead to "good learning" but it's slow, inefficient and can lead to a lots of initial confusion. Therefore, we saw a lot of folks milling around not really knowing what to do, and not enough RC personnel around to tell them what to do. The first few minutes were chaotic at best for first time cruisers, as they did not know what to do. We are not newbies, so we tried to avoid the milling throng and found our cabin (which was ready for us except for luggage). Next we needed to find food. We found an interactive touch screen by the elevator giving us step by step directions to The Windjammer Cafe (aka the buffet) on deck 9 upstairs. After a nice lunch we discovered the do-it-yourself Internet Cafe. We signed up for accounts. Next we decided we really needed a map of the ship so we discovered "guest services" on deck 5 and found a map.
The next big discovery 2 hours later was the emergency drill. Every ship has to have "the drill" before it sets sail. You might remember the sinking of the Costa ship off Italy a couple of years ago? That ship sailed AND sank before the drill. So, no matter the cruise line, the drill comes first now. At 4:45 PM we all scrambled to find our specific outdoor "muster station." Some ships lines believe that the pax should all meet in a large nicely air conditioned room to learn the procedure of getting to the lifeboats, RC believes it's best to go outside TO your particular lifeboat station to learn the process. While the latter is not as comfy, it's probably better. Again we discovered our muster station amidst just a little too much chaos. RC needs to have more personnel helping the pax out.
After the drill, we had a brief rest before "discovering" our table for dinner. By now, we are used to the RC "discovery process" so we show up late in order not be caught in the herd. It worked! But we could not find our table. We asked 4 waiters, they could not find it either! We were looking for 166, and the highest number we could find was 162. Finally we found a "red jacketed Head Waiter" who took us to a 3 person table pushed next to another 3 person table (#163) smack dab in the middle of the deck on a raised floor, with the best view ever. From our table we can see what is outside on both starboard and port side. So at dinner, we saw Singapore sail away from us. We were finally moving.
After dinner we had planned to see the show, but alas that did not happen. Our luggage had arrived so we put stuff away. Jet lag found us and staying awake became impossible. We both crashed!
This morning I'm awake before dawn (jet lag is a strange bedfellow) writing away. Soon a wake up call will sound and we will get ready for a shorex to Kuala Lampur. I hope we will see the Petronis Towers, which is still the tallest twin tower hotel building in the world. As you know, watch this space.
In the following pix...look at at the far right of it...the last ship is ours. I need to take some pix of her today.
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