The good, the bad, the ugly

The ship is beautiful and quite large, which made crossing the Atlantic very smooth.  Our cabin was a great size and we had a lot of storage.  We stopped sailing with Norwegian about three years ago because we did not like the food.  The good thing about this cruise was the food.  It was very good.  The service and all staff were also very good.  You could not walk past them without them saying hello and smiling.  The sliding boards, especially the middle one, were great fun.  The bad was:  the layout of the ship.  There were no middle elevators, which required you to walk the complete length of the ship to get from one area to the other.  If you have no mobility problems, then this would be no problem for you.  There was only one elevator on the 5th floor, which meant you went to the 6th floor and always had to walk in the casino to the escalators to go to the fifth floor.  The casinos were full of smoke.  You could not smoke anywhere in the ship and there was a small designated area outside, but smoking was allowed in the casinos.  It was also hard to get chairs outside by the pool area.  By 7:00 am, the best seats were saved.  We observed a person saving 2 seats in the shade and going over and saving 2 seats in the sun.  One day, we got there early and sat and read.  Six very good seats in the shade had towels saving all 6 seats and no one around.  We starting timing.  No one showed up for over 3 hours.  My husband said something about it to 3 staff members and no one did anything about it.  There were signs saying you could only save a seat for one hour.  The ugly:  definitely the TV, library, and internet.  You paid for the internet by the minute and one day it took me 14 minutes to read one email.  It was sluggish, expensive, and undependable.  The TV only had 32 channels and of those 32 channels, there was one movie channel and one TV channel, which played the same things over and over.  If you wanted a new movie, you could purchase it at $9.95 per movie.  Some of those 32 channels were in different languages, even further limiting your choice.  All this means that reading was important, yet the library was tiny.  There were 3 small book shelves and they contained books written in different languages.  One time I went to check out a book, and there was only one novel in English.  All in all, this cruise was worth the price I paid, but fill up your reader and you may want to download movies before you go.