An Awful Experience

Our first night eating we were very optimistic. The items on the menu sounded great, and we ordered one item each from each category as expected. But each course that came out was horrible. Not only was the quality abysmal, but the portions were the tiniest I'd ever seen. We aren't pigs by any means--I'm 21, 5'5", and 110 lbs., and I was constantly hungry on the ship. My boyfriend had a much worse--and more dangerous--time of it; he's a type I diabetic. So that first meal, he took what he assumed was enough insulin, and after the meal, discovered he'd taken way too much insulin. Because of that, and also because we were both starving, we ended up going straight from the Four Seasons to one of the buffets, where the food was even worse, but at least we could have as much as we wanted. The room service was pitiful--anything halfway decent cost a lot, and they would only make them at certain times, and would take hours to do so. The alcohol was also beyond disgusting.

This almost seemed to be a type of weight-loss cruise; the food quality was horrible and the portions were tiny, and they were constantly advertising their weight loss seminars, held at various times during the day, every day. I never went to any of the night programs, but I heard they were awful. The library had some books I was interested in, but the glass panels covering the books were always locked and I could never find anyone with the key. The band was awful. The pools were occupied by screaming children most of the time--even the adult pool, where children aren't allowed--and the staff never seemed to care. The announcements made over the system were consistently inaudible, and they wouldn't play in the staterooms.

With the exception of the spa staff and the staff at the information desk, who were truly great, the staff on board did a lousy job and had lousy attitudes. When we started ordering more than one entree due to the tiny portions, the waiters would give us nasty looks, and some would even try to protest. There were no exceptions. When my boyfriend would try to do the polite thing and order for me--which I enjoy--the waiters would attempt to interrupt him and get me to order instead. The cocktail staff outside would disappear with a drink order for anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour. A cocktail server lied to me and said the 18% gratuity didn't go to the staff but to the ship--a masseuse in the spa later told me that he'd lied. The spa staff really were fantastic, though nothing ruins a massage more than when it's immediately followed by a high pressure sales pitch for the ridiculously overpriced products they just used.

As I mentioned before, the ship was small, which isn't a particular problem. But the place was filthy. There were stains on the carpets and the decks were in poor condition. Most of the time whole sections of the decks would be closed off because they were varnishing the rails. Sometimes they would put up a wet paint sign, but sometimes they wouldn't, which meant it was always a risk holding a handrail on stairs located outside. Our first day sunbathing on the sun deck, I somehow got black filth--dirt, maybe soot, who knows?--ALL over me within five minutes, and immediately had to go shower. I brought several pairs of heels, which proved to be a huge mistake, because on the decks, the weird blue plastic flooring was missing pieces about a half-inch wide all over the place, which meant my heels were getting caught every few steps and I was constantly worried about falling. The elevators were disgusting and the buttons didn't always work, which was a bizarre disaster.

Upon arriving in the stateroom, we discovered there were rust stains dripping from the window, cigarette burns on the bedspread, the phone didn't work, and we seemed to be missing information that should have been there, like the list of phone extensions for services and the breakfast order form for room service that was mentioned in the information book. No one pushed our beds together that night, so we had to do it ourselves. When they pushed them together the next night, we discovered they wouldn't use fitted sheets, just a regular sheet tied at the corners, which slipped off as soon as someone got in bed. The beds were constantly moving apart, which was beyond annoying. We never were given the breakfast room service forms. The phone was kind of fixed at some point. If we left our towels on the floor when we wanted new ones, half the time we'd come back to find the used ones hung up on the string in the shower.