A DIFFERENT KIND OF CRUISE

Inna and I love cruisin’ the world by ship and have previously gone with Royal Caribbean (our favorite), Holland America, and Norwegian. Those are the middle ground cruise lines.  You get all that you need for an enjoyable trip at a reasonable price and the ships are ornate and clean.  Disney and Princess are the top tier lines.  But you are going to pay more for the fancy perks, like mints on the bed each night and bathrobes, better entertainment and food, and more lavish surroundings.  At the bottom end, there’s Carnival.  Carnival sucks you in because they are always the cheapest.  But there is a reason for that.  They suck.  So, we stick to the mid-range cruise lines and it has always worked out well for us.

MSC is cheaper than most of the other cruise lines, so their ships are always packed.  But they constantly nickel and dime you with add on fees – expensive shuttles from the port, Internet that doesn’t work, steam room and sauna, coffee or tea at dinner – it’s all extra and got slightly aggravating.  You probably end up paying more for the cruise in the end when you factor in all of the hidden costs.

One morning I was standing by the Espresso machine, waiting for the server to change the filter, and this little Italian lady just butted right in front of me.  I smiled and then kneed her right in the back.  She didn’t say a word or even look at me.  But she got the point, and immediately moved behind me where she belonged.  Imagine doing that in America.

Food is definitely a big part of a cruise for a lot of people, but not so much for Inna and me.  We do breakfast and then we are off the boat until late afternoon.  We take along some fruit and yogurt in our packs for while we are ashore.  Dinner is our big meal and it’s always fun to eat a fancy feast where you get served like royalty.  And we invariably meet very nice people with whom we can share our daily adventures. This time around, it was a wonderful couple from Montreal who taught ballroom dancing.  We plan to visit them this summer in Canada.

Dinners are always a big production on a cruise ship.  There can be no denying, however, that many passengers spend a lot of time chowing down in the cafeteria buffet and that’s where most people eat all of their meals, especially families with kids.

The MSC food was okay, nothing special.  There was less variety than we were used to, but they changed up the menu a little each day, it was pretty tasty, and we always found something we liked.  It was mostly Italian.  There were many pasta and rice dishes, casseroles, and a wide assortment of meats and fish.  The salad bar was immense with a wide variety of ingredients to mix and match.  And the desert lines were always quite long as people grazed through a nice assortment of cookies, cakes, custards, and jello parfaits.  

Fruit is my thing and the fruit was fresh every day.  One thing we found interesting was that all the fruit had seeds, like the watermelon and grapes.  I had forgotten that those fruits even had seeds.  I thought that seeds in everything other than maybe oranges were long gone.  That’s because Americans eat genetically modified foods.  The Europeans don’t.  So their fruit still has seeds.  And it tastes better too.

One of the most popular food items was pizza.  They had two big pizza ovens pumping out pizzas from dawn ’til they closed at ten.  And it was really, really good.  It was very thin crust pizza with spicy ingredients and excellent cheese.  They couldn’t make it fast enough.  And as soon as a pizza was put out on a tray, it was gone.

Another big hit was pure Americana.  They served hamburgers and pretty tasty french fries.  For some inexplicable reason, they put them in bright yellow fast food packages like at Burger King.  We found it very amusing. 

But the most popular food every day was bread.  Anything bread – buns, biscuits, rolls, doughnuts, bagels, bread sticks – it didn’t matter. We often saw people walking with an entire big plate laden with bready substances.  They also really went in for monstrous cold cut subs that were mostly bread.  This was curious because Europeans are rarely overweight.  Maybe they were just loading up while on vacation.

Most cruise ships offer several high-end places to eat, where you pay extra like you are dining on the town, but our ship just had one eatery, a very attractive sushi restaurant that required reservations.  We both like sushi but never found the time to check the place out.

The one thing that was exactly like America was peoples’ constant obsession with their goddamn cellphones.  Even on a ship without Internet most of the time, everybody was always checking their phones, especially the young girls.  I could never figure out what the hell they were looking at.  The only time I used my phone was to snap a photo, play my music out on the balcony, or upload my handy-dandy Avenza geopdf map App which I used to navigate without an Internet connection in each city we visited.

I was constantly perplexed by  the MSC business model which is really quite odd.

For instance, the excursion help desk was closed in the mornings before the shore excursions left.  This often led to much confusion.

The library was always open, but the books were all locked up in pretty glass cabinets and there was often no one there to help you.

At dinner, they swiped my cruise card to pay for tea and coffee, and then a few minutes later they would come back and ask for my card again in order to pay for our drinks. We could never figure out why they didn’t just do it all at once.

They aggressively pushed the photo package and there were photographers standing all over the ship, like panhandlers on a street corner, trying to get you to let them take your picture in front of a nondescript black background that could be anywhere on earth.

They were constantly hawking the Internet package and it was a total ripoff because it often didn’t work.  And when it did, it was incredibly slow.  On the fourth day, Inna got a denial of service message when she tried to go on-line, and when she asked why, she was instructed to read the fine print on the contract where it said in tiny print at the bottom that once you reached 800 MG – a limit very easy to quickly reach if you are downloading photos – the service would end without warning, until you bought the extended package.

It took at least 15 minutes to get a drink at almost any bar – 30 at the pool bar – so we soon learned that it was much easier to order through room service which was actually quite speedy and efficient, and cost the same. (8 euros)

Because of the language barrier, we were never really sure whether the answer we got was correct, or whether they got our order right.

The thing that I liked the most about MSC was the fact that they didn’t hassle us about bringing liquor on-board at each stop.  They told us in advance that we couldn’t bring ANY liquor on the ship at any time. And they made a big show of checking our bags in metal detectors and x-ray machines each time we re-boarded the ship.  But they never confiscated anything.  Like with everything else on-board, it took us a few days to figure this out.

By day three we were sick of paying $10 per drink, so in Naples, Inna bought a nice bottle of wine and stuck it in her big purse.  I had her throw in a few tall boy beers in glass bottles for good measure because I’m not big on wine.  She smiled at the attendant as they scanned her bag and nothing was said.  We sat on the balcony that night drinking our wine and beer, wishing we had brought more.

When we got back on the ship the next day in Messina, we had a bottle of wine, a handful of scotch miniatures, and a couple tall boy beers. Again, we sailed through the scanners without a peep.

In Malta, I just bought a six pack of local beer in cans, put them inside a plastic shopping bag and no one even noticed – or cared.

Having your own liquor on a cruise is a huge bonus, and MSC makes it easy.  We really liked that.

Being a true lover of frosty beverages, I would be remiss if I didn’t say a little about the Mediterranean beers.  They really go in for lagers and they have some great ones.  Three of the best were: