Day 7 – Norwegian Bliss Inaugural Transatlantic

It’s Day 7 of the Inaugural Transatlantic cruise on Norwegian Bliss.

Well for the first time we decided to sleep in and miss breakfast altogether. I had had a bad night and needed a few hours of deep sleep to recover so we got up at 11am.

We noticed our bathroom door had started to screech badly so reported it to our steward on our way out.

First, we headed down to Guest Services to hand in our E311 Canadian Declaration form for the port stop in Halifax on Monday.

Then, in another first, we decided to go up to the Garden Cafe for lunch. We generally don’t eat a meal at lunchtime on a cruise but may grab a small snack.

Here, we found burgers, hot dogs, pizza and fries on one side of the Cafe:

And Bavarian food items on the other side, with mac n cheese!:

It filled a hole as the saying goes.

Then we set off to The Manhattan Room for a Cruisecritic Roll Call event called Chocolates of the World. Members of the roll call bought along chocolates from their home town or country for everyone to taste.

We shared a table with two couples we had met on the pub crawl the previous day and it was fun swapping chocolates. There was even trivia and prizes such as the most unique chocolate. That went to some Durian fruit chocolate bought over from Thailand.

Our Cadbury Fudge fingers were popular:

Other tables:

The leftover chocolate was handed over to the ship’s crew.

We stopped by The Atrium for a much needed drink and chill session. Then we headed down to deck 5. I wanted to stop by The Splash Academy to check some pricing questions from Missy who is reading the blog updates and Chris wanted to check out the Video Arcade.

The Splash Academy lady was very helpful and, for those interested, these are programmes for the whole cruise:

Guppies – 6 months to 3 year olds

Turtles – 3-5 year olds

Seals – 6-9 year olds

Dolphins- 10-12 year olds

Essentially, there is a $6 charge per hour per child for the Evening Fun Zone ($4 per extra child in immediate family) and $6 for each meal time during port days.

Chris enjoyed the Video Games in the room next door. Here is a selection;

We then went to look on the perfumes and aftershaves section of the shops. There seemed to be a good selection but some didn’t have samplers. Chris bought some new Lacoste for $60 and was happy with the deal.

Next, we went to the Sugarcane Mojito Bar and had about 3-4 drinks. We chatted to an Australian couple who were doing the same 3 x B2B NCL cruise deal with flights and hotel stays for 8,500 AUD dollars that others had mentioned. What a fantastic way to see the world!

A note on the quality of the Bliss Internet package. I paid for the full unlimited package and it’s been pretty good. We can stream videos and access the sites we want. There have been about 3 short blackout sessions in the last 4 days probably lasting no more than 15 minutes. And it can be a bit awkward switching between devices but we are happy with it (apart from the initial price of course!).

We went back to the stateroom to change for the evening and the headed down to The Manhattan Room for dinner. We were assigned a table for two at the side. It was 7:30pm but the dining room never got that busy.

The menu had some good selections:

We both had the Buffalo Chicken Taco Salad as an appetizer:

The chicken had some kick to it!

Then I selected the Grilled Lemon-Pepper Chicken and Chris chose Roasted Prime Rib of Beef:

The lemon chicken was light and delicate. The Prime Rib was good.

The dessert menu arrived:

I ordered the Warm Chocolate Volcano and Chris chose the Kahlua Cream Pie:

Both were delicious.

We came back to The Atrium for drinks. We would have liked to see a comedian this cruise but everything has been booked up quickly. We are fairly new to Norwegian so were not on the ball about this. They say you can line up for late admissions but we are not spending half an hour standing in a line – it’s meant to be a relaxing cruise!

We had fun watching a Thriller Dance Flash Mob training session before the 80s party. An Assistant Cruise Director was dressed up as Michael Jackson and took them through the steps. It was hilarious.