It’s Day 8 of the Inaugural Transatlantic cruise on Norwegian Bliss.
After an unexpectedly sunny day yesterday, we saw nothing but eerie mist outside all day today.
The view from The Observation Lounge this morning:
We are all also cruising close to the remains of a famous ship that should never be mentioned whilst on board!
This was the map from the stateroom TV;
On the subject of the Norwegian Bliss TV here are some pictures on what to expect.
Home screen with the link to the previously shown Sea Map
The What’s Going On screen lists the timetable of events:
TV gives you access to a number of channels including BBC World News, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News and Sports 24.
You also get free movie channels for different genres which will play one movie at a time.
The Movies option on the home page offers a pay-per-view selection:
The Dining option lists all the complimentary and speciality dining offerings on the ship.
The speciality dining offerings:
And you can reserve a table on a specific night for a specific time:
The Entertainment option lists the available shows and events on the ship:
And you can book these too:
What would have been helpful was to have the My Calendar option on the home screen as well as being available on the Menu only. We didn’t find it for days. It only had our bookings made on the ship and sometimes these were cleared down and empty for a few hours!
After our usual breakfast in the Garden Cafe, we headed to The Atrium to chill out and nurse a Starbucks. We listened in on the events run by the cruise staff and chatted to another couple.
We headed back to the stateroom to pick up our Mystery Gift for the Cruisecritic Roll Call reveal event and trekked over to The Manhattan Room.
Here, we met up with the other members who had signed up for this event where you buy a gift that is personal to you and then deliver it to a randomly assigned stateroom in secret. The recipient then needs to try and guess who sent it.
We had colluded with the steward of our recipient to arrange for our bag of goodies to be placed on their bed. This was a popular method of delivery and was how we received ours:
Our gifts were individually wrapped in tissue paper and came from Worcester MA but we never found out who they were from. Weirdly the bag also included a pound coin!
A couple of our gifts had a David Bowie theme and that completely confused our recipients (we live very near to where he wrote Life On Mars and developed the Ziggy Stardust persona).
It was a fun session where people stood up and said what they had received and how they received it. Some even guessed who sent it!
The afternoon was spent in The District Brewhouse on another Cruisecritic themed session – Oktoberfest! This was a rowdy session of silly outfits, lots of drinking and a competition to see who could hold water-filled steins for the longest!
For dinner, I had to persuade Chris to come along to La Cucina. We are not into upscale Italian food but I wanted to try the pizza. The menus are in a previous post.
So we ordered a pasta dish each as an appetizer (no antipasti thank you!) – Spaghetti Carbonara Classica for me and Pasta Amatriciana for Chris.
These were amazing and we would have been happy with an entree sized version of these.
We duly ordered our pizza – Capresa for me and Peperoni Salsiccia for Chris.
The pizza was excellent and huge! It was clearly freshly oven baked (we could see the ovens!) with a nice thin crust.
We were so full – no room for dessert!
Next, we headed into The Cavern to check out the karaoke. There were seats thankfully and we settled down with a cocktail from the Cavern Bar. The karaoke started well with a great rendition of Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol and then Copacabana but then it went to Rod Stewart and a long list of Rat Pack songs one after the other. Not our favourite. At least they didn’t have My Way on the books!
So we went back to the District and saw out the night there.
These are the Day 8 Freestyle Dailies:
Brits On A Ship 