Day 4 (Oct 5th): Paris in Paris and Normandy travel log

This was the day we board our ship, and the bus would pick us up at 12:30 to go to the port. However, since we hadn’t packed and did not sleep well the previous night (and the fact I watched Match of the Day 2 may have contributed to it), we didn’t feel like going out. So, we instead stayed at the hotel, woke up relatively late (9am), to catch the breakfast buffet. I ate a lot… the previous night’s dinner wasn’t quite enough, so I ended up getting nutella crepe, an assortment of cheeses and breads, lox, cured beef, scrambled eggs, and sausages. I was very full by the time I got back to our room. I napped for an hour while La Professeure worked, and we headed down to the lobby to catch our bus. While waiting there we ran into other cruisers… there was a couple from Colorado who are probably the closest age to us (they only have a 25-year-old daughter, most other cruisers have teenage grandchildren). But we found that, like our previous cruise, everyone is friendly and curious and nice.

The bus took us to a suburb, Saint-Germain en Laye, where our ship is forced to dock (because it’s a big ship and hasn’t gotten a license from Paris to dock there), and we met up with La Professeure’s parents, who flew in in the morning at 7:30am. They were understandably tired but looked better-rested than us. So we had a re-union with them, and then we went up to a walking tour of Saint-Germain en Laye, where we looked at a park and a history museum which was converted from a palace with an attached chapel. It was raining quite hard so we didn’t enjoy the tour all that much. The locale itself is nice though.

When we got back to the ship it was time for a “safety drill”. Last time we did that we went to the sundeck and had the cruise director give us a lecture on what to do during emergencies, but this time because it was raining, all we did was put on our life vests, went into the lobby to get counted, and went back to our room. At least it was short.

After that we had a welcome presentation by the cruise director and hotel manager, and we went to eat. We met a lot of first-time cruisers this time, and they were all impressed by the ship and the food. By the time we were done, La Professeure and I went back to the lounge for an evening of “french” music. But you will understand my confusion when they started with Verdi’s Brindisi from La Traviata. They stayed mostly with french opera classics following - flower duet from Lakme, the boat song from story of Hoffman (though it was the first time I hear a baritone sing it with two sopranos) , the Toreador song, the can-can from Orpheus, etc. There was an odd Quando m’en vo, or Tchaikovsky’s Waltz sentimental, but we can let that slip. Then they sang pop tunes in the second half - Sous le ciel de paris, Le fuille mortes, or La vie en rose. For the most part I felt bad for the pianist because she needed (and didn’t have) a page-turner, and she was struggling with the electric piano we have on the ship. After the concert, the singers stopped us when we were on the way out and said that I must be a musician - apparently they could see my mouth the words. I try to kick the habit.

This ship we’re on is, as I’d mentioned, a larger ship, and is wider, and newer than the one we were on last year. And everything is nicer - the door to the restaurants were electronic glass door, our bathroom floor was heated, there was night light and reading light built into the bed board, the TV was a flat-screen, there was even a fridge, and the drawers were self-closing. I think we we had been on this ship before going on our last one, we would have been disappointed. The only gripe I have about this ship is that it lacks an actual piano.

Last updated October 23, 2015