Bob:

I kept waking up at night expecting the ship to be moving, but it never did and I found that vaguely disquieting. A ship on the open ocean OUGHT to move, after all, but as it turned out the Mediterranea that first night was gliding through the water steady as a rock. In fact I felt far less motion than in the Comfort Inn at Osterport the previous night where our room would tremble and shake as the trains went roaring past just outdoors. When I stopped to think about it, the contrast between a ship's cabin that didn't move and a hotel room on terra firma that did move was just bizarre, but there it was.

It was a beautifully bright, clear day with beaming sunshine, blue skies, and an even bluer sea, so after a quick breakfast at the deck 9 buffet, we walked around the ship taking pictures. The outside decks of the Mediterranea were a more typical simple cruise ship decor, in contrast to the fanciful decorations inside. Each of the three pools on deck 9, however, were also extensively (excessively?) decorated with statues, colorful tile floors, and colorful chairs and tables. In general, the Mediterranea was a colorful ship.

Monika:

Bob:

The Mediterranea did not feel like a big ship, but in fact it was as it was 85,700 tons displacement, 292 meters long, 32 meters wide, and had a capacity for 2,680 passengers and 900 crewmembers. It had been built in 2003 and so was only five years old when we cruised on it and everything seemed to be holding up well. I was surprised that the ship had 14 separate bars on it, which was far and away the most bars of any ship we have ever cruised on, and it clearly indicated that one critical profit center for the Costa cruise line was the sale of drinks. The usual casino was there, so gambling was the second critical profit center, and clearly the shore excursions were there third profit center. The profit on shore excursions was certainly helped along on this cruise by the fact that the only feasible way to see St. Petersburg was to book a shore excursion because otherwise the Russians would require a visa, which was impossible to get in St. Petersburg itself.

In the other ports, however, we were planning on just walking around to see the cities, and the Costa brochures were quite helpful in that regard. Instead of the crude, limited maps we have typically found on other cruise lines, Costa gave us right up front a nice map of the main section of each city on our itinerary. The maps were good enough, in fact, that I planned to use them to map out our walking tours for Tallinn, Helsinki, and Stockholm, and I hoped that together with our new GPS that had the city streets of Europe in it, we would be able to avoid getting lost.

Monika:

Bob:

At 11:00 we attended a Cha-cha-cha dance class beside the central pool that has the huge rolling cover over it, which turns it into a kind of rather large spa. Reviewing the three basic cha-cha-cha steps in a group of complete novices made me feel like an old pro. Nice to know that at least some residual learning is occurring between the widely spaced practice I get on these cruises! Our instructor was very good and coped with the multi-language requirements partly by multiple translations but also partly by exaggerated miming of the exact movements of each dance step. Shades of Charlie Chaplin! I also thought that his approach, to teach 3 basic steps and then how to tie them together into a choreographed sequence at the very end of the session, was the optimal way to approach teaching a large class of beginners. However, he had us all learning by stepping off with our left foot, which was correct for men but really incorrect for women, and he never did explain the woman's position vis-a-vis the man or the fact that the woman leads off with her right foot in a way that complements the man's lead with his left foot. The review was not only fun but also decent light aerobic exercise as I was sweating by the end of it.

We also tried to attend a line dance class right before lunch, but they had the amplification turned up so loud that I really thought it would injure my hearing, which is bad enough as it is. So we gave up on that and had a light lunch of fruit and a slice of thin-crust pizza before returning to our cabin for some quiet time. Monika and I took turns working on the computer to update our journals, with the non-computerized person whacking away at a quote-acrostic type of puzzle. Even working together, it typically takes us hours to solve one, and as we had brought along a book with over 150 of them we had plenty to choose from. Monika also found a good book in the ship's library cum internet room, and that together with the paperbacks we had also brought with meant we had no fear of running out of things to do.

Monika:

Bob:

After catching up on the journal and solving a tough crostic (the text was a poem and that always gives odd grammatical structures and unusual juxtapositions of words), I collapsed for yet another nap. It was a great nap but I really resented the waste of my time on board a perfectly fine cruise ship with lots of things to do. However, I did it anyway because I was strongly hoping that I could get all the sleepiness and fatigue out of my system by the time we arrived in Tallinn, Estonia the next day. Our mandatory lifeboat drill was at 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, and I thought that was particularly well done. The Mediterranea is organized so that there are only 4 lifeboat stations, all on Deck 3. Station "A" is starboard forward, station "B" is starboard aft, Station "C" is larboard forward, and Station "D" is larboard aft. This charmingly simply set of muster stations means that everybody just marches down to Deck 3 and then divides up into groups at each quarter of the ship. The personnel at our muster station set us into rows and actually divided us so that the women and children were at the front of each row, the men behind, which is the first time I have ever seen the old principle of "women and children first" actually carried out at sea. After donning our life vests and having the procedure described in Italian, English, Spanish, German, French, and what sounded like Portuguese and Russian, the drill was completed and we returned to our cabin to rest until the Captain's reception that evening.

Monika:

Bob:

On previous cruises at a Captain's reception we have found that more often than not, music suitable for dancing will be played along with the free champagne, and the Mediterranea was no exception. The pianist and singer performed some nice numbers at a nice tempo for dancing the foxtrot, so Monika and I had a nice time dancing a few numbers. Although we were on center stage in the theater we did not feel that self-conscious because clearly all of the other folks were just as inexperienced dancers as we were. At dinner that evening, Michelle and Raul said that they thought we had danced very well, an undeserved but appreciated compliment. We chatted mostly about other cruises and trips the folks around the table had taken, and it turned out that both of the other couples had taken trips to China in the mid 1990s, back when seeing the sights there was still relatively inexpensive. Michelle described a harrowing cruise from Valparaiso, Chile, around Cape Horn to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she had had to cling onto the mattress to avoid being tossed onto the floor of the cabin, and that didn't sound like much fun at all. Seeing the fjord areas of Chile, the Maldives (Falkland Islands), the southern Pampas area of Argentina and Uruguay is, however, something I would like to do so I listened closely to her experiences.

Monika:

Bob:

Having taken a nap, I was finally able to stay awake long enough after dinner to attend the evening show from 10-11 p.m.. The show was in some sense the usual pastiche of energetically-executed song and dance routines by young, extremely fit men and women, but it had a different feel to it. The women's costumes ranged from revealing to downright skimpy, a fact that I appreciated, but the men's costumes were generally much less so, much to Monika's disappointment. Surprisingly, every song that the two lead singers performed was in English, but their subtle accents and strange cadences were just enough different from the way the original versions of the songs were sung that they ended up sounding vaguely foreign. The grand finale number was, however, a real show stopper. The ensemble did a "Riverdance" style of Irish dancing to the highly embellished tune of "The Lord of the Dance". It was flawlessly executed and we had front-row balcony seats where we could really appreciate how hard those young folks were working with all that fancy footwork and choreography. At the end of that number, streamers were blown over our way and I collected some to decorate our cabin for the night. I figured that Dennis, our steward, must get bored to see the same cabins every day and that would add a little bit of variety to his life. (It later turned out he was a compulsive neatnik and probably just frustrated by my adventures in interior decorating!) Besides, it was something out of the ordinary to do for me to relax and get ready for bed.

Monika: