Part 4: Activities

Stephanie — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:43:00 GMT

Activities aboard the ship were first-class, well-organized, and in many cases riotous fun! I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I did during the Hairy Chest Contest on the Lido Deck. The stage shows in the evenings were eye-popping extravaganzas that either had me rockin’ out, tearing up, or cheering wildly. I was amazed at the level of production and talent these shows exhibited. The acts that were playing in the other lounges and bars around the ship provided top-notch entertainment, too. When was the last time you heard a Beatles cover band made up of four Vietnamese men who sounded on stage just like the original recordings?! Well, I just did. And I managed to get a picture with them, too.

Cruise Director Todd Wittmer was a hoot, as was Assistant Cruise Director Noortje. The way those two verbally sparred with each other during their live morning and afternoon shows was something everyone talked about. I’m sure that I saw Todd just about everywhere on the ship, at all hours. His seemingly boundless energy and good spirits seeped through into just about everything going on during the cruise. I think he did a great job.

As an aside, I should say that the general notion that I had for the duration of the cruise was to use my new iPod touch in conjunction with the ship-wide Wi-Fi facilities to regularly update my Twitter page with whatever I happened to be doing at the time. Twitter.com is a relatively new “microblog” Web site that is rapidly gaining popularity with the social networking crowd. I thought it would be another unique first to “twitter” from the ship, and keep all the landlubbers following my posts (including my family) up to date with what was going on. Unfortunately, the technical obstacle that thwarted my ability to do this was the unusually short inactivity time-out on the Wi-Fi login sessions. I had to log in to bring up the Twitter site (since the iPod doesn’t have facilities to type something offline and then copy and paste it into an online form), and if it took me more than about 90 seconds to type what I had to say, I found myself logged off by the time I had a short sentence or two to post. That meant discarding what I had typed in order to log back in. Consequently, my posts were fewer and farther between, and much more abbreviated than I had wished. I’ll go on record as stating that I think someone at Carnival should re-evaluate the time-out duration for the shipboard Wi-Fi sessions. Having the ability to connect to the world from just about any location on the ship is terrific. But it’s not always feasible, or possible, to indicate activity to the system with every minute. OK, off the soapbox.

Next: Part 5- Destinations

Splendid Things in Life : Twitter

Part 4: Activities