My Cruising Experience: A 14-Year Old Perspective

By Jonathan Looi

Part One

My Cruising Experience: Activities

As I am preparing for my third cruise in October I’ve been thinking about the last cruise my family and I went on last year. The last cruise I went on was on the Norwegian Star to the western Caribbean.  This year we are going on the Norwegian Sun to the southern Caribbean. The two ships are about the same age, so I am sort of expecting similar activities.

On the Star one part that stood out to me (in a bad way) the most was the water slide. The first time I went on the water slide I was expecting to actually slide down. But when I sat down and prepared to go down I didn’t go forward. I had to push myself down with my hands in order to get down the water slide.  It’s not like I’m fat and got stuck on the slide, I think there wasn’t enough water to push you down. I tried it sitting down, on my stomach, on my knees and some other strange ways, all without any success. That was truly disappointing.

Personally the most interesting thing to do on the Norwegian Star is play ping pong/ table tennis. I’m not good at all and the rocking ship doesn’t help my efforts to return serves, but it’s still lots of fun. I played with my dad a bunch of times but we would have played more often if there were more tables. There are only 4 tables on the whole ship, two in the kid play area in the back and two somewhere in the front. Regularly there were kids asking us if they could play, usually I wanted to say ‘no’, but that would be mean so you would say ‘yes’, but then you don’t want to play with them, and you have an internal conflict, which usually ends up in you saying ‘fine you can play’.

There are other semi-notable things to do on the Star, like theatre, and the jogging/walking track around the top deck. 
During the very rare time when I don’t feel like eating there is a decent amount of activities to do on the Norwegian Star.

Hopefully the Norwegian Sun’s water slide is actually slide-able.

Part Two

My Cruising Experience: The Cabin

To me the cabin that you are staying in is fairly important, because you stay there for a good amount of time during your stay on the ship. Our cabin last October on Norwegian Cruise Lines was in the stern 8th floor. It was my second cruise and we had an ocean view (a fancy way to say a room with a window) cabin. The room was really small, but I wasn’t expecting to stay there for that long.

In the ship we were on, the Norwegian Star, I got lost more than once looking for our room. The hallways and corridors were like a maze, and only until the third day of the cruise I actually knew how to get to our room. In particular one embarrassing event when looking for the room was on the first day when my dad and I went in the wrong hallway. We forgot the room number and knocked and put our key in another random cabin’s door. Eventually we found out that the door we were trying to open wasn’t ours.

The room was apparently only 159sq ft. That was really small and cramped, but I was mainly doing stuff around the ship or at port. I got to sleep on the pullout bunk bed which was like the rest of the room small, but it was fun to sleep up there.

Here is the floor plan of our room:

A strange part of our cruise was that the hallway that led to our stateroom always smelled really weird. It was probably from the restaurant that was nearby. Other than that, and seasickness my stay at on the Norwegian Star was quite comfortable.

Have you ever gotten lost when looking for your room?

Part Three

My Cruising Experience: Food

While preparing and working extra hard to go on an 11 day cruise to the southern Caribbean I was thinking of all the good food available on cruises. You could safely say that the food is my favorite part of cruises. It's like living on a buffet for 11 days. Not the best place if you are on a diet. On the last cruise I went on last October there were tons of food options so I hope it will be like that on the next Norwegian Cruise we are going on In October.

On the Norwegian Star and I'm guessing most other cruises there are many restaurants and food choices. There's the generic buffet area and also normal restaurants. Some however you have to pay extra. For example we booked a dinner at the special French restaurant for 25$ per person, but ended up canceling it because we all felt really seasick. One thing I found really strange was that there was a Tex-Mex restaurant on the cruise that you had to pay an extra $10 per person for, yet I could eat steak at another restaurant for free.

During the first few days it felt like the crew members were rationing the food, because they had to give you the food at the main buffet area. Two days into the cruise we found out that there was some sort of disease going around so the crew was just doing that for health precautions. It was all good from there.

A personal favorite for me was going to the café in the atrium and eating assorted flavors of pound cake. I’m pretty sure that the staff there eventually recognized me, because I was going there twice a day.

Throughout the cruise there weren’t many places to get water. There were a couple of times that I had to drink hot water in the atrium, because I didn’t feel like going to all the way to the 12 deck to get cold water. If I was on a cruise for more than 7 days I at least would make the effort to drink water instead of living on apple juice and soda, for health reasons.

Cruises aren’t just about buffets. Even though there is a main buffet area, there are still many other sit down eating options. Some are complimentary and others aren’t. I think that the complimentary restaurants are good enough, unless you really want sushi and stuff like that.

Which cruise line do you think has the best food?

What’s your favorite activity to do on a cruise? Leave your comment below.

Photo Credit http://www2.ncl.com/cruise-ship/sun/overview