August 3, 2016 – At Sea on the Costa Fascinosa, the Captain’s Reception, and Formal Night

Today we slept until 8:30 AM and had a room service breakfast. We then slept until about 1:30 in the afternoon. We had a late room service lunch and then sat on our huge deck for a while. We didn’t last long as the sun was extremely hot, but it was nice to have the option of having a deck to escape to, unlike our cabin last year which did not have a balcony. We listened to Harry Potter for a while.
We showered and watched some news on TV. It was interesting to the see the different perspectives in the world from Russia, China, Britain, and Europe on what the hell exactly is going on in this wide world. No one agreed.

No land in sight as we left the Balearic Islands heading for Sicily.

So, we discovered that Costa adds sugar to their "fresh squeezed" orange juice which tastes reminiscent of Tang.

The sugar crystals were easy to see on the empty orange juice glass.

On this cruise, the "cake of day" was not the same cake every day like our last Costa cruise. We were amazed.

We dressed for the cocktail party with the captain that we had been invited to (we're Coral level on the Costa card loyalty program). We were a little late for the reception, which turned out to be mostly alcoholic drinks and an exceedingly sweet fruit punch and some very sketchy canapes, similar to those that were brought to our room on the first day. We were in an auditorium, all sitting facing the stage where four flamboyantly attired dancers, two men and two women, pranced around and then hunted in the audience for victims willing to disgrace themselves in public, dancing on stage. Then in a strange turn of events that surprised us, random couples went and joined the dancers and victims on stage to willingly dance in front of an auditorium full of strangers. It was a bizarre spectacle. We never saw the captain (perhaps he hated the music as much as us and had left?). We left, as the music and dancing were neither pleasing to our eyes nor ears.

Just what you want to do when you're on a cruise, get scooped up by some rando dancer and forced to dance on a stage in front of an auditorium full of strangers. And yes, the men are shirtless but with little short jackets.

In the halls on display is the "Little Captain Program" where all of the pictures of this pay activity for children are of young men pretending to be a captain for the day. Yes, a woman could never be a captain. How backwards.

Slightly more diversity of the leadership roles on this ship, Costa Fascinosa, compared to Costa Magica, but still pretty homogeneous

Unfortunately, the story is different in the officer roles. This is still very homogeneous. 

Clearly these light fixtures are made out of real diamonds.

We wandered around the ship and then decided that we would give dinner in the dining room assigned to us another try. It turned out to be our formal night. We hadn’t even realized it, but Bill was wearing his jacket and April was wearing her silk dress, so we were dressed for it.

We did not like the looks of the dinner that we ordered off of the paper rolled up and tied with a bow. Everything was previously frozen on the menu except for the lettuce, cheese, and bread. April ate almost nothing other than the bread at the table. The mussels tasted fishy and she was not about to repeat the food poisoning from the year before (on the Costa Magica).

The vegetarian option in the entrees was the only option not previously frozen. It consisted of a couple of slices of tomatoes, some slices of onion, and under cooked potatoes, covered in breadcrumbs and baked. Gross.

Bill finished his gross dish, but April tasted how fishy the seafood penne was and remembered the food poisoning on the Costa Magica the year before. She chose not to eat hers and risk another bought of food borne illness.

The only not frozen option in the entree section was this sliced tomatoes, under cooked potatoes, and onions with bread crumbs concoction. It was legitimately gross. April didn't eat this either.

For the toast, normally carried out with some cheap swill, our server offered us 7-Up as we had refused the alcohol. We appreciated WiWin accommodating us without hesitation unlike our experience when we first arrived on the ship and were not offered and then refused an alternative to the welcoming bottle of sparkling wine (even though all we had wanted was a bottle of sparkling water, which eventually was rectified).

Get me out of this restaurant!

So this is what hell tastes like.

The captain's table was not very diverse.

We watched as a microphone wielding man whipped the dining room crowd up into a napkin twirling frenzy almost completely in Italian, as the Pizza Pie song again featured into this formal night event (just like last year on the Costa Magica- it must be a thing).

The pizza pie song appears again. We heard this at the formal dinner last year on the Costa Magica. Let the napkin swinging begin.

Let's take the tune to "We no speak Americano" and talk over it rapidly in Italian and a bit of English.The night just became even stranger.

The desserts were underwhelming and we retreated from the restaurant.

On our way back to the cabin, we spent some time photographing ourselves in front of the odd wallpaper pictures emblazoned upon the hallways. Some of them have a very “rapey” feel to them, as if the women have been roofied and are now at mercy of the deranged looking men.

We were mesmerized by the awesome pictures on the wall leading to our cabin.

Let me imitate these images so I can remember them forever.

This is how a Costa dinner makes me feel.

I'm staring off into the distance dreaming of the day I'll be on land again.

We got ready for bed and retired, as we needed to be up earlier for our port call in Palermo, the next day.

This picture was taken as we entered the Captain's Reception (never saw him there) and was given to us as a gift. The captain of the ship is plastered on the photo of us. What a cute memento.

June 22, 2015- Another At Sea Day

At Sea Day, a Not So International Breakfast in the Restaurant, Thwarted in Finding Good Deckchairs Again, A Day in the Sun Accompanied by Loudspeaker Italian, Another Appointment with the Guest Services Manager and the Completion of the Formal Complaint Form, Time Alone in Our Room That's Falling Apart, More on the Condition of Our Room and the Costa Magica, Dinner at the Restaurant at 9:15 PM

Today we continued our passage from Valencia, Spain to Savona, Italy (a small port town in the north, near Genoa). We awoke early and went to the "International Breakfast" restaurant which is also our normal restaurant for eating dinner at every night (excepting the nights when we choose to have room service in our room). It was actually open this time, unlike the last time we tried to eat there.

Bill had the "British Breakfast" which consisted of eggs, sausage, truly abysmal hash browns, and beans. April had the "Belgian Breakfast" which was supposed to be waffles, but they were cold, dense, and quite flat and served without syrup or butter. Since she also wanted some protein, she ordered a smoked salmon omelette (bluck! Part of it was completely raw!).

We went straight to the pool at 8:30 AM and still had trouble finding deckchairs even though the place was largely deserted. The main occupants of the cruise seemed to have put out all of their stuff over all of the chairs and then left to eat breakfast or go back to bed for several hours. It seems that though the ship has policies that are written all over the place, they do not bother to enforce them, leading to the general chaos and lack of order that we have come to expect on this ship.

We chose two chairs, several decks up from the pool (the closest we could get), and away from the other chairs. As the hours slipped by there was no sun on these chairs. It was freezing cold in the wind on the deck.

We went for a gross lunch at the buffet (the culinary highlight was a macaroni and cheese that we could have matched or bettered at home cooking ourselves with no formal culinary training). At this point, we'd like to offer a note for all the men reading this blog. If you're inclined to wear a tight little Speedo around in public at the pool, putting on a big T-shirt and wandering into the restaurant in just a T-shirt and flip flops is not good enough (seriously, you're not five years old anymore). No one wants to see your bare legs and every once in a while a flash of your Speedo while they are eating food that already makes them feel nauseated or at the very least, disgusted. Although it was posted every single day in the newsletter and they announced it at various points that people should cover up swimsuits when attending restaurants on the ship, the main occupants of the ship did not seem to care and it was not enforced for the rest of the people who did abide by these reasonable rules.

When we returned to our isolated chairs, there was still no sun there and it was still very cold. Eventually two people left and we took their chairs on that level and sat in the sun for a couple of hours. We watched the blue Mediterranean bob by from our chairs.

It was impossible to relax with the almost constant din around the pool area projected on the loudspeakers. They had people putting stuffed fish and crabs on their heads and doing a conga line and then participating in what looked like musical chairs, although it was impossible to tell as it was all done in rapid Italian. Even with her earphones in and her phone turned up as high as it would go, playing music, April could still hear the loudspeaker antics of the Costa team. There was also dance instructions and some weird version of aerobics that seemed to be more like the making of a truly awful music video for a song that no one wants to listen to. The main occupants of the ship though seemed to be right into it or indifferent as if they were used to constant noise and no quiet contemplation by the sea. We were disappointed that there was nowhere on the ship to just relax and chill in peace and quiet as this was after all a vacation and a chance for us to get away from the city. What a shame.

We returned to our cabin, happy to be away from the clap along, sing along, shouting for no reason activities of the pool deck. We changed and dressed for dinner a little burnt from our time in the sun.

We had to go to the office of the customer service manager to fill out a formal complaint for our problems with the cruise thus far. We were only given a one page form. It was not carbon paper as we had been told, but just a plain paper form. This single sided page was not enough space for all that had happened, so we ended up writing an additional five pages that we appended to this document. She scanned the document on her scanner and gave us the original to take with us. She said that she would send it to the head office. She asked if she could read what we had said about her customer service team. We were surprised. Why wouldn't the customer service manager be reading our whole complaint? Isn't that the job of a customer service manager? The workplace dynamics on the ship seem very odd and smack of a workforce that has had a serious and perhaps fatal breakdown in communication.

She offered us one possible "solution" to the problems we had been having with our cruise while we sat there. She said since we were on the North American package we could elect to not pay the gratuities that we would normally pay at the end of the cruise to the people who had served us (they calculate how many times you go to the restaurant, order room service, etc and then use a percentage to figure out how much of a tip to give to everyone who served you on the cruise, you can dispute it if you want). Why would we want to cancel our tips to some of the only people who we enjoyed seeing on this cruise? Why punish people earning probably minimum wage because Costa had failed so badly? We naturally did not choose this strange proposed "solution." You don't punish vulnerable employees for the failings of management or ownership of huge multi-national company.

No one from customer service or the Costa excursions office gave us any information about how much a private tour of Monaco would cost as they had said they would, so resigned ourselves to not seeing Monaco as we had previously planned.

We also used our time with the polyglot Guest Services Manager (she's French, but also speaks Italian, studied Spanish at University, and married a Portuguese speaker, and she speaks English perfectly) to find out what or who the "animation team" on board our ship was. Every day in the newsletter delivered to our room there were mysterious references like "Let's Dance with the Animation Team," "Hit the Animator," "Tutti Frutti Game with the Animation Team and Trio Tringali, "The Big Snake Game with the Animation Team and the Trio Tringali," and particularly enjoyable, "Sexy Night Let's Dance with the Animation Team and DJ Alessandro Serra and the Participation of the Costa Magica Dancers." On a side note, we never found out what "Game: The Human Slot Machine" entailed.

One of our waiters when asked defined the Animation Team as "animators . . . you know they animate people." This was not an illuminating or particularly satisfying definition and we were left wondering if there were corpses on board who needed to be animated or if the Animation Team did CPR on people who died during the cruise. The Guest Services Manager explained that there were several different animators on board the ship and that there were animators who worked with only children and then ones who worked with adults and that different animators did different things, but not drawing as we had first assumed (very complicated). Eventually we determined that some of them led dancing, some led singing, some led games, and they were what might be called an activities coordinator at a camp or a camp counselor.

While this was edifying, it did nothing to solve our problems with the cruise and we returned to the room to watch the BBC channel and write in the journal. We also organized pictures for our blog. Being in our room made us think of some of the other deficiencies we had found in it such as one of the lamps no longer having an on/off switch, having no do not disturb sign until almost the end of the cruise when one mysteriously appeared, the fluorescent light in the room being about 2/3 burnt out, the towel rack centre rung falling off and not being fixed despite us telling customer service and leaving it out for our cabin steward to find, the shower pole falling off the wall on one end and not being repaired, the seal around the window being partially detached and hanging, greasy marks on the wall that had not been cleaned before embarked on our trip, nail polish on the walls, chips out of the bathroom counter, numerous scratches on the toilet seat, and many others.

We went to dinner at 9:15 P.M. at the restaurant. April's food poisoning seems to be abating with the aid of antibiotics (proving that it was indeed food poisoning causing her severe intestinal issues), but she is still not feeling great and every time she eats she has agonizing stomach cramps. In fear of receiving further food poisoning on this nightmarish Costa cruise, April has stopped ordering anything with meat and is eating strictly vegetarian, not that this is easy given the frozen meat heavy menu.

As we looked above table 133, where we were seated every night in the Smerelda Restaurant, we noticed a huge splatter pattern all over the ceiling (yes, the services are so long that even couples who normally have interesting conversations will eventually run out of things to say). The ceiling looked like it was made of a wipeable vinyl. Why was this strange explosion not dealt with at the time and left for posterity? We wondered if someone sitting at our table previously had not been able to hold the awful food in and had exploded in a Monty Python "The Meaning of Life" shower of frozen shrimp, fish, and beef.

When we returned to our room to fall into blissful oblivion for several hours, Bill's Costa card would not open the door, so we had to use April's. It's interesting that his card could not even withstand part of a cruise (he had it replaced on day two after he lost it). Seems like everything on this ship is falling apart.

The turndown service had revealed a surprise, the illusive mini bar fridge, which had been locked every other night was unlocked. We were far too depressed to drink safely, so we just went to bed.
We cannot wait to be off this ship.

2.23 km walked today.

I really don't know what's going on here.
Something about putting stuffed animals on your heads, forming a conga line, and then returning to a
collection of chairs on the deck . . . Weird.

The only beautiful thing in the buffet that day was a decorative owl.

Yes, it was so loud from our perch above the pool deck that the sound was breaking on my phone.

Sunset from the Smerelda Restaurant.

Bill is not happy with just the cake.

Ice Cream makes things better.