Day 24 First Impressions

This blog post is written particularly for those cruisers who are joining the ship in Beijing on 1^st May.

The ship is lovely, very similar in design to the Grand, but the organisation seems to run more smoothly. The food so far has been extremely good. The staff, as always, offer very good service. I will review the ship more fully in a future post.

We had our first cruise critic ‘meet and greet’ yesterday. Most of the members turned up, and we had a chance to meet our tour leaders. The badges were very useful, in that we could recognise people we had ‘met’ online. Most of us were travel-weary, so,  although the meeting was friendly, we did not move around the room much. I suspect that our next ‘meet and greet’, when we are joined by the cruisers who join on 1^st May, will be more lively as we all be less tired and have loads to talk about!

There are 700 passengers onboard who are staying for the full 35 days. The majority are American with smaller but significant numbers of Australians, British  ,and  Canadians. Of the non-English first-  language speakers the largest groups are from Brazil and Switzerland.  The Captain is Italian, Dino Sagani. He seems very personable and is quite high profile around the ship. He introduced himself at the ‘meet and greet’. The Cruise Director and his Deputy also came to the ‘meet and greet’. They are both English and very funny. Their morning TV show is very entertaining and worth a look. Chris and I haven’t been to any of the shows, but last night we watched both a comedian and an illusionist...all extremely good. There is a very good selection of recent films scheduled throughout the cruise.

We are looking forward to meeting you. Our holiday has got off to a brilliant start. If you have any specific questions, post them below in the comments and I will try to answer them in my next blog post.

See you soon! Claire