Now onboard Serenade of the Seas, finished unpacking, and have completed the necessary training for this ship. I will not be staying long, but more on that later. I really like the size, layout, and decor of this ship. RCI guests always rave about the Radiance-class ships and I can definitely see why. So far, I can see it is also a great layout from a crewmember’s perspective: easy to navigate and not so huge that it’s nearly a mile-long walk roundtrip just to get a meal (which is very much the situation on Voyager-class ships). I have now met all of my co-workers and everyone seems very friendly around the ship.
I got very lucky and (at least for now) have my own cabin. It is an ECCR cabin, which is basically a spare cabin used to house crewmembers when there aren’t enough crew cabins of a particular designation (IE. by division and gender). So this particular cabin is not in the same area of the ship as all the other production staff, but for me that isn’t really a problem. The crew cabins on Serenade are a much nicer layout than those on Explorer of the Seas in my opinion. I haven’t seen any other crew cabins on Serenade but I’d be willing to bet that all 2-person crew cabins on this ship are identical (Update: I was wrong about this. My cabin is part of about 10% of crew cabins that are oriented with the door on the long side of the cabin. The remaining 90% are the same layout as voyager-class crew cabins, but slightly smaller). The interesting thing is, I’m pretty certain that the cabin itself is smaller than the crew cabins on Explorer and yet the layout still seems better to me. I guess of all the interesting quirks to be found in this German-built ship, one of the things they got right was the crew cabins. One downside however is that it appears all of the internet terminals which the crew cabins on radiance-class ships were fitted with, have been removed. I guess they sustained some damage over time (not all crew members take good care of their cabin and its contents) and the company opted to simply remove them instead of replace them (which I can imagine would have been a huge expense). There is still an internet cafe and I also discovered that by plugging my laptop into the now-available Ethernet port in my cabin (where the terminal was previously connected), I can access the ship’s internet service at the standard crew wi-fi rates. This is pretty useful but could potentially become very expensive to have around.
So as I mentioned earlier, I will not be on Serenade of the Seas for very long; about a month actually. After signing on yesterday, I received flight details to join Voyager of the Seas on August 8. I will leave Serenade on August 6 in St. Maarten and fly to Barcelona (connecting in Paris) to join Voyager for the remainder of my contract, or at least until such time as I am promoted (hopefully). Until November, Voyager does 7-day cruises out of Barcelona, Spain calling in Naples, Rome, Livorno (Florence & Pisa), Villefranche, and Nice. About mid-November, Voyager relocates to Galveston TX for the Winter where it sails Western Caribbean cruises. I’m looking forward to doing a European itinerary for a while but it means a quick and massive change of plans for my mom, sister, and some family friends who were going to come visit me on Serenade in mid-August. Luckily I told them not to make too many plans ‘til I was on Serenade because I know these kinds of transfers can happen towards the beginning of a contract and if they had booked the cruise it probably would have been non-refundable and they would show up here after I left.
Anyway, that’s all I have to report for now. I will try to post again sometime in the next week to report my progress this week after learning the two production shows and whatever else there is to know.
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