Thursday, March 17 ~ Sea Day

Once again, we set the clocks back one hour last night to prepare for our arrival in Costa Rica tomorrow.  Between that, and going to bed early last night, we were awake and ready for breakfast at 7am.  It was really disappointing that the main dining room did not open for breakfast until 8am.  There were lots of people awake and waiting for breakfast, so we really wished they opened at 7am, especially with changing our clocks back last night.  We debated going to the buffet again, but after eating there the last 2 days, we were really looking forward to a change of pace at the dining room.  To hold us over, we went to Cafe al Bacio for some caffeine and a pastry (which looked better than it tasted).

By the time 8am rolled around, there was a huge line to enter the MDR. They seated everyone quickly but the wait staff seemed overwhelmed by taking in so many people at once.  We expected service to be slower than eating in the buffet, but we were there for over an hour and found it to be just way too slow of a process.  It was nice having waiters serve everything to us at the table instead of fighting with the crowds at the buffet line, but I was famished by the time I finally got my meal at 8:45am.  On days like this, it might have been better to just go to the buffet where I can get the same exact food but significantly faster.

Cheese Plate

Classic French Omelet, Apple Pancakes, and Corned Beef Hash

Today’s daily schedule included a flyer from the Future Cruise department offering up to $500 onboard credit for this cruise plus 2 free perks for the future cruise if we booked a new cruise today.  We weren’t thinking about booking another cruise, especially since we already booked our honeymoon cruise to Tahiti on Paul Gauguin for September 2017!  It sounded like a good deal though, so we went down to see what cruise itineraries were available for spring 2018.  We arrived at 9:20am and there was a super long line!  I guess we weren’t the only ones who wanted to take advantage of this promotion!!  There is an iPad mounted outside the office, so I scrolled through the itinerary options while J waited in line until it was our turn at 9:50am.  We found an amazing itinerary for a 14 night cruise on the Eclipse for March 2018 that goes to a few Southern Caribbean ports plus all of the ABC islands! Remember way back when we booked this current cruise and I had been already eyeing a cruise on the Carnival Breeze? Well that cruise went to Aruba and Curacao, so clearly I have been dying to get to the ABC islands for a long time!  There was no penalty for booking the cruise today and we could cancel or change our booking up until final payment is due at 75 days before the cruise, so we booked a balcony cabin and opted to apply our $250 onboard credit to this current cruise.  We could have opted to apply that to the future cruise, and that would have made our deposit refundable, but we chose to pay the $250 nonrefundable deposit and take the OBC for this cruise because we already planned to spend that much anyway. We were planning to upgrade to the premium beverage package and we had dinner reservations at Tuscan Grill, plus J wanted to take the mixology class, so with all those charges pending, we decided to make use of the $250 OBC now, not knowing if we would have a use for it on the 2018 cruise.  

We spent about a half hour sorting out the details of the booking the new cruise, then we went back upstairs to spend some time reading on our balcony and drinking mimosas.  It was just so relaxing to sit out there and watch the clouds float over the ocean.

Today was St. Patrick’s Day, and we noticed decorations all over the ship to
celebrate the occasion.  They even had a special section of desserts at the buffet for lunch!

I forgot to take a photo of my lunch, so not sure what I ate but I know there’s no way I skipped a meal on a cruise ship! I think I might have made another visit to the pasta bar.  After lunch, we walked around the ship for a few minutes.  I loved this sign saying “Here Comes The Sun” on each of the decks near the glass elevators.

Library on deck 10

Grand Foyer

We ended up at the pool deck at the Slush bar where I upgraded to the premium beverage package.  I was on a mission to try every drink on the Slush menu, but the drinks cost more than was allowed on the classic package and they just weren’t as good when they were made as virgin drinks.  Iwan is the bartender at Slush, and he charged me $11.80 for each of the 8 days remaining on the cruise, and put a sticker on my seapass card to verify my upgrade.  After being on the ship for 4 days, I will admit it got annoying when every bartender tried to convince us to upgrade to the premium package.  J and I made a game out of it- every time someone asked us to upgrade, we took a sip of our drink!  We always planned to upgrade at some point, but wanted to hold out a few days to save some money and drink the less pricey drinks.

With that piece of business taken care of, we continued walking around the ship.  J was convinced that the coffee in the buffet was decaf because no matter how much he drank, he never felt the effects.  We went over to Cafe al Bacio so he could order something a little stronger, and we shared a slide of carrot cake (yumm!)

We ended up back on our balcony for a few hours until it was time for the Mixology class.  This is held every sea day at 4:30pm in the World Class Bar, and the cost is $35 per person.  I personally didn’t have much interest in participating in the class, but I wanted to keep J company so they let me just sit at the bar and watch for free.  As it turned out, I really enjoyed the class and learned a few things I didn’t know about making drinks.  Six people attended the class, plus me and another woman keeping her husband company but not participating in making the drinks.  One of the bartenders, Santos, taught the class, and he started with a little intro about the various types of drinks (every drink is NOT a cocktail!  There is also a swizzle, smash, mule, collins, etc.)  

Santos taught us how to make 3 drinks, and each time he would demonstrate how to make a simple version of the drink, then he substituted a few ingredients for a jazzed up version of the drink and he brought 2 people at a time behind the bar to make it.  Everyone had their turn behind the bar to make each of the 3 drinks: a mojito, a Tom Collins, and a swizzle drink.  The class was supposed to take one hour, but actually took over an hour and a half! Maybe because there were 6 people participating and they only took 2 people behind the bar at a time?  I’m not sure if this was a larger turn out than normal, and maybe they should have divided us into 2 groups of 3 people to make it go faster?  One woman actually had to leave early or she would miss her 6pm dinner time! Regardless, everyone seemed to have a great time, and even though I didn’t get behind the bar to make the drinks, I still learned a lot and thought it was a good value (you get to drink the 3 drinks you make, by the way!).  

Here are a few photos of J making his drinks…

Pouring a shot into the jigger

Did you know the way to know how long to use the shaker is to listen to the ice?  When the sound of the ice changes, you are supposed to stop shaking because that means the ice is starting to melt and you don’t want your drink to get watered down!

Straining the drink into the glass

A pineapple mojito

Muddling raspberries for the next drink

A raspberry version of a Tom Collins

J smashing the ice because they don’t have a crushed ice machine

Swizzling the drink instead of using a shaker

The World Class Bar opens at 5pm, so people arrived for pre-dinner drinks while we were still taking the class.  Luca is the other bartender here, so he kept coming behind the bar to make their drinks while we were finishing up the class.  J and I loved the dry ice drinks and Luca let us hold the glass after the class was over.

No comment…

At about 6:15pm, we finally made our way back to the cabin to quickly get ready for dinner, then we went downstairs to the martini bar for a pre-dinner drink.  This is our second year in a row on a cruise ship for St. Patrick’s Day, and we made it a tradition to get dressed up to celebrate.

We arrived at the hostess stand promptly at 7pm, and Gorica was happy to seat us with our regular wait staff at our window table for 2.

Tonight’s dinner menu

French Onion Soup from the everyday menu (it was soooo good!)

If you read my Carnival Valor review, you may remember that J brought green food dye to dye all our liquids green for St. Patty’s Day.  It was very entertaining to see the confusion on our waiters faces when they returned to our table to see lots of green drinks and soups when they knew that’s not what we were served!  From the minute we booked the Equinox cruise, J knew he had to bring green food dye again!

Duck Terrine

Slow Braised Lamb Wrapped in Phyllo

Turkey Parmesan (tasted exactly like chicken parm- not sure why they used turkey?)

Dessert menu

Strawberry Angel Food Cake (it was too bland)

Tonight’s show was the second big production show, Destiny.  Once again, the aerialists and acrobats were fantastic!  The music selection was very similar to the show Life 2 nights ago, with lots of current pop and R&B songs.  Strangely enough, we didn’t know about half the songs- J actually thought Celebrity wrote original music for this show.  We enjoyed the show, but thought it was weird that it was so similar to the show 2 nights ago.  Usually each of the shows have different themes, but this show was very similar to Life, so if you do/don’t like one, you’ll probably feel the same way about the other.

The dancers were hooked up to bungee cords and ran vertically up the screens- a very cool effect!

After the show, we returned to the martini bar, where Yopi served me a candied apple martini on his wrist!

After another full and exciting sea day, we went back to the cabin to rest up for our next port of call!

Up Next: Puerto Limon, Costa Rica

Tuesday, March 15 ~ Sea Day

Last night, we had to set our clocks back one hour to align with the local time in Mexico.  The good news was that we got an extra hour to sleep in on our first sea day… the bad news was that we woke up at 7am when our bodies thought it was an hour later. At least this view made waking up early a bit easier…

The MDR doesn’t start serving breakfast until 8am on sea days, so we went to the Oceanview Buffet instead.  I knew I wanted one of those yummy Belgian waffles, and the sticky bun was really good too.  My favorite treat was the smoked salmon-  I really liked that they served smoked salmon every day at the buffet, as I am used to only seeing it from room service or the MDR on Carnival cruises.

J loves his morning cup of coffee, so we went up to Cafe al Bacio so he could get something a little nicer than what is served at the buffet.  This became a frequent morning stop for us on both port days and sea days, and it was rarely crowded.  

I don’t care for coffee (hence the reason I brought those cans of energy drinks in my carry-on bag yesterday!), but I did treat myself to the pastries or cakes in the display case.  These are better quality than what is offered at the buffet, and they are complimentary even if you don’t order a drink.

Bistro on 5 is located right across the hall, so we walked over to look at the menu.  It looked yummy, but we never made it here to eat.  Guess I’ll add that to my to-do list for my next Celebrity cruise!

We continued our tour of deck 5 up to the photo gallery to see our boarding photo from yesterday.  It was still so early that they weren’t open yet, but they had a machine where you can insert your sea pass card and it will pull up all of your photos.  It uses facial recognition software so it automatically finds all the photos taken of you, and you can view them, order prints, or even make a photobook on the machine!  This was way more convenient than searching through multiple walls of thousands of other photos to find ours (although I did like that they organized the printed photos by the deck of your cabin so it made it slightly easier to find ours once the photos were put on display later in the day).    

The next stop on our tour of deck 5 brought us outside to check out the view.  Looks like the Constellation was sailing along with us towards Cozumel.

The Cruise Critic meet and greet was scheduled for 10:15am today at the Sky Lounge.  Luckily a few people mentioned it at the informal gathering yesterday as we never got an invitation sent to our cabin.  We mentioned that to someone at guest services this morning, and she insisted that it must have been in our cabin but we didn’t see it.  Not only did we know for sure that we did not get our invitation, we also never got yesterday’s daily schedule or our Captain’s Club coupons. Well by the time we got back to our cabin a few minutes later, all our embarkation day documents magically appeared on our bed.  We were fairly sure that Rhonda forgot to give us the papers yesterday and just placed them on our bed when she made up the cabin this morning.

Well over 100 people attended the Cruise Critic meet and greet.  The cruise director John briefly introduced himself, and then handed the floor over to the hotel director Jamie for a Q&A.  He answered lots of questions about the upcoming Edge class ships, TV stations available on board, and a few other topics.  Unfortunately, we had to duck out a few minutes early as we had a scheduling conflict today.  We felt badly about not staying until the end to chat more with our roll call members, but the Galley tour started at 10:45am and we did not want to be late.

I really appreciated that Celebrity offered this free Galley tour as it was a rare glimpse at the behind-the-scenes action.  We arrived at the MDR promptly at 10:45am and it was PACKED!  I wonder what time people arrived to be seated up front??  The hostess gave us each a mimosa and a sticker for group number 18, and escorted us to a table at the back of the room.  

A few minutes later, the Executive Chef Josh Becker came out to introduce himself and all the other head chefs from around the ship (one for the buffet, one for the specialty restaurants, one for the pastries, etc).

They called 2 groups at a time to start their tours of the galley, while Josh answered our questions about food services onboard.  At first, I was annoyed about having to wait a long time for our galley tour to start, but I actually found this Q&A session to be extremely interesting and a valuable use of our time.  

Our group was called in for the tour at around 11:15am, and our guide was another chef named Sam.  The tour was very brief, maybe 10-15 minutes max, but it was interesting to see the lay out and flow of the galley, and to watch as they prepared for today’s lunch and dinners.

We finished our tour by 11:30 and went up to deck 4 to check out the specialty restaurants on display.  Sam told us that if we booked a specialty restaurant for dinner tonight, we should mention his name for a 20% discount.  We knew we wanted to go to the Tuscan Grill for my birthday dinner next Monday, and luckily they were willing to honor that 20% discount for a future date. We requested a 7pm reservation, but they said they only had 6:30pm available so we agreed to that and finalized our booking.  

All this talk about food was making us hungry, so we went back up to deck 14 for the day’s second round at the buffet.  I loved the antipasto salad with fresh artichokes, mushrooms, and sundried tomatoes. Only in the buffet on a cruise ship is it acceptable to pair that with macaroni salad and battered fish! haha Probably not the most logical combination of foods, but it hit the spot!

After lunch, we went outside to the pool area to check out the action (how did we manage to spend nearly all of our first 5 hours today indoors??). The pool was quite crowded, and nearly all the loungers were occupied. We noticed the Slush bar was open so we each asked for a virgin version of a drink to stay within our classic beverage package.

I loved that the Slush drinks were served in these plastic cups so we could take them in the pool or walk with them around the ship.

Insider tip:  While it would have been above the price maximum price allowance of our package to order the Slush drinks with alcohol, there was nothing to stop us from ordering a virgin drink, then walking around the corner and ordering a shot of rum at the pool bar, and dumping that in our slushie!

With such beautiful clear skies, we wanted to spend some time outdoors, but didn’t want to bother with the crowds near the pool.  We wandered upstairs to deck 15 and found that the lawn was nearly deserted! Having a live grass lawn on a cruise ship was so unique, and it was so beautiful to see the bright green grass contrast against the cobalt blue ocean and light turquoise skies.  We felt like we were having a picnic in a park, while drifting out to sea.  

While we did want to be outdoors, we did not want to burn in the bright Caribbean sun, so we sat under the shade of the overhead canvas.  We spent a few hours laying out on a towel and enjoying some more drinks from the Sunset Bar.

At 3pm, we shifted over to the seating for the Hot Glass Show. This is another unique feature of the Equinox.  They have a contract with the Corning Museum of Glass where they have 3 gaffers on board who perform 2-hour shows and make 3-4 pieces each show.  It seems kind of random as an activity on a cruise ship, but I really enjoyed watching the process of making each project.  We only stayed for an hour because it was getting hot sitting so close to the ovens, but in that time they made one vase and one cup.  Unfortunately, we never made it back to observe any other shows during the cruise, but I wish we would have because it must be a different experience each time. They even had shows at night and I imagine the glass glowing brightly against the dark night sky would make for an unforgettable evening.

At 4pm, we left the show so we could spend about an hour on our balcony before getting ready for dinner.  Tonight was the first “Elegant Chic” night, and we treated it like a “formal” night on any other cruise.  I noticed many men wearing tuxedos and women in long formal dresses, but there were also many men in suits or just slacks, and women in cocktail dresses and sundresses.  Maybe it will just take a while for people to adjust to the revised dress codes, but at least for this sailing, it seemed as if people still get very dressed up.

We arrived at the Silhouette Dining Room at 7pm, and Gorica was able to seat us at a table next to a window again, but this time with a different wait staff.  We really liked our waiters this night- they took our orders and served our food at a good pace, and they were chatty and had a great personality.  We actually requested to sit in Arsapha and Fredys’s section for the remainder of the cruise, and Gorica was able to accommodate us.

Chicken Liver Parfait

Salmon Tartare

Seared Duck

Celebrity Signature Beef Tournedo

Dessert Menu

Phyllo Dough Tulip

Warm Apple Crumble a la Mode

The Equinox is such a beautiful ship- there were interesting wall hangings and decorations everywhere we went to make a nice background for a photo.

We posed for the ship’s formal photos at a few different backgrounds but we were ultimately unimpressed and did not purchase any of the photos.  I guess the other guests on the ship were more talented than the professional photographers on board!

Looked like there was some fun dancing in the Grand Foyer as we made our way forward to the theater.

Tonight’s show was Life, the first of 3 large production numbers featuring the singers, dancers, and aerialists.  The singers and dancers were good, but the truly phenomenal talent came from the aerialists.  I was extremely impressed every time they were on the stage, or should I say hovering above the stage!  All of the songs in this show were contemporary songs from the last 5 years or so (Just Give A Reason by Pink, I Lived by One Republic, Story Of My Life by One Direction, and Heartbeat Song by Kelly Clarkson, to name a few).  I personally really enjoyed the music selection, but that is because I like that style of music.  It seemed like Celebrity was gearing this show towards a younger, trendier demographic as compared to the traditional cruise line production shows, but that was fine by me! Another evidence of this was that they announced before the show that they encourage us to take non-flash photography and video of the shows to share on social media.  I guess they wanted to use us for free advertising of their fancy new production shows haha

The show ended at around 9:45pm, just in time for karaoke!  J loves karaoke and always wants to participate when we are on cruises.  Unfortunately, we felt this was a bit of a miss from Celebrity.  They host it at the Quasar night club, but the set up is terrible for karaoke.  The words are projected onto the far wall of the room, and the singer stands on the dance floor, but most of the people watching are on the other side of the room. The singer is forced to either have their back to the audience, or to stand sideways and keep looking left to see the lyrics and then right to perform for those in the room.  It was just extremely awkward, and I think that was part of the reason the karaoke was poorly attended.  

J sang one song, then we left to get one last drink at the Gastrobar before going to sleep around 10:30pm to rest up for Cozumel.