Day 11 - Sea Day

We decided we would have breakfast in the dining room as this was a sea day.  We weren’t up particularly early but, nevertheless, the dining room was really quiet.  We felt like Lord and Lady Grantham with two waiters standing by us, watching us with their arms behind their backs, waiting to satisfy our every whim!  The minute we put our utensils down or drank a little from our cups, they were there, looking after us.

We gave the weekly pub lunch a miss this time and decided that the restaurant lunch menu wasn’t that exciting either so went up into the cafeteria which had its usual tempting variety of items.

The afternoon was spent starting to pack and reading up some of the things we had promised ourselves we would finally read on this cruise!

This was the second and last formal evening of this cruise.  Adherence to the dress code was, if anything, worse than on the first formal night and about as bad as the only formal night on our first cruise.  Hardly any of the men wore either a dinner suit or a lounge suit as described in the ship’s dress code.  Several were wearing shorts and t-shirts (and many of these were ‘fatties’ who really should have been totally covered up and/or in their cabins!)

I imagine it’s only a matter of time before football shirts/sports vests are worn on a formal evening.  Some men were at least wearing a jacket, but not many were sporting a tie.  Most would not have passed the test for a smart casual evening on Cunard and would probably have found themselves eating in the cafeteria that evening.  All in all, we were fairly seriously overdressed and I began to wonder why I had used up part of my precious luggage weight allowance to bring my dinner suit etc on these cruises!

One highlight of the evening was that the ‘big band’ – such as it is on here – was playing before dinner and we - along with a lot of others – enjoyed some ballroom dancing as part of the evening.

It was all rounded off by the ritual of the Mr and Mrs Game Show in the theatre.  Here they ask for pre-registration and told us they had 28 couples who had pre-registered – who in their right mind would do that, I wondered!

They chose one (Australian) couple who had been married for a couple of months, a couple from North Carolina who’d been married for around 24 years and an older couple who’d been married for over 50 years – also from North Carolina and who happened to be sitting next to us in the theatre when they were called to the stage!  It was the usual hilarious mix of answers to very much the usual questions and we enjoyed it a lot.  The disappointment here is that they don’t then relay it the next day over the cabin TV as they on other cruises.