Arrividercci!

It's been over 3 weeks, so i'd say it's about time for another blog! Today we will embark on my adventure aboard the Costa Atlantica, cruising through the blue waters of the Caribbean.

My week aboard the cruise was simply amazing. Whether I was eating wonderful food or fighting off Krakens or just watching the waves go sailing by, I was in utter bliss. The ship itself is enormous. It was ten stories high and probably three times as long. It takes a couple of days just to learn your way around the ship. There are two main restaurants, one is a buffet that is open all day, and the other is a fine dining that is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The ship also comes complete with a casino, a theatre where you can go watch various shows every night after dinner, a disco room, a shopping center, 3 swimming pools, weight room, salon, numerous bars, party rooms... I mean you name it. It's like a mini city floating on the water. Incredible. What's amazing is that our ship was a smaller ship too, so you can only imagine what the bigger ships are like.
The food was fantastic! Every night we were treated to 7 course meals. That's right, 7 courses. Costa is an Italian cruise line, so we dined on fine Italian food. There were other kinds as well, but the main emphasis was Italian. We started out with various breads and oil. Then Ignatius our waiter would come by and we would give him our choices for our next courses. The appetizers were great, my favorite of the week being the snail :O It was served in this cheesy sauce and it was superb! Kind of tastes like a muscle or clam. Next came the soups. I usually opted out of the soups. Soups make me pee. I love soup, but these dinners were 2 hours long so yah... but they had a huge variety of soups from chilled fruity soups to soups with raw meat in them :/ Next course was salad. Again they offered a wide variety of salads, but I'm not really into fancy salads. I mean, how good can leaves be? I got the caesar salad every night, and it was the best caesar salad I've ever had! Moving on, the next course was the pasta course, YUM!! I had fettucini, spaghetti, ravioli, fagotoni, and it was all delicious. By this point I was usually starting to feel full haha, but there were still three courses to go! Next was the main entrees. Delicious fish, beefs, duckling (poor guy...) lamb, pheasant, raw veal and tons of other weird yet tasty foods. Next was the cheeses! I was the only one from my family who got the cheeses every night. I hadn't heard of 3/4ths of the cheeses they served. Some were pretty strong and smelled awful. I felt distinguished though, eating cheeses. It has that fancy European twang. And finally it was time for coffee and dessert! The coffee on board was strong and delicious all week. I'm not usually a huge dessert man, but they had some great desserts.

If you weren't eating, the rest of the day could be spent at your leisure. You could tan on the deck and read, swim in the pools, sleep, listen to Jamaican music, partake in different activities throughout the boat. I took an Italian lesson one day. Arrividerci! That means goodbye. I did get a pretty wicked tan, but it is already fading :( We stopped 3 times throughout the trip. The first stop was the island of St. Thomas, which is in the Virgin Isles. St. Thomas was in my opinion the prettiest place because it had forested mountains and gorgeous beaches. We got to lay out on Magan Beach which is one of the top 10 beaches in the world! The driving is strange their. They drive on the left side of the road, but the steering wheels are on the left side of the car too. I've never seen that before. St. Thomas had a rum factory that we got to tour, and at the end we got free samples! The mango rum was so good :) Our next stop was San Juan, Puerto Rico. San Juan was ok. We took a tour of the town and got to see an old fort and we had some good food there. Our final stop was Grand Turk, which is in the Caicos Islands. This was simply a beach bum island. The water here was so blue and the all we did was just swim and lay out.

The coolest thing in my opinion was the diversity of the people on board. I had never heard so many languages in one place. Although almost everyone could speak English as a second language, true english speakers where definitely the minority. All week I listened to spanish, italian, french, german, Indian, some asian language that I'm not sure about... It was awesome. It inspired me to learn French, since my heritage is French so I have started learning!
Over all it was an excellent week. I strongly recommend that sometime in your life, you should go on a cruise. It's an adventure everyone should experience at least once!