Day 4 - Frozen Day
As I mentioned this was the second day of moving two hours forward, and we definitely did sleep in. Not super late - I think we were probably up around 9:30am or so, and we headed off to Cabanas. I will say that I would love if
DCL would consider leaving Cabanas open as a buffet for most of the day instead of closing it off between breakfast and lunch.
I skipped Anyone Can Cook because it was to be "Pickled Watermelon Salad" - of those three words the only thing I like is watermelon, so no thanks!
Day 4 was a fairly windy day and it was a little cloudy as well, so the kids decided to put off swimming till later. I guess that answers a question earlier, as to whether it was possible to swim every day. Well, some kids definitely did swim - well okay you can only see one kid in this picture plus the pool deck in general is fairly empty.
Not overly choppy, just a little chilly.
The boys decided they wanted to head off to Oceaneer's Club (which they always preferred to the Lab, for some reason) so DH and I went to the
Bridge Virtual Tour in Fathoms. This was a very cool event. I didn't take any pictures, but am super glad I went. It was led by Chief Officer Fabrizio (so my notes say) and he had a slideshow prepared to tell us a little about how the Magic operates, its maximum speed (for most of our sea days, we were at max speed - I want to say 21 knots), what happens on the bridge, what the various officers do, harbour pilots, etc. He talked about how one gets into working on a ship, I gather there aren't that many schools at which one can gain this sort of naval training, and in the US many of those schools are military based. He himself had wanted to be in this career since he was very young.
After the slides, he did a Q&A and that itself was also pretty interesting. Two nights prior it had been a touch rocky, and one woman said that she had fallen off her bed at night because it was so, so rocky. I was pretty surprised by this - it wasn't THAT rocky. Then again, we were deck 2 midship, maybe she was higher / more aft / more forward. Anyway, her question was, why would the ship sail into a storm? The CO's response: "We would NEVER sail into a storm!" Haha! I think the gist of his full answer was, "weather happens". Anyway - highly recommend doing this, especially since you can't go onto the actual bridge any more.
When the seminar was over, DH and I headed upstairs to get some food. Why not, right? This was one of my favourite places to have a little snack/light lunch - the
Build a Bowl station. It's upstairs on deck 9 and aft. Selections were different every day, but I often came here for some rice or noodles (as mentioned - I miss Asian food a lot). My favourites were the chilli beef ramen and the chicken biryani. You can also build salads, it isn't all noodles and rice.
We missed the cheese seminar, which was on my list, really too bad. Oh well. Instead, we went and lined up for
Olaf! I am not sure how often Olaf is on the cruises - I seem to think he was not on our Fantasy 7 night cruise but have seen reference to him turning up at the Frozen gatherings. I didn't sign us up for a Frozen gathering this time, as the kids decided they are absolutely NOT into meeting Anna and Elsa again. Boys, I tell ya. The lighting used for this background is really weird; even the Shutters pics didn't turn out much better than this, so anyway. Here's Olaf! Olaf must be played by a rather short CM, maybe my height or so (5'2").
Oh, that reminds me that another fun little event happened on this day, it was
Anna's Chocolate Chase, a scavenger hunt that you do around the ship looking for symbols from Frozen. Really cute. After you complete it and leave it in the stateroom, the next day your stateroom host brings you....drum roll....chocolate. Lol. But they are nice sized chocolate bars, bigger than the standard Ghirardelli square. I am pretty sure I didn't actually complete it, because one clue was at Preludes, but Preludes was closed until the evening show. Anyway, still got the chocolate.
so Frozen is one of those movies that I have both seen a million times and not seen at all. This is because we own this movie on DVD and when it first came out, the kids often requested it at night when we were RV'ing (just long weekends and such). But as I was always busy cleaning or doing dishes, I've actually never sat down and watched the whole movie. So I had no idea what the Oaken's Maypole thing is all about. I should look that up.
The atrium all decked out for Frozen night: