A Night at the Movies!

The cyb@study being dismantled

The supports for the raked seating going in

The old cyb@study is no more and in its place a boutique cinema is being constructed. You can see in the photos that raked seating to afford the best sight lines is being built. A fabulous use of space that will see Arcadia’s passengers get the cinema that has been so sought after. It is planned that Café Vivo will service the refreshment needs of cinema-goers and I’m sure that it will be difficult to extract passengers from the very comfortable, ample leather seats at the end of each showing!

The supports are covered

Some idea of the different levels - the red carpet to follow!

Well yesterday it snowed. And, boy, did it snow! It was a truly enlightening experience to see the faces of some of the Indian and Filipino staff for whom this was their first experience of the wonderful white stuff. It was funny to see the smiles on their faces as they discovered the joy of using passers-by for snowball target practice (although I noticed that none of them were aiming any at me for some reason…..). Growing up in the United Kingdom I always took snow for granted but it obviously doesn’t snow in Mumbai or Manila and it was just one more of those ‘different’ experiences in refit for our hard-working crew.

'Don't aim at the boss!'

All the major works are progressing to plan and the ship is changing in appearance daily. It’s a strange feeling to be walking around the ship seeing things you didn’t know were there – bulkhead panels and deckhead panels stripped away for access to pipes and cables that are so important to the running of the ship. I start to think more about the cosmetic nature of this floating hotel and appreciate that for us in the Hotel Department it’s a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ but to the Deck and Technical Departments it’s completely different. It makes your own boiler at home being out of action seem quite trivial when you see what is involved in the works on board. We’ve done well for hot water – the inevitable shutdowns for maintenance being restricted to ‘office hours’ – but you certainly appreciate much more the ‘luxury’ of a shower at the end of the day when you know what’s involved in maintaining the services normally. We take so much for granted and I take my hat off to my Technical colleagues for the job that they do for us 24/7, all year round. There’s always so much going on that we don’t know about or appreciate – speaking of which, check out http://www.bestblogsatsea.com/. for the latest on news and views from elsewhere in the cruising community.

Time to go – a run round the Christmas Market in Bremerhaven is planned for this evening. I’m sure that the warm glow of gluehwein will be appreciated…

Bye for now

Ian

Current thought: Surely oak and threefold brass surrounded his heart who first trusted a frail vessel to the merciless ocean. Horace, from Odes, 23BC.