Onboard Fun — MSC Sinfonia

While we’ve had great stops, we’ve also had fun in the evenings once back on board and on sea days.  Above is a pic of our wait staff at dinner. Denis and Maite, both from Peru, have been fantastic. Our dinner time is 9:30pm, which is quite late, but we’ve adjusted. 

Today was a sea day, sailing from Istanbul towards Corfu, Greece, our last stop tomorrow before landing back in Bari, Italy in two days. 

The weather today was beautiful as we sailed across the Aegean Sea. It was sunny and cool, not freezing, but not warm enough to sit up there for long. We spent a few minutes up on deck to enjoy the view. 

Almost every night we’ve gone to the show before dinner. The entertainment troupe is pretty good. They sing and dance, often performing classic American music hits.  We saw a magician one night. The other night the show ended with a little audience participation — YMCA! — Marylou and Kristi were really into it, that’s why the pic is so blurry. 😆

Marylou and Jim tried a little country line dancing today. 

Our dinners on board have been darn good. We’ve enjoyed trying some things and also enjoying some standard fair. Marylou had a great T-bone steak one night and she really loved the lobster. Kristi loved the Williams salad, which had mixed greens with cherry tomatoes, and candied walnuts with a citrus vinaigrette. A couple of Jim’s favorites so far have been the duck á l’orange and the prime rib last night.  

Cliff’s favorite so far has been the lobster bisque appetizer. 

We’ve had some nice views of the ports from the ship:

Piraeus (Athens)

Izmir, Turkey 

Istanbul

[pic coming]

Corfu, Greece 

We also played some miniature golf today:

While the majority of the passengers are Italian on this cruise, there are passengers from many countries. We’ve met just a few Americans, we met a few Australians, and one family from South Africa in the elevator. We’ve also met passengers from Chile and Mexico. There are a good number of passengers from Spain, Germany, and a few from Russia.

Being so international and multilingual makes for some interesting announcements and activity times. The staff are very multilingual, it is so impressive. Most of the entertainment staff speak at least three languages, some more. Everybody speaks some English. Some people might find this a little bit much; we think it’s fun to try to practice some of our language skills.

We’ve met crew from Peru, Honduras Mexico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, South Africa, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and Albania.

Most announcements ship-wide and at the shows are made in at least five languages and today when the captain came on at noon to make announcements about our course and weather, he made the same announcement in at least four languages. 

Jim, Marylou, and Cliff went to karaoke almost very night after dinner. Some great singers … some not-so-great. 🤣 It was fun!

Of course we took a nap everyday. In between ship’s activities we often played cards.