Cruise Day Twelve: The Assistant Cruise Director Really is Named Julie

We've been aboard this ship for almost two weeks, and it's amazing how little I know about it. Our first cruise, a year ago on the Carnival Legend, we knew everything about the ship in a couple days' time. I attribute the difference to a number of factors:

1. The fact that we were in port for nine of the first ten days, instead of starting, as we did last year, with two days at sea.

2. The fact that it's our second cruise, so everything is less unusual to us.

3. Differences between Carnival and Princess.

4. Differences between the Carnival Legend and the Star Princess.

The first two factors are pretty obvious, so I'll concentrate on the last two.

Carnival is the "Fun Ships", while Princess is the Love Boats. Carnival does a very good job of imparting a lot of enthusiasm to its crew, and to making it very hard not to participate in a lot of organized activities. Princess, from its advertising to it promotional emails to what happens aboard ship, is very much more laid back. We haven't actually seen Assistant Cruise Director Julie. We've only been to two shows (Marjorie went to a third). Marjorie went to a fruit carving demonstration, but in fact they really didn't show how to carve fruit. Otherwise, we've pretty much done the tours and eaten the meals and done our exercising and hung out by ourselves.

The Legend was simply a stunning vessel, designed with visual enjoyment in mind. Some of the public rooms were worthy of photographs all by themselves. I actually pulled out a photograph I took last year of the tile on the Legend and asked Marjorie to identify it. She picked a whole bunch of tour stops on this cruise, but wasn't surprised at all when I told her it was a very modern set of tiles from last year's ship. There is simply nothing like that on this ship, nothing worth photographing for its own sake, no venue you'd visit just to say you'd seen a show there.

And, I hate to say this but it's true, the staff on this ship sucks. There is one, exactly one, crew member we've gotten to know, a red-haired Balkan woman named Victorine who works in the buffet morning and noon, and then is the hostess for our dining room at night. Other than that, the staff is generally standoffish and anonymous. Our cabin steward, Cristian, is aloof and not very good. A lot of the staff communicate with one another in their own languages and their English is, on the whole, not good. We had dinner with a couple who are parttime travel agents, and they told us that a lot of the staff are leaving the vessel, their contracts up, at the end of this voyage, and that that is probably contributing to their attitude.

Assistant Cruise Director Julie is a New Zealander who is on her last cruise, and has all the enthusiasm of a college football team behind by 30 with two minutes to go. You can tell the younger members of her staff have no respect for her and are trying to get into the good graces of people who can actually help their future careers.

Nonetheless, and while we are enjoying the vacation very much, the experience on the cruise and from the cruise line leave a lot to be desired.