Muster, Leaving Port, and Teppanyaki
At 4pm the announcements began for the safety muster. We gathered up our life jackets and went down to our station. Unlike the previous cruises we've been on - this one let us muster IN THE RESTAURANT which was great! We were in Skyline, the big restaurant with skyscrapers and a New York feel to it. There were perhaps 20 people in our area, and we sat at a four-person table so we could make some new friends. Sure enough, in short order a couple from South Carolina sat down with us and we had a lovely chat while we waited for things to begin. It was a very short actual muster where they explained how the life jacket worked, and we were done!We headed back to our cabin to drop off the jackets, and spent some time unpacking our things. Even our biggest bag fit underneath the bed, so that worked out well. We had two large suitcases and two smaller ones, and all four managed to go beneath. There was no soap in the bathroom sink area, which I found a bit odd, but the shower gel worked fine for that. Then around 5:30 the sun began to set, which was in perfect view from our balcony. We took pictures of it going down, but with all the clouds it was a very grey sunset. That's fine, a Hawaii sunset of any type is great. Then we headed down to dinner.
We had a buy one, get one free coupon for the first night only, and it worked in all restaurants, so we chose to go with Teppanyaki tonight since that was excluded from specials for the rest of the week. Apparently not a lot of people figured out the dinner situation this early, because there were only six of us at our table and the rest of the tables were empty. We sat with a couple from Oregon and another from Philadelphia. They forgot to give us menus, but when the chef came over to start his spiel he got us a set. We both went with the steak and shrimp combo. I ordered cold sake. I only found out after dinner that they had a whole sake menu! I wish they'd told me, I would have loved to look through that.
The chef spoke broken English so it was hard to understand what he was saying, but he put on a nice show, spinning his knives and so on. We started with soybeans in the pod. Note - do NOT eat the pod with these! :) Then miso soup in a small cup, a nice seaweed salad, an appetizer of shrimp, a trio of veggies (squash), a mushroom and onion duo, and then the main dish. He made our fried rice last for us. There was one other table starting up just as we left, and they got the rice early on. For dessert there was vanilla ice cream, green tea ice cream or a fruit platter.
We have a mixed review on this one. I write up reviews of Japanese restaurants and have visited tons of them. I really like them :). So I thought the food and show was nice enough - flipping knives, a flaming onion volcano, de-tailing the shrimp, etc. But Bob points out that the normal upcharge for this is $20 *in addition* to what you've paid for dinner. So you're not just paying $20 a person - you'd already paid for dinner for this night and you're paying an *extra* $20 to eat here. So even if you assume you only paid $10 to eat in the main dining room as part of your cruise ticket, that's now $30 to be in here which is too much.
Actually though from my point of view this is a great first night meal (especially if you have that coupon) because then it's only $10 each and it's a "forced group" dinner so you get to meet other people. I always find that a great part of cruising, to talk with other people.
Intriguingly, the woman from Portland thought Norwegian was of the same tier as Royal Caribbean, Princess and Celebrity. I'd always thought of NCL as a "step down" from those, and will have to look into that. It came up in a discussion of bringing wine on board, and which lines charge for that and which do not.
We finished up and headed over to the golf shop to get Bob set up with his golf times. They have a little putting green in the shop which I played with. Intriguingly, there was a female clerk and the female 'golf person' who managed the shop. When we arrived at first, the 'golf person' was not there and the clerk was talking a visitor into playing at a certain golf course. He was just signing up for it when the golf person showed up - and promptly began berating that course as not worth it and told him to sign up for another one. So he signed up for that one instead. The poor guy was trying to trust in the NCL staff and was getting mixed messages.
Bob went with the golf person to unpack his clubs - they are stored right by the Hollywood entrance - and got that all set. He found out that even though there are two golf nets on board, BOTH are currently unusable. He was told that maybe one might be working by Monday, but the golf person didn't have a lot of faith in that. I checked my watch - it was almost 8pm and time to head back to our room to watch us sail away from shore.
It was great fun to watch the lights of Honolulu and Waikiki drift by the cabin. They were right in front of us, as if we were sailing directly away from shore - perhaps a bit of an angle so that people from the port (left) side of the ship could see them as well. We watched the lights fade away. I pulled out my noise meter. It was 45db in the room - nice and quiet. On the balcony, right by the door it was 57db. Out at the back rail, looking over the wake, it ws 64db. So certainly you could hear the waves and such, but it wasn't overly noisy. Our internet connection lasted until 9pm, when it faded away. Interestingly, the bathroom switch has a light on it so you can find it in the dark - but the main light switch does not!
No towel animal tonight, but you never get one on the first night of a cruise :) So no worries.
For late night eaters, it's important to note that the Aloha buffet area closes at 9, so plan around that. The Cadillac Diner is open until 3am though, so there is somewhere for late night snackers to go to.
We called to track down our bags. We were told that the airline had mistakenly delivered them to the Pride of Aloha! So they were "behind us" by about 10 minutes, following us to the Big Island. We were told we'd get our bag tomorrow during the day sometime. Sounds good to us! The port would go nicely with the chocolate covered strawberries which had appeared in our room :) We put those in the fridge to wait until tomorrow.
We then climbed into bed, so we could wake up bright and early for tomorrow's full day of Volcano stuff!
Photos from Teppanyaki
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