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Review of the Poesia on the Norwegian fjords!


the_princess
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So, I just got back from my first cruise ever!!! I know, exciting right?!? Well, it's not exactly my first cruise cause I have worked as a tour guide on a much smaller cruise ship on the Nile in Egypt, but this was quite different. After reading about MSC I got nervous, like really nervous cause everyone seem to hate this company. But we had already booked and decided to get the best of it. I travelled with my mom, she is a cruise newbie as well so none of us knew what to expect.

 

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Our ports of call:

16th of Aug.: Copenhagen, Denmark

17th of Aug.: Warnemunde, Germany

18th of Aug.: At sea

19th of Aug.: Bergen, Norway

20th of Aug.: Flåm, Norway

21st of Aug.: Geiranger/Hellesylt

22nd of Aug.: At sea

23rd of Aug.: Copenhagen

 

We booked this cruise because of the price and the fact that we wanted to sail on the Norwegian Fjords. Being from Copenhagen it was easy and cheap to take a cruise out of our home port. We booked with a travel agency who placed us in a group, but we didn't really interact with these people except for a couple of shore excursions.

 

This won't be a long and detailed review but I'll split it and post one day at the time together with some pictures.

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So here we go for day one!

Getting to the harbor was actually difficult even for us as locals. The ship embarked from Ocean Kay but the busses doesn't run there on Saturdays so we ended up in a private shuttle bus. The driver tried to scam us until he found out that we were Danish and knew the currency! (Shame on him!)

Check in went very smooth. We booked the all-inclusive drink package (Allegrissimo) online and had it on our cards from the beginning. No problems at all.

Once on the ship we had to find our way around. This actually took us days before we knew where things were. The ship was huge and as we never been on this kind of ship before, we got lost a lot!

First we went for lunch at the buffet. The food was great. Fresh, well prepared and with lots and lots of options. I'm a vegetarian and I had plenty of options. My only complain would be that I sometimes found it difficult to see if a dish contained meat. The signs wasn't always in place and sometimes it didn't say. But beside that the buffet was fantastic.

After lunch we went to our stateroom. We booked an inside stateroom which we regreted already before boarding but it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be. The staterooms are quite big and this cruise was very cold so we wouldn't have used a balcony anyway. But next time we’ll go for an outside or balcony stateroom.

 

Then it was time for the safety drill. It said that we had to bring the life west but most people had it on, which was quite funny. I don't think people realize how stupid they look with that thing on ;-)

 

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After a few cocktails and a show it was time for dinner... Ok, let's stay with the cocktails for a moment. Most cocktails were included in the drink package and they were amazing. I thought that maybe because they were "free" they wouldn't be as good as the ones you pay for, but they were really good. We never felt like we were getting the "free stuff" and we never felt like the waiters tried to get us to buy the drinks that weren't included. Not once! Zebra Bar quickly became our favorite bar.

 

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Before dinner my mom went to the show which was an opera inspired show. The theatre it self is so beautiful (well the whole ship is beautiful) and she said that the show was good but nothing outstanding.

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For dinner we had the second seating in Il Palladio. Both of our waiters were from Indonesia. They didn't speak much English but they were so sweet and funny. We got everything we asked for.

 

This is our waiters one the last night

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We were seated with other Danes. A couple from our group and to ladies from another group. We had a great table. We all got along really well and ended up sitting long after dinner every night. Our waiter had to ask us to leave a few times because the place was closing. We enjoyed the second seating cause this gave us time to enjoy the sail away and we weren't rush through dinner, but it also meant that our seating was at 9 which is a very late dinner for me.

After dinner it was time for another cocktail and then off to bed.

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Enjoy the cruise around Norway a stunning place, the Poesia is so far the best of the three MSC ships we have been on and looking forward to the Orchestra in November.

 

The Zebra Lounge was our favourite bar with views out to sea on both sides of the ship and very quiet during the afternoons on most days.

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Thank you so much everyone for talking the time to read my report. Day 2 will hopefully be up later today.

 

Thanks for your review and photos and I think that those lounge chairs went unused the whole cruise.

 

As soon as the sun came out people were sunbathing and playing in the pool. I don't know how they did it cause it was freezing cold but on a few of the days the sun deck was actually full.

 

Thanks for the review and the time :) The ship looks so nice! we'll be also doing the Fjords next year. The only difference with your itinerary is Stavanger instead of Warnemunde.

 

Looking forward to the rest of it!

 

Yeah that stop in Germany seemed a bit weird because we got on in Copenhagen, but I think the official embarkation was in Warnemunde. I would have loved to do Stavanger as well.

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Day two

 

Warnemunde. Today was our first port day. We were not that excited because we definitely didn’t do this cruise because of this port. We wanted to go to Norway and this was a big detour on our way to the fjords. We decided to go for at walk along the harbor but quickly went back to the ship after a quick look at a souvenir shop that sold nothing but things with strawberries on.

 

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After a quick lunch we went to the top deck and spotted the city from there. We decided to give Warnemunde another chance and went out and under the train station which brought us to the city itself. And what a lovely city. The old houses showed that sailors and fishermen had lived and worked here for generations. After a few hours we went back to the ship.

 

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Back at the ship we got ready for the show and dinner. The show today was a chess inspired show. It was really good. I wasn’t impressed by the dance team on the ship. They were good but nothing outstanding, but they had some really talented acrobats and a young female singer, Angela Semerano who was amazing. Unfortunately she often had to do duets with a guy who wasn’t very talented, let me put it like that.

 

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After the show we went for a drink before heading to dinner. I can’t remember what I had for dinner the first two days but from tomorrow, I’ll share my dinner with you.

After dinner we went to put some clothes on and went outside to the top deck. At midnight we were suppose to sail under the Storebæltsbroen (the great belt bridge) which connects Sealand and Fyn (two Danish islands) I have been on this bridge many times but I have never been under it so this was exciting. Well, we did our best to make it exciting by throwing our own little bridge party.

 

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I made this little video of the crossing under. It’s dark and difficult to see what’s going and the stupids comments (in Danish) in the background is me and my mom trying to be funny.

 

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After our very exciting bridge party we went inside for a late snack and coffee. And here I have to rant about the food cause the late night sandwiches were awful. Dry white bread with really bad tasting tuna salad, cheese or something, we never found out what was. This was our first and last time having late nights snacks. Luckily we didn’t need them because the food during the day was so good.

 

Day two was finished. Tomorrow is our first sea day. I will finish with the view of the day picture. As you can see from my big jacket it was a cold day!

 

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Day 3

 

This day was our first day at sea. I started the day in the gym together with everyone else at the ship. It felt like that anyway!

The weather was nice, the sun was shining and the sea was calm. We had a nice long breakfast and just went around the ship, looked at shops and relaxed a lot.

 

In the afternoon something happen to the weather, it got so windy that they had to close off all the outdoor areas. It got worse and lots of people looked as if they would rather be home in their bed then at sea. One of the waitresses at Zebra Bar tried so hard to hide that she didn’t feel well. I felt so sorry for her.

I found a window seat were I sat with my book most of the day and looked out at sea. It was so beautiful. Especially when the wind picked up.

 

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As you can see from the book I’m reading I’m very obsessed with sailing.

I don’t suffer from seasickness at all, I’m used to do day sailings and have been out in some bad weather, so I have to confess that I really enjoyed the rough sea. The waves makes the sea look even more beautiful and feeling how the ship moved through the storm and the rain was amazing. Yes, I know I’m strange! So when everyone else were talking about how awful this was, I found peace in looking out the windows. We found out after worth that this had been quite a big storm but I’m sure The Poesia had seen worse.

 

At night it was the first Galla evening. We all had fun dressing up for this. The show this evening was a casino inspired show, which was pretty good. We had a few games in the casino before we went to dinner. I decided to have risotto with spinach which was a good choice. This is were you can feel that you are on an Italian ship. The pasta, pizza and risotto was out of this world!

 

I’m sorry I haven’t got that many pictures to show you but sea days are not that interesting when it comes to pictures. But here is the view of the day. As you can see… Very windy. This was before they closed off the outdoor areas.

 

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Stay tuned for tomorrow were we are entering the Norwegian fjords…. This is were the pictures get interesting!!!

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Thank you very much for sharing a live report from the lovely MSC Poesia sailing to my homecountry. Very interesting. The fall is coming here in Norway so the weather is more unpredictible but I hope you get some nice weather and the seas in the fjords are calm anyway. Enjoy the magnificent MSC Poesia and I'm looking forward to more pictures.

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Day 4

 

So we are finally getting somewhere. I started the day at the gym with this view.

 

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Today we arrived at Bergen in Norway. To get into Bergen we had to take a shuttle bus provided by MSC. It is’t possible to walk because the harbor is closed of, but there were plenty of buses going in to the city and back, so we didn’t have to wait for a bus.

As I said in the beginning, we were part of a group tour and today was our first excursion with the group. It was a little walk around the old part of Bergen which took us to the St. Jørgen Hospital which used to be a monastery and a hospital up until 1946.

 

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Down at the harbor we decided to take a look at Bergen’s most famous shopping area. What I liked most about Bergen was all the different colors of the houses. Back in the old days, the color indicated the wealth of the people living there, but today I think it’s more decoration then anything else.

 

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