I have to confess, it’s nice getting back on the ship and being reminded of the high level of service the crews gives you. Waiters compete to clear your just-barely-empty plates so quickly you become jaded. I actually noticed when it took more than 30 seconds; In my cabin there are three kinds of electrical outlets – US (120v), European and “Mixed” (both 220v). However, none of my US plugs worked. I carry adapters, so there was no issue the first night. But I informed my butler before breakfast the next morning, and by the time I came back to my cabin it was fixed. Easy to get spoiled…
Welcome to Cruise Boy’s Norwegian Grammar Class: The “Å” in “Ålesund” is pronounced like a long “aa”, with a bit for an “r” sound at the end. Thus: “uhrl-sund” is the name of the Norway’s thirteenth-largest city (the Wiki page has a sound-link at the beginning).
While yesterday’ sea day was bright and clear, today it is not. We arrived in a gray-and-drizzly afternoon. The town looks kind of new, due to a fire in 1904 that wiped out 3 solid kilometers of the central town. Part of our walking tour dealt with the changes in architecture as they slowly rebuilt in an Art Nouveau style, also called “Jugendstil” in the German.
We spent 90-minutes at the Sunnmøre museum, which is an outdoor museum where they moved houses from the surrounding districts rebuilt. They ranged from medieval houses to 1950’s school houses. Again, if the weather were nice it would have been much more fun. There was an indoor section dealing with the ship-design and building culture, included a re-creation of viking-era ships found buried nearby.
There was a section dealing with the ships used to smuggle people to England during the WW2-Nazi occupation of Norway. We visit Narvik next, so I’ll deal more about that in my next post.
Funny internet story. I explained in my last post how the ship offers WiFi in a per-device basis. I have a phone, table and laptop with me, but I never plan on using more than one at a time, so the standard plan works for me fine. However, since our satellite-internet can bounce all over the world when down linked, Google did not trust my laptop when I checked my Gmail. So they wanted me to verify my identity using my phone. Which I could not have on the WiFi at the same time as my laptop. Several minutes of 3-stooges-hilarity ensued of me trying to get the timing right between the phone and laptop before I just shut off my laptop’s WiFi and tethered my phone to the laptop when I need to. So far, so good.
I had a similar issue once trying to deal with that we were on our way to the movies, and I forgot my phone at home, so tried to access my gmail with someone else’s phone. Google required that I authenticate access from a new device with my phone, thereby eliminating most of the cloud benefit!