Oasis of the Seas - Day 3 - Sea Day (Part 1)

Small edit in relation to the previous day's post about Chops: After digging out the receipt from my pile, I realized that our server's name was actually Angelica not Angelina. I've since gone back and fixed her name in my previous post. Super helpful that each server's name is listed at the top of your receipts. Comes in handy when you want to praise someone by name in your post cruise survey as I did for this lovely server.

I must take a moment here and say how much more I liked the style of the Cruise Compass on this sailing with the information on the outside pages and a removable insert just listing the schedule of activities as well as times for dining venues. It worked out great to mark up the schedule insert each night for the next day and then fold it in quarters down to a small rectangle. Now it not only fit in a pocket or my small phone size cross body purse to carry around with us but it folded down in such a way that you could see all morning activities at once, then turn it over to see afternoon activities, and lastly fold it the opposite direction and you could see all evening activities at once. I don't know if this design was a big ship thing or something that has changed over time. Our Grandeur sailing still had the tear off half sheet style. Kudos to whomever decided to change the design and I hope it is fleet wide soon if not already.

I set my alarm this morning for 8AM. What? An alarm on a sea day? Blasphemy! Alas, our Cruise Critic Meet & Mingle was scheduled for 10AM and we wanted time for showers and breakfast before then. A perk for the first time ever cruising together, we each could shower in our own bathrooms at the same time! Yes, it's the little things that excite me. I have a feeling though that there must be some sort of magic wand incantation I was missing because I could never figure out the knob turn combination that got me the right temperature water. That tub is very deep to get in and out of and at 5'7" I was only about an inch from bumping the top of my head on the ceiling once inside. I was just glad that the shower curtain covered the entire space preventing water from flooding the floor and didn't try to give me a GYN exam. Another perk of being the only person using the bathroom - all the towels to myself!

Once we were all squeaky clean and dressed, it was off to our first experience having breakfast in the Coastal Kitchen. Our only other RCL suite experience was on the Grandeur where they put suite diners in Giovanni's Table for breakfast. A quick check in and seating. I may or may not have a love affair with donuts so I was forcing myself to wait to have any until we were on the cruise. We were soon offered our pick from the pastry tray and I was so happy to see donuts even if the one filled donut was lemon curd flavored. Why?! I settled instead for a chocolate frosted donut but unfortunately the excitement faded when I found the donut to be so stale that the frosting actually came off as if it was one big puzzle piece that they put together with the donut shaped puzzle piece.

A plus for RCL over Celebrity though is that they know how to make fruit flavored pancakes the right way! Drove me batty, I know, short trip, on Celebrity when I'd order strawberry pancakes, the strawberry would come as a pile of goopy fruit compote on top of the pancake. This morning, I went with the "fruit flavored pancake of the day" of banana:

Sliced banana pieces in the pancake batter - much better RCL! My mother gets grossed out whenever I dip my sausage and any banana in the syrup leftover from pancakes or waffles. I don't usually mind the extra sweet taste combination but I think in this case, the bananas were also caramelized so it was like every few bites of fluffy delicious pancake got interrupted with feeling like I'd stuffed candy in my mouth. Next time I think I'd enjoy plain pancakes more.

Dad was glad to see that RCL also offered a bagel and lox on the menu. It also was available on the breakfast snack bar on the lounge side. He gets it all the time when we go for suite breakfast on Princess. One thing I was also impressed by was that RCL thought to automatically give you ketchup if you got eggs. I have to ask for it on Princess and then they bring it over in a silver gravy boat to scoop out a little onto your plate. That's about as helpful as getting only one of those little fast food ketchup packets.

Then it was down to Jazz on 4 for the Cruise Critic Meet & Mingle. The coordinator for events you may want to organize for your group was manning the door taking invitations and handing out raffle tickets. I told her about not getting an invite and she asked for my cabin number to look into why I didn't get anything. Don't know if anything ever came of her looking into it but she handed us each a raffle ticket anyway. There was a small setup of coffee, juice, and pastries for us to help ourselves. Cruise director Jeffrey came to the event and made some jokes. He picked on an older gentlemen who looked so bored he was falling asleep. The gentleman got so annoyed that he was dragged here by his wife only to be made fun of that he got up and walked out. Jeffrey tried to make amends by offering his wife one of the raffle prizes to give to him. After much debate, his wife agreed to take one of the restaurant vouchers.

The prizes weren't as great as our last Meet & Mingle raffle where we had bags and hats and the like to give out as well as vouchers for upcharge items on board. Now it was about 3 bottles of wine, a voucher for internet minutes, and a couple vouchers for different restaurants. Jeffrey even joked that the restaurant vouchers were only good for 1 person so you'd still have to pay for your cabin mate. At least the one time I won a free dinner from a Princess onboard raffle it was for your whole cabin! We had a pretty good size group in attendance but once the small lot of prizes was handed out, Jeffrey ended the event. 

The one invite we got right away in our suite was for the Captain's Cocktail Suite Party that was held today at 11:30AM. We went to it on our last RCL cruise, partly because it was held in the same spot right after the Meet & Mingle, and it was a great time to meet the various officers and spend time talking to them individually about RCL and cruising. The waiter delivered free drinks and snacks weren't too shabby either. This time however we decided that our love for trivia on cruises won out and skipped it to attend the Entertainment Trivia in the Schooner Bar. Had a lot of good trivia teams on this cruise and it was great competition. Did notice a few trivia sessions in a row always seemed to have the winning team win by announcing that they got just 1 more answer right then the otherwise highest scoring team. Coincidence? I once had an entertainment staff crew member introduce all his trivias as "My answers are always right, I don't care if your mama or the captain comes in here. Plus when the winners see what they get as prizes, they won't feel like winners anymore."

Now that we'd depleted the brain it was time again to refuel the body so off we went to Sorrento's to try the pizza. I had to go for the chicken and potato flavor everyone else seems to find weird. Barely tasted the potato so it wasn't bad at all. The line for the Freestyle machines was longer than the line for pizza. We later learned that the machines up at the Windjammer had broken down so everyone was coming down here for their Freestyle fix.

And since everyone asks about what they can get from the Freestyle machines (when they are working) - Here are the brand choices. Once you choose one it offers extra flavor choices like once you choose Diet Coke it gives you the options for Vanilla or Orange flavored Diet Coke:

I also liked that they had this button halfway down on the machine for those with disabilities. 

A rare sight! Is it an exotic bird? A flight that leaves on time? No, it's the sight of no one in line at the machines for a change! So rare that my finally bothering to use my cup just to say I did seemed to trigger the native species from their habitats and I soon had a line appear behind me.

To kill time we wandered around the shops onboard and watched people on the zip line and flowrider before settling on some ice cream at Cups and Scoops. Yes, everything here is included in Star Class as well. Over the week, we got both single and double scoop cups and cones. I had meant to try the cupcake sundae but never got the chance. The flavors of ice cream do change slightly each day so if there's something you can't decide between one day, get both because it may not be available the next day. Our receipts this day when Dad got 1 scoop of 2 different flavors of ice cream and I went with my traditional vanilla:

With our bellies full again, it was time to refuel our brains. We headed off to the first round of Progressive trivia. For those who haven't ever played Progressive trivia on a cruise before, you form a team and you play with the same team members over multiple sessions (usually one each sea day) and your daily scores get added together to find an eventual winner after the last session. This first session is when we met a new trivia loving friend also from Cruise Critic named Karen. The other members of our team changed slightly over the next sessions. Hello to all who played with us, I'm sorry I don't recall everyone else's names. When it came time to choose a name, I asked for input from my team members as I always end up being selected to write the answers. Karen's suggestion was "Oh just pick something" so our official team name of "The Pick Somethings" was born! No one would help pick a name for our last RCL Progressive trivia team either so I took the first initials of all our names and spelled out DADE. Everyone who heard our team name the rest of that sailing asked if we named ourselves after Miami-Dade County. After Progressive trivia, we stuck around for Movie Quotes trivia faring much better than I expected. I guess I'm better at memorable lines than I am at identifying movie stills. Five teams all got perfect scores so they each sent up a representative to participate in a tie breaker.

Walking back to our cabin we noticed a small group of cabins with this new feature on their doors:

It reminded me of a smoke detector and made me wonder even more when I noticed this "Repairs Completed" card left in the key slot:

After trying to use our included internet to find out what that item was and having still no clue, we stopped their steward as she was cleaning those cabins to ask. She explained that those particular cabin inhabitants are deaf and the devices are actually sensors that set off something visual in the cabin should someone come knocking on their door. Very cool to learn about another disability modification offered by RCL!

Back to our cabin where we had our first daily afternoon visit from the suite bar cart. They would leave these little cards in your door slot if you weren't there to answer their knock which ended up being about 90% of the time for us. They showed us the small list of drinks they could have made but none were really what we would choose normally. Dad asked if they made anything off the list and they offered to go get him whatever he wanted instead. We weren't in the mood for anything at all at the time so we declined the offer.

Our first afternoon snack delivery was in our cabin when we returned this afternoon - tortilla chips with guacamole and queso, brownies, cookies, a fruit plate, cheesecake squares with caramel on top, cheese and crackers, a pina colada, and a chocolate malt and vanilla shake. The guacamole, queso, cookies, fruit, cheese and crackers were what we requested pre-cruise for enjoying in the cabin so we dove right in. Dad was pleasantly surprised by the chocolate malt and I enjoyed the vanilla shake. Notice how that pina colada (the glass with the cherry floating on top) looks like a root beer float with all the dark soda having settled on the bottom? That's because all of the rum they put in weighed everything down and sunk to the bottom. I took one sip through the straw and if my insides were a car, they'd be stripped of all their varnish. Overly strong alcoholic drinks would turn out to be a theme of its own on this cruise.

After enjoying our snack and watching the Aqua Theater cast dress rehearsal, our first laundry bag was returned just in time to get dressed for our first formal night dinner.