My Week on Ecstasy
- Hannah
- Mar 20, 2016
- 8 min read
Nope, I don't use drugs... I play on cruises! For my Senior Spring Break, 3 of my closest friends and I went on a Carnival Cruise to the Bahamas. Happy college graduation to us! For 5 days, we cruised on the Carnival Ecstasy from Charleston, SC to Half Moon Cay and Nassau, Bahamas. The best way I can describe it is that this was the perfect mixture of being lazy while taking in the sun and playing with my friends to explore new parts of the world! We met new friends, saw new places, and learned some hacks for the next cruise that we'll go on! For this post, I'm going to talk mostly about the boat itself and our "FUN" Days at Sea! Stay tuned for our adventures on Half Moon Cay and Nassau!
First of all, I'd like to thank Carnival Cruise Lines for calling the boat for what it is: fun! They assumed their activities and amenities would be fun, so everything was named accordingly: FUN days at sea, The Fun Shops, FunHub, etc. No matter what we thought of the ship, we could always count on that one thing! I wonder if they've copyrighted the word yet... Eventually, we took to using more descriptive words like "amusing" or "exhilarating". You can call it as you like, though, because this cruise was really very "enjoyable"!
Food: the only thing new comers know about Cruises
The one thing that everyone associates with a cruise is the food, specifically the buffet. We really ate at the buffet mostly for breakfast, though. For lunch, however, I recommend that you locate wherever your cruise's "Chinese Wok" is! It's a lot better than the buffet style, semi-hot food. You pick your raw vegetables and noodles, and the chefs stir-fry it right in front of you! So really, I went to the buffet mostly for the soft- serve ice cream. Mid- afternoon and late at night are prime times to take advantage of the never ending ice cream!
The included sit- down dinners was definitely my favorite meal of the day, however! I recommend trying to eat earlier because the food is more fresh, and the lines are not nearly as long. Luckily, even when we did have to wait in line, we could go anywhere on the boat instead of staying around the restaurant. This gave us more time to explore and play games in the Library.
Pro tip: Each person can bring on one bottle of wine. If you have enough people, and everyone brings a bottle of wine, that's cheap alcohol for the night's dinner! However, there is a $15 uncorking fee if you bring your own wine. To get around that, bring your own corkscrew and open it in your cabin. You can ask for wine glasses from any bar and pour it before you go in! The restaurant thinks that you've already paid for the uncorking, so they don't charge you.
Dinner was also a fun experiment in Psychology. Have you heard about the dogs that Pavlov trained? Well, by the end of the trip, we were the dogs, and we were trained to wave our napkins in the air whenever a pop song (usually Gangnam Style) came on. Every couple of hours, the dinner servers would put on colorful parrot shawls and dance around the dining room while the guests waved their napkins enthusiastically in the air. To some extent it was exciting, but it also was a strange interruption to dinner.
Another tip is that you can order multiple appetizers if you would like. That way you can sample the different items on the menu. There is a set menu every night, but I always liked to order from the specialty menu because I knew that it wouldn't be offered the next day, and I wanted to try new things! However, we didn't branch out much for dessert... We most commonly got the chocolate lava cake. ALWAYS GET THE CHOCOLATE LAVA CAKE. You may think the other desserts will be better, but trust me- they aren't.
Night Time Entertainment: The Best Part of the Boat
Personally, my favorite part of the ship were the night shows. There was a lot of entertainment provided on this boat, and it was fun taking advantage of the night programs. (There were also programs during the day, but I tended to spend the days lying in the sun!) As a former show- chorister, I enjoyed the singers show every night. It was usually a short 30 minutes, but it was a fun way to start off the night. We then went to the comedy club a couple of times, but it was usually a last minute decision and we wouldn't stay very long. One show we actually really enjoyed was the "Love and Marriage Show"! None of us are married, but it was a game show to challenge couples to match up their answers to questions about each other. Not surprisingly, it was a lot harder than the couples imagined! The participants were really funny, too. They chose the most newly married couple, the longest married couple, and a couple in the middle. The oldest couple was definitely the cutest in their matching "Paw Paw" and "Maw Maw" jackets because they just picked on each other the whole time.
My absolute favorite part of the ship and the night shows, however, was the Piano Bar with Eden Parker. That man could play virtually any song that we requested! We would sing along and dance in our chairs. Of course, I requested my all time favorite sing-a-longs: "500 Miles (I'ma Be)" by the Proclaimers and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" by Whitney Houston. Eden also got silly with his songs by changing the words of 500 Miles (I'ma Be)" from the "La da Da da!" repetition part to "Shot of vodka!" or "I like Grey Goose!". His song range included anything from Justin Beiber, Venessa Carlton, and Usher to Billy Joel and Elton John. The most impressive part to me, was the amount of alcohol he drank in tips while doing all of this! One night, we counted that he took 8 shots and drank 2 mixed drinks in the span of about 3 hours... I'd be on the floor by then, but I think he played even better! I probably could have spent the entire cruise at this bar, and have been perfectly happy.
So, we loved all of the shows and bars that we went to, but sometimes the shows would come to us. In a cult-like fashion, they would come chanting "Rock the Promenade" and chase us from bar to bar. It was one part of the cruise director's events to introduce the ship to guests. He lead a bar crawl of sorts after one of the musical shows, and they sang this chant continuously around the ship. No matter how much we tried to escape the crowd, they always found us at the next bar chanting the same thing... I think I heard "Rock the Promenade" all night in my sleep that night.
Another nice thing about this ship was the opportunity to mingle with other people. They had 40+ mingles, 17 under mingle, 25-40 mingle, and LGBT mingle. However, they didn't have a 21-25 mingle (our age group!) While I wasn't looking to meet a man or anything like that (because relationships do count on international waters!), I just happened to notice that there was an age gap for the "spring breakers". I guess they just expected us to meet around the pool and in the Skyy Club. My friend, Rachael, and I went to this club one night. It was such an odd experience... It mostly consisted of groups of girls dancing together while guys danced around the edge of the floor hoping to jump in with one of the girls. It didn't really happen often, though, because we girls stick together!
The Heart of the Ship: The People
One of the things that made this cruise so unique and fun were the people on board. It was a smaller ship (beware of sea sickness) so we ended up seeing and talking to a lot of the same people. There was a nice mixture of older couples with families and college spring breakers. It was nice to hang out in the silence of the Serenity Deck with the older couples, but it was also fun to swap to the pool side of the deck and talk with people our age. I want to just recap a couple of the stories that we ran into:
Stripper Marine Guy: the guy every cruise has who thinks he's the man every girl needs
We never learned the name of this man, but he was about 25, an ex- stripper, and a Marine. Of course, he had a nicely toned and muscular body, but he knew that a little too much. He would dance around showing off his stripper moves and hoping to impress the girls with it. For us, it worked the opposite only in that his many efforts gave us more to make fun of. If his one goal was just to get us to talk about, he succeeded.
Matt: the boy with friends so terrible they almost ditched him in another country
This was my favorite story just because of the effort we ended up putting into his story. We first met Matt's 3 roommates while boarding the ship from Nassau, Bahamas. They were sunburned so badly to the point of lobster that they couldn't sit down. They were also incredibly drunk. They were laughing about their times at the bar, Señor Frog, and how their friend was trying to hook up with some cute girl. To help him out, they just left him there to keep flirting while they returned to the boat. This was 15 minutes before the boat departed... Matt didn't have his phone, but he did have his passport, so they weren't worried. They joked about how they didn't really like him and could use the extra bed in their room for more space. So basically, they were planning on just leaving him in the Bahamas to fly home. I'd be so mad at my friends for leaving me like that... (Thanks, y'all for taking care of me!) That night, we were wondering if Matt made it back on the boat, but we had no way of knowing. Until the next day when we saw Matt's friends. Curious, Amanda and I went down to ask if Matt had made it back on the boat. Perplexed, the guy to my right looked at me and said "I'm Matt?" We had a little laugh about his almost missing the boat, and then went on our merry way. I'm glad he made it back on!
"Exit Only"
There's not much to say about this guy, but he was certainly interesting. He was a spring breaker from Ohio State (classic...), and he had very interesting bathing suits... At one point, he and his friends put on speedos and just stood by the pool. They didn't get in or sit down- they just stood. One day, this guy was wearing a white (slightly see-through) bathing suit with the Italian flag on each side of the legs and the anatomically matching portion of the Statue of David on the front and back. The worst part, though, was that his see-through bathing suit revealed that he had "Exit Only" tattooed on his "Lower Back"/ "Upper butt" ...*shudder*
That drunk old guy: the inevitable
One day while we were sunbathing before dinner, we took to people watching around the pool. As it was bound to happen, one older Dad got way too drunk and wanted to relive his college days with the spring breakers. So, he stood by the pool, drinking a margarita, and dancing... by himself. My favorite part was that he danced for an hour and a half straight without moving his feet. He just stood, swayed, and bopped to the music. Sometimes, he would try to draw in a random passerby, but they never stayed long. We enjoyed laughing at him for the time he was dancing!
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