Disappointments

1. The food was good but not spectacular. Holland-America brags about their gourmet chef, so I was expecting Really Great Food. It wasn't. On the other hand, what we had was one room service meal plus a small mid-evening snack in the buffet restaurant, plus which they were dealing with a couple hundred people who were on the ship only overnight. So I won't enter a final judgment on this matter just yet. And I suppose it's really hypocritical to complain that the food is not irresistably good when I'm also worried about gaining back my lost weight.
2. The string quartet was mediocre at best. And they only played arrangements of Broadway tunes. I had had visions of relaxing every evening in the company of new friends to the strains of Bach and Beethoven. Not if this was any indication.
3. We really were not well-treated during the embarkation process. Not having access to food was partly our fault -- we should have had lunch before entering the cruise terminal -- but sitting us for a couple hours on plastic chairs in a warehouse room, and not giving us information about how long we'd be there was callous. "It usually takes an hour from now until you have to check in" would have freed us to seek out restrooms and vending machines, and would not have cost HAL anything.
4. If the man who made general announcements on the mini-cruise is a permanent part of the staff of ms
Amsterdam, I may return with a homicide indictment hanging over my head. I like Australian accents generally, but this man sounded like a parody of the jolly Aussie tossing another shrimp on the barbie. That, and I always hate being urged to enjoy myself. If someone feels the need to say, "Aren't we all having a wonderful  time?", in my experience it is only because we aren't.
5. And they made us get off the ship just because our mini-cruise was over. I liked being on the ship. I liked wandering around the ship. I liked sleeping on the ship. After less than a day, I was tuned in to being on the ship. Why should we have to leave just because we were in Seattle and our tickets said "Seattle"? If that's the way HAL treats its paying customers, I may have to reconsider future plans to sail with them. After I get back next April, that is. (And yes, you have permission to throw this paragraph in my face when I blog about how desperate I am to get off the damned boat after the fifth or sixth day at sea next February.)