Our Baltic Cruise part 3: Tips for First-time Cruisers

This cruise on Norwegian Getaway was our first, and we didn't really know what to expect, despite my obsessive Googling in the weeks leading up to it. If you're about to book, or embark on, your first cruise, here's what we wish we'd known.

Tip 1 - think carefully about what you will and won't need in your overall package

We booked through an agent - the lovely Warwick van Reenen at Cruise.co.uk. This made things much easier as he was the expert and able to cut through some of the technical stuff and make sure we had all the right documents in one place (although in the end we didn't need any of them - everywhere just scanned our passports). He also knew what all the added extras are and built us a "package" to meet our needs. However, I maybe should have spent more time telling him about us. For example, he booked the Ultimate Beverage Package for us which meant all drinks, throughout the cruise, were free. (Well worth it when you know what the drinks prices are - I had some jealous looks from other guests when I just flashed my card and walked off with two diet Pepsis.) We don't drink alcohol though, so what we actually should have had was the soda package. Our package also included unlimited coffee and bottled water in our stateroom. We don't drink coffee either, and when we left we'd barely drunk half the bottled water left for us.

Similarly our package included three opportunities to dine at the speciality restaurants. While they were nice, they weren't so much better than the complimentary ones that we'd have missed out if we hadn't had that opportunity. And we had one hour's free wifi (for the entire cruise) which, despite my anxiety at being cut off from civilisation, we didn't use. We have free roaming on our mobiles, and were often close enough to land to get a data signal. I learned later that the wifi on board isn't very good.

Our package included flights and transfers, but the flights (with Norwegian) were from Gatwick. Our local airport also flies to Copenhagen and is only five miles away, so we could have saved a lot of travelling and parking costs if we'd booked our own flights. Also, the transfer (in a sleek black car with a besuited driver) was very luxurious, but a taxi would probably have been cheaper and would have left us free to detour via the Little Mermaid statue on our way to the ship. (Also for the return transfer NCL claimed that there were very few taxis in Copenhagen and that guests should buy an NCL airport transfer for the end of their cruise, but when we disembarked there were actually plenty of taxis.)

Finally our package included $75 each of onboard credit. With all our meals and drinks included I asked Warwick before we left what we'd spend our onboard credit on. "Anything you like", he replied. Well, nothing. I know many people bought tickets to shows or other entertainment, Norwegian's shore excursions, gambled it at the casino, spent it at the onboard Starbucks or shops, but we weren't interested in any of  the entertainment, we used the city sightseeing buses for shore excursions (much cheaper), we don't gamble, and didn't see any point in paying for Starbucks when the Garden Café was open 24/7 and served free cakes and sandwiches. By the end of the cruise we realised we had to use it or lose it, so I bought an overpriced dress from one of the shops, and we bought some cupcakes from the onboard bakery ($3 each and really not good) and a few souvenirs.

We got the gratuities included, which is good because I never understand when to tip, how much,  and when not to, but felt a bit mean leaving our lovely cabin steward Iwan with nothing more than the bottle of champagne he'd tried to leave us. (Having said that, it wasn't him cleaning our stateroom on the last morning, so I'm not sure he'd have got anything we left anyway.)

Tip 2 - always get a balcony room

To my surprise our very favourite thing to do on this cruise (even more than eating) was sitting or standing on the balcony watching the sea, the islands, the other ships, and occasionally the shore go by. It was so restful and therapeutic. We didn't have a big balcony (it only fitted two chairs and a small table) so on the next cruise we'd book a bigger one. The decks below had balconies big enough for sun loungers.

Tip 3 - take a lanyard

We had to always have our NCL cards with us. It was okay for hubby dearest who generally had pockets, but women's clothes don't often have pockets, so early on I spent $7.95 on a Norwegian Getaway lanyard. I have hundreds of old lanyards at home, so could have saved that money if I'd thought to bring one.

Tip 4 - take currency, and research what currency you'll need

Partly because I forgot to go to the Sainsbury's currency booth before we left we showed up in Denmark with no Danish Krona to tip our transfer driver (twice), and in Germany with no euros. Yes, there's currency exchange available on the ship but the rates they give you are terrible (€0.93 to the £ when Sainsbury's would have given us €1.10) so I spent the first hour in Warnemunde looking for a cashpoint (which gave us a rate of €1.04). We also totally failed to realise that the ship's currency was US$. Not that we needed any (see tip 1 above about onboard credit) but if you're reading this because you're going on an NCL cruise bear in mind you might also need dollars. We also didn't have Swedish Krona or roubles either, but luckily almost everywhere took cards.

Tip 5 - it'll cost more than you think

Everything onboard is extremely expensive and also your only option. There are also hidden extra costs such as a 20% gratuity on everything (including the cupcakes we bought from the bakery). If you've budgeted carefully for your cruise allow some wiggle room and don't spend up to your maximum because you may need more than you think.

Tip 6 - research where you're going

We really did this cruise for St. Petersburg, and it was amazing and well worth it. I also enjoyed Warnemunde, and Tallinn, but didn't really know what to look out for in Helsinki and didn't know whether Stockholm was worth making the effort for, given that we docked some distance away. I think if I'd spent more time reading up on the places we were going to I might have had a better idea of where to visit and appreciated it more.

Tip 7 - prepare for changes of plan

Our ship was supposed to dock at Stockholm but actually went to Nynasham. Reading reviews, it seems it's not uncommon for cruise ships to change itinerary mid-cruise, and in fact Getaway had had to cut short a cruise and go into dry dock only a couple of weeks before we boarded. Ports experience problems or get full, weather makes it necessary to change routes, and most of this is completely out of the cruise line's hands. Be aware that your holiday may not be exactly what was in the brochure. For us it didn't matter too much that we didn't get to Stockholm, but don't book an entire cruise based on one place you want to go to - it might not happen, and the cruise line is not obligated to compensate you.

We loved our first cruise, and are really hoping to do another one soon. But next time we might be more prepared.

For more tips, see this blog which I thought was very accurate.

Our Baltic Cruise Part 2: The Ship and the Food (AKA Vegetarian rant)

Norwegian Getaway is enormous. It would have to be – it holds almost 4,000 passengers, plus 1,600 crew. It has 21 restaurants and bars, 2 pools, a water park, a fitness suite, a spa, 4 hot tubs, a ropes course, a climbing wall, a bowling alley, theatre, casino, shops… you get the picture.

Our stateroom was room 10126 (which, appropriately for Star Trek fans, is located in the Ten Forward area) and it was lovely. A lot like a floating Premier Inn room, including a mini bar and coffee tray (which we had taken away so that we could have more desk space). The best bit was the balcony. It was small - just room for a couple of chairs - but we spent a lot of time on it just looking out at the sea.

Despite being a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship it was very American. Around two-thirds of the guests seemed to be American, and the onboard currency was dollars. Typical of America, everything costs extra. The restaurants where you have to pay (most of them are included, but not all) add a mandatory 20% tip to your bill, and many of the additional activities have a cost attached. (Everything free in America, for a small fee in America.) 

There was a lot of onboard entertainment, but that's really not our scene. Shows, dance classes, parties, family gameshows, art auctions... we didn't do any of it. In fact, we very carefully avoided public areas when these things were going on. The only thing I was remotely interested in was the behind the scenes tour, and that turned out to cost $79 per person (!)

There's a large casino in the middle of the ship. The reviews I checked out before we booked said that people are allowed to smoke in the casino and since it's open to above and below the smoke drifts and makes the whole ship stink. But maybe that rule had changed, or maybe we avoided it at the worst times, because I didn't notice any smoky smell. I also did my best to avoid the casino, though. I've never been comfortable around that sort of thing.

Where I am comfortable is in the pool, and the pool was wonderful. At least, the adults only one was - I didn't test the other pool. It wasn't that big (maybe 15 metres) but it was deep and warm! That quite surprised me, but it was only a degree or two cooler than the hot tubs. The water park was also pretty good, with five flumes at varying levels of speed and terror.

There's a pretty good gym (although the first treadmill I tried had a slipping belt) and a spa but, you guessed it, that costs extra, and $259 for a little over a week didn't seem like very good value to me.

The Food

The food also had a distinctly American slant, with pancakes, waffles, bacon and syrup always available at breakfast, as well as porridge (labelled oatmeal) and grits. At lunch and dinner desserts were all served with caramel sauce. Now, I like caramel sauce as much as the next person, but not on apple cobbler (crumble). Needless to say we had to open a tin of custard the minute we arrived home.

There are five complimentary restaurants on Norwegian Getaway:

The Garden is a buffet-style restaurant on deck 15 so with great sea views. The food is good, varied and plentiful and caters to everyone. There is always pizza, burgers, "Asian" (Chinese, Thai and Indian) and a carvery. We went here when we first got on board, and struggled to find a table. It gets very busy so it's best to go at quieter times. The downside with a buffet is that you don't get to talk much, as one of you is always off getting food while the other looks after the table.

I noticed early on that the vegetarian options were pretty limited, and also really badly labelled. The food labels were on coloured card, with brown for "not vegetarian" and green for "vegetarian", however they often got the colours wrong and I learned not to trust them. They also really didn't bother catering for vegetarians except as an afterthought. For example, there were always three soups available, but about half the time none of them were vegetarian.

Thank goodness for Indian food. There was a large Indian contingent on board, and since half of India is vegetarian, I was always able to get a vegetable curry and dahl. Including at breakfast time. It seems that in India they eat curry for every meal. (Yes, I did. Roti with creamed coconut and mango chutney one morning, if you must know.)

The Tropicana Room is a smart restaurant with silver-service-trained wait staff, and there were two vegetarian options among the starters and appetisers, but it isn't a big menu. There was also a live band playing as we ate.

Taste and Savor (sic)are pretty identical. A step down from The Tropicana Room, but still very elegant and usually with a vegetarian option, although I was very disappointed to note that on one occasion both the vegetarian starter and main options contained parmesan cheese. Parmesan is not vegetarian (it contains calf rennet) and I would really expect someone involved in catering on Norwegian Getaway to know that.

O'Sheehan's is the Irish Pub. Roderic told me that every city in the world has an Irish pub, and we did indeed see one everywhere we went, but O'Sheehan's is Getaway's. It did food 24/7, but is distinctive only in being the first restaurant I have been to anywhere that did not have a single vegetarian dish on the menu. I've been vegetarian for a little over a year and have never had a problem finding lovely things to eat in restaurants until this cruise.

There were also some speciality restaurants, where you had to pay extra to eat there. With these five free eateries to choose from, I didn't see the logic in going there, but the package we'd booked included the chance to eat at three of them for free, so we did. We chose Le Bistro (French, very nice), La Cucina (Italian, best vegetarian selection on the ship) and Cagney's Steakhouse.

So, Cagney's Steakhouse. I get that the clue is in the name, but again there was NOTHING vegetarian on the menu. My husband happens to love steak, and I didn't want him to miss out, which is why we decided to go there. (Another restaurant which didn't make the cut, La Churrascaria, also had nothing vegetarian on the menu.) I explained my plight to our "server" (like I said, American) but they had nothing to offer. No alternatives, not even a veggie burger. I ended up having onion rings, chips, mushrooms and corn. In other words, just the sides. Hubby dearest enjoyed his steak, but I think he felt guilty that we went to a lovely restaurant and there was nothing for me.

I wrote to Customer Services on my return about the lack of vegetarian options. I received a long reply which was somehow at the same time surprised (they'd never heard this complaint before), concerned (they will speak to the staff on the ship about appropriate labelling), and dismissive (I should have mentioned my particular dietary requirements during the booking process.) But I have also picked up a couple of brochures from British cruise companies since we got home, and noted that both make mention of their extensive vegetarian and vegan menus. I think my mistake was in choosing an American cruise line.

In the UK 8% of the population is vegetarian, and almost 2% is fully vegan. Every restaurant I have ever been to here includes a choice of three or four (and often many more) interesting and delicious vegetarian and vegan options, and these are often dishes which tempt carnivores too. On Getaway the vegetarian options, if they were present at all, were uninspired and generally heavily based on cheese. But it's an American ship and apparently only 3.2% of Americans are vegetarian and less than 1% are vegan. In America vegetarianism is still considered a "special dietary requirement" apparently, not a common and compassionate choice.

Our Baltic Cruise part 1: The Ports of call

That's our ship in the background
(the big one, not the pink flamingo)

On 7th June 2019 hubby dearest and I set off on our first cruise, a 9-day voyage round the Baltic which included two days in St. Petersburg. Hubby dearest lived there for two years (1992-1994) when he served as a missionary for our church, and loved it, and has been trying to persuade me to visit the city since we got married. Unfortunately he'd also told me some horror stories about Russia (he was there shortly after the end of communism) so I wasn't keen. Cruising there seemed a good option, and it was also his 50th birthday treat.

I'll do other posts about the ship, the food, tips for first-time cruisers, etc. but this one will focus on the ports we called at.

We flew into Copenhagen and took our transfer to the ship without any issues. Unfortunately the transfer arrangements made when we booked didn't allow any time for sightseeing in Copenhagen, and it looked like a lovely city. 

Warnemunde, Rostock, Germany

The official ship's tour from this port is Berlin, but it's quite a distance away and we'd decided beforehand not to bother (especially as the tour cost $500 each). If we want to see Berlin at  a later date we can fly there from our local airport in a little over an hour. Anyway, it turned out to be a good decision, because Warnemunde was lovely, and a great first port-of-call for first-time cruisers.

If you’re reading this because you’re about to do this cruise, my tip is to turn right out of the ship and head towards the station to get to Warnemunde town centre. You have to go under the railway line to get to the town, and we turned left and ending up going the long way round. (Ended the day with 20,000 steps recorded on our Fitbits, though.)

Warnemunde is a delightful town with some beautiful traditional German architecture, and a nice beach. The weather was perfect – warm and sunny but with a light breeze. Roderic went up the lighthouse tower (I’m scared of heights so I passed) and I enjoyed a few of the shops. 

Talinn, Estonia

There were five huge cruise ships in the harbour and it’s easy to see why Tallinn is a popular port. The old town behind its well-preserved medieval walls is within a km of the cruise terminal, and there’s a little souvenir market to pass through to get to it. As we soon discovered is true of every port (including Warnemunde), there were hop-on, hop-off city sightseeing tour buses waiting at the port and these are generally pretty good (with the exception of Helsinki) and much cheaper than the official ship's tours. We paid €25 each to do the hour-long tour on an open-top bus with an interesting commentary. We learned that even the combined colours of the independent Estonian flag had been banned at one point, and that Estonia had the “singing revolution” when people gathered for the traditional singing festival rose up to revolt. The country has a population of only 1.4 million, and only 1 million people speak Estonian – the rest speak Russian.

At the end of the tour Roderic opted to take another one, since two further tours were included in our ticket, and I walked to the old town which was very pretty, and did a bit of shopping.

St. Petersburg, Russia

In order to go to Russia you need a visa. These are quite expensive, but tourists on organised excursions don't need a visa, so we opted for that route. The ship's official tour was prohibitively expensive once again, but we had looked into this in advance and booked a two-day tour with SPB tours. We were late getting off the ship due to Norwegian's somewhat inefficient procedure. We were supposed to meet up with our tour guide at 8.30 but it was over an hour later that we were off the ship and all assembled. This meant we had missed our 10.05 tour time at the Hermitage, and the queues were now all the way around the building. (The Hermitage actually opens at 10.30 so we had special early access.) Our tour guide, Elena, got round this by joining with another SPB tours group near the front of the queue. In other words, we pushed in.

The Hermitage was incredibly busy, but it is also utterly stunning. It was the home of Catherine the Great, built to house her burgeoning art collection, so it's actually a collection of several (very large) buildings, since she built a new section every time she bought up a new collection. She was something of a hermit, or recluse, and wanted somewhere to shut herself away from the rest of the city, hence the name. She had 18,000 dresses, and by the time she died she had almost bankrupted Russia. 

We then visited the Church on the Spilled Blood. It was built on the site where, in March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was fatally wounded. He was much more popular than Catherine the Great, and so a great Russian Orthodox cathedral was erected on the site. The Russian Orthodox church doesn't allow crosses or paintings, which means the only type of decoration left is mosaic, so the whole interior is covered with mosaics.

Following lunch at an Italian restaurant, we went to Hare Island (St. Petersburg was originally 42 islands, and has over 300 bridges) and the Peter and Paul Fortress. This was originally intended to be the city, and strong walls were built, but by the time they were complete the city had already grown outside them, so instead the fort became a prison. It now houses the mint and another Russian Orthodox church where the Tsars and their families are buried. We saw the memorials to Tsar Nicholas II and his family - his wife, four daughters (including Anastasia on whom the Disney film is based) and his son. They were killed on the orders of Lenin in 1918 and their remains were found and identified 90 years later and brought to the church where their ancestors  were buried.

The second day in St. Petersburg started with a boat trip on the Neva river, and then a  visit to St. Petersburg's underground, the Metro. It's the deepest in the world (because St. Petersburg is built on a swamp) and is also very ornate. When it was built by the communists, they wanted to make each Metro station a "palace for the people" to rival the great palaces of the Tsars, so each Metro station has ornate columns and mosaics.

We then went to Peterhof, a palace built by Peter the Great to rival Versailles. We only did the exquisite gardens, but I now have no need at all to see Versailles. 

After lunch our final visit was to Catherine's palace in Pushkin, the summer residence of Catherine I where the famous Amber Room was located until it was stolen by the Nazis. Like many of the other places we'd been to, what we were seeing was the restoration of the original - half of the Amber Room had been recreated. Much of St. Petersburg was bombed during the war, and some restoration work is still going on, so some rooms were plain,  and others had already been plastered in gold leaf. Realising just how much of the city wasn't the original but a restoration was quite heartening in light of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire.

Helsinki, Finland

After St. Petersburg, anything was going to be something of a damp squib. We again took the city sightseeing bus tour, but it was quite expensive (€40) and was very dull. Fifteen minutes in we'd seen nothing more interesting that the biggest department store in Finland. We got off at the Rock Church (a church blasted out of a rock) but there wasn't very much to see there either so we got back on the bus to return to the ship. It seemed part of the problem was that the cruise terminal was actually halfway round the bus route. The official route started in the Market Square, and the interesting sites and commentary were from that point on. So if you're someone doing this cruise, bear in mind that the tour gets better. There's not much to see in the mile from the cruise terminal, but later there are  some really pretty art deco streets.

Nynasham, Sweden

Our final stop was supposed to be Stockholm, but the ship was diverted to the next port along, Nynasham. This can sometimes happen when ports are too busy, and the cruise line isn't legally obliged to compensate us for the missed stop. Because of the distance to Stockhold the city sightseeing buses were too expensive ($65 each) and we didn't have much time - the ship was leaving at 4.30, so we decided just to look round the town of Nynasham. We saw some pretty typical Swedish houses, but not much else, so headed back to our ship where the view from our balcony, of some of the islands off the coast, was beautiful.

It was the warmest day we'd had on the entire cruise, and everyone else had gone off to Stockholm, so we took advantage and spent the afternoon in the pool, hot tubs and waterpark, which we had to ourselves.

We concluded that the great thing about cruising it that you get  a "taster" of lots of places. Apart from two "at sea" days we woke up in a different place each morning, and had a day to explore.That's not long enough for many places (especially St. Petersburg) but it helps you get a feel for a place and figure where you need to return to. We're already planning to fly to Copenhagen for a long weekend, and take a train to Stockholm from there - it's only about £26 for the return journey.