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August 19, 2004
Our Misadventures on the Silja Cruise Line
Since Wednesday's post is about Tuesday's doings, today's post is about Wednesday's doings.
Today, we got onto the Silja Line cruise ship, heading for Stockholm. There are two ship lines that cruise from Helsinki to Stockholm. We stopped by both the Viking Line and Silja Line ticket offices to inquire about tickets, but only the Silja Line had cabins left. We were told by the Silja Line ticket sales person that the cabins available are 'luxury cabins'. So, we bought tickets for those cabins because that was all they had left. However, all of the cabins are booked for the Helsinki - Stockholm - Helsinki cruise, so we settled for Turku - Stockholm - Turku tickets. Turku was the former capital city of Finland. This meant that we had to buy train tickets to get from Helsinki to Turku Harbor, which is a two-hour train ride.
We boarded the ship when we got to Turku Harbor. Before boarding the ship, we had to wait in a huge waiting area, packed amongst other people. Eventually, I got very sick and tired of standing there with luggage, and smelling other people. Our 'luxury cabins' were pretty sparse. The bathroom was less than nine square feet, I swear. It was fun watching the ship leave the harbor from the top deck. After that, we went to the bar and had some drinks - I decided to try some scotches. While in the bar, we could hear the nearby lounge singer. At one point, he was singing 'YMCA' in Swedish. Then, we realized it was already two in the morning, and decided to go to sleep.
We were awakened at 6:30AM by the overhead PA speaker in our room. It was making a alarm-like noise. WTF?!?! Never mind, go back to sleep. At 7:00AM, a sharp knock on our door was followed by the door actually being opened by cruise line staff to let us know that really, we needed to wake up. I had read on a posterboard on the ship's restaurant deck that breakfast was being served from 6:30AM - 10AM, so I assumed that we'd be able to sleep later than 7:00AM. This was starting to piss me off. I can be a real grouch in the morning, when I'm rudely awakened. I decided to ignore the staff opening our door and closing it again. At 7:15AM, she opened our door again, made some noises that sounded to me like 'ah, boh, boh, boh' while slapping her hands together, and actually propped our door open instead of closing it again. I so wished I had a battle axe then. We raced to close the door again. Unfortunately, the door opens outward, so we couldn't just prop something against it, and there's no bolt or chain. OMFG, if I knew that it was going to be like this, I would never have chosen to get to Stockholm via cruise line. Instead, I would have booked plane flights via Finnair or some other smaller carrier from Helsinki to Stockholm. By 7:30AM, we were all off the boat, and waiting for a taxi to take us to our hotel in Stockholm, and we were all pretty cranky.
Posted by Kathy at August 19, 2004 11:32 PM