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Silver Shadow
Oct. 17th, 2009 09:50 amIn all the talking about the excursions into Mexico that I was doing last week, somehow I forgot to describe the ship that we were living on as we went down to Mexico and back. We were on the Silver Shadow, one of the ships run by Silversea Cruises, on a nine-day sail down the coast of Mexico and back paid for by Whitney's grandmother that we'll probably not be able to afford again until retirement. I took a heap of photos of it while wandering around on the last day we were there, with the plan to stitch them together into a Myst-style slideshow exploration, but after I got to the 150-photo mark I realized the complete impossibility of it. Listing them offhand, it included a pool, about five places to eat, several lounges of various degrees of pretentiousness, a fitness centre, spa, casino, golf cage, library, and probably a lot of other things that I'm forgetting.
Our room was fairly near the top of the ship on deck 8 of 10, right next to the door to the outdoor pool (complete with bar and grill in the corners) which was where we spent most of our time, and not just to stave off seasickness as I've described the physics of before. The other place that I spent a lot of time was in the observation room at the very top, which was a quiet library atmosphere with a view out towards the rolling sea (and I spent time there at first because I could sit roughly in the horizontal centre of the ship and experience less wobbling). In our own room we had a veranda to ourselves where we could watch the sun rise and the ship docking, and when we were away from it, it seemed that at least one of the staff always sneaked in to refill the mini-fridge with drinks or to rearrange the bedclothes - I don't know how they managed to always stay unseen, but it was slightly like having elves.
I think that we were the youngest couple on the entire ship - it's worth highlighting that the review that I linked to above considers the "youngish passengers" to be those in their mid-40s - but we weren't short of things to do. Most activities and meals are included in the cost of the cruise, and for those that aren't, you have $500 of starting shipboard account to yourself, which you'll never realistically run out of unless you buy any of the particularly customs-dodging stuff from theshops boutiques dotted around. As I mentioned I quickly got classified as one of the golfers, and was at the putting competition most evenings where I was consistently mediocre, apart from the second-last time when I got nothing and going out with a good run at forty-four. The points accumulated from activities like this over the course of the cruise could be redeemed at the end for prizes of various degrees of tattiness, and our collection netted us a small silver money clip that I think they just put their logo on after getting it from a Marks and Spencers Christmas cracker.
There are a number of choices of places to eat - three full restaurants, one sensibly called The Restaurant, and two next to each other further up the ship called La Terraza and Le Champagne (both requiring reservations and Le Champagne being exclusive enough to be the only non-free one). In addition to that there was the grill bar next to the pool, and also a 24-hour in-suite menu detailed in the leather-bound room booklet (and masterfully translated on the German pages simply as IN-SUITE MENÜ) where you could call the room service with your order and soon afterwards one of the waiters would appear with a tray that he then laid out on your coffee table. All of those options featured the choices you would expect of soup in a tower, various arrangements of seafood and several species of vaguely posh animals. Most meals were made up of at least four courses and it was unusual to leave any of the restaurants feeling completely able to walk unaided.
Towards the end I went to one Spanish lesson where everyone else was rather above my level - I had no idea about even the basic sentence structure, and whenever I attempt to speak in any foreign language that I don't know, my brain ends up defaulting back to German, which gives me possibly the most international dialect in the world. There's nothing like beginner language lessons to make you feel completely non-absurd talking complete gibberish to strangers - during the course of the lesson the most complete sentence I learned how to say was "My castle is yellow and in the centre of England", just in case the need ever arises.
And in an attempt to remove some of my permanent high level of stress, Whitney suggested I book an appointment at the ship's spa while she was out doing a tour of wineries with her mother. This took place in the afternoon of the last day we were on the ship, and while waiting for the time to come I made the mistake of thinking "I'll just have a couple more goes at Aletheia first". Fifteen minutes later, twitching all over, I arrived in the waiting room and had to fill out a questionnaire about my current stresses (on which I rated myself a 9 out of 10 and ran out of room for the recent medications). Throughout the procedure, she kept saying she was finding colossal knots in my back and upper arms, and had to compensate for my incredible ticklishness by using her lower arms instead of hands in some places, but there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon than lying blindfolded naked on a table and being oiled by a woman from Brazil - and all this without having to keep it from your wife, either.
Our room was fairly near the top of the ship on deck 8 of 10, right next to the door to the outdoor pool (complete with bar and grill in the corners) which was where we spent most of our time, and not just to stave off seasickness as I've described the physics of before. The other place that I spent a lot of time was in the observation room at the very top, which was a quiet library atmosphere with a view out towards the rolling sea (and I spent time there at first because I could sit roughly in the horizontal centre of the ship and experience less wobbling). In our own room we had a veranda to ourselves where we could watch the sun rise and the ship docking, and when we were away from it, it seemed that at least one of the staff always sneaked in to refill the mini-fridge with drinks or to rearrange the bedclothes - I don't know how they managed to always stay unseen, but it was slightly like having elves.
I think that we were the youngest couple on the entire ship - it's worth highlighting that the review that I linked to above considers the "youngish passengers" to be those in their mid-40s - but we weren't short of things to do. Most activities and meals are included in the cost of the cruise, and for those that aren't, you have $500 of starting shipboard account to yourself, which you'll never realistically run out of unless you buy any of the particularly customs-dodging stuff from the
There are a number of choices of places to eat - three full restaurants, one sensibly called The Restaurant, and two next to each other further up the ship called La Terraza and Le Champagne (both requiring reservations and Le Champagne being exclusive enough to be the only non-free one). In addition to that there was the grill bar next to the pool, and also a 24-hour in-suite menu detailed in the leather-bound room booklet (and masterfully translated on the German pages simply as IN-SUITE MENÜ) where you could call the room service with your order and soon afterwards one of the waiters would appear with a tray that he then laid out on your coffee table. All of those options featured the choices you would expect of soup in a tower, various arrangements of seafood and several species of vaguely posh animals. Most meals were made up of at least four courses and it was unusual to leave any of the restaurants feeling completely able to walk unaided.
Towards the end I went to one Spanish lesson where everyone else was rather above my level - I had no idea about even the basic sentence structure, and whenever I attempt to speak in any foreign language that I don't know, my brain ends up defaulting back to German, which gives me possibly the most international dialect in the world. There's nothing like beginner language lessons to make you feel completely non-absurd talking complete gibberish to strangers - during the course of the lesson the most complete sentence I learned how to say was "My castle is yellow and in the centre of England", just in case the need ever arises.
And in an attempt to remove some of my permanent high level of stress, Whitney suggested I book an appointment at the ship's spa while she was out doing a tour of wineries with her mother. This took place in the afternoon of the last day we were on the ship, and while waiting for the time to come I made the mistake of thinking "I'll just have a couple more goes at Aletheia first". Fifteen minutes later, twitching all over, I arrived in the waiting room and had to fill out a questionnaire about my current stresses (on which I rated myself a 9 out of 10 and ran out of room for the recent medications). Throughout the procedure, she kept saying she was finding colossal knots in my back and upper arms, and had to compensate for my incredible ticklishness by using her lower arms instead of hands in some places, but there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon than lying blindfolded naked on a table and being oiled by a woman from Brazil - and all this without having to keep it from your wife, either.
