Sea Day

Our next stop -- Kotor Harbor in Montenegro – was over 700 miles away, which means 36 hours of sailing at 20 mph, which means that Monday was spent entirely at sea.

 

The ship’s staff have a quiet day when the ship is at dock, because most of the passengers go ashore and explore whatever town we are at. The buffet is quiet, the cafes are quiet, the pools are quiet – not empty, but quiet – until the passengers begin to swarm back onto the ship a few hours before sailaway.

 

But sea days are different, because all 3,000 passengers are on board the ship either looking to be entertained, or doing things that they can’t do on shore days, like laundry.

 

It was easy to spot the ship’s passengers on a sea day, since they were actually on the ship, and it wasn’t who we expected.  We were expecting the geriatric set – and perhaps half the boat was over 55 – but there were a LOT of families, including children and especially teenagers. This may have been an atypical set of demographics for the Crown Princess, an accident of our popular itinerary in the height of summer. But whatever the cause, the swimming pools and snack bars stayed busy.

 

With all the passengers stuck on board, the ship, in turn, amps up its enrichment and entertainment schedules on sea days, since they have a ready audience, perhaps even a captive audience.

 

An Enrichment Lecture

 

We started with a window breakfast in the Horizon Court, and then headed to the Princess Theater for an enrichment lecture by a travel expert who would explain to us the history of our next two ports – Kotor in Montenegro and Messina in Sicily – and what to do when we got there.

 

It was the worst enrichment lecture ever.

 

I fell asleep 5-10 times.  One time I started dreaming. I dreamed that there was a button or a toggle switch on my right, and I urgently needed to turn something off.  I lunged across Chiara to press the switch, only to suddenly find myself near the front row of a theater, with the lecture still ongoing.

 

You’d think that the reason there were only about 25 people in the theater was because everyone knew that the speaker was no good. And that’s a very good guess, but there is another possible explanation, which is that a recorded version of the identical lecture runs continuously on Channel 48 of the ship’s TV system.

 

Television Onboard the Crown Princess

We haven’t talked about the TV system.  There is a big flat screen TV in every stateroom. These are new. They were just installed at drydock a few months ago. Before that, the staterooms had ancient CRT monitors.

 

The new flat screen TVs have about 50 channels. One of the channels is CNN, and the lack of Internet on board was making me crazy, so I turned on CNN to see what was going on in the world, and they were talking about Trump’s SCOTUS nominee, and I realized instantly that a great advantage of the cruise was that I didn’t have to think about Trump for a week, so I turned the channel instantly and never went back.

 

Channel 35 shows a map with nautical information, like the ship’s location and the weather.  Channel 36 is a live bridge cam, which almost always just shows open water. Channel 37 plays the sound of relaxing waves, in case you have an interior cabin or don’t feel like opening your balcony door. But if you really, urgently need to go to sleep, you choose Channel 48 and watch a pre-recorded Powerpoint enrichment presentation with still photos of someone else’s vacation to where you are going tomorrow.

 

It’s really horrible.  “Beautiful Kotor,” he drones on. “The main church in the main square served two different congregations, one orthodox, and one catholic,” he says. "Here you see a statue of Saint Tryphon, the patron saint of Kotor. He holds the city in his hands, because he is Kotor’s protector.” Then some random classical music comes on – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in one instance -- as the show auto-pilots through a few more images, before the soothing British voice returns.

 

Boring Man urged us to get up early for the sail-in to Kotor, because the Bay of Kotor is beautiful, like a great fjord from the Nordic countries transplanted into the Mediterranean. Gianna took exception to that characterization, because it was so northern-europe-centric. Why aren’t the Nordic fjord’s just beautiful copies of what we see in Montenegro?

 

I took exception to his comments as well, but later and for a different reason.  He told us to get up early to see the sail-in, but he didn’t tell us that the sail-in would take almost two hours, so I woke up in a panic at dawn already in the Bay, thinking I’d missed it. Anyway, you can watch the Bay of Kotor sail-out in the evening and it looks just the same, only backwards.

 

More Enrichment Activities

 

So that was an enrichment bust, and then Chiara and Toni went to an enrichment event in which they teach you to make paper flowers. I got there too late to learn how, because they locked the glass doors to keep out late-comers, but I still got a photo of Chiara and Toni learning how to make paper flowers.  They said that the session was bogus.

 

The Fine Art Auction

 

In the afternoon we went to the Fine Art Auction – an Art Auction at Sea – to find out what that was all about. It was the most horrifying thing any of us has ever witnessed, and negatively colored the rest of the week.  The art auction was despicable. The whole thing is a giant social psychology experiment in persuasion.

 

Stage One occurs when the artworks are displayed for days on the wood paneled walls on Deck 5 just off the piazza, giving the general sense of a museum.

 

Stage Two is when the auctioneer, Boris, gives an enrichment talk hyping up the quality of the art and pretending to teach the audience something other than random lingo, like “chiaro-oscuro.” This includes videos shown before the auction that hype up house artists as employing extraordinary and innovative techniques, and coining nonsense terms like “abstract sensualism.”

 

Stage Three occurs immediately before the auction begins, when everyone is encouraged to select which of the hundreds of paintings are put up for auction – no obligation! – and to “reserve” specific paintings, which would entitle one to a lower price than the auction price under certain circumstances. Some people have been given preferential treatment and are allowed to view the pieces and “reserve” them in advance of others.

 

Stage Four is price anchoring – Boris tells us that we’ll be seeing pieces worth a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, even fifty thousand dollars, but there will be some less expensive pieces as well, starting at $400, $500, $600, to make hundreds of dollars seem like a small amount.

 

Stage Five is the elimination of objections: It turns out that spending money is risk-free at a Princess art auction, because you have 40 days to get your money back – simply return the painting – absolutely no risk. And you have four YEARS to change it for another painting, if you later see one you like better, or simply want to change. It sounds like a good deal, but if you listen to the fine print, you don’t actually get your money back – you pay a 15% restocking fee, shipping both ways, and what’s left is just a credit toward your next art purchase, so those dollars are gone, gone, gone.

 

More fine print: Princess encourages you to get an appraisal of your art before you buy it. They’ll sell you an appraisal, for convenience, but they aren’t responsible if you subsequently get a separate appraisal and the price is lower than Princess appraised it at.

 

We investigated this pretty thoroughly. One of the prints Princess was offering was a classic scene from Beauty and the Beast, a giclee Toni had seen in Disneyland, and then at the Disney Store, and had really liked. When she got a real job with a real salary, Toni even considered buying it, but the price was $500, which was unreasonable.

 

Since she knew the actual price, we expressed enough interest in the piece to convince the Princess Fine Art staff to give us a reservation on it, which entitled us to a low, low, rock-bottom price of just $7,020 – even if someone else bid more for it, we could still have the rock-bottom price,  of $7,020, if we bid on the piece at the auction.

 

Stage Six is the first stage of the auction, when Boris gets the audience used to holding up “bid cards” which display a number. The phrase, Everyone’s "hands on a bid card!” occurs repeatedly, and the warm-up is that the first cards up win “a free work of art.” Then a fake auction is conducted using fake $40,000 that has been imaginatively allocated to each participant. Once everyone’s muscle memory has been primed to participate in a frenzied way, the real auction begins.

 

Just kidding. It’s never a real auction. The thing they are selling is Limited Edition Prints, and although they don’t say what the limit is, there is not much scarcity. If five people or fifty people all bid on the same print, they appear able to sell one to everybody – if you are holding up your bid card, they’ll take down your number -- just meet afterwards in the art gallery to work out the details, where they probably upsell expensive frames and insurance.

 

Stage Seven is when the remainder of the tricks come out during the auction itself.

 

For example, after hyping up a particular piece, Boris asks the audience to hold up their bid cards to publicly commit to how much they think the piece is worth, what would be a “good price.” He descends through $1,300, then $1,200, $1,100, as more and more cards go up, then starts the bidding at $900, so everyone holding up their bid cards feels like an idiot or a liar if they don’t bid far less than what they have publicly said is a “good price.”

 

The same dynamic is at work, although not as strong, when a piece is auctioned because you selected it in the pre-auction, and you feel like you’re wasting everyone’s time if you don’t bid, since you are the reason it is up there, even though there was no obligation.

 

Boris requires the audience to applaud the auction winners, and solicitous staff congratulate the winners on their accomplishment.

 

Boris also claims that he is receiving bids from the room when in fact there is no one bidding – I watched, and he called out the bids and said thank you, but nobody was bidding and he never said the number of a bid card.

 

Then there are gimmick auctions, where they auction of pieces sight-unseen, which are placed facing away from the audience, with assurances that these pieces are going to be much more valuable in the future, because they are from up and coming artists, and these are insanely low prices (like $350).

 

The way I describe it, you would assume that nobody would ever fall for this, but these psychological techniques are the oldest in the book, and they absolutely work.  Our guess was that 80% of the room was not bidding on anything – they were just there out of curiosity, like us -- but the remaining 20% seemed to be bidding, and we witnessed several authentic-looking sales at over $1,000 each. 

 

We left in disgust, having seen far more than enough, so we don't know how it ended. But there was a post-auction sale in the evening, and a follow-up auction on Thursday, which we ignored.

 

The story of the Fine Art Auction has two morals. First, as a cruiser, you just need to ignore all the sales scams, which are not only art sales, but also endless jewelry raffles and watch sales, the casino, and wildly overpriced spa services featuring a $50 off coupon for services that have been marked up by more than $50. Just ignore them entirely, as if they weren’t there, and do whatever you want on the ship.  The scams don’t get in the way if you don’t let them. 

 

The second moral of the Fine Art Auction story is that Princess, and perhaps some other cruise lines, is addicted to some REALLY toxic revenue streams. Princess needs to be able to make money without scamming their customers in shameful ways. And if they did that, then they could use the art gallery space, and the ridiculously huge casino space, for something that delivered more value to more passengers.

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The company that conducts these auctions is called Park West, and Bloomberg did an expose on Park West a couple years ago documenting the practices I described above, and other magazine articles, like this one, have also been critical.

 

More Bad Enrichment

Later, Toni and Gianna went to an enrichment event in the Piazza to learn how to do “speed painting.” It wasn’t the kind where they teach you how to speed-paint, however. Instead, they put you in groups and make you speed-paint, and then present your mediocre work for the public to mock and jeer.  Total bust, but it did result in some funny dinner stories involving Toni’s attempt to draw sand dollars.

 

Dirty Laundry

There is a coin-operated laundry on each of the residential floors – decks 8-14 – near stateroom 600.  In each laundry room are two washing machines, two dryers, and two ironing-boards-with-irons.  The laundry rooms also offer a token machine which sells laundry tokens when you swipe your room card -- $1.50 for a wash, $1.50 for a dry, and $0.75 for a mini-box of laundry soap.

 

Chiara and I, anticipating that Sea Day might also be Laundry Day for a lot of cruisers, headed to the 14th floor laundry room the night before, as soon as we returned from the caldera islands of Santorini. The token machine was out of order, and all of the machines are out of laundry soap; the sign says to go to guest services on Deck 6 to buy laundry soap.

 

Instead, we headed down to Deck 12, where the token machine was working, and bought enough tokens for two laundry loads, and settled for a generic version of color-safe bleach instead of laundry soap, because we were too lazy to visit guest services, and we did two loads of laundry. Which was a good thing, because Sea Day really was laundry day for a lot of passengers.

 

Sabatini’s

Monday night was formal night, so we had planned to have dinner at Sabatini’s, the specialty Italian restaurant, which requires “smart casual” (long pants and collared shirt) all seven days, and never celebrates formal night.

 

Sabatini’s is located about as high as you can go on the stern of the ship – Deck 16.  Because Sabatini’s is on the stern, it experiences a disproportionate amount of engine vibration.  Because Sabatini’s is located high, it experiences a disproportionate amount of lateral sway.

 

The Mediterranean Sea was as calm and beautiful and blue as anyone ever described, without a single white cap. EXCEPT when we were steaming north to Kotor, when there were a LOT of white caps. And THAT is when we were in Sabatini’s.

 

Now white caps are an exceedingly minor nautical phenomenon. We are not talking about 10-20 foot swells, or hurricane winds. We are not talking about 5-10 foot swells with gusty winds. We are not even talking about 1-2 foot swells. JUST white caps. And despite the fact that the Crown Princess weighs over 100,000 tons, when you accelerate those tons to any speed at all, lateral resistance is discernible. So the trip north up the coast of Greece felt surprisingly similar to an airplane navigating through very minor turbulence. Not enough to rock the plane, no sudden drops, but just a persistent noticeable chop, with occasional creaks from the ship.

 

It didn’t bother me in the slightest; you’d be lucky to have an airplane journey as smooth as that. It bothered Aaron a fair amount. And when we climbed to the top of the 16th deck above the stern in Sabatini’s, magnifying both the motion and the vibration, you could not miss it.

 

So we vibrated our way through what purported to be and might have been an 8-course traditional Italian dinner. Eight courses if you count the drinks and the bread and the dessert and the coffee separately, even though they were present together, and then there was a soup, an appetizer, a main course, and its side dish, for a total of eight?

 

The restaurant was mostly empty, and even if the restaurant had been busier, those alien cruisers would have populated distant satellite tables, of which we would have been barely conscious. Instead, we remained within our private social bubble, bouncing up and down with the ship and laughing at our own jokes, while a couple of extraverted servers without much else to do refilled our drinks and swapped our plates.

 

I had the lobster tail with lobster pasta and lobster sauce; it was great.