Two Days in Sydney

While we have found travelling to Sydney the "wrong way round", going west to east, tends to lessen jet lag for us, it does not go away. We were comfortably settled in our room at The Four Seasons by 11:30 PM, but didn't actually turn out the lights until 12:30. In spite of our best efforts, we were both wide awake at 5:30 AM, and after staring at the ceiling hoping to go back to sleep, gave it up and got up at 6:00!

Several years ago, on our first New Zealand/Australia cruise on Crystal, one of the lecturers did a whole section on the science of sleep and jet lag. His main suggestion was to re-set your watch to your destination time as soon as the plane leaves the ground, and try and live on the plane according to that time. We have found this to be helpful in previous trips, so based on that we found ourselves in a "dilemma" on the flight from Dubai. We both got a good "night's" sleep and woke up hungry. Logic said time for breakfast, but the watch said 5:00 PM, or time for dinner. What meal to eat? We compromised, with Larry having dinner and Monica breakfast. Regardless, by 7:30 Thursday morning, we were both hungry and ready for breakfast. When we were here in January 2017, the lobby restaurant was closed for renovations, and while it was now open (and looks very nice), we were not keen on a $42.00/person buffet!!!

Our favourite breakfast spot is Pancakes On The Rocks, located near the Park Hyatt hotel in The Rocks area, but everything we needed to do was the other way, so we compromised with one of the restaurants fronting on the ferry terminals in Circular Quay, about five minutes from the hotel. Monica had The Canadian Breakfast (such a stereotype) of eggs, back bacon and pancakes with maple syrup, while Larry had The Big Breakfast, which had all of that plus a sausage and hashbrowns. And yes we ate the whole thing, while watching the good citizens of Sydney scurry by to work. The ferry system is to Sydney what the subway system is to Toronto, an integral part of the transit system, so sitting having breakfast at the Quay is akin to sitting in a restaurant at King and Bay at rush hour, except no one is wearing parkas or boots!

This trip being so long, and needing to bring so much "stuff" along, we decided to buy a bunch of the  bulky sundries, like sun screen, shampoo and cough/cold meds, here in Sydney. The cough meds because it seems every World Cruise involves respiratory issues, commonly called the Crystal Crud on Cruise Critic, and we know from a friend currently onboard that this year is no exception, so better to be prepared. And we know from our 2017 visit that the Aussies have some really effective cold meds. Maybe they work so well because our Canadian systems don't know what they are! What we don't use over the next six weeks will be packed into our traveling medical kit!

The plan was to do all of our shopping in the morning, then spend the rest of the day at the pool, or wherever. The hotel is located on George Street, the main downtown shopping and business street. Sort of a combination of Yonge Street and Bay Street. They are putting an LRT on George Street, so what it looks like is an obstacle course, complete with cars turning at random intersections trying to escape, which we had to navigate, with necessary stops on both sides, but we managed. We did, however have to make an extra unplanned stop at Adidas sporting goods when in the course of talking as we walked, we discovered that Larry's gym clothes never made the suitcase. Went from the washer, to the clothes line, back into Larry's gym bag instead of the suitcase! Since the last stop was a shop called Lorna Jane, where Monica had planned to buy new gym gear anyway, we will now be the best dressed people in the gym on the ship! (Yes, we WILL be there regularly!)

All you really need to know about the morning is that we both hit 10,000 steps before Noon!!! After a light lunch, yes, we were hungry again, we set off for a stroll around The Rocks area and spent a while sitting on a bench near The Harbour Bridge overlooking the harbour like a couple of old folks on holiday (Insert smart-assed comments here!) before heading back to the hotel to get ready for dinner.

A different perspecitve on the Harbour Bridge, from
Dawes Point

The iconic Sydney Opera House. It is hard to get
tired of looking at it!

When we did the Greek Islands/Adriatic cruise on Esprit back in September, we met a couple from Sydney and had mentioned that we would be here in February. About ten days before we left, we got an e-mail from John asking if we could get together with him and his wife Fran for dinner one of the two days we would be here. (John, if you are reading this, I believe the English call this "being mentioned in despatches" ) We met at the UTS Haberfield Rowing Club, about a half hour taxi ride from our hotel and had a lovely dinner. The two and half hours just flew by in good food and great conversation. John and Fran live in North Sydney, on the other side of The Bridge, and dropped us off on their way home. We were in bed and lights out by 9:30!

And for all that, we were STILL awake at 6:00 Friday morning! And hungry too. A pattern is developing we think! We had two highlights/plans for the day, the arrival of Serenity at the Overseas Passenger Terminal around 9:30, and lunch at our favourite restaurant, Doyle's at Watson's Bay, at 1:00 PM. Since we decided the best place to watch Serenity come in was the lawn of the Park Hyatt Hotel, and it is "conveniently" located 100 feet down the street from Pancakes On The Rocks.............. After a rather light breakfast,  and a long walk, we were in place for Serenity's arrival. And she came majestically down the harbour at about 9:45.

Pancakes at Pancakes On the Rocks. Yummy!!

Crystal Serenity's arrival

 After seeing that she was comfortably tied up at the OPT, we went for a walk up to the Opera House and back to work up an appetite for lunch.

Now this is also the first weekend of Chinese New Year, and since Sydney has the largest celebration outside of Asia, there are lots of Asian people visiting, and the city goes out of its way, as it does for every major event, to decorate. All around Circular Quay we found huge blow-up figures, all of which lit up at night. Here is a sampling:

Roosters on Circular Quay

A dragon at the Museam

A tiger relaxing on top of a ferry
wharf

Tai Chi bunnies in the park

Samba kitties on Opera Quay

And in the prime spot, Year of the Dog puppy at the
Opera House

You know you have been coming to a city a lot when you start to recognize little changes, like for instance, the fact that Sydney Ferries has taken delivery of at least three new ships since we were last here. How do we know? They had names we have never seen before, and one of the new high speed ferries took us to Watson's Bay for lunch. We came to Doyle's at Watson's Bay on our first trip to Sydney in 2004, and it has become a "must do" for us on every trip, along with visiting The Rocks, walking the Botanical Garden, and long walks around the city. We prefer to go for lunch because we can get there and back by ferry, while in the evening you can get there by ferry, you have to taxi back, and it is a long ride! The other reason is the portion sizes. After lunch at Doyle's we rarely have to bother with dinner. As usual, it was delicious!

Amazing hot and cold platter, complete
with Lobster Mornay, miso marinated scallops
(under the green seaweed), scampi,
fish, crab. Always the best!!

And yes, he had room for dessert. Monica
had a Coffee Affogato - espresso, and
Kahlua poured over a scoop of vanilla ice cream

The view from the beach back toward
the Sydney central business district

The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent picking up a few odds and ends, finally visiting the new lobby bar in the hotel, and later watching the Chinese New Year fireworks for a few minutes over the harbour. New Year's Eve it was not!

The view from our hotel room during the day, while
Serenity had her spot at the OPT

And at night, with the bridge and Opera House
glowing red for Chinese New Year

Tomorrow, we board Serenity!    

Adventure to Southeast Asia!

Hello again, everyone! Time for another new adventure. This will be our longest trip away at a whopping 7 weeks, with 39 days aboard Crystal Serenity from Sydney, Australia to Singapore. After Cairns the entire itinerary will be brand new to us, so we're really looking forward to this cruise.

It felt like we were packing for about a month, as we started early to make sure  we were not packing too little or too much! At the suggestion of some other world cruisers, we bought some compression bags and were able to mash down a lot of the bulkier stuff into about a quarter of its regular size! Best idea EVER (as some people we know would say)!!

We were so intent on getting the packing done that we didn't get an intro blog post up. So we'll include a couple of photos from the flight - Emirates A380 First Class. And boy, is it ever nice! The seats are really little pods with privacy doors that can be closed when you want to sleep. And speaking of sleep - the best sleep we've ever experienced on a plane! Even the turbulence (and we encountered some on what is normally a very smooth flight) didn't bother us too much.

Here are a couple of photos from the flight:

Our private pods. You can see the door just to Larry's right

The mini-bar of soft drinks and water on the right, large
widescreen TV for movies and info, lit mirror vanity, and snack basket.

Emirates First Class is known for its avaliable shower. This shows about
half of the bathroom. A really nice size, a big enough shower
stall with 5 minutes of water per shower, and even a
HEATED FLOOR!!

We arrived at our hotel in Sydney at about 11:00 p.m. local time, and are now ready to head out for breakfast and a little shopping for incidentals for the cruise. This evening we're having dinner with a couple we met on the Esprit cruise in September who live here. More later!!

From Rüdesheim to Basel

As you may see from the posting date, we have already been back from the cruise for two days, so we thought we'd get the last few days of the cruise blog posted before Monica gets into her Christmas baking. We had a very early start on disembarkation day, 3:00 a.m. for a 6:00 flight from Basel to Amsterdam, and were way too tired to try to write a post during our layover at Schipol Airport.

There was even a Crystal Society party evening, although according to Monia (no, that's not a spelling error, that's her name!) there were 55 'newbies' and 50 repeat cruisers on board, so everybody was invited. And it turned out that we had the highest number of Crystal cruises for our sailing. Monia gave us a lovely bouquet of flowers which graced our suite for the rest of the cruise.

That evening after the party, we attended a special dinner, and since we have been quite lax about posting food pictures for this cruise, we'll make up for it here:

Foie Gras

Lemon Sole

Surf & Turf - a slice of beef tenderloin and a lobster tail

Traditional German cookies and a chocolate strawberry

Our next stop was Speyer, where we elected to take the excursion to Heidelberg. It turned out to be a nice day, although a little cold, and once we got to Heidelberg we saw that they had had a dusting of snow overnight. Apparently, they'd had a wicked thunderstorm before the snow (?!!), which made the trees and the hills across the river from the castle that much more frosted and beautiful.

Down by the Neckar River

We had been to Heidelberg Castle before, and it was nice to see it in a different setting with the huge Christmas tree in the courtyard.

The Elizabeth Tower

The tree in the castle courtyard

Overlooking the river. The frost was still thick on the
trees in the hills beyond.

Christmas card shot??

Our free time in town was supposed to include a visit to another Käthe Wohlfahrt Christmas store, but it was so crowded that we decided to look around in the markets instead. Heidelberg has three Christmas markets in the old town, each with a little different theme. One had some rides for the children and a skating rink, another had more food than anything else, and a third had more of the craft stalls. Of course, there was always food and Glühwein available. Our lunch that day consisted of sausages on baguettes and Glühwein. Yummy!!

Lots of people were falling down. You can tell they don't
get much chance to skate.

We took Sunday off in Strasbourg, as the weather reports had been saying there would be snow changing to rain during the day, and nobody likes to walk around a market in the rain. Our fellow guests who had taken the shuttle into town said it was quite nice while the snow was falling (although the market wasn't open yet), but then it turned to sleet and rain and became slippery and windy. The phrase "We're soaked." was heard from many a person returning to the ship! Not the best day to be outdoors, so we caught up on the blog and had an 'in-port sea day'.

The next day, Monday, we landed in Breisach, or rather quite a ways outside of Breisach, near a very small town in France called Schönau. This part of the Upper Rhine is a real mixture of French and German as the river is the border between the two countries from just south of Karlsruhe until it reaches Basel. Then it becomes the border between Germany and Switzerland, ending in Lake Constance where its two mountain sources come together.

After a quick crossing of the river back into Germany, we headed toward Freiburg, the capital of the Black Forest area. Unfortunately, the weather from Strasbourg had followed us, and it was a mostly rainy day. The Freiburg market looked very nice, but it was no fun dodging umbrellas and avoiding wind gusts. Instead we found a Glühwein stand in a sheltered alleyway and warmed up, then we went back to the Münster, which looks like the cathedral in the town square. We finally found out what the difference is - a Dom, in German-speaking countries, is the home church of a bishop; if there's no bishop in that town or city, the main church can only be called a Münster.

As you can see by the pictures, a lot of people seemed to be taking refuge from the weather in the Münster, but it was worth taking some time over anyways.

Our entertainment host on board (aka piano player/singer), David, a fellow Canuck from Sault Ste. Marie, who lives in Parry Sound when on land, did a great job every evening in Palm Court. On Monday evening he hosted 'Name That Tune'...Monica really shouldn't have been allowed to participate since she's so good at this...Our team ended up in a tie with the other Canadians from the Toronto area, a group of older folks travelling together. The tie-breaker: somebody had to go up and sing a song with David! Well, that puts a lot of people off, but our team sent Monica out to do the job. And she got quite the applause at the end, even though the song was 'New York, New York', one that she really doesn't like that much. Our prize - a box of Mozartkugeln,  Austrian chocolates with marzipan centres and hazelnut cream.

Tuesday we arrived in Basel, after what the captain later called quite a night for the crew. The rain of the previous couple of days, which extended through most of the Rhine's Upper Valley, caused the water level in the river to rise unexpectedly by about a metre, or 3 feet. As a result, the crew had to scramble around on the Vista Deck to lower the outside bar (that would have been interesting to see) and the shade canopies and put down all the railings so the Bach would be able to get into one of the locks.  He apologized that evening for the crew waking anyone up as they worked over our heads at 4:00 in the morning. We actually didn't hear them, that's how comfy our bed was!!

Finally got the picture of  the ship! The top deck railings and
canopies fold down, and the pop-up bar lowers into
a space behind the Bistro when the ship needs a 'flat top'.

Rather than waiting for the shuttle bus and the 15 minute drive to the drop-off point, we took a 15 minute walk to the Christmas market near the Münster. We had a little more shopping to do, and we wanted to get it done before the market got busy and the weather got worse. The forecast was, again, for showers off and on during the day.

After our early shopping success, we checked out one of the food tents, where the proprietor was handing out free samples of potato pancakes. Great marketing tool - and the first time we'd seen it. After another stroll around the market and the Münster, we went back for our lunch, with the requisite Glühwein. Now we know why all the markets have it - nothing warms you up better on a blustery day! Coffee just wouldn't have done as well.

After lunch we headed on to the Barfüsserplatz and the other large market in town. This one had fewer food stalls, but a lot of crafts, Christmas decorations, soaps, jewelery, etc, etc., and they were jammed pretty close together. We thought all the decorations they put on the roofs were quite cute.

Market stalls

The singing moose (meese?), Moni (yup!) and Roni. They
can also sing in English with a German accent!

There's a whole village on top of those roofs!

The tree in front of the town hall.

We got back to the ship and got our packing done, as we had already planned an early night ahead of our 3:00 alarm in the morning. But, of course, the early night didn't quite materialize as planned. We were all having such a good time that even the captain joined in the entertainment. He brought out a guitar and played a couple of tunes for us. And even Monica had to go back to the microphone a couple of times.

The pastry chef was busy! These gingerbread houses and
people showed up toward the end of the cruise.

Captain Hans and his guitar

Two of our bartenders, Zoltan and Josip, holding their
namesake nutcrackers

David got guests up and dancing most nights.

David Williams, pride of Parry Sound! And you wonder
why he works on cruise ships??

Overall, a great trip! Of course one can only see Christmas Markets at Christmas time, but we'd love to do a warm weather cruise on one of these ships to take advantage of the outside deck and the suite window that lowers half way to become a variation on the French balcony.

We haven't shown much of the onboard food, but suffice it to say that this is the most regional specialty cuisine that we've seen of any of our previous river cruises. At the buffet lunch there was some local food included every day - even 4 kinds of sausages and sauerkraut one day - and dinners often had one local dish on the menu. And the servers working at the buffet never hesitated to give another suggestion to add to your plate!

The food, our suite, the public spaces and, of course, all of the staff, were just as we've come to expect from Crystal. Everyone we met on board, from the captain on down, had one goal in mind - to make this river cruise the best one we've ever taken, and they succeeded. Crystal certainly did its homework in designing these river ships, and we think the final product has turned out fantastic.

Oh, and our final count on Glühwein mugs: 5 different styles!

We're looking forward to seeing some of our fellow guests in 2019; there are two other couples who are, like us, booked on the full world cruise. We'll just have to see how we get through our next cruise - 39 days aboard Crystal Serenity from mid-February until the beginning of April. Until then, Happy Holidays to all our blog readers. Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2018!