Anchors Away!

We set sail on our first cruise last Sunday. We took a seven day cruise from Rio to Rio. We went to the north of Brazil and hit some nice beach towns on our way back to Rio. We cruised on Royal Caribbean and it was our hope to have a little break from Brazil while on the cruise. We figured we would meet lots of Americans, eat American food, and speak English. Well, we were wrong…







Our ship had 2,300 passengers and there were a grand total of 14 Americans-4 families including ourselves. My mom came with us so we made up 4 of the 14. Two of the families also lived in South America so we enjoyed talking about life in South America (I’ll admit, we mostly complained about it).



Overall, the food was much better than what we eat from day to day here, but there was definitely a Brazilian flare to it. We were able to get reacquainted with a few long lost foods that we miss so much-salad with salad dressing, cereal, food with spices and flavor, French toast, etc. There was ALWAYS food available; I can see how people can gain 20 pounds if they are not careful. We just happened to be seated at dinner with two of the other American families, which was great. Of course Grace was very excited about formal night. We ate enough to feel guilty so we actually hit the gym on our vacation. It was tricky running on a treadmill while sailing over the waves, but we made it work!







The staff spoke English, but we found ourselves speaking a lot of Portuguese with the remaining 2,286 Brazilians on the cruise. I feel like I actually improved my language skills while on board. With all the Brazilians on the cruise, we saw a lot more skin than we planned on seeing. What better proof of the Brazilians than the thong-bikini and mankini as seen below.



As I mentioned this was our first cruise and we weren’t exactly sure what to expect. Grace loved the pool (at times I thought we could have saved ourselves a lot of money by just going to the pool in our building). She, Dean, and my mom climbed the rock-wall. Dean and Grace made it to the top, Grace was so proud of herself! Every night after dinner there were shows-the only problem was that they were in Portuguese.







I always worried I would feel closed in and bored on a cruise but we definitely did not feel that way. Part of the reason we probably did not get bored was that out of seven days, we spent four of them in different ports. It was fun exploring new cities. We were definitely thankful that we knew enough Portuguese to navigate through the different places. More on that on my next post!