One step on the SS Serenade - the ship that would take me 16 hours across the Baltic sea to Helsinki - and you can soon see why people take this cruise and never get off the boat, opting instead to use the day in the dock to recover from the onslaught of entertainment the night before. The ship literally is it's own city, in every way except for the paradoxical fact that a city requires a country in which it exists, whilst the Serenade spends its life perpetually drifting between a few different ones. And during that first step on board, you are greeted by an amazing string quartet jamming to ABBA, which would be followed by the rest of the evenings entertainment - a Hungarian acrobat on a giant mouse wheel in the ships central atrium, a Finnish rope acrobat performing stunts 50ft up in the air, and a Swedish pianist. Much more romantic than the last ship I was on to Estonia - the SS Romantika. Go figure.
It's 13 floors comes complete with shops, cafes, several resturaunts, an irish pub, a nightclub, spa and sauna nestled under palm fronds and a glass roof under the stars, a playstation lounge kitted out with 50 inch plasma tvs ps3's and psp's, and a theatre with an automatic-raising floor. And who can forget the karaoke bar where I had a song dedicated to me - and nothing more apt than the song from titanic (there is a story behind this by the way, so its not just the fact that Im a lifelong Celeine Dion fan). Then there's the 'sundeck' covered in, well, not sun.
The best part of all though, is waking up in Finland and stepping off the ship in search of gargoyle adorned buildings, a new culture, and the infamous rax pizza buffet..
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