We arrived in Souda Bay in Chania (pronounced HAN-ya) on the island of Crete around 7 am. We had some breakfast at Blu again then met the group downstairs on deck 2 at the Destination Gateway which is a thoughtfully designed area of the ship where we could have a seat, meet up with our group and then disembark for the day.
It didn’t take us long to get off the ship so we waited for a little bit for our tour guide to arrive and pick us up. We found Myrsini and our driver, Artemis at around 9 am and boarded our “limo VIP” van to go to the old Venetian port. It was simply beautiful and influenced by so many different cultures – the Venetians, Ottomans, Egyptians, Catholics, and Greek Orthodoxy. We bumped into Joyce and Perter while we were there and got a quick picture with them.
I didn’t realize that the Greek islands are so well known for their Bougainvillea – I mean I’ve seen the gorgeous photos of the beautiful flower canopies but never made the connection. They were really everywhere and in so many different colors.
Myrsini was a really good tour guide – she reminded me of our ABD Italy/Switzerland guide, Miki from Italy. We stopped off at a local coffee shop and tasted some Greek coffee and homemade pastries called Mizithra Kaltsumi drizzled with honey which was yummy.
We then re-boarded our van and headed to a monastery where we were given some raki to try – a pomace brandy (distilled from the leftovers after grapes are used to make wine) – which always tastes like kerosene to me. It’s called Grappa in Italy and a stronger version of Ouzo.
By this time it was already 1:30 and we were getting super hungry. I had forgotten that people in Europe tend to eat a very late breakfast, stop to have lunch mid-afternoon and then not eat dinner until well after 7 pm. So we finally made our way to a family taverna at around 2:30 and had an enormous amount of food with white wine. Greek salad, scallion and fennel flatbread, dolmas, tzatziki, fried pastries with cheese that looked like empanadas, beef meatballs, and Imam (eggplant). It was all so delicious. At the end of the meal, a cat that seemed to be channeling Linus sat quietly next to me and enjoyed a few food morsels I passed on to him. Dessert was a cake of some sort that was moist and delicious.
A word about booking reservations online on the Beyond and my experience with the Celebrity website and app. Admittedly, some of it was my fault for basing a lot of assumptions on previous cruises on Celebrity but I still feel that there were a lot of issues with the reservation system on the website. One thing I always do for any trip we take is to secure reservations at the places we want to eat. One thing I really hate is bumming around an unfamiliar location without having a solid plan on where we’re going to eat (or do, for that matter). I’m a consummate planner and organizer. So when I saw the opportunity to save some money and be able to make specialty dining reservations ahead of time, I went ahead and purchased a 12-night dining package for the 5 of us. After booking and paying for it, though, there was no opportunity to make any reservations. I emailed Celebrity and one of the concierge staff emailed me back and said that the dining package didn’t include reservations. Uh, what? We wouldn’t be able to make reservations until we were on board! This wasn’t going to work for us so I worked with Celebrity Concierge for MONTHS to get our package refunded. The concierge was able to make some reservations for us through multiple emails back and forth but the only reservation I could make on the Celebrity website was for Raw on 5. None of the other restaurants ever showed availability. I didn’t like this system at all.
So I wanted to book all of our specialty dining on the cruise – we had so many options (restaurants where you pay a nominal fee to eat – somewhere between $40-$70 per person and can order anything off the menu) and generally like to stay away from the main dining venues which are included with the price of the cruise. Usually, there’s a large enough menu that you can eat more than once in a specialty restaurant and have different things to try. I lumped in the suite restaurants (Luminae and Blu) with the other main dining venues and that was a mistake. We didn’t ever get to eat at Blu for dinner but Wade, Tim, and Lisa did and said it wasn’t their favorite. Luminae, however, was really good each time we ate there – it was our mainstay for breakfast even though it was a hike from our suite. The schedule I had come up with through the Celebrity Concierge before we got on board really didn’t work very well. We ended up changing most of them.
I did make one other dining reservation that was listed on the website - it was for the Chef’s Table at Daniel Boulud’s Le Voyage but the date/time it said was May 15 (boarding day) at 12:30 pm. A Chef’s Table lunch? Weird, but ok. I figured to make a reservation at 12:30 pm on time, we would be able to board earlier which was fine with me. I was totally wrong. Not only did we not get to board any earlier but I was told by the Celebrity concierge that the boarding day time of 12:30 pm was just a “placeholder” and that we would find out, once we got on board, what day and time we would have the Chef’s Table. This was just stupid, IMO. Once we got on board, we found out that the Chef’s Table was scheduled for our 2nd night which we had already booked a reservation at a different restaurant.
We ended up working with the Retreat concierge and changed up almost all of our reservations. What a huge waste of time. Celebrity really should make the online reservation system more useable.
We met up at the martini bar for cocktails and then headed up to Le Voyage. The maitre ‘d at Le Voyage had popped in to confirm with us the last 2 nights while we were eating dinner. The original Chef’s Table was for 6 but since we only had 5, they did add on another couple to dine with us. We met Nina and Charlie who were delightful to have dinner with.
We were initially given a kitchen tour where we saw that each restaurant on the Beyond has its own kitchen. We were then seated in a private room in the restaurant and told that the rest of the restaurant was just at partial capacity so that they could concentrate on the Chef’s Table. We had a set menu and opted for the wine tasting. The wait staff were really great and we enjoyed having the head Chef from Spain come and chat with us. At the end of the meal, each couple was presented with a copy of Chef Daniel Boulud’s massive book filled with recipes.
Next post: Day6 - Friday, 5/19/23 - Santorini
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