The Celebrity Equinox
September 3 - 14, 2018
The Equinox was built in 2009, and she is planned to go into drydock again in May 2019 for upgrading and minor repairs. She belongs to the Solstice Class with a passenger capacity of 2850 and a crew of around 1250. Equipped with 13 full decks and 1426 cabins, she is a nicely sized ship; big enough so that you don’t feel confined and small enough for intimacy. Even with 2850 passengers on board, there is enough space everywhere to sit down and to relax. In the public areas there is a wide choice of seating, including hammocks, sofas, where you can stretch out, and even just one pair of chairs in a separate room with a nice view. And compared to the And you will not be bothered by waiters asking whether you want of their overpriced drinks. If you want a drink, just sidle up to one of the many bars around. .
right: A “swinging” chair in one of the bars, where purple was the dominant color.
And even in peak periods you can always find a table to sit down in the Oceanview Cafe on floor 14, which is the buffet, open most of the time for food and snacks.
Celebrity passengers are generally well-off couples and groups, with an average age in the mid-50s. The longer the sailing, the more mature the crowd, but weeklong voyages during the summer draw younger families. On the cruise we were in, the September 3-14, 2018 sailing to the Southern Caribbean from Miami, there were some 1200 passengers from the UK. giving the ship a strong European character. In the evenings everybody dresses up a bit to create a genteel and more refined atmosphere.
We had a 273 sq feet balcony cabin on the 9th floor, which was very nice, even though storage place was rather limited. Our cabin more to the front, which was actually, to me, very much to our liking. We were fairly close to the front elevator, and the gym was right above us on the 12th floor. I could get from my room to the gym in 1-2 minutes. And right below us, on the 4th and 5th floor, were the entrances to the theatre.
The “drawback” is that we had to walk the whole length of the ship to get breakfast in the Oceanview Café on the 14th floor, or dinner in the Silhouette Dining Room on the 4th floor. Dining venues in most cruise ships are in the aft of the ship. This is actually fine, because in a cruise one tends to eat too much anyway, so the long walk is quite useful to help digest the stuff you ate.
left: The multilevel Silhouette Dining Room.
Talking about food; the quality of the food was generally quite good; especially in the specialty restaurants. For a fee, these venues are open to all passengers. On a Norwegian cruise ship we were on recently, these were the only places where we could get decent food and service, because what you get in the regular venues is dicey at best.
right: The spacious Oceanview Cafe.
In addition to the specialty restaurants, Celebrity has a restaurant for the suite passengers only, where the food is excellent; they also have a restaurant only accessible to Aqua Class passengers only. These are the preferential denizens of the in-between class between suite and Balcony Cabin. We were in a balcony cabin and were invited to bid for an Aqua-Class cabin, which is the same size as a balcony cabin, but which has the special restaurant and access to locations in the ship where you can relax in privacy, or at least away from the smelly masses. I bid $155/person, but that was too little.
With all these specialty restaurants, where the best food is served and where the bests cooks are, the lower ranked cooks end up preparing the food for the buffet in the Oceanview Café and in the Silhouette Dining Hall. So the quality in these two venues is variable. On some days, the food is very good, on other days, the food may look good, but they are not. The roasted meats can be extremely tough, because they did not take the time to slow-cook these very good looking chunks of meat.
What was very impressive on this cruise was Captain Kate McCue, who took command of the ship in April 2018. She is very capable, visible, and approachable to all the passengers; we have been on some 30 cruises in large cruise ships (>1000 passengers), but this was the first time that the captain personally said goodbye and shook our hand, (as well as the some 2800 other passengers) as we disembarked at the end of the cruise. She has a great sense of humor and her daily messages always contained nautical nuggets, a riddle for us to solve, and her trademark word play “Confucius says”. The one I remember about her word play she “attributes to Confucius” was: ‘Do not try to run with cars; in the front you’ll become tired, you run in the back, you’ll be exhausted”.
Everything equal, we’ll probably still opt for the Celebrity Equinox for a future cruise if Captain Kate is still there.
Like most other cruise ships, the crew comes from many countries. There is a large contingent from fabulous Bali, Indonesia, where beautiful topless maidens (ooops, that was a few decades ago; not anymore now) would walk regally between the ornate Hindu temples and handsome young studs would dance the Kecak Monkey dance. Which reminds me what a comely Indonesian waitress asked me, in the presence of two of her male companions, whether I knew why the men in Bali are so handsome? “Well:, she said: “ that is because they send all the ugly ones as waiters in the cruise ships.”
left: And standing next to Norma is our sommelier, Karelia Jimenez, on her first job on a cruise ship.
It is quite common to see her running around with as many as nine bottles in her hands. Give her a couple more cruises and she’ll be carrying 12 bottles at one time. She is one of the hardest working members of the crew.
As in other cruise ships, there is the same ritual on the last evening of the cruise in all the cruise ships we have been. This is the “10 rating” game, where all the service personnel buttonhole you to entreat you to give their service, the food, the ship, etc, a 10 rating. Nothing less than that should go on the ratings in the e-mail all passenger receive the day after we disembark. For the waiters, their future promotion depends heavily on what rating they receive. Their promotion is strongly related in how well they can cajole you to rate them a 10.
