We metro'ed to Jaume, in the barri gotic to the church I mentioned the past few days.  The service we headed to was (according to information I found online) suppose to be in English, but it definitely was NOT.  I believe it was Catalonia, not Spanish.  We did our best and got by, despite being confused by the different actions there.  There were chunks of nuns in front of us and off to the left of us - not everyone stood/kneeled/sat at the same time, which made it difficult to follow along w/ the mass.

The church is quite amazing inside, so very old and intricate.  I wish we could have hung out there and took photos inside, especially of the large pipe organ on the one wall.  As promised, a bit of normalcy for the girl on our way back - we stopped in a local place to grab a pastry and then went across the street to the starbucks for coffee before heading back to the hotel on the metro and get ourselves to the ship.

Of course, once on board, we headed to the windjammer (since the rooms were not ready) and grubbed some honey stung chicken - one of my very favorite delights on board.  We got to the room and took a nap while waiting for our luggage.  I snuck out at some point and hung up a door sign reading "congrats grad" to embarrass the kid and met our room attendant, Garfield, who brought us our luggage before the muster drill.

Turns out Garfield did a great job.  We didn't get to talk to him much, but we didn't see him much, which I guess is the perfect attendant - transparent.  If we needed things he'd respond to a note quickly and was on top of giving us things we needed each day.  The only disappointment there is that my special package was not there (which I had forgotten about until the end of the cruise).  When I booked they had a deal going where I should have had champagne and flowers in the room upon arrival.  No huge loss, but still a small bummer.

We unpacked quickly after the muster drill and headed up on deck for sail away.  Since we left from Europe girl-child was allowed to booze it, so she sipped (tried) a corona while I took in a BBC and got our first taste of the goofiness of our entertainment staff.

Our dinner isn't til 9, so we swung past the solarium for a small bite on the way back to the room to get ready for the evening.  We rocked out the trivia, scoring a highly coveted plastic key chain, hit the welcome aboard show (Los Pampos Gauchos) who I think I've seen two other times at this point but was still good.  Amusingly we saw them through out the rest of the trip and the one was even working the tee shirt stand, so that was odd.  For the first time EVER, RC didn't do a stellar job setting up our dinner table.  It was us, two empty seats, a british couple who may have been nice but were a bit too far to talk to, 4 oriental family members who kept switching to their language, and a couple (who we later found out were from Miami) who kept speaking Spanish to one another - talking about the table/people from what I could pick up.  ... and no one spoke to anyone else.  I simply couldn't deal w/ this for 12 nights so I asked for a new table for the next day.

So let's talk about the ship.  I was on Serenade for my second cruise, with mom to Hawaii, back in 2004.  For her age she's in really good shape.  I made sure to go up to the 13th floor for a quick picture of the swirly mirror wall that I so adored back in 2004.  If I could have a wall like that I would!  You'll spot it in my posted pictures when they're up.  We did notice some oddities and issues here and there.  One that disappointed me is that the projection wall in the centrum was not on the entire time we were on board ( I have to assume it was broken), I consider it part of the centrum art, so that made me sad.  In our room someone had a heavy ass finger and busted the on/off button on the TV and two of the buttons on our safe.