Day 9

Saturday 18th February: After the nice relaxing pace of the last 2 mornings this morning was quite different! We docked at 8:00am in Genoa. We got up earlier and went to the Bora Bora for breakfast. The nice thing this morning too was that we could see right into the centre, the nearest port to town we'd been to. After a short walk we saw a lady selling bus tours of the city and we decided to take one, it was quite interesting and the commentary seemed to mention Piazzas a lot! Genoa has many squares of dedications, lol! There was also some interesting historical facts and nice buildings.




Through researching we knew there was an aquarium in Genoa too and after not being able to go to the one in Valencia we thought we'd look into this one. The tour dropped us off just outside it, thankfully this one was more reasonably priced and was really good! We saw many species of fish, lots of different creatures and penguins!








We still had some time before we had to be back on board so had a look around the town and had a treat from the Gelateria (ice cream shop.) We caught the shuttle tour bus back to the ship and Charlie went along to the kid's club, Courtney had a snooze and we started packing. We seemed to have worn most clothes on this holiday so we didn't fold them carefully, they'll all need washing anyway!
On the ship newspaper last night it said today there would be an emergency procedure practice. Genoa is a main changeover port so we just presumed it was for the new guests as we'd done the briefing when we boarded but the tannoy announcement just before was also heard inside the cabins (the first one we'd heard in the cabin) and in the message it said all guests were required to go! Good timing the day before we actually disembark the ship! Mark quickly went to collect Charlie whilst I got Courtney's shoes on and grabbed the life jackets! All 4 of us bundled down to our muster station (The Aft Lounge on deck 7) of course as this was a practice we were not allowed to use the lifts so had to walk the 12 flights of stairs! (2 flights per deck.) On arrival at the muster station we each had to put on our life jackets, something which both Charlie and Courtney were not impressed with and we had to stay there for what seemed like ages. Mark and I actually had a bit of a giggle to ourselves, if that was a real emergency there would never have been as much calm and frivolity! On returning to our cabin we had about an hour of spare time before dinner so we just relaxed. We joined our American 'table buddies' for our last dinner together in the Villa Verde, they have been very good company during our dinners. The show sounded quite good this evening and as it's our last night on board we decided to go. It was an interesting show, a mixture of dancing, a juggler and hand shadow artist. Courtney was pretending to juggle and then started making movements with her hands for the shadow artist!



We made our way back to our cabin and got Charlie and Courtney ready for bed. We put all the last to be packed items in the cases, labelled them up and put them in the corridor ready to be collected. Our disembarkation newspaper was delivered and although it does all sound very organised for tomorrow we still think it's going to be a long day!