After what seemed like a short night's rest, we heard the 8am ok to go ashore. Since our walking tour didn't start until 10am, we got dressed and headed up to the Lido for breakfast. I didn't spot Angela in our normal eating spot but found a place with Rose and John from Cruise Critic and saved her a place. About halfway through our meal, our hostess mentioned that Angela was sitting at the other end of the area. Rose went and told her where we were sitting but Angela stayed put as she was enjoying conversation with a German lady and her son.
Just before 10am we met shoreside with our guide and Lori F and her husband John who organized the tour. Our guide, John, was a lifelong resident of Kristiansand and retired 3 years ago from work in the silica plant where he worked for 40 years. He led us on a delightful 3 hour tour through Kristiansand pointing out out items would probably not discovered on our own. Kristiansand is the 4th largest city in Norway after Oslo, Bergen, and Stavanger. It relies now on fishing and tourism as principal industries. The city was named after King Kristian IV who founded it on ground of sand hence the name.
The city is laid out in a square pattern with evenly spaced crosshatch spaced streets. There's a main shopping street named Markensgate (with heating coils in the street so prevent freezing during the winter months) and there is one of the most striking McDonald's in the world there: it has the facade of a Roman columned former bank building. The Cathedral is fairly plain but has a couple of stained glass windows on the altar end of the structure. It was destroyed at the beginning of WWII and later rebuilt). An organ recital was being played when we were there and it was refreshing to listen to. The city also has one of Europe's largest collections of old, low-rise timber houses. John pointed out the one he was raised in after WWII.
At the conclusion of the tour we walked back downtown and enjoyed a simple McDonald's meal and used their WIFI before wandering our way back to the ship via the fish market where we sampled a yummy fish cake.
We finally used the first gigabyte of data over an almost 3 week time period on our Glocalme Simcard device. It's worked out well for the two of us to have easy Internet access when or near port. I would judge that to be a success.
We were back on the ship early at 3pm for a 4:30 All Aboard time. Shortly after 5pm the anchor lines were relaxed and re-stowed, and with a long toot of the horn we pulled away from the dock and did a 180 degree counterclockwise rotation before sailing out of the harbor leaving the Ocean Glory at her berth. We did a quick change into our gala clothes (for me it was in my freshly cleaned suit - one has to love the free laundry for 4 star Mariners) for our dinner reservation at 5:30pm in the Tamarind (our favorite specialty restaurant). This was to be the first cruise where we have never eaten a gala night dinner in the main dining room. We were assigned our favorite table aft overlooking the rear pool area where we watched the sailing out of the harbor with a beautiful sunset. We ordered the lobster without breading along with a shared tenderloin steak so we would have our own 'surf and turf' which was the key entree in the main dining room. It was delicious and the tenderloin was probably the most tender of any steak on any HAL ship I've had. Our open bottle of Moscato was retrieved from the main dining room and it complemented the meal wonderfully. Additionally, the Matre Dei remembered us from our cruise last fall on the Eurodam.
We caught most of the 7pm World Stage show which featured Iris Kroes, the 23 year old who won Holland's The Voice TV show competition who also sang for the Queen during the dedication ceremony a week ago . We stayed in the showroom to see her 8:30pm performance. We've spoken with her offstage and she's quite approachable.
We returned to the room and watched the movie 'Big Game' set in Finland and involving a terrorist attack on Air Force One. It was a cute flick.
Will the retired gentleman who gave the walking tour be doing the tour for future cruise visitors?
ReplyDeleteI heard that there was a small beach in town. Did you get to see it? It is hard to imagine anyone swimming in the water that far north. Maybe all they do is build sandcastles in the sand.