Cruising on Costa Victoria is a bit like being in the film Cabaret, with every announcement in at least four language and usually many more.
You have to take your hat off to the crew for their ability to switch languages at the drop of a hat. At dinner, our waiter Jose Sanchez, from Peru, speaks English to Ilana and I, Italian to the people on the next table. His native language is Spanish and he also speaks Portuguese. All fluently, without even an "um" or "err".
Captain Mario Moretta was great at his welcome cocktail evening, switching so casually between English, German, Italian, Dutch and French that in the end I really didn't know which language he was speaking. But even he had to use his notes to read a welcome in Japanese and Russian. That got an applause.
Unlike the boat drill, when we had to endure an explanation of what to do when the alarm sounded in eight languages, including Japanese and Russian, then stand by the lifeboats in our lifejackets while more instructions were read. Again in eight languages.
"I wonder what would happen in a real emergency," someone near me commented. "We'd have sunk by the time they got through that lot."
Jane Archer
