We woke on our second day aboard Celebrity Silhouette to grey clouds and fairly blustery conditions in the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands. The port city of IJmuiden was visible in the distance ahead of us as we finished getting ready and headed up to the buffet for breakfast.
This was our first time in Silhouette’s buffet area, The Oceanview Café, as we’re not the sort of people who head directly for that sort of venue on a cruise ship when we board and we’d had no need of its services until this point. We know that some people see that the food in buffets is included in the price of the cruise, worry that everyone else will eat it all before they do, and make it their goal to stake out spots in the restaurant for much of the duration of the cruise. We were on a cruise once when we spotted the same woman sitting at the same table every time we popped into the buffet so we started coming up with excuses to pass through the location at odd times of the day to see if she was still there and came to the conclusion she’d eaten herself into a coma at some point early on and the staff had been too polite to move her on.
Anyway, the Oceanview Café was very nice. Large, open, great variety of food in sensibly-arranged food stations, excellent coffee facilities, including real cream to add to it. And proper crockery, Princess, hint, hint. And hash browns. My wife loves them. They had them. Every day, Princess, hint, hint. She was happy about that and I was happy that she was happy. Food quality, though… ah. I skipped a few items I’d originally angled towards when I saw the state of them. Fried eggs, for instance. I know that Americans have that thing where they ask for fried eggs “Sunny side up” or “Over easy” and so on whereas I tend to just like them “Cooked” but I’m not sure why the default preparation for fried eggs on Celebrity Silhouette appeared to be “Compact and grey, like those aliens that probed me”. With no seats anywhere to be seen indoors we headed outside into the sharp wind and faint smell of cigarettes from somewhere to wolf down the breakfast then grabbed coffees and made our way across to the Sky Lounge.
Morning Trivia
There was method in our madness of braving the open deck even more to make our way from the buffet to the observation lounge at the front of the ship. We’d taken a look at the things taking place on the ship during the morning’s approach to Amsterdam and ruled out the port seminar (we’d been to the Dutch capital before and didn’t think we’d learn a whole lot of relevant information) and the various art events taking place (hosted by Park West Gallery and, well, we’ve had a falling out with them which involved so much drama it belongs in an episode of a soap opera and not on this site, but I’ll probably write up about it one day) and the dancing (just, no). But there was trivia taking place and we like a good quiz.
The Sky Lounge was fairly quiet when we got there but people drifted in slowly as the time for the quiz approached, with some seemingly quite fascinated by the skyline we were slowly cruising towards; IJmuiden makes for a wonderfully dystopic sight and if there’s one thing better than cruising to beautiful destinations it’s cruising to places that make you reminisce about all those cheesy VHS tapes your dad used to rent in the 1980s about biker gangs patrolling the landscape of a world where everything except motorcycle repair shops has been destroyed.
A bit of inspired guessing and a smidge of dragging some answer out of some dusty memory hole and just a soupçon of all the really smart people probably nursing hangovers and not turning up saw us achieve a comfortable victory for which we received trivia prizes from across the other side of the world. Exotic!
We passed through the indoor pool area, snapped a couple of photos, and headed off back to our room to watch the rest of the approach to Amsterdam.
Approaching Amsterdam
We were on the starboard side of Celebrity Silhouette, the same side of the ship we’d been on when we’d previously cruised to Amsterdam aboard P&O’s Azura in 2017, our preferred side of ships for reasons of tradition and helping someone’s wife not get lost, and, subsequently, we got to see many of the same things on the approach to Amsterdam as we’d seen then. Not that this stopped me taking photos, of course, but I may have taken fewer than usual.
I’m fond of architecture when we travel and I’ve got an appreciation that spans all of history with ancient styles and absolutely modern designs both finding equal favour. One of the most prominent buildings along the southern side of the North Sea Canal on the outskirts of Amsterdam was the Pontsteiger building. The area around this impressive-looking structure was formerly a port where cargo ships would unload timber but is now undergoing renovation. The suspended bridge section of the Pontsteiger reminded us of a building we’d seen in Beijing on our very first cruise but it also reminded me of the shapes I used to make with Rubik’s Snake and I’d like to think that the architect did the same thing and was duly inspired.
The Pontsteiger pretty much marked where the industrial outskirts of Amsterdam were giving way to the commercial and residential areas of the capital. We knew we were very close when we started spotting some of the outermost of the city’s famous canals which, if you look at a map, spread out like ripples as if the central train station had been dropped from a great height onto the edge of the IJ and water had rushed in to fill the trenches. The Dutch are crazy. I would not rule that out as their construction technique.
If you’re on a cruise coming into Amsterdam then the Centraal train station is the final big landmark before you reach the cruise terminal and docking area for ships. Riverboats, though, have a far larger set of jetties and surface area in which they can tie up and allow their passengers ashore on a desperate hunt for beer cheese and this is handy as an awful lot of riverboats visit Amsterdam. Or they did this day. It’s interesting looking at the boats tied up alongside one another forcing passengers to go through (or over; who knows?) a vessel owned and operated by another company entirely. This has got to present some potentially worrying situations late at night if you’re returning to your boat in slightly inebriated fashion (the best way) but your boat is behind another one so you’ve got to remember not just what boat you sailed into this strange city on but also what the boat nearest the dock looked like or was called. “Is this one ours? No, I don’t think ours had a statue of a bear throwing a trident at a dolphin in the central area so let’s carry on. I don’t think this one is ours either as I’m sure our riverboat was built after the fall of the Soviet Union. Has to be the next one. No, this is definitely not ours but it looks a lot nicer than our one. I wonder if we can transfer. Well, this is a problem because there’s only open river beyond this.”
The river cruising bug hasn’t bitten us yet. The river cruising bug hasn’t even shown an interest in landing on an exposed bit of flesh. Perhaps because we’ve grown up beside the sea in a historical, naval port we naturally secrete a pheromone that wards off river cruising bugs.
Holland America Lines Nieuw Statendam
We had one last sight to see as Celebrity Silhouette finally approached the cruise terminal in Amsterdam: already alongside in the city was the newest Holland America Line cruise ship, Nieuw Statendam. We’ve always liked the look of the HAL ships and have read favourable reviews and comparisons with our preferred cruise line, Princess, in terms of itineraries and service but we’ve always worried that we wouldn’t be able to pronounce their ship names and we’d be looked down upon by the staff on board.
It was great to slowly pass so close to the other ship, to marvel at the precision piloting of the vessel, to be mesmerised by the reflection of the Celebrity Silhouette in the glass balconies and cabin doors of Nieuw Statendam, and to fervently hope to catch someone doing something they shouldn’t be doing in one of the rooms we were gliding by. Recording a video walkthrough of their cabin in portrait mode, for instance.
A lovely bit of parking (I think that’s the correct term) then took place as we passed the aft of the HAL vessel and manoeuvred into position at Amsterdam’s cruise dock. The gap between the two ships looked very small indeed from our vantage point on our balcony but I know that the brain’s ability to judge sizes at distance and from unusual perspectives is quite poor and while we drew in deep breaths and made oohing noises (not caught on video) there was no real danger of the two ships colliding with easily ten, maybe even twelve, centimetres separating us.
We got our bags ready and read for a bit while we waited for immigration to clear the vessel to disembark. We hadn’t arranged an excursion in Amsterdam because we were confident enough in our own ability to find things of interest and we had a skeleton of a plan for the day all worked out anyway. That will be covered in the next post in this series covering our taster cruise with Celebrity Cruises on Celebrity Silhouette.
