Greece & Turkey Cruise

Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) is a wholly own subsidiary of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, an American company headquarted in Florida. Norwegian is a publicly traded company, with major shareholders including Genting Group.  Genting Group also owns Star Cruises. As a result of the strategic partnership (and co-ownership), NCL does not sail to Asia, leaving this side of the world for Star Cruises.

To sail on a Norwegian ship, we had to fly ourselves to Europe, which we did. This blog landing page is for our 10N cruise on the Norwegian Jade out of Civitavecchia (Rome).

We flew from Singapore to London on Emirates.  Subsequently we found our way from London to Rome on British Airways.  And we flew back to Singapore from Rome, after the cruise.

Pre-cruise, we stayed in Civitavecchia, at the Hotel Traghetto and had dinner at a pizza place next door (see the link for videos and pictures).

The itinerary of this cruise was,

Day 1 - Rome (embarkation)
Day 2 - Sea Day (more videos of the ship)
Day 3 - Katakolon, Greece (for Olympia)
Day 4 - Piraeus, Greece (for Athens) - Acropolis
Day 5 -  Kusadasi, Turkey (for Ephesus)
Day 6 -  Istanbul (overnight) - 
Part 1 - Topkapi Palace & Blue Mosque;
Part 2 Basilica Cisterns, Grand Bazaar
Day 7 -  Istanbul - Part 3 (leisurely day)
Day 8 -  Sea Day
Day 9 -  Sea Day
Day 10 - Naples

And back to Rome for disembarkation.

This short video shows our itinerary.


Flight to Europe
We flew to Europe via Emirates, our first time!  That was a good product.  We also stayed at Civitavecchia for one night pre-cruise.

This was our first time on Norwegian, after cruising seven times with Royal Caribbean, once with Celebrity and once with Holland America (many years back).  We did not know what to expect from NCL, especially the concept of Freestyle Dining.

We were very pleasantly surprised.  The NCL Jade cruise has definitely helped us understand the NCL product much better and we are pretty comfortable with it.

Suite Life
We decided to squeeze six of us (my family of 4 and my parents) into a 2 bedroom penthouse suite. It would be a bit tight, but we wanted all to enjoy the suite life.  Here are some videos.

Norwegian Jade 2 Bedroom Penthouse Suite Cabin 11018


The suite comes with our personal coffee machine.

One great perk of staying in an NCL suite is the perk of having breakfast and lunch in a speciality restaurant.  On the NCL Jade, suite passengers could have breakfast and lunch at Cagney's.  Here are two videos of the experience.

Cagney's Breakfast - Suite Perk


Cagney's Lunch - Suite Perk


Here are some more videos of the cruise experience.

The buffet area of the NCL Jade, located on Deck 12 of the ship, was called Garden Cafe.In this video, I show you the buffet offerings for lunch on embarkation day.



In this video, I show you the dinner offerings in the Garden Buffet on one of the evenings.



On a separate evening, they had a grilled theme and here were the grilled offerings.



We found the Main Dining Room food to be very good, comparable with what we had enjoyed on other cruise lines.


One evening, we had dinner at the Jasmine Garden Asian speciality restaurant, including Shabu-Shabu.  The cover charge was US$15 per person and half price for kids below 12.  The food was just average, I wouldn't recommend it.



How about some Paella on the pool deck?  Served by your Cruise Director and Hotel Director, no less.  Cool stuff.



Here is the wine list, for reference.



We had a good cruise. Well done!!