We did notice such things as the on-board ATM machine never working. We've been on several recent cruises with ATM machines, and in every case the machine never worked.
There is a CD listening room onboard called "Notes". The listening equipment was not operating. We learned that on the last day of the prior cruise fifty CDs were stolen from their boxes by passengers. The cruise line was trying to sort out how to handle this, so in the interim, the service was shut down. We also learned that many of the books in "Words", the self-service library, had been pilfered as well.
So goes the world.
The casino appeared to us to be larger than anything we have ever seen onboard a cruise ship before. In fact, it approaches the size of a casino found in a small hotel. The Millennium casino is very extravagant, resembling in décor what you find in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.
Computers and Telephones:
There is a well arranged Internet computer center on-board the Millennium. Twenty PCs are equipped with wood-framed flat-screen monitors and located in a glass-walled semi-circular room with a view of the sea. The glare from the windows presents a problem during the daytime until someone comes along and pulls down the semi-transparent shades.
The computers have several applications available including MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Use of these applications is free. You can print from these applications (when somebody remembers to put paper in the printer) and you can also save to a floppy disk. Not all the floppy disk drives were operating properly, however.
You can also bring message and graphic attachments written from a laptop to a floppy and email them using the MillenniumInternet computers.
You cannot write a message in Word, copy the message to the Windows clipboard, and then go online and paste message into an email in order to save time while online. The reason given is fear of virus introduction to the system. I fail to understand this. It certainly helps to maximize your time online.
On-line cost is 95 cents per minute. I think this price is unreasonably high, so much so that you see people using the facility only occasionally. Most of the time it stands empty. I'm convinced that eventually the price will have to fall to increase revenue. If it were reduced, say, by half, I think the center would get a lot more attention.
For example, the ship-to-shore telephone service from the cabin which costs $9.50 per minute is now almost half of what it used be only a couple of years ago. On-shore calling cards as well as cell phones have certainly added to the competition of long-distance calling, and that helps to drives the price down.
Since there were a lot of European passengers on board, you saw a lot of cellphone use aboard ship when we were in port. Most cellphones on the 900 MHz GSM system can roam freely throughout Europe. Standard 1900 MHz GSM US cellphones won't work in Europe.
The satellite link on the shipboard computer provides for downloads at 256K and uploads at 60K. The built-in email software allows sending to a single recipient and a copy to another recipient, but that's all. You can use a webmail service such as MailStart to send email to multiple recipients.
There are some instruction sheets printed out, but we never saw a person in attendance at the computer center. We got on-line a few times, and other than the high cost and the fact that the satellite link wasn't working a good part of the time, we found the service to be satisfactory.
Computer classes are advertised and offered in another area. One-hour courses are available in Word, Excel, as well as some basic training in Windows. The cost for a 1-hour course is $59. Courses can be repeated free of charge.
Oslo:
Oslo is a relatively small city at the north end of a long fjord. It is the smallest capital of a major country in Europe. The Millenniumrequires almost three hours to transit the fjord from the open sea. The surrounding countryside reminds us of some of the waterfront communities in Puget Sound or possibly the coast of Maine.
The ship docked within a 10 minute walking distance of the center of the city. Our day of arrival was absolutely beautiful, about 70 degrees with just some scattered puffy clouds.
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