As you can see the Helsinki day was a late start, with all ashore predicted as 11.45am. If you're interested, Palo brunch was available that morning even though I believe it's usually only available on sea days. We had other ideas though and had booked a character breakfast for that morning.
It started well and we were seated very efficiently -although there was only two of us we were at a table for six
It was the classic character breakfast
and I couldn't resist some mickey waffles
I don't know if you can picture the restaurant space in Animator's Palate, but if you divide the room into four quarters, we were sat in the top right corner. No one else was seated any where near us everyone was in the bottom right quarter ... and the restaurant began to fill the bottom left quarter and then the top left quarter. You can see from the picture above no one was near us. We'd long finished our food and the characters were in the bottom left quarter at that point. On a changeover of characters a CM from the cruise staff team apologised and said the characters have to follow a specific route and we would see them eventually
here is Mickey walking though, you can see people have started to fill up the top left quarter. We'd been here about 30 minutes at this point ... the characters still had half the restaurant to cover, and the people coming in were being seated in the empty spaces you can see in this picture. After about 45 minutes we decided to leave ... we're adults, we don't HAVE to have a photo with the characters, but I was disappointed with this. Our waiter tried to persuade us to stay, but I really couldn't be bothered
maybe it was just the mood I was in. I considered asking the CM on the door who was allocating tables why he'd placed us where he had, but I thought I'd just come over as an over-entitled grown woman who wasn't prepared to wait!
I think we ended up heading up to Cove Café and watching us sail into Helsinki.
We docked at the port which is south west of the city (apparently small ships can dock in the more central port). We decided to hang around, have an early lunch and the use the shuttle bus into town. It was cold that day .. no one was hanging around on deck except the poor lifeguards
This was the view back out to sea
The skies were bluer than we'd been led to expect, but once again the forecast was rain!
By the time the shuttle bus had dropped us off in the town centre it had brightened up considerably
we had a walk around the shops in the area before heading to find the Senate Square. I loved this display of Moomin merchandise. I'd loved reading the Moomin books as a child