Our Recent Cruise: Our Stateroom Balcony and Central Park

On our recent Royal Caribbean cruise...we rode on their Allure of the Seas ship out of Ft. Lauderdale...our living quarters, called "staterooms" and resembling small hotel rooms, had balconies.  Some guests' rooms faced outward, their balconies overlooking the seas and sky.  Across the hallway were the inner rooms, whose balconies presented a different picture: the interior of the ship.  Although Melissa and I would have preferred the ocean view, as it turned out we probably got the perfect inner balcony: not so high up that we couldn't see and hear what was happening below, and a perfectly centered location above the ship's so-called "Central Park" Deck #8 with its horticulture, restaurants, and musical performance area...all outdoor despite being located within the ship's "interior".  Sitting out there we could watch the pedestrian traffic and the entranceway to Giovanni's restaurant while listening to various performers.  Directly below us people would be sitting outside the Park Place Café, making the area as a whole a kind of informal meeting hub.  Each evening they would have a different performer, usually either a pianist or light jazz artist.  A couple of times Billy Pando, a musician from Texas, put on a show of old hits that he interpreted and sang on the piano...he is very talented, funny and engaging: I got a big kick out of watching and listening to him and apparently so did the rest of his audience.  On the last night of our cruise, as Pando was winding down his show I noticed that several couples who were just walking through the area would spontaneously stop and begin dancing with each other to the music...if I were Billy (and I am, in a roundabout way)...I'd consider that to be the best compliment of all.  Also, toward the end of the performance I noticed several couples seating themselves at Giovannis' outside tables in spite of the restaurant already having closed...and they, unlike previous Giovannis' customers, didn't seem particularly interested in the concert.  Finally, after having gone a few minutes past his scheduled 10 pm ending, Billy Pando finished and left...and those "customers", along with several others that seemed to appear from nowhere,  took over the area and began speaking in Russian and singing Russian hymns from their smartphones.  Now that I thought was about as cool as it gets...

Melissa and I occasionally walked through Central Park...sometimes we breakfasted at Park Place, one of the cruise line's "free" eateries, and on Friday the 14th we dined at Chops (a few steps to the left out of our balcony's view), where we celebrated Melissa's birthday (yes, it lies on St. Valentine's Day).  No doubt about it, I totally dug our balcony and Central Park...although being on the inside we were necessarily more conscious of the need to protect our room's privacy than we would facing the sea.  More on our February 9th-16th cruise to come...