First Time on a Cruise | Carnival Mardi Gras Cruise Ship Review
foreign with Matt I am your host Matt Taylor today I have a little different video for you I had the opportunity to go on my first ever Cruise a about a week ago and I wanted to share my experience with you from a first timer and also um just if I liked it or not and if I were to do it again and the particular ship that I was on was the carnival Mardi Gras ship and so I’m going to do a little review of that ship again this is from a perspective of a first
time Cruiser so I don’t have a lot of a reference just from what friends and family have told me um like they said you’re gonna love the You’re Gonna Love The Cruise you’re gonna love the food and all that kind of stuff so I’m going to kind of tie that in as well for this review also I wanted to mention I wasn’t planning on doing a review until after so there’s a lot of footage and clips that I wish I would have gotten while I was on the boat so I won’t really have that I’ll
just reference those in this video but here we go let’s dive into this awesome Cruise experience that I had again first timer and so this Cruise
of an experience from maybe what other people would have because I went with a an enormous singles group a friend of mine puts together all these single excursions and trips and so I joined that one so I already had a lot of people that I knew that were going and I had a really good friend another friend named Matt that was going as well so him and I were able to hang out quite a bit together so that really helped me have a good experience on this so this perspective is not from like going on
a fam with a family or going as a couple it’s just from just going kind of by myself and showing up and knowing that there was other people there that I would know okay so keep that in mind as well and so I I may not have liked it as much if I just went by myself or just with one other friend and I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to meet other new people um you know singles and things like that on the boat um because that really helped me have a good time meeting
a bunch of new people and having a good time with them as well and so what I’m going to cover is kind of the ship itself the amenities things that were on board that were really fun I’m going to cover the food this is a cooking channel and Food Channel so of course I gotta cover the food and kind of my impressions of the food on the ship and then also I’m going to cover those uh the ports that we visited and some of the excursions that we went on so let’s dive in one thing
first thing I noticed when I got to the port was this a boat this cruise ship was massive um someone told me one of the workers on board told me that it was the equivalent of like an 18 story building that’s how tall this cruise ship was which is pretty massive and uh at one of the ports I had the opportunity to take a photo or video of our cruise ship next to one of the other Carnival Cruise ships and ours was so much bigger pretty interesting and I think our cruise ship was 9 or
10 times bigger than that than the Titanic to give you reference which is insane and again I’d never been on a cruise ship before so I wasn’t knowing didn’t know what to expect but it was large and uh I liked that it was large because there was a lot of places to explore and so let me talk about the food and my experience with the food on board they have they had a lot of um stuff that was included with your cruise price and they had other higher end um restaurants and things that you could
pay extra for I didn’t do any of the extra stuff because I wanted to experience it from just the not free because I did have to pay for the cruise but for the stuff that was included and so on the Lido deck deck 16 they had it’s like a buffet style and where I ate there pretty much every day for breakfast I only ate there one time for lunch and then the rest time I was eating other places for dinner our big group always met in the Palm restaurant that’s where we had a dinner every
night we kind of we sat in a table and we kind of rotated tables each night so we can meet more people and they had other places like they had Guys burger joint on board and I ate there twice and I really liked Guys burger joint the burger was really really good and then they had Shacks uh big chicken that was on there and that was pretty good as well and they had Emerald’s a lounge I didn’t go to Emeril’s place and they had several others uh specific restaurants they had guys Pig and anchor which
is like a little barbecue place and that food was really good one thing that someone told me a friend of mine said you’re going to love the never-ending supply of soft-serve ice cream and frozen yogurt and I did like I probably had four to five ice cream cones a day now I didn’t fill it up like really tall I probably only did it about that high over the cone each time um but that was really awesome and I did manage to gain like four or five pounds on this cruise I would have gained more if
I didn’t do so much walking I average probably five four or five miles per day just walking around on the cruise ship and then also doing the excursions so good thing I did all that otherwise it would have gained a lot more weight probably and so kind of my impressions of the food specifically I mentioned some of those already but in the main dining room I wasn’t super impressed impressed it was just okay to me a lot of people said oh you’re gonna love the food for me like there’s some things that I like there’s
some like this strawberry bisque cold soup was really good it tasted like a pretty much a melted strawberry milkshake and so that was really good and uh my first entree that I had was fried shrimp and fried rice and I enjoyed that um I had a filet mignon one night and it wasn’t really a filet they called it a filet but it wasn’t a flavor I’ve had I’ve had a lot of filet mignon in my day and this wasn’t a flavor the flavor was fine but um it wasn’t really a filet even though it tasted
okay um I had shrimp a lot of times I had the shrimp and the shrimp was really good but there’s other things like the roast beef that they had and um some of the other entrees like they had a chicken parm which kind of tasted like almost like chicken jerky it was really tough and overcooked they had a creme brulee and it just wasn’t that great I make a good a great creme brulee here on my channel you can find that creme brulee recipe and their creme brulee just wasn’t that good the the sugar layer
was really thick and then the custard it just didn’t have that great creme brulee Custard flavor that I’m looking for it was just okay to Me overall I think the appetizers were better than the main entrees and then the desserts were just oh so so in my opinion they could have been a little bit better maybe um and Carnival I think is known for being a little bit more of the bottom of the barrel or entry-level cruise ships um I’ve heard that the food on like princess and Norwegian and the Disney Cruise Line I think
their food might be a little bit better but uh all in all it was okay like it was included I didn’t have to pay extra for those things and so I wasn’t super disappointed with the food and there was things that I really did like about the food and then also like on board the ship which was really cool is the amenities that they had they had comedy shows they had different uh Productions that they do sometimes on the main pool deck on Deck 16 they would show a movie on the on the big screen
they add constant like live game shows Bingo things like that they had a Sports Court they had an arcade for the kids they had a roller coaster on top of the on top of the ship and I tried the roller coaster it was fun I think it was like it was 15 for like a three minute ride but it was still pretty fun it was fun to do a roller coaster on a cruise ship and then they had these slides like water slides I didn’t do the slides because the water was too cold for me
and they had like a putt-putt or like miniature golf course on there they on the other side of the ship they had where they called The Serenity area which was like no kids allowed there was a nice hot tub and there are several hot tubs throughout the boat but look kids can get in those but in this area the serenity area no kids were allowed and a lot of our friends from our group each evening would go to the hot tub and just hang out and have a good time and so the amenities I was
impressed I I couldn’t have asked for more amenities I think on the ship that was there was plenty to do on the ship a lot of things that you could sign up for and do so I really liked that aspect of this Cruise and then our first Port that we visited was Puerto Rico I’d never been to Puerto Rico before and so it was really fun to visit this uh it’s a United States Territory and so we got off and we were going to do a zipline tour so I was really excited to do a
zip line and so we showed up to the zipline place and got our harnesses on our helmets and then we did some zip lining it was a lot of fun I I like zip lining and it was kind of a fun way to just to see a little bit of Puerto Rico as you’re going across the you know sliding on those zip lines and then it was right there in the parking lot of the zip line I was able to see some cool things like this the tortoises or these big turtles and then I was
lucky enough to find some um I was lucky enough to find one of my favorite fruits growing on the tree the star fruit or Carambola and one of the groundskeepers helped me pick a ripe one and it was so good here’s a little video of me tasting that so I am here in Puerto Rico and I just got done doing the zip lines and what I found here is a fresh star fruit star fruit tree there starfu tree there and I love star fruit so I’m gonna give this a taste and see how good it
is really good so good normally I would cut it up mm-hmm and then I was able to pet an emu which was really fun petting this email and so I just had enjoyed my experience there and then when we got back to Port we still had a couple hours left and so we walked around uh town a little bit Old Town San Juan and um some cool things to see I wanted to eat some authentic Puerto Rican food and so we had this Mofongo dish and it’s like a plantain a mashed up planting in shape
of a bull and they put like beef or chicken I had chicken and they put that inside and that was really good that was one of the better things that I’ve eaten on my whole trip it was really really good and then we only after it took like an hour and a half to finally get done with our mule it was just really slow and then so we had about an hour left we walked around a little bit and went and saw one of the main forts there on San Juan and then we went back
to uh went back to our ship and now that concluded our Puerto Rico visit I would have liked to have more time in Puerto Rico to see see more things that was one of my gripes I wish um we had maybe two days at each Port but I understand why the cruise ships don’t do that long at each port and then we are back at Sea and then the next day we wound up in the Dominican Republic and so again this was going to be a a ziplining Adventure but also included with a zip line
after we were going to go through these seven waterfalls and do some jumping and some sliding and so again we we got on and so these two excursions the one in Puerto Rico and the one here in Dominican Republic those were organized by our tour guide um the person the girl that put together a whole trip for us she organized those we didn’t book those through the Carnival ship and but there’s plenty so many different things that you can book through the carnival like they have so many excursions like anywhere from like 8 to 15
different excursions that you can book through them so I actually was impressed by the variety that they had I just didn’t book any of those and then so we went to this uh Park in the Dominican and again we got we had this probably 40 minute hike 45 minute hike up to the um the first zip line and then we did the zip lining it was fun I love zip lines and I like the zip lines I think better in the Dominican Republic than I did at the park that we did in Puerto Rico they
were just so much faster and uh we didn’t have to walk as far in between each zip line and so that was really fun and then at the end of the zip line it was time to go through these waterfalls and uh that wasn’t my favorite part the water was really cold and I don’t really like jumping into water that much and the sliding was fun sliding down the little um the slides but uh that I prefer the zip lines over the water part but it was still fun and once we were done with that
we had some authentic food there La Bandera I think it’s the flag whatever it’s like kind of their classic dish there in the Dominican Republic of rice and beans and like fried chicken and some other things I didn’t really have on my plate that were available for you and that was really really good I really really like that like again that was one of my favorite things that I ate the whole trip and then it was time to leave once again and we left and went uh back on the ship and then the next Port
was Grand Turk from turken Caicos I don’t know how to pronounce kaikos I don’t know how you pronounce the Caicos part but this was the main big island and it’s not that big the whole island was like seven miles long I think by a couple miles wide and so we got to Grand Turk and this was an Excursion that I booked through Carnival and it was a catamaran ride and then also a snorkeling trip and then they took us to a private beach that whole Excursion was about three hours so when we got back we
had plenty of time to explore and do other things on Grand Turk and so being on board at catamaran right it was fun there’s probably like 80 to 100 people on board and it was just a good time um they had music and stuff and there was a lot of drinks and snacks that they had on there and then we went snorkeling and I didn’t have I didn’t have an underwater camera so I couldn’t I didn’t really take that with me when I snorkeled but it was a great time the water was so clear and
it was not super warm it was like 78 79 degrees um definitely a lot warmer than where I grew up in California but the uh I would have liked the water to be a little bit warmer but it wasn’t bad by any means and definitely warmer than that water in the Dominican in that River or little stream waterfall wherever and so we did the snorkeling and that was great and then the private beach and got to hang out and just enjoy the beach for a while pristine white sandy powdery beaches and super Crystal Clear Blue
Water kind of my idea of like Tropics the tropics you know and then we walked around when we when we got back we walked around again I wanted some authentic food and then one of the locals said there was a jerk chicken place um down the beach so we walked down there and got some yummy jerk chicken and that was so good jerk chicken and this yellow rice and a potato salad and again this was one of the better things that I had on my whole trip so the three local foods that I had at
these local places we’re better than a lot of the stuff that I had on the cruise ship and um so that was great and then I just got to see more of Grand Turk Island walking around with some friends and taking photos and whatnot and then it was back on the ship and then we had one last day at Sea the Friday before we came home on Saturday it was kind of like I was sad already when it was like Wednesday even though I had a half of the trip left I was actually getting sad
that I had to go home soon already so I really really enjoyed this cruise I liked the ship a lot it was a great first time experience for me I love the excursions I love the ports that we visited different locations the food was fine it was good there’s some times where I thought it could have been better but overall I was I was happy with the food on board ship and I really loved all you can eat ice cream and frozen yogurt I lost I liked pretty much most of the appetizers that they had
just the main entrees I think could have used a little bit more work and the other the other like little restaurants that they had that I was able to try like Guys burger joint guys Pig and anchor and uh Shacks um Chicken Place those were all fine those were all good and so it was just a great Cruise experience I highly recommend it if you’ve never done a cruise before go on a cruise if you can do it if you can swing it if you can afford it Carnival is the the cheaper of the lines
I think cruise lines so it’s a great first experience if you can’t do a seven day one maybe try out a three day one or four day one but I really liked my first time going on a cruise and I can’t wait to go again once again my name is Matt Taylor this has been another episode of in the kitchen with Matt a little bit different of an episode hope you enjoyed it let me know if you’ve ever been on a cruise and if you enjoyed your cruise take care everyone and happy cruising
