On our week long fall break back in October 2011, a relatively large group of us CAPA students (plus a few other Americans we met on board that were also studying abroad in London) took a cruise on the Costa Magica. The cruise set sail in Rome, Italy and called at Naples, Palma de Mallorca, Valencia, Marseille and Savona before returning us to the eternal city. The cruise was great. We were able to vacation in opulence with unlimited food, multi-course meals and nightly entertainment. London is an expensive place to live, so it was nice to not have to scrimp to our usual extent.
Costa Magica
As most of you probably have heard, another one of Costa's ships: the Concordia crashed into the Tuscan coast on January 13. Several bodies have been found, while many are still missing. Two weeks after the fact, search crews have abandoned any hope of finding more people alive. The event is bizarre, with no news of any cruise ship disaster in just shy of 100 years! I'm talking about the RMS Titanic of course. Why did this happen? More controversy is added by the fact that the captain deserted ship before everybody else got off.
My friends and I have taken the news in a unique way. While the ship was not the one we were on in particular, it could have been. The closeness to home of the entire situation is unsettling. One of my friends even got a letter from Costa apologizing about the incident. That came as a surprise - why are they apologizing to a customer from 3 months ago? Were they doing damage control and placating him to preempt him deciding to never sail with Costa (or Carnival its parent company) again?
I hope everybody's memories of the great time on the cruise are not forever connected with this disaster!
