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We have now taken our tour of the ship and now perhaps it is time to have a meet and greet with our fellow cruisers.

If you have not already done so, you might want to take a look at Cruise Critic, a cruise forum, message board, and info center. The Cruise Critic Main Page is here. There are sections about destinations, ships, cruise styles, cruise reviews, and loads of other things that are helpful in planning your cruise.

On the top menu bar of the main page you will find Boards. On these message boards you will find questions and answers posted by other cruisers about ports, ships, cabins, cruise lines, etc. There is also a section on the message boards called ROLL CALLS - MEMBERS ONLY. To maintain our privacy, Cruise Critic only allows registered members to read these posts. If you want to join in on our cruise conversation, you must create a screen name, use a password, and give your email address. The email address is kept private and you will NOT be innundated with junk from them.

The Roll Call section is divided first by cruise line (in our case Royal Caribbean Meet & Mingle), and then by ship (Brilliance of the Seas). Our sailing already has a thread going, and there are some very nice and helpful people on our cruise. Lucky us! Anyway, this board is a good chance to get to know fellow passengers before the trip, to get together and share costs of port excursions (like our day in Rome), and to exchange thoughts and ideas for hotels, things to do in port, and just about everything else. Royal Caribbean also has a special party for those registered on the Cruise Critic Meet & Mingle Board. Our thread is call Brilliance Special 7 day Med - 11 September 2007.

Something we came up with on the Roll Call is a Cabin & Pub Crawl. Since this is the first time many of us have been on the ship, we thought it would be fun to check out the other cabins, and to show everyone ours, too. So far, we have insides, oceanview, 2 different levels of balcony cabins, a couple even on the "hump" of the ship, and and aft suite. As we get closer, maybe the folks who have the Royal Suite will join in so we can see that one, too. As we go from deck to deck checking the rooms, we will also stop into each pub that's on that deck. A time has not been set for this, but if we all get onboard early we should have time to do it before the life boat drill. We agreed to exchange little sussies, what my kids used to call small surprise gifts. Fridge magnets, postcards, stickers, anything really from your hometown or area, with each other cabin we visit. If we visit 10 other cabins, our (Q, M C) will need 10 gifts, and U & H's cabin will also need 10. Oh shucks, in other words, we do not each person need to bring 10, but each cabin will have to have 10 to exchange. As we get closer to sailing I will have an exact count of how many sussies we will be exchanging.