Where to start? we have travelled for years both ocean and river cruising, and never on a mega-ship before! To begin with, if you like your sleep! forget it! this modern ship has cabin doors which are of the automatic slam shut ! variety, consequently 24/7 doors are being slammed the length of the vast corridors, and no one thought to hang on to the handles as the doors closed, why 24/7? because of discos and casinos there was always something going on. As for the dining! being of a free style variety! you either joined the chaos of top deck diners, with all of its constant noise, and shoving to get food and find a table, or you joined a few free restaurants which in the evenings were so popular (no surprise!) that you then had to queue before a table became free. Obviously you could choose to pay extra and dine elsewhere. With most busy ships numbers of passengers can disappear with many activities but with 4,000 passengers and approx. 1500 crew there was no where to escape to apart from the llibrary and the smokers room!! A word of warning, if using the main theatre which is canted so everyone gets a good view, however near the top of the stairs two short steps follow each other so that the number of people stumbling and even falling, occurred each night we were there, one night an elderly gentleman stumbled down them and went crashing into a seat back, did anyone care? Needless to say a stop in Stockholm was cancelled because of bad weather (this is quite often the case as its a floating dock!), so we had to spend two days of a short 10 day break going slow to waste time. If we missed the stop why could we not have made it a day earlier to Copenhagen as compensation, as it was for the two days the decks were roped off! so had to stay inside, and as many ended up with the ships cough! at $250 dollars for a brief visit with the ships GP and a few antibiotic tablets.