Enrichment seminars

We usually cruise with Crystal. We are interested in a Viking ocean cruise but want to know if they have enrichment seminars.

We usually cruise with Crystal. We are interested in a Viking ocean cruise but want to know if they have enrichment seminars.

YES!!!!! On the two we've been so far there were four each time. Each with their own specialty. Keyed to the area. When I get home I can tell what kinds of lectures were given. All good.

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This is one of the things we loved the most about our first Viking cruise, Empires of the Mediterranean in 2017. We went to as many as our schedule allowed. They were very well attended.

The Resident Historian was Dr. Fenella Bazin and her first presentations was on "Greek Civilization". She also presented a roundtable discussion on "The Bayeux Tapestry", and a talk on "The Venetian Republic". There was a second roundtable on "The Ospedale of Venice".

One of the guest lecturers was Brigadier Philip Sanders, who spoke on "Empires of the Mediterranean", and then on the "Doughboys in WWI". He followed that with "The Rise & Fall of Yugoslavia".

Our favorite was the guest lecturer James Stourton, an art historian and retired Chairman of Sotheby's UK. His first presentation was "My Time at Sotheby's". He then did a presentation about the transition from Paris to the US as the cultural capital of the world, called "America Triuphant". His final presentation was the "Great Houses of London". He was both informative and quite funny as well.

There were daily port talks for the next day's stop, and these were also available for your viewing in the cabin on demand on the tv. The port talks were very helpful.

We usually cruise with Crystal. We are interested in a Viking ocean cruise but want to know if they have enrichment seminars.

Here are all Viking Dailys from our Viking Homelands in 2016 that you can peruse to find the topics covered by the 4 speakers. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/i9q99w1v62dxirp/AACz5hossbTM03bELvQPCfX9a?dl=0

I need to scan the ones from our Panama & Central America cruise last January. That one included a lot of sea days (VH only has one) both planned and unplanned (sea conditions prevented us from docking at two ports and added one). The speakers did a crackerjack job of coming up with new topics to cover on short notice. I remember asking one of them at breakfast - "so what you gonna do?" He gave a slight groan and said "something!". And his something was pretty darned good.

Here's the photoblog site prepared during that cruise by one of the 4, Corey Sandler: http://sky.coreysandler.com/

And the web site on Dave Roberts who was the resident expert on all things about Panama tho Corey was pretty good too - they did tag team commentary during our half transit of the Canal: http://www.drdavesandiego.com/. He's the one who groaned.

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Thank you for your responses. It’s seems like it’s a go for us. ,

Thank you for your responses. It’s seems like it’s a go for us. ,

I hope you enjoy it as much as we have. We have our second trip in two weeks, and a third in April 2019.

As mentioned there were 4 on our recent cruise too - I have to say their subjects were very closely related and we did give a couple a miss - the minutiae of Viking Mythology and the history of boat building were not quite our thing! We enjoyed the history and Geology . We were disappointed that the wildlife lecturer was left off because the boat was completely full!!! Many of the history lectures are “standard” ( look for the magic word iconic) - these have all been written by Charles Doherty who runs the history programme for Viking. He is very entertaining and we have met him a couple of times. This means if you go say on Viking Homelands and In the Wake of the Vikings (which we have) the lectures are repeated!!

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Really felt like I was taking a college course....enrichment was great!!!