Anyone considering a Baltic capitals cruise should overlook the relatively low price that is offered on the Norwegian Sun. The ship was recently refurbished and had all new carpets and bedding, so the interior looked nice and the beds were quite comfortable. The ship suffers from age and a design that has long since belonged in a museum. The showers are virtually unusable -- you have top open the curtain and step outside the shower to wash your feet (unless you want the curtain to wrap itself around you. There is virtually no drawer storage space whatsoever on the ship and closet space for hanging clothes is very limited. The big picture porthole is a nice feature for a porthole cabin. As usual on NCL ships, the entertainment was quite good -- the main song and dance company was very good and the shows were well choreographed. The cabin was kept well by our very attentive cabin stewardess Larry (not a misprint). The ports were great. I recommend the use of outside tour agencies for the St. Pete tours. NCL charges a king's ransom for their tours. SPB Tours and TJ Travel both offer tours that are more comprehensive and a lot less as well as being designed for groups of 16 or less. We didn't partake of the Berlin tour offered by SPB because it was a 7.30am departure on Sunday, having flown overnight and arriving only on Saturday morning, departure day. Be prepared for some incredible food costs on land, particularly in Sweden, Finland and Copenhagen. Our Russia tour came with lunch both days so I can't swear to food costs in that country. Germany (Warnemunde/Rostock) wasn't nearly as expensive for eating off the ship.

Now for the really bad news. We dreaded going to the main restaurant for dinner, the food was so tasteless and in most cases of poor quality. When we ordered the "roast turkey" we got turkey loaf. When we ordered "beef wellington" we got some strange looking, almost like dyed red meat that obviously wasn't close to being filet mignon and the pate tasted like groul and the pastry shell was like eating a piece of bread. I had exactly one dinner where the entree was quite good, the 8th night, the English beef loin strip. We actually ate dinner 4 nights at the buffet because we couldn't see any reason to go to the restaurant. The lunches were the identically same menu every day, offering the same 5 tasteless sandwiches and several other mean looking things. Breakfast was the same. They had no egg beaters, no skim milk, no alternatives to butter. ONe server said they had no egg substitutes because they were low on budget. I think he meant they had a low budget, period. The lack of crowds in the dining room every evening pretty much told the story of how good the food was there. THey also don't have trays at the buffet, making it almost impossible to carry food and beverages to a table, which was almost impossible to find in the inadequate space (they had converted part of the buffet sitting area on the port side to a surcharge restaurant (what else?) called Moderno. Also, they didn't provide plates for people to set down the food tongs. So everyone left the tongs in the food, sometimes the entire tongs, including the handle everyone touched. A lot of people had coughs on the ship, and I developed a very bad cold the last day sailing back to Copenhagen, and I think I know how I got it. Enforcement of the hand sanitization entering the eating areas was lax too. All-in-all, if it wasn't for the wonderful ports we went to, we probably would have gotten off the ship during the cruise and gone home. Unless you want to spend every evening in a surcharge restaurant (and some people said the service and the food wasn't that good there either), don't go on this cruise line. They are the worst line sailing year round out of US ports.