Sorry for the delay in writing updates; I feel like this 21 day vacation trip report is somehow going to end up taking me till my next vacation to finish
A few random comments:
Serving team: we loved our servers. Non from Thailand (server), Ratna from Indonesia (***'t server) and Valentin from... possibly Slovakia (head server). First of all Non and Ratna - both experienced (Non has been with
DCL for many years and was on the Fantasy when it first sailed over from Europe in 2012) and just super efficient. Ratna had drinks ready for us every night (and the first night that she saw me not drink mine, she immediately asked what else she could bring me; the next night she didn't bring one in advance so that I could choose something). Non had excellent, spot on recommendations every night. He never put down any of the food of course but if it wasn't the best item, he would either not mention it, or would say something like "It might not be what you expect" (e.g. when there was pad Thai and he noted it's not like in his country!)
And a huge thing I noticed: every night, a serving team dropped something. Every single night in the MDR. Once it was an entire tray. And it was never, ever our serving team. They weren't slow at all, they just told us they would rather go to the kitchen more times than carry too much and risk dropping it, and creating 3x the work for themselves. Further, Non told us what he could about every port, including his own experiences, and he always knew the all ashore/all on board times. Our head server Valentin was also awesome. When my son mentioned he wished there was curry on the menu (he had missed butter chicken that day in the buffet), Valentin arranged for a special dish of it, with naan bread, to be at our table the next night. He too was just lovely about greeting us every night at our table (I've had head servers that we never see!)
They did not give us the "excellent" speech, except a brief mention on the last day that we would get a survey, and to please make note of the questions that would ask about our dining experience which really meant our experience with the servers - and that for DCL, "very good" isn't as good as "excellent"

I assured them everything had been excellent of course and that we would be grading them that way.
Non and Ratna weren't the type of servers that act like they are your best friends. Ratna brought origami for the kids some nights, and challenged them with crayon or other puzzles. They were honestly the perfect servers - great at their jobs, friendly but not overly so, and knowledgeable. I am so happy we had them.
The Magic vs. the Fantasy
Wasn't sure if I'd like the older ship, but I really did love it after all. I missed the AquaDuck, but otherwise it was really nice to be on a smaller ship. Orienting ourselves was easy. I loved the food options on deck 9 (the Build a Bowl was one of my favourite places to eat lunch). For me, the "Sweet on You" on the Fantasy is useless space, as I don't really believe in paying for ice cream when you can eat so much of it on a regular basis either at Eye Scream, or scooped for you at the buffet. And the shawarma is awesome, so much better than just standard burgers and fries (although I consumed many chicken tenders!)
Soft Serve Ice Cream: available flavours alternated of course but we had chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, banana, pineapple and blueberry. I heard someone say she didn't like the mango one from the day before, but DH swears to me there was no mango because he went every day. I don't know, but I did enjoy blueberry and pineapple.
Cove Cafe: a really nice place to sit and kill some time. I wish the menu were a little more standard because when faced with a colourful menu with only a few items on it, I apparently can't think of what to order if it isn't on the menu, and I generally found the coffee not strong enough when I ordered specialty coffees. No doubt my own fault. I ordered an espresso chiller one day when it was the non-alcoholic drink of the day and it was great, but the next day I tried to order it and got something vastly different. Oh well. I did manage to fill one stamp card. As for the treats at Cove, I'll go with "meh". Does anyone else not like DCL pastries? I feel like they could be so much more delicious. The chocolate pillow (basically a pain au chocolat) was good, everything else was just calories I didn't need.
Quiet Cove: maybe owing to the fact that this was a 13 night cruise with plenty of platinum members and obviously fewer kids than usual - I did not find Quiet Cove to be quiet at all. We never really found loungers by the pool, and the adult pool often had more people in it than the kids pools. We sat and watched the ocean go by a couple of times, but I thought I'd enjoy this area way more than I actually did.