A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Take 2

First off, I must admit that title is a blatant plagiarism from an article written by David Foster Wallace about how some magazine asked him to cover a cruise for a story and how he hated every minute of it. Granted, I am not that negative about the whole thing and I have not been wearing long underwear under shorts with a ratty ski hat, as he did. After all, I was a queen aboard a Celebrity cruise for one week - just imagine me walking down the grand staircase in a suit - sorry fans, no gown or tiara - from Seattle to Alaska’s inner passage. Accompanied by my friend Jose Maria Buceta Olmo, a man who I liked to introduce to the cruisons as my “camp counselor”, which is essentially true. When 17, I attended an international camp in Sweden, Sollentuna to be exact, said with a raise in your voice at the ‘en’ syllable and an exaggerated ‘oo’ sound in –tuna. Jose was a staff member, four years my senior, and he instantly felt like an older brother. Equal parts pervert, foodie, alternative music lover, and jokester, with a laugh that borders on a hyaena’s cackle. Heh heh huh huh huh. I have known him for 16 years now, which we deduced from the difficult math problem 2008 – 1992, the latter the year of our camp in Sollentuna.

Our assigned seating at dinner placed us with a couple who taught college classes at a small school in the middle of Pennsylvania and a gas station owning couple from Oregon. We were clearly the entertainment at the table because all questions focused on Jose and I. How did we meet? (He was my camp counselor.) What did we do? (Him: construction project manager, me: HIV curriculum developer) Why do we know about all the alcohol related events on board? (Which we did because we decided to be weeklong drunks.) Martini degustation the first afternoon. Wine tasting the second afternoon. Whiskey tasting on the third day. Followed by an all-you-can-drink-in-an-hour wine party today just after gaping at the calving glaciers of Hubbard and ___ (the one on the left). The days have been drunktastic. I think the reason hours in the day were spent sober was because we were sleeping.

I was admittedly apprehensive about cruising. The schedules. The forced fun. The confinement. The feeling of being a herded animal. My impulse to bray and bah and moo was met with fruition. I couldn’t hold back my farm animal noises when we were instructed to line out on the decks in front of our emergency boats while still in Seattle. The worst indecency of all is when we had to take numbers to get on the emergency boats which led us to our daylong adventure in Sitka. After getting a number, as if we were at the deli counter, we had to endure a dreadful trivia game. Apparently no one on board knew the seven ancient wonders of the world, so I had to put the crowd (and the announcer) out of our collective misery. My prize: two luggage tags and two necklace room key holders, both with prominent Celebrity Cruises logos. I said, “Can you call #26 instead? That would be an awesome prize.” The announcer laughed nervously and asked the crowd to give me a round of applause. Then he dutifully called #15.

Why did I choose this boat? I asked my travel agent to give me the boat that sailed on June 6 and had the best food. Celebrity Infinity it was. I will say the food has been quite good: gazpacho with parmesan croutons, medium rare NY strip steak, phyllo pastry with roasted pear and gorgonzola, sushi buffet, profiteroles shaped like swans, apple pastries with caramel sauce, chicken wrapped around spinach, feta, and wild mushrooms, After Eight dinner mint ice cream, pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, julienned zucchini, and pesto. I can already see the cleft in my chin coming back with the weight I’ve gained.

Amenities on the ship are good. The gym is modern and the attached spa has every service you can think of, including some bullshit “thermiomine” or something that can take off “1-8 inches” from your body. Inches of what? Neurons? The Persian baths with herbal, Turkish, and dry steam baths were quite relaxing and actually cleared out my nose for the first time in weeks. I have since learned that if you wear your room robe, you can waltz in for free, because it looks suspiciously like the spa robe, and save yourself the ludicrous $17 fee to sit in some steam filled rooms and take a rainforest shower with alternating red and blue lights. It’s called color therapy, people. Get with the program.

Old people and assholes abound. The former are mostly harmless, although requiring extra room for their Little Rascals (one asked the Maitre’d, Can you park my BMW?), walkers, oxygen tanks, and wheelchairs. At the spa is where I encountered the worst of touron behavior. This guy had the arrangements for spa treatments for a party of five and they were each getting treatments every day of the cruise. He kept changing times, dates, and treatments: “Suzy wants the hot stone and Sheldon wants a Swedish massage with a seaweed wrap. What can you recommend for a man? A mud wrap? Isn’t that dirty? Do men do that? Yeah? And microdermabrasion? What’s that? Can I get that with a foot and ankle massage and the 90 minute four hands massage. No, wait, I’ll do the four hands with thermiomine treatment. But sir, men typically don’t have much cellulite. Don’t tell me what I need and don’t need! Yes, sir. No, 5:45 on Wednesday won’t work. I need tomorrow. No, 8am is too early. What do you mean you don’t have openings at 11am? Move someone else!” If I lacked any sense of decency and couth, I would have kicked him in the crotch, and said: “Oops, my foot slipped. I’m sorry.”

Jose and I did cut up with Sara, the partner of my friend Ranae in Seattle, who just so happened to be on the boat with her friend who is one of the two acupuncturists on board. Sara has a great sense of humor and helped me point out all the cruisetastic fashions like an elderly couple with matching nautical captain’s hats, jauntily set off to the left, sporting navy sweaters with white cable stitching on V-neck collars, and a woman with a black, white and gold blouse where the gold took the form of cartoons of stylized knotted cords on the shoulders, biceps, and triceps of her bodice. It was the kind of shirt rich people mistakenly spend over $500 for without having the foggiest idea it would shame a homeless person. And there is a preponderance of metrosexuals with unsuspecting young wives who have no idea their husbands find male companionship while on business trips using craigslist. You know the kind where their hair is perfectly coiffed and spiky, the pants are tight fitting and the underwear is 2xist or worse, some stringy banana hammock bullshit they bought out of an International Male catalog. Families are few and far between. But the children seem to be well behaved and no one has bothered me yet.

We also met a great New Orleans couple we’ve dubbed the King and Queen of New Orleans. They drink everyone on this ship under the table and have been our booze hound buddies the last three days. Most of their conversations relate to partying, types of wine and liquor they like, and stories about buying or drinking booze. Jose and I love them. And they love us.

Most of the onboard entertainment is appalling: Broadway revues, ventriloquists, has been naturalists from public television, and an abundance of guest relations staff who man the dancefloor to encourage crusions to dance and talk with too-happy voices about the trivia games we will play or the 40% off Tanzanite sale in the promenade when the Hubbard glacier is in view. The casino is ancient Egyptian in theme, and you can imagine the plethora of Anubis, King Tut, and pyramids-tinged “art” that surrounds the slot machines, craps and poker tables, and sports bar. Speaking of art, they kept touting their art auction, which looked like the saddest drop-out dregs of that art school on TV where you copied three cartoon characters in pencil and mailed your application to some backwater in the north Midwest. The Queen of New Orleans said she saw the exact same artwork on her Mediterranean cruise a couple years ago.

Which brings me to money. Celebrity Cruises loves your money. They set automatic tips on all bills. They tell you how you can purchase jewelry, spa packages, mimosas and spiked coffee drinks, porn in your room, internet time, wolf and polar bear decorated fleece jackets, genuine collectible Celebrity martini glasses, bathrobes (the ones in your room), and bottles of wine with dinner, at every possible moment throughout the day. The excursions in any guide book look to be about 25-50% of the cost of what you pay the bozos on this boat, and you tend to get less freedom, more bus time, and less time at the destination you are actually seeking to spend your vacation time at.

I officially passed out at 6:30pm last night after the round the world wine party and a chocolate martini with Sara to top it off. The plan was to meet Jose for dinner at 8:30 in the buffet, but somehow my trip back to the room resulted in a nap that began at 6:30pm and ended at 1:30am. The funny thing is, I had the smallest of pasta salads for lunch yesterday, slept through dinner, and I don’t feel the least bit hungry. Apparently, like a good grizzly, I have stored enough fat to nourish me through days without eating.

Now I am stuck awake at 3am and Jose is snoring like a diesel engine that has almost run out of oil, but keeps churning its cylinders. The sound is quite amazing in that it actually comes out of a human being as opposed to a machine you’d find in a factory in Detroit in 1890. He claims that if I cluck my tongue he will stop snoring. I’ve been clucking like a chicken, but alas, the snore goes on. I switched my tactic to a shoulder push, and after a 30 second reprieve, the Bartok symphony started again. Here’s to Benadryl!

Ok, admission. I kinda like dressing up for dinner. I like wearing a suit and tie. I don’t mind that formal night means dark suit and tie and informal night means slacks and jacket. I do find it funny that in our rules book: jeans, tank tops, flip flops, and hats “ruin the ambience in the dining room, so please refrain from wearing them.” Listen up Seattle! In fact, the Oregon gas station owner said that he had not worn formal wear in so long, when he went to get his suits dry cleaned, not only had the two cleaners he knew been closed down, the physical buildings had been torn down as well. Both of them. After watching a sublimely simple YouTube video, I am now a master at the Windsor knot, and my ties have a nice triangular shape at the top. I guess I am anal retentive, because that knot makes me smile a little inside.