"How do you market a cruise to people? That seems kinda hard. Do you know what I mean? Like, 'Hey, do you like hotels?' 'Yeah.' 'How about one that could sink?'"
-- Demetri Martin
On the ship there are port days and sea days. As you might guess, the port days are spent in port, and the sea days are spent SEAsoning french fries with many different and exotic salts. No, wait-- the days are spent literally at sea. This is a repositioning cruise, going from Hawai'i to Australia, to take advantage of the southern hemisphere's warm weather (or maybe to avoid the northern hemisphere's cold weather). And as such, there are A LOT of sea days. Of the 19 days we're on the ship, something like 13 of them are just us at sea, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and not a whole lot else.
The point I'm trying to get to is that Steve from Canada, the Cruise Director, has to program a number of activities to keep people occupied, and these range from built-in things on the ship, like swimming and rock climbing, to trivia and bingo, to live music and other performances. And in fact, there's so much going on that I've been too busy to blog. Or relax, even. Which is not at all the state I want to be in.
We figured this out a couple of years ago when we went to Ottawa. Our normal mode is to plan our time pretty extensively. But on this particular trip we decided to take a day off to watch Iron Fist (do not recommend) and eat candy (100% do recommend). And having this brief oasis of calm in our otherwise full week of activities made a huge difference in our vacation enjoyment.
But right now, we've been on the ship two days and haven't even made it to a pool yet. A travesty! And one that needs to be rectified immediately. Or maybe as soon as the pools open tomorrow.
But if soaking in hot tubs hasn't been happening, how have we been filling our time? Meeting people, mostly. We were told by Steve from Canada that there are roughly 3200 people on the ship: 2400 of them are from Australia and 800 are from "other places". So we are meeting a lot of Australians. And so far they have all been delightful, friendly, and quite interesting.
We've mostly been meeting people at supper. We're used to being assigned a table with the same people the first day of the cruise. But this trip we get randomly assigned to a different table every night. You don't form those same friendships (we have people that we still talk to regularly from our Tampa cruise in 2015), but you get to spend time with more people. So this time maybe that trade is worth it.
We're still so early in the trip that it's difficult to tell what friendships will develop or who we're going to meet. There are still two weeks left before landfall -- an eternity! Maybe I'll manage to get my schedule straight just in time for the trip to end.
The opening paragraph in Herman Melville's Typee:
ReplyDeleteSix months at sea! Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else! Weeks and weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted. There is not a sweet potato left; not a single yam. Those glorious bunches of bananas, which once decorated our stern and quarter-deck, have, alas, disappeared! and the delicious oranges which hung suspended from our tops and stays—they, too, are gone! Yes, they are all departed, and there is nothing left us but salt-horse and sea-biscuit. Oh! ye state-room sailors, who make so much ado about a fourteen-days’ passage across the Atlantic; who so pathetically relate the privations and hardships of the sea, where, after a day of breakfasting, lunching, dining off five courses, chatting, playing whist, and drinking champagne-punch, it was your hard lot to be shut up in little cabinets of mahogany and maple, and sleep for ten hours, with nothing to disturb you but ‘those good-for-nothing tars, shouting and tramping overhead’,—what would ye say to our six months out of sight of land?
The opening chapter of Herman Melville's Typee:
ReplyDeleteSix months at sea! Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else! Weeks and weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted. There is not a sweet potato left; not a single yam. Those glorious bunches of bananas, which once decorated our stern and quarter-deck, have, alas, disappeared! and the delicious oranges which hung suspended from our tops and stays—they, too, are gone! Yes, they are all departed, and there is nothing left us but salt-horse and sea-biscuit. Oh! ye state-room sailors, who make so much ado about a fourteen-days’ passage across the Atlantic; who so pathetically relate the privations and hardships of the sea, where, after a day of breakfasting, lunching, dining off five courses, chatting, playing whist, and drinking champagne-punch, it was your hard lot to be shut up in little cabinets of mahogany and maple, and sleep for ten hours, with nothing to disturb you but ‘those good-for-nothing tars, shouting and tramping overhead’,—what would ye say to our six months out of sight of land?