2004-08-05 - 10:28 p.m.
That first night in the ship, I slept like a baby in a cradle. What is it about sleeping in something that moves, such as on a ship or a train, that induces such a peaceful sleep? That must prove our nomadic heritage. And being in that ship�s cabin felt like I was in my own little cocoon.
I got up about 9:00, later than I had expected to, and took a shower. I�m not sure why I liked that little shower so much, it was just slightly larger than my body, but something about being in there smelled so good, so I really enjoyed it. Scent was one of my happiest senses on this trip and I truly regretted that no Thomas Edison had ever invented a recording device to satisfy that. We can record sounds and we can record sights, but smell, touch, and taste are kept internal and unshareable.
By the time I was dressed, I had missed the breakfast in the main dining room, but the Big Apple Caf� was still serving breakfast for another hour, so I went up there (it�s at the rear of the Pool deck) and filled my plate and tray with a buffet breakfast.
The dining room was somewhat crowded and I felt that sharing a table was prudent, but up here there was no maitre d� to control the seating, so I simply selected my own victims and imposed myself. I�m not sure what made me select them, a middle-aged couple sitting alone at a table for six (maybe like an atom with a nearly empty outer shell, that configuration invited molecularization), but although at first they seemed a little surprised, they instantly got over it and seemed pleased. They invited me to sit and told me they had been waiting for another couple who was traveling with them, but it looks like they weren�t going to make it that morning. That gave me an opening into the conversation, talking about how I had slept late, too, and their friends were probably just relaxing and enjoying themselves and what�s a trip like this for, otherwise? I went on to talk about the peaceful cabin and the beds moved over and the lights on the water outside the window and rocking like a baby and the delicious smell of the shower�that�s one of my skills, I think, that in an instant I can join a party of strangers and start talking about whatever. And I was soon discovering that middle-aged or elderly couples were best for this (although it certainly didn�t have to be that age group), as by this time in their marriage they�ve pretty much already talked about anything they want to talk about with each other and infusing the atmosphere with new energy is a plus, particularly if the infuser can get them to laugh, which is something else I can do. People in that age group don�t have that stilted, comformative-expectative, social reticence that so many young couples do, nor is there that painful hesitant, surly, stop and go, �you have to draw out of them every word� conversation that involves, say, teenagers. I guess what I am saying as that somewhere around the second half of life, people finally relax, get over themselves, and just have a more comfortable time of it�so there is some advantage to aging.
Again, these were people that I wouldn�t have ever expected to be in combination with under normal circumstances, they were from Oklahoma and that might be all you need to know about them, and yet they, and also their friends who did join them soon after I sat down, ended up being among my favorite people on the trip. Being good representatives of America�s heartland, with an uncomplicated but an honest, appreciative, and joyful view of life, they are just exactly the kind of people that I really like. Not a cynical bone in the bunch. These aren�t the only kind of people that I like, but very definitely a kind that I do. In all honesty, how can anyone not like individuals from Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, South Dakota�there must be something that goes along with being so distant from the oceans and, instead, exist smack in the middle of the land that flattens a person down to what really matters and makes them accept more solidly grounded, rather than dangerously absorptive and fluid, values, and they have neighborliness, unlike isolated and fortressed mountain people. Maybe it�s their being generously open to others that makes me like them so much�their vision is as all-encompassing as their vistas of waving grain across infinite rolling prairies, that�s their ocean and it gives them a sustenance that they know how to control. Salt of the earth, people like this, and God bless �em. I mean that. (Now if I can only get them to not vote for George Bush, but people like this truly aren�t as dumb as people make them out to be, it�s just that they move at a seasonal, instead of daily, or maybe even a glacial pace, but they have good reason to be like that and so we�ll just have to deal with it).
I kept running into these four people all over this ship in the ensuing days, and they were always happy to run into me and were eager to hear of whatever was my latest adventure no matter what it was. And they would laugh, and how I would love that so! They simply were having a great time, as I was, and as one of my goals was to avoid the complainers, a corollary to that was to be attracted to the appreciators, as they were.
Next up on my agenda was to once and for all settle on �the shore excursion problem.� This had been another area where the saboteurs had done their subtle work. The shipping line had contracted with various tour operators to provide a variety of wonderful excursion options at every port. I saw their colorful catalogue as a marvelous wish-book of fun and adventure and, at first, my difficulty had been to select just one excursion at every port, as so many sounded so appealing. However, my �experience in the travel business� friend (whom I now think must never actually ever leave the ship and go into port) was insisting that I didn�t want to have �anything to do with any of that.� He tried to convince me that all the excursions were criminally overpriced, I could do much better on my own, and besides, I�d be stuck with hordes of �tourists,� that kind of person that everybody claims to abhor, and yet it is on their backs that all these travel operations are able to exist and run for the �rest� of us. After all, we�re not going around the world in eighty days in hot air balloons or joining with Stanley Livingston to explore into the darkest heart of Africa, are we?
But my friend did have a point. I remembered when I had vagabonded around Mexico (and had all the time in the world, which is an important factor in exploring �on the cheap�), I had been able to obtain things on my own for tens of dollars that tourists working with agencies had gotten for hundreds. And even now, my Lonely Planet guidebook did seem to raise a flag of suspicion�for example, the ship�s offering of an excursion to the pyramid of Xunantunich in Belize, which included a two-hour bus ride all the way across country practically to the Guatemala border, a boat ride across a river, entrance into the Xunantunich National Park, and a lunch in a Belizian restaurant, came at the price of $83.00. In offering instructions to the traveler on how to visit Xunantunich, Lonely Planet explained that you could take a cross-country bus that would drop you off at the river for $1.50 one way, the boat across the river was free, admission to the park was $3.50 and if you wanted lunch, depending upon what you wanted to eat, you could find one for a couple of dollars. So, yeah, sure I could put together this excursion for myself for somewhere around $12.00, and yet I wouldn�t enjoy a second of it, because I would be constantly worried about losing my way (assuming I had been able to find it in the first place) or missing the ship (because this was a 7 � hour excursion and the ship was going to be in port for 8 hours), and I�d be doing this whole thing by myself instead of joining along with new-found friends from the ship.
To help me decide (after already studying this issue for a month prior to getting on the ship!), I attended the ship�s port excursion lecture. His descriptions of the various offerings did not change what had already been my leanings. For example, Lonely Planet said that the only reason to be in Cozumel was for the diving (or snorkeling), so I decided to forgo all the ATV, Jeep, horse, or other excursions around the island and settle on snorkeling. For Roatan, the island off the coast of Honduras, I decided on an all-compassing tour that ended at a beach. And for Belize, I decided to go see one of their larger pyramids. In the end, I took the prudent, easy route and selected ship-offered excursions for Cozumel, Honduras, and Belize, but left Cancun to my own devices. Included in these was the very Xunantunich excursion in Belize that I mentioned above, and I think I got my money�s worth.
People very definitely can find their own thing to do in port and often right there on the dock one can find local tour operators who will offer the same tours that the ship was offering for more money, but not really that much more money and for my money, what gives the nod to selecting the ship�s excursions are the convenience, the security, and, most importantly, some people you already now know to join along with, and I think those things are worth the extra money the ship�s tours cost.
By the way, comparing Lonely Planet with the Internet, Lonely Planet was quite off on their prices. For example, they said you could take a small plane from Cancun to Chichen Itza for $120 round trip, but in doing research on the Internet, those airlines revealed that they charged $280 round trip. I don�t know if the prices are cheaper when you are there on site and the web site prices are inflated, but quite often the Internet seemed to reveal that the ship�s excursions were only about $20 more expensive per excursion than what you could get if you found one on your own, so for my money, to spend $20 to save all the hassle is well worth it. And I�m not a timid traveler, as my experiences vagabonding around Mexico and the U.S. definitely reveal. I�ve paid my dues hitchhiking, walking from town to town, sleeping on the ground or in bat-infested dormitories, and now I like to have a little convenience in my life.
While I am still on this subject, I will say that from talking with lots of people on the ship about this excursion issue, other than taking the ship-offered excursions, the only other option I might recommend would be to hire a taxi driver for the day. I don�t have experience doing this so I can�t say for sure how well it works out, but many people I talked with did this and really, really liked it. The drivers know the area well and can take you to whatever in the world you want, whether it be a pristine, vacant beach, or great shopping, or a hot bar, or a museum�anything. They don�t charge much and are perfectly willing to be with you all day, even while you are just playing on the white sands of a beautiful beach. (The trick is to pay them at the END of the day.) And they�ll get you back to the ship on time. Especially for a family or a large group, this is extremely cost effective, whereas the ship excursions charge by the person and this could really add up if you have a large family. This option is something I will definitely look into next time I go on a cruise.
After filling out my excursion selection form and dropping it off at the excursion desk, I decided to explore the ship once again, this time during the daylight hours. I loved seeing how people had spread out all over the ship and every single thing that there was to be done, somebody was there doing it! People were walking or jogging around the Promenade deck, swimming in the pools, soaking in the hot tubs, playing basketball on the basketball court, playing shuffleboard, practicing drives in the golf net, working out in the fitness room, getting massages or other pampering in the spa, gambling in the casino, shopping in the duty-free stores, trying their luck at bingo, playing cards and board games in the game room, communicating on the Internet in the Internet caf�, sunbathing, reading, or attending any of the various lectures or workshops that were offered. Wherever anybody could eat, they were eating. And wherever they could drink, they were drinking.
There was a sign on the Promenade deck that said that four and a quarter times around the ship equaled a mile, so I decided to walk a mile. The Promenade deck turned out to be one of my favorite locations on the ship, being deck 6 and the lowest open deck, it was where you were closest to the water. It was also the quietest public deck; the only �music� piped in came from the waves, themselves. I noticed that if anyone sought quiet, contemplative moments, they would most often find a bench on the Promenade deck, although I found other quiet spots, too, such as the �porch� outside right behind what was the disco in the evening hours (but silent during the day) at the rear of Deck 8 and also right at the front of the ship on the Sun deck, blocked from the noise of the Pool deck down below by the fitness room and the golf net structure. Several times I pulled a deck chair over to that location when I wanted to read outside, which put me in line for meeting and having conversations with the people who had come up to use the golf driving net and then hung around afterwards to talk. Those tended to be a younger, more athletic crowd (although the most athletic hung out around the basketball court), even kids. One cute little boy had come up there to hit some drives but he got there after the crew had put away the golf clubs (which they did after 6 P.M.). Undeterred, he found some loose golf balls and said, �Well, I can�t do any golf, but I can do some pitching!, so he used the golf driving target to pitch golf balls at as if he were a baseball pitcher. I enjoyed his enthusiasm and his willingness to make do and once having made his acquaintance, I kept seeing him all over the place on that ship. It wouldn�t surprise me if had already found his way into the engine room and other private spaces, and if so, I hope he was well-welcomed.
A cruise like this was a perfect vacation for families because, as I wrote earlier, it really was quite cost effective, and one of the best features was that kids could run all over that ship and be quite safe, something they can�t even do in their home towns these days. No more �Huck Finn� summers for kids nowadays, it seems, yet on a ship they and their parents can have some freedom to do whatever the hell they want, together or apart. Kids loved the independence and parents loved the relaxation of not having to worry about and watch over the kids every second. And the ship offered all sorts of organized programs for kids of every age group, from babies all the way up to the oldest teenagers.
Many of the families outfitted each member with a walkie-talkie, which I thought was a clever idea. Often I�d hear them converse with each other, the mother would be shopping for souvenirs in the store, the father would be smoking a cigar in Gatsby�s bar, the teenage son would be hanging out on the Promenade deck with a girl he had met, and the little girl would be taking a face-painting class. They�d all agree to meet at a certain place for dinner and then afterwards go to the song and dance show.
On my mile walk around the Promenade deck, I ran into the girl I had met yesterday who was going into the Army. She was feeling seasick and was zonked out on the bench under a lifeboat, trying to recover. I never suffered one hint of seasickness on this trip, thank God, and I have been one to suffer from it in the past, most noticeably on a deep sea fishing excursion out of Ventura, on the ferryboat across to Catalina, and on a dive boat in Australia. I had gotten for this trip a box of Bonine, but I didn�t seem to need it. You�re supposed to take it one hour before you get on the boat, which I had done yesterday, but then I forgot about it and by the time the ship left port five hours later, Bonine was the furthest thing from my mind.
But the Army girl seemed really miserable and I suggested that she go down to the ship�s doctor for a shot of medication, but she was reluctant to do that. Instead, we sat down and she told me about the partying that she had done last night and as she talked, I began to wonder if how she felt wasn�t seasickness at all, but the result of too much drinking champagne, smoking, and dancing. She was the only person I met on this entire trip who ever complained of seasickness, and even with her it was only that one morning.
After a while, her mother came out and joined us, and then the Army girl decided to go upstairs to her cabin for a nap and the mother wanted to go up to one of the lounges to get a drink. We picked �Oscars,� a piano bar in the evenings, but it was quiet and peaceful during the day. She drank a �Cosmo� and I had a free Coke from my unlimited soft drink card. We mostly talked about food, of all things. Then the mother, too, decided to go take a nap and I figured it was time for lunch.
I went to the main dining room (The Seven Seas), which I had missed for breakfast that morning and told the maitre d� I wanted to share. I was taken to a table for four and soon afterwards was joined by a young couple celebrating a wedding anniversary via this cruise. The man was a Texan, but his wife was from the Ukraine, a very beautiful woman who was quite proud of her country, but nevertheless loved now living in Texas. Our waiter was from Turkey and he and the Ukraine woman discovered that they were from towns across the Black Sea from each other. I told the Ukraine woman that I wanted to see the Black Sea (although I didn�t elaborate that I had been introduced to the setting by gay porn featuring Russian porn stars on vacation) and she said I had to go to the Ukraine and if I truly wanted to go, I could be a guest of her parents.
I asked the man how the two of them had met. He said, �God brought us together,� but she said, �We met on the Internet.� So he said, �Well, God USED the Internet to bring us together,� and I said, �Like that story about the drowning man and the rescue boat and the helicopter� (as in �how else does God work, but through the tools of reality) and he got very excited and said, �Yes, yes, exactly like that, oh please, tell her the story,� so I told the Ukrainian woman the story about the drowning man who wouldn�t accept help from the rescue boat or the helicopter because he believed in God and God would save him, but he ultimately drowned and when he arrived in heaven, he was very mad at God and asked, �Why didn�t you save me, I was praying to you for help."
�Well, I sent you a rescue boat and a helicopter,� God explained.
The man and I further talked about miracles and God answering prayers and so on, and his wife and I talked about the Ukraine and the Black Sea. In-between, the Turkish waiter would bring us our delicious food choices and the Ukrainian woman would talk with him in Turkish. She spoke out loud his name, �Aslan,� which she read from his nametag, and then she said the word �lion.� Suddenly my ears perked up and I said, �Wait a minute,� and asked the waiter to show me his nametag. �Aslan� was his last name. �And does �Aslan� mean something?� I asked. �Lion,� said the waiter, �Aslan is Turkish for �lion.��
�Well I�ll be,� I said to the Texan, knowing full well that he was a Christian and would know and love C.S. Lewis (as I do), �So that�s where �Aslan� the lion in the Chronicles of Narnia got his name, it simply means �lion� in Turkish!� It was a marvelously revelatory moment, and as for the Texan, he, too, was excited and seemed to be filled with even more appreciation for God than he had been previously.
His wife said, �If you really want to go to the Ukraine, I�ve got to write down for you my parents� address, do you have a piece of paper?�
It just so happened that I had my journal with me, so I handed it to her and she wrote down not only her parents� address, but also her own e-mail address.
�This is the first time I have allowed you to give out your e-mail address to another man,� her husband said, �but it is because with this man that I finally got to have the conversation about God that my whole life I�ve wanted to have.�
From then on, whenever I saw Mr. Aslan in the dining room, I�d call out to him, �Hello, Mr. Lion, how are you doing today?� and he�d nod and smile and say, �I hope they are giving you good service, today, and if not, you come to me!� But yeah, they always gave me good service, the crew was outstanding, as the reviewers had written.
After lunch, the celebrating couple went down to their stateroom, which happened to be right next door to mine. They spent a LOT of time in there, for obvious reasons. I left them alone, for obvious reasons.
I went off to one of the ship�s lounges to hear a lecture on the ancient Maya civilization. However, the lecturer kept putting me to sleep, it was absolute torture. I wasn�t sure if it was because something about the comfort of that lounge induced sleep, or I was tired, or the lecturer was truly dull, but I kept feeling that I could have walked up there right then and there and extemporaneously given a lecture on the Mayas that would be ten times better than that dreck he was monotonously droning out. (Of course, I had already read up on them prior to my trip.) Finally I gave up and walked out and went back to my cabin for a nap. Later, others told me that that man was awful, so boring and disorganized in his talks, and yet he was the one the cruise company had hired to give various lectures on the ship. Beyond his series on the Maya, he gave some writing workshops along the vein of �the stories that are within you.� I thought, I could do everything in his job so much better and wondered how it is that a person gets a job like that and how much it pays.
I woke up from my nap thinking, it�s time for a drink. I was attracted to the idea of the �Martini Clinic� that they offered up in Gatsby�s lounge (the �Wine and Martini Bar�) on the rear edge of the top deck. I have to admit that the popularity of the martini as a drink was a mystery to me. In my very earliest drinking days, in college, a girlfriend and I experimented with various combinations of gin and vermouth one whole evening in an attempt at finding a formula that we liked, to no avail. All we did was get stinking drunk and decided that no matter what, the martini was a foul-tasting drink. And yet so many people that I know swear by them, including �Mr. I Was Once In The Travel Business� who drinks nothing else, although to be precisely accurate, the drink he likes is more properly called a Gibson, as he always insists that the cocktail waitress furnish him with a boatload of cocktail onions, not olives.
But now bartenders are making �modern martinis� out of vodka instead of gin, and they flavor and color them not with vermouth, but with various combinations of liqueurs, something I am sure that makes the older, macho martini drinkers retreat in homophobic queasiness, but which is quite appealing to a bower bird like me who also doesn�t parcel the world�s experiences out into limited categories of �manly� and �not manly.� To me, it is more manly to do whatever the hell you want without worrying about what other people think of you. (Although if what you want is to display your fat hairy ass in a thong, I draw the line at that.)
So, the Martini Clinic: the waitress explained to me that for $10.00, she would bring me a taste of each of four different martinis, and then at the end I could choose the one I liked best and she would bring me a 10 ounce glass of that one. That sounded like a great idea, so I went for it. I imagined that �tasting� the four of them meant she would bring me a shot glass of each, but instead she placed on my table what looked like a full-fledged complete drink, reddish-orange in color. She said, �Here is your first one, a Cosmopolitan Martini,� which was made, I think, with grenadine. (In my later talking about it, the Army girl�s mother knew exactly what it was, saying that a Cosmo Martini is a very popular drink these days.) I must say that it was delicious, which was good, as I wasn�t sure I would like any of them, but this did not harken back to my drunken Berkeley evening with Jeanne Teresi. But as I am normally a one-drink-an-evening man, I worried about the size of it. Well, what the hell, it sure tasted good, and the waitress also brought me a big bowl of salted peanuts, so I dove in. I wasn�t going to have to drive anywhere afterwards.
Also up there in Gatsby�s, the only other people besides me and the cocktail waitress, were two guys in their late 20s, early 30s, also having the Martini Clinic, intent upon playing cards in one of the booths. One was rather cute, the other one was fat. They did not lay eyes on me the whole time. The combination of the fat with the cute at first was a red herring that fouled my gaydar, but as time went on and I was safely able to observe them, they did seem rather more intimate with each other than two straight men would have been, I think.
I finished the Cosmo Martini and the waitress brought me my second one, this time a Sambuca Martini, which was clear-colored, with three espresso beans floating in it. Unfortunately, this one I didn�t like all that well, as Sambuca is a licorice-flavored liqueur and I don�t like licorice. But with the help of the peanuts, I managed.
While I was drinking that one, a group came in that consisted of a Kennedy-haired man, a well-dressed woman, a sorority girl, a very handsome jock in his early twenties, and another guy slightly older than the jock, with a shaved head. I figured that all but the guy with the shaved head were in one family, they shared the same handsome look of Eastern Seaboard sophistication and money. The guy with the shaved head was the odd man out and I couldn�t quite figure out what his relationship was with the group, except that he seemed to use every opportunity to touch the jock, patting him on the muscular shoulder, squeezing his taut thigh, while making his conversational points, and throughout all this attention, the recipient of the touching responded not one whit, the shaved head may as well have been ministering to an empty chair. Were they really lovers (or sex buddies), but the handsome Easterner was trying to keep it from his parents? The shaved head guy was certainly being indiscreet, himself. After having so far not seen one gay person on this cruise (Tadzio, possibly, was questionable), suddenly there were four potential ones in this one cocktail lounge.
Right on time, the waitress brought me my third, a bright green (musk melon) Midori Martini. Ah, now we were back to tasting good, again.
The Kennedy family had whatever it was they were drinking (not the Martini Clinic) and got up and left and I wasn�t sorry to see the unsmiling, non-reacting jock go�he bugged me with his combination of beauty and consummate lack of reactive personality. So now it was just me and the card-players in the booth, still ignoring my presence. Yeah, they had to be gay, they looked into each other�s eyes too long. Plus the fact of their ignoring me�how very �gay bar� of them.
Upon my finishing my Midori, the waitress brought me my fourth Martini, a Blue Curacao one that also had Cr�me de Cacao in it. Now, prior to the taste test, just simply ordering off the menu, that was the one that I would have ordered, and I did like it, but upon drinking all four, my favorite was the Cosmo. But who could tell at this point how well my taste buds were functioning.
By this time the card players were getting ready to leave and asked the waitress for the check, which broke them out of their eye-lock with each other. I, and my so far four martinis, jumped into the gap. I said, �Did you guys have the Martini Clinic, too?�
�Yep,� said the good-looking one, none too friendly and still avoiding all eye contact. The fat one just dug out his keycard.
I said, �I wonder just how much we actually had to drink?� You know, seeking a little commiseration, here. Based on my delivery, this could have, should have been a funny line (I mean, when I ran into the two couples from Oklahoma several days later, they laughed at just my recall of the experience, they liked it when I said, �Martini Clinic, and Clinic was the operative word, because you needed a clinic when you were through!), but to this humorless pair, it was as welcome as a mosquito in the ear.
�Don�t ask what you don�t want to know,� was the good-looking one�s response.
�But I do want to know, that�s why I am asking,� and when the waitress came to ask me which one I wanted for my big drink, I said, �How much have I had, anyway?� She got confused and started to explain how the $10.00 was a good deal, and I said, �I don�t care about the money, I want to know how much alcohol I have had. I mean, am I going to just get up and walk off in the wrong direction and step right over that rail (which would send me plummeting ten decks down into the ocean)?� In all honestly, I was concerned that I might have had the equivalent of four martinis and was about to imbibe a fifth, maybe sixth one. She didn�t seem to fully understand just exactly what I was asking, but maybe the price of the drink was a clue and, if so, I really hadn�t had as much as it looked, maybe just the equivalent of two drinks, that�s all.
I ordered my ten-ounce Cosmopolitan Martini (the one I had had when my taste buds were fresh) and then a great big Hemingway-sort of a man came in and sat down at the table next to me, ordered without fanfare a real man�s martini for himself and then turned in his chair and started talking to me, very friendly. His behavior, contrasted with the gay guys, underscored a social principle for me: the only people who will talk to you are the ones who are either sexually attracted to you, or else feel completely safe from being sexually attractive to you�which is one reason why I didn�t specifically take a gay cruise (another reason being that they market them like they�re floating circuit parties and that image doesn�t exactly appeal to me, Tina). That�s why I can easily engage in conversation old married couples, kids, or secure straight men, they�re not sexually attracted to me and don�t fear that I am sexually attracted to them. But few gay men feel that secure, they just always kind of feel like they are available meat (though truth to tell, very few of them are), thus this Hemingway hunk immediately became like my best friend, whereas the cute card playing guy (or his unattractive friend) couldn�t even deign to be civil.
Hemingway told me he was on this cruise with his wife and daughter�his son wouldn�t go with them, because he was too self-conscious over his weight, so now, to be fair, the man had to come up with another vacation to do with the boy. That was the second person on this cruise to discuss weight with me, and I was beginning to be a little bothered by it. But I sympathized with their plight and wondered what he and the boy could do that would be a good substitute for the cruise. I did like this man and almost daily ran into him on the ship. The problem was that I kept running into him in the exact same place every time, which happened to be in the Internet Caf�, which really was just one of the hallways on the ship with computers lined up along it. A woman whom I took to be his wife was always on it and he was always hovering over her. When I first saw him, I joked, �Be careful, don�t spend all your money, now,� (using the Internet there cost something like $15 a minute), but I guess he was going to spend all his money there, because I saw them there every day. Maybe they were communicating with the overweight son, who had stayed back at home. I felt that it really wasn�t a very happy family�certainly the woman, who could have been beautiful at one time, seemed overburdened by some kind of stress. It got so I didn�t like running into them, much preferring to run into, say, the two couples from Oklahoma who were always good for a quick pick-me-up.
It was by now dinner time, and tonight was going to be a �formal� night.
I ought to explain that this cruise line pioneered what they call �freestyle dining,� which some other cruise lines have now copied. Traditionally, on ships, you select one of two dinner �seatings,� an early seating or a late seating, and you have an assigned table that you use every night. You have the same people at your assigned table, and you have the same waiter every night, who gets to know your tastes and idiosyncrasies. Also, you have to dress up for dinner.
In freestyle dining, you have no set dinner time and no set table. You simply go whenever you want (during the hours that that dining room is open) and you have flexibility as to where you sit. And, of course, you will not necessarily have the same waiter. And along with this more casual arrangement, cruise ships have abandoned the dressing up, saving that for special nights only.
Since modern cruise ships have more than one place to eat dinner (this ship had eight different places, The Seven Seas, The Four Seasons, Le Bistro, The Pasta Caf�, The Big Apple Caf�, The Internet Caf�, the Casino, and the barbecue out by the pool), the freestyle arrangement makes much more sense, anyway. And while on this ship you weren�t allowed to wear shorts, jeans, or collarless shirts in the two �fancy� dining rooms, you could wear whatever you wanted in any of the others, so nobody ever needed to feel constrained. I noticed that some people never ate a single meal in the fancy dining rooms, much preferring to simply eat every meal out by the pool, or take advantage of the buffet in the Big Apple Caf�.
Some people like the formal thing of old cruise ships and so the formal night is a big deal for them. In fact, if men want to wear tuxedos and didn�t own one, they could rent one on the ship, if they wanted. One could also simply wear a dark suit to a formal dinner, a tuxedo wasn�t necessary, only an option if you wanted.
They also combine this formal night with having a cocktail party with the Captain, which is mostly a photo opportunity��For $29.95, you can have a photo with the Captain!� Well, I didn�t go in for any of the �Captain� stuff and since I was traveling alone, I didn�t think having a tuxedo was important (I might have if the trip were a romantic occasion), but I did bring a dark navy blue suit, so I was okay for formal night.
I took my second shower of the day and put on my white dress shirt, favorite blue, white and silver tie, and dark navy blue pinstripe suit. Thank goodness for air conditioning! I told the maitre d� that I wanted to share, and I was placed at a table that had three other couples at it. One couple was from Phoenix, Arizona, another was from Wichita, Kansas, and the third was from Dallas. It was a fun group for that dinner, but otherwise nothing particularly outstanding�running into any of them later was uneventful.
During the dinner, the ship�s photographer was almost a pest with all the pictures he took, when I knew I wasn�t interested in buying any of them. But the couples at our table were really into it and I kept seeing their pictures everywhere in the photo gallery. I suppose if I weren�t in my pictures alone, they would have been worth buying. I did toy with the idea of buying pictures of other people, pictures of the families I met or pictures of some of the cute guys out by the pool, but I figured that would be dangerously suspicious so I didn�t even ask if that were possible. Wouldn�t it have been weird if somebody bought some of the pictures of me?
After dinner, it was time for a show in the large, comfortable show lounge (I found the big long couches to be best). Here, and in the evenings after, I realized that describing the shows as Broadway was a misnomer. Like Las Vegas was more like it, as these were all just song and dance revues, not actual plays, or Broadway-type musicals as I had expected. The performances were generally good and very high-energy, perhaps too high energy, as a little modulation is good for interest and an emotional wallop. With these shows, it was as if all the slides of the equalizer were put all the way to the top�a little too treble and frenetic. Also, they didn�t take any risks, which I guess is necessary for a homogenized audience like that. All the songs they sang were Oscar, Tony, and Grammy winners, or hits from the 50s, 60s, 70s, that sort of thing, things that were more or less guaranteed to be popular or acceptable to as broad of an audience as possible. I found their delivery to be frustrating, though, as they were given to singing medleys instead of complete songs, like they wanted to appear good by giving you as much stuff as possible, but by doing so they sacrificed emotional depth. This was kind of like the MTV of Las Vegas shows, with very quick cuts from scene to scene which, ultimately was unsatisfying.
Then at midnight there was a comedian. This guy was quite funny (despite the occasional homophobic joke), but again, I realized that they had to homogenize the material down. After all, this was more like a �captive� audience, it wasn�t like the people had especially selected and bought tickets for a comedian based on the kind of material that they appreciated. For example, for an audience like this, they would never have someone like George Carlin or Whoopi Goldberg�I would think that even Jay Leno or David Letterman-type comics would even be too controversial. No political jokes. Which pretty much took it down to nearly the level of bathroom jokes. In fact, some of the jokes were bathroom jokes (such as the already aforementioned joke about getting clean up by soaping up the walls and spinning around in the shower).
But a couple of his jokes can get me laughing again, more than a week later. For example, this one:
What do think about those powerful vacuum toilets, pretty freaky, huh? Have you ever flushed one while you were still sitting on it? (Ha ha ha!) I tried that and was stuck there for a week! (Ha ha ha!) Gave me a big hicky on my butt! (Ha ha ha!) It looked good in my thong, though. (Ha ha ha!) Boy, that thong�the first few times I wore it, I didn�t even know there was supposed to be a front and a back. (Ha ha ha!) I wore it backwards (Ha ha ha!), I thought that wide part was like a little pocket in the back, I put my bottle of suntan lotion in there (Ha ha ha!). And an apple for a snack! (Ha ha ha!)
I still love that one, the image of a bottle of suntan lotion and an apple in the back. I don�t want to think about how it looked in the front.
Or this one:
These islands we go to�the way they drive, oh boy, you don�t even want to look! There�s an accident waiting around every corner. You ever get a rental car and drive yourself? I did that once. I was driving up a mountain road and a guy came at me from the other direction. When he passed me, he rolled down his window and shouted �Pig!� I rolled down mine and shouted �Ass!� I rounded the corner and there was a pig in the road. I looked back and said, "Uh, watch out for that ass�."
So what were his homophobic jokes? The only one I really remember was part of a routine about how bad he felt neutering his male dog. I mean, guys, doesn�t it make you feel especially bad? And he doesn�t know what you�re doing, he�s all �Okay dokey, where are we going, huh, is it going to be fun, huh,� tail wagging. I wanted to hide my eyes in shame. Got him home afterwards, and he was all [now acting all limp-wristed and like a fag] �Thay, want to redecorate?�
I kind of felt like lodging a protest with the comedian himself afterwards, but then thought the best of it. Some people just don�t get it. And besides, I loved his �apple in the thong� joke, so maybe it�s a fair trade.
By this time it was after one in the morning and tomorrow was Cozumel, our first port, so I decided to go to bed.
END OF DAY TWO
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