First itinerary revision

I just got email saying that for "operational reasons", the first day of the six-day China excursion I'm signed up for has changed. A museum in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, that we were originally scheduled to see before lunch, we now see after lunch; a temple set atop a cliff near a famous surf beach and attended by a family of macaque monkeys, is no longer to be visited, and we're now on our own for dinner, for which we will have an hour inside the airport. I have to wonder whether Balinese airport food is any better than American airport food. I suspect not.

I know sometimes changes are necessary, and I trust Holland-America to protect us from untoward occurrences. But "operational reasons"? Come on, people, inquiring minds want to know. Is there a plague of crazed komodo dragons loose on Bali? Is the surf beach overrun by predatory Balinese surfers who have started kidnapping tourists and holding them for ransom, to be paid in boards and ganja? Has the tour guide broken up with his vindictive long-time girlfriend, who manages the temple macaques, to the extent that macaques can be managed?

This is a world cruise! We have signed on for adventure! "Operational reasons" is something we can get from any bureaucrat at the local city hall. We want details! (And if it's something boring like, "In the past, we've found that we overloaded that first day, something had to be cut, we're sorry about the macaques, but we need to be realistic here," you might consider making something up. We'll go where you tell us, we might as well have some imaginary romance to chew on with our airport food.)

One down, one to go

OK, I've got one suitcase packed, closed, labeled with the yellow plastic Cruise Specialists luggage tag and the red paper ms Amsterdam tag and the white paper FedEx tag with collections of laser-readable black lines that will bring my suitcase from my condo in Portland to my cabin on board the Amsterdam. Or so I hope. (Can I survive for four months with the one set of clothes I wear on the plane to Florida if all these labels fail? Might make doing laundry a bit weird, though I could probably wear my terrycloth onboard robe and borrow flipflops from a neighbor.)

OK, so you are probably wondering why there is a stuffed penguin atop this blog entry.

My daughter Anne and her friend El came down to Portland from Seattle this weekend for a Merry Christmas and Bon Voyage visit. El suggested that I might want to get a garden gnome to take along on my cruise so I can take pictures of him in all the exotic locales I'll be visiting to prove that any photos I publish aren't just postcards or stock shots cribbed from the Internet. "Garden Gnome" didn't speak to my condition, but then I remembered the penguin.

The individual you see in the picture has been with me since freshman year of college -- 1961. He is the sole survivor of a set of three or four that I acquired for the inscrutable sort of reason young women acquire such things. One of them I named after a young man I was secretly in like with -- it felt like "in love" at the time -- but I gave that one away. The other ones disappeared as I moved from college to marriage to motherhood to career. But this one has stayed with me throughout and so has probably earned a world cruise for loyalty if for no other reason.

He had not, however, earned a name until this morning, when Anne asked what his name is. He is now officially Dmitri. Anne objected that there are no penguins in Russia, but on that point she's wrong, at least in a literary sense and if you're willing to count Ukraine as part of Russia. I recently read a book called Death and the Penguin by a modern Ukrainian author named Andrei Kurkov. Good book, even in translation. That penguin (fictional, but very clearly personified) lived with the hero of the book after a zoo in Kiev closed down and gave away its animals to anyone who wanted them. He (the penguin, not the hero) became a popular fixture at the funerals of (fictional) Ukrainian mafiosi. 


We'll pretend I'm not naming my penguin for my favorite Siberian baritone, because I am clearly beyond such adolescent behavior. 


You can look forward to seeing him (the penguin, not the baritone) admiring famous sites around the world and various locations on board the good ship ms Amsterdam over the next several months.

I only hope he's strong enough to complete the trip with me. After 40 years, some of his felt is a tad moth-eaten, and I'm not sure how the salt sea air will affect him.

inspiration from Maureen Dowd

I don't usually like Maureen Dowd's NY Times columns. She has an annoying tendency to string smart-aleck phrases together without having any actual interesting thought tying them together. But in today's column, she talks about the values of silence. And the reason this is relevant to my upcoming cruise (30 days, 3 hours, 9 minutes, 11 seconds from now) is that the cruise is going to require me to fast from electronica. No more constant smart-phone/tablet/laptop distractions, which in my "normal" life take up hours and hours of my days. Access to the internet will be severely rationed by its cost, slowness, and relative inconvenience -- no wireless connectivity in my cabin, and, after schlepping the tablet up to the public rooms where I can connect, each minute will set me back at least $0.25. I've pre-ordered 1000 minutes, which seems like a lot, but the cruise lasts 112 days, making that less than 10 minutes a day. I'll have time to check email and post any blog entries I've written offline, then I must re-engage with external reality. And my choice of external reality will tend to be, not the ongoing carnival of bingo games and stage shows the cruise provides for its clientele, but sitting watching the ocean going by, walking around the promenade deck, reading books about the sea, or knitting. At least I hope it will. I expect to return transformed.

paperwork in place

I've now got my passport with spiffy new visas for Brazil, India, and China. It cost an arm and a leg -- over $700 going through the visa service. But there they are. I can bop in and out of India until October 2016, China until October 2012, Brazil until -- yikes! only 90 days from last Monday! OK, that's nine days until the end of November, plus 31 days of December, 40 days, plus 31 days of January is 71 days. Whew! I'm OK, we'll be done with Brazil by January 20 unless I get kidnapped by curare-dart-wielding tribesmen from the depths of the Amazonian rainforest. Even then I'll be OK as long as the ransom gets paid before February 20 or so. I wonder why Brazil is so stingy.

And the welcome packet from Holland America arrived last weekend with the information that there will be 18 formal nights, about one a week, plus offers for beverage and spa and internet packages. I've already ordered a glass of "house wine" with each dinner, 1000 minutes of internet access, and the cheapest of the photo packages -- I am a dunce at photography, and if I want to remember how I looked on this cruise, I'm going to have to pay for someone else's version of me. And there's a deal whereby I get a liter of water delivered to my cabin every morning. Probably a good idea, since we'll be in hot, humid tropical places most of the time. I can put my liter of water in my knitting bag with my tablet* as I wander about the ship looking for a place to sit where I can watch the ocean go by. **

*Yes, I've ordered a tablet, a Toshiba Thrive. My friend Nanette got one, and just twiddling with it for a few minutes was all it took to overcome my feeble resistance. It arrives late next week. I had all sorts of very valid rational reasons not to get one. But Nanette's was all shiny and colorful and had all these neat apps on it and I swear I was a grownup once, I really was, I did deferred gratification and everything, I really did. I have the image of the fallen woman crooning, "I was not always as you see me now."

**It will, of course, be nothing like this when I'm actually on the ship. There are people who plan out their adventures to the last detail, then go and march triumphantly through their plans, point by point, and return having done exactly what they expected to do. That sounds to me like a total waste of time. Why have an adventure if you already know how it's going to turn out?

letter from the Captain

Yesterday I got a letter from the captain -- from two captains, actually.

The man who has been captain on Holland-America's world cruises for several years is unable to continue this year due to family medical situations. He wrote to apologize to those with whom he has sailed before, saying how much he had looked forward to sailing with them again and wishing them a good voyage.

The man who will be captain wrote to say how delighted he is to be sailing with us and how much he's looking forward to, yada, yada, yada.

But the exciting thing is the information about the new captain. He's British, for one thing, but the really cool thing is that he's been a seaman for 43 years and a captain for 25. He's sailed on British Merchant Navy vessels, cargo ships, and ferries as well as several Holland America line ships. I am entranced with the fact that he didn't just enroll in cruise ship captain school and graduate with arrogance and class entitlement. (Occupy Portland is only six blocks away, the spirit is getting to me.) I (unrealistically) imagine him hauling ropes and clambering up masts to unfurl sails and maybe even occasionally saying "Arrrh" -- no, wait, that's pirates. But you get the idea.

"Any mariner would be delighted to sail in such a great variety of waters -- Antarctica, Polynesia, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Suez Canal." This is a man after my own heart.

Can it be that this is actually going to happen in just 54 days, 5 hours, 26 minutes, and 48 seconds?

"Don't drink the water, and don't breathe the air"

If you're old enough to remember Tom Lehrer's satirical songs, you'll recognize the title of this post from his song "Pollution". It comes to mind because of the following:

Readings today from the indispensable (and highly controversial) @BeijingAir feed:

For explanation of the readings, see this chart from the EPA and other government health agencies. Take-home message: air quality readings in the high 300s, like those prevailing in Beijing recently, are defined as "Hazardous" and only rarely occur in North America or Western Europe:



In case you can't read the "Hazardous" description, it says that readings over 300 "would trigger a health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is more likely to be affected." For real-time reading of comparable US AQI levels, see this map.

I'm going to be in Beijing for two days as part of the overland China excursion that leaves the ship in Indonesia and rejoins it in Hong Kong. I hope I will be able to see from one end of the street to the other. I'm pretty sure two days is not enough time to do serious damage to me, but I do wish my Chinese hosts had a choice about what air they breathe over longer periods.

Maybe I'll add "BeijingAir" to my Twitter feed. It's published by the US Embassy based on measurements taken by equipment on their roof. The Chinese government wishes quite emphastically that they'd shut up about it.

test post via email

Following a suggestion by commenter Michelle, I'm attempting to post to my blog by sending it email. Since internet access on board is (a) expensive and (b) slow, it is clearly desirable to minimize the amount of actual bandwidth involved in posting entries.

I was also sorely tempted to use a Spot, a GPS-type device attached to software that posts a map showing my exact location plus pictures and blog entries. Sorely tempted. Sufficiently sorely that I may still go that way. But Spot is actually more for people who hike the wilderness or sail the ocean blue in itty-bitty boats, not people who circle the globe in floating hotels. Still, it's got all these really cool features ...

A Disaster Becomes a Gift

This is not strictly about my upcoming world cruise, but it's something I definitely want to document, and here is as good a place as any.

In 2009, I spent nine weeks in Russia trying to improve my Russian language skills. As I approached the Lufthansa gate to return home, I reached into my purse for my passport. It wasn't there. It wasn't there the next five times I reached for it, shuffling through the contents, emptying them onto a nearby chair, unzipping every zipper, opening every fold, shaking the upside-down purse frantically, looking into the empty purse as if somehow if I just looked harder ... no passport. "You cannot travel without a passport," the Germanically courteous Lufthansa attendant informed me. And a few hours later, the airplane to which I held a ticket took off without me.

I was in Russia without a passport. I freaked out. I then, in freak-out mode, managed to lose my cash card in an ATM. And then my cell phone, with the contact information for the dozen or so people I knew in Russia, died.

And yet here I am. Clearly I did not get sent to Siberia. I did not disappear into a Russian jail or end up wandering the streets of Moscow, one of innumerable old women begging for kopecks* on a street corner. I eventually climbed down from the freak-out, called the help line for my travel insurance, got temporary documents from the Russian police, a temporary passport from the American embassy,  a new plane ticket, and a hotel room for the interim.

And why am I revisiting this now? Because I just read an essay about how cell phones are preventing young people from the adventure of cutting ties to home and setting off on adventures that let them define themselves. And it occurs to me that you don't have to be young to have self-defining adventures. What a gift that was! Three major crutches -- passport, cash card, phone contacts -- pulled away, and I figured out what to do, did it, and got home.

*A kopeck is worth 1/100 of a ruble. A ruble is worth about 3 cents. And there really are a lot of old women begging for them on Russian streets.

Tim Dorsey on cruises

This is from Tim Dorsey's "Atomic Lobster":


“You’ve taken a cruise, right?” Coleman shook his head.
“You’re kidding. I thought of all people.”
“I haven’t been on one, okay?”
“Familiar with Las Vegas?”
“Of course.”
“Add a rudder and subtract government. The whole country’s into excess, even when fighting excess, and cruises are the nation’s bad habits on steroids. All the things you’re not supposed to do on land you’re supposed to do on a cruise because it’s one of America’s official responsibility-free zones, like Mardi Gras, New Year’s Eve or Courtney Love. Twenty-four-hour free buffets all over the place, raunchy stage shows, countless bars that won’t cut you off as long as you can knee-walk into a casino and blow the mortgage—”

- - - - -

Only correction that I know of is that there are apparently not twenty-four-hour free buffets. Some people on the Holland America forum on Cruise Critics say that the dining facilities shut down around 9 pm -- folks were complaining because they'd get back late from an excursion and couldn't find anywhere to eat except via room service.

Anyway, thank you, Doug Miller, for getting me to read Tim Dorsey.

Pirates

OK, look at the map to the right. One of the highlights for me of my world cruise will be going through the Suez Canal, which is at the end of that rip in eastern Egypt at the northwest end of the Red Sea. There have been news reports of Egyptian protestors threatening to close down the Suez Canal, but I'm assuming the combined forces of the Egyptian military and world-wide commercial interests will keep that from happening.

But I hadn't considered the other end of the Red Sea. See that unlabeled yellow chunk at the bottom right? That's Somalia. Where there is no government, no law, and lots of pirates. I just read an article that, among other things, says:

"In the first six months of 2011, there were 266 piracy attacks compared with 196 incidents over the same period last year, and 60 percent of them were carried out by Somali pirates, the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) said. ... Five years ago, pirates were more often armed with knives. But now ships, including oil and chemical tankers, are being attacked with automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenade launchers, the report said. ... Fourteen ships had been attacked in the South Red Sea since May 20."


Am I dissuaded from the cruise? Of course not! I'm sure Holland America will be extremely conservative in its response to any potential threat -- if only because it would be very bad for business to be the cruise line whose passengers suffered rocket-propelled grenade attacks. Rich old people are not big on rocket-propelled grenade attacks. Can't say as I'm all that enthusiastic about them myself.


Now if they could arrange for the pirates to be led by Captain Jack Sparrow ...

my sweet little cruise ship

This is a picture of two Holland America cruise ships. The big one on the left is the ms Nieuw Amsterdam. The little one on the right is the ms Amsterdam, on which I will be sailing around the world next January through April. Isn't it cute?

My future home

Thanks to the generosity of a man who, I suspect, woke up from a nap to answer my knock on his door, I got to see the stateroom I'll have for the world cruise. It's on the third deck, the "lower promenade deck", with a window looking out at the ocean. The view is "partly obstructed" by the graceful sweep of a column of the ship's external superstructure, and the obstruction is maybe 15% of what I'd see if it weren't there -- absolutely no problem. The exterior of the window is covered with a mirror-like substance, so I can stare out at people walking by without having them stare back in at me.

You can see what the space looks like by going here, then clicking on "Staterooms" and "Oceanview". I'm going to see if I can get the room configured with only one twin-size bed against the left-hand wall -- that's all the space I need to sleep in, and it would be nice to have more floorspace, plus that second bed will, guaranteed, end up being where I throw all my stuff, which the housekeepers will dutifully fold and stack for me and which I will regularly unfold and unstack to get to random items of stuff that I think I want. They will come to hate me.

The stateroom (I keep wanting to write "cabin", which I think I will do in future) is close to a door out onto the external walkway that goes all the way around the ship. I meant to find out how long that walk would be, but I forgot. There are lots of chairs on the deck, and Nanette assures me that, should the weather be chilly, they come around with cups of absolutely delicious split pea soup for anyone sitting outside.

I'm spending a lot of time thinking about being in that cabin or walking around on the deck. I've been assured that even when the ocean is fairly rough, the ship is engineered so that walking around will be possible. Here I am, looking out to sea, watching waves crash and blow in the stiff breeze, sipping my soup. And smiling. There's a lot of smiling in these fantasies. Can't think why.

Doom looms

From a Weight Watchers article on how to control weight gain on vacations:

Beware of cruises. A cruise is a lot like a giant, floating buffet. Sure, there's usually a gym at your disposal, but barbells are no match for the endless supply of daiquiris and midnight spreads.


And to confirm that, one feature of ms Amsterdam I have not yet mentioned is the ice cream bar with half a dozen flavors where you just walk up, ask for what you want, and saunter away licking happily. 

Disappointments

1. The food was good but not spectacular. Holland-America brags about their gourmet chef, so I was expecting Really Great Food. It wasn't. On the other hand, what we had was one room service meal plus a small mid-evening snack in the buffet restaurant, plus which they were dealing with a couple hundred people who were on the ship only overnight. So I won't enter a final judgment on this matter just yet. And I suppose it's really hypocritical to complain that the food is not irresistably good when I'm also worried about gaining back my lost weight.
2. The string quartet was mediocre at best. And they only played arrangements of Broadway tunes. I had had visions of relaxing every evening in the company of new friends to the strains of Bach and Beethoven. Not if this was any indication.
3. We really were not well-treated during the embarkation process. Not having access to food was partly our fault -- we should have had lunch before entering the cruise terminal -- but sitting us for a couple hours on plastic chairs in a warehouse room, and not giving us information about how long we'd be there was callous. "It usually takes an hour from now until you have to check in" would have freed us to seek out restrooms and vending machines, and would not have cost HAL anything.
4. If the man who made general announcements on the mini-cruise is a permanent part of the staff of ms
Amsterdam, I may return with a homicide indictment hanging over my head. I like Australian accents generally, but this man sounded like a parody of the jolly Aussie tossing another shrimp on the barbie. That, and I always hate being urged to enjoy myself. If someone feels the need to say, "Aren't we all having a wonderful  time?", in my experience it is only because we aren't.
5. And they made us get off the ship just because our mini-cruise was over. I liked being on the ship. I liked wandering around the ship. I liked sleeping on the ship. After less than a day, I was tuned in to being on the ship. Why should we have to leave just because we were in Seattle and our tickets said "Seattle"? If that's the way HAL treats its paying customers, I may have to reconsider future plans to sail with them. After I get back next April, that is. (And yes, you have permission to throw this paragraph in my face when I blog about how desperate I am to get off the damned boat after the fifth or sixth day at sea next February.)

A possibly transformative experience

It occurs to me, as I sit here most of this day and every other day in front of my computer reading tweets and blog entries and newspaper articles and exchanging email with friends, that my life on board the Amsterdam next January will be very different. For one thing, there will not be internet connectivity in my stateroom, so I'll have to go out in public to connect. For another, connections will cost money -- $100 for 250 minutes, an amount of time I easily use up every day at present. For a third, every evening another issue of the Holland America Line Explorer will be pushed under my door, telling me about all the possibilities for the next day which do not require electronic media.

So in one sense my "world cruise" will be like going into rehab for computer addiction. I'll come back with a taste for neatness and order and orientation toward the world outside my condo. Or I'll come back grumpy and disheveled, resentful of that danged boat that kept me from posting to my blog and continuing Lexulous games with my friends. Or both. I'm a Gemini, I contain multitudes.

Delights 1

1. The route from Vancouver, BC, to Seattle is all inside passage -- no open ocean -- but still sometimes, as I lay in the soft bed between the crisp, smooth sheets, there were enough waves to provide a gentle rocking motion, very soothing. There was almost no noise from the ship itself. The rocking came and went, gently, unexpectedly, and was so pleasant it seemed a shame to sleep through it.
2. The moon was half full and spread a silver path across the water to our balcony. Very beautiful.
3. One of the things I love about the high desert of eastern Montana where I grew up is the Big Sky -- you feel you are in the center of a huge, pure, spiritual world when you stand under a Montana sky. To my surprise, the sky over the ocean is similarly huge and pure and spiritual.
4. The agenda for the day we boarded included not one but two tai chi sessions. All the exercise machines in the gym face outward so that exercisers can watch the ocean go by as they work. My stateroom is near a door out onto the outdoor promenade deck, a walkway that goes all the way around the whole huge ship. I may indeed gain back a lot of the weight I've lost over the last year or so, but it won't be because what's available on the ship makes it inevitable.
5. Even when my phone can't reach Verizon's services, it still seems able to tell me latitude and longitude.

No mess

One thing I've learned from the mini-cruise that concerns me: it will be impossible for four months to generate any mess.

I live in a messy house. I am writing this entry from a computer on a table piled with an anarchy of papers, yarn, cat treats, and random objects that I find interesting or that I expect to find interesting or that I once found interesting and am not entirely sure are not still interesting. It's how I live. A friend tried to tell me it was bad mental health, and I laughed at her. Some people choose to live orderly lives. Do I tell them to let some dust accumulate in the corners of their minds? No. So they should not object to the dust bunnies under my mental (and physical) bed.

Anyway, it will not be possible on board. Leave the stateroom* for a stroll around the deck, and when you return, the bed has been made, the tables have been put into order, and the toilet paper has acquired that fussy little v-shaped fold on the next available sheet. Was there a fingerprint on the chrome? Not any more. Were the pillows left in disarray? They are now arrayed with geometrical precision and ordered from firm to soft on the crisply made bed, just as they were on the first day.

And it's not just in the stateroom. There are twelve elevators arranged in banks of four aft, amidships, and forward.** In each of them is a red carpet, into which has been woven the day of the week. When we first came on board, they all said "Thursday". When we awoke the next morning, they all said "Friday". This is not an electronic display, this is in the fiber of the carpet. During the night, someone took the "Thursday" carpets out and replaced them with the "Friday" carpets. We passengers are guaranteed never to sully the bottoms of our shoes by stepping onto elevator carpets which have not been cleaned in 24 hours.

Dear God! After four months of that, will I return having been Stepford-ized? Will I start vacuuming my condo and dusting bookshelves and wiping down surfaces with disinfectant***? Will I be unable to function if I cannot see the surface of the table on which I eat my meals? Will I start washing dishes the same day I use them?

Stay tuned. If you detect such un-Roberta-like tendencies, warn me. I will disembark at the next port and hitchhike home, even if the next port is Australia. I'll bet people on tramp steamers don't change the rugs in the elevators every day.

*To refer to the room in which I live as a "stateroom" feels very unnatural. I could go with "cabin", though. I wonder whether that's in any sense appropriate.

**Notice the way I used nautical terms there? Nanette, whose father was an internationally credentialed marine engineer, tells me I've got it right. I feel absurdly proud of myself.

***Lest you visualize me with crud climbing aggressively up my internal condo walls in lieu of ivy, there's a very nice lady who comes in once a month and does all these housekeep-y kind of things for me. I'm a slob, but I'm not totally lost to civilization. Of course, for 12 years I was totally lost to civilization, but my daughter Lizz cleaned my condo for me while I was in Russia in 2009, and I found I kind of liked it that way. Not enough to actually run a vacuum myself, of course, but enough to pay someone else to do it for me.

Lines

As a preview of my world cruise next January, my friend Nanette and I took the ship I'll be on then in a little mini-cruise from Vancouver, BC, to Seattle. We rode the train from Seattle to Vancouver, then sailed back. It wasn't much of a cruise -- less than a day, most of it happening during the night. There will be several posts about it, of which this, which details all the lines we stood in, is the first.
First line: in King Street Station, Seattle, to get our Amtrak tickets using receipts from online purchase.
Second line: to get the specific seats on Amtrak with the tickets we got from the first line.
Third line: to go through the doors of King Street Station to seat ourselves in the seats we got in the second line.
Fourth line: at the other end of the train ride, to go through Canadian customs. Canadians, even customs officials, conformed to the stereotype -- they were cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable, responding to a request for a stamp in my passport with a smile and the impress of a stamp on a page of my passport. (This is the passport I got to replace the one I lost in Russia, so all it has in it are blank pages were official stamps from other countries should be. It's like I've never been anywhere. The customs lady was very nice about it.)
Fifth line: actually, where there might have been a fifth line, there wasn't one because the Vancouver Sky Train pulled up in the station just as we emerged from the escalator, having encountered another cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable Canadian who gave Nanette a Sky Train ticket when Nanette's credit card refused to cooperate with the Sky Train ticket machine.
Sixth line: OK, now we're at the cruise ship terminal. There were several more cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable Canadians who helped us get there, but you get the idea about that part. And we're in one of those snaky lines delineated by blue cloth ropes waiting to go through metal detectors -- alas! even in Canada, they must worry about the stuff seen in metal detectors.
Seventh line: to present our cruise ship tickets and be shunted into an echoing room full of plastic folding chairs filled with those who would -- eventually -- after a couple hours without access to food or water, with restrooms only a vague whispered rumor among the huddled masses -- be our fellow passengers, but not before the --
Eighth line: to present our tickets yet again, get our pictures taken, and receive the electronic keys to our stateroom on board the ms Amsterdam! Which, you'd think, would be it. But no.
Ninth line: short line to pass through the "Welcome Aboard ms Amsterdam!" cutout so the ship's photographers could take our picture in hopes of selling it back to us as a souvenir. And are we done yet? Of course not.
Tenth line: at the top of the gangway as we Actually Set Foot On Board ms Amsterdam! Yes! We are on the f-ing boat! We are aboard! But we still need to show the stateroom keys to a ship's official to make sure that somewhere between the checkin desk at the end of the eighth line and the step onto the ship, we haven't somehow transmogrified ourselves into people who have no right to be on the ship.

But now. Finally. After all our toils and troubles and hunger and confusion and fear and trembling, we are in our stateroom, verandah suite #6213. We've been told that there is food at the other end of the ship a couple floors up in the Lido Restaurant. But, unable to face the possibility that we might have to face an eleventh line of those with whom we had already shared the last few lines, we order room service, including generous slices of chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. Which was just as good as you think it was.

There were virtually no lines to disembark the next morning. Everyone had been assigned to a subgroup, each subgroup was called forward to pass by an official who read our electronic keys so they'd know who was officially gone. We had to show our passports and customs declarations to US customs, but there were no lines, you just walked up to one of six or seven uniformed guys behind desks, they made sure we looked at least moderately like the photos in our passports, smiled, and waved us through. They weren't Canadians, but they were cheerful, polite, helpful, and personable.

I'm getting a cruise preview

Turns out the ship I'll be sailing around the world on, the ms Amsterdam, will be doing an overnight cruise from Vancouver BC to Seattle next month. So a friend and I are going to ride on it so I can (a) get acquainted with a place that will be my home for four months next year and (b) make sure I don't easily get seasick.

This idea came from a fellow participant in the Wednesday afternoon meditation group associated with my new church, St. Stephens Episcopal. And my travel agent, Diane Ritchey of Cruise Specialists in Seattle, got me connected to a verandah suite, which is much fancier than what I'll be inhabiting during the long cruise. I'll have to make friends with someone rich on the long cruise so I can use their verandah now and again.

OK, so we're on for the Taj Mahal

I just called Holland-America and booked the one-day excursion to the Taj Mahal. They'll fly me from Mumbai to Agra, where I'll spend half the day wandering around the grounds of the Taj Mahal on March 28, 2012. The other half of the day is for an optional tour of the Red Fortress, which I may or may not do. Maybe they'll let me wander around he grounds of the Taj Mahal all day.

Damn! I just poked some numbers on my phone, talked to a nice young man, and now I'm all set to spend a few hours at the Taj Mahal in a little over a year. Of course, I also just wiped out the progress I had made on my credit card bill with my tax refund -- almost to the penny -- paying a year in advance for something. But the nice young man said my ticket for the Taj Mahal will be in my cabin in a hot pink envelope.

This is going to be like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. A hot pink envelope in my cabin. Once this cruise starts, you're going to get a lot of gee-whiz posts as I accustom myself to being on the ms Amsterdam learning the cruise lifestyle. Or maybe some dear-God-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into posts. And meanwhile I sit in my condo sipping herbal tea and petting my cat and knitting another pair of socks.

Excursions

I just got the 168-page brochure that describes excursions available on my world cruise next year. It is intimidating. I can about wrap my head around riding a really big boat around the world. That makes sense. But this brochure reminds me that, well, we'll actually being Going To Places. And that there are a lot of things to do in each of those places.

168 pages. And very few pictures, mostly just text, and not particularly large print either.

Sometimes the excursions are about what you would expect -- going out for an evening at a Tango Show in Buenos Aires, for instance, will cost me $79 including transportation,  not unreasonable. If I knew how to ride a horse, I could spend $339 for a private polo lesson. And for $39 I could spend half a day "In Evita's Footsteps".

But then there's the six-day tour of China that departs from a port in Indonesia and catches up with the ship again in Hong Kong. It includes the Great Wall, the army of terra cotta men, The Forbidden City in Beijing, the Wild Goose Pagoda, built in 652, and a cruise down the Li River -- "—limestone spires rising above a smooth river at one of China’s most aesthetic destinations. The river is like a green silk belt, and the hills are like turquoise jade hairpins." Cost? A mere $5000, if I can find someone to double up with, which, as it turns out, I can, because I've been in correspondence with a woman in Florida who is also taking the cruise and wants to do that excursion.

Of course, I could just stay on the boat and watch the world arrive one port at a time and depart one port at a time. But how you gonna keep me down on the boat after I've seen this honkin' big excursion brochure? And can I really end up spending as much on excursions as I'm spending on the cruise?

Dang!

old Michael Caine movie

It occurs to me that these posts now, anticipating where I will be in a year on the cruise, are kind of like an old Michael Caine movie, whose title I can't remember. It's a caper movie that starts out with Michael Caine's character explaining his plot to his accomplice. Shirley McClaine is to be recruited to be part of it, and as MC talks, we see the plot playing out just as he wants, with Shirley McClaine's character sitting silent and mysterious, which is just what his plot requires. Then we see how the plot actually plays out, with SMcC being lively and intelligent and unpredictable. Of course, in the end, that's just what's required, they pull off the heist, MC's character falls in love with SMcC's character, and they all live h.e.a. It's an American movie, of course they live h.e.a.

The reason I cite this movie is because I'm beginning to suspect these fantasies of what it will be like will turn out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual experience of being on the cruise. Now, it's me sitting at my computer daydreaming (with the help of Wikipedia) about places I have no real idea about. Then, it will be me on this enormous boat with 1000 other people actually being there. Actually being there, 3-D, air as hot or cold or humid or dry or ocean-smelling or hurricane-ridden as it really is, people, both on the ship and at the ports, being as unexpected and fascinating as people actually are, Sun beating down with tropical furor or enveloped in icy clouds or hidden in storm clouds. And no living h.e.a. because there is no e.a., just now, and now, and now.

Dang. Just can't find any substitutes for reality, can we?

Does anyone remember the name of that movie?

Antarctica

In a year, on January 31, 2012, we'll be cruising the South Shetland Islands, of which there are a couple dozen, most of them with two names, one for Russians and the other for everybody else. More penguins and seals, and a lot of coldness -- the midsummer* average temperature is about 35 degrees Fahrenheit. So I'll need to pack something warm or huddle inside for several days, which hardly seems a good way to spend time on a cruise. It doesn't look like they plan on us landing anywhere, which is probably just as well: Wikipedia says that "...[the islands]  remain more than 80% snow and ice covered throughout the summer." Plus which the resident population is 0 -- lots of research stations and scientists of several nationalities, nobody selling souvenirs or hawking lichen burgers to tourists.


I'm beginning to appreciate that I'm going to be on this big boat for FOUR MONTHS. We spend three days cruising around Antarctica. I'll need to be sure and do a lot of meditating during our times at sea, otherwise I can see myself getting into a "you've seen one iceberg, you've seen them all, when's the next lounge show?" frame of mind.

*No, really, midsummer. We're in the Southern Hemisphere, so in end of January there is like the end of July here.

the Falklands?

OK, in a year from today, 1/28/12, I'll be in Stanley, Falkland Islands, or, if one has Argentinian sympathies, the Islas Malvinas. I know nothing about the Falkland Islands except that Britain and Argentina went into a somewhat silly set-to over them some years back. According to Wikipedia, "virtually the entire area of the islands is used as pasture for sheep," which is a perfectly fine profession, and might be very appealing to the overstimulated for the ultimate getaway vacation ("Come to the peaceful Falklands, watch the sheep wander out to pasture, take a nap, watch the sheep wander back from pasture.") But we're only going to be there for a day, and we're already on vacation. Let's see what Weather Underground has to say about the weather. Well, today late afternoon, it's 54 degrees Fahrenheit and 82% humidity -- I suppose islands generally have high humidity, what with all that ocean all over the place, and 54 degrees isn't awful. Oh, wait, look back at Wikipedia: they have PENGUINS!





Penguins. OK, I'm reconciled to the Falklands.

Two days in Rio de Janeiro

It's now January 21, and in a year I will just have spent two days in Rio de Janeiro. I will have walked along the black and white wave pattern of the promenade along the Copacabana beach, staring in awe at the beauty and elegance of the people sunning themselves. I will have looked up at the statue of Christ the Redeemer and maybe ridden the car up to Sugar Loaf. Lent will be a month off, so I won't have had to fight Mardi Gras crowds, but I won't get to see the parades and costumes either. It will be mid-summer, temperature around 90 F., humidity in the mid-70s. And I can imagine all I like, but it's like an innocent from the provinces imagining her first trip to New York City. Only for me it's the whole world, about which I can at present only poke around in Wikipedia and pore over the itinerary and pretend to myself that I have any idea what the trip will actually be like. In a year I will have been in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and will be on my way to Buenos Aires, Argentina, as in "Don't Cry for Me". Maybe I'll sign up for a tango tour.

This is going to be terminally cool. I won't be, of course. I will be gawking wide-eyed, barely past picking straw out from behind my ears.

you thought I was kidding ...

... about the pirates. And then there's the rebellion in Tunisia which may spread to Egypt, putting the Suez Canal at risk of national instability. There aren't a lot of alternative routes between India and Greece. I wonder what the cruise line would do if they decided we couldn't safely get through the Suez Canal. Go around Africa instead, substituting Johannesburg for Piraeus and Monrovia for Barcelona? Fly us from Dubai to Naples? Put us ashore at Sharm el-Sheikh and let us hitchhike home?

Where I'll be -- January 17 2012

At the excellent suggestion of my good friend Nanette, I'm going to start anticipating next year's cruise.

For instance, today's January 17. Next January 17th, I'll be at sea on the two-day voyage between Recife, Brazil, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, having already been ashore at Roseau, Dominica; Bridgetown, Barbaros; Belem, Brazil; and Recife, Brazil. We're sailing south of the equator, having gone past the big bulge in the side of South America. According to the Weather Channel, the temperatures are in the mid 80's and the sky is mostly clear with winds between 10 and 20 mph from the south/southeast, humidity around 60%.

And here I sit on deck*, watching the ocean go by, eagerly anticipating supper (since it's late afternoon) and writing a blog entry about, oh, I don't know, what South America looks like off in the distance as we move south. At the moment, being a total landlubber, I have no idea what 10-20 mph winds do to the sea. Then, I'll know. Stay tuned, I'll tell you all about it.

*My idea of what one does on a cruise ship is very primitive at the moment. I'm assuming one can sit on deck except when the waves are surging and the rain and wind make that a suicidal way to spend time. So I'm imagining scenes from some Cary Grant movie, where I get to be Joan Crawford with a big hat and way longer legs than I actually have, reclining in a deck chair in the sun and flirting with anyone who flirts back and some that won't.