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.