Just a just a just a just a just a just a just a little bit

All of the free cold drinks on the boat—and that only includes water, iced tea and lemonade—are served in these leeetle plastic cups. They’re very brightly colored. Maggie observed that they made her feel like she was in a daycare, and she’s not far off.

I realized yesterday that a cruise essentially encourages the infantiliziation of its passengers. Everyone on board can act like children most of the time. You want two cheeseburgers for a snack? Great! Three pieces of cake for dinner, chased by a bowl of soft-serve ice cream topped with mini M&Ms? Knock yourself out! No one chastises you if you order too much and then don’t finish it. You can go the entire trip and not see a vegetable, if you like. And there’s no such thing as money, so don’t worry about how much it costs!

It goes beyond food, though. Nearly every time we step out of the cabin, our steward sneaks in and cleans stuff up! It’s like the Room Fairy my mom swore did NOT live in our house. And everything on the ship is focused on our amusement. It’s like Carnival is afraid we’re going to throw a tantrum if we’re left to our own devices.

And maybe we are. I saw a passenger bitch at some worker because the cruise ship-shaped inflatable pool toy the passenger bought his son was broken.

Maybe some people want this on their vacations—actually, there’s no maybe about it. I’m on a boat with over 2,000 people who want to spend their vacation like this. And that’s their right, and I can see the appeal. You literally have to worry about NOTHING. Everything is taken care of. You can wander around the ship, free ice cream in hand, for hours. You don’t have to be anywhere. You don’t have to do anything. And the staff is really, really good at making you feel important.

But everything that I like about travel is impossible to find here. I like to experience new cultures—it’s nearly impossible. We stopped on Grand Turk in Turks and Caicos yesterday and it’s like the entire island is conspiring to keep you on this small plot of land set aside for cruises. There are restaurants (Margaritaville and the like) and shops and a beach and a pool (people got off a boat with a pool. To go to a DIFFERENT pool.) You could take a cab into Cockburn Town (and we did), but, like they say, there’s no there there. The rest of the island is (deliberately?) discouraging to tourists. We did eat at a local place, though. So that helped.

I also like to try different food. The food here is actually better than I expected, but adventuresome it’s not. And it’s tough to talk to the crew members (the vast, VAST majority are not American) because, well, they’re working. They probably don’t want to chat about what’s going on in Belarus or Indonesia.

So the very reasons I travel simply don’t exist on a cruise. They’ve been replaced with 24-hour pizza and family karaoke hour. That doesn’t mean that cruising is bad or wrong—but it’s certainly wrong for me.

Not like I’m somehow above the cruise culture. Yesterday for snack I ate two hot dogs, French fries and ice cream. And we DID go to family karaoke, only because Jack likes music and clapping, so we thought he’d enjoy it (he did. Maggie and I spent the time wondering how this 8-year-old boy knew “Beat It.”)

Hee. And about family karaoke (we didn’t sing.) There was one girl who was, I don’t know, ten? And she wanted to sing “Respect.” You could kind of see the (packed) room was hoping she’d be some Susan Boyle-esque prodigy, but it turns out she didn’t really know the tune. So she just read the lyrics. It was a like a bizarre poetry slam. Just picture it (remember, ten-year-old girl. Kind of pudgy. Also white, if that helps.)

I’m about to give you
All my money
And all I’m asking
In return, honey
Is to give me
My profits
When you come home.

Picture that read in a monotone, with perfect diction. Awesome, isn’t it? It gets even better when she gets to “re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-spect.”