Ensenada cruise: water, water everywhere...and free food.
http://www.lasvegasmercury.com/2004/MERC-Nov-11-Thu-2004/251...
November 11, 2004
By Andrew Kiraly
I'd only been on the boat for half an hour when it dawned on me that I was actually on a cruise. Oh, it wasn't the wedge of blue-black ocean glinting
outside that sparked the realization, nor was it the gentle bob of the ship as it sat, still docked on Monday afternoon in Long Beach Harbor. Instead,
the epiphany came from something I saw in the ship's Normandie Lounge, where I sat with about 1,999 other guests to hear the cruise director's canned
spiel about the four days of fun we were about to endure.
Mere feet from my face, a man and woman, oblivious to it all, identically dressed in striped pullover shirts and jean shorts, were slow-dancing under
a spell of love beneficently aided by alcohol. The man looked like an escapee from the South Dakota chapter of the .38 Special Fan Club; she, the
same, but with a shorter beard. Rotating in a slow-motion whirlwind of simmering lust, kissing tenderly like walruses, dancing in a universe of their
own making, they paused only to squeeze each other's ample ass cheeks--and glug from improbably iridescent c-cktails.
That was when it dawned on me. I was on a cruise--a rictus-grinning "Love Boat" nightmare that promised to unfold over the next four days in a
merciless march of paper-umbrella drinks, whiskey-zonked middle managers and more geriatric conga lines than you could shake a bottle of Dulcolax at.
And it would dawn me again and again, as I'd see other couples over the following week looking like Candyland siblings as they held hands in J.C.
Penney catalog oneness. One night, sartorial boldness had even inspired the .38 Specials to don outsized black T-shirts that depicted howling wolves.
So this was a cruise: being marooned in a Midwest Travelodge singles mixer circa 1978, as imagined by Aqua Man.
Ahoy and all that chit, mateys, for now I come to you with tales of sort-of faraway lands, exotic foods, strange peoples and high adventure on the
seas. Like the ancient mariner of Coleridge's gangster rap single, I am doomed to tell my tale until, well, I live down this snapshot of me as a
snorkeler 69ing with Charlie the Tuna's gay cousin (see photo). Woe, woe...when will I be rid of this albatross around my neck? Wait a sec--that's no
albatross. Oh dear. That's bread pudding from the cruise ship's buffet.
Set a course for `loser'
But first, a prologue. When I told friends and colleagues I was going on a cruise, they bathed me in looks of concerned condescension, which stems
from what I soon discovered is a widespread, principled disdain for cruises. To many, a cruise is not so much a vacation as an extended social gaffe
that lies on the spectrum of no-nos between fondling altar boys and eating veal. "I'm going on a cruise!" I said. "We're not cruise people," they
groaned with haute bourgeois indignation, pausing only to ladle more caviar in their poodles' mouths. Far from their ritzy origins in the 19th century
as a pastime for the well-heeled, cruises today are considered by many to be the cheap paperback version of real travel, the art of vacation distilled
to its most banal residue, the pro wrestling of cultural discovery.
Truth be told, yeah, I might not have gone if I wasn't there to chaperone my mother-in-law as she partied naked, but, once faced with the murmurs of
withering disapproval from born-again cultural gatekeepers, my inner populist wanted to play tournament shuffleboard all over their smug-ass faces. In
embracing the trip, I'd be embracing my middle-classness, using a multinational cruise ship giant as an overworked metaphor for American consumer
values or, uh, something like that. And the Carnival Paradise would prove the perfect vehicle. In the world of cruises--peaking in intimate, Greek
Isle yacht excursions with masseuse cheerleaders and champagne enemas; hell, even lefty online mag Salon.com is selling boat-based getaways now--this
ship might be christened the Wal-Mart of the Waters. And I'd just signed up for a four-day employee party.
Maybe what offends people about cruises is it attacks their view of serious leisure having to include some measure of cultural legitimacy, the "leave
only footprints, take only stories to make you feel superior to your friends" school of thought that shuns guided tours, gift shop tchotchkes and
excessive drinking. Screw that! The last time I vacationed sans tour guide, I ended up zombie-walking the streets of Amsterdam at 3 a.m., the hashish
in my cells turning my limbs into epileptic breakaway Soviet republics. See, dorks like me need cruises to protect themselves from the searing molten
goo of having too much fun--or too much cultural authenticity. A vacation should not be too pleasurable nor too edifying; it just makes your chitty
job that much harder to return to. And screw edification, too. I wanted to sit on a chaise longue, tan my hairless, larval-white chest and just let
the IV filled with Kahlua and cream glorp, glorp, glorp into my veins.
The drunken boat
To board the ship, which from the ground looked like a giant bar of Dove soap sprayed with buckshot, we passed through a dome-shaped convention center
to which the Paradise was docked. After we checked in and security detonated, at a safe distance, our fingernail clippers and turbans, we wandered
through a maze of ropes only to arrive...in the middle of a fake courtyard in a fake Mexican village, complete with faux-finish stonework, gourds and
stuffed parrots. Suddenly, a Romanian guy with a camera the size of a television was telling us to smile. Wha? All part of the program. Carnival
employs an army of shutterbugs and videographers who are constantly snapping and recording, capturing memories of your vacation--as you live them!--to
sell back to you starting at $20. Avast! News camera-toting Czechs on the gusty top deck! Ahoy! Lithuanian photogs in the atrium, taking shots in
front of painted beach backdrops! Aargh, mateys! Italians at the gangplank, telling you to smile as you're jostled up to a photo-prop ship steering
wheel! The media-savvy Carnival folks subscribe to a very postmodern notion of why people vacation: to record the facts of the case for evidence that
they were having fun. We vacation to relax? No. We vacation in order to manufacture memories of having vacationed.
Anyway, my aesthetic sensibilities nearly chit their pants when I set foot inside the Paradise. Don't think of the cruise ship as a ship per se.
Rather, think of it as a badly moored Laughlin hotel filtered through a disco ball--silver speckle here, gold veneer there, glitter there. I let my
eyes adjust to the abomination while old people flooded around me, hound-sniffing the scent of buffet food and beelining for the casino. As they
whooshed by in a locust-swarm, threatening to denude me like a cornstalk, the irony struck in a cosmic guffaw: Gee, I was leaving the continent...only
to arrive at a locals casino.
Eat, eat and be merry
As the boat slurched its way to Catalina Island, we looked at the endless sea. Its lulling expanse soon filled us with feelings of being bored
chitless.
"What do you wanna do?"
"I don't know. Wanna eat again?"
"That's cool."
Food, not sunny frolic, is the spiritual linchpin to the cruise experience. Without it, passengers would just get all Lord of the Flies over the three
ping-pong tables (only the most hearty souls braved the human-scale cappuccino froth roiling atop the spa). After all, in leaving the continental
U.S., we were also leaving behind our puritanical directives against using a slab of ham as a primitive scoop for eating creme brulee. By day, the
Paris buffet, with its bizarre, stylized banana tree motif, was ground zero for the methodical pursuit of mass consumption, where cruisers could pop
out a few tummy staples and pad their bad cholesterol count. Though I ate there at least 17 times a day, I can't remember what I had specifically; in
memory, it's a smoothie blizzard of steakish, pizzalike, yet chickeny substance with hints of pasta, soft-serve ice cream and black forest cake, the
consumption of which was watched over with mild alarm by the prim Eurochick servers and a distinct "flock you" expression by the seagulls constantly
perched outside.
But lest I give the impression of this cruise as any unholy orgy of caloric bacchanalia (which it was), hole-stuffing did have its refined side, as
evidenced by the more traditional nightly dinners in the Elation restaurant. Beef Wellington...lobster bisque...seared scallops, all served by
smooth-talking, painfully deferential Lithuanians as they whispered Transylvanian wiles into your wife's ear--Oh, pretty lady, how terrible of me to
leave your wine glass unfilled for so long! Please forgive!--with the coffee service winding up the three-course dinner with distinct Old World flair.
I could get into this, I thought, savoring a two-glass wine buzz and my final bite of cherries jubilee--until WONK WONK BUMPA BUM BUM--what the
flock!?--some impossible Europop song began bucking through hidden speakers and our Vietnamese waiter who up to this point was all supercool Mr.
Belvedere was suddenly seized by a feverish rhythmic motion as though menaced by dozens of unseen cattle prods, lined up now with the other waiters--a
U.N. rainbow coalition of the damned, suddenly flinging themselves through tortured charades of St. Vitus' dance, reeling and rocking, hand-jiving and
jigging, shades of macarena and--no, no, no!--could that be a Cambodian server at table 115 doing the Cabbage Patch?--and just when the riotousness of
the funny dancing waiters threatened to break into a food fight (I slid a spoon under my neighbor's remaining plug of papaya sherbert and prepared for
launch), the maitre d', a 9-foot-tall Indian dude named Chander, took the mic and finished up with this joke about a priest and a cab driver who meet
at heaven's pearly gates and...and?well, I and my sweet old lady dinner companions could only mouth "What'd he say?" as the punchline was outsourced
somewhere far beyond the borders of intelligibility to a sweatshop of impenetrable Indian accents. (I played along, laughing, delaying sherbert
deployment, reconsidering only when the .38 Specials blundered by in matching madras shirts).
It was as though we were not to be trusted with too much refinement--gotta entertain the folks with the dancin' help! Still, the food kicked my
palate's ass, dude! Though by the third day, the overrich diet had me sweating mascarpone, and visits to the bathroom were, alas, less about
evacuation than exoricsm.
Land, ho
On Wednesday morning, we docked in Ensenada, Mexico, where terra firma offered a break from the slow back and forth motion of the ship, which began to
feel like being pushed around by lazy union poltergeists. Ensenada is quaint in the way that only a Mexican town with no traffic laws can be, a place
where the pleasures of window-shopping is compromised only by toothless Mexican women who, with a deft flick of their skirts, unleashed fleets of
equally toothless beggar children clamoring for you to buy their quaint square pieces of gum. My inner Sally Struthers would have led me to corner the
chicle market if my vision hadn't been eclipsed by an equally urban menace, the aggro Mexi-waiters at the various fratboy-friendly chain bars who
accost you on the sidewalk and entice you to come in, drink tequila and vomit on some sorority girl's ta taas. Everywhere we turned, some franchise
gaucho from Papas & Beer, Mango Mango or Viva Wings--two-story bar-restaurantasauruses thundering with jukebox bass--was in our faces, reciting food
and drink specials while aerobicizing with the pure enthusiasm that only fun, friends and free uniforms can inspire. Believe me, I love wings. I think
they should viva. But I could not patronize a place called Viva Wings. It just felt so...American, which felt so...un-American.
Two blocks later, we regretted our decision when a typhoon tore into us. We scurried back to the ship, ducking along the way into shops and
restaurants, pretending to be interested in buying their quaint Day of the Dead dioramas ("Ha! Check out this one! This skeleton nun is taking a
chit!") while all we really wanted was to avoid the hunks of falling building that threatened to halve our skulls us with their quaint seaside
velocity.
As we shmocked like wet mops through the gosh darnn perfect storm and up the Paradise gangplank (pausing, of course, to have our picture taken by the
Italian photographer), I was mewling softly to myself in a child's shivering language of naked fright. "All I want is my buffet...all I want is my
buffet," I whined. Through rain-streaked glasses and a brainful of margarita served in a fishbowl, that ship, you see, looked kind of like it was
shaped like America. Like home. I was glad to be back. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the weirdly consoling purgatorial gloom of the Paris
buffet, where diners continued to take advantage of the free food by filling tube socks with cheesecake and flagellating themselves.
Quasi-sun and quasi-fun
On Thursday, the weather, which up to this point had been an East Coast assful of gray skies and mist, had finally relented. The afternoon saw the top
deck fill up with people sunning their grublike, buffet-enriched bodies. Oh, so this was what a cruise is supposed to be like.
I lay there among my fellow Americans and savored the aneurysm delivered by some toxic pink drink. I forgot myself for a moment and, for about 20
minutes, actually relaxed...I mean, really relaxed, and was able to digest my experience. Snark as much as you like about cruises, but they represent
a country and culture unto themselves. Where else can you see Indian bartenders singing along with "Amarillo by Morning" in an empty karaoke lounge?
Where else can you see comedy hypnosis, a hilarious blend of comedy and hypnosis? (Okay, everywhere.) Where else can you see a polyester-armored
wheezer from Indiana get nearly carried away by a thuggish cell of overzealous seagulls? Nowhere can you see such sights but the sovereign nation of
Cruise.
Around midnight in the Paris buffet, I stopped chewing on my creme brulee-covered ham-scoop when I saw lights on the horizon. My heart deflated. Had
we reached land already? Was my vacation over?
A fellow cruiser explained. "Look! It's another cruise ship!" he said, tugging his son with him as he headed for the starboard deck. "Let's moon 'em!"
I became choked with emotion, or possibly ham. No wonder I wasn't homesick. I had never really left home.
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