1.
Today, I boarded a cruise ship. A really big one — she holds 2900 passengers and, with her massive crew, is a floating city of about 5000 people. There are multiple restaurants on board and shopping and a casino and a gym and several swimming pools. There’s a nine hole golf course and a wedding chapel and a movie theater and a cigar bar and a lot of other stuff — I saw only a tiny fraction of what’s on offer because while I boarded a cruise ship today, I also disembarked a few hours later. My belly was full of ravioli with truffles and lobster risotto and an intense chocolatey dessert that I rather enjoyed though I could not eat the whole thing. I’d also eaten bacon wrapped shrimp, a chicken lollipop covered in sweet bbq sauce, some foccacia bread with olives, bite sized quiche, and probably some other things that I’ve forgotten about but will remember when I look back through my pictures.
I was invited by Princess Cruises for an on board lunch. I have never wanted to go on a cruise, those giant floating buildings make me nervous, I am a little claustrophobic, I get seasick something fierce, I don’t like casinos or shopping malls… there is little to entice me in this particular method of travel. But Seattle is a cruise ship town and while I continue to cling to the idea that cruising is not for me, I am nothing if not nosy. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to get a peek at what all the fuss is about. The invite I received was all about the food — we were to sample some of the culinary offerings on board the Golden Princess and then tour some of the facilities. I was partly hoping to be convinced that I wanted to go on a cruise, partly hoping that I would have my suspicions that cruising is not for me validated.
2.
“You are a snob.” my husband said.
“I’m NOT, ” I insisted. I was peeling shrimp with my hands and tossing the shells into a little plastic bowl. The bowl recently contained the sweet sauce I’d poured over my bun, a cold Vietnamese salad with rice noodles, fresh vegetables, and grilled shrimp. “How can you call me a snob when I’m sitting here peeling shrimp in this place?” I gestured at the room, a perfectly charmless but consistently delicious pho joint in White Center. “I just like good food.”
I had been describing what I’d eaten during three hours of meandering aboard the ship. It was… fine. Beautifully presented, to be sure, but I was not floored by it. I liked the ravioli very much, but they’d been made while the group — six Seattle based writers in food and travel — watched. The bread was very fresh, but it was just a white bread. I liked the selected olives; the bacon wrapped shrimp was a little overdone. The coffee was quite good, as was the dessert, but I found the duck, which I don’t usually like, but tried anyways, to be tough. The lobster didn’t have quite the right texture; it didn’t fall apart like I think it’s supposed to.
“What do you expect from cruise ship food?” the husband asked.
I have almost nothing to compare it to. I have been on a ship only once before, when I went to Antarctica. That was a Dutch ship and the bread was grainy and brown, European style. (It’s possible that the Golden Princess serves Euro style bread, but I did not get to try it.) The food on the Dutch expedition ship was quite good, and also very pretty, though I remember despairing of the obvious recycling between meals, even while I understood why that happened. Plus, I was so utterly boggled by the experience of Antarctica. An elegant plate of food in front of me while we slid past penguin rookeries seemed ridiculous in its mere existence.
“I guess I did just get back from France,” I conceded.
3.
The ship’s galley kind of blew my mind. It wasn’t just the scale of it, though it was indeed enormous. It wasn’t the smiling men surrounded by stainless steel, their impeccable white jackets, their mellow vibe. It was the idea of all that in motion. When my group passed through, the galley was not fully staffed — at peak, it holds 180 people, 180 people making meals for 2900 passengers. When I thought about all of that happening while the big ship was moving, I got dizzy from the idea of it. From the idea of that big batch of spaghetti — a line cook was stirring noodles in a huge square vat with a canoe sized paddle — swinging back and forth as the ship rolled. I thought about the soup swaying in those galvanized hot tub sized containers. I thought about the racks of plates and glasses and the steady hand of the chef as he squeezed chocolate mousse out of a pastry bag into heart shaped molds.
“What happens when one of your crew gets seasick?” I asked Joel Directo, the charming executive chef.
“It doesn’t happen often, but we send them to bed and hope they get over it very quickly,” he said.”It takes a day, maybe two, and then usually they’re back to work.”
“Have you ever been seasick?”
“No… uh. Once. One time. In 17 years. One time.”
The entire operation seemed impossible to me. The sheer effort of getting a thin slice of duck to a plate in a dining room three floors up, I think it was three floors up, made me feel, in retrospect, extremely ungrateful for not falling wildly in love with the food.
4.
The first thing I did when I got home from my afternoon outing was to search for a frequently referenced piece of writing by David Foster Wallace called “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — an essay written for Harper’s Magazine in 1997. In this classic piece of writing, DFW boards a luxury cruise ship out of Miami and describes the seven day Caribbean cruise experience in angst filled, funny, and exhaustive detail. In spite of the fact that this piece of writing is a modern classic, I’d somehow managed to avoid reading it until now.
I found it excruciating. It’s full of footnotes that take up probably a quarter of the 24 page essay. It’s also a great read, self-deprecating and pointedly observant. It is not a glamor choked piece of fluff on cruising; upon finishing it I thought, “Yeah, he probably could have stayed home.”
Some time back I was invited on a Caribbean cruise. I was also invited, lord knows why, to the launch of the Disney Dreamliner. I declined both invitations. While I was genuinely thrilled to finally get a look at one of those monster cruise ships and have a tiny bit of my curiosity — and my hunger, I am always happy to be fed — sated, I’m still not at all sure I’d enjoy a cruise. I was relieved to drive away from the cruise ship terminal and back to my own, stationary house.
I’ve cruised twice. The first time because everyone told me it was a good idea. My mother and I did 14 days to the Mediterranean. It was okay, but it wasn’t for me. I hated sitting with the same people at dinner all the time and so we ditched them after two nights. Plus I hated dressing up like it was Prom Night every night. I just want to eat in my shorts. Five years later, now married, I thought cruising would be a good idea for my husband and me–to go scuba diving in every port. We did it over the holidays. Bad idea, really. Too many kids (we don’t like them) and the people looked at us like we were weirdos when we told them we traveled the world to go birding. They just didn’t know what to say to us and walked away quietly.
I saw your cruise ship photos on instagram and thought someone might have stolen your iPhone and was updating in your name. I’m not sure a cruise would be for me as well, but I would love to have a look around inside so this looks like a fair compromise.