There’s sure to be a special place in hell for marketing geniuses who plan voyages for cruise ships. Much is promised, little often delivered. Our parent company, Carnival, is notorious for painting lipstick on the pig that is the Caribbean, for example.
The latest disappointment is the current cruise, which the geniuses in the marketing department dubbed the Christmas Markets cruise, voyage number QE722. The only problem is that the Christmas markets which we’re supposed to visit are on land, while we are at sea. We left Thursday, and we are still plowing the waters well into Sunday.
Why? Well, it would be useful and instructive to consult a historical weather map for December for the following countries before planning this one out: England, Germany, Norway, Holland and Belgium. An expectation for stormy conditions would have been drawn from these readily-available documents, and maybe even a whopper of a winter storm.
So what is it, then, that made the 1700-odd passengers, many of them Germans, most English, and 71 of us Yanks presume that historical trends would be suspended and a ray of sunshine would light QE2’s way through the Christmas markets of northern Europe in the middle of December?
Whoever that was has been proven wrong. First, two of the ports were switched. Hamburg was to have been our first, on the day after leaving Southampton. Originally that was supposed to have been Oslo, after a sea day. But nooooo, Hamburg it is. Or it wasn’t, because while we left in a force 9 gale, we approached in a force 10, enough to scare off the pilot boat if we’re to believe the captain. His hasty plan for an alternative was to contact Oslo and advise that we would be arriving early, only, only . . .
When we came to the bay at the top of Jutland, where we used to come with the Star and slip without delay into the Oslo fjord. we suddenly went from heading 360 degrees to heading 240, going northwest, and made lazy circles in the bay for a good 16 hours. This is open water, in the North Sea, mind you. More bumps, but at least the weather had improved. We did not enter the Oslo fjord, smooth as glass, until well into the afternoon. The captain had made the announcement at 9 in the morning that we were delayed this afternoon, but the crew had the 5:30 arrival last night by 8:00. So what’s the real story? Who knows? But there are a lot of disgruntled Christmas shoppers aboard this vessel right now.
Last night there was a as interment of the ashes of one of the guys who used to play trombone on the ship’s band a decade or so ago. He had met an American woman passenger while he was working on QE2, married her, became an American citizen and, before his death, expressed the wish that half his ashes be spread in the sea from this ship, and half of them in the area of England where he was brought up. Aside from the tragedy of this event, there are instructive dimensions to this, because I can’t think of another ship that would inspire this kind of loyalty. Not one of the Princess ships I worked on could fill the bill.
The Illusionist was the movie in the afternoon, guaranteeing that I’d be missing the twilight minutes when we could make out the contours of the Fjord.. In Norway, the sun rose at 8:06 and set at 4:10. That explains a lot about the Norwegians--for example why so many of them moved to the tropical paradise which is Minnesota.
After the Illusionist, I met Jim Coglan, a very interesting Irish priest who’s the chaplain on board. Talk about an interesting guy! A counsellor, he’s been doing woodturning for a hobby for four years and he’s used the prodigious skills he’s developed to create a symbology for healing of multi-generational family issues. He’s a Jungian therapist, among a lot of other stuff. I think he’s on to something and you can look up his website by Googling his name if you want more information.
So we finally pull in to Oslo, dark, cold and expensive, and I am informed that, due to the missed port, Oslo would be my turn for in-port manning and, because there were auditors aboard, the security system wouldn’t allow me to go ashore.
With the sea days, scheduled and unscheduled I haven’t been ashore since Southampton, and there’s another sea day ahead with a boat drill in Rotterdam on Wednesday, the 12th. But I’ve decided that I will go ashore in Rotterdam, maybe not the rail trip to Amsterdam some people are planning, but less stressful, time-consuming. (I ended up walking the pier in Rotterdam, having more a extensive shoreside in Zeebrugge. An the wily Belgians!)
A couple guys are flying home for the holidays, including Pete, whose home is Plano, Texas, on his first contract with the company. How he pulled that one off I’ll never know! Oh well, you don’t ask you don’t get. So I didn’t and I won’t. Next time, though . . .
My friend Sian is engaged, her boyfriend having done the kneel down thing when he came down in Southampton complete with a rock. Nice sensible guy, knows what he’s getting himself into.
Off to the ever-popular costume ball, where the masks are sold by the dancing instructors and then to sleep. Last night, after we left Oslo we entered into the North Sea once again instead of the bathwater-still Baltic through the Belt by Copenhagen, resulting in much loss of sleep.
The morning of the 12th of December, at nine o’clock, in Rotterdam, after we’d parked the boat for about 2 hours, the Queen Victoria went by the QE2 for the first time. Preceded by a spouting fireboat, the Queen Victoria was on its shakedown cruise, having had her naming ceremony in Southampton a couple days before, in a ceremony that must have cost the company a decade of entertainment budgets for the entire fleet from Carnival to Princess to Costa to Cunard.
The Victoria, representing the new and snazzy Cunard, will follow us like a Doppelganger when we cross in advance of our World Cruise.) It somehow escaped my notice that the Queen Elizabeth 3 was announced, to be sailing in 2010.) The QV was made by Fincantierri, the maker of most of the modern Princess ships (except for the Sapphire and Diamond, which were made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan).
This is quite a departure for Cunard, which has had every ship since the earth cooled made by the John Brown shipyard outside Glasgow. Don’t think little details like this go unnoticed by the passengers. Although most of the people looking at the QV were just blown away by the sight of her, some had comments deriding the new design, which follows the current design among not just Princess, but RCL and every other profitable cruise line: The Holiday Inn with a hull.
QE2 is so far away from this design that it looks by comparison like a battleship with a fancy paint job. It’s not a cruiser, it’s a liner. And it’s the last one out there.
Of course, it’s easy to reject modernism out of hand, and that was the source of most of the comments above decks this morning. So many things have changed for the worse. Strong opinions, but maybe they’re right. Look at how music turned out, becoming a crap tool of capital to market consumerism.
Jan thinks that big band music, even when played by little bands, is sounding its death knell as the generation which occupies QE2’s cabins passes from the scene. I held out hope that quality would rise to the occasion. Maybe I’ve been hopelessly naive. Maybe it’ll all disappear. Well, that’s the risk we take I guess.
Coming up: Stevie has been here 22 years, playing guitar. Trevor has been here 13 years, playing drums. They adapt and they endure. Both of them are horrified at the changes that have taken place around here.
I’m having a wonderful time with the new Mac OS. How they’ve pulled off another distinctive, functional upgrade in OS 10.5 I’ll never know. Too bad Apple doesn’t make cruise ships. Or liners.
Hope you’re all well and enjoying your Christmas shopping, more so than the passengers of this unhappy vessel.
Next: a booze cruise to challenge even the Azure Seas, and a three-week Caribbean adventure, from and to Southampton. When that’s over, we do an Atlantic crossing and the World Cruise starts.
Innocents Abroad, here we come!
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