I feel like a week aboard the Queen Mary 2 has made me soft. I certainly don't think I was walking enough. Two days in Southampton have fixed that. But, yeah, it was a good trip, and I managed to dodge any hidden charges. I sprang for the wifi, which was around 200 dollars, and I ordered a bottle of whiskey for my room, which was 94 dollars, and this all I was expecting. For some reason I could only order the bottle of whiskey as part of a minibar set so I was required to have mixers with it. I chose juice and options were orange juice, cranberry juice, or pineapple juice, except they were out of orange and cranberry juices so I ended up with twelve little glass bottles of pineapple juice. With the bottle Famous Grouse it wasn't such an unreasonable price, provided I wanted pineapple juice. It was good pineapple juice.
You'll notice I keep saying "dollars". Throughout the Queen Mary 2 there are portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, pictures of British royalty on previous cruise ships and passenger liners, and then of course the name, which comes from the consort of King George V, when the original ship was christened in 1936. And the officer staff were all British, the captain was Irish, and the service staff was all Filipino. But for whatever reason, the ship uses American money. I assumed I'd need British money so I'd gone to a currency exchange near Times Square so my wallet was full of pounds when I was aboard. Fortunately, everything is charged to your card on file. Unfortunately, the whole reason I wanted cash was so that I could tip the staff. I'd recently watched a YouTube video by Lindsay Ellis in which she went on a trip on every major cruise line and she'd reported that many cruise lines included a mandatory gratuity in your bill automatically. While this implies that you shouldn't have to tip, what it actually means is that this mandatory gratuity is used to fill out the crew's basic wage. When I tipped the barman and the steward, they were clearly very happy to receive it in British currency, but I couldn't tip very often because there was no way for me to make change or to withdraw more cash. The purser was as unable to answer this request as he was to supply me with glue.
I spent most of the time in my stateroom working on my comic and on the research paper I'm writing as a sample for my grad school application but there were a number of interesting events going on aboard. Professors of history and sociology were speaking at various times throughout the trip and there was a documentary filmmaker named Marion Milne giving talks. I caught the end of one of her talks, the Q&A section in which someone asked her if she thought Princess Diana had been murdered, and she gave a very roundabout answer before unequivocally answering "No," she thought the security staff was incompetent and drove recklessly.
The only talk I attended was by a young woman from Los Angeles who called herself just "Kylee" who showed a powerpoint in the ship's planetarium about depictions of women in art throughout history. Kylee is a former model and her talk felt very much like a college student's final project, especially since she didn't take any questions. She showed the clip of Rita Hayworth singing "Put the Blame on Mame" from Gilda and I tried to talk to her about movies and about how I'd been writing a paper on H Rider Haggard's She but she really didn't seem like she wanted to speak to anyone. When I tried to engage her further, she mentioned she'd been to university in a way that told me I ought to know my place.
She was a curator of the ship's onboard art gallery provided by Clarendon, which is not, but I liked to imagine it was, named after Edward Hyde. Incredibly, they had a Jackson Pollack painting and a number of sculptures by Salvidor Dali.
If you've heard that stale gag in a movie or TV show, "Looks like a Jackson Pollack painting", well, this is what a Jackson Pollack painting looks like.
These are two of the Dali sculptures. I especially liked the one on the left, which is in ode to Isaac Newton.
The Queen Mary 2 also has a library, which I appreciated in principle more than anything else. It was a comfortable little section of the ship and they had a fair representation of the classics--they had Moby Dick of course--and lots and lots of romance novels.
The food was very good in the King's Court buffet, except their Japanese food was terrible, as is typical of Japanese places in America not run by people from Japan (I had the worst sushi I ever had in my life in Times Square). King's Court is kind of the bottom rung, though, I didn't bother with any of the fancier dining options, though mostly I surpassed the dress code by having not only a collared shirt but also a tie. Things probably would've gone smoothly so long as they didn't notice my crumbling boots. I overheard a family from the US south dressed in t-shirts outside one of the fancy restaurants talking. Their teenage daughter asked, "Were we supposed to get dressed up for this?" I'd overheard a lot of comments throughout the trip that indicated people had failed to read written instructions. At the embarkation terminal, a lot of people were caught by surprise when asked about their ETA, not "estimated time of arrival" but Britain's new customs procedure, Electronic Travel Authorisation. The ETA is apparently a product of Brexit as it's not a requirement for any EU country. I think I was one of very few people who'd gotten the ETA ahead of time and I only knew about it because I'd asked Google's AI, "Is there anything I need to do before travelling to the UK?" I make fun of the AI a lot but I have to admit it can be very useful.
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