Celebrity Cruise

I’m finally back from our trip to Greenland and Iceland, and it was an amazing time. The food and room were excellent, the entertainment was top notch, and the shore excursions—wow! Greenland is incredible and the north of Iceland is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We went whale watching (saw 3 different humpbacks), toured around with locals, and renewed our wedding vows in a mass ceremony presided over by the ship’s captain. Overall, I couldn’t be happier. But of course, it wouldn’t be a mydangblog trip without some funny things to share as well, so today’s topic is Weird Signs That I Saw On My Trip:

This isn’t technically a sign–it was the name of the pilot boat that helped our ship get out of the bay in New Jersey. “Cape Fear” seemed like a very ominous name for a boat—personally, I prefer boat names like Boaty McBoatFace or Ship Of Fools, because they’re much less prophetic-sounding (I originally had Full Of Seamen but Ken said that wasn’t very PG-13, so I changed it. Sorry.). But we had nothing to fear—we said farewell to the Statue of Liberty under dark but beautiful skies and then we were on our way. (Also, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the other boat seems to be named Double Skin 27, and I don’t know why but that makes me think of serial killers).

The reason this sign is hysterically funny isn’t found on the sign itself. You’ll notice that from 1875 until 1903, the building was used as a Catholic School for Girls. Beginning in 2001, it became The Cotton Club. What you can’t see is that The Cotton Club is a STRIP CLUB. So it’s still a “school for girls”—just naked, naughty ones. The Sisters of Mercy must be rolling in their graves.

This one is just funny in its simplicity:

Tourist: Whose food is this?
Icelander: Is Moe’s Food.
Tourist: What kind of food is it?
Icelander: Sheep eyes and rotted shark.
Tourist: You eat that kind of thing here?!
Icelander: Já. Would you like some sour milk and fermented testicles?

Yes, according to our one tour guide, Icelanders eat a lot of strange food. About the rotted/fermented shark, she actually said, “It tastes like shit, but we love it.” I can’t really judge though—I’m Scottish, and people say the same thing about haggis. It also explains why the restaurant looks kind of like a dumpster. (And yes, I know that IS is short for Iceland, but seeing it on all kinds of signs made it incredibly funny and had me randomly pointing at things and yelling “Is souvenir shop, Is seal fur processing plant, Is waterfall”, and so on.)

This sign was outside the oldest bookstore in Iceland. I was pretty hyped by the whole “magical world” thing, and it set up some pretty high expectations, which were immediately dashed when we went inside to discover that there was NO magic at all. Just an Icelandic guy selling books, candles, and jam. Still, he was very nice, and the other people in our taxi van were super-jazzed by all the Icelandic refrigerator magnets. We did see an actual magician on the ship who performed in the theatre. He came into the audience to get a volunteer and before I knew it, he’d grabbed my hand and hauled me up in front of about 300 people. Normally, I would have been terrified that he was going to cut me in half or make me quack like a duck but I’d been drinking a lot of free champagne at the art auction, so I went along with it. Turned out to be just a card trick, but it was really cool and fun, and for days after, people would see me in the elevator and say, “Hey! You were the girl on stage” so he made me kind of famous in a cruise ship way.

But now we’re back, and I’m playing catch-up with everything that I missed over the last two weeks, because ship wifi is crappy, as anyone who has ever been on a cruise ship will tell you. Oh, they HAVE excellent wifi, but to get anything other than the basic connection, you have to pay an exorbitant cost. So when they asked if I wanted to upgrade, I just said, “All signs point to NO.”

The journey continues…

First, just for the record, I did NOT pull the emergency brake on Canada One.

Anyway, the Canada One train that Ken and I were on did, however, eventually stop in Vancouver, and that’s where the next leg of the journey began. We boarded our ship, the Celebrity Infinity, in record time. I have to say it was an excellent ship—there was a lot to do, and our cabin was extremely comfortable with a lovely balcony that we couldn’t use because it was freezing; in fact, if Ken had a dollar for every time I said, “Why? WHY IS IT SO COLD?!” he could have paid for the whole trip. If you know anything about me, you know that I’m always cold, and a trip to Alaska, in retrospect, is something I should have thought more carefully about.

So cold it’s glacial.

At any rate, we had a lot of fun onboard, going to lectures, silent discos, and trivia contests, where we met a lovely pair of English couples who, at the end of the trip, gave us their names so we could look them up on Facebook. Unfortunately, the names they gave us were supercommon, like “Mary Jones” and “Jane Smith” and there are hundreds of those names on Facebook so now I’m worried that they didn’t really like us after all, and we’ve been ghosted by English people.

In addition to fun times on the ship, we also did 3 shore excursions. Here are the highlights:

1) Icy Strait Point

We paid $90 each for a tour called “Taste of Hoonah”. It was advertised as a tour of the town, with a stop for an “Alaskan Beer and Local Cuisine Tasting”. The driver’s name was Bill. The tour consisted of three stops: the ferry dock (there was no ferry but we learned that it cost Bill’s family $400 to go to Juneau for shopping), the local public school (Go Braves!), and the Icy Strait Lodge, where we had the tasting. The lodge owners greeted us with “So what do you want to drink? The first one’s free.” Um, beer…? Then everyone got a small dish that had three tiny things on it—a piece of halibut wrapped in bacon, smoked salmon on a cracker, and a miniscule crab cake. I have a severe shellfish allergy but I also love bacon, so I told the woman about the allergy and asked, “Was the bacon halibut thing cooked near the crab cake?” and she looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course not!!” she exclaimed. “Everything was cooked separately.” So I ate the halibut. 3 hours later, when I was doubled over in the ship’s bathroom, I whispered to Ken, “I think that woman lied to me.” Luckily it was just a little cross-contamination so I didn’t need my epipen.

Rating:
6 out of 10 for Bill, because he was very sincere and it wasn’t his fault that Hoonah is boring.
2 out of 10 for Icy Strait Lodge and its crabby halibut and dishonesty (the 2 points are for the bacon).

2) Juneau

Our tour in Juneau was “Gold Panning and a Salmon Bake”. Our tour bus driver was also named Bill. The tour was very disorganized, with buses coming and being too full. We chose to wait for a second bus and received tremendous gratitude and goodwill from the tour company, but little did they know we had a hidden agenda—the other people who would be on the first bus with us were an extended family of 6 adults and 9 kids under the age of 10 from Las Vegas. One of the kids was named Tyler. I know this because every two minutes, one of the women would scream, “Tyler!! Stop that!!” So we had to wait fifteen minutes for the next bus, but I’m pretty sure it was worth it. At the gold panning, they gave us pans with dirt in them, and everyone immediately found some teeny flakes of gold. It was really exciting until I realized that the pans were pre-loaded—when Ken and I scooped our own dirt from the river, there was nothing, and I was sad because I had visions of finding a huge nugget and waving it in Tyler’s face (yes, his entire family was still goldpanning when we arrived. Tyler had, at that point, fallen in the river and was wandering around soaking wet as the woman continued to scream his name). But we came away with a small vial of our gold flakes as a souvenir.

Then we went to the salmon bake. The food was great, and there was live entertainment in the form of a woman playing guitar and singing famous songs that she had ‘modified’ for the tourists. Our favourite was her rendition of “Proud Mary” which included the lines ‘Salmon keep on churning, cruise ships keep on burning,’ and if that wasn’t f*cking ominous and perhaps a little telling about her attitude towards tourists, I don’t know what was.

Rating :
8 out of 10 for the Gold Panning because for most of it I was super optimistic that I would end up rich.
7 out of 10 for the Salmon Bake because the food was great but I’m pretty sure that the singer was throwing some very passive-aggressive shade at us.
10 out of 10 for Tyler because of his ability to not give a single f*ck.

3) Ketchikan

It was pouring rain when we arrived in Ketchikan, and it didn’t stop all day. We were soaked by the time we got on the tour bus, whose driver was called Helen. She was oblivious to the fact that we were cold and wet, and that the windows of the bus were so fogged up by our dampness that no one could see out of them. This kind of ruined her tour “patter” which consisted mostly of her saying stuff like “If you look out the window to the right, you can see a bald eagle” or “If you look out the window to the left, you can see a totem pole”. We were all too busy trying to wipe the windows off and shivering to see much of anything. The best part of the tour was when she took us to a totem-carving centre where they had these bizarre stuffed squirrels dressed like explorers, cowboys, and other things.

Price Tag: $265

Also, at the end of the tour, we stopped by a river to see bears fishing for salmon. Now, normally I’m terrified of at the mere thought of bears, but there were several elderly people in our tour, 2 of them with walkers, and I knew I could outrun at least half of them, and probably Ken too if I had to, so I was like “Bears? Cool. Whatevs.”

Rating:
6 out of 10 for the cold, foggy bus.
10 out of 10 for the creative taxidermy.
8 out of 10 for me for overcoming my fear of bears. I’m deducting 2 points because my attitude was a little mercenary.

Overall, Alaska was beautiful, despite the frigid August weather, and the cruise ship was the nicest one I’ve been on so far. Next week, I’ll finish up with a quick tale about our return to Vancouver and the Tour of Death, and then we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled lunacy. Cool? Whatevs.