A Cruise to the Land of the Bipolar Bear
Part 1
Our flight from London Heathrow to shockingly colorless, dismal Copenhagen should be only half again as long as a flight from Angeles to San Francisco, but seems to take several hours. Perhaps imagining that I support Donald Trump’s (hereinafter the Vile Excrescence) plan to seize Greenland, the Customs lady who stamps my passport seems to wish she could compel me back onto the plane. A Kurdish Dane whose parents immigrated to Denmark from Turkey in the mid-‘60s drives us to our hotel, in desolate, charmless neighborhood., some of whose modern architecture amounts to a refutation of the human spirit. There are no trees in sight. Our hotel room is tiny and TV-less. The elevator can accept only one passenger at a time. For what we have paid for our one-night stay, we might have hired a suite at the Dorchester.
No, not really, but Copenhagen restaurant prices are exorbitant. Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) and I spend one night there, and for dinner buy takeaway items from the nearby 7-Eleven, which bears no resemblance whatever to the American version. The pasta I get in a circular little paper container is the most delicious thing I will eat during our holiday. I swoon at the memory of it.
An Indian Dane drives us to the appropriate dock, and we board without having to stand in a queue for 17 hours, as before our voyage to Hawaii in 2023. Having eaten only a small croissant (350 kroner at the 7 Eleven) all morning, I intend to make the Norwegian Star buffet restaurant wonder what’s hitting them, but the food is inglorious. (Fair is fair: the charred cauliflower salad is delicious.) We traipse around carrying our heavy coats and my laptop case at great length before the blessed announcement that our stateroom is ready.
Once therein, Mrs. Mendelsohn turns on Fox News. In around 14 seconds, incredulity has made my jaw plummet. Talking heads are marveling at the marvelousness of the Big Beautiful Bill. I wish I were Elvis, and that I had a pistol with which to assassinate the TV.
To our astonishment, we voyagers are around sixty percent Chinese, and the rest mostly American. Mrs. Mendelsohn points out that there seem to be far fewer mobility scooters than on our previous voyages, and far less morbid obesity,
The evening’s entertainment consists mostly of the ship’s Jessica Rabbitish cruise director introducing the bosses of various jurisdictions — housekeeping, dining, and so on — and our applauding them, even though there isn’t been time for any of them to earn applause. I suppress my desire to shout, “Poor showing, sir, except for the charred cauliflower salad!” when the Goan head chef is introduced.
So The Beautiful Norwegian Star has substandard food and offers the showerer a choice between Not Quite Warm Enough and Scalding, but the voyage-long baseball tournament in the mini-Fenway Park-sized stadium up on Deck 14, with teams comprising crew members of various ethnicities and creeds competing against teams of guests, is pretty terrific compensation. Muhammad al-Qawra, the star of the Islamic All-Stars — comprising stewards, restaurant servers, and chefs from Indonesia, Egypt, Somalia, and Burkina Faso — is said to be the Babe Ruth/Shohei Ohtani of the Seas, at once a formidable batter and a nearly unhittable pitcher. The South American team, mostly Argentinian and Colombian, has a second baseman who played briefly for one the Toronto Blue Jays’ minor league feeder teams. The American team nearly has me, until it comes out that my twice-replaced right shoulder isn’t up to the task of throwing, my recently “repaired” left knee precludes my running, and I was never much good at bat. Although it comprises mostly beer-bellied Trump enthusiasts who think, because baseball was invented in America and Donald G. Trump is president, that God will ensure its victory, Great Again!, loses 11-0 to the Muslims in its opening game, in which al-Qawra hits three home runs and strikes out 23. In its second game, it will lose 13-1 to the Tigers of Taiwan, and one will thereafter mention the tournament in the hearing of a member of the team only if he craves a knuckle sandwich.
Our first port of call is the idyllic and charming Kristiansard on Norway’s west coast, which is full of sculpture and water features, dazzling green lawns, and closed shops, whose closedness we learn has to do with its being a religious holiday. I help Mrs. Mendelsohn select a fridge magnet for her remarkable collection, and we marvel at the city’s huge opera house, whose roof evokes thatched cottages.
One of my most cherished ambitions has been to ask fellow voyagers and vacationers, “May I take a selfie of you?” A middleaged solo traveler from northern Minnesota offers to photograph us. She is very nice, and fractures my heart by informing us that she’s a Trumper. “I like that he’s running the country like a business,” she chirps. I bite my tongue even without Mrs. Mendelsohn’s sharp elbows.
I compose a couple of little melodies on an app I have downloaded to Google Pixel 6a smartphone. Wishing to avoid the teeming masses yearning to breathe free in the buffet restaurant, we breakfast in the gaudy, huge full-service restaurant Versailles, on shakshura, which Mrs. Mendelsohn tells me is a big favorite of fashionable ladies (and gentlemen) who brunch in swinging London. Poached eggs in a spicy tomato sauce, you see. I order two bagels with smoked salmon, hold the bagels, and am disappointed to discover they the kitchen has also withheld the capers and lemon slices one gets with the full monty.
We attend a napkin-folding workshop in the ship’s niteclub venue. To the surprise of no one, the instructor might as well be speaking in Urdu, and my attempts at folding vividly recall the model cars and airplanes I tried and failed hideously to assemble at 12. Our instructor can’t help but guffaw at my ineptitude, but I am nothing if not a good sport (and am not a good sport), and pretend to share his amusement. Mrs. Mendelsohn manages an estimable Sydney Opera House. For the balance of the cruise, I will, while waiting to be served in the full-service restaurants, entertain the extremely resistant Mrs. Mendelsohn by pretending to demonstrate some intricate folds of my own invention.
We go to the gym together — a first! — and then repair to our stateroom to watch the horrifying news from what I consider my hometown, where American servicemen are now pointing deadly weapons at American citizens outraged by Tom Homan’s fascist goons snatching alleged undocumented aliens off the streets whlle the undocumented alient’ children wail in terror. I think of my 10-years-ago English-as-a-second-language student Isai Salvador, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known, who worked in Los Angeles as a busboy to earn money for his mother and sister back in Oaxaca. He is the descendant of indigenous Oaxacans, and very dark-skinned, and I can easily imagine him living in fear now, even though born in the USA. I wish prolonged agonizing deaths on Tom Holman and the Vile Excrescence and Pete fucking Hegseth and Krisi Noem and Stephen Miller, and I could of course go on and on far into the night. The marines you deployed at the VE’s command to protect the family-separators, Secretary Hegseth? Are they exemplars of the warrior mentality you think it so manly to admire?
*
Måløy is in the process of being dug up and repaved, and isn’t exactly Kristiansand on the charm scale. We visit the town’s big supermarket, Kiwi, and note that an immoderate percentage of the place’s shelf space is devoted to El Paso and own-brand Mexican food.
At karaoke the first evening, I won a pleasing amount of applause with my soulful performance of George Jones’ heartstring-tugging “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, but our second experience of Karaoke Madness is very much less satisfying. I open the festivities with a melodramatic interpretation of “My Way” (the Sinatra version, and not the Sid Vicious), and am loudly cheered, but then a succession of young passengers lacking a sense of either pitch or tempo (do clap on two and four, will you, darlings, and not on 1.35 and 2.8), but believing themselves to be infinitely adorable, tortures the great hits of everyone from Abba to Pearl Jam.
Please help me buy a refurbished MacBook. The present one is almost as old as you.
We visit the small city of Ålesund, noted for its art nouveau architecture, which I had hoped would remind me of Aubrey Beardsley, whose drawings inspired one of my idols, Fillmore Auditorium poster artist Wes Wilson. No such thing takes place. Inexplicably, Mrs. Mendelsohn acquires for her remarkable collection a new addition not preferred by the deputy curator, and admits to finding Ålesund more charming than Kristiansand! I love her nonetheless.
Once back aboard The Beautiful Norwegian Star, as its 120 percent Filipino and Indonesian crew are required to refer to it, I return to the…fitness center, which, unlike those on our previous cruises, offers the fitness enthusiast no sea view. I watch one of those cyclist’s-eye view videos of San Francisco, hoping to be taken all over the city. I instead take a very disjointed virtual ride around the city’s northeastern tip, past none of my old haunts.
We dine at one of The Beautiful Norwegian Star’s hotsy-totsy speciality restaurants, at which only the best and brightest may dine. (All passengers are entitled to three speciality restaurant dinners over the course of the voyage.) Mrs. Mendelsohn strikes up a conversation with the adjacent couple, who turn out to be Canadians, but whose male half proudly recounts their son having knocked unconscious someone who cut in line in front of him at a convenience store, possibly a 7-Eleven. We witness a sparsely attended performance by a British working class comedian of the sort who’d be right at home in a workingman’s club at the end of a British pier. Mrs. Mendelsohn, who has felt herself to be the only Brit on the boat (rather than the only gay in the village) fairly roars with delight.
We spend a day at sea, sailing toward the top of the world, where, at this time of year, the sun never sets on the British flag, or on anything. At our meals in the full-service restaurant, which, when many of our fellow diners have chosen to dine at the same time as we, service is glacially slow. We amuse ourselves by re-enacting the funniest scene from the best television series ever, the British version of The Office, that in which Ricky Gervais’s David Brent tried to guide his employee Keith through an employee questionnaire. “Your main course last night,” I, as Brent, will say to Mrs. Mendelsohn, playing Keith. “Would you rate it Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor, or Don’t Know.” Mrs Mendelsohn thinks it over at some length and finally says, “What are the choices again?”
I sigh and say, “Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor, and Don’t Know”. She thinks about it at great length and finally settles for “Don’t Know.” I sigh and proceed to the next question, inviting her to rate the previous evening’s service. “What are my choices?” she says. “They’re the same for every question,” I sigh, “Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor, and Don’t Know”. She thinks about it at length and finally says, “Don’t Know”.
Good, clean fun!
[I rate the questionnaire sketch alongside Abbott & Costello’s classic “Who’s on First?” among the best written and best acted two-person comedy sketches in history. As for why I regard The Office as the greatest comedy show ever? Because it’s simultaneously hilarious and heart-breaking. At some point you begin feeling terribly sorry for Brent, who desperately wants love and admiration, and gets mostly revulsion.]
In spite of my brilliant showing at the napkin-folding seminar, we don’t attend the towel-folding seminar, where we might have learned to concoct wonderful white cotton creatures of the sort the more inventive housekeepers leave on the beds of staterooms they’ve just restored to perfection. We do attend a trivia contest at which I learn that Mrs. Mendelsohn’s elbows have lost none of their sharpness, as, for instance, when the MC asks, “America’s Sweetheart died in 2015 at 89. Who was she?” and I loudly speculate, “Britney Spears?” I am desperate to be thought hilarious, and to be admired for it. And what do I get for my efforts? Bruised ribs. Je suis David Brent.
Please help me buy a refurbished MacBook. The present one is almost as old as you.
At lunch, I enjoy a bowl of Vietnamese pho and fish tacos, both of which are considerably more delicious than anything else I’ve had on The Beautiful Norwegian Star. We do not attend the big art auction. On our 2007 cruise to the Caribbean on The Beautiful Carnival Victory, Mrs. Mendelsohn bought an autographed photo of the Beatles and Muhammad Ali for more than I earned in 2007, and I guess got buying art on cruise ship out of her system. We have separate accounts, as I have had with all of my life partners.
We go to the gym together, and then circumnavigate the deck a couple of times. I yearn to play shuffleboard, which I don’t know how to play, but know to have been a staple of cruising life in the days when people got dressed up to travel by aeroplane. Mrs. Mendelsohn does not. We attend the big late-afternoon Abba Trivia Contest. There are no questions about which member’s bottom the Australians went wild over, and we get only eight (of 20) questions right.
Agnetha’s.
I have sushi at one of the limited-access restaurants for dinner. Mrs. Mendelsohn dissembles a couple of California rolls and eats the avocado out of ‘em. We find the innovative cocktails, based on wasabi and sake, respectively, revolting. The evening’s entertainment is a program of alleged Broadway hits performed by the ship’s four singers, from South Africa, London, Liverpool, and New Jersey, respectively. I hate the South African’s haircut and self-delight. The only song we enjoy is Monty Python’s “The Song That Goes Like This”.
Back in our stateroom, we’re horrified by Fox’s coverage of the Los Angeles ICE “riots”, and by the news of an Indian jetliner having crashed almost immediately after takeoff in Ahmedabad. Because Mrs. Mendelsohn turns into the princess of The Princess and the Pea fame at bedtime, and can’t doze off if there’s even the faintest light visible, and it’s still light and bright outside at nearly eleven, she lies awake for hours while I begin a series of troubling dreams the moment my old gray head touches the pillow.
While on the cruise, I published most of the stories from this collection on Substack. Reading them will give you immense pleasure. I once won a PEN award for short story-writing.
Please help me buy a refurbished MacBook. The present one is almost as old as you.