Cruise-Ship Dull

When I first saw the ferry I was going to take to Helsinki, it seemed that the ship was so huge that I could spend the entire trip finding new places to explore.

But once I got inside, it became clear that most of the gigantic vessel was devoted to passenger berths, the car decks, the engines, and other inaccessible or uninteresting spaces. After an hour of walking through the public spaces and permitted decks, I ran out of new things to do. The weather was overcast, cool, and somewhat drizzly, so walking around the decks was only so entertaining. Most of the public places on the ship also were either restaurants or duty-free shops. Somewhat amusingly, it seems that most big passenger ships have a room full of video gambling machines deliberately mislabeled "The Fun Room" or something similar.

Since I figured I'd only be doing this once, I also got a bigger berth than necessary. Still ship's rooms are pretty spartan, due to space constraints. No TV, of course, only 4 radio channels, no internet access, and not exactly spacious, especially for the money.

I'd also tried the onboard cafe and gotten a latte. They had a small cups, perhaps 10 oz and were charging $3 or so, when you did the conversion. I picked up the cup and then took it to a machine and pressed the button for latte. But when I pressed the button, the machine stopped flowing when the already small cup was only half full. This didn't seem right, so I pressed it again and the cup then filled to a reasonable level. I got to the cashier, a tall man dressed in some white naval uniform, and said "latte". He looked, paused a second, and then said "Oh, I see you got a double!" and charged me appropriately. Great....

After 2 hours of traveling and still waiting for my shift at the smorgasbord, I understood why I've heard people eat and drink so much on ships -- there's really little else for most people to do. I thought to myself there's boring, there's deadly dull, but the worst probably is cruise-ship dull.