pjmedia.com
“A guy in a bathrobe walks around a family cruise ship” sounds like the setup to a really bad joke and, in a way, I suppose it is — if you’re ready to join me on my epic quest to fisk the most unintentionally hysterical article The Atlantic has published in a long time.
Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas is the world’s largest cruise ship with a crew of 2,350 and room for up to 7,600 passengers. This ship displaces more weight than two Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and sports a set of six water slides that look like a tangled mass of giant twisty straws.
It also has one misplaced Atlantic writer named Gary Shteyngart.
His first glimpse of the Icon brought “on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress,” that forced him to “shut my eyes in defense.” That’s when readers knew they were going to be taken on a very special trip with the man who has “been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.”
I’m guessing that’s because Shteyngart lost an office bet, based on his self-assessment: “I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, ‘This too shall pass.'”
You get the feeling that Shteyngart once had a real dachshund, the first dog to commit suicide.
Before leaving port, he got himself good and loaded:
I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.
Frilly drinks? That’s a rookie move, particularly for a world traveler…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (pjmedia.com)
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