Conflicted by the cruise

Let me state for the record that I'm not a cruise person.

I wanted these last few days of this last family vacation together on a multi-day whitewater rafting trip, not a floating Vegas casino. I wanted to spend it in the exhilarating, churning currents of some western river, maybe the Colorado, and not the glassy plain of an ocean so named because of its purported peaceful waters.

I was outvoted in favor of the lure of way too much food, schlock entertainment and nightlife, and the confines of, well, a confining ship. Like Vegas, it was breathtaking and jaw-dropping. And if you think there's a dichotomy there, you're right.

First the expected:

• Ample bad-for-you food. Where were these things when I was 16? I can eat that way now at my aorta's peril, but the breakfast and lunch buffets had all the bad stuff you expect: bacon, sausages, corned beef hash, double bacon burgers, cheese fries with brown gravy.

• Schlock entertainment. The first's night's show was a salute to the popular music of the American South. Or, as we tend to call it, country. The costumes ran to his 'n' hers chaps with cow skin patterns. That should tell you all you need to know. The second night's show was a loose history of rock 'n' roll, complete with pompadoured Elvis impersonators and ending with the rock version of of the "Ode to Joy" chorus from Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9."
  
  "Was it just me, or were those shows really tacky?" observed my daughter with an obvious gift for understatement.
  

• Strong drinks. Despite what the brochures say, there's not much to do on a cruise ship besides drink and gamble, those of us who are non-gamblers tend to enjoy the chief advantage of drinking on a cruise: You can imbibe all night and not worry about getting behind the wheel of a car and killing someone.
  
  And a good stiff drink sure makes the shows easier to take. I usually stick with beer or wine when we go out, but my drink of choice was a Manhattan straight up one night and a margarita the next (after wine with dinner). Both were loaded with extra booze and, subsequently, so was I.

Now the unexpected:

• Unfailingly polite staff. Yeah, I'd heard cruise folks were nice, mainly because you're paying them to be and their tips are built into the cruise cost. But the pleasantness and professionalism of the cabin stewards, dining room waitstaff, cooks, and barkeeps was astounding. And I mean that in a good way.
  
  
• Diversity of passengers and staff. A cruise is a good value, particularly if you can avoid the extras that are constantly being sold to you (portraits, DVDS, duty-free booze), but it certainly isn't cheap. A four-day stay for a family of five in a comfortable but modest cabin ran us about $2,000, including meals, drinks, shore excursions, gifts, and gratuities. We could have spent much more.
  
  But this cruise wasn't just for us moderately affluent white Americans. The passengers were a mix of white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, Japanese and European, just for starters. The staff, all of whom wear name tags that list their countries of origin, hailed from Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania Russia, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines,Vietnam and Cambodia.
  
  
• A spirit of tolerance and respect. If there was an undercurrent of prejudice or racism here, I couldn't detect it. Although groups of like people tended to hang together, that seemed more due to language than anything else.
  
  And when it came to the schlock entertainment, everyone, it seems could appreciate it for what it was, especially when the performers and the seven-piece backup band were more than competent --- far too good for the material they had to work with.
  
  Folks didn't seem to care that it was bad; they were all here to have a good time for a few days and made the most of the distinctly American cruise pastimes of overeating, gambling, drinking, and partying.