A satirical writer spends a week on Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas, the world's largest cruise ship, and discovers an absurd floating world of football talk and trash-filled pools.
I recently came across this article in The Atlantic from maybe a year or two ago, written by Gary Steingart, and it's absolutely hilarious. If you're looking for something entertaining to read, I highly recommend tracking it down.
The premise is simple but brilliant: a writer known for his satirical work spends an entire week on a cruise ship. But not just any cruise ship—this is the Icon of the Seas, operated by Royal Caribbean, which is currently the world's largest cruise ship by pretty much any metric. We're talking about a vessel that holds over 7,000 passengers. Steingart goes on the inaugural cruise for a full week, and you can sort of imagine how this experience unfolds, especially for someone with his sensibility.
Steingart goes into this assignment with what he thinks is a clever plan. He brings along a t-shirt that reads "Daddy's Little Meatball" written across it, thinking it'll make things interesting and help him strike up a bunch of conversations with fellow passengers. As it turns out, not really true.
Everyone on the cruise ship wants to talk about football and other very American things that he knows nothing about. So his conversation starter completely fails to land in the way he expected.
The observations throughout the piece are both funny and a little bit depressing. Steingart talks about his view from the suite on deck 11, where he's actually facing this mall called Central Park right in front of his balcony. Imagine booking a cruise vacation and your view is essentially... a shopping mall.
He talks about trying to do laps in the pool, but it's trashed with candy wrappers and dissolving tortilla chips and napkins and stuff like that.
It's these kinds of details that make the piece so vivid and entertaining. You get this sense of someone trying to maintain some kind of normalcy or routine while surrounded by the absurdity of cruise ship culture at its most extreme scale.
The whole article is a fun time, even if it does paint a somewhat bleak picture of what happens when you put 7,000 people on the world's largest floating resort. If you're looking for something light and easy that'll give you a good laugh while maybe making you think twice about booking that cruise vacation, this is definitely worth your time.
