My wife and I cruised on the Conquest 8/5-8/12. Before I told you that, I probably should have told you that I'm a pretty pretentious human being. I like art, I like metaphors, I like philosophy, I like self-reflection. I could make my review short by simply saying that a Carnival cruise (or at least this Carnival cruise) lacks all of these things -- that the company has so little faith in the fundamental literacy of its clientele that, in one of its shows, it abstractly represented a computer mouse with ... wait for it .... a dancing mouse (I'm still shuddering at the extent to which the cruise was literal). This isn't to say that my wife and I didn't have fun on the cruise (we did), or that there wasn't always "something to do" (shudders again), but is to say that I've never before taken a vacation that was so determined to shut off all avenues for thought or reflection. Granted the need for illusion in the face of despair, but what I saw on the Conquest was not so much the need for illusion as it was the need to let out one's "inner-ugly American" like one's burgeoning gut -- that person who eats their body fat percentage in bacon, gets their jollies from what they can get away with and, principally, never thinks once about their fundamental reality unless someone around them impinges on it. More simply: "It's so sad those Jamaicans are so poor," he said.

If you're still reading, you've probably realized that to the extent that I'm cynically arguing for a cruise to be a vehicle for social justice my tongue is somewhat in my cheek, and, moreover, that I was on this cruise, too, eating my way from port to port. I'm ugly enough, or ugly as anything at least. Yet, in these multitudes there's the specter of suffering we may see but refuse to encounter (much as many passengers see -- but refuse to encounter --the Conquest's crew) -- there's a desperately failed ethics, a gluttony that makes each of us tacitly believe it's righteous to be, even in your light. It's a road rage gone terribly polite, if only because there's too much flesh to hide behind.

Dining The food was fine. We ate in Renoir our first night and Monet for the remainder of our cruise (this after changing to our preferred seating time -- if the seats were available, which they certainly seemed to be, I have to wonder why we didn't have the seating time that we had requested in the first place). We liked Monet better than Renoir -- for its kitschy Parisian designs and its windows. Our servers, Neil and Renata, were both fantastic and attentive. Halfway through the cruise, drink service was shifted from the wait-staff to floating barstaff (not floating literally -- here I suppose is an onboard metaphor) -- this was enough of a disaster to cause me to get my glass of Shiraz as a dessert. As the cruise went on, most of those at the tables around us began to bring their drinks with them to the dining room. Wait-staff is clearly overwhelmed, but it doesn't seem difficult to devise a system that gets passengers their drink orders in a timely way (this is a fundamental expectation, no?). Read more