Okay so back to our trek across the US: after taking the bus with Alejandro, we waited 3 hours in Toledo for our train, and then endured 16 very unrestful hours on the train before arriving in NYC.
We dropped our stuff off at my cousin’s place in Long Island City and met up with some of my friends to grab dinner in Koreatown. Very yummy and highly recommended if you’re ever in that part of New York and never had Korean BBQ. And then the next day was also filled with lots of purposeful trips to have different foods in the city. Before heading to the Manhattan Cruise Terminal, me and Mang-Git managed to make it to Chinatown for breakfast and the Halal food cart on 53rd and 6th for lunch, which, if you know us, we wouldn’t miss for the world.
Around 4pm, we rolled up to the Manhattan Cruise Terminal to check into Cunard’s famous Queen Mary 2. Famous? Yeah, I personally had never heard of the boat until I desperately Googled "trans-Atlantic cruises from US to Europe" the week before. After paying a pretty penny for my ticket, I felt the need to read up more on the Queen Mary 2, and apparently Cunard has been running that voyage for a while. I have friends whose families came over to the US from Europe so long ago that they're not entirely sure what their lineage is. Anyway, it would be their ancestors who probably sailed on the QM2's predecessor, the QM1, to come to the US.
The entire check-in process only took about 15 minutes, but I was scolded quite a few times for bringing my own bag onto the ship (I’m always extra cautious now because a few years ago, I took a cruise with my family and a laptop, N64 system and suede jacket were stolen from our checked luggage). Really though, if you think about it, I needed to bring work clothes, play clothes, and cruise clothes. 1 big rolly suitcase (which Mang-Git affectionately refers to as my “big bag of uselessness”) and a 55-litre camping backpack isn’t that unreasonable.
The first few hours on the ship were kind of like a culture shock. Or whatever kind of shock exists that has to do with an awkwardly sizeable age gap. When we were getting into the elevator with all our stuff, 2 old women behind me freaked out because they were afraid my backpack was going to take out their shoulders. Also, when we were doing the lifejacket drill, me and Mang-Git passed time on the deck by playing “spot the 30-year-old” in the sea of senior citizens. After the drill, we saw a few old guys on motorized scooters racing each other to the handicapped elevator. To top it all off, when we got back to the room, the first lecture of the journey was entitled “Lower Back Pain: Prevention and Treatment.” Definitely not what we expected on a cruise, but I guess we should’ve seen it coming. I mean really, who thinks of taking a freaking boat across the Atlantic ocean?
When we finally set sail at 6pm (I don’t get why they still refer to it as “setting sail” since there were no sails involved) and Mang-Git and I did the whole Titanic thing and stood at the very front of the ship and watched the city get smaller and smaller as we drifted down the Hudson River. We met a few interesting people during embarkment, including an 80-year-author of "They Made America", who actually has a daughter our age! Oh yeah, and a nice British lady who took particular interest in our story of how we chose to sail Cunard. We chat for a while about what we studied in school and what our internships were about, and she smiled and said “what a lovely, lovely beginning to the rest of your life.”
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