I generally am not a fan of cruises, truth be told.

Cruise ships generally feel to me like floating hotels with overpriced shopping malls attached. I’ve never been much for shopping malls; the appeal, so obvious to any 14-year-old girl, is totally lost on me. I do rather like hotels, and I’m more than a little fond of getting up to all sorts of serious hanky-panky in them of the type that gets the staff talking, but sharing a stateroom with my sister rather than a partner puts the kibosh on that.

Having said that, modern cruise ships are awe-inspiring structures. They’re big. Really, really big. I mean, it’s hard not to be impressed by the bigness of the size of them. They’re big and they’re massive and they’re driven by power plants that probably produce more energy than all the industrial machinery of, say, the year 1800 combined.

While we were pulling out of Copenhagen, I couldn’t help but wonder what the world balance of power would look like if this thing were suddenly transported backward in time to, say, 1770 or so. It’d be an impregnable floating nation-state!

Well, until it ran out of fuel, anyway. And yes, this is the kind of thing I think about. All the time.

So we set sail on our impregnable-steel-nation-state-cum-floating-hotel-and-gift-shop straight into a storm front that was impressive and spectacular in the way only storm fronts over the Baltic can be.

I quite like dramatic thunderstorms. Especially when i can stay indoors and watch.

A few hours later, as we were passing through the tail end of the storm, the sky got SERIOUSLY dramatic. If I were of a more religious bent, this sight probably would have turned my mind to thoughts of God’s promise to Noah that if he decides to kill me and everyone else in the world, he’ll do it by burning me alive or burying me in rubble or something like that, rather than drowning me, in his infinite mercy.

My stateroom was on the Deck 13 of the ship. Or, rather, my stateroom was on what would have been Deck 13 except that there wasn’t a Deck 13; the deck numbers jumped straight from 12 to 14 in a transparent attempt to throw the Universal Forces of Malign Evil off the scent, or something.

Now, I’m not quite sure how that works, exactly. I have a couple of working hypotheses, though. One of them is that the Universal Forces of Malign Evil aren’t too bright:

Captain Malevolent: This is it! We’re on the thirteenth deck. Now, my minions, the hour of our ascendence is at hand! Begin opening the warm, moist, suspiciously vaginal Portal to Hell, like in that one movie!

Demonic Underling: Um, sir, we’re on the fourteenth deck.

Captain Malevolent: What?! How can this be? Quickly, back to the elevator! We will open the Suspiciously Vaginal Portal to Hell one level down!

The FORCES OF EVIL get into the SHIP’S ELEVATOR and go down ONE FLOOR

Captain Malevolent: Now then, hear me, my minions! The time of our ascendency is at hand! Begin opening the–

Demonic Underling: Sir, this is the twelfth floor.

Captain Malevolent: What is going on here? We can only wreak evil on the thirteenth floor! Everyone knows this! How can we have been flummoxed so easily? Curse you, clever human elevator-button-markers! Curse you!

My other hypothesis is that the sorts of people who believe in superstitions about the number 13 generally can’t count.

The day after leaving port, while I was poking around on the ship wishing for something to do that didn’t involve gambling, buying stuff, eating, or portals to Hell, I watched the moon come up through the ship’s rigging. Apparently, even modern ships have rigging, if I understand the meaning of the word “rigging” correctly.

I also ended up having to do some work. I do have to say, though, that if you have to work, there are worse places you can do it from than here:

Take that, corporate CEOs! My office view is better than yours! Now take your $100,000,000 salaries and your corporate jets and…err…

…give them to me, if you don’t mind. I’d really like that.

I haven’t been around on LiveJournal a great deal lately, largely because I’ve spent the last month or so running around Eastern Europe, Great Britain, and France.

Now, I didn’t actually plan to do this thing. In fact, had someone told me ten years ago that I’d one day be traipsing around Eastern Europe on an American passport, I’d have looked at her like she’d suggested I try marinated roadkill with a side order of lightly grilled mongoose kidney. I am, after all, a child of the eighties; I still remember a time when the Soviet Union was the Source of All Evil™, before they were demoted and that position was offered to the Iraqis.

Which, if I were them, I would have declined. But whatever. Anyway, my parents decided to go on a cruise through the Baltic, because places like the Bahamas have been done to death (and once you’ve seen one gorgeous, sun-drenched island paradise, you’ve really seen them all). And, while they were at it, they decided to invite me along as well.

So late August had me flying across the Atlantic with my knees in my nose. Now, I’ve always thought that intercontinental flying was something of a luxury. I keep seeing all these ads for these flights where buxom stewardesses hand-feed you strawberries and champagne before you recline your chair into a sleeper pod and wake up in a different country…

…no, not so much. Ten hours with my knees in my nose, more like it.

Though the plane I took out to Denmark, where the cruise began, did have laptop power outlets in the seats. Let me say that again for people who haven’t quite grasped the awe-inspiring level of cool in that statement: The plane. Had laptop power outlets. In the seats.

It would have been even cooler if I hadn’t purged my laptop of nearly everything interesting, in preparation for going through British customs during the second half of the trip. More on that later.

So as it turns out, Copenhagen is more than just a brand of chewing tobacco. It’s actually, apparently, a town. In Denmark. Which is, I gather, a country.

We, by which I mean my family and (some hours later) I, arrived in Copenhagen the day before the cruise was to leave, which gave us an evening to explore the city.

One of the first things I noticed about this strange land was the striking iconography. I don’t know if it’s the fact that they see visitors from many lands who speak many languages, or the fact that Denmark was settled in 463 BC by nomadic tribes of warring graphic artists and pre-press technicians, but everywhere you look, striking symbols and icons abound.

For example, i saw this symbol everywhere in Copenhagen:

It showed up on road signs, banners, billboards, and even the ancient Copenhagen Central Train Station, built in the late 1800s by the Danish, a race of warrior breakfast pastries.

Another striking icon I saw all over the place in Europe, particularly throughout Copenhagen, was this one:

I asked some guy I met what the symbol meant. He gave me a weird look and said “It means if you see an Agent, you do what we do. Run. You run your ass off.” He also offered me a drink that tasted like engine degreaser. Man, Europeans will drink anything.

The hotel we stayed in was across the street from Tivoli Gardens, which is (I’m told) one of the world’s oldest amusement parks, and the place that gave Walt Disney the inspiration for the various Disney properties that have been entertaining tourists and infuriating the French for decades.

Tivoli Gardens is actually quite lovely.

Especially at night, when it’s lit up with enough lights to make Michael Jackson’s former choreographers blush.

It’s also home to the world’s tallest sit-in-a-chair-attached-to-a-spinny-thing-by-chains thingummy. I rode on this thing, which offered “breathtaking panoramas of the city.”

Which was complete rubbish.

You can’t actually see squat of the city when you’re a zillion feet in the air spinning around at warp 7 with 200-mile-an-hour icy cold wind blowing in your face. All in all, the experience was a lot like skydiving: a few minutes of unpleasant, bitingly cold wind, and then you’re back on the ground thinking “I spent how much for that?”

But hey, now I can say I’ve ridden the world’s tallest spinny thingummy with chains. So that’s something, I guess.