Apologies that my entries have got a bit dull recently, just haven’t been spending so many hours on trains dreaming up what to say. A quick entry is in order to describe the bizarre experience of taking the overnight ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. It has completely confirmed what I always knew: I will never, and I mean NEVER, take a cruise. What a weird experience. The ship was so huge, and had a kind of fake indoor road down the middle called the ‘promenade’. So it was like a road, but really not, since it was on a big ship in the middle of the Baltic Sea, with a glass roof on it. There were shops and restaurants lining it, which had little partitioned off ‘al fresco’ dining spots ‘outside’, so you could eat inside or outside, except they were both inside – I think I’m still a little spun out by it all. Jane and I passed on the Dinner Show, which by the sounds of it had performances by an Elvis impersonator, but caught from our cabin window (which overlooked the ‘promenade’) two rather impressive aerialist performances. Yes, in the middle of the Baltic. We narrowly avoided getting chatted up by a group of elderly Scandinavian men in the English theme pub, and eventually returned to our cabin to watch Zoolander on DVD on my computer, which seemed totally normal and sane in comparison
with the rest of it all.