The first organized activity I participated in was a shave — the best of my life. My face radiating smoothness, I sauntered into the casino, lost $40 at blackjack, returned to my cabin and donned my swimsuit, and rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The pool area was a study in relaxation: Couples reclined in chaise longues on the teak deck, reading Tami Hoag novels and contemplating a plunge in the pool.

Before long, a rhythm took hold, one as lulling and constant as the ocean swells — and centered around eating. I'd wake up, have breakfast, play bridge or do Pilates or go to a wine tasting. Then it was time for lunch. After lunch I'd do something else, and before I knew it, it was time for dinner. After dinner I'd hit a show, maybe cap the evening with a drink at the nightclub Luxe. Soon enough it was time for bed — that period of prolonged rest that allows the staff to prepare the breakfast buffet.

What no one could see coming — not me, not my mother, not even my high school guidance counselor — is that I would turn out to be a sucker for the lectures. There were four a day, and I enjoyed them all. I was riveted during the one on diamonds (did you know that in Mumbai, the industry employs no fewer than 750,000 people?). I was transfixed by the one on gas turbines (the world's smallest is two inches in diameter and produces seven pounds of thrust). And my attention did not waver once during the series on American foreign policy, delivered by Edward Peck, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

The best lecture wasn't actually a lecture. It was the kitchen tour. It had all the informative horsepower of a lecture, but instead of sitting there passively you get to walk through a stainless steel wonderland while being privy to some mind-blowing stats. In the course of a single day, the Symphony goes through one ton of vegetables. During dinner alone, it takes 22 individuals to transfer the prepared food from the pots and pans onto plates. The meat freezer, which can hold up to 2,000 pounds, is large enough to play tennis in. On this never-ending expanse of seawater, perhaps the most precious commodity is fresh water: The galley uses 100 tons a day. And over the course of the cruise, the 966 passengers consume some 1,600 pounds of iceberg lettuce. That works out to 1.7 pounds per person — I'm quite sure someone else ate my share.

The scale of culinary activity may suggest that the Crystal Symphony is a kind of floating smorgasbord, but it's much more than that. The ship has all the earthly delights and amenities a person could hope for — from a small hospital and a library to a business center and a putting green — in the place you'd least expect to find them: the middle of the ocean.

To conquer the sea, we build ships that look and feel like land. Indeed, the Symphony seems to be in a state of denial over the fact that it's on the water at all. Everywhere there are ornamental flourishes reminiscent of place. The Italian restaurant has barbershop poles made famous by Venice. The Asian restaurant sports Chinese scrolls. And the Crystal Plaza — site of the two-story fountain — flaunts Corinthian columns (along with smoked-crystal sconces and a piano made of Plexiglas). The designers have succeeded wildly: It's only from the exterior that the Symphony actually looks like a ship. But when it comes to smoked crystal, polished brass, and mirrored surfaces, more isn't always more. With its relentless ornamentation, themed rooms, and unending schedule of activities — cards, bingo, handwriting analysis — the Symphony feels at times like a suburban fantasy of the afterlife.

The result was that despite being on the ocean, I found myself craving it. When one of the staff told me of a disastrous Antarctic cruise, during which a wave crashed through one of the windows and drenched passengers in their beds with frigid water, I kind of wished the same would happen to me. Each morning, the captain would come on the loudspeaker to tell us the day's forecast and our present depth, and I would be seized by thoughts of what lay suspended between the hull and the earth's crust so many miles below. Were there schools of tuna? Blue whales? Swordfish?

The food was beginning to get to me. There was a lot of it — fish, lamb, lobster, pork, and steak at breakfast, lunch, and dinner — but every dish tended to taste the same. Sauces were either too salty, too sweet, or both. At an event called the Gala Buffet, which seemed like an informal eating contest, there were seven food sculptures on display, including a chocolate pirate and a parrot made of butter. I counted almost a hundred separate dishes, not one of which I would describe as delicious. I looked out at the ocean and fantasized about the crew throwing lines baited with mackerel off the stern and hauling in big tuna, and of one of the Filipino crew slicing into its smooth hide to reveal delicious dark-red flesh. That night at dinner, I ordered grouper. During the galley tour, the chef had boasted that all the fish served on board was fresh. He assured us that seafood could last up to six days in a cold fridge. That's just how it tasted.

On day 13, the sea delivered. We were somewhere north of the Mariana Islands, eating breakfast in the Lido Café, when the German man who conducted the seminar on diamonds yelled, "Look! A ship!" Amazingly, this was our first such sighting, aside from a smattering of fishing vessels and private yachts near Honolulu. I walked to the bow, where I was joined by a man named Bob. Bob and I spent the next several hours looking, wishing we had binoculars. "It's an oil tanker," Bob said, "on its way from the Persian Gulf to Asia. Probably Japan." Here was a glimpse of globalism's circulatory system, conveying the blood that keeps the world economy alive and kicking.

An hour later, the ship had disappeared over the horizon. We still stood there, now watching a seabird hovering near the Symphony's bridge and scanning the ocean below. More birds appeared and took similar positions near the bow. They were gannets, white and black, like seagulls but with much more style. Every now and again, one would spot a flying fish skipping over the surface. At this, the bird would turn 90 degrees in a fraction of a second and accelerate toward the water. Sometimes, the gannets would snatch the flying fish while they were in midair. Other times, they would tuck back their wings, bring their legs up landing-gear style, and torpedo beak-first into the sea at full speed. Even from several hundred yards away, you could see the trail of spume left as the birds knifed through the water. Seconds later, they would break the surface quite a distance from where they'd entered and bob like rubber duckies while they swallowed their lunch. The fish never had a chance.

Pacific means peaceful, and it was so dubbed by the first European ever to sail it, Ferdinand Magellan. (Magellan's flagship, the Trinidad, was 1/450th the size of the Crystal Symphony; it did not have an indoor pool.) It seemed pacific to me, too: There were perhaps ten minutes of rain during the 17-day voyage, and even though the waves occasionally struck me as big, the North Atlantic taught me that they were anything but.

The North Atlantic is what you would call a friendly place. When I boarded Cunard's Queen Mary 2 in Southampton on a blustery day in late May, the wind up on the bow deck was strong enough to give anyone who didn't cover his ears a pounding headache. We all stood there, waving at the group of well-wishers back on the pier, until the wind forced us inside, where everybody headed straight for the bar.

For the next six days, the wind would not stop howling. At one point, it made an eerie whistling noise as the ship sounded its basso foghorn and plowed through fog as thick as wallpaper paste. The wind relented only when we crossed beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and chugged into New York Harbor. It was what you'd call a steady breeze.

The route out of England is pleasingly rife with geography. You begin by navigating your way down a tongue of salt water dotted with sailboats, yachts, and ferries known as Southampton Water. Then you hit the English Channel and turn right for America. That evening, as I sat down to dinner in the spacious dining room, there was a speck of land visible in the far distance. It was the western tip of Cornwall.

Whereas the Crystal Symphony serves about 500 meals at a typical seating, the QM2 serves 1,200. There are 1,250 staff, as many as 2,592 passengers, nine bars, and ten restaurants. On the fifth floor, there's a warehouse-like area where workers ferry entire pallets of supplies — celery, toilet paper, soap, Bordeaux — on forklifts. When it was christened five years ago, the QM2 was the longest, widest, tallest ocean liner ever built; to this day, it is still the heaviest. At $900 million, the cost of building it equals the yearly economic output of Grenada and Vanuatu combined.

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