I realize I’m a day late in posting my final thoughts on our trip. I’m probably a dollar short, too. Better late than never, I suppose.

I have no idea why I just used two idioms in the span of three sentences. Probably boatlag.

Okay. Cruise. Final thoughts.

Leigh and I thoroughly enjoyed our cruise, but it was much different than other vacations we have taken. Cruises are designed to be carefree experiences for the vacationer, which, depending on how you look at it, can either be a positive or a negative. It’s a positive for folks that aren’t used to vacationing, that feel uncomfortable when confronted with new and different cultures, and that basically need a babysitter. It’s a negative for folks that relish cultural challenges, that want to learn about and try to immerse into new societies, and that are independently minded.

Let me say this: If you’re the type of vacationer that a) is uncomfortable when surrounded by different-colored, different-language speaking people; b) is passive and in need of guidance; or c) gets so freaking drunk that you need a bib and a diaper, then the cruise ship is probably just right for you.

I had a lot of fun, but since I’m am none of those things, I felt a bit antsy at times. There’s only so long I can sit by a pool doing nothing. I like wandering around odd cities and watching the people and eating the native food, and that’s pretty damn hard to do on a cruise ship. Well, unless you count watching drunken college students, hyperactive children, and drunken middle-aged parents. Sure, there are plenty of those to watch.

Another odd thing is that even when the cruise ship stopped at a port, we had to actively try to find the native culture. Carnival has recognized that poverty, illiteracy, and brown-people are all things that the average cruise taker probably doesn’t want to look at. The average cruise taker wants to buy cheap jewelry, liquor, and Cuban cigars. Carnival has wisely encouraged the cities that its ships port at to revamp the area around their ports to more closely resemble American shops and restaurants. Consequently, several city blocks that surround the Carnival ports are indistinguishable from Las Vegas, with the exception of Jamaica. Jamaica’s port is shabby and real, but Carnival doesn’t suggest the cruise taker to go out and do anything on his or her own in Jamaica. Too dangerous and all that.

Which is not to say that we won’t take another cruise. They’re convenient and fairly reasonable. They’re just extremely limited.

And I’ll close this post by introducing some of the interesting people we met on our cruise

This is Wallace. He was our tour guide in Jamaica. He liked to punctuate every sentence with “Ya Mon!” And I didn’t get the impression that he was doing it in an ironic way, either.

This is Kino and Marlon. They were our kayak and zip-line guides in Jamaica. I feel like I’m a pretty brave guy, but those two fellows would do things on a zip-line that I wouldn’t even dream of trying. They also tended to say “Ya Mon” a lot, but sometimes I got the feeling that they were playing it up for us tourists.

This is Yasa and Made. They were our waiters on the Cruise ship. They were very nice men who were very good at their jobs, but I got the impression that not many people said “thank you” to them. They always seemed shocked when we said it.

This is Paul and Andre. They were the art auctioneers on the Carnival Ship. The painting to my left? We now own that.

This is the nice man that sold us a coconut in Grand Cayman. He was lethal with a machete.

This is Debbie, the ship’s sommelier.

And this? Well, this is Big Black Dick. I think the name says it all.

Today was our last day of the cruise. We should arrive in Galveston sometime tomorrow morning around 6:30, and hopefully we’ll be able to get off the ship and through customs before 8:00AM.

I’ll post final thoughts about the cruise tomorrow night.

To be concluded…

Still cruisin’, but we only have one more full day at sea. We dock at Galveston on Sunday.

This will be a relatively short post because I haven’t showered yet, we have dinner in an hour, and frankly, I’m freaking exhausted.

We arrived at Cozumel this morning around 9:30. Leigh and I had booked an excursion to Tulum, an archeological site on the mainland. Cozumel, which, for those of you who don’t know, is an island that sits 12 miles east of the Yucatan Peninsula; consequently, we had to leave the ship, board another, smaller ship, and head over to Playa del Carmen, which is the nearest port on the mainland from Cozumel.

So we get to the mainland, board a bus, and ride for more than an hour to Tulum, which is a site of Mayan ruins. Oh, and on the way to Tulum, some dipshit on the bus had to pee so bad that he made the bus driver pull over. I was secretly hoping he would get smashed by a car while he was getting back on the bus, but his luck held out and he made it back on safely.

Tulum (pronounced too-loom) was a fairly late addition to the Mayan empire. It was probably built around the 1200s, but since the Spanish Conquistadors destroyed so much of the Mayan civilization, archeologists are actually unsure of the date.

Walls surround Tulum on three sides, and the back of Tulum sits on the edge of a huge cliff overlooking the beautiful waters of the Caribbean. Try to imagine these pictures without all the annoying tourists:

Leigh and I love going to archeological sites like Tulum, but normally we do so alone and not in a tour group. Oh sure, sometimes we hire a guide at the site, but we never go on tours with more than five to ten people.

We had a whole bus-load of people on our tour today, and I think that I now need high-blood pressure medicine.

I hate to sound like an asshole, but touring Tulum with a big group of people reminded me that most people are fucking morons. Here’s my short list of why most people are fucking morons:

1. We’re touring an archeological site that’s more than 800 years old, and the majority of the people on the tour were more amazed by the damn iguanas that were running wild than the ruins themselves.

2. It’s Mexico. We’re near the equator. It’s gonna be hot. Unfortunately, people wouldn’t stop talking about the fucking heat.

3. All the yapping maws made it impossible to hear the tour guide. I wanted to spit in the mouths of all the jerks that wouldn’t shut up.

4. Yes, I know that one of the places we stopped at was Jamaica. But we were in Cozumel, which is another freaking country, and many of our fellow tour-mates kept answering Mexicans with “Ya Mon!”

5. While we were in the big tour group, people kept trying to shove me over so they could see something. I have a temper. I shove back, and the asshats had the audacity to look at me in an offended way when I did.

Here’s my last complaint and then I’ll go shower””our guide was an imbecile. A nice guy, sure, but an imbecile nonetheless.

First off, he got a lot of facts about the Mayans wrong. Facts like dates, cultural habits, religion, and so on. Now, I’m not an expert on Mayans. Far from it. But I could have given a more factually accurate tour of Tulum.

Second, he believes in the Mayan prophecy.

And no, I will not repeat the lunacy that is the Mayan prophecy here on this blog. I’ll hyperlink to a wiki entry of it, but I won’t repeat it. It’s too stupid to repeat.

Off to the shower”¦

Still cruisin’, cruisin’, cruisin’.

We spent all day yesterday in Jamaica, and we arrived at Grand Cayman this morning around seven o’clock. Since a coral reef surrounds the Grand Cayman Island, large cruise ships cannot dock at the port. We dropped anchor in the middle of the bay, approximately half a mile from the dock, and a tender boat shuttled us from the cruise ship to the mainland.

Leigh and I went SCUBA diving today and it was totally amazing. We only went down about 45 feet, but we both loved the dive. We were right above the coral reef of Grand Cayman and the sea-life was just breathtaking. Fish of all colors and sizes hover around and inside the coral. I hate to use a cliché, but it’s literally teeming with life. We saw a barracuda, a couple of huge sea urchins, and a large, slightly shy, lobster, and loads of fish that I couldn’t name.

After the dive, we ate an early lunch at a little sea-side restaurant that our dive guide recommended. There were so many interesting things on the menu that we ordered a ton of food just so we could try it all out. I had a turtle burger and Leigh had fish and chips. We also ordered conch fritters and fried plantains. Leigh had a super-strong Mai Tai and I enjoyed a Red Stripe beer. We sat on the deck of the restaurant and watched snorklers as we ate. It was pretty nice.

After lunch we browsed through some of the shops in Grand Cayman, and we ended up buying a coconut from a street vendor. He took a large, dark green coconut from an icy cooler, deftly grasped a sharp machete, and proceeded to viciously, but quite precisely, cut into the top of the fruit. He carved a flat base on the bottom and a silver dollar sized hole in the top and then plunged two straws into the coconut. We sat on a bench, watched the ocean, and drank fresh coconut water from our impromptu coconut-mug. After we finished, he cut the coconut in two and let us scoop out the gelatinous coconut meat with a machete-carved spoon.

Several thoughts and anecdotes that are unrelated but still swimming around in my head:

1. Last night, Leigh and I ate at the five-star restaurant on the cruise ship. It’s the only restaurant on the ship in which guests have to pay the bill, but it was well worth it. Leigh had escargot, asparagus soup, lobster tail and filet minon, and I had beef carpaccio, gruyere and candied tomatoes, and a bone-in ribeye steak.

A couple from Houston sat directly adjacent from us and we could pretty much hear their entire conversation. They were quite entertaining. The woman ordered a porterhouse steak. Now, steak aficionados know that the porterhouse is one helluva cut. A porterhouse is actually two steaks in one: on one side of a bone is a New York strip and on the other is a piece of the tenderloin, which is basically a filet mignon. It’s a monster piece of meat. The neat thing about the porterhouse is that you get to taste the delicate flavor of the tenderloins combined with the bolder flavor of the New York strip. The bone simply enhances and mingles the flavors of the two cuts of meat. The porterhouse is a study in contrasts and it’s not a steak to be taken lightly.

So this woman ordered the porterhouse and then was vocally taken aback when the huge piece of meat landed on the table. She made sure everyone in her vicinity knew that she had no idea the porterhouse was that big, despite the fact that the menu and the waitress informed her that the steak was 24 ounces.

And then, here’s the kicker, she asked her waitress for A1 Sauce. The woman actually seemed annoyed that the A1 wasn’t on the table. I’m actually not sure the waitress, who was from Europe, knew what A1 even was. She had to go get the maitre d, and when the maitre d got to the table she simply asked, “Ma’am, is there something wrong with your steak?”

2. While we were in Grand Cayman, we were walking past a street vendor and I overheard this exchange:

Loud, bombastic, American tourist woman: Hey! You carry those coconut bras here!

Reserved, impassive-looking Jamaican woman: Ya might wanna be tryin’ the Hawaiian isles for dem.

And some Americans wonder why foreigners dread American tourists.

3. Despite the fact that they share a common history, Grand Cayman couldn’t be more different from Jamaica. Grand Cayman is clean and elegant and the city clearly caters to high-class tourists. Maybe that whole independence thing was a bad idea for Jamaica. The colony deal is obviously a slice of fried gold for Grand Cayman.

4. If you’ve never tried Red Stripe beer you should go out right now and buy a sixer. It’s like a mix between a European Lager and a Mexican beer. It’s totally awesome. Go. Right now. We’ve gotta get ready for tonight’s formal dinner and tomorrow’s excursion to Tulum, Mexico anyways.

Check back tomorrow for more”¦

I realize I didn’t post last night. We were slightly dazed all day and all night because of the art auction. I wrote in the last post that I wasn’t going to drink, since I was scared I might get a little bid-happy if I imbibed during the auction.

In hindsight, maybe I should have drunk something. Perhaps we wouldn’t have bought the seven friggin’ paintings that we bought if I’d been drunk.

We spent all day today in Jamaica. We went on a kayaking tour, zip-lining over the jungle, and dining on authentic Jerk chicken at a local BBQ right by the beach. I had several Red Stripes and Leigh had fresh coconut water with her meal. It was a good day, indeed.

Jamaica is an interesting place. It’s a country of inescapable beauty and heartbreaking poverty. The jungles are filled with glorious examples of flora””trees fifty feet tall filled with electric bromeliads; groves and groves of beautiful oranges””and all the while the ditches are filled with refuse. The remnants and cultural artifacts of Imperial Britain still remain, but the stately mansions are in depressing states of disrepair. The windows in them have been gone for decades, as have the doors, and some of the once beautiful buildings the Jamaicans now use as hovels, and the others the jungle is reclaiming for its own. It won’t be long before they’ll disappear under the vegetative canopy completely.

When we travel, I’m always reminded of the importance of visiting other cultures. We met some truly beautiful people today, and yet I’m so happy that I’m a United States citizen. Let me explain that a little further””our bus driver was rightfully proud that Jamaica has now made school mandatory for children. Unlike the U.S., school in Jamaica only lasts about four hours a day. He drove us by several schools that he was particularly proud of, and they were tiny little things. Basically brightly colored sheds. The biggest and most impressive one was an all-girls Catholic school, and it was smaller and less aesthetically impressive than a Best Buy.

Part of me wishes that we had time to spend several weeks here to truly connect with the culture, but I know that’s impossible, and I also know that it would most likely depress the hell out of me. I’m just thankful that I live in a country where education is so ubiquitous that we think of it as a right and not as a privilege.

Enough of that.

One neat thing about traveling and visiting different cultures is discovering that as people, we’re not so different after all. On our kayaking tour, one of the guides asked me if I saw the bird that was flying low by the river. I said I did. He told me that it was a Turkey Buzzard and it was a scavenger. I told him we have them in Texas, too. He thought that was pretty neat. And kayaking down the river reminded me of floating down the Brazos or the Guadalupe, except that we were surrounded by completely different plants and trees. It was differently familiar.

Tonight we’re eating at the five star restaurant that’s on the boat, but I have a nagging feeling that I’ll always remember the fourteen dollar meal of Jamaican Jerk Chicken, peas and rice, festival, and Red Stripe beer much better than I will tonight’s meal of haute cuisine.

Actually, it’s not a nagging feeling, it’s damn near a certainty”¦I’ve had this exact same experience before. I can’t tell you anything that I ate at the five star restaurant in Athens, Greece, but I can describe with vivid acuity what it was like standing on a corner in Monastiraki Square and eating a gyro from a street vendor. I can tell you what the meat tasted like, how sweet my coke tasted, and the bready goodness of the fresh pita drizzled with local olive oil. There were pan-handlers and tourists surrounding us, and that was one or the best meals of my entire life.

And it cost less than fifteen bucks.

Tomorrow we’re going SCUBA diving in Grand Cayman at eight in the morning, so I’m going to try to get a good night’s sleep.

To be continued”¦

This will be a short post because it’s almost one o’clock as I’m typing this, and I’m debilitatingly groggy. Too much sun””too much wine. Mark needs sleepy time.

I believe I made mention in the last post of a hairy, middle-eastern man who was shedding in the swimming pools. Well, this afternoon Carnival held a “hairiest chest” contest and guess who won? That’s right. The same gentleman who was turning in the pool into a hairappuccino. If they hold a “hairiest back” contest tomorrow, I know who’s going to win that one, too.

We stayed out by the pool for most of the day today. Since my skin color is pretty much translucent, I applied prodigious amounts of sunscreen. Except, sadly, on the tops of my feet. So now it hurts to put on socks. Yay for me.

Tonight was one of the two formal dinners the ship holds during the cruise. I had prime rib and Leigh had the lobster with shrimp. Ain’t we cute?

Tomorrow we’re going to an art auction, but don’t worry, I’m going to abstain from any and all alcohol consumption before and during the event. I don’t like to lose a bidding war when I’m sober, and I’d hate to get a little tipsy and find out several hours later that I’d “won” an original Picasso.

More to come”¦