At least half the ship hadn't even bothered debarking at Key West. I figured their all being from Florida had something to do with it (seriously, the number of people from Miami alone I ran into was staggering)...and I'm sure the 7am port time in Key West had even more to do with it. Seven in the morning, on Carnival Victory, was a time one would start thinking of going to bed.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, dear reader, but Cozumel was not such of a much for us, and even less of much when we actually got off there.
Victory is on the left. The ship on the right is the Carnival Elation, and there was a third Carnival ship (Vision of the Seas) a couple of piers over
Now, I kind of wish we'd done the Mayan ruin excursion. But it was a hundred bucks a person and Eva has historically had problems with extreme heat. The last thing we needed was her passing out on some temple pyramid. So Cozumel was, for us, a chance to set foot in a different country, eat a genuine Mexican meal and do a little shopping.
To get on shore there, you walk down that pier and enter this incredibly long duty free store (you don't have a choice, you have to walk through here):
Coming from Canada, I find it hard to understand Mexican duty free stores. The prices, while remarkable by Canadian standards, certainly don't seem to be cheaper than they are Stateside. (Somebody's sure to correct me here). The products, too--enough alcohol to keep the Victory party going for at least a week; cigars, perfumes, and jewellery. These four categories were in all the shops on board the ship, not to mention in every duty free store I've ever seen. It's kind of weird. There's obviously a big market for booze (just on my ship alone)...but how much perfume can people be expected to buy?
Once you're out of there on Mexican soil proper, you find yourself in this oh-so-touristy (albeit pretty) little plaza area.
Check out that Spanish place, UN TOQUE DE ORO!
We were feeling peckish. To the left was Fat Tuesday's, to the right the Three Amigos. I suggested right because at least one of those words was Spanish. (Of course, as I found out later, Fat Tuesday's had the only free wifi in the area, but hey. Can't win 'em all.)
The service--I've never been to Jamaica, but I'm pretty sure it would have been considered slow there. The waiter was visibly pissed that we didn't order any alcohol and probably even more pissed when all we bought was an appetizer. Painfully slow service (we were there for about 90 minutes and ate one appetizer); insanefully high prices. The cheapest food on the menu was eight dollars (all U.S. pricing, of course) and it went up like Speedy Gonzales from there: most of the mains were $25-35. This place is not fancy. It's roadhouse food.
The decor was interesting, though.
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Para el gigante
There were a couple of claw bathtubs next to our table. I wasn't sure what they were for until a shithawk flew in under the awning--the whole place was completely open to the air--and took a dump in one before landing on a table a few away from us. Very considerate of it. I wasn't sure its friends and family knew to use the bathtub, though, and it kind of put me off my meal-priced appetizer.
As did the mayonnaise packets.
I have never seen mayo packaged like ketchup, in little squeeze packets, in my entire life. Answers.com claims they're safe, but lacking wifi I couldn't check that for myself. Rationally, since mayo bottles say "refrigerate after opening", they're okay. But the thought of warm mayo was vaguely disturbing.
Appetizer finally finished and paid for, we went out into the plaza to shop.
Beautiful gardens in the center of the plaza
Maybe I just shouldn't travel outside the U.S. and Canada. And Europe, I suppose.
Shopping in Ameranada is (mostly) fun. And I say that as a "get-in-get-out" sort of person. My ideal shopping experience involves being left alone until I need help, at which point someone should decipher my body language and be there to help me. Then I pay, preferably the price indicated, then I leave.
Shopping in Puerta Maya, Cozumel, Mexico is not like this at all. Before you can even get into a store, people are accosting you like beggars in the street. And they're aggressive. One of our fellow passengers was actually grabbed. If that had happened to Eva, both of us would be rotting in a Mexican jail right about now.
We weren't grabbed, but we had people actually step directly into our path and urge us to buy things we had no interest in buying. And a simple "no" didn't seem to convince them we had no interest in buying. It was infuriating.
And then when we did find something--my dad had warned me to haggle--well, the first price offered was an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has ever bought anything. We walked away when we couldn't get the guy below the point we were willing to start at.
I understand that this is normal for most places in the world. As usual, I don't like normal. I like my own normal.
We were back on board Victory within three hours of docking. The ship was pretty much empty: it was fantastic. We had a couple of hours of the kind of cruise experience I couldn't have hoped for. Then I realized I had forgotten Nicole entirely.
My friend Nicole had come back from a sojourn in Australia with a little Aboriginal boomerang for me. I had to get her some sort of Mexican something-or-other...and I knew just what to get. Eva had a nap and I set out for Mexico alone this time.
I contain a multitude. One of the Kens inside me is about nine or ten years old and considers being alone in a whole 'nother country to be an adventure akin to interstellar travel. I let that Ken take the con as I debarked again and made my way down the pier, through the duty-free, and into the plaza...which, if anything, was even more packed than it had been before.
That's the thing about this aggressive confrontational shopping that I don't get. You can't lack for customers when you have thousands of people teeming off cruise ships every day. If your little kiosk isn't attracting the business, there's got to be something wrong. And collaring people won't fix it. Soapbox, soapbox, get off the soapbox.
After the seventh or eighth store, venturing further into the plaza, I finally found what I was looking for. (Sorry for the secrecy: she reads this blog, schedules have not jibed and I haven't been able to give it to her yet.) As I was reaching for the package, a stranger (they were all strangers, of course) tapped me on the shoulder. I almost dropped what I had in my hands, and that would have been ugly.
"Yes?" Curtly. As touchy-feely as I am, I really don't like being touched by people I don't know, especially in whole 'nother countries when I'm all by myself.
"For my commission, por favor". The staff member thrust at me a piece of cardboard with the name "Mike" inscribed on it. Took me a second, but then I understood. I was supposed to present this with my purchase at the till. Mike hadn't actually done anything to earn his commission besides being the first person to me, but hey, whatever.
The line was ridiculous...almost half an hour long. Nicole, I hope you like these things.
Back on board Victory. The "dive in movie" on tap that night was Gravity. It was to be shown on the big screen overlooking one of the pools.
I had seen Gravity alone back when it was in theatres here, and loved it to pieces. (Eva was at her Mom's that weekend, as I recall). I babbled endlessly to her about how incredible the special effects were and how tense the whole thing was and please please please can you see this with me?
No interest.
I was made to understand that George Clooney tarnished this movie with his mere presence and that was an end to it.
"But he dies!"
(Sorry for the spoiler.)
Didn't matter. He had to live to die, and Eva Breadner has zero interest in seeing George Clooney living or dead.
Unless she can maybe watch him in a pool.
See, a pool is like docean except a pool is not the shark's house. The shark doesn't come in our house so we don't go in the shark's house. It's fun to sail over the shark's house and look at the shark's house, but actual swimming should happen somewhere that is not the shark's house. And actual swimming is something Eva was born to do. She could endure anything if she could swim while doing it. Even George Clooney.
Alas, neither swimming nor Clooneying was meant to be.
The pool was drained, and in any event was almost directly underneath the screen. And the screen was--
Well, here's the thing. When we read reviews of Victory on cruisecritic.com, the thing that kept coming up over and over again was how "dated" everything was. The decor was "hideous" (as if pink tile in the cabin bathroom is going to put me off my cruise). The ship is scheduled for refurbishment next year and yes, it could use it. But some of the amenities really ought to have been fixed by now.
Like the movie screen.
There are entire fist-sized splotches of pixels burned out. Like fifteen of them. You simply can't watch a visual SFX extravaganza like Gravity on a screen like that.
I managed to extract a promise that we'll see this movie when it comes out on the Movie Network, and then I hit the whirlpool on the Lido deck...which I had all to myself. Heaven. After that, we went up to Serenity:
Of course, "adult" was 21 and over, and 21 is also drinking age...but I needn't have worried. The few people here were mostly older than us. Loved it up here. If we'd had an interior stateroom, this is where I would have been spending most of my days.
SEA DAY
was fantastic. Exactly what we were hoping for when we booked this cruise (with the caveat that if anybody was supposed to be suffering sea stomach, it was me, not Eva.)
Most of the day was spent lounging and chilling (quite literally) in our cabin and steaming and Reclucing out on our balcony. But I did go here
and do this
twice. Would have done it four or five times, but it was salt water and it burned my eyes something fierce. (Going down with my eyes closed: not an option. Can barely see as it is without my glasses and I didn't want to be completely blind.)
At the end of the day, we figured we'd go see Vrroooom...
which was fantastic. But now I'm confused re-listening to this because there didn't seem to be a trumpet in the pit in the show we saw and the trumpet I heard was so clean it almost had to be pre-recorded. Here you can definitely hear a live trumpet clenching some notes. Hmm.
It was an hour long show and people were flooding in fifteen, twenty, even thirty minutes through the runtime. I couldn't believe it. It was just one more piece of rudeness to try to ignore and forget.
The next morning we were up at 4 am and rolling back into Miami not long afteri:
We were told to be in the Atlantic Dining Room at 7:30 a.m. if we chose z"self-assist" debarkation, meaning you carry your luggage off the ship yourself. We figured that would be easiest.
In that room with us (in half of it, we were packed in like sardines), there was a handicapped gentleman in a motorized scooter. A Carnival staffer approached him, then turned to his family or travelling companions and asked "can he walk as far as the entrance" or some such thing. She was informed he couldn't. and once she was out of earshot the handicapped gentleman muttered
"They never ask the man in the wheelchair"
in a tone of voice I know far too well. I've used it myself to deflect hurtful remarks for about thirty five years. Affable on top, with a lifetime of pain underneath it.
Why is it people assume that physically handicapped persons must be mentally handicapped as well? I've observed it before, and I used to make a point of chatting up any wheelchair-bound customers I came across. Eva, too, was specifically trained for this in nursing school. They never ask the man in the wheelchair. This left my heart hurting as we disembarked.
We were almost the first off the ship, and we were at Miami airport and through customs four hours before takeoff. Unlike Pearson, the wifi in Miami International Airport was not free. I was a day out of touch already and this really irked me. Oh, well. I finished the last of Recluce and started 1Q84, read the Miami Herald, and listened to CNN blather about how ISIS was going to kill us all. Lovely thing to hear before you get on a plane. America was at war again, and from the tone of the reportage the country was pleased as a roundhouse punch. Never mind that Mexican cartels operating right on America's doorstep are at least as vicious as ISIS. They don't count. These guys are...brown. Bomb 'em. Get all excited about it.
God, I needed to be home.
We landed in Toronto almost half an hour early, but it took almost an hour and a half to claim our baggage and get through Canada Customs. I was put in mind of the American I'd chatted with on our way out, who said that Pearson International was the worst airport he'd ever flown into, including many in Third World countries, and he avoided it whenever possible. I couldn't blame him. The place is like a perpetual Chinese fire drill. You have to show the same piece of I.D. no fewer than four times when you're a Canadian citizen arriving home. You have to line up each time. It's lunacy. And to pay for this lunacy you're charged the highest airport fees on the planet. Ugh.
We were home by 8:30 p.m., home to some very relieved puppies, and very glad to be.
Thank you, Ande, for taking care of everyone. And thank you, love, for a trip I'll never forget. It had its warts, but we made it our own.
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For those who may be interested in seeing more of the ship, this is the best video I've found on YouTube.
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