continued...

On-board the Crystal Serenity

So here's the ship, the Serenity, which is one of 3 ships in the Crystal Cruises line. They're smaller ships than most of Royal Caribbean's, which is the line with all the adventure ships (rock climbing walls, ice rinks, etc.). Crystal caters to old rich people, so onboard activities tend to be things like Learn to Knit, How to Purchase Fine Art, Seminar on the Mayan People, blah blah blah. Very boring if you have nothing better to do. Since I write or read while I'm cruising I don't mind at all, but my mom was bored to tears when she was onboard for the Alaskan cruise.

I dressed-up for dinners (mandatory), otherwise I wore shorts and my bikini top or a T-shirt. I have to say the food was extremely disappointing, or else I'm comparing the meals to some fantasy in my head. Either way, I wasn't thrilled by anything we ate, which was probably a good thing because if the food had been spectacular, I would have pigged out and then I wouldn't have been able to fit into my bathing suit!

Here's David at the casino manager's desk. You see all the screens he can zoom in on at any time. Everything's being recorded. The cameras can zoom in extremely closely using a special joystick console (below). The zoom is so strong you can see the hairs on the back of a player's hand (they always cite that as the example for some reason).

Hehe, you can see the corner of Black Always Wins. I gave out some comics to the current casino supervisor, Angie, and the cage supervisor, Rob, and the current casino manager, Darrin.

Closeup of the surveillance screens. Top row left to right: blackjack, blackjack, dice, roulette. Second row: dice 2nd base, roulette bank & wheel, casino bar, multi-game slots. Third row: cage cashier, SDS (?), cage window interior, vault. Fourth row: cage, count room 1, count junction, count table.

The casino is fairly small and can't be open while the ship is in port so it's good to be a casino worker because you can leave the ship and explore the port. Other departments, the restaurants or spa, for instance, never get to leave the ship because all these old people are either too lazy to leave the ship or else have visited the port before and so they stay on board and take advantage of the ship's amenities. Oh, and some of these rich people became that way by being cheap, so they return to the ship to eat (where it's free) and then go back on shore. Sheez.

The main lobby. I've never seen one with such geometric designs. There was a large Christmas tree to the left but you all know what they look like so I didn't bother snapping a pic.

One thing I did cultivate during this cruise is a love of teas. TEAS! I'm hooked. I had it after every dinner and on the few times I ventured into the Bistro. I tried out a new tea every time, which was great fun. Back home, I ordered nine samples of some strangely named teas and I'm giddy with excitement to try them out.

Every afternoon for an hour they served tea in the Palm Court. So I would sit at my little table by the window and read while servers walked around offering finger sandwiches, pastries and scones. I am now also hooked on scones slathered in strawberry preserves and clotted cream (hello, enormous ass!). I can't wait to go to Whole Foods and stock up on fattening tea goodies.

In addition to normal tea sessions, they had three themed teas: English Colonial High Tea (which didn't seem any different from the normal selection), American Summer Tea (I didn't bother going but my brother joked they served nothing but sweetened ice tea), and Mozart Tea, which was different in that the musicians wore period costumes, as did the servers. Also, they laid out a generous buffet. Goodies on the buffet: Ham Kipferl, Salami Sandwich, Tafelspitz Sandwich, Roast Chicken Sandwich, Tomato Sandwich, scones, Viennese apple strudel, sacher cake, guglhupf, fruit tarlett, creme caramel, dobosch cake, berliner, indianer, esterhazy slice, linzer slice, cardinal slice, chocolate roulade. Teas: English Breakfast, Earl Grey, Himalayan Peak Darjeeling, Leaves of Provence, Hojicha, Chamomile Citron, Ginger Twist, Verbena Mint.

Check out the chocolate Mozart bust.

Unbeknownst to the passengers, the crew is downstairs playing bingo! They have a bingo session once every couple of cruises, with prize money accumulating until the final round coverall ends up in the thousands. No kidding.

Here are David's friends. (left to right)Rob, who's the cage manager and totally awesome. He's got a boyfriend back home but the entire time he was talking about who he had a crush on and which guy he planned on cruising. Angie met her girlfriend at the front desk. Her girlfriend is Swedish and happens to be from the same town as David's girlfriend. Rossi works in the dining room. I don't know if he's gay or not but he's either that, or very European, haha!

There are quite a few gay crewmembers. My favorite were the four boys who made up the a capella singing group. Picture a bunch of squeaky clean college boys and you've got these guys. Rob says they have orgies all the time in their room, omg.

Rob's reaction to learning he didn't win a single penny.

And guess who won the final coverall this session? Omg, David won $365 and a bottle of Super Tuscan, that lucky bastard. Behind him, Rossi is thrilled because David used his winnings to give everyone their entry money back.

Afterwards, everyone went to the crew bar, which is like a small disco. Rob was the dj on the night I attended, and he was totally obsessed with playing the 'right' music to get people dancing. It was like he would win a prize or something. It was funny. I found it weird to be sitting on a bar stool, completely sober, and yet be swaying back and forth on my chair as if I were drunk. I imagine if I *had* become drunk, I would have fallen on the floor whenever the ship rocked.

 

Tuesday - Cozumel, Mexico

 

The plan for Cozumel was to scuba dive since they have some great reef systems and very clear water. My brother is one open water dive away from earning his scuba certification, but he opted to sit this one out and finish his cert elsewhere. So I signed up alone and he tagged along to wait on the beach.

Whee, here I am getting instructed by Perfidio. Until you're certified you have to go through the same set of instruction before diving, even if you've heard the same instructions ten times. He showed me how to clear my mask of water while under the surface, how to clear air from my respirator if it comes free of my mouth, and how to equalize my buoyancy by adding or releasing air from my BCD, which is the inflatable vest that the tank is attached to. It took about half an hour for him to tell me everything and explain how my equipment worked. I had feared that learning from someone with a heavy Spanish accent meant I might misunderstand something and end up dead in the water, but Perfidio had done this for 17 years and enunciated everything clearly for me.

I like this pic because I look somewhat competent here, lol. The tank is really heavy, especially if you're not prepared for it. It makes you want to fall backwards. With the ground sorta rocky and covered with seaweed and anemone, I was afraid I'd slip and fall flat on my back like another guy did.

Alright! Now we're preparing to dive! I was really fortunate that I was Perfidio's only client so I received one-on-one instruction. He held my hand as we swam, guiding me over the coral and keeping me from cutting myself on it. I did end up scraping my thigh on the coral and it stung like crazy, making me paranoid that I'd been infected by some reef organism. I kept checking the wound the next two days but nothing began growing in me so I guess I'm okay.

I took this during the snorkeling, but this is exactly what it looked like while scuba diving. Once we crossed over a shelf, we were in giant fishbowl. It was like we'd swam into an aquarium. Fish were everywhere! Loads and loads of 'em. The most amazing to me were the huge parrot fish, which were iridescent and gorgeous. Some of them were nearly 3 feet long! But there were also zebra striped fish, long skinny fish, fish that looked like Angel fish (maybe they were?), and fish the colors of the Caribbean (pink, turquoise, yellow). So many pretty fish -- it made me temporarily swear off eating them. They were so colorful! Man, that was such an amazing section. We'd swim down and look in caves and they'd be filled with hovering schools of yellow fish like these. I saw all different kinds of anemone, conch, and weird things I can't identify by name. I was so excited and happy during the dive.

Forty-five minutes and a mile later, here we are! Can you tell I had the time of my life? ^__^ I think what I enjoyed most was the freedom of being able to breathe underwater. It was an incredible feeling to listen to yourself breathe. Very calming, actually. And to swim without worrying about surfacing made me feel like a fish, myself.. I want to get my advanced dive certification and explore the option of getting a summer job at a resort leading dives for tourists.

My first dive is a success! I'm addicted to diving now.

Ah, a nice relaxing lunch of lime soup and a margarita. I later had a steak burrito that was filled with steak from an animal other than a cow, I'm fairly certain. I guess I should have drowned it in the house special "Mexican Sauce".

 

Wednesday - Progreso, Yucatan

 

Progreso is a new stop for most cruise ships. It was newly declared a port location so it's not a Cozumel or a Puerta Vallarata. It's very small and quiet. It has a pretty beach with thatched roof huts all along the beach, but the water is muddy, so it's not good for snorkling. Way back in olden times it was considered the 'Paris of the New World'. Interestingly, this is where Chicxulub is. Chicxulub is the crater formed by the asteroid that was theorized to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

We skipped the beach activities and the dinosaur crater, though, because this area of the Yucatan offered a different destination: the famous Mayan settlement of Chichen-Itza. The ship offered a tour, for $77 a person, but David and I and four dealers rented a minivan, which ended up costing us each $27 total. We had a lot of fun trying to find our way to Chichen-Itza using the tiny tourist map they gave us just for orientation. Apparently every single freeway in the Yucatan is named 180, no matter if it's heading North-South or East-West, or if it's heading to Cancun or Australia. It was ridiculous to the point of being absurd, but we finally made it to our destination after two and half hours.

 

The El Castillo pyramid and surrounding structures. Chichen-Itza is a current candidate for the New Seven Wonders of the World. After seeing it, I think it's extremely cool and I would vote for it above say, the Sydney Opera House, but I'm not sure it's one of the Seven Wonders. Interesting fact about the pyramid: each side holds 91 steps which, combined with the platform on top, numbers the exact days in a year.

Heh, the pyramid looks really small here. Conversely, my boobs look huge.

A lot of screaming occurred during the filming of this.

See the red scaffolding at the top of the pyramid? They're doing restoration work at the top, but the rest of the pyramid is fine. I base this on observing the restoration workers seating themselves on the steps of the pyramid and having their lunches.

Normally visitors are allowed to climb all the way to the top. But because of the restoration at top, they wouldn't let anyone climb a single step. This was very bad news for people who would never be here again (like us), so my brother made the executive decision that we *would* climb the El Castillo pyramid. So we rounded the pyramid and found the side least surrounded by tourists. Then my brother propped up his camera on a bunch of our bags.

David goes, "When I give the signal, jump the rope and run up to about the twentieth step." Yeah, okay. Which one is the twentieth?

He set the camera for its max timer, which was a measley 10 seconds, and then we all jumped the rope and made a made dash up the side. As you can see, 10 seconds went by quickly, lol. After the flash went off, some workers yelled at us to get down, freaked by our mass storming of the pyramid. The steps were pretty steep, so it must be pretty scary on the normal days when you're allowed to climb all the way up.

Every column was covered with these awesome carvings. This section was roped off so I couldn't get detailed pics or better yet, some rubbings.

This is the Ball Court, which is a giant circular hole filled with nasty algae water. This is where the Mayans beheaded people.

There must have two miles of vendors stretched out throughout Chichen-Itza, selling some pottery, but mostly offering Mayan masks.

The details on some of them were exquisite. I wish I'd brought more cash, because the choice was so overwhelming I wanted to buy several. There must have been a several hundred masks for sale in Chichen-Itza, each vendor offering a minimum of 30.

Close-up. Each vendor has their own style of carving although they were generally pretty consistent. It was the small carving details and the amount of hand painting that differentiated them and dictated price.

Finishing the last walk of the longest pier in the world. Seriously. The Yucatan sits on a limestone shelf, so the pier had to be built five miles straight into the Gulf of Mexico. Even though it's the world's longest pier, the water is still only 28-32 feet deep at the end where the ships dock.

And here's what I bought at Chichen-Itza. This one isn't a mask, it's more like a statue since the back isn't open -- the carving goes all the way around like it's a full skull. There were only two that were carved like this; the rest were all masks (and the other one was teal colored). I think this is so cool. The other guys, though, thought I was weird and morbid to pick this one out of all the carvings and masks that were on display. In fact, I picked this one because it was so different. I didn't see any other skull ones, besides the other one which I bought...

I was in the middle of negotiating the price on a different mask that was very colorful and had a jaguar on it when I saw this one. It's a perfect companion to the skull head I bought above and I was thrilled to find it. This was the only mask that looked like this, with a skull and a rounded top half of the mask. I really love that this one is so unique. And it reminds me of some things I'm writing and also a favorite pirate/Mayan video game. The vendor was selling the two of these for $130, but just as in Beijing, you should try to bargain down to around a third of the price. I ended up getting both pieces for $50. Yay!.

Here's the mask I passed on which David ended up buying. It's pretty cool so I may steal it from him. He's got a ton of masks from Africa, anyway. He'll never miss this one, hehe

.So the next day was a sea day and David and I spent it each in our own way. I checked out books from the ship library and managed to finish two of them. I did get seasick on the last night, but only for an hour or so. My room was mid-ship, so it was bad but not too bad. Poor David was in the first room forward (front) so being in his room was like riding a roller coaster. I don't know how he fared.

I had a fantastic time and discovered two more things to be passionate about: snorkeling and scuba diving. I can't wait to return to a tropical island and do it all again for a much longer time :)

 

-- Tricia, December 24, 2006