Back to Work

Well, 7 days in the Caribbean and I did not see a dead body; I was truly on vacation. 

However... Just a few thoughts I’d like to share:

First, it was discovered quickly that my wife and I are well below the average age of most of the other passengers.  Looking around us as we walked the decks, I felt as if we had been transported to a nursing home, complete with plenty of wheelchairs and racks of chilled prune juice.  The Mrs. and I took a shore excursion, where our tour group had to walk up a steep hill; I considered the average age of those on the tour with us and wondered how many of these people I would have to give mouth-to-mouth to at the same time.  Luckily, everyone was up to date with their medications and/or had their O2 bottles recently filled, so I did not have to challenge my perfect (perfectly dismal) record at CPR: 0 and 3. 

Next, used car dealers in the U S of A have nothing on the hucksters in Jamaica.  I was walking through an area of “Native Handicrafts,” (i.e. cheap wooden figures of some volcano god, manufactured in China) when this young man came up to me and started talking in that smooth, Jamaican accent about friendship and love and “No problem mon”.  The next few moments were sort of fuzzy, but ended with my last 5 bucks slipping into this young man’s hands as I was holding some wooden figurine that I normally would not have let my dog chew on.  Perhaps with some counseling and hypnotism, I can recall the exact chain of how that all happened. 

Then there is the food.  It seemed that the cooks, crew and staff here were paid by how many pounds of food they could shove into passengers during the week.  Now understand, the food was good, although a lot of it I could not even pronounce; muesli, florintine trattoria, veil au poivre; and by the way... "Pearls of the Sea" is just a fancy name for stinkin' fish eggs.   Thank goodness, there were areas on the ship where we could avoid all the foreign stuff and get some good old, back home American food, like: lasagna, nachos, fried rice, fish ‘n chips, latte’ with biscotti, and of course, shrimp sushi. 

Lastly, this cruise has helped me to correct a gross misunderstanding.  I foolishly thought that people who could afford a cruise would not be stupid; how wrong I was.  This morning I heard one of my fellow passengers ask, “Do you think the workers live on the ship?”  Maybe she saw a submarine, filled with bunks, following the ship that I somehow missed.  A cruise line’s employee told me of the following questions, which were actually asked of her by passengers: “Is that island completely surrounded by water?”  “What’s our present elevation?”  “Does this elevator go to the front of the ship, or the back?”  “Is the ship’s television satellite or cable?”  It seems that some cruise passengers are the same as everyone else, pretty dense... and of course I am NOT talking about any of my readers!

Well, it’s back to work for me, thanks for reading,

Dave