I woke up to the chains rattling again around 10:30. We must have been in port. I realized that my cabin is right next to the mooring lines so every time we get into port I’ll be able to tell when we dock. I realized after talking to Brad that I didn’t know around what time they wanted to go get lunch. Not to mention I didn’t even know where he lived so I couldn’t really call him or go knock on his door. As soon as I could think of a game plan on how to get in touch with him the phone in my cabin ringed. Apparently he talked to Diana and she told him where I lived. Sometimes, leaving the ship can be a hassle. There is only one gangway and everyone is trying to get off the ship. Add to that people who don’t really know what they’re doing and don’t have a schedule to keep and mayhem ensues. Before you leave ship they make you go through a metal detector and scan your bags and shoes. I don’t know what they would be looking for since you’ve had that stuff on the ship the entire time. I mean if it was a bomb or something wouldn’t you want it to be on the ship? All of the crew members go through a rough pat down every time they get off ship. This was not a TSA pat down. The Pilipino that underwent the service just motioned for me to spread my arms and he gave two pats on my arms and two pats on my legs. He definitely didn’t really care or probably didn’t even know what he was looking for anyways. I didn’t bring a backpack with me just my passport, my crew ID and my wallet. I met up with Song and Brad and they had pretty much full backpacking gear. I guess they wanted to bring their computers or something. We made our way to the docks and all of the duty free shops from the docks to the outside world. Cozumel is beautiful. It reminds me a lot of Japan because the beaches are coral and the water is a nice baby blue mixed with various greens. Once we made our way through the shops the Thai place was literally right across the street from the entrance of the docks. It was surprisingly a modern building unlike the rest of the buildings around complete with four floors and a grocery store on the bottom level. We took the elevator (also another luxury I wasn’t expecting) to the fourth floor and sat and ordered Thai food. We mostly let Song order it for us because she knew what was best. The restaurant was pretty classy and I was a little worried about how expensive this could be considering I only had about twenty five bucks in my wallet. The fourth floor was almost level with the tree line so we could see for quite a distance. I was really thirsty because of the heat and I didn’t really want to order beer unlike most of the gang. I had heard horror stories about the drinking water in Cozumel but didn’t know how much a bottle of water would run me so I had myself a nice tall glass of grape juice. After about 15 minutes our soups came out. The soup was kinda milky and it had pieces of shrimp and some vegetables that I didn’t recognize in it. I tried a little bit and sure enough it was spicy as all hell. I sipped on it for as long as I could try to avoid my precious glass of grape juice. Then came the entrées. Song just ordered a bunch of things for everyone to try. There was some squid in what looked to be a green sauce. Spicy. Then the Pad Thai (excuse my spelling). Spicy. And finally, some vermicelli noodles. Super spicy! There wasn’t much time until my glass of grape juice was exhausted and I was left eating the ice in the bottom of the glass. I knew it was probably from tap water, but at this point I didn’t care. The bill was around $70 bucks so I threw in a twenty for good measure. This left me a little low in the cash department. After our lunch we went down the staircase to the first floor. Song met up with some of her friends and quickly vanished. Brad said that he needed to go to the Mega (Mexican version of a grocery store. At first it sounded like he said Mecca). He wanted to show me the local crew bar called The Barracuda. Apparently it’s for cruise ship crews only. He wanted to take me there because the margaritas were apparently amazing. The only problem was that we had to take a taxi to get there. Uh-oh. I asked what the fare was going to be because I had a limited amount of cash on me and he said not to worry about the fare. The bars other name is “no name” because they try really hard to keep it to cruise ship crew only. It was definitely hard to find. You basically had to walk through a space between two shops and through a little hallway to get there. You came out at giant wooden signage of the Barracuda, white beaches, two pools, a hot tub and a tiki bar. It was stunning. We chatted for a while and ordered margaritas and they lived up to their reputation. They were almost better than the margaritas in Colorado at the Mexican (to those people who know what I’m talking about ^.~) We stayed there for about an hour and basically watched people jump off the sea wall into the ocean below. I think this would be a good time to get recertified in SCUBA. Brad had to stay and buy some groceries but I had to make my way back to the ship. I had a grand total of three dollars left in my back pocket. I panicked when he said that he needed to stay because I knew I didn’t have enough money for the taxi. He asked me if I had enough cash to get back to the ship and I lied through my teeth. Eek! Luckily I was paying attention where we were going so I could walk back. I knew that we didn’t make any turns on the road and we were right next to the water so I knew it wouldn’t be so hard. The only problem was time. I didn’t know how long it would take to get back to the ship and it was already 2:15. I had 45 minutes to walk back to the ship, go through the long embarking line and get back to the theatre. Damn. Once I crossed the hallway leading out of the bar I turned my causal walk into a very brisk one. I crossed by lots of bars and little shops for tourists. Occasionally some of the shopkeepers would try to get me to come into their shop but I just told them no and kept briskly walking past them. After what felt like forever I turned around a slight bend and saw the Liberty in all its majesty along the dock. It was pretty far away but it was very comforting to know that it was right in view. 2:45 Eff! I had 15 minutes. I increased my pace. I finally came to the entrance of the dock and the four story Thai place where we had lunch earlier. I grabbed my ID and headed straight to the dock avoiding every little duty free shop that made the dock seem like a maze. I flashed my ID to the guardsman and basically ran towards the gangway. Then I saw it: the gigantic embarking line to board the ship. 2:55. I had five minutes. I waited patiently as the line slowly crept towards the ship. Standing there was the most painful thing of it all. I wore my new flip flops and they weren’t broken in yet so my feet were basically bleeding from all the stress. Finally it was my turn to go through the metal detector. I took of my flip flops and placed them onto the x ray machine. Most pointless exercise ever. Do tell me how would I hide a bomb in flip flops? (or anything else that is dangerous for that matter) After the nonsense of the x ray machine I ran up through the crew passageways and had a 30 second quick change into my uniform. Then I clocked in and ran out onto the stage breathing heavily. 3:05. Dave looked at me like I had just ran a marathon. I apologized for being late and said that I had to change into the uniform. He looked at me quizzically and shrugged it off. For the next three hours we went through the basic functions of the movers and the different problems that they were having. A lot of the movers had sensor errors so we had to take the color wheels out and replace a little sensor chip and clean the wheels. The ship had been built in 2005 and most of the movers are as old as the ship so regular maintenance is always needed. There were at least ten movers that had this problem so after Dave gave me a demonstration on how to take the color wheel apart we headed off one by one replacing sensors and cleaning the wheels. We got about halfway when people started showing up in the lounge. One by one they trickled in. At first we didn’t pay them much attention but after a while we discovered that there was an event in the lounge so we couldn’t really fix the rest of the movers but by this time it was dinnertime so we broke for dinner. After dinner we went back upstairs to finish what we could with the movers. Around 10 we broke for the bar. Yes, the Miami song did play again. I ended up getting to bed around 2:30.
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