May 8th

May 8^th- Cozumel

                Cozumel is a wonderful place.  There are plenty of dive shops, restaurants and a nice grocery store and plenty of bars.  Ryan invited me out to lunch with a couple of his friends from the Carnival Freedom.  Apparently the Freedom and the Liberty would be at port at the same time.  We had a little bit of a problem getting an ID for him (because he was supposed to be on port manning) but I talked to Daniel last minute and he was able to forgo his ID for Ryan.  This time I managed to sleep through the bow thrusters this morning.  I woke up for a minute but I guess I must have fallen back asleep.  I met up with Ryan around 10 downstairs and we trekked through security and onto the dock.  Apparently one of his best friends works on the Freedom and he hadn’t seen her in a while.  We headed to the Three Amigos which is a little bar on the pier where we sat and chilled for a while trying to catch up on the wifi.  Sadly, it wasn’t working correctly so we hung out and waited for Natalie.  We ordered a beer but we didn’t have to wait long because she wanted to get the most out of the day.  I told Ryan I would pay for the beer because he had bought my drinks last time and I was shocked when the bill came in.  The bill was around $218.00.  I was taken aback for a minute before I realized the currency was in pesos not USD.  So the bill actually was around 15 bucks (we also ordered some bottled water and salsa).  Upon meeting Natalie I had to keep myself from laughing.  She reminded me of Tiffany Deveraux hard core.  She had her triangle shaped face and her hair was spiked up in the back except Natalie was a lot nicer.  So that took a little bit of an adjustment.  Ryan wanted to go and get some Mexican food from a local restaurant downtown which involved a little cab ride but it was well worth it.  The restaurant had a little bit of everything steaks, fresh fish, and even some lobster and the prices weren’t that bad either.  I stuck with something that I was familiar with (after the Thai food episode I just wanted something familiar) so I ordered the tuna steak and a margarita (yum!).  They even had some fish like red snappers and a bunch of others (literally pick one from the tank) but I couldn’t bear to pick a fish to eat.  Apparently Natalie had saved up enough money working with Carnival to buy herself a house in Italy and everyone was stoked about the possibility of visiting her in Italy.  The conversations were nice and after dinner we headed to the “no name bar” (the crew only bar).  I had asked Ryan what the rules were for bringing fresh fruit back to the ship because I have been craving a pineapple and he said as long as you don’t try taking the fruit off in Miami you could bring it onboard.  So we went to the bar and hung around there for a while.  Ryan had some errands to do at Mega (the local grocery store across the street) so he left me at the bar for a couple of minutes.  After a while he came back with a giant delicious pineapple! (and some other things for his cabin) I honestly wasn’t going to buy one mainly because I didn’t have a knife to cut it with or Tupperware to store a whole pineapple but I guess I have to figure out what to do with it now (its currently in my fridge in my cabin). After hanging around the bar and pool for a bit we decided to head back to the ship.  It was around three o’clock and while the ship didn’t leave until 6 we wanted to get back before the rush started.