Thursday, February 19, 2015

Day 6 -- February 7, 2015



The water at Cozumel is as beautiful as any that we’ve ever seen. I hope the beauty will be evident in my photos. As we walked through the duty-free shopping mall that led to the city, we saw vendors selling every kind of alcohol that anyone might want (I suppose), perfumes, vanilla, diamonds, emeralds, just about anything that a visitor to Cozumel could desire. And then we laid eyes on the real vendors . . . those with shops. We had already been indoctrinated on the ones that are the most reliable, the ones that will send replacements free if anything is wrong after the buyer gets home. What the “pushers” didn’t tell us is what kind of kick-back they get when cruisers purchase. I’m sure there’s some kind of deal between the cruise line and the business people. But maybe not. I’m afraid no one got anything much from our purchases.

We walked through Diamonds International, just looking and listening to the people who worked there. We don’t have either the money or the desire to purchase expensive jewelry, but we do like to look. The aggressiveness of the clerks turns us off, so we don’t spend much time in jewelry stores. Claudia and Ivan are more patient and really look at beautiful jewelry, but on this trip, they didn’t buy any.

We all wanted to see genuine Alexandrite, so we went in a store that has probably the largest collection anywhere. It’s so expensive that the clerks weren’t even aggressive to us. Guess they took one look and knew we were just lookers!

After visiting as many of the stores as we wanted to, we left the shopping area and went toward the town. I bought a big bag to carry everything in. I love it and will use it at home, too. Then we decided to go to the beach to take pictures. We saw a sign saying that it was 1 km to the beach, but that was too far for my gimpy knee and back to walk, so we found a taxi to take us. It cost us $14 for the four of us, not bad since it was actually 10 km to the sand and water. We were surely happy that the driver didn’t take off immediately because when we discovered that it was going to cost us $15 EACH to walk on the sand and take photos, we decided to head back to town right then. We were disappointed but not distraught.

Our decision for lunch was to go back to the ship, where our lunch was already paid for. We had hamburgers at Guy’s Burger Joint (the Guy of The Food Channel fame). Absolutely delicious! Frank and I had The Ringer . . . a cheeseburger with a fried onion ring filled with barbecue sauce on it . . . and a handful of fries.

Back to our room to read and snooze till dinnertime. Claudia and Ivan went back to Cozumel to the lounge chairs right at the water to catch their zzzz’s!

Dinner was in Paris Dining again with the same wait staff that we had had the night before. The same loud DJ erupted about half way through dinner, but this time he played a tune that all the waiters knew, and they danced and danced! Wonderful entertainment!

Claudia and Ivan are really good at roaming around the ship after dinner and finding all sorts of interesting activities; however, we just get ready for bed and either read or watch TV and are perfectly happy. This cruise has been so relaxing and such fun. I can’t believe that we have only one more day at sea before docking at Galveston. But there’ll be more fun after that, and I’m excited about the next week, when we’ll be able to visit with friends and family!












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