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!
No comments:
Post a Comment