Day 4

Day 4: Tuesday: Cozumel, Mexico.

Day four started bright and early at 7:30 P.M or something like that anyway. Most of us had signed up for an offshore deal at a beach on Cozumel. The deal was 27 dollars for unlimited food, drinks (including alcoholic), snorkeling, kyaking, volleyball, and windsurfing. They also had 3 swimming pools, a restaurant, and various games.
Originally I had planned to not go for monetary reasons, but Phil loaned me the money, so I got to go to this thing and now I owe Phil a months allowance!
So like I said, we got up at around 7:30 and everyone was getting together and preparing to go off. By about 8:30 roughly 10 of us got off the boat. Immidiately 6 of them turned back to the boat because it was lightly raining and the entire sky was overcast. "We'll go later if it clears up", they said. Well after waiting for more people to arrive for nearly an hour, we had enough people to head to the beach. Ten of us hopped in a few taxi's and headed to this beach resort.
It wasn't till about 10:00 that we finally got checked in and our beach vacation began. We started with a prayer that the weather would improve, because nobody likes rain and no sun on a beach. We ate a delicious breakfast at the restaurant and waited. After no more than 30 minutes of praying the sky was perfectly clear and the sun was shining through beautifully.
We began our fun and excitement with kiyaking around in the ocean, which wasn't difficult by any means, but was not quite so easy as I thought it would be. I capsized probably 10 times.
A little past noon the rest of the group arrived. Out of the 26 of us on the boat only 5 didn't show up. The rest of the day was spent eating, drinking and swimming.
I tried a little bit of snorkeling but gave up for two reasons. The first was that rather than a sandy beach, we were at a rocky beach, and there were alot of big rocks under the water making it difficult to get to deeper water where there were no rocks. The second reason was when I finally got out to deeper water and took a peek in, the first thing I saw was a stingray buried in the sand. I thought it might have been a flounder at first but when I saw the tail whip up I was pretty certain of what it was. Needless to say I got out of there pretty fast. If it weren't for the Steve Irwin incident I probably would've continued snorkeling but after that, I honestly didn't want to take any chances.
This probably turned out to be the best day of the entire cruise. I had a ton of fun, soaking up sun, and sipping as many virgin drinks as I wanted. Despite Mexico's awesome drinking age of 18...I still don't qualify for that yet. But the 18-20 year olds certainly enjoyed the opportunty. They even had a drinking contest in which one of our party (who shall remain anonymous for his own sake) entered and, to nobody's surprise, won!
We left the beach at about 5 o' clock and the ship left port an hour later.
One interesting thing I noticed was that at this port we obviously weren't the only cruise ship there, but what I noticed most was that ours was without a doubt the smallest one. It stands to reason though, because of the cheap price and the fact that this would be the last trip this particular ship would go on, that it wouldn't be the best ship in the fleet. In fact it was their oldest and smallest ship. But I'm not complaining because it was still the largest ship I've ever been on.
Later on that night five of us had dinner at the "Terraces". My first night of the cruise eating at a restaurant other than the "Trattoria". This turned out to be a pretty amusing dinner for 4 of us, and probably the worst dinner of the cruise for one of us. Maybe I choose my company poorly, but one of the guys I was eating with has a special kinship with hats. Which is a nice way of saying he never takes his hat off. Of course one of the things they ask at a restaurant like this is to take your hat off. So as he's seating us the waiter asks...this guy (who is still nameless) if he could take his hat off. Of course he does, but only for about 2 minutes, when he gets bored and puts it back on.
So the five of us are sitting there, laughing and having a good time, for at least half an hour, when a grumpy old man who was eating alone approaches our table. This is what followed...
OLD GUY to HAT BOY: You know I've been watching you all and I'm appalled and disgusted by your lack of respect you are showing by wearing your hat in this restaurant, and I want you to take it off right now if you wouldn't mind.

HAT BOY: Just curious, Why?

OLD GUY: It's something called manners, and if you don't have manners than you don't belong on this ship or any other ship.

Now if it weren't for the fact that the old guy was technically right, and that we were trying to be a good Christian missionary sample, I would've told this old man to take his salad fork and stick it where the sun don't shine because of the rude approach he used. Fortunately we all kept our cool, and Hat boy calmly removed his hat. That was the last night he ate at a fancy restaurant.