DAY 7 - August 20, 2004 - At Sea

Aunt Ying woke us up with a phone call before 8 a.m. and asked if we’d be joining them at the dining room for breakfast this morning.

It's funny how something'll sound so good on a menu and then turn out to taste so...well...it wasn't disgusting, but it sure as hell didn't taste anywhere near as good as I thought it would be.

I didn’t realize this, but Canadian bacon is actually just ham. It’s not the crispy, greasy fried stuff that you see on the side of your plate.

I guess that's why it didn't taste all that great.

I also ordered a hashbrown, thinking it’d be like the ones you’d get at McDonald's (which, sadly enough, is the place I think of when I compare a lot of the fare I'm offered when it comes to breakfast), but it looked like shaved bits of potato deep fried and heaped onto the side of my plate.

After breakfast, we were a little unsure about what to do because we’d looked over the Cruise Compass leaflet and couldn’t find anything interesting.

Uncle Wei Kuo insisted that we head to the photo gallery area to take a look at the pictures that the onboard photographers had taken. It seemed like they were everywhere, ready to snap an unnatural, stiff pose as people grinned broadly into the camera.

I've never been a big fan of that. I prefer taking the unexpected shot --- the one that automatically takes you back to that exact moment in time.

Uncle Wei Kuo and Aunt Ying couldn’t decide, at first, which ones they wanted to take. And trust me, they’d taken quite a few.

Funnily enough, it wasn't about the picture in which Aunt Ying looked best in. It was all about which one made Uncle Wei Kuo look good.

"I look so fat in this one," Aunt Ying protested.

"Yeah, but I look better in this one. So, we're taking this one."

Afterwards, we wandered up to the fifth deck to mindlessly walk through the Royal Promenade, looking at all the crap that were being sold at 50%.

If the people at Royal Caribbean know anything, it’s how to milk every last red cent out of you and fleece you completely dry.

Luckily I'm not so stupid as to buy crap just because it's on sale.

It was actually kind of boring because I was beginning to get the sense that no matter how big and fantastic the ship might seem, you're still stuck on a boat.

When we reached the end of the Royal Promenade and found ourselves once again in front of the Ixtapo Lounge, we noticed the 3Ds riding up and down the elevators. Daniel kept motioning for us to come over, but I knew it was just so he could close the elevator doors in our faces.

The doors don't really close all that fast, though and it was easy to stick your hand in and claw them apart like Robert Patrick did in Terminator 2 and grin wickedly at their disappointed faces.

The boys didn’t want to hang around us, so they watched as we got off one of the top decks and then rode the elevators back down. We walked around outside and soon found ourselves soaked in sweat --- which is probably the grossest feeling you could have when you're on vacation. (Besides having diarrhea, that is.)

We paused on the twelfth deck and sat down on some chairs in the shade. Don't ask me why. It seemed even hotter just sitting there. But sitting on those deck chairs had a narcoleptic effect; maybe I was suffering from a heat stroke.

It later occurred to me that we did a lot of sleeping on this trip. It's amazing we were ever conscious enough to do anything.

We decided to go to the sports desk and try out the mini golf course. We needed to change first, though, and when we got back to our cabin, we soon got a call from Aunt Ying saying that her luggage tags had already arrived and they were the wrong colour. And that, apparently, was a bad thing, 'cause no matter what happened on this trip, we'd best be damned sure we got home with our cases of booze.

She urged us to get our tags and double check with our maid to see if our duty free booze from St.Thomas had arrived.

When we ventured out to the sports deck, it was already really hot. You could see the heat waves simmering across the basketball court and the last thing I really wanted to do was hang around out under the sun.

We walked over to the rock climbing wall and found out from the attendant that it was too hot to go right then. The sun was bearing down on the wall and the stones were too hot to touch. We’d get blisters on our hands if we did. If we wanted to, she suggested we come back in the afternoon when the sun would have shifted.

I guess I was secretly relieved. As much as I wanted to try the wall out, I was too lazy from the heat to want to do anything besides sit around in an air conditioned room and do nothing.

None of us were really into the game. When it wasn't our turn, we'd run back to a shaded area and pray to God that the other person would take a really long time.

Theresa was still nowhere to be found and we were already on the fourth hole when she arrived with her digital camera.

I was miserable at mini golfing. Sometimes, it took me eight tries just to get the ball into the hole. And I wasn't even really trying. I don't know why I bothered. I felt like I was near the point of melting into a puddle of sweat.

When we finally finished, it came to no one’s surprise that I was in last place.

Theresa was actually pretty good, managing to sink the ball into hole within four tries.

As soon as we were finished, we rushed to return our golf cubs and balls.

We lingered over lemonade at the Windjammer because there wasn’t much else to do.

Theresa noticed that one of the waiters had served two women a plate of papaya and this became an obsession of sorts with her.

"That's not fair. Where'd they get that from? I didn't see any papaya around. Why should they get some and not us?"

You'd think papaya had magical properties or something.

I don't even think it tastes all that good.

Theresa and Aunt Ying say it's an acquired taste and that most people on the cruise are too unrefined to consider loading up their plates with the stuff when they're in the buffet lines.

Al-righty, then.

The annoying Kruise Komics were outside teaching people how to juggle.

Christ almighty. I don't know of any two less entertaining people on the face of the Earth.

They're like the clowns that your parents would hire for a birthday party. They're supposed to be funny, but they're not. And the more you see them, the more you want to kill them.

The Kruise Komics do lame acts like pretending to be ushers at the Metropolis Theatre, constantly shushing people who are talking too loudly.

That's supposed to be funny?

Picking toe jam is more entertaining than that!

The other day, they were walking around the pool with purplish red paint all over their bodies, pretending they were badly sunburnt.

Derek actually thought it was real.

“Did you see that woman? She was red all over!” he exclaimed.

Flo, Daniel and I just looked at him, as if to say, "Are you kidding me?"

“They’re just pretending!” Daniel tried to explain.

“No! I saw them! The woman’s arms and legs were totally red,” Derek insisted.

“Don’t you recognize them? They’re the stupid comics that we see at the theatre all the time,” I told him.

He was silent for a moment.

“Oh.”

It seemed like by the seventh day, things were winding down and there wasn’t much to do beyond vegetating by the pool side. If I was better at relaxing, maybe that’s what I would have done, too, but it seemed like I should soak up as much of the boat as I could before I left it tomorrow.

Reluctantly, we ventured back outside and walked around the deck, looking for a place to watch the juggling.

Flo and I got ourselves some soft serve ice cream from the Arctic Zone and happily lapped up the chocolate and vanilla swirled cones as we wandered around.

The eleventh deck was completely swamped with people, tanning and soaking up carcinogenic rays.

Lounging around all oily and brown, most people slept under the hot sun.

It seems like something you need to be good at.

I'd been on the ship for seven days and I was still pretty pasty looking.

I suggested going up to the twelfth deck for better luck at trying to find a place to sit.

It seemed to be the first time Aunt Ying had ever noticed the running track and she suggested we do one lap, thinking that one lap equalled one mile. (It was actually five laps.)

With the sun bearing down on you and sweat collecting under your armpits and all across your back, the last thing you really want to do is take a leisurely stroll around a jogging track. And even though speed walking just to get back under the shade isn’t a good idea, either, it was at least better than spending too much time under the hot sun.

Collapsing under a shady area and dragging some deck chairs close together, Aunt Ying, Flo and I sat down. Theresa decided to finish up 5 laps.

Aunt Ying actually dozed off on the deck chair, but I was feeling too suffocated by the heat. I got up and wandered inside. I walked around the arcade by myself, at first thinking that the games were all free.

But then I noticed the coin slots.

Those people at Royal Caribbean must make loads of money.

Ever since we found out that it costs about $640 million just to make one ship, we’ve been trying to guess how long it takes to make back that money. But when you think about it, they must do brisk trade with all the drinks they sell, all the crap from the gift shops and the arcade.

They know how to milk you dry.

Me? I'm all about the free things they had to offer.

There was a towel folding seminar around noon and we opted to delay lunch so we could see what it was all about.

(As if "towel folding seminar" isn't all that self-explanatory.)

It was being held in the Ixtapa Lounge and was already packed by the time we got there.

We were each given three towels: a face towel, a hair towel and a body towel. We were actually supposed to get a floor mat, too, but they’d already run out and the Chinese girl who was the MC for the seminar said we could improvise with just the three.

You know how there are some people who shouldn't do public speaking? She was one of them.

It was a little after one when we were done and the four of us headed to the dining room.

For breakfast and lunch, only the first tier of the dining room is usually open.

Because there were only four of us, they made us sit at a larger table with another group.

Being the friendly sort, we didn’t say a single word to them. (But then again, they didn't say anything to us, either. We just pretended there was a great big wall dividing the huge dining table in half and blatantly ignored the other half.)

There was supposed to be yet another parade that afternoon.

Parades bore me, though. It's just people walking up and down in costumes while people bark and clap enthusiastically like seals at the silly get-ups. But hell, there wasn't anything else to do.

My sister and I got there so early that the place hadn’t even been cordoned off yet.

We decided to stand in front of one of the shops, across from the Café Promenade.

Aunt Ying spotted a little girl standing along the ropes and she whispered, “See that kid? She’s so annoying and silly. I don’t know what it is, but I just hate her.”

She said this with a frenzied passion, which was kind of funny, but which I kind of understood.

The parade’s cast consisted of the ice dancers, the Royal Caribbean singers and dancer and the cruise director’s staff.

Aunt Ying and Uncle Wei Kuo wouldn’t be having dinner with us tonight because they’d won a gift certificate for dinner at Portofino’s, an Italian specialty restaurant on the ship. I kept telling them it’d be a nice “romantic” dinner for two.

Theresa whistfully said that when she found out about the gift certificate, she felt like asking the guy if they could make it a reservation for three people instead of two.

Even though there were only two people missing, the table seemed quieter somehow.

Things got better once the food arrived.

I always chose something I wouldn’t normally be able to eat at home or something I usually ordered when I was at a restaurant in Toronto.

I decided to try the cold cucumber soup and it was probably the only bad thing I’d ever ordered. It had an almost sour taste to it. But despite how bad it was, I still felt compelled to force it down my throat.

Flo and Daniel tended to like the clear broths. In this instance, I wished I’d ordered it, too.

I also ordered the vegetarian spring rolls, which were surprisingly good — despite my belief that nothing tastes good unless there’s a slab of meat in it.

Hera’s recommendation was for the steak, but I’ve never been a big fan of steak. If you order it well done, you get a bad cut of meat that’s basically incinerated. If you order it medium rare, you cut into the meat and find little rivers of blood seeping onto the plate. If you order it rare, you’re basically asking for raw meat.

Derek and Darren always ordered two desserts and even though there were times when Flo and I got ambitious and said we were going to have two desserts, we never really managed it.

Hera said that the surveys we’d be given tomorrow to fill out would be really important. She said that waiters who got low ratings would be given the front tables to wait on for the next set of passengers because it was a longer walk from the kitchen.

Theresa promised that we had nothing but good things to say about her.

Hera shrugged and replied, “No matter how nice you try to be, there are some people who always have something to complain about.”

I wondered if that was a not-so-subtle way of telling a certain somebody something.

There was supposed to be a farewell variety show tonight. (God was I ever missing television.) Flo and I got there early (as usual) and we were soon joined by Aunt Ying, who was carrying a bag full of things she’d picked up from the gift shop.

I'm sure that, because we were sitting in the middle, the people we had to walk past just loved us.

That night, they had yet another comic — this time, a pudgy, sweating white guy from New York who seemed really nervous.

He kept laughing at his own jokes to prompt the rest of us to laugh. He wasn’t particularly funny until he started imitating his sister, whom he said resembles the Elephant Man when she gets excited. And the bit where he started talking like a 15-year-old Valley girl was, like, so totally lame, but like, maybe I was so, like, bored by then, that it was like, totally funny.

When we finished, we had some time to kill before we caught some of the Royal Caribbean singers performing at the Cosmopolitan Club on the 14th deck. (Doesn't it seem like we always had time to kill that day?) They were going to do an initmate little jazz show and since we’d never been to the Cosmopolitan Club, it seemed like an interesting way to wind up our stay at the Navigator.

We found some seats by the window and found ourselves looking out over the pools.

From where we were sitting, we could see Aunt Ying and Uncle Wei Kuo walking around on the 12th deck, lost and confused. We’d made the same mistake and had gone to the other end of the ship.

The club was full of smoke and because we weren’t drinking anything, we felt a little out of place. I think I spent the whole half hour of the performance with my hand covering my nose and breathing through my mouth. Not that it would have done much of anything. I guess the Ontario government does a really kick-ass job with those anti-smoking campaigns. But get this: there was this young, Brazilian couple sitting at the bar, with their baby and they were just puffing away, oblivious to the fact that people who don't smoke can actually get lung cancer through second hand smoke. How selfish is that? I swear to God, people like that should be sterilized and not allowed to breed.

It was totally annoying.

Aunt Ying, Uncle Wei Kuo and Theresa went to a pub to listen to the piano player there until about 2 a.m. Daniel had raved about him every single night, saying the guy always got good tips.

“His wine glass is always just stuffed with cash,” Daniel would say in awe.

I tried explaining that, even though it was "stuffed with cash", it was probably full of $1 bills and that it probably totalled up to something like $15 if the guy was lucky and that this doesn't really qualify as striking it rich.

Tomorrow would be our last day and everybody seemed reluctant to go to sleep. This was our last full night on the ship.

But I was ready to go home, anyway.