Today we went to Cartagena bright and early. First we went for a quick breakfast of Pineapple at the buffet, then we tried to get off the elevators at deck 5. As it turns out, the deck was so packed, that we couldn’t get off of the elevator. We ended up going to deck 7 and taking stairs down to a different gangway. After a relatively short wait in line to get off the ship, we got on a tour bus driven by Luis. Our guide’s name was Herbert, and as a way of tracking passengers, we were each given a sticker with Herbert written on it, so we wouldn’t get on the wrong bus by mistake or something.

Anyway, after driving for a bit, we came to the San Felipe fortress, which was pretty interesting stuff. They had all kinds of places where they used to store gunpowder that could be ignited from within the walls, in case invaders ever managed to take the fortress. It was really an interestingly designed fortress, Cartagena was really well fortified in it’s day. We’ve got a few pictures of the fortress, but really we were too close to it to really do it justice, so some of the pictures of the fortress were taken from the Lapopa Monastery, which was our second stop. The monastery is situated on the top of a large hill, which overlooks the entire city. On the one side of the monastery, there was little spiked fences sticking out to keep the children of the area from climbing in to beg for money. All it did was make them use a little ingenuity, there were a couple of children with cut off pop bottles attached to sticks that they stuck through the grating to attempt to get money. Our guide said not to give them any, because they should learn to go to school and earn their money properly. It was quite sad actually. At one point, one of the sticks came a little too close, and the Tourist Police snapped the end off, and threw it in a pile of other similar sticks.

After the monastery, we drove through the old section of Cartagena - the part enclosed by the walls. We stopped in a church, which was quite magnificent, with an extremely high dome, with stained glass surrounding it. Sadly, the lighting was such that it wasn’t possible for me to get a good picture of it. I managed to get some good panoramas of the city from the monastery, as well as a couple of vertical panoramas of the altars at both the monastery and the church.

This being my first visit to a “tourist” city, I was fascinated by all the street vendors. We made some purchases at the monastery, as well as outside a shopping center. I don’t think I’ve said “No, Thank you.” as many times in my entire life prior to today though. The truly funny thing is that you’d tell some of the people no, and they’d follow you for a half a block still trying to sell you something. The prices kept dropping too.

We did stop at a shopping center in between the monastery and the old city, and looked at a bunch of emerald jewelry. We had no intention of buying any emeralds, but I’m sure if we had wanted to, we were in the right place to do it. Basically all the stores in this little shopping center were jewelry stores. There were a couple of knickknack stores and a casino, but by far the majority were Emerald stores. The funny thing is that I could swear we signed up for the non-shopping tour. No big deal though, it was kind of fun to circle the block and see the different ways the street vendors tried to snag your attention. As an interesting side note to our trip to the shopping center, Herbert told us to meet back at the bus in 45 minutes. Well, after 45 minutes, all but two of the passengers were on the bus. Two ladies were AWOL, and Herbert was quite beside himself. He searched the entire center, even enlisted the help of his tour agency’s head office (which was also in the center) but the ladies were not to be found. We ended up leaving without them anyway. I think they must have caught a cab, or hopped on another tour bus or something. It would have been nice of them to mention something to our tour guide, or driver or something. We’re pretty sure that the ladies made it back on the ship, because there were two people who were being paged just before we left (ie. Are you on the ship? We want to leave) and they were not both female.

We were quite overheated at this point, so we went for a quick swim, and cooled off. After taking a bit of a nap/watching some cheesy 1985 teen movie with Sara Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt (Shannen Doehrty too - can you name the movie?) and doing a load of laundry, we got ready for supper.

Tonight was French cuisine, so I got to try out some new things. For previous dinners, I’d tried such famous dishes as Lobster Thermidore, and Gazpacho soup. Tonight, I had Viscysoisse (which is a chilled potato soup) and frogs legs. What can I say, I had to at least try them, and they were quite good. Taste like chicken. After the first night, the dinners have been superb. Erin’s been a little less adventurous, but I think she’s enjoying things nonetheless. She had a chocolate souffle the other night, which was apparently good, but didn’t hold a candle to her uncle Jim’s chocolate souffle (which is among the seven wonders of the modern world in my estimation, along with velcro, and those pens that can write underwater and upside down) The desserts have been quite good. The only problem is deciding which one to order.

Which brings me to Dottie. We’ve had dinner with Frank and Dottie twice now, they’re a retired couple from Jupiter Florida (originally from New York) Frank is quite a nice guy, and he’s fun to talk with. Dottie is nice too, and she’s ordered two desserts both times, though the first time was my fault - I had a Pear tart that she thought looked quite good, so she ordered one for herself, after she was finished with her first dessert. Interesting conversation at any rate, and it was interesting to be seated with the same people again. I think the traditional cruise dinner method would be quite nice, where you’re seated with the same people every night. The only problem is that you could easily get stuck at a table with a couple of real duds (like me :) and you’d have a heck of a time getting out of it. It seems like we’ve had a pretty full day, and at 3:00 it seemed like it should be time for bed already. I’m looking forward to a relatively relaxing day tomorrow, when we go through the Canal (You know, a man a plan a canal, Panama?) I’m not super interested in the sight of going through the locks, so I don’t plan on getting out of bed at 6:00 in the morning to fight for deck space. I figure I can see the same thing when we go back through, only in reverse, plus I get to sleep in a bit.

I could get used to this “being on vacation” thing. The amazing thing is that I’ve only been gone from work for three days at this point, and I feel like its been a million years. Very fun and very relaxing. My only real complaint is that there is no laptop connectivity, so I can’t just use my computer to hook up to the net like I’d like. Apparently some cruise lines do offer that, so I think that’s something I’d look into before going on another cruise (though I suspect that by the time that happens they’ll all offer a laptop in every room or something silly like that)

Wow, someone must have used the verbose switch on me today. I guess that’s more than enough to digest on our latest day at sea. I’ll have to work up a page with pictures on it, cause we got some good ones, and there are quite a few of them.

Until tomorrow night then…