Week 3: eventually, I'll catch up

Welcome to life on my boat. It’s time to tell you about week 2 now (I promise, I’ll catch up to real-time soon). The end of our first cruise (or “run”, in the biz) saw the departure of Matt, our director. Here we are, taking the requisite “goofy” picture on his last night:


Man, I'm really givin' it to Marco in this picture...

We went out to eat that night, to celebrate. Some of the restaurants on board are free (or rather, included in the cost of the cruise), whereas some cost extra. We went to the Asian one (“Shogun”) which is pretty good, though I’m pretty stoked to try the $15 all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant (umm... also called “Shogun”).

(side note: They have screens all over the ship which show how busy each restaurant is at any given time. For example, the steakhouse, “Cagney’s” seems to be very popular with the American tourist crowd. The sushi restaurant is always, without fail, completely empty).

So the next day we said goodbye to Matt, and set out for our first afternoon of adventure in New York City!


Marco and Amanda went to visit an old friend (Marco used to live in New York), whereas Derek wanted to find a Best Buy (bit of a DVD-buying nut). The girls went with him, and I set off by myself to explore before meeting with my buddy Robert. We met up at a brunch place he recommended at 9th and 56th St., called Route 66. They had a Sicilian Omelet (full of mozzarella, onions, and sausage), which is officially the best omelet I’ve ever eaten. Here’s Robert:


And here’s Robert in Times Square:


We spent most of the rest of the afternoon bumming around, taking in the sights in mid-town. I got lots of pictures of Times Square, including this one of me grooving to some salsa band that was playing on a street corner:


Downtown was pretty crazy that day, since it was Puerto Rican Day. We couldn’t quite get over to see the parade, but people were everywhere. Now that I think about it, it’s kind of weird calling one part of Manhattan “downtown”, since the whole thing is effectively downtown. I just love walking around and staring up at the buildings for miles. I really can’t wait to do the tour on the Empire State Building, and check out the Village. For the time being, I settled for going to Mid-Town comics and stocking up for the week. If anyone’s interested, I picked up issue 4 of Joss Whedon’s new “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series, and a book called “Y the Last Man” and another called “Pride of Baghdad”, both by Brian K. Vaughan (all 3 of which I highly recommend). After that I headed back to the ship, signed back in, called my folks, and got ready to do the whole thing all over again.

Monday saw our first day on our own as a cast, and our first day to really relax on our own. And my first day to go to the gym since... ever. They have a pretty good gym on board (as far as I know) and I’ve been hitting it every day since then. Almost. In that time I have learned one thing: I am terribly, terribly out of shape.

Our next stop on our exotic whirlwind adventure to far-off lands brought us all the way to... Port Canaveral, Florida. Woo. Actually, we were all pretty stoked to get there. Among the few things to check out, like Disneyworld or the Kennedy Space Center was a sight that we were all thankful to see: a mall. A Wal-Mart, to be specific. Most of the crew heads in to the mall during these 6 day trips, and we took the opportunity to go in to town and stock up on all the stuff we forgot to pack. I’ll spare you having to look through pictures of our Wal-Mart excursion (here’s a hint: it looks a lot like the Wal-Mart near your house). But I did get this picture of my “Big Bacon Bison Burger” I had at Ruby Tuesday’s. These Americans know how to cook their bison!


Once I picked up all the sun screen and coca-cola I could carry (along with a DVD copy of the 1987 John Candy/ Dan Aykroyd vehicle “The Great Outdoors”, which I hadn’t seen in about 13 years) we shipped out to sea again. That night we had another “Best Of Second City” show, and it went well. We only did one show this week as opposed to two, which kind of sucked, but I can think of worse things than only having to do half as much work in a week for the same amount of pay.

The next morning we woke up in Nassau, in the Bahamas. After mistakenly attending a crew-only boat drill and then going to a crew meeting, we set off to explore a bit of our surroundings.


This pretty much included a small row of tourist stalls, and a Starbucks. We went to the Starbucks, which kind of sucked. It took 15 minutes to get our drinks, the wireless internet they had wouldn’t work with macs, and Katy was quite creeped out by all the cockroaches running around our feet. So the Nassau Starbucks gets zero stars in the “Ian Travel Guide”. I did see a guy selling nifty conk shells though:


For fifteen bucks, I dunno. I can always buy one on a later trip. On the way back to the boat (we grew tired of the Bahamas quite quickly) I took some pictures of the Atlantis resort hotel.


Luxury suites go for $25,000/ night, and you can see the building in “Casino Royale”, when James Bond lands there in a helicopter.

Speaking of “Casino Royale”, they have been playing an ‘edited-for-content’ version of it repeatedly on the ship’s TV. Each cabin has a TV set, and gets about 6 channels: ESPN, Cartoon Network, TNT, CNN, and two channels of recent-run movies that the boat airs ad naseum. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen various lengths of Pursuit of Happyness, MI:3, the Da Vinci Code, Failure to Launch, Superman Returns, Erin Brockovich, and (shudder) Because I Said So. Thank God we collectively packed about 70 movies as a group.

That night we took a short jaunt to and island called Grand Stirrup Kay, which is a private island owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines. Warning: this is a lot less cool than it sounds. The island basically contains one beach, with a few little drink huts, some beach volleyball nets, and a tourist shop. Oh, and according to several sources, a shitload of sand fleas. It isn’t large enough for the cruise ship to dock on, so we have to take smaller “tender boats” to get to the beach.


Once there, I hung out, grabbed a drink, and chilled out in a hammock. It was nice and relaxing, in spite of the mob of drunk partying tourists on the beach. Ooh, and I think I saw a monkey! But it was pretty dark, and I’m not quite sure what ran across the path in front of me. After my near-primate encounter, I did the only other thing to do on the island: take pictures of American tourists dancing the Electric Slide:


The rest of the week went pretty quickly. We did two more “Scriptless” shows, which the crowd really enjoyed. Another night was Hazel’s birthday (one of the singers from the Broadway show). It was a good time, though I learned that you can’t set beer down unattended on this boat for more than a second. Ever.


The boat also celebrated Philippine Independence Day, which was awesome. Over 40% of the ship’s crew is from the Philippines, so they put on an enormously elaborate pageant, complete with dancing, songs, and free beer! There were candle dances, as well as lots of history (did you know that the Philippines gained their independence from Spain? I didn’t either). I can honestly say, that show was the coolest thing I’ve seen on this boat thus far. I wish I'd gotten some pictures, but I left my camera in my room. Hopefully I'll come across ome later.

So that’s it for this week. Next week, I’ll try to bring things up to date. Till then, keep writing and telling me about what’s been going on back home. Later!