Cozumel or Bust

Our last excursion day was spent in Cozumel. There were stores all over the place and in each doorway we were greeted by at least two people begging us to come in their store. Most of them started with the phrase "We've got a great deal for you honeymooners!" and they would try to put fliers in our hands. We avoided most of these stores, but the ones we went into put selected at least one worker to follow us around for the duration. Argh! It was more annoying than any other stop on our trip for these reasons. Prices were marked most of the time, so no haggling. We caught a taxi and made it to the hotel from where we would leave to go para-sailing. It was really fun and freaky at the same time. We went out on a boat from which you take off and land without even touching the water. Anna didn't want to go up, but decided to eventually. We were afraid of hitting the water, but went up so fast that we forgot about how high we actually were off of the ground. You could see most of the city from the air and also the different colors in the water down below, supposedly caused by walling off the city. It was a fun experience from me because I have a flat butt and the harness strap kept slipping off of me because of this. When I hit the boat, I was about to fall out of the harness and hang by more arms, so when I landed, I hit feet first almost flatfooted. Lots of pain immediately shot up my legs. My wife didn't have this problem with landing or with the strap on her harness. After getting back to the hotel, we ate a Tex-Mex meal in Mexico.

This ended up being our worst day of the cruise because our snorkeling trip was canceled and we didn't find out until we had raced across the city to get there. The boat rudder was dysfunctional and we couldn't get our refund then, which prevented us from being able to book with another snorkeling group. We ended up spending more time in shops being bothered by more salespeople before finally getting back to the ship. The snorkeling trip was the thing we were looking forward to the most. I did get to go to a music store which had lots of Mexican made guitars which is not that different from the U.S., right? I did get to play a few nice guitars and the owner showed me lots of pictures of instruments he has in his museum of traditional Mexican music. He also travels to schools to teach kids about Mexican music history. The guitars were cheap, but I really don't need to buy another one and I only want a Telecaster at the moment.

I did some more karaoke that night and slept a whole lot because I was so worn out from walking all over the city.
Yesterday actually, my wife got a karaoke machine to plug into the front of the TV. The whole system is built into the microphone and has a chip in it featuring 300 different songs. It was really fun, but the music is midi so after a few songs, you wonder if you are in the grocery store being friendly with the pretend versions of popular songs. My wife actually sang in a talent show and should have won. This spurned us into deciding to work together on some songs and karaoke is great practice for singing whether people want to admit it or not.