Day 42, 43 - Back on the ship

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Mauritius just flew by. Wow. We're back on the ship now of course. There were some rough seas the first day, but today is perfectly fine. It's so nice not having to take the seasickness medicine. That stuff just makes me feel weird.

We still can't use Google, which really sucks. Well, we can't use it for free anyway. That means I also haven't been able to go on facebook or check any sports scores or news. It's been down for over two weeks now and nobody seems to know how to fix it.

I was able to book, and (finally) finalized our Beijing tickets. This could have been done a lot sooner but the site that we got them through, elong.net, wanted a photocopy of my passport and both sides of my credit card. So after debating whether or not i really want to do this and searching on Google for other people who had concerns about it I decided to send them it. However, I didn't send them the most high quality copies and even blurred out the 3-digit security code on the back of my credit card. I did a little blur-action on the front of my card and passport as well. Then saved them in the worst quality that I could. They responded right away
saying that the tickets were issued successfully. So for our ticket from Shenzhen to Beijing, then Beijing to Shanghai it cost us all $320... I figured that wasn't too bad.

Once we got back on the ship we had to spent quite a bit of time figuring out who owes what since so many people loaned others money in Mauritius and only one person could put our entire villa on their credit card. Kind of a hassle, but oh well.

It was TACO DAY TODAY!!! For the first time that we've been on the ship at sea they finally gave us a full out taco bar for lunch. It was SOO good. Not quite as good as Sally's taco Tuesday bar but a hell of a lot better than the same food that we've been eating over and over again on the ship.

Some ending thoughts on Mauritius. It was as beautiful as it looks in pictures, probably even more beautiful. The one downfall is that it's a European hot spot, so most of the people base selling stuff compared to the Euro, which is much stronger than the Dollar right now. It got to be a little expensive when all was said and done. The main thing was the cost of the taxi's. Food was way cheaper than you would find in the US. The cost of a drink at the bar could buy you an entire bottle of alcohol right down the street.

We had our last sea captains challenge tonight. The sea Olympics are in two days, on Saturday. This challenge required all of the seas to get a group of people together to come up with a skit that couldn't be longer than 5:22 and had to tell a story (or many stories) about something that has happened in port so far. Most of them were pretty hilarious. We ended up in 2nd place,
which doesn't really mean anything. The challenges are what decides who comes into the opening ceremonies first, second, and third.