Hello Pittsburgh!

So I'm back in the burgh now, and I know, I'm way behind on my Blogs... I swear I will upload them soon, I'm so exhausted from the cruise and I've been busy (yet again) out the Wazzoo! I will get it uploaded ASAP! and trust me when I say Blog #11 will be awesome, so much to discuss!

GOOD TO BE BACK!

Cruise Journal 10

Cruise Journal 10: 12/13/07

Anyway, now it’s time to move on to talk about my second dive trip. It was so rewarding, probably the first dive I’ve done that I can say without a doubt that I performed masterfully! Absolutely everything went off without a hitch. I was perfectly buoyant underwater, entirely under control. There was beautiful coral and we saw five eels, four spotted and a huge black eel. (If you’re reading this Bill, don’t laugh, I know it’s a wonderful sexual innuendo.)

The second dive wasn’t quite as good. I had trouble equalizing on the way down and to prevent the explosion of an ear drum or two I had to resurface. I spent my time doing a tad bit of snorkeling on the surface and lying out in the sun. It wasn’t too bad actually; a bit of relaxation was good… however a bit of underwater fun would have been better still.

After the dives there really wasn’t much going on. I played a bit more Guitar Hero and hung out with the same crowd. I can hardly remember the 12^th; I was practically unconscious because of the decompression and just plain tiredness. I just remember going to bed fairly early in comparison, like, 1:00am.

The 13^th was much more interesting, we dove at two amazing wrecks with great history and I stayed up with sprinkles until around 6:00am. I will write all about it in my next blog (of course). To all of you; be safe and have some fun, I’ll be back late Saturday night and ready to hang out again Sunday. Although when I get back I doubt that I’ll be blogging every day anymore, but I still want to keep it up! Missing, loving, see you soon, all that good stuff!

Cruise Journal 9

Cruise Journal 9: 12/13/07

I’m getting a little behind on my journaling; things just don’t slow down for me on this ship. Although, that’s the only way I can have fun since I’ve always found relaxation boring on a vacation. Anyway, I will start writing where I left off, which is two nights ago on the 11^th.

Well, the Guitar Hero contest that I mentioned before didn’t fly. We hooked it up to the big screen but there was no contest, the timing was off by over 130ms so there was almost no way to play on it. We had our own contest downstairs afterwards, which worked a lot better. I would have won too, if not for a new player.

I finally don’t feel alone anymore; the only other “white” kid on the cruise showed up… and schooled me in Guitar Hero. Anyway the new guy goes by the name of Sprinkles, and is pretty much as geek as myself. We pretty much just hang out and play Guitar Hero or Final Fantasy in the teen lounge. We’re up to the Demon Wall, but we’ve both insisted to beat the first wall before we move on. (Brittani will know what I’m talking about; I don’t think anyone else reading this that I know of has played FF12 enough to know… I wonder how far you’re at, hope you’re having fun.) It’s a little bit weird not saving at all, we just have to leave the PS2 on and hope nobody screws with our game.

Anyway, I spent the entire night hanging out with Sprinkles, Tina, Bria and these three teens who only speak Spanish, I don’t even know their names (probably because I just don’t remember.) But it was a very amusing time staying up until 3:00am trying to break the language barrier! It was a very strange night, to say the least.

As a quick preview, on the 12^th I went on a spectacular dive and had yet another crazy night. I’ll have to write about that at some point later. I have my third dive excursion today and I couldn’t be more exciting, Aruba and all. Talk to y’all later! I’d say I miss you guys, but I think its getting a little bit repetitive after the 9^th journal. However I will definitely mention how much I miss Brittani.

PS: sorry for the lack of journals

I have been busy out the wazzoo on this trip, so I apologize if I can't upload blogs at regular intervals... I know its been at least a day or more between journals 6 and 7... I just can hardly find time to write them, ever since I got addicted to Guitar Hero and with all the SCUBA. I promise I will still do the journals, I just may have to upload them in spurts.

Love you all!

Cruise Journal 8

Cruise journal 8: 12/11/07

So… my first set of dives was today and they make me want to be a merman. Whenever I was above water this morning things just went awry, but the dives themselves were spectacular! Anyway, it’s now 5:15pm so I have a whole day to write about. Let’s get started.

The SCUBA excursion went swimmingly, pun intended, although, the boats were very badly organized. We were picked up from a little dock by the cruise ship by a fully equipped dive boat. However, instead of going to our dives we had to head back to the dive shop to get rental equipment for people like me, who don’t want to carry around their own giant BCDs (the jackets) and Regulators (the tubes/gauges). The dive shop doesn’t have its own dock; normally the boat pulls up right to the beach because there’s a sudden drop-off of where the beach goes from about 1 foot deep to 3 feet. However the swells were too rough and the boat was being knocked against the sand so we had to anchor a little further out. This meant wading through 3ft deep waters to get to the dive shop, which wouldn’t be so bad if I’d remembered to take my shorts off (bathing suit underneath) before getting off the boat…. But I didn’t, so I jumped in and got my shorts and half of my shirt soaked. Not only that, but the tide was bringing in a lot of dead coral, which is actually fairly sharp, especially when propelled into someone’s leg by a wave.

Needless to say, the start of the day wasn’t leaving me with high hopes for the dives to come. Luckily, you don’t have to be a good sailor in order to be a good diver, and our instructors were fabulous. Everything from the initial briefing to the finding of reclusive eels went very well when conducted by our “underwater tour guides.” They took our group of 9 divers all over the 2 dive sites like pros… which they were… so that’s good.

The first dive was a reef wall at a maximum depth of 60ft. The coral was beautiful and the dive instructor was able to handle the wildlife, in other words; he could pick up and play with the spider-crabs, coral and other underwater intricacies. There was this living coral that we all got to hold that would latch on to your hand and you could turn it upside down, it felt really weird, like a grandpa who’s trying to chew your hand without his teeth.

The second dive was spectacular, the best wreck dive I’ve been on yet by far. It was 50ft deep, although I probably could have gotten 51ft with a shovel… Anyway, it was the wreck of an old freighter with the hull blown straight open. There was this awesome broken-down crane still attached and we could swim into the hull. Inside there was a small air pocket at the aft of the ship that, although filled with carbon dioxide, still was about 1.5ft of “air” at about 40ft underwater.

We snapped some great pictures of both dives; I’ll make sure to upload them if we ever get the camera back. See, we (my dad and I) accidentally left the camera inside the rental BCD pocket and now it’s in Granada and we’re on a cruise ship that has set sail. I assume the dive shop will find it and mail it back to us; at least that’s what the cruise employees tell us.

We got back on the cruise ship at about 1:00pm, but this blog is already a page long so I think I’ll leave off for now. You’ll have to wait for Journal 9 to hear the rest of this afternoon… and probably tonight too. We’re set to have a Guitar Hero contest on a giant screen, so it should be fairly interesting. I miss you all! I love you Brittani! Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera!

Cruise Journal 7

Cruise Journal 7: 12/10/07

So I’m sitting up in the teen lounge yet again. It’s 10:00pm now and it’s been nonstop fun since 7 when I got up here. Lets see, there’s been at least an hour of playing air hockey with Isaac, I always kick his ass in it because he overextends his arm and leaves the goal way open… I may suck, but I know how to hit the broad side of a barn! After the air hockey we switched to Guitar Hero, in which he kicked my ass royally. Although I won my pride back when we played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which is probably the only video game I’d call myself a “pro” in.

Yeah, you get the basic idea here, video game competition galore. Not only that, but at 9:00pm they opened up the arcade for free to us teens for an hour. I spent the entire hour playing House of the Dead 4… It was fun, nobody else wanted to play with me so I picked up both player 1’s and player 2’s guns and went Rambo on those zombies! I ended up beating the game, although I probably would have spend a fortune in quarters if it wasn’t free.

Now I’m sitting in the teen lounge, as I said, relaxing my arms. All that trigger-pulling really takes it out of you! There’s some crappy Spanish rap playing so I think I’ll go ahead and plug in my Ipod after this to play some music I like. Anyway, adios for now, I’m missing you so I’ll make sure to drink some extra Shirley Temples for you!

Cruise Journal 6

Cruise Journal 6: 10/12/07

It’s about 5:15pm right now; we were all just kicked out of the teen lounge because it closes from five to seven. I should probably do a quick recap before moving on though; I left off last journal with watching the fifth Harry Potter movie. After the movie we all pretty much just hung out and played spoons, a fast-paced card game. I met up with my dad again at 1:00am to walk around the lower part of the boat, now I’ve pretty much walked every part of this 1000 foot cruise ship.

Anyway, today I slept late again and woke up at about 11:00am. I really didn’t feel like getting up so I turned on the TV and watched that Click movie, which is alright but not really fantastic. After a relaxing lunch with the folks I went (yep, you guessed it) back up to the teen lounge. I played some video games with this guy named Wilfred who I met the night before, it’s a little bit weird though because he only speaks a little English and I only speak a little Spanish. Oh, have I mentioned that they have Final Fantasy 12 in the teen lounge? It would be great, except that they don’t have any memory cards so the game just sits in its box and taunts me! (I hope you’re having fun playing FF12 by the way, Brittani. You were always better at that then me at it. I wonder how far you and BJ are…)

After some gaming some of the guys started up an air hockey tournament, in which I lost badly. We then had a Foosball tournament… which I also lost in. Somewhere along the line we also had a scavenger hunt which turned out quite hilariously. We lost in a tortoise and hair manner, me and Wilfred got finished first and stopped to get some ice cream in celebration, as we ate the other team finished and won. (Yeah, we felt real smart!)

Now, as I said, I’m sitting in our little room watching Click again, because it’s been playing repetitively all day. Although I got this little sticker on my cruise-card that lets me get free soda, including Shirley Temples. Good stuff! I’ve said it before, but I’ll go ahead and mention it again, its times like these, when I’m not busy, that I really begin to miss all of you back home. By the way, Brittani, you’re a big hit with the guys up in the teen lounge, apparently you’re even hotter to Puerto Ricans then you are to us Americans!