We had what we call a "down day" today on our first visit of the winter to St. Lucia, and, amazingly, we're not feeling too guilty about that at all, which is HUGE progress for one of us (not me). You have to admit that we've had two active days, and we have another planned for tomorrow. This is a good time to mention, I think, that we have never before done this Eastern Caribbean itinerary in this order before, which really didn't occur to me until Antigua came the day after St. Thomas. Generally, 99% of the time, Antigua is first or last in the five days of islands, and St. Thomas is first or last, and Barbados is always in the middle. But these islands are close enough to each other (well, not Barbados...Barbados hangs off the eastern edge of the Caribbean all by itself) that they are rather interchangable from an itinerary perspective, as this cruise proves. So, anyway, poor St. Lucia always gets shortchanged by us, I thought because it lies between big fun on either Antigua or St. Thomas on one side and Barbados on the other, but it got shortchanged again today and so now I must conclude that St. Lucia is so often a day of rest in our Eastern Caribbean cruises simply because it's harder to find things to do around the town of Castries where the Emerald Princess docks.
G was the slow one this morning, and I was showered and out the door while he was still deciding to get out of bed. IC was my first stop, of course, but when I went to the DaVinci Dining Room at 8:45am, I couldn't tell Ingrid with certainty whether I'd would be one for breakfast, or two. G showed up just as the dining room was closing at 9am, and then simply had orange slices and mixed berries and a scoop of vanilla ice cream (really) so as not to hold up the galley. When I was done eating, we then went to the Horizon Court Buffet so he could get a second, more nutritious breakfast. We had a decision to make about how to spend our day, and the weather didn't help (it was a gorgeous day and we could have done anything-water, beach, inland on St. Lucia- but as I said, we didn't). We sat on the back of the ship for awhile and watched a fire drill on the P&O Adonia, docked just behind us at Pointe Seraphine (a Mein Schiff ship was at the freight dock).
Eventually we walked off the ship into the nice little shopping area at Pointe Seraphine and went to look for friends Dev and Alencia who work in the shops (and it was great to see them both).
We spent an hour or so walking in and out of shops and talking with fellow cruisers (it's really quite a pretty area) until we were given the password for free wifi at one of the stores and went to the beer garden right next door and enjoyed two Piton beers for $3(!), and interneted to our hearts content. I had picked up gifts for the girls, and then had a change of heart and exchanged one for a different color, and then texted their mom who said J was favoring a different color these days and so exchanged one shirt back to the original color and I'm certain Alencia thought I was nuts but I just shrugged my shoulders and said, "teenage girls" as an explanation and she understood perfectly.
This bird provided some competition for the ubiquitous Caribbean rap music played at the beer garden.
I spent an hour with the free wifi trying to learn Macedonian. Really. You know, Darko is from Macedonia, but crew from Macedonia are rare and when I Googled "Map Eastern Europe" I could see why. It's tiny, tiny.
We've never encountered another waiter from Macedonia (that I can recall) and so know no Macedonian words. We like to learn five (good evening, thank you, please, good, a little bit) so I pulled up sites with simple phrases and, heaven help me, the alphabet is different, and even with English translations I could not figure out pronunciations.
So then I Googled "Macedonian phonetic" and finally found something I could use. My goal is to learn one word a day for the next five days and we should be good to go. Actually, their word for "thank you" is the same as in Serbian with a slightly less gutteral pronunciation, so I'd been practicing "good evening" all afternoon and G keeps saying, "What? What?" 'cause I'm kind of mumbling it under my breath as I practice. What is shocking is that I already know these words in Tagalog, Thai and Indonesian. Me, who spent years studying French and Spanish and can speak neither. I guess I just needed to use them on a daily basis for them to stick.
Eventually, wifi slowed to a crawl as more and more of the crew started FaceTime-ing home, so we gave up and returned to the ship. It was 3pm by then, and we were hungry, so we grabbed a piece of pizza and returned to the cabin just for some cool, quiet darkness before getting cleaned up for dinner. Well, actually, G squeezed in a hot tub visit before getting cleaned up, because although he may have relaxed enough to let an active day on the island pass by, he still can't go a day without a hot tub visit. We made a quick stop in the Elite Lounge in Skywalkers (because St. Lucia is just so darn beautiful on sunny days), and then walked across the promenade deck on our way to dinner, watching as the P&O Adonia sailed off into the sunset.
Eventually, wifi slowed to a crawl as more and more of the crew started FaceTime-ing home, so we gave up and returned to the ship. It was 3pm by then, and we were hungry, so we grabbed a piece of pizza and returned to the cabin just for some cool, quiet darkness before getting cleaned up for dinner. Well, actually, G squeezed in a hot tub visit before getting cleaned up, because although he may have relaxed enough to let an active day on the island pass by, he still can't go a day without a hot tub visit. We made a quick stop in the Elite Lounge in Skywalkers (because St. Lucia is just so darn beautiful on sunny days), and then walked across the promenade deck on our way to dinner, watching as the P&O Adonia sailed off into the sunset.
I was so proud that I was going to be saying "good evening" to Darko in Macedonian and then I screwed it up and God only knows what I actually said because he got a look of...well, not horror exactly but certainly not delight on his face until he figured out what I was trying to say, and so now it's back to the drawing board for me.
:-(
We were done with dinner in time for the 7:15pm Disco- Blame it on the Boogie production show, and as I watched it, I realized that I had never seen it performed so well. We walked out of the theater and G turned to me and said, "That was the best performance of that show I've ever seen", so I think it was more than just my imagination and it really was especially good tonight.
We spent a bit of time in the Explorers Lounge listening to the Emerald Princess orchestra and watching all the couples dancing. We're enjoying doing that occasionally, which is good, because there's a lot of dancing on the Emerald Princess and, as non-dancers, we've decided we needed to get some entertainment value out of it anyway, and, of course, we always enjoy live music.
The 70's night party was tonight in the Explorers Lounge, but we've been forever spoiled by that same-titled extravaganza we enjoyed on the Allure. We chose instead popcorn, fuzzy water, blog and bed (well, popcorn, fuzzy water and bed for G), and we've set an alarm (horrors!) for our early arrival tomorrow into Barbados.