Fun Day At Sea

Thursday was our "Fun Day at Sea." After breakfast, Gina and I read by the pool for a while, and Jessica went to the Casino. Jess didn't want to sit in the sun anymore. Meanwhile, I had a soar throat and felt a cold coming on so I didn’t want to be in the casino around the cigarette smoke, so I joined Gina by the pool.

We all met up to watch the Newlywed/Not-so Newlywed game, which was funny, but could have been much funnier if he had the contestants say their own answers. Instead, they wrote their answer down and he read them aloud to us. However, it was all quite funny!

While there some girls dressed up in costumed handed out a flier that announced that the San Juan Sensations would be performing on the ship at 4:30 (not a Carnival sponsored event.) We thought we might come back for it.

Jessica went back to the cabin to take a nap while Gina and I went back out to the pool. I was reading "The Other Women," and almost finished with it. At around 4:30, Gina and I decided to go check out the girls dancing thing.

It was awful. I don’t know what other way to put it. It was so awful it was funny. It was like this weird classical dance. The thing is, the choreography was the same for every single song. Fast or slow, strong beat or melodic flow, the dance moves were these same slow spins leg lifts, strange jumps, and circles. I don't know how to describe it to you without Gina and I doing our fabulous demonstrations. The craziest thing was, at the end, the dance coaches came out on stage with the girls and clapped and danced along... like, I don't know, the girls doing their finale by themselves wasn't enough. Then, as the girls took their bow, their coaches came out at the end and took one, too, and stayed center stage until the curtains closed, with the girls behind them. It was very odd.

My theory? Some yuppie ex cheerleader couldn't stand that her glory days were over, so she started this dance club. What did you need to join the dance troupe? Not talent (The even announced that this was their last stop for touring this year - you would have thought the mistakes would have been adjusted by this point...) - Now, all you needed to join was $3000 to pay for your costumes and you Carnival Cruise trips. You may not be able to dance, but at least your outfit would look good.

Anyways, we went back to the room, took showers, and began packing. Before dinner, we went out and found our favorite photographer (Dushyant), and he took some more cute pictures of us.

Dinner was, as usual, madness. The main event for this evening was that one of the girls had persuaded one of the cabin stewards to give her their Carnival Name tag. SO for the rest of the evening, any Carnival person who walked by (waiters, photographers, bar tenders...) the girls would ask, repeatedly, "Can I have your name tag????" Over and over again, even when the person said no. Again, the parents said nothing.

After dinner, we went up to buy our last minute pictures. There were so many good ones to choose from! We ended up buying a total of 8 pictures. Most were taken by Dushyant. (If you go on Carnival's Paradise and he is there, get him to take your pics. He is awesome!) Then we swung by the casino to play that game where you try to bump quarters off of the ledge... we won a t shirt! Jessica put the quarter in that won it so she got to keep the shirt.

The show that night was Shout, and I thought it was the best show of the cruise. We knew almost every song, the singing and dancing were incredible - very high energy. After dinner we headed back to the casino to play the quarter game some more. At midnight we went to the adult comedy show which was pretty good, although by this time I was feeling really tired and congested.

The next morning, I was up by 6 (I couldn't sleep anymore I was so stuffy...) but that was fine because there was a problem on our fun pass bill that I had to go resolve. (They charged us for pictures that we didn't buy.) It was a mistake and they refunded it.

The girls got up around 8:00 and we went and had breakfast before departing the lovely Carnival Paradise.

What a fantastic trip!