Monday, February 9 - Cruise Day Two

Labadee, Haiti today! We took a boat, called a tender, to the island. It was an interesting place – all developed by the cruise line. Hammocks everywhere, volleyball courts, cafés, beautiful aquamarine swimming beaches, and a Haitian flea market. Again, we put our kids in Adventure Ocean (on the island this time) where they could explore a “pirate ship” and play in a water park. We went shopping in the Haitian flea market stalls. We had a good time haggling with the locals. One seller was incredibly multilingual, speaking about seven languages. I spoke in French with him and Doug spoke to him in Spanish! Even though they were willing to come down in their prices, they wouldn’t go as low as I would expect. They wouldn’t take ten dollars for a shirt I wanted, for instance. And I know that a lot of the items were cheap goods from Asia; one tunic I saw was identical to several our dance group bought in PA for a small price! I started wondering what kind of a deal they had with the cruise lines, since they lived on the island and ALL of the island was owned by Royal Caribbean. Hmmm. I was picturing an elaborate application process to live on the island, with those that make it enjoying relative prosperity.

We snuck back over to the kids to see how they were doing. Christopher was chasing a girl around with a whiplike branch, as the children’s worker was yelling, “No, Christopher!” Again, everything was normal.
We had some wind whip up, and a little rain. We hung out together under some towels on the hammocks, and went back to the ship. We played shuffleboard together, had another wonderful dinner in the dining room, and put the kids back in Adventure Ocean.
Then we went Latin dancing at a bar called Boleros. Even though we thought that we didn’t know what we were doing, a crowd gathered all around the dance floor. Either we are better than we think, or we look so silly that we are entertaining!