Bromance - Day 1 - What A Way To Start A Trip!

Since you all pretty much know how this trip began, I’ll start the story off by recalling the first memorable memory.

So, we’re sitting at the gate waiting for the plane to arrive, we’re informed that it’s slightly delayed, it should be here in the next 15 minutes or so and that we should be able to board shortly after they clean up the seats. They ensure us that all the connecting flights at this point will be able to be completed. We’re just sitting there not really doing anything, I’m listening to my MP3 Player, and he’s on his new fancy phone playing his games. I decide to lean my head back on the chair and get some shut eye, my eyes are closed for maybe two minutes at most, yet I have an eerie feeling going on inside my head, it’s going “Someone’s watching you!”. So I pop my head back up and there he is, Bryan is just staring at me, silently watching me sleep. OMG! Awkward! I can only imagine what was going on through his head @ that time.

In the interest of not ruining my trip, I decide not to inquire further about it; I will just pretend that never happened.

After we board the plane and some light conversation, I find out that he doesn’t sleep on planes; he can’t, for some reason. Then all of a sudden he goes frantically rifling through his bag, not once, but twice. I was unable to fathom a reason at the time as to what he was looking for. It seemed like he misplaced something really important though, but the look on his face seemed like he was about to cry. I couldn’t bring myself to ask what he was looking for, so I asked “is everything okay?” that’s when he told me that he lost his brown envelope.

We get to the Detroit airport and I’m starved! So before we board on the next plane, we make a quick stop @ McDonald’s and we each grab a Big Mac combo to inhale on the plane. He inhales all of his food in no time, ‘man that guy’s fast!’ About half way into the flight, he wakes me up because he has to go potty, so I have to disturb the guy sitting next to me, as I was sitting in the middle. As Bryan leaves, the guy makes small talk with me, asks me if we’re going for work or for fun, I tell him fun. Then ask him the same question, he says he’s going for work, he’s got a conference, and it’s on Power Engineering. Huh! I have no idea what Power Engineer does. But would you look @ that, I learnt about another profession on another trip to Vegas. Vegas is very knowledgeable!

We arrive safely, only a few people at the upper rows clap, I was expecting more excitement that people would stand up, shout hoorays, say stupid shit, because I certainly was ready to do it too, but nobody did it. Too bad, maybe next time. Next time? Yes, there will be a next time!

We de-board and have to take the tram to the baggage carousel, I’ve been here twice before, but I can’t seem to recall having to take the tram to the baggage claim, I must be getting old. We stop @ Carousel 7 and wait, and wait, and wait some more. I didn’t even realize there were only a few people left until I started bringing myself back to reality, that’s when we went to the lost baggage to file a claim.
Long story short, our flight was delayed, so our bags didn’t make the connection, the lady opening up the claim said that we could go buy some necessities and then send the bill over to head office and we’ll get reimbursed for it. We wanted some guidelines on what we could buy, and how much we could spend. She mentioned a $75 Kenneth Cole shirt, that they might reimburse you $50 for it. But in reality she didn’t know. So we decided that once we got back to the hotel we’ll call head office and inquire.

Enough of the prologue let’s get this show on the road already! I have no idea what time it is at this point, probably 10PM Vegas time? Still early right? Plus we get an extra hour too, due to daylight savings.

We hail a cab, hop in and I say “Excalibur please, no tunnel!” The cabbie laughs.
Cabbie: No tunnel eh? Boy you’d have to be real creative to get to the Excalibur via tunnel. Yeah, I guess you could.

Bryan: Yeah, we just wanted to cover our bases, yano.

Cabbie: You guys Canadian? I thought so, that tunnel thing is only a Canadian thing, I tell yah, 90% of my passengers who ask for no tunnel are Canadians. Not all of us are crooks yano, I just don’t get it, why go all out of your way just to make a buck!
I’m not sure if he was an actual stand up guy, or he was just saying that ‘cause we knew to ask him to not take the tunnel. For those of you who don’t know, there are two ways to get onto the strip from the Airport, one is via the Freeway, where you have to go through a tunnel, this is the longer way, costs about $5 more, and the other way is to just go down Tropicana.

We get to the hotel, he gets out of his cab and begins to open up his trunk, force of habit? We kindly remind him that we don’t have luggage, I give him around $15 for the ride, I think.

We get to the front desk for check-in, time to try the $20 trick (The $20 trick is where you wedge a $20 bill between your ID & Credit Card, to bribe the person checking you in to give you an upgrade to your room). I hand over all of my information, she takes it and says let’s see, and goes “Oh, they already upgraded you, no need” and hands me the $20 back. I wanted to tip her a $5 spot, but then realized she didn’t even do anything! Since she wasn't able to upgrade us, I asked her if the porn in my room could be disabled, she replied by saying "No, sorry, we only have normal porn". Ha ha! I love that joke!

We tell her that they lost our luggage and asked if there was any place in the hotel or around here that we could buy some necessities? She tells us that there is a store in the lobby over there! Awesome!

We get up to the room, drop our things off, use the washroom, and call head office. The guy from head office wasn’t able to tell us what spending limit we had either. I guess no one really knew, otherwise everyone would max out on it.
This room was suppose to be a newly renovated Widescreen room. It was just like the room I had @ the Paris hotel, nothing too fancy, oh well something to look forward to tomorrow.

We find the store do a quick look around, they don’t have what we need. We go to the front desk again and ask a lady there, about where is the closest Wal-Green’s so that we can buy some stuff. She tells us that it’s down the street from the MGM. Oh cool! We know where the MGM is, we saw it as we were coming in! But wait, she didn’t tell us which direction. North, East, South, West? Ah well, we’ll ask again, once we make it to MGM.

We get to MGM and start making our way up the strip, looking for that Wal-Green’s, still nothing in sight, so we ask again since I wanted to make sure we were headed in the correct direction, we still haven’t eaten at this point yet! We finally get there, probably spend about 30 minutes going through the store, looking for all the things we needed to buy, toothbrush, toothpaste, underwear, socks, shirt, sweatpants, 99 cent Arizona Iced tea, spicy Cheetos. We each ended up spending about $50 there.

We quickly head back to the hotel to drop our things off, then quickly head on back out to go find that legendary In-N-Out Burger. We can easily spot it, but it’s on the other side of the freeway? How on earth are we going to get across that? I read on the internet that some where there is a sidewalk that leads us to a crossing on the sidewalk. Luckily Bryan is l33t @ video games and was able to find the hidden pathway.

We head in, holy cow! The lineup is long! It’s probably 1am right now, and all the drunks are piling in, we wait in line and place our orders. Holy cow! These burgers are good! What do they put in them? They’ve got a slight crunch to them; I suspect that the secret to the burger is fresh toppings, lettuce and tomatoes.

We head on out and make our way back to the strip. No word of a lie, as we’re standing at the intersection waiting to cross a random black guy strolls along shouting “HEY YOU WANT COCAINE? TRY BEFORE YOU BUY, FREE SAMPLE. COCAINE, MAN." We just ignored him and laughed about it afterward.

The original plan was to go clubbing after eating @ the burger joint, but since they lost our luggage and our clothes were in there, that plan went to shit.

We then head on over to the Hooters hotel to try and find some $3 blackjack for Bryan since he’s a newbie and all, and needs to build up his comfort zone. They have 2 $3 tables going on, and of course they’re all full, we walk around for a bit more, only to discover that the waitresses are all really saggy looking and that the players desk is closed. So we head out and head on over to the Tropicana. They just remodeled the place, so the place looks pretty clean and neat. The floors are milky colored, so they have a very bright atmosphere to it. Of course being 2AM right now, the Players Desk is also closed, oh well. I didn’t have any of my players cards on me, as they were all in my luggage, but I said what the heck, let’s sit down and show the newbie how it’s done. Played for a bit, not too long and walked away up a bit. I just wanted some spending money, so it wasn’t hard to walk away. After that we just headed back to the hotel for some rest. It was going to be a long day tomorrow.












Some Notes:

• The giant slot machine that they have outside of the Tropicana, is no longer there, so now you can’t spin it and get a free deck of cards.
• Jerry McCambridge is no longer performing @ Hooter's, not sure if he's even still in Vegas, didn't see any billboards
• The place where I once got $0.25 chicken wings is no longer @ Hooter's. I think it was called Dan Marino's.
  

White Hot Party

The next night, was the NCL White Hot Party. So naturally you’re suppose to wear white, it was just a coincidence that I had on a white outfit during the day. So, I run into my uncles and aunts sitting outside with some beers and a bottle of red wine. They invite me to sit down and have a beer with them, to which I politely accept. I just sit back and observe the conversation.

They’re trying to convince one of the wives to let their husband go with them to the party tonight. However the wife is worried that the husband will do something wrong. I wanted to chime in and say, relax we’re on a boat, this isn’t government where you have a bunch of old single Viet ladies dancing around for your attention, this cruise is filled with drunk adolescents. But then again you knew know what might happen, so I kept my mouth shut.

In the end she said he could go, but she brought her kids along with her, she said she wanted to let them “experience” it, since we were on a ship and probably international waters, kids were allowed in. They didn’t stay very long, not even the husband.

So my uncle went up to buy booze for everyone, which was 6 bottles (they had a deal all week long, buy 5 get 1 free). He said that some chick approached him and said that if he gave her one bottle she would give him a kiss. He said that if she was pretty he might have done it, but she was ugly so he said no thanks. Or so he claims, since his wife was there. Later on in the night, my aunt orders shots of tequila for her and her friends. Ballin!

They don’t stay very long after that since the party seems to be dying down a bit, I go out to the dance floor and find my Taiwanese friends and hang out with them. They tell me they’re going to go check out the after party and I tell them I’ll see them there in a bit, to which I do.

It’s getting late and I’m getting tired, hungry and thirsty. So I make my way over to the one true 24h restaurant – Blue Lagoon. (We have a 24h Blue Lagoon here as well, however it’s a rug and tug, just saying). So I’m in my white dress shirt, standing by the podium waiting to be seated, when these two drunks girl come up to me and ask for a table. I start off by handing them a couple of menus and ask them if they’ve decided on what they would like to get yet. They recite their order and say they know what they want, the problem is that no one has come up to their table and taken their orders yet.

At this point in time, I’ve run out of bullshit material. So I turn to one of the girls and ask them the following “Did you notice how my English is significantly better than some of the others here?” and she goes “OMG, I was just thinking that!” I reply with “Then what makes you think that I work here?” You should have seen the look on their cherry faces. It went from being a drunken cherry to drunken cherry cola.

So that was embarrassing for the both of us, they return to their table, meanwhile, I’m still standing there waiting for my table, and not even 30 seconds pass by, two more girls walk up to me and ask for a table. WTF!? This time I just get straight to the point and go “okay, what makes you think I work here?” and you could tell they’re embarrassed and trying to come up with something on the spot other than the fact that I look Filipino. They reply with “I don’t know, you’re wearing white and you’re standing there.” Fair enough, I guess. The waiter comes up and asks them how many and they say two. I say hold up you just stole my table, make that three! So we just end up eating with each other.

The next time I run into any of the 4 girls, you can tell they’re still slightly embarrassed and just kind of turn away, trying to avoid eye contact.

Multiple Personality Disorder

I played various characters throughout this trip. In the mornings, I would play the loving brother and have breakfast with my younger brother, after that I would play the responsible friend and go hang out with Yvonne and Doris and have lunch with them. Sometimes we’d hang out into the wee afternoons, other times, I’d pretend that I was the 18 year old and go hang out with the crew of Asians, which were usually found in the card room.

I sometimes would go to the Casino and play the perfect Grandchild and hang out with my grandma there and teach her how to play slots.

When dinner time came around, I would play the perfect child and go have dinner with my folks, after that I resume my duties as the 18 year old and go hang out in the card room with either Yvonne or the “crew”. 11PM was Yvonne’s bedtime, so once 11 rolled around both her and her sister would disappear into their room. However, once 11:30 rolled around for me, that’s when the over 21 in me would roll out. I would head on over to Bliss Lounge, it was the on ship club at night and a 4 lane bowling alley at night.

I would stay there and party until 3 am, to which I would then return back to my lower bunk and sleep until 8:30-9.

I went to Bliss one night with my uncle, just to check it out and we each had a couple of beers, he said he was tired and returned to his room, little did he know that I stayed till 3.

The next night, I couldn’t find him, so I went there by myself, lo and behold; he was there with his friends. They didn’t stay very long either; however that was not the case for me.

I think by the third night, I had made my marks. I spotted a group of 6 Asians, 3 guys and 3 girls, they looked to be Mandarin speakers. The 6 of them would just dance around in a circle, been there done that, these guys are just friends. I need to find my way in! I notice that one of the guys is quite flamboyant and mark his as the gay one. So how do I get myself into their group? Easy! I talk to the gay one! I don’t remember what I said, but next thing I know, he’s introducing me to his group of friends. Perfect, I’m in! I don’t stay too long, just in case I don’t ‘fit in’, it’s confirmed they speak Mandarin and are Taiwanese. Better Taiwanese than Mainlanders….I think.

Cruisin

For those of you who haven’t been cruising before, it’s like the most amazing thing in the world. Why? Because it’s like a “solution” to poverty.

You take your giant cruise ship, sail it to a country, say the Philippines and you go to the citizens there, claiming that you have the opportunity of a life time for 1,000 people. You will give them a job, pay them, give them free room and board, let them travel the world AND teach them English. Heck, I’m a middle class citizen and even that sound tempting. You then sail your ship over to another country, say India and do the exact same thing.

Once you find your cheap source, you pay them very little, but in USD, and keep them on the ship for as long as you can and keep them isolated from the outside world. You tell them that if you work hard enough, they will be promoted, which is true. In turn, they will see all this wonderful opportunity that you’re presenting them with and see that you’re promoting them from within and they will all work very very hard for you.

I don’t think you even need to get them new citizen ships, ‘cause your company is registered in the UK, your ship is on international waters the majority of the time and even when you do dock, it’s just to refuel and replenish supplies, your workers won’t even have the opportunity to leave the ship to explore!

On your ship, make sure you charge people for alcohol, but not too much otherwise they won’t buy much, a little higher than regular bar prices and slightly lower than strip club prices, offer mediocre but free food, make sure that there is a happening club that goes into the wee hours of the night, hire a good DJ if necessary.
Create your own world of gambling, set up a casino, with various table and slot games. Set up a lottery. Create your own instant wins and ‘break open’ tickets. Create bingo games to increase revenue and sell raffle tickets to further increase your revenue.

The only thing missing on your ship right now is a strip club, but we can always add that in later on.

All-Nighter

On the very last day of the cruise we got a wake up call @ 6:30 in the morning, I had crashed around 3AM, and Eric kept saying he wanted to try sleeping on the lower bunk, so that night I crawled up into the top bunk. When I woke up the next morning, my mom was surprised to see me there ‘cause she thought it was Eric who climbed into the top bunk and that I was the one who never came home that night, sneaky little kid that one. Turns out he pulled an all-nighter with his new found friends, not sure what they did though, ‘cause he wasn’t even in the video that was posted.

After that all the ‘kids’ hit up the buffet at around 8 and got together for one last hurrah. When 9AM came, we all headed back to our respective rooms to grab our luggage, and once again, we were hit with approximately 3,000 passengers trying to get out of 1 set of double doors. As you’re going out, you have to be swiped out too, to ensure that there are no stowaways. Once you get out, you got to find your luggage and go through customs, by the time we got to our bus and took off it was already 10:30.

We were the first bus to leave the marina, and according to our tour guide we were making great time and that we would be back at Commerce Gate around 10PM, even though we kept stopping every 2 hours for a washroom break or a food break. I just understand why we couldn’t have done both at the same time. We stopped for dinner at around 6, and then about an hour or so later, we stopped at the border to shop at the duty free shop, and we stayed there for about an hour. Wouldn’t you know it! There’s a Tim Horton’s there and get this! It has a restroom!

His defense was that he knew the border would be packed, since most people are returning from their holidays and he wasn’t sure how long we’d be stuck there, so he needed to let us go eat first, ‘cause our bus was full of old people, and people tend to get cranky when they are hungry.

So we’re coming out of the duty free shops and there is only 1 lane for buses and cars and 1 lane for cars only, with one final lane for trucks. The crossing guard removes some pylons so that our bus can get through, so our driver decides to use this to his advantage and ride the truck lane all the way down and merge at the very end. We get close enough to the border and we see a uniform officer get up and walk towards the bus, we think “uh-oh” he’s going to lecture us, but instead he goes the car that we’re trying to get ahead of and both the tour guide and driver think that we’re scott free, that he’s telling her car to let us merge. WRONG! He probably just told the car, “don’t worry, I’ll take care of this” and he goes up to our driver to ask him what he is doing and tells him that it’s not fair for everyone else who had to wait in line etc etc. So our tour guide plays dumb, he said “sorry, sir, I didn’t know” But border patrol isn’t dumb, so he says “listen, if I pull up your records, I’m sure it’ll say that you’ve been through here many times” So our tour guide goes “yes, yes, I have been but my driver is new, he didn’t know, I so sorry!” So long story short, they send a patrol car over and we get escorted back to the states and we have to do our trek all over again, sure time flew in this entire process, but it also cost us about 30-45 minutes.

We get back to commerce gate at midnight! I get a phone call from Ivy’s dad and turns out his bus got back at like 10PM, right on time! Rumor has it that they skipped the dinner pit stop, which saved them a bunch of time.

Tour Guides

I’ve been on countless Chinese guided tours and not once have I gotten a tour guide that I liked. Maybe it’s always because I know I can do a much better job than them. Career change? This time my tour guide literally only spoke Mandarin, he came from China about 12 years ago, and has been a tour guide for about 11. He knows very little and very poor Cantonese and a small amount of Engrish. Usually on these tours they’ll say stuff in Cantonese and in Mandarin to cover their basis, well whenever he spoke Cantonese, it would be a different set of instructions than what he gave in his mother tongue, Mandarin, during the beginning of the trip he looked really flustered, like he was new to this job, only at the end of the trip did he reveal that he had been doing this for 11 years. My mom had to translate this last part for me, but apparently all the mainlanders thought that he did such a good job, they started asking him what other tours he would be involved in, because they wanted to sign up as well. WTF?

Casino

I also spent some time in the casino, I think on the second day, I lost about $100, then took out another $100 wanted to chase, but decided not to. I lost that/spent that later on. I entered my very first black jack tournament on this cruise, it was only $15 to enter, whereas Fallsview wants $250 to enter. Maybe they’re structured a little differently ‘because the one that I participated in only went for 7 rounds, and the winner would be able to move on to the finals. My dealer was a somewhat pretty female Filipino dealer, we didn’t have a choice, and I only won 2 of my 7 hands for that round, so needless to say, I didn’t qualify to move on. I witnessed the highest score of the tournament which was 9,500. Everyone started off with 2,000. She got lucky being the last 2 hands of the round she got blackjack both times, which paid 1.5 times. She ended up coming in second at the final table. First place won $500.

Blackjack wasn’t the only tournament available; they also had slots tournaments ($20) and Poker tournaments ($60). I already tried a slot tournament in Vegas and knew how mind numbing that would have been, and I figured I would have much more fun with the $60 in video poker if I skipped out on the Poker Tournament. I ended up entering the blackjack tournament twice, I wanted to enter several more times, but had to resist the temptation. The second time, I entered, I just heard that they were looking for players so I signed up and they were offering a free drink to all who participated, so I paid $15 for a rum and coke.

On the very last full day of the trip, I took out $200 and went to play $25 per hand blackjack, I managed to win about $450, saved $400 aside to repay my father for the money that I “borrowed” and went to go use the several match play coupons that we were given when signing up for their players card.

Craps sucks, I can never win at that game, wasted $10 there. Roulette was okay, won my bets there. The $15 in promo chips were pretty crappy as well since I kept losing those, but the best coupon was the ‘Lucky Ace’, where your first card was an Ace, won the majority of those hands, I could have walked away with a bit of money, but that just wasn’t enough, so I kept playing until I lost all the money that I was suppose to leave with. We had 6 new sign ups, so that meant 6 coupon books and it says only 1 per person, so I had to discreetly and slowly use them, every time I wanted to use one, I would play stupid and ask what I had to do, and they would tell me.

Throughout the week I overhead a couple guys say that their buddy was in the casino and he’d be up money every night, one night I walked in and saw him sitting at the $15 minimum tables, pretty much betting the table minimums, his face was all red like he was just a regular drunken teenager playing blackjack and he turned to his friends and said “yeah, I’m up again”. The very next night, which was the last night of the cruise, I see this very same kid, sit down with $20-$30,000 is chips, and playing the table limit of $2,000 at 2 hands a go. I watched him double that money and then bring that pile back down to less than what he bought in with. I left shortly after seeing that he was down, so I’m not sure the end result of that story. At one point, after splitting aces and winning all three hands, he turned to the dealer and said ‘pick a number, 1, 2 or 3?’, the dealer picked 2 and he tipped him $200.

Nassau

The next port of call that we visited was Nassau Bahamas. This was supposed to be a great day for sun as well, however as we were leaving the ship, it started to lightly rain, and the remainder of the day was mildly cloudy. This was the first and last excursion that we actually participated in. I knowingly paid $65 for a guided tour of the Atlantis Resort, usually tours of the hotels are free, and after having been to Vegas this was more of a ‘been there done that’ moment. The price of the ticket did include admission into their Aquarium, and you could go through it as many times as you would like.

Today was also St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m not sure if it was the lack of food, the lack of liquids, or the lack of sleep, but I really wanted a beer. Okay fine, maybe I caved into peer pressure, being surrounded by drunken adolescents wandering the streets with a bottle in a brown paper bag, but the above facts were true too.
I was stuck on babysitting duty, watching Eric, Yvonne(11) and Doris (17), Doris was old enough, so she wandered into the street markets to look for a “designer handbag”, while I wandered the streets with the other two.

As soon as we saw the parents and they took protective custody of their kids, I marched myself into the nearest convenience store and purchased a bottle of local beer for $2.50, after drinking half of it and on an empty stomach I was already feeling a little talkative, looked down on the bottle notice that it says 7% alcohol. As we were making our way back to the ship, I stopped in another store for another one, this time it only cost me $2.25. So I got a little wobbly on less than 5 bucks, beers on the cruise cost @ least 6 bucks!

We boarded the ship about 2 hours before they closed the door, as there wasn’t much more to see and we were getting hungry since the kids skipped lunch, the parents went back on the ship for lunch.

This was the last stop of the trip and from here we would be headed back to NYC, which surprisingly is a 2 day cruise, but hey that’s 2 more days of partying, so no one’s complaining.

To help pass the time between travels the cruise staff put together a long list of activities for people to do, and each day they would come out with a newsletter outlining all of the activities available.

They had Bingo, Karaoke, movie screenings, shows, games to play. We had several coupon booklets that were given to us by our travel agent at the time of booking and in that book was a coupon for 3 free bingo tickets, so we played bingo a few times. But the catch to those free bingo tickets is that they are only valid for the ‘blackout’ game, which you have to get all the spots on the bingo card within a certain number of calls in order to win the prize.

Shows we watched a show where a woman sang some songs, we watched a close-up magic show, we watched a hypnosis show, I watched the dating game show.

Karaoke, needless to say there were some talented singers on this cruise and there were some not so talented singers on this cruise. My mom’s friend’s daughter, Doris wanted to sing, but she didn’t want to go up alone, so she asked me to sing along with her, so I said fine. I let her choose the song, she chose “Never Had A Dream Come True” By S Club 7, and I said okay, since I knew the song. So we get up on stage, they cue the music and the lyrics, and I go ‘wait a minute’ I don’t know this song, the only thing I know is the chorus, but by that time it was already too late, she had started singing, so I just stood up there for moral support.

The other ‘cool’ places to hang out were the Library and the Card Room, yes the library, Eric and his crew would go there late at night when no one was around and they would just sit around and talk, one night they played ‘Truth or Truth’ after a couple of questions, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I’m not sitting around playing ‘Truth or Truth’ with a bunch of 14 year olds. On my way back from the bathroom I stopped by the only truly 24 hour restaurant and had some vanilla ice cream, before I made my way back to the room.

Tai Pan tours advertised it as the ship having 3 24 hours restaurants, but we only found that there was one of them.

GSC

After Port Canaveral we would be docking in Great Stirrup Cay. Just like any other major cruise company, they purchased a small portion of the islands which allows them to have parties and access there. To get off the island you had to ride a small boat that carried 400 passengers at a time and it would only be a 10 minute boat ride. If you purchased tickets for their excursions then you would get first dibs to get off the boat, however if you didn’t then you would have needed to get a ticket and wait till your set of numbers would be called.

I went to go line up for the onshore tickets and got numbers in the 900’s. The tour guide was handing out tickets in the low 20’s, so needless to say, I abandoned my tickets and went with the tour guides tickets.

Even though we had tickets in the mid 20’s we somehow managed to miss the first set of boats and ended up on the next set. Luckily my mom’s friend was able to get to the island first and they reserved seats for us.

From there on it was just one big beach party, with food and water provided. After lunch, I was hanging out with Ivy and her friend Priscilla, when Priscilla saw a girl who looked really familiar and said that she thinks she knew her, that she was one of Derrek’s friend’s girlfriends, but she was too shy to go up and ask her if it really was her. So we were all just standing around when someone from their group asked me to take a photo of them, of which I did and when I returned the camera, I said “alright, which one of you is Anna?” after she identified herself, Priscilla took it from there, and then our tribes merged and we all became great friends for the remainder of the trip.

My tribe was a lot smaller in size than the other tribe, the other tribe was already well established and had almost 10 people in it. That is where all the lying began. I didn’t want to be the oldest one of the tribe, so when they went around asking for everyone’s ages, I told them that I was only 18, they all bought that at first, eventually later on in the trip, they would get from multiple sources that I was 25, of which I would blatantly deny and leaven them wondering how old I actually was.
That was pretty much the only day of warm sun we got, the rest of the trip was really cold, who knew that travelling across the transatlantic ocean in the middle of March would be so cold and windy!

We never once, hit the pool. I did go outside one day to sit and read, but it got so cold that I had to run back in and grab a sweater and even then I didn’t last very long. There were people there just sitting there while reading and sunbathing, I had no idea how they did it, and I’m from Canada!

Florida

The next day we would be at sea once again, everyone would pretty much go exploring on their own and then report back their findings during meal times. Sometimes at lunch it would just be the kids, my mom’s friend had 2 kids that we would hang out with.

When we docked in Port Canaveral in Florida, we didn’t want to visit Cocoa Beach, The Kennedy Space Centre, Disney World or Universal, we wanted to go to the Outlet Malls, so the 11 of us hired a taxi van for about $275 USD to take us there and back. We probably stood around the port for a good hour discussing where we wanted to go, if it was worth it and negotiating with several cabs before we actually boarded one. The driver was a nice guy; it seemed like he needed the money so he picked up a shift from his buddy and borrowed his taxi van.

The drive to Orlando was a spot on 1 hour drive, so I guess the excursions people didn’t lie about the travel time, I kept thinking that they deflated the travel time to get you to join.

Over in the outlet mall area, Eric fell in love. He bought some kind of fudge smoothie from the fudgery and it truly was the best thing we’ve ever tasted. Every time we took a sip, an uncontrollable smile would run across our face.

Everyone seemed to have managed to pick up a few things at the outlets, after that we even had time to travel to downtown Disney and walk around there and snap some pictures before heading back to the ship.

Getting on and off a cruise ship with 3,000 people is insane! Everyone is crowded in the stairwells waiting for the “go ahead”

NYC

The very next morning we all boarded the busses at around 8AM and were headed to New York City! This next part for me was unexpected; I didn’t realize that they would be taking us to the Rockefeller Centre, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and Times Square. I honestly thought that we would just dilly dally, have breakfast and make our way towards the cruise ship, but leave it to Asian bus tours to cram every little minute in. In New York I bought a Jay Leno coffee Mug and a Heroes T-Shirt and it took me awhile but I finally managed to find a NYPD shirt for a suitable price.

Boarding the ship was an interesting but long process. Who knew that there would be 3,000 passengers onboard a 3,000 guest passenger capacity cruise ship? Oh and did I forget to mention that it was Spring Break 2010 as well?

They let us board the ship beginning at around 1 and the ship wouldn’t set sail until 4, but none of the rooms would be ready until 2. So our only options were to either explore the ship or go eat at the buffet. So naturally like everyone else we all chose the buffet. OMG it was like P Mall on Christmas day, you could barely walk. Miraculously most of the trays of food remained full, and once you got food, it was impossible to find a parking spot, or in this case, a table.

By the time we finished eating, our rooms were ready, so it was time to go check that out. Once we walked in, we were in for a huge surprise, it wasn’t dirty or anything, it was just really really small. I mean we all knew that it was going to be a small room; we just had no idea how small of a room it was going to be. I mean it was smaller than my first year dorm room, and we had to fit a family of four in it. After that our next concern was, where are we going to sleep, there are only 3 beds, after asking our housekeeper, they informed us that there was a pull away bed tucked under one of the beds and that it would be pulled out and set up for us at night.

We had what they called an inside cabin, my mom’s friend upgraded and paid $50 more per person to have a little window in their room, their room was a bit bigger, but only by a couple of feet.

The first night was very rocky, there was a storm in NY when we left and we probably had to sail through it in order to maintain our schedule. It was so rocky that the tableware in one of the specialty Japanese restaurants started sliding off and broke, people were sliding all over the place.

We started dinner with 11 people, and before the food came we were already down to 8 people. *Sigh* the rest of us just had to pick up the slack and eat their food.
If you went up Deck 7, you would see a cluster of people just sitting by the stairs and holding on, looking really pale, having just consumed some sea sick pills.

Where it all began. The Big Bang Theory

It all began with my little cousin’s parents wanting to take her on a vacation for her March Break, so they signed up for the cruise along with 7 of their friends. My cousin’s dad asked his mom, if she would like to join them on the cruise, she said only if she could find some of her friends to go with her and sure enough she found two.
Then my mom caught wind of this and immediately like the idea so she signed us up and began telling her friends about it, at first there were several others interested, but due to vacation conflicts only one could go. So in the end we had a big group of 21 or so people.
We were all supposed to be together on one bus, but for whatever the reason we got separated into 2 buses. Turns out that Tai Pan had 3 buses leaving for this trip. My mom’s friend and her family, my Grandma and her friends along with my family were placed on Bus A. While my cousin and her party was placed on Bus C. The buses are suppose to leave in alphabetical order, but Bus A had some late stragglers which caused us to be the lone wolf and leave a bit later than everyone else, while Bus B & Bus C were already on their way.
When we got to the Niagara border the line wasn’t that bad, it was soon revealed to us that Bus C made it through the checkpoint without and hassles and were already well on their way, while Bus A & B had to be screened carefully. So everyone on those two busses had to take all of their luggage and belongings off and report to customs individually or as families. So needless to say, this gave Bus C a huge head start and left Bus A and B only 15 minutes apart.
We were never really able to catch up to Bus C, every time we got to a checkpoint they would have already left or was already boarding the bus to leave. When we stopped for lunch, they were nowhere to be seen, when we stopped at the outlet mall to shop, we caught up with them, however they had 2.5 hours to shop while we only had about 1.5 hours to shop, and for some that was just simply not enough. So they left the mall pit stop before us and when we got to dinner, they were already finished and was about to leave. When we got to the hotel they were all already checked in.
Bus C = Fast Bus
Bus A = Old Bus
Bus B = Slow Bus
I was on the old bus because the majority of the passengers on my bus were senior citizens or on their way to becoming one.
Bus B is the slow bus because they were always 1 step behind us.

The Deal

A 9 day Tai Pan Tour embarking from Toronto headed to New York to board the Norwegian Gem which would eventually make port calls @ Florida and the Bahamas.
The schedule was to leave Richmond Hill on Friday March 12th, 2010 @ 6AM and take us to New York where we would be accommodated in a hotel and the very next morning take us to the pier to board the ship, with minor and various pit stops along with way to New York since it was a lengthy bus ride, with one of the pit stops being an outlet mall.
The schedule to return was to leave the New York pier by noon and return to Richmond Hill by 10PM.

PJ Party

So after losing battle of the sexes to the opposite sex, i was extremely devastated. Not because I lost to members of the opposite sex, but because of the fact that I had just lost out on my bottle of rum.

So Kevan the host of the event said that whoever would come up here and do the best job promoting the pajama party that was going to take place in 30 minutes downstairs would get a bottle of rum.

I was the first and only person to run/go up there and promote the PJ party.

Naturally of course, after promoting it, I would have to attend it.

When I got there I did not find this:

or this:

Instead, we were greeted at the door by something like this:



That wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

JA Talk

*Please note that the below is an actual conversation, however the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Annette: i dont even kno wat to say but i am feelin like apart a me is missin nw that ur gone

J-Starr: same here! man, i'm so bummed too, you left that night without even saying goodbye! we were suppose to have a kodak moment and make it last forever!

Annette: o no now u makin me feel even worse baby

Annette: if am alllowed to cal u that

Annette: u didnt tel me did i get ur number o yes i think so

Annette: now u makin me feel bad i didnt kno u wanted to take photos o gosh forgive me

Annette: ur so cute u kno that i av always wantedto ask u cuz i av seen u a few times glancin at me wenever i turn to look at u

J-Starr: Yeah, you gots my number, lets just hope you didn't lose it.

Annette: u always av me wonderin y is he lookin at me that way

Annette: but anyway hope al is wel wit u wat u gone back home to now work? do u have any kids arent u plannin on gettin married do u mind tellin me a bit about ur life as i'l do the same

J-Starr: Serious eh? 'cause girl you looking trash!

Annette: well i av no kids yet jus 25 have been wortkin at starfish alomost a year have a degree in hosp and tourism mgmt

Annette: am at work now as i am speakin to u the resort gettin al bored without u Canadians

Annette: trash???????

Annette: in ja that means rubbish huh explain

Annette: wen u plannin on comin back to ja was it ur furst time hon

J-Starr: I'm single, not married and no kids either. Yes, I be 25 too. I have a degree in marketing mgmt, almost went into hosp + tourism as well, but decided to do marketing last minute.

Yeah, the resort must be dead without us, looks like you'll have to cancel all your events, now that we're gone due to a lack of participation.

J-Starr: Trash means rubbish? Serious? My tour guide told me that trash in Ja means looking good. It means rubbish in english over here.

Yeah it was my first time. Maybe I'll come back during high season and see how the crowds are then.

Annette: y r u single

Annette: o thanks then (lookin good)

J-Starr: bc CDN girls cannot twine like JA girls!

Annette: the peak season starts from december to late june

Annette: u wont b ere fa ma bday sept 26 sorry u werent ere still aw

Annette: wel ur young we both r so no need to rush huh

J-Starr: too bad, but you can come to TO for mine!

Should I help her escape from the island?

We're Back & We're B_____! Entry 4

So after spending an entire week in a foreign country with people who have an accent, you're bound to pick up some sort of accent.

So why is it that we have a British Accent?

Well we were hanging out in the pool, then this chubby kid comes along (he was watching us play flip cup the other day, and he was cute then, not annoying)

This kid was a bigger attention whore than I am, and he was like only 8! We first started interacting with him because he managed to find and catch three crabs in the pool and keep them in a cup, and he was showing them off to us. Then he started playing around with this 15 year old kid named Marc. It started out as just plain old fun, he would take his crabs toss them in the other direction and then they would go race and find them. Then it turned into a sort of bullying situation, where he would take the chubby kids beloved crab and just throw it across the pool to have him go fetch it.

This is when the kid started swimming for it, but said that he wasn't that fast, well I told him to swim faster and he said that he couldn't, this is when i said the phrase "pip pip cheerio" to him to which he replied with "oh shut up" in a snotty British accent.

He tried to play with Ly, but Ly would just ignore him and swim away, and he would say "Whot? Do you go to special needs class or something?"

This kid was annoying, to everyone around the poolside! But I think he was tolerated because he was cute @ the same time. I dubbed him to be Dobby because he was annoying just like the house elf in HP.

Then there was this German/Jamaican kid, who was my dance partner from the beach party, he was probably about 7 years old too, he was cute too....up until dinner one night where Aileen pointed out that he would pick his nose and eat it.

Then there was this little British Girl who was probably about 7 as well, she was there with her parents and we started interacting because we were part of an activity where you had to throw tennis balls to knock down bottles. She was cute, and wasn't annoying.

At one point during the trip it felt like I was running a baby sitting service because the German/ Jamaican kids sister was there, the not-annoying British Girl was there and two little girls who were part of a family of 5 girls from Montreal were there as well. We just throw the volley ball around and back and forth.

Then Aileen came in and I passed the baby sitting service over to her and she took the reigns from there.

Turns out that all of these kids were big fans of Ly's work. They would all ask me if I was the one who did the Monkey dance on stage that night and if I was the one who picked Miley Cyrus. They were all looking for him, they all seemed to like him.

Aileen was playing with those two sisters from Montreal and they some how gained possession of the ball and Sang wanted the ball, but the older and wiser sister of the two wouldn't return the ball back to Sang until he proved that he was worthy of such a possession, so she made him answer a series of questions, she asked him to spell numerous words all of which he refused to spell, in the end she gave up and let him have the ball, but not before she made fun of him and coined him Mr One and a Half Push-Ups.

So from that moment on, Sang was known as Mr One and a Half Push-Ups.

In terms of other fans, there was this one random dude, who I don't really remember who congratulated me on my performance for the Mr. Starfish Competition and said that I was really putting Canada on the map. (7 of the 8 contestants were from Canada).

For those of you who went with me, you might remember a more mature but very well built black guy (he was representing the female team for the arm wrestle competition in battle of the sexes), well, he started acknowledging me whenever he saw me too, so I guess he must have been a fan as well.

One last fan to shout out. There was this probably 6' 2" tall black dude, with braided hair, he was probably about 16 as well, and I think his name was Greg (according to Shelby), and he was from Britain as well. As I was walking into Bubbles Disco one night, he stopped me to tell me, and I quote, "you're so cool man", I smiled and asked him why, and he replied with the generic, IDN (I don't know).

Oh! One more side story, this guy wasn't a fan of mine, at the time, who knows, maybe later on he will become president of my fanclub. So after the beach party, I wanted to wash my feet off in the pool, so I sat down beside the pool, and let my feet soak in the water for a bit and I was just chatting with one of the workers who had just gotten off work, and along comes this Jamaican guy with a British accent, oh great another one!

His story is as follows: he use to work at this very resort about 11 years ago, and one year, he met a girl, they kept in touch and eventually she sent him a plane ticket to go to England for a maximum of 6 months. He said that when he got to customs, the custom officer looked at him suspiciously and asked him several questions, such as what are going there for, who are you staying with and are you going to marry this girl.

To which, he said no at the time, that he wasn't going to marry the girl. I didn't ask him, but I'm assuming that they eventually got married and that they're still together since he claims that he has 5 kids now, who are all going to very prestigious schools and that he's been back to Jamaica for vacation every year since he left.

If you look around, it appears that the people who work at the resort have it pretty good compared to the living conditions that we briefly witnessed outside of the resort. The people who work at the resort are happy and they know it (get it?), they get to eat free food and get free drinks, they walk around with nice clothing and nice bling. They have a chance to earn some extra cash on the side (secretly collecting tips), so on a good day, they probably make a lot.

But deep down inside, I think they're all trying to get off the island, and just like our fore-fathers believe, they too believe that America (or in their case Britain) is the land of opportunity.

I don't really know what else to write about, so I think I will end it there. I don't know when my next vacation is, but for now 'We're Back & We're British!'

We're Back & We're B_____! Entry 3

All these events are a blur for me, not because I was drunk, but because there was no change of scenery, time or calendar to help me distinguish between the occurrence of each event. I'm sure that if I had the event schedule to work with, I can recall each event in grave detail.

We had to have played Trivia on Sunday, because that's when Le Yen met her arch nemesis, Neil early on in the week, and I recall us asking the ENT team what events are in store for Tuesday because we weren't going to be there on Monday. This would be the trivia game where Le Yen came in second place.

After that I think we played Charades with the Pictionary game set. This is where I found that Stacee was extremely good @ Charades, just like Amy, therefore I said that she was like the Jamaican Amy.

On Monday, we would go on our first and only excursion. We would be headed to Dunn River Falls to climb a waterfall! How insane is that? to climb a 900 Meter Vertical Waterfall!

The package that we signed up for was $55 it said that we would be picked up @ 9:30 in the morning, taken to the falls, shopping and then followed by lunch. They told us that we needed water shoes to climb the waterfall otherwise it would hurt. They told us that we could rent them for $7 at the water fall place.

Before that we decided to check out the gift shop in our resort lobby to see if they had water shoes for sale and indeed they did. I picked up a pair of size 8's for 12 bucks. I guess I must have picked up the last pair 'cause Ly wasn't able to find another pair and buy his.

So in the morning they bring a tour bus to pick us 5 up from our resort, but we shared the bus with several other groups from different resorts.

Our first stop was the water shoe rental place, which was really just a little hut that had a whole bunch of them for rent/sale. Ly was able to purchase his here for 17 bucks. We figured that if we spent a few more dollars we could keep the shoes as a souvenir.

After the water shoe rental place we were all expecting to be headed to the water fall to climb the waterfall, little did we know that they pulled a fast one over us and took us shopping before hand, they took us to some duty free shopping centres.

The first stop they were selling jewellery, coffee, and alcohol. We didn't really want any of that stuff so we walked across the street to some other souvenir gift shops.

This one guy tried to get us in to his shop by asking if we were from the Starfish resort, then he told us that he's a bartender there and that today is his day off and he's just helping a friend out. I don't think anyone of us believed him but we were already planning on going in.

Then I heard him give the exact same speech to a couple behind us, but he used a different hotel name. Clever!

We walked around to a whole bunch of shops and discovered that they had water shoes for sale here as well, and they were priced cheaper than the gift store and a lot cheaper than the rental place, the cheapest we found was a pair for $6, and that's without negotiating.

I don't think anyone one of us purchased anything in these shops here. So we all boarded the bus and then headed to the next shopping centre.

Here it was pretty much the exact same thing, the items being sold here were the exact same as the other place, however here we discovered Jamaican Rum Creme, it's just like Bailey's but tastes a whole lot better, and only costs 10 bucks a bottle.

The interesting thing about all of these souvenir gift shops is that they're all owned by Indian people! They just hire Jamaican girls to work in their shops, and they all speak English very well.

"Would you like something? I give you best price"

After this shopping centre they told us that they were going to take us to a place were we could buy some Jamaican crafts. So they took us to this little village looking place and we had to be divided into smaller groups, i think it's to ensure that everyone in the village gets a chance to make some money off of the tourists. They seemed to have a roster going on. I stood outside while Le Yen and Aileen were buying their bracelets and I heard one women say that the tour guide didn't give her any tourists this time and she was quite vexed.

"$10? That's too much. No thank you"
"Okay, how much are you looking to spend?"
"$1" (That's how Ly would negotiate)
It never worked though, maybe it he shouted $4 instead.

It wasn't really a high pressure sales tactic that they would use, they would let you leave their shops, but they would really try to beg you to go into their huts and view their items. I think that was their only source of income.

So finally after leaving all of their Wal-Mart stores (they would name their huts 'Wal-Mart') we were finally on our way to the falls, or so we thought. Turns out we had one more stop, and that was lunch, but it wasn't just any lunch, it was a $15 lunch buffet.

I went in with Ly and Aileen, while Sang and Le Yen stayed out to enjoy the scenery. Much to our surprise it was an Asian themed buffet, then we noticed that a few of the wait staff were Chinese, then we noticed that the guy standing around wearing a tie, who was presumably the owner or manager was Chinese as well.

He noticed us and came over asked if we were Chinese and asked if we spoke Chinese, I said yes to both and he seemed really ecstatic that he finally had Chinese people to talk to, so he began telling us about the great sites of Jamaica and where we should go visit while we were there. Told us about a nice beach that was about a $100US cab ride away.

Then told us that he came over here from Hong Kong about 6 years ago and started this restaurant, business is usually pretty good, he says he's usually able to fill up his restaurant.

So finally we were able to get out of the restaurant and be on our way to climb the water fall. When we get there, we have to make our very long descend to the bottom of the waterfall. When we got there we were all very disappointed that it wasn't a 600ft vertical climb with a race to the top kind of thing, but in fact that it was a waterfall that was slowly elevated and that we had to climb it as a group effort, forming a human chain. No wonder why it takes 1.5 hours to climb it.

We would be formed in a human chain slowly climbing it, while the videographer and the tour guide would simply just run up the waterfall. They hold our cameras for us and take pictures for us.

At the end of the climb they would return your camera and expect a tip. In this case they would truly deserve a tip since they took pictures for us and did not get our camera wet.

We would also be able to purchase a more professional photo for $8, but I don't imagine that sales for those photos are high since they already use our cameras to capture the same shot.

They also had a 30 minute DVD for sale as well, this DVD would set you back $40 if you were to opt in for it.

Instead of paying for it, here is a 10 minute sneak preview of the video: http://www.jamaica-tour.com/dunn-river-falls-jamaica.htm

They did make the climb very fun though, but would I do it again? Probably not.

We're Back & We're B_____! Entry 2

I don't remember what time I got up the next day, but it couldn't have been too late, since I wanted to get out there and soak up the rays.

We hit up the breakfast buffet, after that we either went to the pool first, then the beach, or vice versa. It probably wasn't even noon yet and I was BORED!

Shelby was wrong, bored after a week? It hasn't even been a full day for me yet and I was bored.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understood that going to a resort all you pretty much do is sit by the beach or pool and drink Mai Tai's all day long, but what I wasn't expecting was for it to be so dead!

I was expecting the place to be a lot more lively, filled with a lot more energetic people, and constant music going on in the background to jam to. But what I found was that more than half the lawn chairs were empty, no one really wanted to do anything! at all!

So once, I realized this fact and was forced to accept it, my vacation became a lot more enjoyable.

So after people watching for an entire afternoon, we finally came to the conclusion that about 60% of the resort guests had an accent, and of that 90% of the people were from Britain, and yes they all spoke with an accent.

I don't recall who, but someone discovered that they had a daily list of activities to do, both for night and during the day, and each days activities would be different, for example, one day would be a rock climbing competition, the next would be a table tennis one etc.

That's when it hit me, why must I find that group of energetic people, why can't I create that energetic atmosphere myself and draw the crowds in. So that's when I began to initiate operation 'Celebrity'.

I don't recall what I exactly did to kickstart my stardom, but when A&E Contacts me to do an autobiography, i'll think harder, I swear.

So anyways, I'm in the lobby getting my drink on and I meet this guy who is probably in his early 40's a bit on the plumpier side and is semi bald? and goes by the name of Steve during the night, but leopard speedo during the day. So I'm talking to Steve and asking him what is with everyone and their "coffee" mugs, then he tells me that those mugs hold a lot more, alcohol, so you don't have to make frequent trips up to the bar, and that they're theoretically cleaner as well. Another newbie resort mistake on my part.

Anyways, Steve traveled alone on this trip, and he was probably my first fan.

My second fan was probably about 5' 7" and just a little over 300 lbs. I was just standing there talking to Le Yen and Aileen and sipping ma beer, I guess we kinda both looked over and he said hi, and made his way over to us, explained that he was on the same plane as us, so that we wouldn't think he we too creepy, then started asking us where we were from, and it gets narrowed down like a Google Earth Search. Canada > Ontario > Toronto > Vaughan > Maple > turns out the world is pretty small and he lives @ Jane & Major Mack. This is clearly fun for him, so he asks us what floor we're on and where our room is, we're on the first floor and our room is right behind the buffet area. Then he told us that he was here with his wife and child, and with his sister in laws family, of which he did not like the sister in law one bit!

Then asked us who we were here with, we told him, then he couldn't really picture what Sang looked like so we started describing what he looked like to him.

I have no idea what time the sun gets up in the mornings, but I'm usually out of my room by 9:30 and the Jamaican sun is blaring and blazzing hawt! But not to worry, usually the sun is gone by three and doesn't come back until the next day. So you really only have to apply sunscreen once. Well I only did it once each day, which might explain why I look Mexican. Huh!

Of the entire week that we were there, it only really rained "once". I say it only rained once because it only really affected us that one time, there was light rain another time and it there was rain another time, but it was night time and we were indoors napping.

So we're outside playing and waiting for the strength competition to begin, and then all of a sudden it starts to rain, pretty hard too! So we all take cover under large living room sized structure and begin the strength competition. The strength competition was to see who could hold two jugs of water at arms length for the longest period of time. Girls only had to hold one jug of water.

Originally it was only a few people who were part of the competition, but since it rained, we were joined by others, no worries, the more the merrier, so it was us 5, a family of 8 from Montreal and a father and son who were both named Mark.

Long story short, Ly was able to hold the water jugs the longest and his prize was a bottle of Appleton Rum. So once that was over we were just hanging around the structure talking to the entertainment staff who were responsible for organizing such events and playing table tennis.

Then all of a sudden a man comes running to us from across the facility where the bar is located, asking us if we had an extra ping pong ball. This caught Sang's attention because he immediately thought of Beer Pong (At the beginning of the trip Sang was genuinely bummed for 6 minutes because Ly forgot to bring the Ping Pong Balls).

Once the guy heard that Sang wanted to play beer pong with him, he invited us as well, then said what about flip cup, since more people can play, and this caught my attention, so we all abandoned our current activities and headed over to the bar area to play Flip Cup!

So here, we pushed two tables together formed two teams of four. The teams were us three (Ly, Sang and Myself) along with one of the entertainment staff (Kevan) against four Americans.

You have no idea how relieved I was when I heard a familiar English voice. Up until this time, we were purely vacationing with Brits. Every single person that we encountered was practically a Brit.

Finally English, that we can all easily understand!

The only kind of cups we had were the resort cups, which were made of hard plastic, and were surprisingly "hard" to flip. I say "hard" because I was lucky and was easily able to flip my cup between 1 and 4 tries each time. I think we only played three matches total.

So for the first match Team Canada all drank and flipped our cups, while Team America was still trying to flip their first cup over. They didn't even get past the first person, he was only a sub for someone who went to the washroom, so when she came back, he was booted.

Round 2! This time was a bit better, they were able to make it to the second person before we beat them.

Round 3! They wanted to change the formation around and start at the opposite end, and as they say in Jamaica - No Problem Man. So we did just that, and we still beat them, I think they only got to the 3rd person this time.

Clearly the Yanks were not having it and were tired of losing so they decided to change it back to their original game of Beer Pong. We stayed for a bit, but clearly the game was going to take forever! So we decided to just leave and that we'll catch up with them another time.

Hopefully the rain will stop in time because we're suppose to have a beach party tonight! We all went back to our rooms to shower and nap. The key is to nap during the "down time", which is when there is no sun and in between the start of the nightly events. So nap around 4-7 ish. I found this out the hard way, 'cause on the second day, I partied all day and was exhausted by night fall, another newbie mistake.

So after dinner we checked to see if the beach party was still on, since the rain had stopped earlier and yes it was. So we all headed down to the beach party.

To start things off, they started with an ice breaker game, where you find a partner, gather around in a group and depending on the word they shout out, you do the action, so in this case, if they shouted out the word Rum, you would continue to dance with your partner, if they shouted out Beer, you would need to find a new partner to dance with, and if they shouted out the word Mudslide, you would need to pick up your partner.

I joined, Ly joined and Aileen joined. Finding a partner was easy for me, because a little German/Jamaican boy tapped me on the back and asked me to be his partner (must be another fan). Aileen and Ly were partners.

I thought that I would be able to make it pretty far into the game considering that I have a very small partner which would make it easy to pick up. But see I forgot one key thing, being able to locate the little munchkin in a crowd, and was quickly eliminated by the third round. In the end Aileen and Ly emerged victorious!

After that we might have played the game limbo, or we might have played limbo before the dancing game, anyways I'm sure you know how limbo works, and guess who wins it. Yup, that's correct...Limberly.

Anyways, we have time for another game! This time it's a like a timed scavenger hunt. Yes, all three of us participate. It's like Le Yen and Sang weren't even there. We all gather around in a circle and when the host shouts out an item we have to go get it. For example, if he shouted out Cup then we would all have to go find a cup and last person to return to the circle with the cup would be eliminated. Ly was first to be eliminated because he was unable to find a watch, then I was eliminated because I was unable to obtain a pair of shorts, and finally it came down to Aileen and two other girls, so they decided to have a dance off for it. Look for the video of Aileen dancing on YouTube.

Aileen lost the dancing competition because one of the girls had a larger fan base.

So anyways after that, we were just hanging out on the beach, drinking and learning some dance moves under the moonlight, so it was a good experience.

While we're dancing we see Team America and we joke around of how we left because they put us to sleep watching that game of beer pong, then they joked around by saying how they just finished about 10 minutes ago, then we joked some more about saving the disposable plastic cups that we had tonight to play beer pong tomorrow.

So then I see the sub from the flip cup game, Lauren and I approach her. I asked her if she played volleyball, she clearly looked the sporty type, I just couldn't pinpoint what sport she played. She told me no, that she played basketball, field hockey, baseball and softball. I said that you play that many sports and I had to guess volleyball, and we had a laugh at that.

After that, most of the crowd had already left the beach area, so we left as well.

The next days daily activities were I think a Rock Climbing Competition, which Ly took first place again and earned another bottle of rum, and a talent show @ night, however the talent show was canceled due to a lack of ...... talent. So they changed it over to a couples game, to see how much you know about your significant other. Le Yen was willing to participate but Sang refused to participate because he knew he didn't stand a chance against the other couples. Ly and myself were going to join in, we were sure that we would be able to win it, we spent a good 40 minutes rehearsing our answers too.

When the show came around, I saw that they had a large audience, so I didn't jump up on stage to claim my fame as I normally do, since I figured I'd give others a shot at playing, when no one but one couple was going to participate, I motioned to Ly that we should go up there and save the day. As we were making our way up, they canceled the game due to a lack of participation and changed it to a Mr. Starfish competition. The ENT Team also called us three guys out to go up on stage, and we were quickly joined by 4 other contestants to make 8.

So now that they had 8 people, the show could begin, to start things off is a chugging competition, do I even need to tell you who wins it? Ly of course!

The next event I think was that we had to take off our shirts and show our beer belly's, I tried to play the "it's a family event" type of thing, but that didn't fly. I flat out lost that challenge.

The next challenge was to pick your favorite animal. Ly picked a Monkey, I picked a starfish, and Sang picked a duck.

Ly did an excellent interpretation of a monkey, where he jumped around ate bugs off another mans hair etc, where I just stood there with my arms open and jumped up a few times, and Sang simply made Donald Duck noises. So Ly took that challenge again. After wards people told me that if I were to have jumped in the pool, they would have cheered harder for me, but I wasn't prepared to take that step to fame.

The next task was to name your favourite female artist. Ly picked, the one and only Miley Cyrus, I picked a picture perfect Beyonce and Sang picked Miss Umbrella herself, Rihanna. Then we had to go into the crowd and find a girl who looked like our celebrity. I thought that was the end of the task, but I was wrong, they then had us compete to see who could do the most pushups with our favourite female celebrity on our backs. Ly was able to do 15 push-ups with his, I completed 10 and Sang was only able to do 1.5 push-ups.

Just by reading these events it sounds like Ly won it for sure, but I must be forgetting some events because Ly lost by 1 point.

So after that we sit around by the pool for awhile, laughing and discussing tonight's events. After that we head on back up to the lobby to view the agenda for tomorrow's events, because Ly needs to win more Rum to bring home!

Shortly after, the ladies retire again and Sang and myself hit the lobby bar, and as i'm at the bar, I run into a Guyanese guy who is on vacation and who was on our plane, he said he saw me up there and just wanted to congratulate me on my work and we exchanged some information about each other after that I bring the beer back to Sang and we sit down, down a couple of beers then head on over to the disco.

Inside the disco we find a table and sit down for a while, just sitting and not doing much talking 'cause it's too loud in there to talk anyways. Then all of a sudden out of no where, Sang suggests that we head on over and do shots at the bar, this catches me off guard, but i'm okay with it, since I haven't done any shots since i've gotten here.

As we get up and leave our seats, Lauren and Martha (the girls who we played flip cup with) bring us shots saying that we looked bored and that we should take the shot with them, so we did, after that, I hit the dance floor with them, along with Danette, one of the ENT staff.

About 10 minutes later, Sang signals to me that he's leaving and that I'm left to fend for myself. Then about 10 minutes after that, we all head out of the club and back to the lobby to exchange facebook information.

Once that is completed, we head back into the club to dance some more. Meanwhile, I make my way over to the bar to get myself another drink and as i'm on my way, i'm stopped by a Guyanese girl, who said that she saw me up on stage earlier and liked what she saw, and that the man who I was talking to earlier was her Uncle.

So up comes Lauren and pulls me up to the bar, telling me that I have to do another shot with her, sure thing. So we do a shot with the bar tender, right after that shot, they decide that they're really hot and they're going to cool off in the pool, but first that they needed to change.
So we agree that we'll meet back at the pool in 10 minutes.

So I get back to the room, slightly tipsy and inform Ly that I'm going to go swimming with them and asked if he wanted to come along, but he declined.

So I get back out there and sit by the pool, shortly after they both come trotting down the stairs, and yes we swam around, well Lauren swam around and made weird seal noises at the request of her friend. So i'm sitting there talking to her friend, then Lauren swims up and somehow manages to convince her friend to go back inside with her bathing suit on to get drinks.

So now, i'm sitting there talking to Lauren and she's explaining to me how my friends suck because they all went to bed so early. I say, yes I know. She said that they saw us sitting by the pool earlier, shortly after the game, as they were headed to the beach area, and as they came back we were gone.

The next thing I wanted to say was "Oh, so you're stalking me?" But as soon as I opened my mouth and said Oh, I found that her tongue was down my throat. Thank goodness I flossed that night!

So anyways we made out until friend came back and broke us up. Then a few blokes were walking on by and they invited them to go to the hot tub with us, and for some odd reason there was some sort of argument going on between the Americans and the British, and being a Canadian in this situation is hard, since we have ties with both countries, so I just stood there quietly until a guy sitting at a table watching the entire event unfold called me over, to tell me that he wasn't with those two Brits, that he was a Scot didn't want me to mistake him for hanging out with them and giving him a bad name.

I told him I understood, then after the Brits left, we invited him to join us in the hot tub, at first he said he was just only going to walk with us there, then when we got there and got in, they somehow convinced him to join us.

So here I am sitting in the hot tub, facing Martha, with Lauren to my left and the Scot, whose name is Greg to my right, for some odd reason Greg refused to move on to the other side and sit with Martha. Lauren even suggested something to him to get him to the other side, then he replied with "no, i'm okay here" (in a Scottish accent), he just couldn't take a hint.

Alright, this isn't working out, so the girls huddle and decide to run a play, so when they get back they run through a list of questions, such as where you're from, what's your name, what do you do, do you have a girlfriend etc.

Turns out that he has a girlfriend which is why I guess he doesn't want to move over to the other side?

Okay, I can't just sit here forever myself, time to run a play of my own. So I ask Lauren if she wants to go check out one of the other 2 available hot tubs, she says sure, but once we get there and test the water, we discover that they're super cold compared to the one we were just in, so we quickly run back.

So it looks like i'm stuck with these two, so we sit there for a while, then Greg decides to call it a night, then Martha decides to call it a night. Assuming that my sister hasn't gauged her eyes out by now and is still reading this post, I don't think I need to fill you guys in on what happened next.

So after a while, we decide to call it a night since her checkout time is at 10 tomorrow and my fingers are getting all pruny. I'm on the first floor in the opposite direction and shes' on the fifth floor, but the gentlemen in me says walk her back to her room. So of course I do.

So she gets to her room and bangs on her door for her roommate to let her in, tells her to leave the door open and we stand outside for about another five minutes, just chatting. After that we say goodbye to each other, since i'll probably never see her again and I make my way back to my room. Wow. It's 3:40 in the morning!

We're Back & We're B_____!

Since this trip is suppose to be a boring and relaxing one, I don't think is much excitement to write about, however do to popular demand, this trip report will happen!

Le Yen's parents drop us off @ the airport and we proceed to check in, after quickly discovering that the family in front of us is in the wrong line up we quickly slide on over to the next line and get ahead of them in the queue. Not that it was a long line up or anything, but we like to capitalize on other people's blunders.

As we're checking in, the typical hindrance of Ly and his passport comes into effect as usual. What is it this time you ask? This time it was because his first name only contains 2 characters and the system requires at least 3. After awhile they somehow manage to override the system and let him through, I guess they'll be phoning their software engineers after this, thanks to Ly.

We get to the security gate and begin stripping down....our belongings to pass through the metal detectors, we all make it through just fine, however at the very last second, Aileen is stopped for a "random screening". The father of the group that we slipped past before can't seem to make it pass the metal detectors either.

After the screening process, we head to our gate and I head to the food court for food, I had a light lunch that day because I was busy running around gathering last minute supplies and packing.

After what seemed like a really long time, we finally board the flight, it was an uneventful flight (I guess that is a good thing) they showed the X-Men Origins movie which helped pass the time, we all had the lasagna for dinner.

After the 4.5 hour flight the row of frat guys behind us, were clearly drunk, they purchased a bottle of Absolute Vodka from the Duty Free and were drinking it on the plane, by the time we were ready to leave more than 2/3s of the bottle had been consumed by probably five guys.

After we deboard the plane we all head on over to the resort check-in counter, and surprisingly enough, about 1/3 of the plane was all going to the same resort. We all board the bus (picture a greyhound bus) and the guy who helped us load our luggage onto the bus asked for a tip when he was done doing so, we read that we were suppose to tip them, so I gave him $5, a dollar for each of us. Some people tipped him, others just simply walked away.

During the 35 minute bus ride Sang was the first one out of all of us to make a friend, Dennis. Dennis was with his wife and two kids, visiting Jamaica for the first time, coming from Brampton.

We finally get to the resort and the check-in process was quite chaotic, no one really knew how the resort system of checking in worked. Everyone seemed to wait and obtain their luggage before proceeding 5 feet towards the check-in desk. However, if some people had experience in this field they would divide and conquer, have one person head to the check-in counter and check-in ahead of everyone else while the other person waited for their luggage.

It's not like we were pressed for time, but it just makes it easier if you get ahead of the line and avoid all the commotions.

We're finally checked in and obtain our nice blue wrist bands. Our rooms were #113 and #114, however we had a difficult time locating our room, our rooms were in a separate wing on it's own, located behind the buffet and away from all the other rooms, but we eventually found it.

When we got in, I was surprised to find a locked cabinet with two bottles of alcohol in there (for taking shots) I presume, I don't think anyone of us ever took any.

So what do you do when you get to your hotel room? You take pictures! After pictures, washroom and freshened up. After that, I think we all went down to the buffet for their late night snack that they serve every night. After that I think we all did some exploring around the place.

After that, I think the ladies went to bed, while Sang and I went to the bar in the lobby to get our drink on! We sat beside these two girls who turned out to be from the U.K. so they had a British Accent, they turned out to be step sisters too, which explained the age difference and the hair colour difference, one was blond, one had red hair. We talked to them and they provided us with a lot of useful information, they were there for almost two weeks, so they had a lot of info to share. The red headed one, Shelby, told me that it gets boring after a week, and I believed her at the time too.

We found out that there was a "disco" right beneath us, that is open until the last person leaves, so we went down to check it out and have a few more drinks, and to our surprise there was only about 6 people in there, and according to them, it's pretty much like that every night.

We didn't stay up much longer after that since it was already 3:30 in the morning Toronto time and we were pretty tired.

Japan - Day 7 - Tokyo

It’s our final full day in Tokyo, and going over the tourist map that we have, it seems like we’ve already hit up all of the major tourist attraction spots, and then some! How is that possible? People said it would take an entire week to explore Tokyo.

We had what we were going to do in the morning all figured out; we were going to head to Odaiba. Odaiba is an artificial island built over a land fill many moons ago and resides in the Bay of Tokyo area.

In order to get to Palette Town and its surroundings we had to take the Yurikamome Line, which reminded me of a high speed roller coaster. Once we got there we began to wander around the island, it’s here, where we came across a familiar face. There are many well known attractions in Odaiba, such as the Island and Seaside Mall, Aqua City, Joypolis, Tokyo Beach and a life sized Gundam.

After saying hello to our giant friend in green, we wandered around the streets and Tokyo Beach for a bit, snapping pictures of whatever we felt was picture worthy. We wanted to head inside to the mall to look for food, however this was around 10:30 in the morning and the mall / food court wasn’t open till 11AM, but it was easy to kill time since there were so many new things to see.

We even came across a guy training his Pokémon.

Once the mall was open and we were inside, we slowly made our way to the food court to grab some fine authentic Japanese food, or as the locals call it, food. I didn’t have “lunch” here per se since before we left the hotel I stopped by the local convenience store and picked up a rice triangle, a bun and some juice, so I was quite full. Even though I was quite full, I could not pass up the offer to indulge in a green tea ice cream and red bean waffle, hey, it’s only my second one of the trip!

After that, we proceeded to explore the mall for a bit, and eventually taking turns going to the washroom, I know, I found that weird too. One person would go to the washroom, then come back, then all of a sudden the other person would realize that they had to go too, this kept going until we all went. If anybody has any theories they’d like to share on this subject, I’d like to hear it.

After the mall we made our way over to Joypolis, it was a decent sized Sega amusement park, inside they had a 24 and Prison Break game/ride. There was a small entrance fee and each attraction that you wanted to visit was to be paid separately. We didn’t go in since we figured most of the action of the story would be in Japanese and we would be left out.

After Joypolis there was still a giant Ferris wheel, FUJI TV headquarters and many other things to check out, but the remainder of these items were all the way across the island and at that point we didn’t feel like making the trek, since we had many other things to check out, or so we thought.

Since the train station was right by our hotel we headed back to the hotel to kind of “regroup” and gather our thoughts and decide on what we wanted to see for the rest of the day. In the lobby of the Five Star Hotel they had an entire display case with brochures for tourists like us, aside from that we also had our own personal concierge at our disposal for information.

I brought some of the brochures over for the guys to look at, while I chatted up the cute lady working at the concierge desk. I asked her where we could find the giant sized Gundam statue that was in the works, but she didn’t know, so we had to research it on the interent, turns out that Gundam statue that we wanted to see was in Odaiba, but on the other side of the island that we were too lazy to go across to, FML.

After that, I asked her what she recommended that we spend some time reviewing, she pointed out a few places, one of them being the Sensoji Temple. I went back and presented this information to the guys. Steve said that he was tired of visiting so many shrines and temples, he wanted to do some shopping. Ly, as usual, did not voice his opinion and said that he was fine with whatever we chose to do. I, was actually excited to visit the Sensoji Temple, since I did not visit enough back in Kyoto.

Since we couldn’t decide on what we wanted to do with our remaining time, we asked Ly what he wanted to do, and he finally said something. He said that he wanted to go to a place, but it would cost money and that we probably wouldn’t be willing to spend it on. At first we thought he wanted to go back to Akiharbara and drop some major coin on some of the electronics that we saw earlier, but he said that wasn’t it. We literally sat in the hotel lobby for about an hour and a half playing twenty questions with Ly, trying to figure out what he wanted to do and what we all wanted to do.

After asking him a bunch of questions, we found out that it couldn’t have been a gadget of some sort, since he said that it’s more of a service and you get nothing in return except for joy. So we immediately said that he wanted to head back to the Red Light District and get his freak on, but he assured us that wasn’t it.

Finally I got tired of just sitting around and wasting time trying to figure out something that he would not voluntarily reveal, so I made the suggestion that we each split up and go our separate ways then come back later on, meet up for dinner and exchange adventure stories, and they all agreed.

So Steve headed off back to Shibuya to do some “shopping”, and Ly headed off to his mystery destination, meanwhile, I headed off to my first shrine of the day, the Yushima Tenmangu Shrine, this shrine house the God of Learning. And yes, I did learn something new, I learned how to walk through a giant wreath in a religious manner.

After that I realized that I hadn’t eaten much solid food for the day and was feeling a bit hungry, so I stopped by a convenience store and grabbed some Dragon Ball Chicken.

From there, I made my way over to Asakusa to visit the Sensoji Temple, I was told that this was the oldest Temple in Tokyo, so I had to check it out. In front of the temple is a gate with a giant lantern and this was a well known landmark as well, however once you reach the giant lantern but before you get to the actual temple, you have to make your way through hundreds of methodically placed street vendors. Here they would offer you delectable sweets, over priced and non over priced souvenirs, as well as various other memorabilia’s.

Here is where I once again pigged out, I first started off with some weird pasty circular marbles stuck to a stick, which didn’t taste that good, then I had to buy a cup of green liquid to wash that down with, after that was done, a homemade fried bean jam bun caught my eye and I just had to try that, that was awesome! A few more steps and a few more shops down, I come across a store offering 33 different flavours of ice cream, but at that moment, I was kind of full from all the previous junk so I didn’t opt for it. After navigating my way through all those vendors and spending a good chunk of money on junk food, I finally make it to the steps of the temple.

Right out side of the temple there was a giant pot, if I may, with a lot of incense burning from it, I stood there for a moment and watched, a lot of the people would just stand there and kind of absorb in all the incense smoke, I suppose that’s what you were suppose to do with it. I was about to do the same, then I came across an Indian guy who basically wafted all the smoke towards him and kind of fanned himself with it. I said to myself, “He looks like a very religious Indian guy; he must know what he’s doing”. So I followed in his footsteps and did the same.

After that “test” came another one, I came upon a great big donation box, determined not to mess it up, I stood there again and watched the locals do it. Throw a coin in, bow, clap twice and bow again? Got it! So, I did just that. I head over to the souvenir stand and purchased some charms for the folks back home, and as I’m leaving I come across a self-fortune telling box. It was an octagon shaped box with a small hole in the middle of it. The idea is to donate a 100 Yen into a separate box and shake the octagon box until a stick with a number comes out of the small hole; you then proceed to a shelf and pull out a fortune according to the number that you shook out.

Does bad English negate the bad fortune?

As I’m leaving I come across another food stall, this time selling something that I haven’t seen yet, a red bean filled fish shaped cake, and of course, I submit to my temptations and purchase it. It was pretty good.

It was time to head to over to another city, Shimbashi. I was planning on visiting the Suitengu Shrine, it was said to house the Seven Deities of Good Luck, I thought that after my bad fortune, this would help. So I make my way there, and when I get there, something strikes me as very odd about this place, at first I thought it was a cult temple, ‘cause there were no stairs to get in, all they had was an elevator with a handicap sticker on it. Well, since that seemed like the only way to get in was through the elevator, I hoped on. Once I got in, the place seemed very quiet, only a few people were around and they were praying, it didn’t seem like a HOT tourist spot like the previous one. I noticed that there were many old couples walking around and there were many younger couples walking around. This is very odd, so I open up my tour guide book and read the description on this Shrine, turns out that this shrine is noted for it’s divine grace such as safe delivery of children, pregnancy and avoidance from flood damage. *smack forehead* Oh! I get it now.

So I quickly skid-addle out of that place, as I’m running out of there, I came across a corner store that was selling fruit, but what caught my eye about this store was that it had a line up that extended from the inside to out and it wrapped around a corner. Wow, this place must sell some good shit!

After all that running and eating all those sweets, I was hungry, so I stopped by an Excelsior Caffe and grabbed an ice cold coffee. I guess this was imitation Starbucks? The price was certainly imitated very well; the drink however, was not. It tasted horrible, and I paid like 6 bucks for that too, should have stuck with a $1.20 Boss coffee instead. Yeuch!

That was it, time to head back to the hotel to shower and rendezvous with the guys. I got back to the hotel first, then Ly a few minutes after and we waited about half an hour for Steve, we suspect that he got lost. While we waited for Steve’s return, we exchanged stories, I told Ly that I think I figured out where he went based on the clues he gave us, to recap he said that it would be something very expensive and that we wouldn’t be willing to spend the money on (which was probably true), there was nothing in return except for a sense of joy and a smile, and that it could be considered as a service, based on all of those clues I came to the conclusion that he went to go find a real Geisha Girl.

A genuine Geisha girl spends years and years practicing the traditional dances, rituals and tea pouring methods. Where as a non-genuine Geisha girl, but still wears the make-up and costume is just a prostitute.

Both are very expensive and I’m sure that once you leave you will be greatly satisfied. He of course denied these allegations, but who knows.

Once everyone checked in, we made our way over to Roppongi. We heard that Roppongi Hills was worth the trip, they were quite right; it was nothing like we’ve ever seen before.

After a quick stop and a few quick photos there, it was time for dinner, we made reservations at a Teppanyaki place the previous night, but didn’t specify that we wanted to sit at the counter to witness all the action so they gave us a room. We didn’t want that, so we told them that we would make reservations for another night (tonight) for the counter and come back then. We didn’t end up eating at that place, ‘cause on our way back the next night we stopped by another place to ask if they had a table and they said yes, so we just ate there.

We decided that since this was our last dinner in Japan we would splurge, so we each opted for the most expensive meal they had on the menu, a set course which consisted of a salad, vinegar roasted mackerel, steak, pancake, seafood (shrimp, scallop) and desert, this cost us a whopping 5,500 Yen.

Although everything looked great and some of the stuff tasted wonderful, it wasn’t really all that worth it, we probably could have gotten a better meal some where else for that price.

Another fail on our part was that we thought Teppanyaki was the one where the chefs perform tricks with your food for you, sadly it is not. It’s just a form of Japanese cuisine that uses an iron griddle to cook your food.

I guess us Westerners have been fooled by the Teppanyaki places that we have here, leading us to believe that Teppanyaki includes tricks with your food, much like serving chicken balls at a Chinese buffet and leading non-chinese people to think that chicken balls is Chinese food.

If you’re in Japan and you want the kind where they cook on the iron griddle and do tricks with your food, then search for Hibachi or Japanese Steakhouse.