2004-08-14 - 10:40 a.m.
Breakfast in the main dining room on day four was a great start to another good day. I missed seeing the model-Bunny-dip waitress with her tray of sweet rolls, but instead there was a tall, hunky blond guy giving them out. He smiled with amusement when I knew that I wanted the raspberry ones and asked for two, but he didn�t tarry for any conversation, so I didn�t have a chance to see on his name tag which country he was from. I am guessing either Norway or Finland.
Romina, though, was pretty quickly aware that I was in the room, so she came right over with a �Hi, how are you this morning!� and we talked for a little while. I told her I was glad to see her again.
After breakfast, and after Romina made sure to say good-bye to me, I passed in the hall the Ukraine woman and her husband.
�Oh,� I said, �there�s a Russian woman on board the ship.�
�I know,� she said, �we met her last night.�
�Boy, you sure work fast!� I said.
�We heard her voice in the disco,� explained the Ukraine woman, �and with that accent I immediately had to go over to her.�
�At the disco, huh,� I said, �she sure does like to dance, yesterday she was dancing on the catamaran I went on.�
�Well, she didn�t like it so well over there, it was all just hip-hop.�
�Again? That�s all you�ve managed to find over there!�
�Every night we try, but every night it is the same. It is all for teenagers.�
�Have you tried the Stardust Lounge? It looks to me like sometimes they have dancing there, perhaps for an older crowd.�
�No, but we�ll try it. We definitely want something romantic.�
�Well, look on the schedule and see�I hope they have what you want.�
When we docked at the pier in Coxen Hole (a quaintly named harbor) on the island of Roatan, we were met by a band of dancing Garifunas, which represented people from Africa who had migrated over to these islands very long ago. This made the atmosphere quite different from Cozumel, and reminded me more of Fiji, which had had a native population of Melanesians, also migrated over from Africa.
Population shifts around the world were quite amazing, as prior to the colonizing Europeans, Africans had populated such diverse places as the Caribbean and the South Pacific, and they had also found their way to Australia. Asians, too, of course, had migrated across the Bering Strait to Alaska and had spread out to populate all of North, Central, and South America.
All over the dock were tour leaders holding up the signs indicating their excursion�the one I had signed up for was called �Roatan Sightseeing and Beach.� I had expected the sightseeing to be in a full-size bus, but instead, it was going to be in a Volkswagen bus. I saw there the Russian woman and her husband from yesterday�s catamaran, and I said to them, �I hear you met the woman from the Ukraine last night.�
�Yes,� said the Russian woman, �she had heard our accent and so she came over to us.� But before offering any other comment, she and her husband aggressively pushed their way into the front seat of the van, thus securing for themselves uncramped seats next to the driver.
I got into the third seat back, and people started piling in after me. By the time they were through, we had fourteen people in there. At first an Asian woman sat down next to me, and while she was rather small, I nevertheless felt so crammed against the window that for a moment I thought of getting out and skipping the tour entirely. I couldn�t see how I could stand a day traveling around like that. But then something made the Asian woman move to the seat behind me, which, fortunately, left one empty seat next to me, which was acceptable. I don�t know how the other people in the van could stand it, but they all seemed okay.
Then I had an additional good fortune, the tour guide, who was a small, young black woman who looked to be about seventeen years old, got in and pulled down a jump seat for herself that was at the end of my seat. Her position was such that she was sitting in a � turn facing all of us in the bus, mostly me. So it was almost as if I had my own private tour guide. The five passengers in the two seats in front of us, while being able to hear her, I think, couldn�t see her, and therefore mostly ignored her. It was the worst for the Russians who had pushed their way into the front seat.
The row of three behind me were also in a good position to interact with the tour guide, but the people in the final seat in the back mostly ignored her, too. I saw that two of the people sitting in the far back seat were the couple with the woman with the white hair and the silver jewelry whom I had smiled at several times on the beach yesterday.
The tour guide spoke English very well, although she explained to us that the English she was �spikkin� now was a more formalized version of English so that the tourists could understand her, not the English that she and her friends used when they talked among themselves, which I gathered, from her example of it, to be similar to how some people talk in Hawaii: �You gwoin down store, yah, but not new shoppin center, too many Haole, I go old store.�
The man behind me asked her if everybody on the island spoke English, and she said they did, although now Spanish was being emphasized in the public schools. The private schools, however, were bilingual, teaching classes in both English and Spanish.
The island had once been a British colony and about a hundred years ago Britain relinquished Roatan to Spanish-speaking Honduras. The people of the island suffered a negative economic impact from the change (and many tens of thousands of residents moved away when that happened), as Britain had been the most powerful empire in the world, whereas Honduras still remains the least developed country in Central America.
Although as we rode along the main street of the island and saw broken-down yet still charming wooden houses on stilts, some of the tourists saw only what they thought of as third world poverty, I was interested to hear that every day Roatan sends a freighter full of lobsters to Miami. It seemed, then, that they had some kind of commerce going on for themselves. Also, they had an �international� airport that accepted direct flights from three cities: Houston, Miami, and Milan. That �Milan� in the mix was an odd duck, and why Milan, say, and not Rome, but the tour guide said that the Milanese had discovered the island and now it was a popular vacation spot for Italians, and some of them had come to retire there permanently.
Every once in a while we would pass a mansion or a gated estate, and the tour guide would say who lived there. A couple of people in that class were running for mayor.
We also seemed to pass a lot of schools and I took it that the average age on Roatan was quite young, although the tour guide did seem to feel that they had good health care (so that people weren�t necessarily dying early). We passed a lot of schools, which to me looked similar to the schools I had seen throughout Mexico, and the tour guide explained that you could tell from the children�s uniforms whether it was a private school or a public school. In both kinds of school, the pants were always navy blue, but in the public schools, the shirts were white, whereas in the private schools, the shirts were light blue. Uniforms in public school?
We went to the top of Panorama Hill, where we had a nice view of our ship docked in the port at Coxen Hole�this was a good photo spot. Some craftsmen were working and selling their wares over under some shade trees. The couple with the white-haired woman came back with some masks, because, they said, their son collects masks.
We rode back down the hill to the seaside road and continued driving through various villages. The man sitting behind me pointed out some fruit trees and asked what kind of fruit that was. The tour guide told us what they call it, and then translated the name to something we might know, which was guava. Interestingly, the others in the van acted like they had never heard of it, although I have trouble believing that. The man behind me said, �What, those aren�t mangoes?� He said the word in a way that emphasized the �ng� sound and reminded me of a children�s record I had when I was a little boy, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz that featured an army of one-footed-rooted vegetable creatures called �Mangaboos,� and, again, the voice of the man playing the Wizard of Oz on the record emphasized the �ng� sound. �Oh, very dangerous,� the Wizard said,� �they�re Mangaboos.� �Oh my goodness,� said Dorothy, �can�t we kill them?� �Well no, my dear,� explained the Wizard, �that�s just the trouble, they�re vegetables and if you cut them with your sword, they will only multiply into two!� (I wonder, did L. Frank Baum, or the kids he was telling the stories to, hate their vegetables?)
The man seemed terribly disappointed that they weren�t mangoes, so he asked if there were any mangoes on the island.
�Oh yes,� said the tour guide, �I have one growin� on a tree in my yard right now.�
�And of course you�re taking us to your house so that we can eat some mangoes, aren�t you?� teased the man.
The girl blushed and said, �No, we�re not going there!�
�I think you should take us there,� continued the man, �I really want some mangoes.� As the trip progressed, he must have said the word �mangoes� about twenty dozen times, he said it so much that pretty soon he became referred to as �Mr. Mangoes� (meant to be similar to �Mr. Bojangles�) by the rest of us in the bus.
Mr. Mangoes, in addition to being interested in mangoes, was also interested in birds, and he wanted the tour guide to enumerate all the ones that she knew were on the island.
The one she was most interested in telling us about was the yellow-napped parrot, which she said we might see in the trees. She said that later we were going to a place that had some, and we might hear them talk. �They are very good talkers,� she said, �and they like to talk a lot.�
�When we go see them,� I said, �will they speak a formal English, or speak the English they use among themselves?� This got everybody, and I mean everybody in the bus laughing, so at least I now knew that everybody on board, no matter where they were sitting, could hear what was going on.
We passed two differerent ship wrecks, one where the ship had caught on fire, and another one that had run aground (freighters, not cruise ships!). Despite the horrors of a shipwreck, there was something romantic, exotic, and �South Sea Islandish� about seeing them in the half-moon curves of their respective bays.
We then arrived at French Cay and went to Sherman�s Iguana Refuge where we saw hundreds of iguanas that this man had gathered for the tourists to see. They were all running loose and crawling all over each other and were quite cool to see, although the next day in Belize when I saw them appear in their natural habitat, they were even more exciting. Iguanas really are just little tiny dinosaurs and are very cute when they are small. I could see why so many have them as pets. I was dying to tell my fellow passengers about the movie star who has written into his contracts that the studio has to pay for a private chef for his pet iguana, but I couldn�t remember which actor it was�Kevin Costner, perhaps, or John Travolta? Somebody awful like that.
These you could feed with lettuce-like leaves, which they would chomp on with needle-like teeth. I was amazed at how long their tails were, I had no idea. There was one really large iguana roaming around, he was about three feet long, but his tail seemed to be six feet long.
One iguana was standing on top of a bin full of the leaves and I said to whomever would listen, �Look, here�s the smart one, he found the whole food supply,� but then his beady little eye was attracted to a leaf another iguana outside the bin was innocently chomping on, so the one in the bin snapped at it and jumped out of the bin in order to fight the other one for it. �Play nice, now,� I said to him, but he wandered on away to look for more leaves, having no idea that he had already found the pot of gold and had been lured away from it by his selfish greed. He reminded me so much of sheep I had seen in New Zealand who would be standing in an infinite sea of delicious green grass, only to be found straining through a barbed wire fence over the edge of a very dangerous seaside cliff in an effort to get at a little clump of green just beyond their reach. Are people really like this, too? I think we are�we�re surrounded by an infinite abundance we don�t even see, and meanwhile fight with our neighbors and strain into danger in order to get some tiny little thing that we can�t have.
At the refuge, there was also a spider money in a little cage. I marveled at the tiny little squeak those monkeys make. He was very cute and strong in his trapeze-artist ability. A man came up to look at him really closely and the monkey turned his backside toward the man�s face. A woman standing next to me said to the man, �Watch out for that backside, they are mean little monkeys and he will whiz on you.� The man jerked his head away, and the woman explained to me that she had taken care of spider monkeys in a zoo.
I reflected upon how zoos depress me and while I enjoy seeing the animals as much as the next person does, I hate the idea of an animal in a cage. No wonder spider monkeys are �mean,� with all that tree-swinging ability, they ought to be swooping their way through the forest with their friends, not trapped in a tiny cage for tourists. As I experienced in Belize the next day when iguanas would come crawling out from among the grass by the river bank, animals are so much more magnificent in their natural habitat. Their whole lives are much more fascinating than merely seeing their bodies isolated from everything else. How much better it would be, if one wanted to see animals, to have to go on expeditions in the forests and on the veldt in order to see them.
The owner of the Iguana Refuge had also trapped some sea turtles and a school of tarpon down in his harbor. I went down to see them. I liked the sea turtles better than the tarpon, although seeing them penned there in the water wasn�t equal to my having watched them lay eggs on Heron Island, or when we saw them swimming under water when we snorkeled. These were very tiny sea turtles, though, only about a foot and a half in diameter. It was cute watching them play, though.
The tarpon were large silvery fish swimming back and forth in unison. People like to fish for them and I guess they are good eating, which is maybe why the man kept them there�it was like an ocean chicken coop.
Much better than the sea turtles and the tarpon was simply the sight of the harbor, itself, with the owner�s boat docked a distance off. The water was so blue, the vegetation so green, the whole setting was lovely beyond belief. As I filmed it, I remarked at how beautiful it was to the man next to me, also filming it. He agreed, saying that the spot was spectacularly beautiful, one of the best he had ever seen, and I agreed with that, too. Then I realized that we both had the exact same model of Samsung video camera, which we both thought was a cool coincidence.
I decided to go back to the van and the driver let me get back inside of it where it was cool. Ultimately the others climbed back in again, with Mr. Mangoes saying to the tour guide that this place didn�t have any mangoes, either. However, she did have some examples of some other fruits that we passed among ourselves to try. She handed one of them to him and said, �This one will either taste very good or very bad, depending upon whether it is ripe, or not.� I thought that was funny, as if she were punishing him for teasing her so about the mangoes. He gamely tasted it, and pronounced it was delicious.
We were then taken to a few more view spots and then ended up at Las Palmas, which is a beach resort that had a restaurant, bar, shaded patio, dive shop, bathrooms and showers, and some beach houses for sale. The tour guide said that a lady on one of her tours liked the houses so much, she bought one then and there for a hundred thousand dollars. People in the group marveled over the thought of buying a two-story house right on the sand of such a lovely beach for such a low price, but when I got home and checked the place out on the Internet, I saw that they are now going for $250,000. This kind of inflation really messes up my mind.
We were to be treated to a drink of island fruit punch and then we could get something to eat from the restaurant, if we wanted (the food wasn�t included in the price of the tour). Most of us were quite hungry by then, so we ordered and I thought the food was quite good. You had to pay in advance, but they did accept U.S. dollars.
My only disappointment with the lunch was that the menu said they had ice cream, and I asked the waiter what flavors, and he mentioned "tropical cocoanut". "That one," I said, but when he brought it, it was a popsicle, which to me isn't "ice cream," despite the fact that popsicles are what you mostly will buy from an "ice cream truck". Oh well, it was good, just not what I wanted.
I had sat down with the couple with the woman with the white hair and the silver jewelry. The woman looked out over the beautiful beach and said, �My, how beautiful it is!�
I agreed with her, and said, �This whole place makes me think of Fiji, the most beautiful place I have ever been.�
The woman said, �Oh yes, we were thinking the same thing, it really reminds us of Fiji, too!� It turns out that they had lived in Fiji for two years, the woman as an English teacher and the man as an administrator revamping the educational system. �All their learning had been by rote,� he said, �which was the way colonized people were taught, because it was a good way to drive basic information into them that their masters wanted them to know, but also kept them from thinking for themselves.�
I never talked politics with anybody on this trip (the cruise originating from Texas and all, I figured that was the wiser course), but what the man was saying did remind me of the video of Bush�s visit to that all-black elementary school in Florida where he was on 9/11. I have made a very big deal about how it wasn�t Bush reading to the students, which is what everybody always seems to say, but that it was the students reading to Bush, it was a demonstration of a reading program that Bush admired. Instead of this fact merely being a trivial detail, I think this is crucially important.
The normal use of this video is to say something about Bush�s reaction to 9/11, although what the video is used to prove is variable, from �this shows that Bush already knew what had been planned and therefore he did nothing upon hearing about it,� to �Bush was so stymied by the news that he just sat there, stunned.� In the video, the part that shows Bush�s reaction to 9/11 ultimately doesn�t tell us much, but to me, the reading demonstration that Bush was there to celebrate tells us volumes. If Bush had been there to read a story to the children, that would have been very sweet and almost grandfatherly, but instead, this was more like a training exercise for Nazi youth and Bush was there like Hitler to review the troops. Those children weren�t reading the story, not with feeling and comprehension, they were vocally goose-stepping through it like trained automatons. That Bush liked this so much, what he called �A reading program that really works,� really showed me what Bush�s 1984-like plans were for education in this country. (Few people ever see the whole video, they only see the part where an aide whispers in Bush�s ear, but the whole video is much more significant than just Bush�s reaction to 9/11, whatever it was.)
The very educational methods that Bush would like to see imposed on American schools are what my dining companion had been trying to eradicate from Fiji schools as an anachronistic hold-over from the old British colonial days. Now this man and his wife were there to empower the people of Fiji by more modern educational methods.
While we were eating our lunches, a woman came over and sat down by a hand-lettered sign that she had propped up that said �Hair Weaving.� I thought to myself, Poor woman, that must be a hard way to make a living, who here would want that?�
I went up to go the bathroom and when I came back to our table, the white-haired woman had gone somewhere. I asked the man where his wife went, and he said she went to get her hair braided! I looked at him, like Huh?, and he explained that she wanted to do it, because it kept her hair out of her eyes when they were on the deck of the ship. Okay!
He told me that he had been a Mormon missionary, so I said, �A-ha, now I know why Utah has had such a population increase from immigrants!�
He laughed and said, �Well, they have jobs there, too, back shop operations for banks, and so on. But yeah, when they think of coming to the United States, the influence of the missionaries very often makes them think of going to Utah.�
I told him of a trip I had taken to Utah once in which I went to all the National Parks. I had been so impressed at how one would drive around a corner in the red rock desert and happen upon lush crops growing. �They made the desert bloom,� I said, �but I�ve always wondered just how they managed to do it.�
�Just hard, steady work,� the man said. �They had to get the water from somewhere, so by patient work with picks and shovels, they dug irrigation ditches huge distances down from wherever they could find streams. There wasn�t much else to it but that, bringing the water to where they needed it to be and not letting anything stop them from doing it.�
His wife returned with her hair all braided and decorated with a rainbow of beads, each one was a different color. She really did look very cute and I told her how good it looked. She blushed like a little girl and said, �Well, it will keep the hair out of my eyes when we go up on deck.�
I asked, �How long can you keep it that way�until it�s time for a shower?�
�I can shampoo my hair with it braided, I can keep it until I get tired of it.�
I guess I was thinking of it more along the lines of dreadlocks, where you had to keep it dirty in order to keep the �dreds.�
Other tour groups arrived there (most of them from our ship) and all of them received the same complementary fruit punch. The hair-braiding woman did a steady business�as soon as she finished one person, another one would go off with her. I had no idea that something like that would be so popular. Each completed customer had different colors and patterns of beads. �Her little daughter picked out my beads for me,� said the white-haired woman.
We really spent a very pleasant afternoon there at that beach, and all too soon it was time to get back in the Volkswagen Van and return to the ship. In the vicinity of the dock, I saw several cruise passengers returning on motor scooters that they had rented. While we had had a good day, I nevertheless envied them, because Tootie and I had so much enjoyed renting scooters on Moorea and Bora Bora . I wished that I had done that here, but you can�t do everything in one day! Next time I came to Roatan, if I ever did, I would rent a scooter and discover for myself all the hidden beaches, which I figured there were lots of.
As we got back to the dock, the tour guide said that we could go shopping around in the nearby neighborhood if we wanted to, but it didn�t look like a shopping district to me, just people�s houses. Besides, I didn�t really want anything anyway, so I just went back on board the ship.
A little later that day (around �drinking time,�) I went back up to Gatsby�s, but instead of ordering a martini, I simply had the drink of the day, which was a Mai Tai. I was the only one in there beside the waitress and the bartender. I think many people were probably still over on the island. Later that evening once they were all back, I heard lots of stories about some amazing snorkeling sites, far better than people had found on Cozumel, so I added another �next time� activity to my list of what I�d do if I come back to Roatan.
Since the waitress had no one else to serve, she and I talked. She was from the Philippines, which it seemed most crew members on the ship were, and I thought to myself that the three most heavily employed people in the world had to be the Chinese (taking away our factory jobs), the Indians (taking away our white collar jobs), and the Filipinos (the workforce of the world).
I was surprised to learn from her that she was a mother, and this job meant that she would be away from her family for eight months at a time. Boy, talk about a day care problem! But she seemed more oriented toward the four months that she would be home with them. I gently asked her how her children were taken care of when she was gone, and she said her parents did that. I figured it had to be lonely and sad, but I didn�t mention that. However, she did tell me that she talks to them on the ship�s satellite phone once a week. Not for very long, mind you, as that phone is very expensive. Also, they use e-mail and faxes. One of my two room stewards told me the same thing a couple of days later. He was a father of two kids, from Colombia. He said he keeps in touch via weekly faxes and satellite phone. They all work and live for those months when they are at home, and earning money the rest of the year is simply what they have to do, seemingly without complaint. Their personal expenses are few, if any, while they are on ship. They earn their salaries plus tips, and all their food, �housing,� clothing, etc., is provided by the ship. �Just about the only thing I need to spend my money on is the faxing and phoning,� he told me.
There wasn�t one crew member that I talked with who had one hint of a complaint or a view that the job or their life was a hardship. In fact, all seemed to genuinely like their job and feel proud of what they did. I didn�t think this was a �party line,� or an attitude that they were trained to have. Not everyone receives and puts into practice training that well! I feel that they were telling me like it really was for them.
Somewhere around the time the ship was scheduled to leave Roatan, I left Gatsby�s and walked out on deck to watch our departure. I stood there on deck for a very long time, watching the daylight slowly dim and the electric lights come up in the houses that I could see all up and down the hillsides. This was such a lovely bay and leaving Roatan was very hard. This was definitely a place that I knew I wanted to come back to. A light but undisturbing rain gently fell while I was standing there. I felt absolutely no reason to move.
A man came and stood by me for a while. He remarked at how amazingly beautiful it was. He figured this would be the perfect place to come back to and buy some beachfront property. �Before it turned into the next California,� he said.
I agreed with him about buying the beachfront property, but the California comment nearly made me bristle.
�Become the next California?� I questioned. �It couldn�t possibly.�
�Why not?� he said. �It�s a lovely spot, good weather, wonderful beaches, what will keep it from growing and being huge like California?�
�No economic infrastructure,� I said. �California was more than good weather and some beaches, they had an economy, they had the development of jobs to support a population of millions�agriculture, oil, the aerospace industry, the entertainment industry, to name some of the obvious ones.� Frankly, I was a little shocked at the man�s ignorance, that Roatan, or any place, could become the sixth largest economy in the world based on beaches alone. He burped and moved on, full of his visions of being the next William Randolph Hearst or Mulholland or D W. Griffith�.
Now the ship started to move, completely sideways away from the dock! They must have some kind of engines or thrusters that push the ship from the side. For about fifteen minutes there was no forward motion at all, but a perfect, steady slide sideways away from the dock until the bow of the ship was lined up pointed out beyond the curvature of the bay, then the Captain increased the thrust on the forward port thruster and that pushed the front end out faster than the back end. In this manner the ship was slowly being turned around, which I guess was required to head us back in a northwesterly direction to Belize. It was so smooth, and felt wonderful to feel the ship move so gracefully like that, that I didn�t want to leave the top deck. Instead, I went over to the starboard bow which was the direction the ship was now moving so that I could watch and enjoy this turning movement and then the journey forward once we were in our proper heading. The sun continued to set and the lights on the island continued to twinkle in such a romantic way. Direct flights from Houston and Miami, huh? How very convenient!
Once it was completely dark, I decided to go down to dinner. I wanted to remain casual tonight, so instead of going into the main dining room, which required a change of clothes, I went down one deck to the Big Apple Caf�. They had a huge variety of buffet dishes, including Indian food for the vegetarians on board. I took a large sampling of the various dishes offered, including some of the Indian dishes, and then found a table.
Pretty soon, I was joined by the man from yesterday who had told me that I looked like Stephen King. His son was with him, his plate filled with a hamburger and pizza slices. I said to the boy, whose name was Colt (�Like the gun,� explained his father, and I wondered if that�s why the boy was named that), �Pizza, I keep seeing people with pizza here, but I�ve never come across it!�
�Oh, it�s right over there,� the boy vaguely pointed.
His father said, �If there�s pizza to be found, he�ll be the one to find it.� Then to the boy he said, �With all this food they�ve got here, don�t you want to try somethin� else?� The boy shook his head and crammed the point of a pizza slice into his mouth. �That�s alright,� said his Dad, �this trip is for you and you can eat any damn thing you want to.� Looked like that was what the boy was going to do.
Despite his son�s taciturn-bordering-on-sullen attitude, I liked the sound of the boy�s voice, which prompted me to ask the man where they were from.
�From a place where there ain�t no other state that has the same name.�
I looked at him blankly�was I supposed to guess?
�Chattanooga, Tennessee, you don�t know any other state that has a Chattanooga, do you?�
�Nope,� I said, �I think they have an exclusive on that one.�
So that�s why I liked the boy�s accent�Chattanooga is just over the mountain from where I was born, Asheville, North Carolina. Also over the mountain from Asheville in Tennessee, this time to the north instead of to the south like Chattanooga, was Knoxville, and that was where actor Brad Renfro is from and despite his early talent, the real reason I liked him was due to his accent, too. I guess it just sounds like home. Those Blue Ridge Mountain boys speak a pure music to my ears.
�I�ve been to Chattanooga, although it was a long, long time ago. I rode the Incline Railway and saw Ruby Falls and went to, what was that place called?�
�Rock City,� the man practically spat. �Now I suppose the Incline Railway ain�t that bad, but if you went to Ruby Falls or Rock City, you just wasted your fuckin� time. Those are nothing but tourist traps. In Ruby Falls, you look and you can see that the water just comes out of a hose.�
�I liked Rock City,� said his son.
�Well then, son, you are fuckin� stupid,� retorted his father. But the boy just shrugged and took a bite out of his hamburger. Since they were from Chattanooga and those were the three main tourist attractions of the city (advertised on the roofs of barns from as far away as Nashville to the west and Columbia, South Carolina to the east), I was sure the boy had heard this particular speech a hundred times.
�They�ve got a great view of seven states from the top of Rock City,� I said, backing up the boy whom I figured must have hung around up there a lot with his friends. Rock City struck me as the kind of place a boy would take a girl so that they could go off and find a private place for some �necking,� if kids even did that, nowadays. (For all I know, they maybe go straight to blowjobs.)
�I grant you that,� said the man.
�How about a more recent attraction,� I said, �down by the river. I understand that Chattanooga has a waterfront development that was used as a model by several other cities in the southeast, wanting to copy Chattanooga�s success.�
�Well yeah, that was once the dirtiest spot in the entire nation, they had to do sumpthin with it,� the father said.
�Don�t they now have riverboat tours and stuff there?�
�Oh hell yeah, they�ve got all sorts of crap there, now.� Despite what sounds abrasive coming from this man, I liked him and considered him to be a reasonable and knowledgeable guy who just likes to cut through all the bullshit. (After all, he had told me yesterday that he had gone on 14 cruises in his life.) In fact, after his boy finished eating and simply got up and left (�I guess he�s clocked,� is what his father observed), the man said, �He�s a good boy and the one thing I�ve taught him is be polite to everybody you meet, but don�t take no shit offa nobody.�
�Well,� I said, �that�s a good philosophy to go by.�
He finished his meal, got up, and said, �Nice talkin� to ya, see ya around,� and left. I got up and got a Coke and sat back down to relax a while longer. A cook (I could tell by his tall hat) came out of the kitchen and stood by the TV they had there. I could tell from his nametag that he was from Jamaica. The TV was tuned to the Democratic National Convention.
�I like this stuff,� he told me. �It�s important to the world. Whatever happens in the U.S., happens to all of us.�
�You�ve got that right,� I said. �Does it make you nervous to not be able to vote?�
�Uhhm, I think you people are reasonable,� he said. �You�ll do the right thing, vote for the right guy.�
�Well, we might get fooled,� I said.
�Sure, you might,� he said, �but not for long.�
Sounded reasonable to me, and quite right. Not for long.
I wanted to talk to the friendly cook from Jamaica some more, but he had to go back to work. It was just about time for the evening�s show anyway, so I moseyed on down to the International Deck and found myself a good place in the Cabaret Lounge. I was early, but what the heck.
A somewhat fat woman came in and sat down next to me, and pretty soon a large crowd of kids and adults joined her. �I sailed this cruise this past June,� she explained to me, �and liked it so much, I brought my kids to enjoy it. You�ll like tonight�s show, �Greased Lightening�, I saw it before.�
�I�ve enjoyed all the shows I�ve seen so far,� I said.
�I�m a travel agent,� she said, �I think Norwegian has the best shows.�
�Well, I�m glad I�m here, then,� I said.
As the people started to filter in, I noticed that the room was full of people with braided and beaded hair, guys, too. It got so that I appreciated that hair, because at the end of the cruise when it was time to go and I wanted to hold onto the experience as much as possible, at the Houston airport I could still tell who were passengers from our ship when they had braided hair.
The show was a �rock �n roll through the decades� revue and I did enjoy it, although it was similar to their other shows. I did think that it must be hard to perform in a different show every other day. Most performers need only learn one show at a time and perform that one show until it closed.
A few days later, I had a chance to talk to one of the dancers (my favorite one) from these shows and I asked him about it. He said it wasn�t as hard as it looked, because each show is short, only an hour long. �So really,� he explained, �we just think of them altogether as one big, longer show, and we perform hour-long sections each night. They�re not like separate or different shows when you look at it like that.� Pretty clever idea, I thought.
Tomorrow was going to be a really early day, because the excursion I had signed up for in Belize was a seven and a half hour long one�a bus ride across country to the pyramid of Xunatunich. So, once �Greased Lightening� finished and I had said goodbye to the travel agent, I, too, clocked.
END OF DAY FOUR.
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