Day 6: Limassol, Cyprus

Today, we got the pleasure of waking up at the very late hour of 9 am because we were docking a little later and our tour took off a little later. It was very nice sleeping in, if you can call that sleeping in. We had to meet for our tour at 10:15 and left from there on the bus.

Cyprus was kind of a disappointment. We all got there expecting a very pretty Mediterrean island, but it was actually very industrial looking and kind of looked like gross-ish in areas. Definitely no beaches, but I am only going to assume that this was because of the city we were in. I am still going to give this country the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, let’s talk about the tour. So Cyprus is split up between Greece and Turkey. Therefore, our tour guide essentially spent the drive to the first stop talking about how bad the Turkish people were. Our first stop was to see the Korian ruins. We got to see this old Roman guy’s house, which had some pretty cool mosaics on the floor. Because of the mosaics, they had a big covering over the area of the main house, which on the very hot day in Cyprus, was a very big relief. They also had a theater there, where our tour guide told us about how bad Roman theaters were, thus offending my Italian family. While we were sitting to listen to this, we were sitting in the top area of it, far from the group. Some lady climbed over us to sit behind us and would shush us while we would talk about how I was dying from bug bites. If she really wanted to listen, I don’t know why she wouldn’t go closer to the actual tour guide, but whatever. She and her friend glared at us while we were loading the bus.

Our next stop was this kind of cheesy-looking castle. While we were listening to the five-second explanation and standing behind Shush Lady and her friend, Shush Lady kept on glaring back at us and then shushing our three-year-old cousin. To Mia, this was the equivalent of a declaration of war, so she spent the entire trip to this castle plotting her revenge. You had a great view of the ocean from the top level of the castle, but it took us forever to get down because as we were going down, about seventy-five people decided to climb up the stairs and not let the seven people waiting in the middle of the one stairway down. Rude.

We loaded back up onto the bus and drove around to the main center of Limassol. It was kind of gross looking, but I was impressed by the solar water heaters and solar panels that lined almost all of the houses of the city. That’s only because I am an eco-nerd. Other than that, it was kind of gross and Mia and I were half expecting our tour guide to (Mia says Hi) tell us “You’re lucky you came here in the summer. In the winter, it gets very depressing.” We got dropped off in this area, which was cited by our tour guide as the tourist part of town and were left there for an hour and a half to shop in the seven shops that lined this area. It was very cheesy.

We did get some silly Cyprus souvenirs, got about 2 euro out of the bank and then tried to get Internet so I could check on the status of my school stuff. This meant we had to wait for Internet in this store, where three girls from our ship spent about twelve years staring blankly at Myspace pictures of their friends. It was extremely frustrating, but Umma found all these ways to make them more uncomfortable and to make fun of them in Korean while we were waiting. They eventually did leave, and I got an email from the Tower Housing saying that my deposit was not in yet, even though I had an extension to turn in my lease. I sent them an email back and took down the number so we could call them at the first moment possible.

Anyway, we did not like this tour and had the option of taking the tour bus back and having to tip the tour guide, or hiding in the sponge store and then taking the free RCL shuttle back to the ship. We choose the second option, obviously. The tour guide drove the bus by us at some point and glared at us as we refused to go back on the bus and ran into the sponge store. I am pretty sure that the Shush lady was glaring at us as well. I really would not be surprised.

Anyway, we left shortly after. We just waited around until Gianni finished writing all his five hundred postcards that he wanted to send out to his friends, but ended up leaving like ten minutes after our tour bus left us. We loaded back into the boat and went upstairs to eat, of course. We returned a little later in the afternoon this time, so we caught the tail end of the lunch thing before they cleared up the food and essentially kicked us out. While glancing through the Cruise Compass, we noticed that there was something called Tri-Bond Trivia going on 15 minutes from the time we were currently eating. We all assumed that this meant James Bond trivia and while none of us really knew too much about James Bond, we thought we had enough general knowledge to have fun giving it a shot.
So, we go down to the lounge that it is taking place in. The six or so of us huddle up and try to piece together the few bits of James Bond trivia that we actually know and prepare for the trivia. Then, the person running the trivia starts explaining the rules and it turns out it is most definitely not what we came for. The actual purpose of the game was to piece together three supposedly random words and find a common theme. So for example, one set of words was brand, nick, and maiden and the word that pieced them all together was “name.” One woman argued that Dora the Explorer was the glue that held these words together, but that argument was not successful. Anyway, we did the trivia, but lost to whom we now refer to as the Super Trivia family, who got almost all of the questions correct. We got like sixteen or something out of the twenty questions, which was a lot better than how we thought we would do, so it was all good.

As soon as that was over, we went downstairs to the Schooner Bar to go do the Name That Tune game. This one was being monitored by the guy who did the trivia game we won the night before and ended up being cartoon and TV theme. With Andrew’s help, we actually managed to win this one. I have no idea how that happened, but some guy tried to argue we should lose because we threw some random answer out there for the last question. We won the fantastic prize of six water wallets. Just what everyone wants.

After we finished trivia, we did some important work and Umma and I called my Hastings housing to clear up the email that I had received. That was more or less successful and I think it has been sorted out. Once that was resolved, I dragged Oppa up to the top deck to go walk a mile. I think I may have also dragged Andrew out to do that as well. I had good timing here because we managed to be walking our mile while the boat was taking off from the dock.

Once that was done, we went downstairs to get ready for the show. The Cruise Compass clearly said that the show was a Broadway musical – movie tribute, but I had jokingly told James that it was a comedy after the mix up from the night before. He took this seriously, told Gianni the same thing, and then decided to come with me to the show. When we actually got there, James was absolutely miserable. I don’t think I’ve seen my brother that upset about having to see a show before. I didn’t think it was that bad. I mean, I have definitely seen better, they could have chosen some better songs, and I think they mixed up songs and the respective musicals, but it could have been a lot worse. It was kind of cute and it was a lot better than a lot of the shows that we had to watch on the cruise before.

We went to Team Trivia immediately after the show. We did not fare as well as the night before and Andrew let us down because even though he is in love with all things that have to do with Japan, he was not able to identify the art of flower arranging. We left the trivia early anyway because we got to dinner so late the night before.

Dinner was good. I had the crab and shrimp salad for the appetizer. I also felt like pure cow meat and ended up having the sirloin for my entrée. I had this BBB crème brule for dessert and it was absolutely amazing. Oh my god. Sooo good.

We left dinner pretty quickly so that we could get to the evening edition of Name that Tune. This one was a little more hard core than the other one. Instead of playing songs off of a lap top, they had the nightly piano player sing and play the songs. Additionally, this trivia session was packed like all the other evening trivia are. It was pretty crazy overall. We actually got all of the answers right, but did not make it to the final tie breaker round because they awarded bonus points for dancing that we did not participate in. Actually, Andrew danced to La Bamba a little, but that’s about it.

We sadly retreated to the sixth floor, outside of the café with Ben and Jerrys and Seattles Best and hung around there for a while. On the way downstairs, Umma dragged me up to the Viking Crown lounge because she wanted to see who was doing the Chipendale performance. We actually almost tricked Andrew into joining us there, but he jumped out of the elevator at the last minute and got laughed at by a bunch of burly men heading up there to see the same show.

Umma and I went downstairs to get ready for bed. It was almost one and we had no idea where Mia was. She was supposed to come in by that time. Andrew eventually agreed to go find her and found her. Apparently she was looking for us in the Chippendale area. Other than that, Stardust was on TV, so I watched a little bit of the movie before going to bed.