Axl's Adventures In The Mediterranean: Part 5

Monday 18th: Sea Day #2.

Sea days are a curious thing on a cruise ship. With no place to go, people seem unable to decide how to spend their time. Most seem to try to solve this by sunbathing. I've never been one for sunbathing. Some people are using their sunbathing time to read a book - this I can understand. What I can't relate to is people who just lie there, cooking themselves. All that wasted time! You know these are the same people who complain about never having enough time in the day to do things. Why then when they get the time do they waste it doing the most inactive thing in the world?! If they spent this time at home, lying on their beds they would be called lazy & unimaginative. Is the pursuit of bronzed skin really so righteous that these peoples inactivity is a good thing? I'm probably being too harsh. I've never understood the draw of beaches after all. Until this year, I was very much of the Bill Hicks "What's so great about the beach? It's where dirt meets water!" opinion. Even as a kid, beaches were alright, but no big deal. This year I've enjoyed being on beaches twice. At ATP, and in Cannes. So I'm coming around to beaches. If yer actually doing something though. I will never understand sunbathers.
The book reading ones I get tho. I spent some of this sea day outside reading while the ship sailed thru the open sea. It was nice. Real nice. Good book, nice setting, those guys have the right idea.
I saw a huge turtle in the sea today. Micaela didn't believe me because all cruise long she's been playing a game where every now and then she'll break off mid sentence to cry out "Whale!", "Shark!", "Mermaid!" etc etc. I definitely saw it tho.
I watched some people playing volleyball up on deck 12. I was amazed how this one guy was taking it a bit too seriously, until I realised the entire opposing team were taking it FAR too seriously. I privately revelled in watching them get beaten. The teams seemed to be split up into USA Vs Rest Of The World. USA lost. A lot of Americans (especially males) seem to take sport so seriously that they can't even seem to handle guessing a coin toss wrong, and attempt to turn any conversation into either an argument they refuse to back down from, or a display of chest-beating one-upmanship. American men taking a friendly contest way too seriously and getting beaten was a pretty sweet thing to see, especially coz the ROW team had 2 women in aswell. If there's one thing that American males too into sport REALLY hate, it's being beaten by women.
In the early evening, there was a mist on the horizon that made a far away boat look like a pirate ship, which was cool but also pretty spooky. Also a bit of a let down when you could see about half an hour later that it wasn't.
After dinner that night, I spent my first money in a casino. Had a little fun losing money on the Roulette table and at Black Jack. And seeing the underage Spanish kid somehow being allowed to gamble with a really bad fake ID. The fact he wanted to change up $200 into playing chips probably helped.