The short version

Cruise was very fun. We were supposed to visit St. Thomas, St. Maarten, San Juan, and Haiti, but thanks to Tropical Storm Chris, we were diverted after St. Maarten and went to Nassau, Bahamas instead. I was very disappointed to miss the last two ports, but whatcha gonna do. Five days at sea is way, way too many, though I do have a very nice tan now.

We got our most basic cert for scuba diving, w00t. Pity we didn't get into the Bahamas a tich earlier, b/c the staff had offered to complete our Open Water cert if the opportunity arose. Scuba is much fun and we are definitely going to do it again - we're already considering another cruise that hits better scuba areas like Cozumel and Belize. Sadly, we had our open water dive in St. Maarten, and the dive site there wasn't as good as the snorkeling site we went to in St. Thomas, where we saw a lot more fish and green sea turtles.

Shopping in St. Maarten rox0rs if you are a jewelry h0r like me. Got a pair of very nice tanzanite earrings for a rockbottom price, plus a full set of fire opals. My SIL and I bought liquor for prices that would make you cry - $11 for a liter of Tanqueray, $7 for a bottle of Malibu rum. We also bought some of the local poison, Guavaberry liqueur, since you can't get it in the States and it did make a nice colada.

Best drink of the trip: Frozen Banana Bailey's Colada (aka BBC.) Just sit me in the sun and bring me these all day long, and I will be happy.

Boat was huuuuuuuumungous, lots of places to go and see, but the flip side is that there were a LOT of people, and a startling number of the morbidly obese. The ship's pools resembled photos I've seen of public pools in Tokyo at about 1 PM on a hot day. We tended to take the water either early in the morning or at about 5 PM, when people seemed to wander off to get washed up for dinner.

We had the late seating at 8:30, which I would not do again. We were usually so deep in a food coma by the time we left (and our waiter Ismet kept bringing us extra food) that we rarely did much besides go to bed. The people at our table were very nice; there was a pair of honeymooners from Barcelona, Spain, and another pair from Delaware.

Our stateroom was very spacious. The Q's treated us to a balcony, which was nice for drinking champagne at sunset and for drying bathing suits and wet clothing at the end of the day. One cute touch was the appearance of towel animals on the bed when the attendant came to turn down the bed for the night - we got a stingray, a dog, a bunny, a monkey, and a manta ray. I learned to fold some of them on our last day.

Getting off the boat was relatively painless, though we had a short tussle with some of the customs staff (to sum it up, people are stupid, and stupid people like quoting rules at you just to see you try to deal with an impossible situation, like that you obviously cannot lift all the bags at your feet when your husband has just crossed the Line of No Return to find your SIL, and then you are told you can't leave your bags there, and you can't lift them all, and you can't leave your bags unattended to find a porter, but your husband Is Not Allowed to walk back ten feet to help you. Thankfully, one of the staff had a brain and escorted my husband back over No Man's Land to help me with the goddamned bags, and now we have learned a lesson.) We were home by 11 AM, and husband had two F1 races to watch, and soon we will go out for Japanese.

Looking forward to all the Otakon reports.

The summer book review

Every summer, I get a chance to catch up on my reading. Here are the book reviews, from my pile to yours, in no particular order.

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

I can honestly say that I bought this book in Maine for lack of anything else to read. It was being hailed as the "beach read of the summer," and if that isn't warning bells, I don't know what is. The story centers around a doctor and his wife (circa 1950) who have twins in the middle of a blizzard, and the girl twin has Down syndrome. The doctor tells his wife the
girl died, and the nurse is supposed to take the girl to a home, but she runs off with the baby instead. The book is a character piece, a dreamy slow work full of misty emotional passages about how this Affects Everyone, and I found myself terrifically bored after a while. Maybe you have to be a mother.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict

This book is a cultural anthropological study of the Japanese post-WWII that was commissioned by the US government in order to better understand how to deal with the Japanese. The author writes without an agenda - there's no effort to rationalize how the Japanese behave, only "this is how it is." Particularly revealing are the sections on hierarchy and how the Japanese armies were absolutely boggled to find out that the people they were conquering weren't happy about it, and also the sections concerning the intricate and burdensome networks of obligations that the Japanese person must spend his/her life paying back - to one's parents, to one's peers, to one's teachers, to the emperor, etc (on, giri, gimu, ko, and so on.) I won't say we don't have similar feelings in the West, but they do not affect the American to nearly the same degree. It's pretty rare that my husband swipes a book from me, but he got his paws on this one before I was even done with it, and that says a lot.

Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling

Since I enjoyed the Tamir trilogy by Flewelling, I thought I'd try this trilogy, which is set hundreds of years afterwards. There's some medieval skulduggery and a lot of magical hand-waving, but the main thrust of this trilogy seems to be the blossoming romance between Alec and Seregil. Flewelling isn't the best at writing romance, and I've been around the fandoms too long to really want to read three books' worth of gay men wibbling like teenyboppers over First Love. Misty Lackey didn't break me in to the whole notion of homosexuality by writing seme/uke stereotypes, so I didn't bother moving backwards in my perceptions, and I won't be finishing this one.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Heartbreaking. Written in the hardlined Asian tradition of taking no prisoners where tragedy is concerned. The passages about how young Chinese girls had their feet bound made me nauseated, and yet the "golden lilies" were a ticket to a better future. The protagonist rises, her friend falls, and it's hard to call the ending happy. You all watch anime, you know what I mean.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

buttercup0222 introduced me to Neil Gaiman, and this book was supposed to be really really good, so I figured it'd make a good cruise read. All I can say is, FANTASTIC. Devoured this in three days, interspersed with my PADI manual. Intriguing concept: immigrants bring the ideas of their gods with them to America, and the gods manifest, but then the people believe in new things and stop believing in the old gods, and the old gods are left to make their own way. The book centers around a war between the old gods and the new gods (like media and electronics) and who's really driving the war and for what purpose. I'd say this was my recommended read of the summer, but I'd have to declare it a tie with the next entry.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

I'd understood that this book was a classic of the cyberpunk genre before picking it up, but I had no idea how revolutionary it was until I'd gotten about a quarter of the way through it and then checked the publication date - 1984. When the Internet was still a beepy thing that you might access with your phone line and boxy modem, if you had even heard of things like Prodigy. Neuromancer is complex and multilayered, and years ahead of its time, and you have to wonder how long it's going to be before people do start "jacking in" to the Internet the way the protagonist Case does. I'll probably have to reread the ending again because I don't quite understand the full relationship between 3Jane, Linda Lee, Molly, Wintermute, and Neuromancer, but it'll be a pleasure rather than a chore.

Red Azalea by Anchee Min

Anchee Min grew up in Communist China and wrote this autobiography after emigrating to the US. She starts out as an idealistic student who has memorized the propagandist operas of Comrade Jiang Ching and the sayings of Mao, and ends up finding the rot in the core of the regime. I was amazed by her descriptions of the people singing the highest praises of Chairman Mao even while his programs starved them to death - it was as if they'd traded one emperor for another. Some animals are more equal than others, as George Orwell wrote, and this book illustrates it in short, poignant, and often awkward prose.

Still have a couple books left to read, like Fateful Harvest, which my intern gave to me. I'm somewhat reluctant to read it because I'll probably feel like part of the problem afterwards, since I work for big chemical companies, but I feel like I should. Still, Fast Food Nation didn't do much for my appetite, so this might just further my current fantasy of selling it all and running a dive boat in the Caribbean. Ah well, they can't all be fun reads. :)