clara: day 3 (already??)

I'm pretty exhausted, but I'll try to post some anyway. Today we met up with Gemma, which was great -- we haven't hung out much in about four years, and I'm really excited to do so again. Her Floridian relatives are also very cute!

I had a slightly weird encounter on my way out of the ship this morning. I was dressed down in a skirt and t-shirt in preparation for our day wandering around Miami, and when one of the older cruise passengers saw me, she said "You're wearing that? I can't believe they even let your group on here." I didn't really have anything to say to that. There's this weird class snobbery built into the cruise experience that isn't really present anywhere I've lived.

Fortunately, most of the "traditional" passengers don't seem to share this woman's attitude -- in fact, I shared a pleasant beer last night in the Golden Lion pub with an interesting gentleman who made a lot of money as a programmer in the dot-com bubble and somehow hung onto enough of it to spend all of his vacations on exciting travel adventures like this.

We had a great day in Miami, though. Fried plantains and lunchtime sangria are for yes! Also exciting plants and glass-blown art; I drew some pictures that were slightly more interesting than my onboard drawings (since I'm not that good at drawing water in monochrome -- I've definitely been practicing, though!). I'd like to put all my drawings from the trip on this blog, but considering that I need to take time away from the cruising experience to take poor-quality digital photos of them and then wait for my glacially-slow computer to process each one, they'll probably only be a few highlights, and those belatedly.

There's a lot more I could say, but of course I've already given up on capturing all the crazy things that are happening in this discrete medium -- instead, I'll focus on experiencing them. (And pretty soon, on experiencing a well-deserved sleep!)