Next was a sea day, not too interesting, took a walk, swam, got sunburned, etc. Dinner was full of surprises, first my having fish as a main course and liking it, and second with the amazing souffle they offered for dessert *_*

Our following port of call was Cadiz, Spain. We opted to try a few of the walking tours, see the cathedral and some of the main sights. The cool thing was, on the map the walking tours were drawn with colored lines - and those same lines were painted on the sidewalks of the street. So you could literally follow the tour without any knowledge of street signs or anything, which I thought was rather clever and after several past trips trying to figure out where you're supposed to turn and when it was a nice break. First we went to the plaza with the old cathedral, which we didn't actually go in, just looked at. And what better to decorate the outside of a cathedral with then dinosaurs!


No, really.





Dinosaurs.



See, there's the cathedral...and there are the dinosaurs. Now, somehow I always thought that dinosaurs and the church didn't get on so well but apparently in Cadiz they think differently.



This one ran afoul of a certain Japanese middle schooler.

After goggling at the dinosaurs for a bit, we climbed a tower that gave an awesome panoramic view of the city (there are a bunch of pictures of that but I don't think I'll post them here cause it would take up a ton of room) and then went to a glass bottom museum that showed all these different levels of how the city had been built up from roman times. It would have been more interesting if I hadn't had to spend the entire time convincing myself that no, the glass was not going to break. Really.

The rest of the day was less interesting, we hit up a beach again after a very nice lunch, but the day was rather chilly and it was the atlantic and thus much colder, so I didn't go in. My brother did, though. I think he's nuts

After Cadiz was Lisbon, Portugal. The day dawned gray and drizzly, which unfortunately never lifted. We made our way to a pretty epic plaza and took a rickety trolly all the way up to the top of the hill to go to the castle. We actually ended up one hill over from the castle, but we got some good pastries and it wasn't that far a walk, so that was okay. The castle was pretty interesting, wandering around on the walls and such (though the staircases to get up onto the was were scary steep), plus there were peacocks, which was cool cause I'd never seen one in real life before.



Isn't he pretty~

Moving on. There were also CATS at the castle and as I was still in my deprived-small-fluffy-animals state I of course squealed and bent to pet them. And then went and washed my hands We wandered the city for a little while after that, making our way back down the hill. Lunch ended up being only ok, since we didn't really know what we were getting when we asked for it.

Following day was another sea day, which was spent pretty much bumming around the ship - it was too cold at that point for swimming or anything. I watched the movie "Invictus" which considering all I know about rugby is the fact that the woman's rugby team at BMC is vicious and perpetually injured, I really quite enjoyed. I did also go to an Indonesian tea which was very good, and that evening we had our second formal night, which of course meant an excellent dinner.

It was also the night of the desert extravaganza. *______* The cooks must have taken the entire cruise to make it all, everything was decorated and everything was edible it was insane. There were tons of cakes, two chocolate fountains, a cabinet of chocolate covered apples...It was incredible. Some examples:







It was fantastic. It would have been more so if it hadn't been half an hour after I finished dinner and I could actually eat stuff, but I digress

I think I'll leave you all to drool over the pictures as faded_lace is distracting me with fic and I still owe someone a tag somewhere that I was supposed to do today but went and saw CATS instead. But we're almost done, so you can expect me to drop off the face of lj except for RP journals again in the near future and stop spamming you all with pictures.