Last Wednesday, we headed out to Jamaica for five days. We had booked a trip at a Sandals in Montego Bay way back in March. We got started early on Wednesday - up at 4:30 am! We were scheduled to fly from Charleston to Atlanta at 7:30 am and then board our flight to Montego Bay at 9:45 am. We got some breakfast at the Charleston airport and boarded the plane, and then the bad news began. There was a bad fog in Atlanta, and they weren't letting any planes land or take off. So we sat on the plane at the gate in Charleston for an hour. We finally made it to Atlanta around 9:30, just in time to sprint to our other plane, which was of course, at the complete opposite end of the airport from where we had landed. After much sprinting and nearly passing out from exhaustion, we arrived at the gate to find that the plane had just left. The next plane was scheduled to leave at 2:45 pm. Needless to say, we were off to a great start. So we roamed around the Atlanta airport for awhile, got some lunch, and settled in at our gate to wait it out. Cy watched an entire movie and I read an entire book. It was almost time to board when one of the other people sitting at the gate with us (who had also missed the earlier plane) receives a cell phone call from her son saying that we were all at the wrong gate - they had switched gates without bothering to let anyone know!!! Sure enough, they finally start flashing some info on the board where we are sitting and it says something about a flight to Vienna! So about 15 of us pack up and start wandering off in search of the new gate which is of course, a fair hike away. So after almost missing our plane a second time, we finally get to the right place, and the plane is delayed!!! We eventually got to board and finally made it to Jamaica around 6 pm Jamaica time (7 pm our time).
When we got to the resort, we encountered our second big disappointment - our resort. It looked nothing like the pictures they used for advertisement. Most importantly, there was no beach! The pictures on the website and the brochure showed a large, beautiful, private beach with sailboats and water sports. In actuality, 95% of the beach had eroded, leaving only a strip of dirty sand a few hundred yards across, no water sports, and heavily populated 24/7 with hoards of rather scary locals. Because, disappointment #3 - the resort not only lacked a beach; it is also in the middle of a very scary part of downtown Montego Bay. Seriously. . .we tried to go for a walk by the water at 7 am our first morning there and a guy walks up to us as soon as we walk out the front door of the hotel and says, "Hey man, want a little smoke?" And we are like, "What? No! And it's 7 o'clock in the morning!" So we keep walking, but a few yards later we see a man who has apparently finished swimming and decides to just strip down and change out of his swim clothes in the middle of the road!!! At that point, we just turned around & went inside, and immediately caught a bus to one of the other Sandals resorts, where there actually was a beach (a really beautiful one), free of nude and/or high locals.
This became the routine for the next few days - have breakfast delivered to the room, eat it out on the balcony, then catch a bus to Sandals Montego Bay. Lie on the beach until lunchtime, then hit up the lunch buffet at the Bayside Restaurant. Around 2:15, we would catch the bus back to Sandals Inn, where we would rest until it was time for dinner. We went to three different restaurants for dinner - the Carlyle (where a local reggae band played while we ate, soon to be followed by an Elvis impersonator, which we did not stick around for), Tokyo Joe's (a Japanese steakhouse where an angry Jamaican chef cooked our food sweating over an open fire), and Cucina Romana, which had delicious Italian food, and where I acquired a billion mosquito bites that I had an allergic reaction to while flying home the next day.
On Saturday, our last full day in Jamaica, we had scheduled a rafting tour on the Martha Brae river. However, when we got up Saturday morning, things quickly went downhill. First, they lost our card with our breakfast order and we never got our breakfast. Then, our front door broke - it wouldn't close or lock, so we couldn't leave our room. Cy tried to explain this to the front desk and they didn't seem to understand. So he eventually just walked down there to yell at them, and while he was there, he was like, could you also please bring us our breakfast? Eventually our breakfast (and later) the maintenance guy showed up. The maintenance guy's solution was to whip out a knife and carve a bigger hole in the door frame so they door would shut. Brilliant. By then we had missed the tour, which they tried to charge us full price for (but Cy would have none of it).Saturday night was actually the best part of our trip. We went over to Sandals Montego Bay for dinner at Cucina Romana (which was the best food we had all week) and we saw an absolutely gorgeous sunset. So that was a nice end to our rather chaotic trip.
Sunday morning we did some shopping in the airport (they had a reggae CD store and a Jamaica Pirates store!) and then flew home. Apparently we were mere hours ahead of Tropical Storm Fay, which we knew nothing about until our pilot said, "We shouldn't have too much trouble from the tropical storm." It was quite a turbulent ride, and apparently the storm hit Cuba just a couple hours after we flew over Cuba. Even though we had a 4-hour layover in Atlanta before we flew home to Charleston, we were so incredibly happy to be back in the United States. Atlanta Bread Company has never tasted so good. And this will probably be our last trip, because I think poor Cy was scarred for life. Maybe next time we'll just take the days off work but lounge around our own home. :)
As of Tuesday, August 5, we have been married for two wonderful years!!! I really can't believe it's been that long - time truly does fly when you're having fun! Our anniversary itself was fantastic. We were able to take the day off work and just spend the whole day together. We kicked off our anniversary with presents (for me - Cy's present, a new iPod Nano, has yet to arrive). Cy bought me some beautiful flowers - a mixture of pink roses, pink carnations, and daisies. And he bought me the most beautiful necklace - a circlet made out of sapphires!!!
After presents, we had a nice, relaxing breakfast at IHOP. For lunch, we headed to Chili's and then to the movie theater where we saw the new Mummy movie (great movie). Then, for dinner, Cy had made reservations at our favorite restaurant for special occasions - Oak Steakhouse on Broad Street. We both agree that Oak has the best food we've ever eaten. We each had a 7 oz. filet mignon (I ordered mine with gorgonzola cream sauce; Cy chose the balsamic barbecue sauce) and shared a family-sized side of whipped potatoes. It was amazing. For dessert, we shared a slice of six-layer chocolate cake called "Chocolate Indulgence." It was such a fantastic day!
And it really has been two amazing years. We love each other more now than we did two years ago. And it just keeps getting better. :)
I'm going to do a book/movie review to recap my weekend. Because this pretty much was my weekend. 1. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer - The much anticipated fourth and "final" installment of Stephenie Meyer's teenage vampire romance saga. I say "final" in quotations because I am in no way convinced that this actually was the final book. She left way too many questions unanswered and way too many loose threads that I know she's just dying to come back and explore later on. And tons of new characters that are screaming for more page time. Plus, she's already admitted to working on a fifth book called Midnight Sun, which coincides chronologically with book 1 (but told from Edward's point of view), but for which I am sure we will have to have another midnight party at the bookstores the night of its release. Other than the Harry Potter books, I think Breaking Dawn is the only book to share the honor of the
midnight release party. I went to the last Harry Potter party, and that was more than I could handle. So I opted out of this one - something about the prospect of hundreds of teenage girls dressed up in prom dresses/vampire costumes and gushing over Rob Pattinson kind of turned me off.
Anyway, Amazon was taking way too long to ship my book so I called and reserved a copy at Barnes & Noble, which I picked up promptly when they opened at 9 am on Saturday. Now I will have to figure out what to do with my second copy of the book when it finally turns up later this week. I started reading as soon as I got in the house. And I must say, I was immediately disappointed. I didn't like the direction the main characters were taking. They had lost something of their former selves - I found them flat and forced, not developed, but being manipulated toward the end goal of the book. Also, the first few hundred pages of the book were just plain creepy. And inappropriate. I was actually rather shocked by the inappropriateness, especially considering that the author is allegedly a devout Mormon (assuming she hasn't been excommunicated yet, based on her books).
Okay, so I made it through the first few hundred pages extremely disappointed. It was way more horror novel than cute, fun vampire romance. Then I get to book 2, which is told from Jacob's point of view. So I am dreading it even more, since I've hated Jacob in the past couple of books. It was also very bizarre, since all of the other books were told from Bella's point of view. But I made myself keep reading, and actually, I liked Jacob a lot better in this book. Reading from his point of view actually provided some much-needed comic relief after the gruesomeness of book 1. Plus, there was the part where he got to drive Edward's Aston Martin Vanquish (I gasped out loud when I read the name of the car, since it is only the most fabulous car EVER) that helped redeem it for me.
By the time we got back to Bella in book 3, things had improved drastically and I found myself devouring the remaining pages. SPOILER ALERT: I was so happy that Renesmee turned out to be really sweet, and not a hideous mutant after all, and that Bella was FINALLY a vampire after much screwing around, and it was really cool to meet the vampires from all the covens all over the world. After making it all the way through to the end, I began to understand why the beginning had to happen the way it did - so I guess the end justified the means. And everyone got their happily ever after. Yea! :)
2. The Dark Knight
Okay, so I finally saw Batman Begins for the first time on Friday. It was pretty awesome, so we decided to go see The Dark Knight. It was also pretty awesome. It was way less intense and creepy than I thought it was going to be - I'd heard so much about how "dark" the movie was. I didn't really think it was that much darker than Batman Begins.
Heath Ledger was fantastic as the Joker. Just straight up crazy and kind of hilarious at times. Cy and I have been quoting the Joker saying "Kill. . .the batman" all day. Overall, good movie with crazy stunts and cool technology. Cy and I both really liked it because it was fairly realistic - they explained the technology behind everything. It wasn't just that Batman was magical and could fly, etc. - there were reasonable explanations for everything.
Except for Two-Face. SPOILER ALERT: Two Face was the creepiest part of the movie for me. And the least realistic. I mean, there is no way you could just be walking around shooting people when half of your face was burned off. Plus, it was so disgusting. I am glad that he lasted only the duration of the movie; I couldn't have handled an entire movie looking at his mutilated face. Especially when the other half of his face still looked like Aaron Eckhart.
The second thing that bugged me about the movie (and this bugged me in Batman Begins too) was Christian Bale's bizarro Batman voice. It kept making me want to laugh and I couldn't figure out why. And then all of a sudden it hit me: his Batman voice totally sounds like Rex Kwon Do from Napoleon Dynamite. I could just picture Batman saying: "Nobody wants a roundhouse kick to the face when I'm wearing this bat suit!" And then I couldn't stop laughing when he talked. Kind of ruined it for me a little bit.
When we got to the resort, we encountered our second big disappointment - our resort. It looked nothing like the pictures they used for advertisement. Most importantly, there was no beach! The pictures on the website and the brochure showed a large, beautiful, private beach with sailboats and water sports. In actuality, 95% of the beach had eroded, leaving only a strip of dirty sand a few hundred yards across, no water sports, and heavily populated 24/7 with hoards of rather scary locals. Because, disappointment #3 - the resort not only lacked a beach; it is also in the middle of a very scary part of downtown Montego Bay. Seriously. . .we tried to go for a walk by the water at 7 am our first morning there and a guy walks up to us as soon as we walk out the front door of the hotel and says, "Hey man, want a little smoke?" And we are like, "What? No! And it's 7 o'clock in the morning!" So we keep walking, but a few yards later we see a man who has apparently finished swimming and decides to just strip down and change out of his swim clothes in the middle of the road!!! At that point, we just turned around & went inside, and immediately caught a bus to one of the other Sandals resorts, where there actually was a beach (a really beautiful one), free of nude and/or high locals.
