January 5th At Sea on the Norwegian Gem

Out to sea! We wake up early and head to the gym. I can't wait to get in the
sauna! We went to the sushi joint today and I was pleasantly
surprised. The sushi was amazing! It's all you can eat and I'm pretty
sure I ate a whole tuna fish to myself. Today was mostly a gambling
day, I'm not much of a gambler but Matt loves to play blackjack and he
is really good at it! I like to watch but today I gambled a little, a
wheel of fortune slot machine and a quarter machine which I slightly
got addicted to. They have a bowling alley on the ship, with 6 lanes!
So we played a game, Matt won of course. I'm not a big fan of bowling
but the alley is nice. We decided to go to one of the shows tonight,
called Colors! It was pretty interesting, entertaining but in a laugh
so hard because it's so lame sort of way. It was a song and dance show
about, well colors. They had some pretty good songs like pink cadillac
and goodbye yellow brick road. The singers were decent but the dancers
were a joke. We tried out the buffet today, I was pleasantly
surprised. The buffet so far is better then any restaurant we have
been to, figures. Personally I like having a plateful of ten different
foods. We decided to get our groove on tonight so we hit up Bliss
Lounge, the nicest lounge on the boat. Everything is crushed velvet.
They have beds in there too which I love. We met a really cool
canadian couple who we talked to most the night. We met two couples
from Jersey when we were out for a smoke and they were super nice. One
of the girls really liked me for some reason and kept telling me we
had to hang out. I got pretty sauced and danced the night away and met
a short little girl from Jersey who forced me to teach her to salsa
dance. It was pretty funny. We also met the cruise director tonight,
Ray, who is coincidentally from Seattle! West Seattle to be exact. We
talked for him for almost 2 hours. He told us how he missed the people
from Seattle, since we were on a boat full of New Yorkers and they are
all super crazy and us Seattlelites are way laid back in comparison.
We really lucked out meeting Ray, in his words "Its good to be king"
he can get us hooked up with all the best things on the boat...and
even better, free drinks! We also met Jimmy the assistant cruise
director. A young kid from London, Ontario. He's a funny guy, Ray's
right hand man basically. Matt and him also hit it off for their love
of hockey. We stayed out till 4. I don't even remember what was
probably the longest walk ever to the room...