Give me some Dutch and French!


The second island that we hit up was St. Maarten. Once again, I was still so dazzled by the water! There's our ship, the Explorer all docked up.

We went on an local artist tour. We got to ride in a nice air conditioned bus and got a pretty good tour of the island. Unfortunately, the tour guide was very boring and I tried really hard to pay attention to her on the bus. Not to mention at each artist's home/gallery, I'd catch her digging for gold. No joke! In one of the galleries, this artist painted on ceramics and pottery. I liked a few of the bowls but they were out of my price range. It was so funny, I was looking at some bowls when this huge thing went scurrying across the wall. I almost broke some things, freaking out that it was probably a crazy humongo island bug. What it actually was, was some sort of lizard. I ended up getting these cute shot glasses with these pretty flowers painted on for my girls. As I was paying for my glasses, I realized that she didn't actually make the bowls. She had bought them and then painted on them. That was very disappointing since some of them had cool shapes and cutouts. My favorite artist was still Dona. She was so friendly and gorgeous. I wanted to buy all these pieces from her but I didn't bring any credit cards or enough cash on me. I was only able to get the one piece with the woman and the boat.

After the tour, we went back on the ship to grab lunch and to pick up some funds for some duty free shopping. Since the main area where we wanted to shop was quite a walk, we ended up taking a water taxi. It was very convenient since you didn't have to wait a long time for one to pick you up. Only Kevin and Emmy had something they were on the look out for. Kevin wanted this ring he saw in the magazine and M wanted a watch. Whatever store we walked into, most of the workers would pounce on you. There were definitely stores that were so out of my price range that once I saw the tag, I didn't even bother trying it on since that would make leaving even harder. I got to try on Dior and Hermes watches. It's funny how they act like $1000 some dollars is not a big amount. M was looking at some TAG watches and I was commenting how they just looked like Fossil watches. The lady behind the counter gave me the most disgusted look after hearing me say that. Em said I had offended her with that remark since the watches are so superior to what I called them. There was this small store that sold the funniest tees. Some were extremely raunchy while others were tasteful. Em and I advised Kevin to get the "man whore" one for his brother. There was another one that was hilarious, it said "what time do you want your mom home?" Too bad they didn't have any in his size. If they made them in women's sizes, I would have gotten it and rocked it in front of a few certain friends. I did end up getting some things, you can see what I got here.