I hope you all had a fun Halloween. I spent it in my hotel room with the door locked and bolted in case a child staying in the hotel decided to knock on the door and say “Hola, tricko oro treato.” The ships on the other hand celebrated in full Halloween style all except the Carnival Miracle which has a nude charter and where every night could be a potential horror night.

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I mentioned on Friday’s blog that people tend to for whatever reason tell me their problems and so it was on Saturday which in itself was a busy day. I had woken early to get off the Carnival Liberty so that I could go to Miami airport and rent a car from a 17-year-old man called Jose whose nose had been abused by a staple gun. Once in the car and if and only if I survived the journey on I-95 which in my opinion should be renamed Hell Road Of Certain Death, I would return to the ship and walk around with our Chairman and CEO Micky Arison and his entourage, more of which we shall speak soon. Anyway, by the time I got back to the Marriotcontinentalhyatt I was pretty tired. I had just started unpacking again when my raspberry started to ring and on the other end was a rather distraught beard from the Miami office.

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Being here on Carnival Liberty has meant that I have seen people I haven’t seen for a long time both crew and guests. Yesterday I met a guest who last sailed with me on Carnival Triumph in 2003. “You look good,” he said. “I barely recognised you.” Er, thanks….I think. Then just this morning a guest who is an avid reader of the blog and a prominent poster on Facebook told me “You know what I really admire about you?” “What?” I asked, preparing to be flattered. “The way you don’t care about fashion,” he continued.

These comments are all brilliant examples of a lost art form………the compliment that really isn’t one and is in fact the complete opposite.

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There is a group of 55 guests from Japan on this cruise and as always they have provided the rest of us with some fantastic sights, from their stunningly beautiful dresses and perfect makeup the ladies wear on elegant night. I think you might have to be Japanese though to understand Japan. It’s not like America, which you can pretty much understand with one mouthful of a Guy Fieri burger or understanding us Brits by learning how to cook Yorkshire Pudding.

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Good morning from Cozumel, Mexico, and from the Lido Deck where I am sitting in the shaded part of the deck behind the brilliant new RedFrog Rum Bar. And bloggers, I have to say that sometimes I wonder how the heck we human beings have evolved as far as we have when almost every single decision we ever make is bordering on the insane. I will tell you specifically what I am referring to in a moment but how have we been able to get ahead of the animal kingdom? You do not see baboons smoking cigars like I did last night or sheep riding their Harley Davidson’s at high speed and not wearing a crash helmet. You don’t see penguins throwing huge amounts of salt over their fish and chips or a Gerald the Giraffe at Saks of 5th Avenue buying something he knows he can’t afford.

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When I travel I am always guaranteed that someone somewhere is watching over me thinking “Let’s make sure John has something to write about for his blog” and what follows usually means I end up in the s**t. It started on Tuesday night when after a whole day of filming with Peter the Hair, Jay the Recently Married and my marvelous and very patient assistant Mel on board the Carnival Liberty we were tired and ready to go to the hotel. We could have stayed on board but the internet during a dry/wet dock is as reliable as the French army when the word attack is shouted and so to download the videos we had to go to a hotel.

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There are many of the senior beards that work at Carnival HQ that have known me for years. Beards who used to work with me on board and know me. By that I mean they know and understand my personality, they know my strengths and indeed my many weaknesses and they all know and put up with my faults as they worked with me for many years and had to put up with and my sometimes rancid bottom.

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Have a question about the Carnival Liberty dry dock or any of the Fun Ship 2.0 spaces? Submit it on Carnival’s Facebook page for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming video.