Puerto Chiapas is a commercial port in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The cruise staff suggested that since Puerto Chiapas is a commercial port that it contained little of touristic interest. They were correct. Luckily, the government of Mexico put up a nice set of giant traditional-looking huts containing a souvenir shop, pool, and bar within the cruise port right next to the cruise ship. We walked though the souvenir ship and then went to the bar, bought a beer, margarita, and guacamole. We heard from some other passengers that there was a $10 round trip shuttle to the nearby fishing village, but we neglected to take the shuttle and instead re-boarded the ship.

The Huatulco area contains 9 bays. Our original plan was to hire a taxi to drive us to the 5 road-accessible bays. However, after disembarking the ship, we were approached by several people offering boat tours. One of them, Aebo, offered us a decent price to take us and another couple (Wes and Marsha) on a boat tour to several of the bays (including some of the ones only accessible by boat) as well as the “blowhole”, a rock formation that occasionally spurts water out of the top like a whale’s blowhole. After the tour, Aebo referred us to his “cousin” Sergio who gave the four of us another reasonably priced taxi tour of the town and remaining bays. Sergio’s superior English skills allowed him to explain the history of the region and the current state of affairs in Huatulco and the Oaxaca state. Both Aebo and Sergio were excellent guides and even though we probably could have negotiated lower prices for their services, both tours combined cost substantially less than the overpriced ship tours.

Another passenger pushed Valerie down the stairs at yesterday’s show which caused Valerie’s ankle to swell up a bit. Valerie rested most of the day in our stateroom, only getting up to pick up food from the Garden Cafe buffet. After icing Valerie’s ankle for a while, I stepped out to visit the ship’s well-equipped fitness center. This gym is much larger than the Norwegian Star’s and the location allows exercisers to look out upon the sea while working out.

For the very first NCL-official shore excursion of our trip, we took a 50-minute boat ride to Las Caletas Hideaway. Las Caletas was the former vacation home of John Huston and is now a relaxing, isolated, mostly-inclusive day retreat run by Vallarta Adventures. We ate lunch, drank a few margaritas, snorkeled in the murky waters, and rested in a hammock before returning to the ship. I’m not sure Las Caletas was worth the cost of admission, but it is a great place to relax in the Puerto Vallarta area.

Just like our last visit, after disembarking the ship, we walked along the marina and harbor area of Cabo San Lucas toward Medano Beach. After surviving a 50-minute barrage of salespeople offering fake jewelry, cigars, timeshares, and water taxi rides, we dipped our feet in the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean. Valerie waded in the ocean for a few minutes and then we sat down in a beachside restaurant for a couple margaritas and a basket of chips, salsa, and guacamole. To avoid a 50-minute walk back to the ship, we took a $6 5-minute water taxi back to the marina.

The first day of the cruise is at sea. Since we didn’t have a chance to eat there last cruise, we dined at the French-themed specialty restaurant Le Bistro. Unlike the steakhouse-themed Cagney’s, Le Bistro served a delicious meal for only 2/3 of the cost.

Valerie and I embarked on a cruise to and through the Panama Canal today. Valerie’s parents took the day off from work and drove us to the Port of Los Angeles. Before departing, we ate lunch at the San Pedro Fish Market at the Ports ‘o Call just outside the World Cruise Center. At the SPFM, you choose your the seafood you want to eat from a large fish-market-like selection and then carry it to the kitchen area and have the staff cook it (fried or grilled with cajun spices). For our first dish, we ate grilled whole Mexican Sea Bass that was recommended by a staff member. For the second dish, the chef combined shelled shrimp, scallops, calamari, potatoes, vegetables, and garlic bread into a tasty tray of greasy goodness.

Valerie and I are consolidating our Europe trip updates on her blog.

When Valerie and I booked our flight to Europe last year, we used a British Airways companion pass to get two tickets for the price of one. However, the companion pass is only valid for round-trips. Since we were returning to the US on a Transatlantic cruise, there was no need for a return flight. Not knowing what to do, we just booked a return flight from Paris for as far in the future as BA would allow with the intention of canceling it after the cruise. Fast forward half a year and we’ve decided to use that ticket. Next week, Valerie and I are leaving for a trip to Eastern Europe, Turkey, and France!

Valerie will be describing our travels in her blog at http://valeriechang.net/blog/.

One of the great things about being a software developer is that I get to learn new and relatively useless information all the time.  Today, I learned about emoji or Japanese picture characters.  As far as I can tell, these characters allow users of many Japanese cell phones to text cute pictures like balloons and bowing businessmen to one another with ease and at minimal expense.

One neat fact about emoji is that it falls outside of the basic multilingual plane (BML), which means that it cannot be represented using three or fewer bytes in UTF-8 (a popular character encoding in modern software). Unfortunately, for historical reasons, MySQL’s utf8 character set can only represent characters within the BML.  That means that if you want Japanese cell phone users to be able to store balloon picture characters in your MySQL database, you can’t store that text as utf8 character data.  (Luckily, the folks on the MySQL team recognized this issue and added a new character set [utf8mb4] capable of storing emoji and other characters outside the BML in version 5.5.3.)

If you’re on a Japanese cell phone, here’s a balloon: