The Propheteer

I’m gonna run out of puns someday…but you’re not that lucky yet.
Day…um…Florence day! (I could figure out exactly what day it was, but I figure this fits in better with how well we managed to keep track of days while we were onboard – i.e. “not very”) This is the first full day we had – the first of three days in a row of 10+ hour tours. In retrospect it wasn’t all that bad; especially given our penchant for napping between tour and dinner.

Had we been slated for the 7pm dinner seating I think we would have likely collapsed by the third tour. As it stood we got up, got dressed, swung by the buffet breakfast and off to the meeting point. Then off on a whirlwind tour of Florence. And I do mean whirlwind – the first thing I learned in Italy is that we have to go back to see everything we missed. All of the museums had lines hours long, as did most of the cathedrals. In particular we wanted to see the Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. This was primarily because Robocop makes an amazing history teacher, and his episode on Renaissance Italy showed just how amazing this piece of architecture is. Again, though, hours and hours of lines. Still, we did get to see an amazing amount of the city, statues like you wouldn’t believe and just an all around beautiful city.

I’m a little overwhelmed by the whole thing, quite frankly. I feel like we need to spend at least a few days there to really get a feel for the city and its flow. We didn’t have time to stop in any of the shops (aside from the few hand-picked by the cruise) and the restaurant we stopped in for lunch was a “five star” restaurant prepared for tourists. I suspect it showed in the food. The food on the entire trip was actually the biggest disappointment. Everywhere we went we ended up at tourist restaurants (until we hit Venice, but that’s for another post)

that were all prepped and ready with a fairly good pasta followed by three consecutive days of a slice of beef, roasted potatoes, and peas. Wait, no, I’m sorry – the third day was a slice of chicken. I’m not complaining about the portions, or even the selection – but it seems unlikely that we’d be eating identical items three days in a row without some…coordination on someone’s part. I suspect it was chosen as “perfect for tourists” because it was bland and uninteresting. Bah. That’s reason number two to go back and spend some time in each city, for those of you keeping track at home.

Finally, we ended up in Pisa. My favorite photo of Pisa isn’t the tower – it’s not even the gorgeous basilica (which has the distinction of being the first we saw on this trip and thus had all the impact of being unique. Something we’d lost by the time we got to St. Peter’s). No, my favorite picture from Pisa is of all the people standing posed to hold up the leaning tower, out of context.

If you look carefully, I count at least 10. All my whining aside, it was an auspicious first day actually in Italy, and our enthusiasm only grew over the course of the trip.

Florence and Pisa pictures are available here

Hopefully I’ll stop breaking each day into two posts soon, although it feels somewhat natural to do so.
Each day really seemed to be comprised of two parts: The Tour, followed by The Ship. After coming back from a day of touring, we’d generally find ourselves with a few hours on our hands until dinner, which generally required a change of clothes (or at least a sluicing off of the grime of the day). Not enough time to hit the pool or do anything really interesting, we’d generally end up taking a couple hours nap before the evening’s activities – which generally also meant we’d stay up pretty late every night. All in all we were pretty happy with the situation. One of the darker spots in each evening came at dinner each night upon the arrival of our dinner guests. Now, it’s important to note that this isn’t true of all FOUR of our table-mates, as Rachel and Elizabeth were delightful and, quite frankly, saved the experience. (And I’m not just saying that because I promised them I’d send them a link to the pictures on this site). No, the dark spot generally came in the form of an older Greek couple whose names completely escape me. I suspect that a lot of the issue had to do with the language barrier, as it didn’t appear that she spoke very good english, and our greek was atrocious, but we did make valiant effort after effort in an attempt to draw them out and form a more congenial group. It finally became obvious that they had little to no interest in conversing with us, and so we (the other four) settled into a pleasant, if occasionally awkward pattern. Sabrina and I would usually arrive right at 9pm, usually because we’d just finished getting ready, or we’d been ready just long enough to have had our first drink and wander down to the dining room. Shortly thereafter, say at around 9:05 the Greek couple would come in and sit down. Another few minutes later, Rachel and Elizabeth would swing in and we’d all look over the menu. After a brief discussion, orders would be placed and a few minutes later our appetizers would be served. Here’s where it got interesting. Invariably, the appetizers were wrong. For the Greek couple. Something would be off, some detail would be unacceptable, and something would have to change. Sometimes – and this is completely threw me – the gentleman would reach over and take his wife’s appetizer (sometimes entree) and eat it, ordering another for her. Cultural differences aside, this took us all a bit by surprise. She never seemed to have any problem with this. In fact, any snide remarks she made were generally directed towards us – at least, we believe so as she’d hold her menu up between herself and us to say some things to her husband – keeping in mind that she rarely said anything not in greek, and it was fairly obvious that we didn’t speak any greek at all. Enough about those two, though

Fortunately we were generally deep in conversation with Rachel & Elizabeth, two…er…what do you call someone who’s no longer a law student but who hasn’t actually received word that they’ve passed the bar yet? Greg, if you’re reading, help me out in the comments. What are you? Two of those, from Chicago, IL. Conversations were always interesting even if I did have a hard time letting go of politics and legal topics, as they generally wanted to just relax and let go of that for a while. I guess when you live this close to D.C. you never really let it go. It took us all a while to relax around each other, but in the end it worked out – especially when we threw Paul and Frances into the mix, but we’ll get to them another day. Next up, it’s our first actual day in Italy, Florence and Pisa!

“Every day” doesn’t necessarily include weekends. Except when it does.
This weekend, for example, was intended to be a relaxing, do-nothing weekend.
In fact, we ended up buying a refrigerator, a new kitchen table, and (because Sabrina was watching the DIY/HGTV one-two punch) started cleaning and planning the minor remodeling we plan to do over the next few months. This mostly involves paint. I have a feeling it’s also going to involve re-finishing a lot of furniture and moving things around. Oh…and curtains.
More about italy in the near future. We’ve only just gotten started.
And for all of you reading this in VA, we’re trying to get an “Italian Night” together in the near future where we serve Italian food, Italian wine, and force you to look at our Italian photos.

I hope you’ve got a great imagination, because you’re going to need it. Cannes was beautiful. Gorgeous. Opulent. And didn’t even begin to compare to Monaco, where the entire country appears designed around the principle of expensive things attracting people with more money than taste. And yet somehow, both managed to avoid appearing too gaudy. Unfortunately I can’t back up what I just told you with any pictures because I didn’t take any.
While we were preparing for each tour a sheet was provided with special notices for the preparations you should take. Certain days required covered knees and shoulders (most days, actually. Anywhere there was a church – and in Italy there’s always a church) and Tunisia required a passport. Monaco indicated that you would not be permitted to carry a camera into the Grand Casino and, since the Grand Casino was the premiere part of the title of this tour, we believed that we would be forced to stay outside the casino with our cameras and miss much of the tour. “Darn,” we said to each other, “I wish we could bring the cameras”. So we left them on the ship.
The Grand Casino, it turns out, has been dealing with this for a long time. They have a coat check room where you can check your camera bags. They’re very nice about it. And I’m an idiot for not bringing the camera. The casino itself wasn’t much to see, but I’m very disappointed about missing the Grand Prix photos and pictures of the rest of Monaco itself.
You can get to the few pictures of Cannes we took from the ship at this link.

I’ve been pondering the calendar entry for today (September 11th, 2008) for a few days now, not entirely certain what to make of it.
Patriot Day!
A day for patriots.
While the cynical 3/4 of my brain wants to make snarky comments about “what, we can’t be patriots every day?” there’s another part of me that understands, welcomes and appreciates days set aside to honor symbols and metaphor. The part of me that loves Christmas for its message of giving, despite the fact that we need to be more generous year-round. It’s a human thing.
No, the part of me that’s trying to make sense of Patriot day is struggling with the sudden disassociation of the words “Patriot Day” and “9-11″. It’s a sudden, jarring attack of historical perspective.
You see, I just realized how Memorial Day became just another weekend for sales, and how Pearl Harbor Day turned into a historical curiosity that my generation largely regards as a date to remember primarily because you needed it on history tests.
September 11th, 2001 was the data of a horrific event that many Americans are still trying to come to grips with. There’s a strong temptation here to say that it’s “a day that will live in infamy”, because it will. That’s an excellent turn of phrase and it applies as well here as it did to December 7th 1941.
Patriot Day, though, will not. If you went up to any American in March of next year and asked them when Patriot Day is, I would be willing to bet that you might get one right answer in a hundred. Most people, if they were even willing to hazard a guess, would probably throw out July 4th. Because Patriot Day is not horrific. And Memorial Day does not begin to encapsulate the mourning of a nation for its lost soldiers.
I’m not suggesting that naming September 11th “Patriot Day” in any way diminishes it. Time itself will take care of this task for us. By all means, every year on September 11th be the patriot that you should be all year long – be the patriot that you want to be every day. Maybe a little more will carry over into the rest of your life, just like the giving you do at Christmas might make you a better person and more likely to be generous the rest of your days. Or the drinking you do on St. Patrick’s Day will diminish your liver for years to come. It’s more that seeing the first steps of this process, watching the inevitable declawing of 9-11 into something less gut-wrenching and more palatable, I feel keenly the loss of the emotional impact that our other holidays, celebrated by rote, once likely had. This event of epic proportion, occurring in my lifetime, is one that I’ll be telling my grandchildren about. They’ll have to learn it for school, and maybe they’ll have special sales just for Patriot Day. Maybe by then it will be an intellectual curiosity, only important to international relations majors, like Pearl Harbor Day is now.
But what I really wonder, remembering how I felt that morning seven years ago and in the short months to follow….
What I really wonder is how my grandfather feels when we celebrate the service of his fallen brothers in arms by offering him a really great deal on a mattress.