The Propheteer » travel

A little Pisa heaven (or, Florence you glad we came?)

hitch — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:08:46 +0000

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.

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

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.

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

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)

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

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.

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

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.

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

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.

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

Florence and Pisa pictures are available here

It’s all Greek to me

hitch — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:44:12 +0000

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

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

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!

Cannes You Imagine It?

hitch — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:05:25 +0000

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

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.

As long as I’m waiting…

hitch — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:08:07 +0000

I might as well continue the story.
Our first night on the ship was an eye-opener for Sabrina. Tons of places to explore, a whole ship to wander around. She’d never been on a ship this size before and it was obvious she was having a blast. Dinnertime introduced a small hiccup upon the realization that we had not yet received a table assignment, leading to the second eye-opener – Americans were a distinct minority on this ship. In point of fact, English-speaking people were a distinct minority, and Americans were in the minority of those as well.
In retrospect, this should have been unsurprising. We’d been hearing all summer about how most people were staying home for their vacations due to the rising costs of gas and airfare, and the ship did leave from Spain, after all. We just weren’t quite prepared for the reality of it.
There were a few odd effects from this – the first being that my Spanish got a stronger workout on the trip than my Italian. Neither being much good, I found myself constructing various situation-appropriate sentences in my head in case it became necessary to use them. It rarely did. The second effect was that we rapidly scaled back our usual behaviour of quoting (again) situation-appropriate bits from stand-up comedy and tv shows due to the high proportion of British references in that pool and the high proportion of British people on the ship. Not because we didn’t want them to know we watch a lot of BBC, but because we were afraid we’d offend people with our horrible accents.
We did start to see an improvement in our ability to tell the difference between various accents, though.
After a 9pm dinner (we had the late seating) combined with the events of the day, we were exhausted. The next day’s tour wasn’t going to be that long, but we were ready to go collapse. So we did.
Next up, I explain why we don’t have any pictures from that tour.

We begin our tour of Italy with Spain.

hitch — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:08:12 +0000

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

Our flight landed in Barcelona early Saturday morning after a brief (long enough to walk from one terminal to the next) layover in Paris. This, after an 8 hour flight that left the previous afternoon EST in Virginia, left us pretty significantly wiped.
“No problem,” we thought, “we didn’t have time for an excursion on Barcelona anyway, we just got the transfer straight to the ship. We’ll head there, crash for a few hours, and then get up and enjoy the afternoon.”
Heh. Best laid plans and all that.
As it turned out our “transfer” generously included a brief tour of the city (and yes, I am being sincere here. They did not have to do that for us) by bus while the ship finished its preparations for it passengers.
The tour left the airport at around 10am (or flight got in around 8:45 am…after grabbing our luggage and going through customs – which consisted of three men disinterestedly watching a flood of people pass by them – we arrived at the transfer point at around 9:30) and proceeded to take use around past one or two points of cultural significance that we were too tired to recall the names of, followed by a trip up the hill to the Olympic stadiums and pavilions.

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

We got out there to take a few pictures from a scenic overlook and see the ship, then piled back on and rode through the city itself. They gave us a pretty good (from what I could tell) overview of the city, showed us the area where everyone was shopping and told us how to get to and from there after we got to the ship. Then, it being one o’clock, they took us to our ship and dropped us off. Disappointed that we were too exhausted to go back into town (and further disappointed to find out that we had another hour before our room would be ready) we collapsed in a heap in one of the lounges and took turns napping and guarding our carry-on bags.
We later learned that when a ship gets into port it empties all is passengers out by 9am and takes on supplies for a further 12-day cruise, gets all of its cabins ready, gets everything ready to serve lunch, starts the flurry of activity that we saw when we first arrived on board and is ready to turn around and accept all its new passengers in under four hours. While the idea of living on a cruise ship still holds some romance, the idea of working on one quickly lost its shine.
Here’s the link to all the Barcelona photos

Tomorrow (or sometime soon, anyway), Cannes and Monaco.