Cruise Day Eleven: Have Some Madeira, M'dear

The last stop on the cruise was Madeira. Frankly, I didn't know a whole bunch about Madeira before we left on the trip, other than the old Flanders & Swann song. I knew it was an island off the coast of Africa and that it was part of Portugal. When we were in DC the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we had stopped in a bookstore between seeing the Sagoffs and the Onkens, and I had found a guidebook to Madeira. As far as I know, the only one on the ship.

From it, we learned to tell good Madeira wine from bad Madeira (the label will be in Portuguese, not English), real local embroidery from fake (it won't say "Made in China", oddly enough) and that Funchal, the capital, is named for the local, native fennel plants.

When we arrived, we were on the wrong side of the ship to see the town. Instead, on the quay, we could see notices that various ships had painted when they first arrived at the port.



We had a very good guide named Maria, who spoke good English with a British accent, and I was later surprised to learn she had learned her English in school in Madeira and had apparently never lived in an English-speaking country abroad. She was everything a guide was supposed to be: informative, not too talkative, flexible, and most of all knowledgeable. She seemed to know every plant and every cove on the island.

Madeira, we learned, had been discovered in 1419, and was uninhabited at the time. This has contributed to its being still part of Portugal today, because the people who live there are all Portuguese (other than the odd foreigner), as opposed to subjugating or assimilating a native population. Madeira has been a popular vacation spot for centuries; Napoleon stopped on his way to St. Helena.

Madeirans, we noticed, are hard-working and serious. We never saw anyone just lying about, and only one panhandler. The island has minimal unemployment, and besides tourism and wine, there is fishing and a lot of intensive, high-value agriculture, including bananas and vegetables. The industriousness of the people is shown by the terraced farms that are characteristic of nearly all the island. All the terracing was done by hand, all the irrigation canals that channel the water down from the tops of the mountains were built by hand, and all the crops are harvested by hand.



Above is a shot from the bus of the terracing.



And this is a shot, also from the bus, of an irrigation canal. The guidebook told us that the canals all have paths next to them to allow for maintenance, which allows you to walk all over Madeira, unobstructed by traffic, by following the paths.



We stopped at two viewpoints, one of which, Capo Girao, is the second-highest seacliff in the world. Maria kept saying it was the highest in Europe (the higher one is in Taiwan), but of course Madeira is off Africa and not really in Europe. Above is the view down from Capo Girao.



There was a museum there, and I took a photo of this large photograph of George Bernard Shaw dancing on Madeira. Winston Churchill was also a frequent visitor; he painted there, and he wrote one of the volumes of his History of the Second World War there.



We drove down narrow roads to a fishing village, which wasn't interesting because it was actually a viewpoint over a fishing village, as opposed to the village itself, and from there by freeway including many tunnels, back to Funchal. There we were given a very nice tour of an embroidery factory, still using old machinery and older methods. The embroidery is done as piecework to the local women, who have been doing it for centuries. The woman in the back on the left is doing the patterns, the woman in the foreground is adding findings.

Here is video of the patterns being demonstrated. You can also hear Maria's English.

Here is the finished product. This is not my mother's embroidery.



Then we were given a wine-tasting. We had the extra dry, or sercial, and it was quite good. I bought a bottle of rum (if I'd read the book more carefully, I'd have realized I'd bought the wrong kind) and a gift for the Sagoffs.



And, yes, Marjorie is smiling as I tell her, "Have some Madeira, m'dear."

Our next stop was the extensive and beautiful market, featuring both fruit and vegetables and fish. There was a really aggressive fruit seller who wouldn't take no for an answer, kept trying to get Marjorie to buy mangos.



The fish market was much more low-key. The fish shown here is fished in only two places in the world: off Madeira and off Japan, oddly enough.



We walked through the town. There were a number of men like this, wearing Santa costumes and selling balloons. Most looked very unhappy (it was a warm day) and a number of them were unshaven and smoking cigarettes, which didn't exactly give off that jolly illusion.



This embroidery shop had the nicest cutwork and embroidery at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, the mat on the left, featuring jonquils, was well worth its price of about 400 euros. We could have had a smaller mat for about 100 euros, but decided to come back later. We saved our money for buying embroidery by going back to the ship for lunch, and then returning to the shop, while I went off and bought Phil and me t-shirts with the Madeira map on them. I'm actually wearing mine (it's nice and soft fabric) while I type this a few days later.

Marjorie found gifts and one small cutwork for herself, but the total price was too euros more than we had, so we used a credit card and still had all those euros.



We wandered around and looked at the Christmas decorations. Christmas is the biggest season for tourism in Madeira, and they do it up royally, with lights everywhere and decorations everywhere.



I had said earlier how nice it was we hadn't seen McDonald's, but there was one, along with the only Pizza Hut we'd seen on the trip. We walked past along the docks and there was a boat that said "Vagrant Ex Beatles Yacht" on it. When I mentioned this to Marjorie she said, "Yes, the guidebook said there was a yacht here that the Beatles used to own." The Pete Best of yachts, I would think.



There was a bunch of shops near the ship, and we stopped there to spend our last euros, and we're glad we did. I wanted a bottle of sparkling mineral water, which they had for a reasonable price, and we saw they also had Madeiran chocolate and Madeiran-made eucalyptus candy, which we also bought. Then we used up our last euros on a cup of capuccino for Marjorie and of hot chocolate (which turned out to be Nestles Quik, but was actually not bad, as they put a LOT of Quik in the glass) for me.



As you can see, Marjorie was pretty happy with her capuccino.

Then we got on the ship and the next time we'll touch dry land is back in the Home of the Brave.



But we weren't done with Funchal. The cruise ship in front of us had to leave before us, so we sat for a couple of hours waiting for its tours to finish, even though we could no longer go ashore. This did mean that we were still off Funchal when the lights came on, and we got some decent pictures of the city with its Christmas lights showing as we sailed away.

Cruise Day Ten: Captain Jolly

The first day at sea, between Cadiz and Madeira, passed pretty uneventfully. I finished Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (thanks, Phil and Amelia, for recommending it; although it took me forever to get past page 25, after that it was pretty smooth sailing and it really is a thoughtful book for fantasy/sci fi) and started Alasdair Gray's Old Men in Love, which I'd really been looking forward to and which has repaid my confidence. Marjorie and I spent a good portion of the day on the sun deck reading. We both worked out as well. Not really exciting.

Now it is time to talk about the norovirus we've had on board and the man we associate with it, whom we call Captain Jolly. For those who didn't actually grow up in my household, the real Captain Jolly was the host of the nightly Popeye cartoons on Channel 9 in Windsor, Ontario, which started at the same time as dinnertime every night, and let to the one word phrase "Kweeeatintheden?" by my brother and me.

Here is a link to an article about the real Captain Jolly.

This Captain Jolly, on the other hand, is meant quite ironically. The captain of this ship, Tony Herriott (presumably no relation to Jim), has the most sonorous, serious voice imaginable.



Three days into the cruise, he came onto the "can't shut it off" PA that comes directly into your room, and told us, in a performance that so clearly had been (a) vetted by the Princess Lines lawyers; and (b) written down and he was told not to vary so much as an adverb, that the ship had passed the CDC's threshold for norovirus epidemics. The CDC's threshold is eight cases, no matter what the size of ship and no matter how long the voyage. Our ship holds 2500 passengers, and nearly as many crew. There are probably eight cases of norovirus going on in a similarly-sized office building at any time, but the CDC doesn't care that people are coming into work sick. It does care about cruise ships, because it has jurisdiction over them.

At the same time as Captain Jolly delivered the happy news, a written medical advisory was delivered to everyone's staterooms. Basically, the changes in routine to deal with it were as follows: (1) the buffet would now be served to you, rather than allowing you to take food yourself; (2) even in the dining rooms with waiters, they couldn't put bread on the table, or salt on the table, or sugar on the table, even in paper packets; these were handed to you by waiters on request; (3) they stopped vacuuming the rooms and the halls; (4) we were requested only to use our own bathrooms, as opposed to the public ones, as much as possible; and (5) any cases of diarrhea and vomiting were to be reported to 911 (the ship's 911, of course) and they wouldn't even charge for it (all other medical services are charged for; we had bought a cancellation policy that also includes most medical services).

The buffet thing was not well thought-out in execution. The buffets themselves are set up for people to mingle from station to station, not to get food in a straight line. As a result, you might put your salad together from five different servers. And the servers didn't speak very good English, and the servers didn't understand what you meant when you wanted "just a little cauliflower", so people were arguing and a lot of the passengers, who aren't good at social skills to begin with, were shouting.

The worst was the drinks line. They are not well-designed even for self-service. The water is separated from the ice. The coffee is separated from the cream and the sugar. Now that you had to get someone to get all these things for you, and again often someone who didn't speak good English, this turned out to create long lines, often with people holding their breakfast or lunch on a plate getting cold while trying to get a cup of coffee.

And the weird thing was, there was one server who figured it out. He realized that if he filled a large number of glasses with ice, and a large number of coffee cups with stirrers, he could save a lot of time when the rush came. He did it once. I figured someone at Princess would understand he had got it right, and make everyone do that. Instead, we never saw it again.

Everyday at about 5, Captain Jolly would get on the PA and give us an update on the spread of the norovirus. It took him four days to even say that the cooperation of the passenges was commendable. Every day he would use the same line about Princess having "the deepest sympathy for anyone struck down by this virus." And the runs/upchuck number climbed "in perfectly predictable ways". I had told Marjorie that my guess was that the restrictions would come off on the first sea day, probably right before lunch. I hit it perfectly.

So now we're back to getting our own damn food. We have bread on the table at dinner. It's a lot more relaxed about the ship.

The day was quiet, as I said. At one point, we saw a freighter out our window, but I didn't get my camera out in time. Otherwise, it looked like this:



All day. No change. Nothing. And we have six days just like it ahead, after tomorrow.

Madeira damn well better be fun!

Supplement by Marjorie

Marjorie sent me two photos referred to in other posts.

The first is called "Two Jews in Gibraltar." This is the shop where I bought my hat. She didn't get the picture down low enough, but trust me, he's wearing tsitsit.



And this is the fan painter, painting her fan, in Santa Croce, the former Jewish quarter of Seville.

Cruise Day Nine: My Own Private Kol Nidre

After ten straight days of travel, all but the day in Elche a day of wonderment and discovery, you might think we were jaded, or at least too tired to be blown away. In a little over a week we'd seen the Colosseum, the Forum, the Vatican, Vesuvius, Pompeii, the churches and art of Florence, Monte Carlo and the Gaudi masterpieces of Barcelona, plus the Rock of Gibraltar.

Then we walked into the Alcazar in Seville and finally found a building we didn't want to leave, in which we developed a complex love-hate relationship we still haven't digested. Perhaps we never will.

In a word, we were overwhelmed.

There isn't a lot to say before we got there. We arrived in Cadiz before dawn and could see only port from our window. The bus ride was nothing spectacular; for once "Seville on Your Own" included no wannabe guide, only a nice young woman named Gisella who handed out maps and coordinated meeting times. We knew no one on the bus. We did see Amparo and Antonio, who were trying to get to Seville by regular bus, on the way out, but haven't seen them since (I'm writing this over two days; actually, we ran into them twice today, Thursday).

You get dropped off in front of the San Telmo Palace, which is pretty special itself.



The building next door looks just as special; it turns out to be a hotel.



From there, we needed a bathroom, so we ran into the local Starbucks. Oddly, the bathrooms didn't have any toilet paper. Luckily, we pack Charmin-To-Go. The Starbucks was filled with American students studying at the nearby University of Seville. In fact, it reminded me a lot of the University Village QFC Starbucks, which is often filled with students studying for hours.



Interestingly, the University of Seville has something else in common with the University of Washington: both are located (as is Washington University in St. Louis) on the site of World's Fairs.

We wandered past the Cathedral and then entered the doors to the Real Alcazar. I have to admit, I was wandering toward the next interesting building, and only after we got there did I realize it was the Alcazar. Nor did I really understand where I was til I got there.

A few facts about the Alcazar. It has been the site of a royal residence, in continuous use as such, since the 10th century, and probably since the 7th century. It is still in use as a royal residence. The second story, nearly all of which was closed, is the royal residence of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia when they are in Seville. For all we know, the royal apartments were closed because Sofia was up there scarfing dates from her palm in Elche. Oh, yeah, and it was the location where Christopher Columbus got the go-ahead to do that New World thingie you may have heard about.

Plus, it's simply gorgeous. I took 300 photos in Seville. I took 200 in the Real Alcazar. And, as you'll see, it's not because there was nothing else beautiful or interesting in Seville.

You want pictures, we got pictures. The first thing you see is a courtyard, the Patio de la Montreria.



It's gorgeous behind that curtain, but they are fixing it. Then you enter the part called the Admiral's Suite. The Admiral was that Columbus guy. This is the room where the Admiral got the go-ahead, the money, the contracts, the silly little title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea. As I sit here on the damn ocean sea, and the boat is rocking so that my very temperamental CD player is struggling to let me hear Andy Statman without interruption, I think about Columbus and his men, past Madeira which he knew as a kid going on fishing voyages, what the hell they were getting themselves into. I don't think they had their iPods, but who knows.



Then there is a room of fans. When you think of Seville, you think of fans (and we'll even buy one later), but these are not your grandmother's fans. Unless your grandmother was, say Queen of Spain (if she was, you've been holding out on me).



I'm really not going to go room by room, but here are about five incredibly gorgeous rooms, details of rooms, ceilings and other small items.







The architecture is a mix of Moorish and Spanish and a lot of Spanish eras, with little hints that maybe a few Jews snuck in from time to time.




On the other hand, there is the Hall of Justice. I walked into the Palace of Justice, and the same thought I had when I first touched Spanish soil in Barcelona hit me: it was time to chant the Kol Nidre. The Kol Nidre, you will recall, was a prayer by Spanish Marranos asking in advance on Yom Kippur to be absolved of the vows they would need to make during the coming year in order to stay alive in a Spain where to be Jewish was a crime. And here I was in the Hall of Justice of the very kings who were imposing that upon those very Marranos that Hobson's Choice. So I sat there and chanted the beginning of the Kol Nidre to myself. And I mimed spitting as I walked out of the room. No one saw me. No one heard me. I was having a wonderful otherwise in the Alcazar and otherwise in Spain, but it was not technically legal for a Jew to live in Spain until well into Franco's reign, well into my own life. It was not something I was going to just ignore.

On a lighter note, if you ever go to the Alcazar, I strongly recommend you use the toilets. Marjorie and I did in sequence, and when we were done we compared notes: we had each in fact photographed the inside of the stall. Here's the men's room.



Here's some more of the details and a bit of the gardens.







And some tapestries depicting the victories of Charles V. They are great tapestries, but I thought the whole point was that Charles V didn't have a lot of victories.




And some details of the tiles:





We spent a lot of time (and money) in the gift shop, including a guidebook which turned out to be interesting in its translation, if that is the right word, from the Spanish.

On the way out, we found we were in the middle of a group of schoolchildren, who were incredibly noisy, but we didn't mind. We were noisy schoolchildren once, too (I believe that my class at Oak Park High was eventually kicked out of every venue for field trips in the greater Detroit area at one time or another for our unruly nature, and no, I wasn't an angel on those trips myself).



Two Spanish policemen seemed just as bemused as we were, mounted on their horses.



From there, we walked a few short blocks to the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the neighborhood of the Holy Cross. Of course, that wasn't its original name. The Barrio de Santa Cruz was the name given to the former Jewish quarter of Seville after the Jews were expelled in 1492. It's a lovely part of town, and the current climate is such that, well, don't let me get ahead of the story. The area is characterized by narrow streets.



It is filled with lovely tourist shops, and this was probably the lowest part of the tourist season, so it was nearly empty, other than folks from our cruise.



But the shops had some really original looking art over them.



And in them.



And they didn't deny they were the old Jewish quarter at all.



Marjorie was very taken with a maker of fans, and went to take a picture of her making fans (she has the picture; maybe she'll let me post it). And then when we discovered there were fans for reasonable prices, she wanted to go back and buy from the woman she'd photographed.

On the way out, we passed this trash bin, which answers the question you've all been wondering about: what happened to Rosie, the Jetsons' robot maid.



We also passed the old Moorish entrance to the Alcazar, which has been bricked up. Or else we passed the back entrance to Moria (Moorish/Moria, hmmmm....).



Say "friend" and enter.

We wandered past the Cathedral again, past the worst Christmas market ever, and into the shopping district. Another couple on the bus said it was for them the best Christmas market ever. I guess they liked no crowds of actual Spaniards or anything artistic. I don't buy Christmas stuff, so who am I to say?

We'd seen a lot of H&M stores in Europe, but I don't think this one looks like the one in Harvard Square.



Since we didn't have Amparo and Antonio to help us find lunch, we wandered around til we found a little hole in the wall that had a menu that was sort of in English.



We passed on Sirloin to the Whiskey and actually had fish and chips and calamari (Marjorie) and eggs and chicken and chips (Rick), which were wonderful, but the guy next to us had ordered chocolate and churro, which turned out to be a churro you dip in a very thick hot chocolate, and it looked heavenly.

We decided we had enough time to see the Plaza de Toros, the famous bull ring, and on the way, we passed this building.



Where you live, this would be a major tourist attraction. In Seville, it is home to a toy store.

Now, start humming the Toreador song, okay?



The front of the statue of Pepe Luis Vazquez. Now the back, with the Plaza de Toros and Pepe's butt.



You may now stop humming. Or not, it's up to you. I mean, I'm writing this on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic and you're not going to read this for over a week, so how am I to say? Maybe you were actually playing Carmen on a CD when you started reading this. Maybe you're going to Carmen tonight. Maybe you are appearing in Carmen. Maybe you're playing Carmen. Okay, so I'm a little crazy.

From there, we walked along the Guadalquivir River, which was the only river in Europe whose name I forgot on one of the tests my 10th grade geography teacher, Mr. Weaver, a/k/a "Master Teacher", used to give, where you had to fill in the map with just the rivers and mountain ranges showing (Mr. Weaver called me "Master Student"). My problem was in my notes it looked like "Guadal Qu IV ir."

Right next to the San Telmo Palace was the Torre de Oro, the Tower of Gold.



From there, we walked back to Starbucks for the same reason we went the first time (I'm sorry about the references to bathrooms, but wait til the next entry, which is pretty much all about the digestive tract), and wouldn't you know it, they still didn't have toilet paper. If I were a paying customer, I'd complain. Or, as Marjorie put it, Howard Schultz owes the citizens of Seattle enough for how much he screwed up the Sonics that we think the least he could do is put toilet paper in the bathroom for us, even if we aren't buying anything.

We walked along the other side of the Cathedral this time, and took some photographs.



Those chimneys look like a forest. These icons aren't bad either.



But then we saw these on San Telmo, as we passed it in the sunshine.



That's Seville, when you've seen something, assume you'll see something just like it only nicer in the next block.

South of San Telmo was the area where the World's Fair was held, now occupied, as I mentioned earlier, by the University of Seville. Unlike the University of Washington and Washington University, however, the University of Seville still calls its buildings by the names of the countries whose pavilions they were during the fair. Thus, this is the Peruvian pavilion, which you can tell from the detail on the balcony.




Originally, our cruise was supposed to go to Casablanca instead of Cadiz, which is where we had docked for the trip to Seville. I would have loved to go to Africa, I would have loved to see Casablanca, and to have taken a tour of Marrakesh, which I believe was offered. But I have to say: I would not have given up the trip to Seville for anything. It was beautiful, it was intriguing, it was enervating, it was frustrating, and it was life-affirming. We didn't see enough, we'd love to go back.

I'd like to know some Spanish before I do, though, or take along someone who does.

Are you still reading this, Philip? This means you.

P.S. Here's the eight candles shining for the Maccabees. If you look closely, the red felt actually has little bits of shiny stuff in it. We did this a lot more carefully than you might think.