Take a Load of This, Elche!

First full day in Florida, I got up early to go biking. It was so great to be on a bike again. It was a bright day and I realized after biking for about 45 minutes that I didn't have any sunscreen. So I went into a CVS pharmacy. Florida has a wider variety of sunscreen than we're used to in Seattle, and it took about fifteen minutes to find something that wouldn't be excessively expensive.

I biked for about two full hours, and it felt great the whole time, even though there was a very strong wind coming back, so strong that at times it seemed I was making no progress at all.

On the way, I'd seen something I wanted to show Marjorie, so after a nice lunch at a deli with mom and dad, we went out by ourselves.

This was what I'd seen:




What it was, of course, was thick, forestlike palm trees. The kind of thing we were expecting in Elche, but never saw.

Compare:

This is Florida:



This is Spain:



Which one would you call a "grove" and which one a "forest?"

Take that, Elche!

The Secret of Joe Btfsplk

Disembarkation from a cruise ship is a critical function. For one thing, the ship has to disembark 2500 people in the space of a few hours, get all their luggage to them, get them through immigration and customs, while at the same time loading the goods needed for the next cruise, taking on new crew members, and getting ready for the next 2500 passengers, who will embark five hours after we dock.

Moreover, it's the last impression you have of the ship, the last thoughts you'll have of the cruise line, and so it is important because last impressions, just like first impressions, are lasting.

Leaving the Star Princess wasn't that memorable, which I think is a good thing.

We woke up when the ship docked. No movement. Cell phone access!



We had nothing with us but a few tote bags and our computer cases, because they pick up your luggage (and screen it) the night before. So getting out would be easy. I called mom and dad, gave them an estimated time of 9am, and we went and got our last breakfast.

Then we sat in the room and watched those with higher priority disembark. These included those who could carry all their luggage without assistance, who got off first at about 7:40 (scheduled; 8:10 or so actual), those who had tight flight connections arranged through Princess, and those on the higher decks. Since we were on the B deck (Baja, which means lower, though of course it was the second highest full passenger deck), we had decent priority.

For some reason, Princess had a lot of confusing colors (like blue and turquoise) for different priorities. Silly.

We leaned out the window and took pictures. Everyone else seemed to, too.



Finally, it was the time we were supposd to leave the room.

I took one more shot of Marjorie before, though. It was the "maximum relaxation" moment.



Cristian sort of said good bye and clearly understood he was getting no extra tip. I wish him well in his future endeavors, and hope he leaves the service industry.

We were supposed to sit in the Princess Theater after leaving our rooms, but when we got there, we realized there were only a few others in the theater, so everyone must have been going to the assigned disembarkation points early, or else not leaving their rooms. We saw a couple we knew and said good bye to them, and then went to our designated point, which was one of the lounges. No seats there.

Disembarkation was going slowly, and I contemplated calling mom and telling her to leave Delray Beach a bit later, but decided to chance it.

Finally, we got the signal to go.

Somewhere on the way out, my bag got caught on a step, and I lost some stuff as the outside pocket ripped open. It had been a great bag that had cost me only $20, but the stuff I lost (not including any pictures or work files) can't be replaced. Damn.

You hand over your cruise card as you leave the ship, and that is that.

It was pretty easy to find our bags, though hard of course to carry them, since they were filled to the brim and there were so many of them. Nonetheless, we got in the line for American citizens, not realizing we wouldn't even have to show our passports.

And there at the end was Joe Btfsplk again. Only he was wearing a Princess shirt and hat, and was helping people to disembark. So all this time, he'd been holding out on us. He worked for the cruise line! He had a very sheepish look on his face. It was illegal to take a picture of him, so I hope the TSA isn't on my case for this one.



Not to mention the Al Capp estate. But we can counterclaim for the use of the "How Far is a Goldfarb?" series. You have to scroll down a bit to get it.

Keeping up our joke, he suggested it was likely a hurricane was going to hit.

Oddly, the second we got outside, it started to pour, the first rain we'd seen since the Sunday morning in Rome. Luckily, there is a big overhang over the area where you wait, so we didn't get rained on.

It was 9:00 am exactly when we got outside.

I called mom, and it turned out that she had heard me wrong. She thought I had said 9:30 and they were just barely out of Delray Beach. I told her no problem (we were very relaxed) and we found seats on a bench and watched the people rushing off.

One thing I love is that Princess tries really hard to get folks who are flying from Fort Lauderdale to buy transfers from them. They claim that there are few cabs at the cruise port, which wasn't true at all, and they don't tell you that the airport is at most a five buck cab ride from the cruise port. This was rather obvious as had seen the planes approaching the airport from the ship.

We saw a bunch of people we knew as we were waiting, helping a few with bags, and then mom called and said they were there. It was really chaotic, what with security people trying to make sure you didn't block the passages, but we finally got the bags in. This is when I found out the bag had ripped. Oh, well.

It was great seeing mom and dad, and great just being back in the States and back where you could actually buy things.

We had two things we wanted to do:

Eat hamburgers and go bookshopping.

It was four days before Christmas, so mom and dad were not excited about going shopping at all.

We had lunch at a hamburger place we had been to before, with an airplane motif. The burgers on the ship had been--generously--inedible, so it was the first burger in weeks (my last one had been at Alonso's in Baltimore with Phil, I'm not sure when Marjorie's was).

And birch beer! This restaurant had fountain birch beer, which made up for the lack of same in Philadelphia. First fountain pop I'd had since the 7-11 in Philly.

We went to both Borders (where we used a 30% off coupon to buy a gift for Phil) and Barnes & Noble. Little things like fresh-squeezed orange juice and a choice of apples at Whole Foods were exciting us.

And being able to watch what we wanted on tv.

And being able to just go somewhere without worry about time or place. It was nice.

We had expressly requested potato latkes for dinner, since we had missed them at Chanukah (for some reason, the ship gave us what they called latkes a couple of days before disembarkation, but they were--charitably--inedible).

Here's mom in her apron.



She was following instructions not to stop smiling til I told her she could.

Mom had emailed me the day before asking if we would be okay with our cousin Alan Sorin coming for latkes. Alan is my father's only first cousin on his mother's side, someone I've looked up to my whole life and, because he'd lived his whole life in New York, someone I hadn't exactly seen enough of. So the answer was of course yes.

Alan's wife Audrey had died just six weeks earlier. They had moved to Florida about a year before, and their house was still in the process of being built (I'm not going to go into some of the details on the internet, but it made the Money Pit look like a routine, smooth transaction). But it was simply marvelous to see Alan, and particularly for Marjorie who had not seen him in years. Plus, most of the times we'd seen him recently were at things like my dad's birthdays and his daughter Abbe's wedding, which is to say at times when we all had other things taking up our attention. I'm afraid the last time I really had this much of Alan, as silly as it sounds, was when we went to the New York World's Fair. In 1965. When I was 8.

So this was special.

There was some discussion about the Sorin nose, and who had it.

Dad and Alan: same nose.



Alan and me, not so much.



Later I put the shots together so the noses knew.



It took a couple of hours to Photoshop these together.

Then Alan suggested using a timer to get all of us in the same shot. And dad brings out the manual to his camera.

If you remember from ages ago, my camera started going on the fritz in Spain. And dad's camera is the exact same model as mine (David had liked it at Emily's graduation from high school last year, so that's what he bought dad for his 80th birthday). So I not only learned how to take a timed shot, I was able to get the camera back to working better!

This was the original picture.



Then I deleted all the unnecessary detail.



Then Marjorie went and added a cute green background.



As you can see, a fine time was had by all.

And we slept like logs.

Seventeen Days, Seven Countries, 8000 Miles . . .and the winner . . .

. . . of the Amazing Race is . . . now, wait a minute. (Actually, someone said they saw racers during the previous voyage, which would fit, as the latest TAR was in Italy and the Balkans).

First: seven countries?

Italy

Vatican City

France

Monaco

Spain

Portugal

United States

Had to show our passports more in the middle of Dublin Airport than on the entire remaining part of the trip.



This is Marjorie on the mysterious Deck 17, which hangs over the bow, miles in the air it seemed. It has these lovely couches and is pretty much empty all day long (it is a disco at night, though I doubt there was a lot of disco on this cruise).



I had finished my book and so spent a lot of the last day taking pictures.

Unlike the Carnival Legend, there is shuffleboard on the Star Princess.



A pure Simpsons sky.



And what is not the last sunset. With the Bahamas straight ahead, the sky started to look like sunset, though it really wasn't close.

Someone took a nice picture of the two of us on the rail.



And we found this pool that we think is for the staff only.



And now is the last sunset.



And a view down the rail the last night at sea.



We were also photographed the night before at the last formal night.



It was a fun and relaxing time. I don't think I'd do it again, but I'm glad I did all of it once.

Cruise Day Sixteen: A Book a Day

Ordinarily, on a vacation, I start out reading slowly, and then reach a point where I'm making it through a book a day quite late. This vacation was a little different. The 600+ page novel I started out reading, and intended to last me through the flight to Rome, I finished on the flight from Philadelphia to Boston. The next book, though, Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods," which I intended to make it through quite quickly, actually lasted me all the way through from the flight from Boston to Dublin until we we left Cadiz, our second-from-last stop. It was quite convenient that it did, however, because it was the only mass market paperback I had on the trip, so I could stuff it in my pocket during shore excursions. It's been read in bathrooms in the US, Ireland, Italy, France, Monaco and Spain, quite an itinerary for a work set in Discworld.

At that point, as I mentioned, I started "Old Men in Love" by Alasdair Gray, one of my favorite authors, a book I'd been saving to read on this vacation when I could savor it. I enjoyed it a lot, although it was ultimately unsatisfying emotionally, as though there was an uncooked center the author didn't take the time to bake thoroughly enough.

From the point I finished "Old Men in Love," on our first sea day out of Funchal, I did get to the book-a-day level. Not that it was all that hard, given the amount of free time we had during the day, but each of the books engaged me quite well and were enjoyable.

They were:

Solo, by Emily Barr. This was the fourth novel by her I read. It concerned a cellist in London who decides in the middle of a concert to leave her husband, and ultimately ends up figuring out why she has been unhappy living some lies and lowers her expectations to find a new life. It is a rare "chick-lit" novel that doesn't require the heroine to end up the Prince Charming. Highly recommended.

The Butcher Boy, by Patrick MacCabe. This was the book I bought in the Dublin Airport. Set in the early 60s, it describes the decline of a young street urchin in a small Irish town after he discovers that the fancy new family in town, despite outward appearances, looks down on his family. Very difficult novel to read, both because it is done in internal monologue and because it uses 40-year old Irish slang, but worth the effort.

Housebroken, a collection of three novellas by Yael Hedaya, author of Accidents, one of my favorite novels. The first, Housebroken, details the life of a relationship between an unnamed man and woman and their unnamed dog, whom they pick up as a stray at the same time they meet on a blind date. The dog's condition exactly mirrors their relationship; he is happy when they are happy together, and he ends up attacking someone when their relationship turns sour. Interesting. The second, The Happiness Game, was probably my favorite. It detailed the relationship of an Israeli woman, Maya, and her parents and a boyfriend, as she realizes that love is more than a game being played between men and women. The final one, Matti, tells through many different narrators the story of a man and the Lolita-like girl he seduces and who remains more important to him than his wife even until his death. All three are very well-written, though not as good as Accidents.

Let Nothing You Dismay, by Mark O'Donnell, whom I knew slightly in college (his twin brother, Steve, played Guildenstern in the production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead in which I had a small role as a freshman; Mark is probably best-known as the co-author of the book for the musical of "Hairspray"). It tells the story of a single day, December 20, in the life of a man who has been fired unjustly from his job, and is about to lose his home, as he attends six Christmas parties. The book has a lot of wit to it, but there were too many coincidences for a single day in New York City, and for such a down-on-his-luck character, Todd seemed to make a lot of fast friendships and get a lot of opportunities in a single day.

Fortune's Bastard, by Robert Chalmers. This told the story of Edward Miller, powerful editor of a conservative newspaper, as he descends from the pinnacle of power to near pennilessness in a matter of days. I had enjoyed Who's Who in Hell, by the same author, but actually thought this book was better. That was a tad surprising, because the premise was a bit absurd, but it was carried off with panache and didn't lose steam at the end. His ripoff of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn seemed pretty blatant, but it fit well into the story he was telling, and I finished the book in record time.

So I'm left with the book I bought in Philadelphia, The Method Actors, by Carl Shuker, which feels promising, but I'm on page 6 so I can't really say.

What's interesting is that the books were set in Australia, Discworld (fictional), Scotland, Ireland, England, Israel, the United States and Spain, with only a bit of overlap. Fortune's Bastard not only had its character visit specific places we were in Barcelona, but ended a chapter by suggesting the apes were leaving Gibraltar.

Marjorie read a lot, too.



She reads nonfiction. And a lot of it was about places we were travelling, especially the book about the Mediterranean we bought in Gibraltar. She didn't like one book I bought her; actually, she liked the book, just not the author and he tended to put himself into the book rather than the sights he was seeing. I think that's a hazard of travel nonfiction.

Cruise Day Fifteen: Splish Splash

You know that particular species of narcissism, the one where what you do is supposed to have some effect on what happens to others? The kind of thing I'm talking abou is where you wear your green t-shirt and your favorite team wins a game, so you wear the green t-shirt everytime they play. Marjorie actually caused the Washington Bullets to win the 1978 NBA World Championship by dropping pins on the floor of our Somerville apartment.

Really.

I mean, you can ask Wes Unseld and he'll admit it.

Anyway, this is about a different instance, but it is nonetheless true.

One day, I was sitting on the "Sun Deck", which overlooks a pool. And the pool was just going nuts with the movement of the ship, looking like you could surf on it.

So I went and got my camera.

And it just immediately stopped. I saw one of the best waves in the pool as I was climbing back up from the Lido Deck to the Sports Deck, sat down on my chaise longue, opened up the camera and the damn thing just stopped.

So I went back to my book and it started again.

Opened up the camera, and this is what it saw:



Nothing.

And so I went back to my book.

And it started up again.

So I turned on the camera.

And this is what it saw:



At a certain point, you start to wonder if you can do it on purpose, or if you've just simply lost your mind. Because it seemed like it took just long enough for the auto shutoff on the camera to shut off after each time I turned it on for it to start up again.

Finally, I'd catch just a little tiny bit of it.



But you have to understand, there wasn't just a little bit, it was as though the whole thing was being drained down into one end and then would splash back, overflowing the outside.

Finally, after maybe an hour, I got this:




But that wasn't it entirely. I never got a still shot, but I did get this one piece of video:

Cruise Day Fourteen: Coconut Yogurt

Packing for a 17-day cruise presents some interesting problems, particularly when there are six consecutive sea days at the end. You have to make sure that you have enough of certain things that you cannot do without, like allergy pills. You have to make sure that you have enough clothes, although the ship's handy and relatively inexpensive self-serve laundry has been a godsend.

In our case, you have to make sure you have enough reading material as well. I am working my way through the second-from-last book I brought with me, including one book I bought in Philadelphia (I needed to add it to another book I was buying my dad for Chanukah to get to use a discount coupon and I figured it might be needed) and one I bought in the Dublin airport. If I finish the book I started today, I will only have the Philadelphia book left unread. Marjorie has read nearly everything she brought, too, and is just about finished with one we bought in Gibraltar (a history of the Mediterranean, which seemed to cover a lot of the places we went to for some reason), and I think all she has left is another book we bought in Dublin airport. I'm sure glad the bookstore in Dublin airport was open that early in the morning.

When you're running a cruise line, the same thing applies: you have to make sure you have everything you need for a 17-day cruise, and once you leave your last port, you'd better have enough of everything.

In this regard, Princess has done an okay, but not a great job. There is still plenty of fresh fruit available, the milk still tastes fresh (at least on cereal), the meat still tastes good (I assume a lot of it is frozen), and they do a lot of baking on board.

Two small bitches. One is that they had had tons of lemon slices avaiable at every meal, which have been great to put in iced tea and ice water as well as tea, but now they only seem to have lime left. Lime doesn't make it for me. I have to admit that Carnival was worse last year; they had lemon slices available only sporadically. The lemons here ran out today, so it's not like a huge problem to live with for one more day.

The other problem is really less explicable. At the beginning of the cruise, there was a nice variety of yogurt, clearly purchased in Europe, available at breakfast. There was cherry, there was lemon, there was peach. It was very good, too.

Since we left Madeira, however, they have had only one variety of yogurt available all the time, and it's coconut. They usually have plain (which is all Marjorie wants) and they usually have banana, but there has been nothing else. And as far as I can tell, no one is eating the coconut yogurt.

It's not like coconut yogurt is some kind of Madeiran specialty; the palm trees in that part of the world are either ornamental or date palms. They do indeed grow a lot of bananas on Madeira, but I doubt very much that they are processed into yogurt there (no dairy pasture). Instead, I suspect that someone screwed up in their purchasing or their logistics and either we got the wrong yogurt, or someone was trying to be a hero and got a bargain on a ton of coconut yogurt, or something is really screwy in their purchasing program.

As I think I've mentioned before, the demographics of the passengers on a 17-day transatlantic cruise in December are very different from, say, a week long cruise to the Caribbean at the same time. At least 95% of the passengers on this ship are older than us, and based on the people we've met I'd guess that nearly 80% are retired. A huge number live in Florida either all year long, or a relatively wealthy snowbirds who come down from Canada or the US north for the winter, and used this cruise as a means of making their transition to their southern homes.

As a result, the demographics of what happens on the cruise are different as well. There are fewer people who stay up late; when Marjorie and I went up to the Lido Deck for a cup of tea after midnight tonight, there were four other people there. On our last cruise, there were a lot of teenagers and twentysomethings and they would be checking out anywhere that served food at nearly any hour of the day or night (Carnival had a wonderful 24-hour pizza and caesar salad bar that I miss on this cruise; fresh pizza is avaiable on the Star Princess only from 11 am to 6 pm, which is pretty limiting.

But while it is possible that the demographics on this ship are different from usual cruises, and therefor the logistics would be different, too, in fact Princess (and Carnival, which owns it as well as many other cruise lines) have enough data on these repositioning cruises that no one should have been surprised. So the absence of cherry and peach yogurt remains inexplicable. And rather annoying, if you've ever tasted coconut yogurt.

Cruise Day Thirteen: The Pride & Prejudice Channel

It's not exactly boring with six straight days at sea, but then again, there's not an awful lot to do either. Once we left Madeira we left the land of satellite television, presumably to come back as we near the US coast, but for now the televisions are filled with whatever is in the video library.

For example, for two straight days, we had nothing on the sports channel but an NBA highlight show, the same show, over and over. We never watched it except for flipping past it, but in the end I swear we'd seen the whole thing.

Then there is the Captain's Log channel, which gives, in one minute updates, our position, the weather, the state of the sea, how far we've travelled from Civitavecchia, how far we've travelled from Madeira and how far we have til we reach Fort Lauderdale, the time in various locations, and a whole lot more. There was one point where as far as I could tell, we were essentially equidistant from Europe, Africa, North America and South America. I guess you'd say that we were in the middle of the Atlantic, huh? Another interesting fact: the temperature of the water has generally been a few degrees warmer than the ambient outside air temperature. The former is a pretty constant 71 and the outside temperature has been more like 68. Not counting windchill, and today we had near gale force winds all day again, though from the southwest instead of the northwest, so the ship has been riding much smoother.

Then there are the movies. They have shown the Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice basically every day at least once, some days all day. They have shown the Emma Thompson version of Sense & Sensibility almost every day. They have shown Four Weddings & A Funeral a number of times. This has led us to speculate on when we'd see related films, like the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma (and they have shown us Shakespeare in Love a number of times), or Notting Hill (since Hugh Grant is in both Sense & Sensibility and Four Weddings & A Funeral).

They have also shown two great Billy Wilder classics, Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment, which we've enjoyed.

And some real duds, like that thing with Robin Williams as a priest. And some of Marjorie's least favorites, like How Does Love a Guy in 10 Days or whatever it was called.

It's not that we're watching a lot of television--we aren't--it's that with so many hours to fill in a day (and most of our days are 25 hours long, to account for the six-hour time change between Europe and the Eastern Time Zone), there are times when television has been a welcome source of chilling out.

No news, though, except for a daily New York Times update, which includes too little of too much. I actually snuck a peak at ESPN.com today when I was sending Phil an email (and getting a wonderful email from Mary and Barbara), and at SeattlePI.com, to see what was going on in the world of sports and at home. Oddly, tonight we sat down at dinner next to a woman who came from Shelton and used to live in Burien, and her brother who was born in Seattle (she was born in Ypsilanti after the family moved). First Washingtonian we'd met on the cruise, and we were her first Washingtonians as well.

Cruise Day Twelve: The Assistant Cruise Director Really is Named Julie

We've been aboard this ship for almost two weeks, and it's amazing how little I know about it. Our first cruise, a year ago on the Carnival Legend, we knew everything about the ship in a couple days' time. I attribute the difference to a number of factors:

1. The fact that we were in port for nine of the first ten days, instead of starting, as we did last year, with two days at sea.

2. The fact that it's our second cruise, so everything is less unusual to us.

3. Differences between Carnival and Princess.

4. Differences between the Carnival Legend and the Star Princess.

The first two factors are pretty obvious, so I'll concentrate on the last two.

Carnival is the "Fun Ships", while Princess is the Love Boats. Carnival does a very good job of imparting a lot of enthusiasm to its crew, and to making it very hard not to participate in a lot of organized activities. Princess, from its advertising to it promotional emails to what happens aboard ship, is very much more laid back. We haven't actually seen Assistant Cruise Director Julie. We've only been to two shows (Marjorie went to a third). Marjorie went to a fruit carving demonstration, but in fact they really didn't show how to carve fruit. Otherwise, we've pretty much done the tours and eaten the meals and done our exercising and hung out by ourselves.

The Legend was simply a stunning vessel, designed with visual enjoyment in mind. Some of the public rooms were worthy of photographs all by themselves. I actually pulled out a photograph I took last year of the tile on the Legend and asked Marjorie to identify it. She picked a whole bunch of tour stops on this cruise, but wasn't surprised at all when I told her it was a very modern set of tiles from last year's ship. There is simply nothing like that on this ship, nothing worth photographing for its own sake, no venue you'd visit just to say you'd seen a show there.

And, I hate to say this but it's true, the staff on this ship sucks. There is one, exactly one, crew member we've gotten to know, a red-haired Balkan woman named Victorine who works in the buffet morning and noon, and then is the hostess for our dining room at night. Other than that, the staff is generally standoffish and anonymous. Our cabin steward, Cristian, is aloof and not very good. A lot of the staff communicate with one another in their own languages and their English is, on the whole, not good. We had dinner with a couple who are parttime travel agents, and they told us that a lot of the staff are leaving the vessel, their contracts up, at the end of this voyage, and that that is probably contributing to their attitude.

Assistant Cruise Director Julie is a New Zealander who is on her last cruise, and has all the enthusiasm of a college football team behind by 30 with two minutes to go. You can tell the younger members of her staff have no respect for her and are trying to get into the good graces of people who can actually help their future careers.

Nonetheless, and while we are enjoying the vacation very much, the experience on the cruise and from the cruise line leave a lot to be desired.