Journeys

The Return: The Short Version

2011-10-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

I thought we took off around 2 PM, and didn't think to check until about 6 AM. Our flight was 9:30!!!!

We had packed the night before, so we showered (Joyce thought that was a bad idea, but I've been saying all along how hot it was) ran downstairs and got a cab. Got to the airport, he dropped us in the wrong place. Couldn't find a cart, carried luggage top speed. Of course, check-in was at the far end of another terminal. But we made it in plenty of time, and you can guess the rest. Exactly. We took off late.

We were harassed by a US Customs Control Officer in Miami for being gay. If you live at the same address, you process as a family. She split us up. We made a complaint there, and have made one in writing since and just yesterday, because responses have been pitiful, I sent a package to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. If I don't get resolution, the media will be next. I don't get why people mess with us. We don't look weak. We are very smart, and we are very stubborn. I never hesitate to carry something all the way to a cabinet department, and so far, at that level, I get what I ask for. Don't mess with me, world.

Then we got on the shuttle bus to our hotel, and I can't say any more because we are still negotiating a settlement. And writing about it makes me sick and angry, so I'll end here for now, and when I get resolution of these issues, I'll come back and tell you all about them.

Happy traveling!

And finally, la Fontana Trevi

2011-10-21T01:28:00.000-07:00

So here's how we always end a visit to Rome, or begin one, or whatever. The point is, we always come here to throw our coins. You throw 10 lire, or some small amount. You stand with your back to it, and throw it over your left shoulder with your right hand. This is to insure that you will one day return to Rome. So far, it's worked every time.

We took a cab from the bridge to the fountain because it was blistering hot. Any other weather and we would have walked, and, oh, the crowds when we got there!

Doesn't the water look cool? It may be, but it was just the hottest day yet, so we got some gelato, took a few pictures, and grabbed a cab back to the hotel.

I could hardly wait to go in the pool. Oddly, Joyce didn't want to, but for no apparent reason. I mean, heck, yeah, we knew the water was freezing, but the kiddie pool would be okay. She decided she wanted to take a bath. I decided she was an idiot and went alone, and I took a book with me so I could stay gone longer. Up on the roof, all the adults were sitting on the bottom of the kiddie pool again, and I joined them. Then I sat in the shade reading until I was completely dry, which means quite a while.

When I got back down, I finally pried it out of Joyce that she was embarrassed about the way we had to get in and out of the pool. The kiddie pool had no railings or steps, so you hed to get down on the deck on your hands and knees. Really? So freakin' what? Do you know these people? How are they getting in and out? Same damn way. Do you care what they look like? No? Well, guess what: they probably never even looked at you!

Was I mad. She wouldn't go with me because some stranger might look at her and think a thought. You've got to be kidding me. Other people's opinions aren't worth crap, for one thing, and chances are they didn't even have any!

So I said I wasn't going to walk to dinner again because she wouldn't go to the pool with me. We had quite an argument. Lots of crying. And here's where the semi-happy ending comes in. She said if I would go with her, she would do something with me that she really didn't want to do. And she didn't put any limitations on cost or, or duration, or type of event. So I get a free trip someplace she doesn't want to go. What do you think? Southeast Asia? Amazon? Nile? Well, it'll be a while before I use this, and I'll be thinking long and hard about it.

So we went to dinner down the street, as usual. See? Our last night in Rome turned out okay after all. Joyce was right; it would have been a shame to waste it, and I'm glad we didn't.

We love Rome, heat, broken streets and all, and we'll return someday, but not to the Radisson BLU.

Radisson BLU fire extinguisher masquerading as "decor."

Ponte e Castello Sant'Angelo

2011-10-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

Finally, someplace neither of us had ever been, and it was our last day in Rome. All I knew about the place was, the Pope hid there from time to time and there's a tunnel to it from the Vatican. The bridge itself is closed to vehicular traffic, which means you can take a bunch of good pictures.

To get there we took a taxi, and immediately had lunch. See?

Then Joyce spotted a motorcycle lot, to have her picture taken with our mascots, Lucky, Plucky and Trip, again. We have lots of shots like these. I have spared you.

So we went over the bridge. Ecco! E il Tevere!

Paid the earth to get in, and started up a long, dark ramp. It was cool inside. We do okay with ramps. Up and up and up. We came to steps. Joyce went down, I went up. We met later by the restrooms. Here:

When you get up, you can see il Vaticano. Molto bello, vero?

They also have an interesting little museum. The Pope's apartments were closed. That was all Joyce wanted to see, so she didn't miss anything.

You can also see this kind of thing.

There are lots of little nooks and crannies, and a tour, but it was just too hot. And we were still going to the Trevi Fountain, so we decided to save what little strength we had left for that.

Nasty Radisson BLU bed platform on which anyone can damage their kneecap, not just me. Note hideous red shag carpet.

Timeless Piazza Navonna

2011-10-17T22:03:00.000-07:00

Which was once a hippodrome which is why it's shaped like a racetrack. We love the fountains and the art. It's probably junk like in St Tropez, but we always buy something; this time a do-it-yourself triptych of this trip's monuments.

We had a wonderful tuna salad (much larger and more complex than an American one) under the misting at a cafe, and watched the people, and just relaxed.

After hiking twice as far as necessary to get there, I wasn't inclined to move too much or too soon, but eventually we had to go around and see all the fountains and all the art. We have been here before and will undoubtedly come here again someday. It's one of those special places. Hint: if you've never been, go in late afternoon and stay through sunset so you can see the fountains lit up. The mimes generally come out in the evening as well.

And always try to find something weird. It's not hard.

Radisson BLU hotel shower mold.

Pantheon and environs

2011-10-16T01:29:00.000-07:00

So we left them to move our stuff and took a cab to the Pantheon. From there we knew we could walk to the Piazza Navonna. That's foreshadowing. Pay attention.

It was still hot as hell. Nothing changed. Why should it? It was Rome in July. Anyway, Joyce remarked that on our last visit, eleven years ago, we always took the Metro. We might still have taken it had the weather been agreeable. It's not all that far to walk to the Termini station. But it was really too hot. And don't forget the aging and the blister, and oh, yeah, the three weeks we were on the road already.

So we go there, and right away, Joyce had to have coffee. Not really unreasonable. We never, ever could get the coffeemaker in any of the rooms to work. We just flat gave up on that. I don't need any coffee; I got off caffeine altogether in Kenya and never went back, and even then, it was Diet Coke, not coffee. So we sat in a cafe and had coffee (American for her, cappucino freddo for me) and watched people for a while, and there were a lot of them, too. And I started feeling better, just like any other time I wasn't in the hotel. I would enjoy Rome every day until we went inside the hotel. I mean, we stayed there instead of going straight home because we love it.

Lotsa people.

And weird stuff like this.

And nuns. Yes, Joyce got hold of the camera again. I almost never take pictures of people unless it's unavoidable, and I don't like stupid stuff like the suit of armor you can wear to have your picture taken. None of that. I hate it when she asks people, especially waiters, to take our picture. Maybe you've noticed we have a lot of those. I'm not sure why, but it irks the crap out of me, and moreso on a day after a night like we had just had. But I gritted my teeth, and as you see, we have the pictures to prove it.

Well, luckily, the Pantheon is quite cool inside, crowds notwithstanding. The pictures we took in there totally suck, but there are a couple of salvageable shots. like the Oculus:

and the unbelievable travertine floor.

There's a bunch of tombs but they didn't come out so well. So go see them yourself!

I always wondered what happened in the Pantheon when it rained. So I looked it up, It gets wet! It rains right in, and they rope it off so people don't slip and kill themselves. There's a special drainage system for runoff under the floor. Solved that mystery!

So I had a map and the Piazza Navonna was only about three blocks away. Too bad all the monuments were lined up facing the wrong way on the map, causing us to go in the opposite direction. But while lost, we had yet another wonderful amirena gelato, and Joyce couldn't resist taking a picture of Our Lady of the Motorcycles.

Snappy, up-to-date Radisson BLU paint job.

Pukeshake, anyone?

2011-10-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

After our nightly hike/limp for a meal,

we retired to our revolting quarters and read. We had no specific appointments for the next day, but our intention was to see the Pantheon and the Piazza Navonna. We figured we'd just get up and go when we felt like it.

Sometime after midnight, we fooled with the lights and window shade until we got the room dark, and went to sleep.

About 2 AM, some of the lights came on. I shut them off. At 2:15, it happened again. We both got up to check switches, and shut everything off again. Fifteen minutes later, same story. On about the fifth iteration of this, Joyce called the front desk. Up came the technico to accuse us of damaging the system. Really? Wouldn't you have to know how it works first?

Another call to the front desk, three way conversation between Joyce, desk and technico. He ultimately realized he couldn't shut the bathroom lights off unless he turned off the air conditioning, and so told us just to leave the air off and the lights would stay off, too.

Unacceptable. Joyce calls front desk again, and they send us a key for a suite which was a about a mile away in another wing on another floor. This is where we discovered the pukeshake stain you'll see at the bottom.

We gathered up enough gear to "camp" in the "junior suite." Big problem. Only one bed. We tried to sleep in it. Well, Joyce of course could sleep, since she immediately drops off and starts snoring like a calliope every night under any circumstances. If we have the sleep machine between us, I can usually, with drugs, and if her Snore Stop works, which it didn't because a. she left it home and b. the Spanish equivalent is not the real thing, get some sleep, but that's not possible in one bed, no matter how large.

I tried sleeping on a bench, and on the floor, but had to rule out the bathtub because of the jets in the bottom of it. Finally at 6 AM I woke her up and told her to get the hell out so I could sleep for a while, and she went back to the room and I guess tried to get them to fix the short in the system, or whatever it was.

Around 10 AM I went back to our room and we drew up a manifesto with which to assault management. Long story short, they moved us to another "junior suite" with two beds, and when I say "moved," I mean they physically picked up and carried every damn thing from our former room to the new one, including the underwear drying in the bathroom and elsewhere. We told them we weren't going to even be there when they did it, and we left. Joyce also got them to remove the first two nights from our bill, although I think they owed us for all four, and they sent us flowers and candy and champagne, too. And in case you weren't keeping track, we were in FIVE different rooms in that hotel.

In our new hallway, between our room and the elevator, was this authentic modern art etched right into the carpet. We told them about it, but in our remaining time there, no effort was made to clean it up.

Radisson BLU hall carpet pukestain.

Day Two: Borghese and beyond

2011-10-12T21:48:00.000-07:00

Before we left for the Borghese, we asked for bottles of cold water at the front desk, and we explained they had better be complimentary, because they had never replaced our broken fridge. They said they would bring them right away, and immediately a woman appeared with enormous glass bottles. We said, "No, we need the small plastic ones to carry around with us. Those are too big and heavy."

Oh, okay, they said. Be right back. Fifteen minutes later we asked again, and finally a woman with small, wet, warm plastic bottles appeared. They had been trying to cool them under cold water. Really? A Radisson hotel has no plastic water bottles in a refrigerator anywhere? We told them no freakin' thanks, walked out, and bought some at the museum cafeteria. We were no longer shocked, just horrified, as usual.

The Borghese is a very strange and wonderful place. It's an interesting building full of fantastic art, and the value of the collection is either astronomical or priceless. The access to this collection is severely limited, so much so that we got our tickets before leaving the States, and if you're going, you should do the same. Go here and bookmark it. This is an excellent service.

http://www.viator.com

I tried to enter this as a link, and of course it came out blank. It's worth C&Ping this into your browser and then bookmarking it, I promise.

The galleries are air conditioned, and you should go lean on the windows in each room while listening to your tour guide, because this is where the cold air comes out. The tour guides know all the dirt on the Borghese family and the artists, and it really makes the whole thing a much richer experience. GET A LIVE GUIDE. Viator will hook you up. A recorded tour is simply never going to be as good.

After the museum tour there was a walking tour of the Borghese park, but as it was arounnd 99 F, we chose a taxi back to the front of the Termini instead. Why? Because we heard, and correctly, as it turns out, that there is a very controversial new statue of JP II out front. The taxi driver knew exactly where, thank God, because there's a LOT of construction. JP II was beatified in May of this year, and the train station was renamed for him, and they put up this pigeon-catcher, er, statue. The controversy is that it looks like Mussolini and provides shelter for drunks. You can decide for yourselves.

Following this mini-adventure, we went back to the hotel and to the pool! At last! Doesn't it look nice?

Radisson BLU soft-surface skating rink.

You can't see it, but trust me, the entire deck is splintered wood, the water is frigid, as in unbearable, even on a hot Roman day, and the rails on the adult pool are so loose, you are safer just using the stairs and your own balance. Otherwise you might rip the thing out and stab yourself with the rusty, jagged edge. PLEASE click on the picture. All that wood is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and note the ONE swimmer on an excruciatingly hot day. And you know what else? The pool is open to the public. That's right; it's not even exclusive to guests. And even with that, no one is actually in it except for this poor child who was thrown in by her brutish companions a moment sooner.

Like all the other adults, we sat on the bottom of the kiddie pool, which, because it was so shallow, was a tolerable temperature. The kiddies were a bit baffled by this behavior, but they managed. And then, of course, we wondered why they hadn't just filled some plastic bottles out of the pool and given them to us when we were leaving that morning. We would never have guesssed!

End of day one. Day two begins.

2011-10-12T00:15:00.000-07:00

I'm resisting the temptation to just sit here and cry about the whole Rome thing for two reasons. First, we actually did do more than limp up and down Via Filippo Turati looking for food. Second, we went and saw some stuff worth seeing, and we want people to know what a great place Rome really is despite Radisson's every effort to sabotage our visit. If it had been our first visit to Rome, we'd never go back. Luckily it was our fifth and fourth visit, so we knew better. The hotel is not all of Rome. As I said, there's a happyish sort of ending. Eventually.

So we returned to our room and went to bed. The air conditioning stayed on all night. We managed to sleep fairly well.

In the morning, however, we really had to bathe. We had looked at the horrible bathtub/shower enclosure and tried getting into it still dressed just to see how. It had no handrails and the bottom was actually soft. You had the impression you really could plunge through the floor into the room below. The controls (? see below) were baffling. Again, they were completely counter-intuitive, and there was no such thing as a diagram. The glass door opened at an angle, creating only a very narrow opening, and the tub was slippery. We agreed only one of us would be naked at any given time in case we had to call an ambulance.

I went first. I put everything inside the enclosure that I would need, sat down straddling the tub, and laboriously swung and raised my other leg over the side with Joyce right there in case I should over-balance. Then, with her to balance me, I stood up, and turned the water on to the settings we had experimented with. There was no towel rack, so Joyce had to stand outside holding the towel until I was done. With the door open again, she gave me the towel so I could dry my face and hands, and then she helped me to sit down and swing back out the way I had gotten in. Then she said, "I'm not washing. I'm scared to death of this thing."

We compromised. I was completely dressed and ready to go for help before helping her to get into the enclosure, and like her, I stood by outside with the towel. The trick was never to move your feet once standing in bathing poition.

So that took an hour, no fooling. But we started early enough so we were way early for our Villa Borghese Museum tour and had a chance to sit in the cafeteria and eat a sort of breakfast while waiting. It was one of those places where, if you didn't pay for a seat, you ate standing up. We paid to sit, and there was a monitor to make sure no standees sat. The whole area outside the sitting room was jam-packed with standing, sweating tourists waiting to go on a tour. It was worth the price to sit down and be able to talk and write and eat. I'm sure the Italians think we're stupid to pay to sit to eat; they don't. But we're tourists, so there!

I don't remember the rules about photography inside, but we had already agreed to buy the book online when we got home, so we didn't take any pictures. There was a bookshop, of course, but outrageously priced and of course, then you have to carry it. So we will see that book again at Christmas. In the interim, here's a link to the museum itself:

http://www.galleriaborghese.it/borghese/en/edefault.htm

It's a very worthwhile tour with a guide who knows her or his stuff, which we had. Lacking a photo, however, here are our tickets.

Sorry this is blurry, but these are the bathtub controls, such as they were. Water came from three places: a slit in the side of the tub, a spigot on a swivel, and directly overhead, where the mold was growing. Note how all the ceramic veneer has been chpped away around the controls. The shower itself wasn't bad, but the sheer terror of getting in and out was just unbelieveable. What sort of loon would design such a thing, we have no clue. But at least it was consistent with the rest of the totally inadequate, inconvenient and poorly-designed establishment.

Okay, one day down.

2011-10-10T01:14:00.000-07:00

So after limping to and from dinner (and the dinner was very good. They always were) we came back to our room, and opened the refrigerator because it was hotter inside than out. We didn't want stuff rotting in there.

In the course of getting ready for bed, we tried a lot of things, like the lights and the "dresser" I showed a couple of posts back. There was also a mechanical shade that was controlled by the lighting box, except it wasn't. You could push "up" or "down" and it would just do whatever it wanted until you managed to push both at exactly the same time.

The beds had backboards up against which you could allegedly sit to read or watch TV, but they were very loose. Likewise each bed had an LED reading light on a gooseneck that simply swung round and round and always ended up someplace where it was of no use at all. As for the TV, we never even bothered. One lamp was made of material and blew up when turned on. I mean, it expanded. It gave off virtually no usable light. It collapsed when turned off. We unplugged it and dried laundry on it.

It was very hard to get the bathroom lights to come on and stay on, because if you used any other lights in the room, they'd go off. The WC light (toilet and bidet room) only worked if you shut off the air conditioning. Luckily, it had a glass door, so you really didn't need a light inside it. And of course, it's also a good thing if you're an exhibitionist about your personal habits. Or if your spouse/ partner/ roommate will agree not to watch you in there, or at least take off her glasses.

Radisson BLU tub surround. That's plastic wood veneer, plastic "ceramic" and mold.

Good God, is it over yet?

2011-10-09T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try to tear through this. At 2 PM the witch at the desk said they had a room, but our stuff was in storage and no bell hop was there. We waited another 15 minutes for him. The first room had no safe. We called and asked for a safe. Someone came to see if there really was no safe. They went away. We waited and waited. Finally we left the room because, as Joyce said, "If they don't see us, they'll have an excuse to forget us."

We carried our own bags down and told the snooty witch we weren't going to just sit there all day. By now it was almost 3 PM anyway, so we didn't get into a room any sooner than they absolutely had to let us.

They said they had another room. No bell hop again. We said, "Forget it, we can carry our own stuff," and picked it all up and left while they kept saying, "Wait! He is coming!" We knew better.

Got to the second room. Safe included. No air conditioning. We called the front desk and they sent a technico. He told us how to push the right buttons in a certain order (nothing remotely intuitive) to get it on. He left, and we discovered the refrigerator wasn't working. We called to get that fixed. They said "We have no more, but we will bring you something cold whenever you like." We explained the idea is to not have to call, and be dressed, and wait, every single time. We also wanted to cool our own water bottles. They were sorry.

We tried to take a nap. The pillows were so soft so as to be non-existent. We called for more. They brought two more. We told them to bring four more, and showed how you can't get any height with two of their pillows because they collapse and suffocate you by folding over on your face.

After this, we thought we'd like to swim, but Arabs had bought out the whole roof including the pool for the night. Then Joyce wanted to walk all the way down to the restaurant district, and I didn't. We didn't want to order room service because were sure it would be like all their other "service" thus far. We didn't want to even eat in their restaurant because we were having an awful time. Joyce agreed to walk to the nearest restaurant no matter what it was. We ended up half a mile away again, because that's as close as they are. The train station had restaurants, but that wouldn't do. The train station had a grocery store where we could have bought our own food, but that wouldn't do. She had to eat in a sidewalk cafe. The fact that I had a blister the size of Monaco on my instep (and had had it since Barcelona) didn't matter.

See how pissed I'm getting? I probably shouldn't even publish this. I'm getting all upset as if it were yesterday. This is a bad idea. But since there is a sort of a semi-happy ending to this, I will put it in here, and eventually I will get to write about that, too.

Radisson BLU closet.

More hotel misery

2011-10-08T20:51:00.000-07:00

I don't know if we're spoiled, or if we cleverly chose excellent hotels for our first three European stops, or if our luck ran out. The first thing that happened when we arrived at the Radisson Blu was nothing. No one was there. No one opened the door. No one was at the "welcome" desk. There was one one person behind a huge blow-up reception desk in the lobby.

This thing is as insubstantial as a Japanese lantern, with occasional hard surfaces at which one may address the staff, if there are any, and if they deign to recognize you. Most of the time, you have to go right under their noses and say, "Hey!" Otherwise they stare at their computers and ignore the guests.

There is a similar piece of craptastic furniture under the sign reading "Baggagli." Presumably you might leave your luggage here. Usually no one is there, either.

The one person on duty (surrounded by people seated on upturned kayaks and big, hard bowling balls all around the lobby) informed us we couldn't get into our room before 3 PM. Legally, they're within their rights. Practically, it's a bad idea, because people who have to sit and stare and wait and are exhausted (which I promise you they are if they arrive early) are just going to get upset and start having negative feelings about everything. Well, it worked like a charm. We decided to go to lunch and leave our bags, but we had to wait 15 minutes to do it while they summoned the "Baggagli Hop." So right there, three strikes. No welcome, no room, no staff.

We walked down to the train station to get more Euros, then had lunch in a sidewalk cafe. Rome has discovered misting, praise the Pantheon! That even beats aria condizionata.

But when we got back two hours later, around 1 PM, they STILL couldn't provide a room. Yes, they had two hours to go, but you'd think with a lobby full of people, they'd try harder. But no, there were just more people in the lobby. All the bowling balls and most of the upturned kayaks were full, so we sat on the remaining kayak.

Around 2 PM I said the the desk clerk, "Look, we're really tired. Haven't you got anything? Surely some room is available by now, since people have to check out by 11 AM."

What ensued was such a pain in the ass I can't do any more right now, so I'll close with the daily photo.

Radisson BLU desk chair.

Civitavecchia: Transfer to Hell, er, Rome

2011-10-07T22:34:00.000-07:00

Transfer days are always such sheer hell. We planned an extra day in Rome just to put off the next transfer day. It was also supposed to be for resting and regaining equilibrium. Instead we went down a terrible rabbit hole and it took four days to get back out.

You always get thrown off the ship early. The bigger, the earlier. Since this is a small ship, we didn't have to get off until, like 9:30 AM. So that, at least was good. And customs and immigration are nothing, and there were porters and the buses were right there. Stupidly, we took this as a sign something good was about to happen.

Bah. Immediately, more or less, we started seeing trouble. The drive from Civitavecchia to Rome is unremarkable and takes maybe an hour and a half. An hour in, someone was desperate to use the bathroom. They asked if a stop was planned. No. They asked if they could stop. No. Why not? There was no place to stop.

We were sitting quite close to the front and when Joyce heard this, she said, "What about that gas station right there? You stop there right now."

The driver was apparently mesmerized by this, and did as he was told. As soon as desperate lesbian number one got off, and ran in, she was followed by desperate lesbians two, three and four.

Now, I know how long the trip is, for one thing, and I don't drink coffee, for another. If I did, I wouldn't have on this occasion. However, many lesbians drink coffee, being humans, and many people over 40 have intestinal issues. Knowing this, Olivia and/or the ship should have arranged either a scheduled stop or a bus with a toilet. Cruises attract senior citizens. Allow for this fact. It turned out not to be about coffee, but the other issue. So plan ahead, tour people.

Not much later, we got to the tour hotel, which was not our hotel, and got a taxi to "our" hotel, the Radisson BLU Roma. You think Radisson, you think quality, right? Forget that nonsense. Maybe "BLU" is code for "fucked up" in Esperanto or something. This place is a big, fancy, expensive, dump.

We chose it for location and a pool. The location was as promised; we'd stayed on the same street before. They actually had two pools, surrounded by splintered planking, entered by loose handrails (or none) and absolutely freezing. Want a towel? Sometimes they had them, on the opposite end of the whole freakin' roof from the entrance to the pool. Other times, not. And if not, they wouldn't get you any, either, claiming there were none. It was just one of those places, and we've all been to them, that act like they are doing you a great big favor if they do their jobs, and if they don't, so what?

They shouldn't have messed with us. But they did, and oh, boy, did we make them just as miserable as they made us.

But let's go back to our arrival at this extraordinary house of misery. It didn't look bad at first, not at all. Here is an antiquity right outside the hotel.

And here is another, actually under the hotel.

We were pleased and diverted by these, because we thought it was a sign of respect for the area. They preserved and highlighted these ruins (some of which are still being excavated.)

But look what we saw next.

Would you rather sit on a set of boulder-sized bowling balls?

Or an upturned kayak?

Perhaps you would like the staff to welcome you.

Don't worry, there's no danger of that happening!

I'll continue tomorrow. I get depressed every time I think about this place, so you'll see Rome in very small doses.

At the end of each Rome entry, I shall present an aspect of one of our rooms that made our stay regrettable.

A Radisson BLU "dresser."

Pisa: beautiful tourist trap

2011-10-05T22:46:00.000-07:00

Joyce, as I say, had been here before, years ago, in the fall when it was actually cold. No such luck the day we went. It was probably the hottest day of the whole year. But they had just finished their centennial cleaning, or whatever, and it was all shiny. So that was nice.

I never gave much thought to anything but the tower before, but like any medieval church complex, there's a sanctuary, a baptistry and in this case, a cemetary. Actually a couple of them.

The church part was probably the big deal back in the Middle Ages, until the tower started canting over. The church proper still isn't all that interesting, although the baptistry and the cemetaries (Jewish and Christian) probably are. But our tour only included the church, and you can then walk around outside all you want. Most of us wanted to go in the shade.

But hell, we were there, so let's look at some pictures!

Jewish cemetary

Baptistry

It amazes me how clear it was on such a hot, humid day. You should click on these to see the detail.

Money shot

We call it the money shot because this is where you can see the"banana" curve. It bows to the left, then back to the right.

This is another good shot of the "banana":

We tried some of those pictures where you're holding up the tower. They have that part covered with open pavers because otherwise there can't be any grass. They came out awful, which just makes us laugh more.

The whole complex was also lined with souvenir stalls, and we bought a few.

We also bought ice cream and cold water. The bus park was a long way off from the church complex, which was odd because not even people in wheelchairs could get close. On the other hand, it was less than 20 miles from the port, and we were back on board before noon, which meant plenty of time to pack and swim and nap.

One the way out of the port of Livorno, the water was somewhat rougher than usual. Check it out.

So we swam, packed, napped, ate dinner and went to see Karen Williams. We made sure we could put virtually everything out in the corridor and have nothing but day packs and shoulder bags to get off the ship. And then they had porters for us (Hello, Keleti train station in Budapest!) from customs to the buses.

Before I forget to say something, all the food on the ship was pretty good. Every night we got the "bent spoon sample," which was always a taste of some odd thing or other presented on a spoon which stood up on the plate. Sometimes you could figure it out, others not so much. But it was a source of amusement and a conversation starter, although we only sat with others once in the whole week. Cruise ships have basically stopped forcing people to eat at the same table with the same people every night, or with anyone at all. They have mostly tables for two, and put together more if you ask.

Oddly, the only foods we sent back were fish dishes. We think they were frozen. Criminy, you're in the Med. Show a little initiative and collect the local catch of the day in each port. Good thing we had eaten a lot of fish before the cruise. Overall, I'd give the food an A- and definitely recommend the Windstar Line. Unfortunately it's in bankruptcy proceedings so no telling how long they'll be around. They were booked for the rest of the summer, mostly with charters like ours: wine-tasting, Biblical tours, nudists and whatever. Windsurf is a very nice ship, even though it's older and smaller. Those huge floating cities jam-packed with kids and shopping just don't appeal to us. As for the one shop, all we ever bought in it was a memory card. I think Joyce splurged on a t-shirt, too, but it wasn't about shopping for us. It never is.

Next time, our transfer to Rome. Just thinking about it exhausts me.

Portofi-no-no

2011-10-05T00:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, we kind of didn't go to Portofino. It required a tender through what looked like a tidal bore. We had been on two shore excursions in a row, and had one scheduled for Pisa, after which we had to disembark in Rome. So we took a little break and called it a day at sea.

Here's some of what we could see from the ship.

Here's some of what we did instead of going ashore:

We also had our hot stone and bamboo oil (or whatever) massage that day, and I would definitely do that again.

That night was Suede's performance. Most people who know me know I really hate listening to a vocalist. I can do it myself, for one thing, and for another, it sounds like cats fucking. Shows like American Idol baffle me. But because Joyce likes some vocalists and I wanted to be a good sport and a good spouse, I had agreed to go. Suede also plays trumpet and piano and is almost bearable, because she chooses the right songs for our age range. So imagine my surprise when she said she'd rather go to bed early and read for a while! Hallelujah!

The previous night's "entertainment" after the barbecue we skipped in favor of escargot, had been the deck party, I guess. As usual, the DJ was in the lounge at 10 PM, our signal to disappear, so I got out of yet another night of not very entertaining headliners. I love the comics. I like when the combos play music we can dance to before dinner. I don't even mind if the vocalist sings some of the songs we're dancing to. But to just listen to someone howl is not my idea of a good time. I realize I'm in a tiny minority here, but some sounds, especially high-pitched ones (like The View) really get on my nerves.

The other entertainer we enjoyed was Michele Balan, who does standup and this time covered being Jewish, lesbian and aging. She was great. But we did make a mistake on the night out of St Tropez by going to the "Oldy/ Newlyweds Game." This is always about sex, but that's not the problem. The questions are always the same. What sound does she make? Where's the most bizarre place? What's the biggest lie you ever told her? and so on. The problem comes with who they pick to play. They audition couples in the right anniversary ranges and get two couples married less than five years, and two married at least 20 years.

Now on this ship, almost everyone was over forty, but who cares? You can be on a second or subsequent marriage in that age range and so still be a newlywed. But no, they had to screw up and find a truly, really young, shy couple who were on their honeymoon, and who weren't sophisticated enough yet to either stand up to the MC or play along. They just sat there and the MC wasted what seemed like hours trying to drag outrageous answers out of them, when there were none to be had. It was such an awful bore, and so just like the last five iterations we saw of the game. I was just kicking myself halfway through that I hadn't remembered this is what always happens. Of course the longest-married and most senior couple (55 years) won, and we were glad, but I'd rather watch a dentist work without anaesthesia than see that again.

The next night, after Pisa, was Karen WIlliams, who did aging, lesbian and black jokes. We don't like her; she's cranky, but her material is good and topical and very honest. I guess I can see why she would BE cranky as an aging Black lesbian. I'm cranky and just a whitemeat fat person myself. But I know this about myself and just take extra Prozac (authorized by my doctor) if I have to deal with the public. So, a word to the wise: St John's Wort if you don't already take anti-depressants.

So now maybe I can get away with just one blog about Pisa! We'll see. Anyway, here's some more ship art.

Joyce took the first one. The others are scattered around the ship.

Moron Monaco

2011-10-04T00:16:00.000-07:00

I may have spelled that wrong. For such a little country, there's a lot to see. As I said, they had just had a royal wedding so it was all spiffed up. Here is the Ministry of Justice. I don't know, is it like the DMV or something?

And the old town, which is also the only town. Actually Albert has deluded himself into thinking he has five prefectures, or something to that effect. We would call that a "housing development."

We finally got a cab down out of there to the Grand Place, which is basically a very slow-moving parking lot full of very expensive cars.

Here we ate and waited to go gambling at the Grand Casino. Yeah, with the two towers. Bigger than the Palais Royale by far. See: Palais Royale:

Cafe Paris:

Gran Casino. Which is bigger, girls and boys?

And also the front of the casino before they open for business at 2 PM:

Here is also where I had camera issues again, but luckily I got all the pictures I needed to take, because you can't photograph the inside of the casino. Some people snuck their cell phones in and did it anyway, because of the rotating toilet seats, but I just don't care all that much. After lunch we hid out in the Haagen Dasz until 2 PM, played some video poker, lost three Euros, and left. It was so freakin' hot, we couldn't take any more.

I suppose the appeal of these Riviera yacht slums must make itself plainer when it's not high summer. My last comment on these floating slums is this. A lot of the women on the boat, whenever they saw a yacht slum, would say things like, "Oh, wouldn't you love to have one of those? Wouldn't you like a tour of one?" and so on. Why, no thank you, I'd rather not spend any time at all with people who individually have the carbon footprint of an African micro-nation. We wouldn't have much to say to one another. And here's another thing about those yachts, and up close, you can see it, and even smell it. Anyone who's been on a cruise knows that, when the ship is stationary, the decks are hot as hell, even in the shade. They pump their bilges into the marina, and there it sits, all around your zillion-Euro beauty. If you attempt to sit outdoors on a stationary vessel, you will combust. As soon as the excitement of being on a ship wears off, you head for an air conditioned lounge, and you don't go out again until the ship is moving. So what do you think it's like on a yacht jammed between its neighbors without a breath of fresh air, all the diesel generators running to produce air conditioning, and everyone around you sweating like a pig? You go hide in a dark lounge there, too, until it moves. You can get that very same experience, with a lot more air circulation, on a cruise with a few hundred people, and use up a lot less of the world's resources per capita.

Fascinating little place, very pretty, and very crowded.

The three or four hours we spent there were just right.

Monaco: arguably bigger than the Vatican

2011-10-03T23:43:00.000-07:00

Whenever I think of Monaco, or see it on a map, I envision a tiny square with a jagged coast. Forget the square. It's just a jagged coast. Prince Albert is straining to enlarge it by building it out into the ocean, so it will no longer have to "prove" it's larger than the Vatican. Well, good for him! Everyone should have a hobby.

Here is a picture, maybe:

So far, so good. It's showing up. This is a pissed-off Joyce who didn't want to sit in the front of the helicopter. But she was taking the pictures, so why, I don't know. My fat ass has to sit in the back, and I don't care either way. There were only four of us on this flight, and one was the cruise director, because unless you have four, no tour. So she allegedly went along to inspect it. Yeah, whatever, Trisha.

We were surprised no one else did want to take the tour. It was a really decent flight, you got to see everything, it really is beautiful, and he kept us up there a little longer than we paid for.

Here are just a few of a hell of a lot of good pics Joyce got. She also took a video of her shoe. We'll spare you that.

Look at the little tiny sailing class!

See the mansions of the rich and obscure!

Lookit! Lookit! See our ship!

Yacht slum! Yacht slum!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Okay, so after that, we took a taxi to the "basillica" which is not a great deal larger than my childhood church in Rego Park. And it was too small to contain the royal wedding held two days previously, so they got married out front, and went in and said a prayer here. But it's a basillica because it has a bishop. The bishop of ALL of Monaco. And his flock of three old ladies that show up every blessed day, but never mind. They also use it as a mausoleum. Here's Grace Kelly. You have to click on it to see her name and other details. The flowers are from her new daughter in law, Charlene, who allegedly has runaway bride syndrome. Have you seen Prince Albert? Yeah, well, there you go.

And an art gallery.

Gives the old ladies something to dust, I guess.

St Tropez, Part Deux

2011-10-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

So, I had to split this post because this damned program won't let me put any more pictures in the previous one. I have no idea why.

We were on this happy little bus trip to see the sights when of course, the camera, or actually, the memory card, croaked. I lost maybe two dozen pictures from here, and a few more the next day in Monaco although I had a new card by then. Never did figure it out but got rid of the offending card. Luckily, we got a lot of postcards while in Provence so I have those and a couple more of my own to share, along with the few I posted last time.

You can see Joyce got her hands on the camera again. But wait! There's more!

Darned good thing we picked these up because right after that, unbeknownst to me until the next stop, the memory card had its brain fart. Coincidentally, however, I got the cards of the things we actually saw. And Joyce, of course, saw this.

So the next thing was, because I was trying, on the ride back, to get the card straightened out, by which I mean, culling stupid stuff to make room for important stuff, I paid no attention to the roads or the driving. Normally I am very sensitive to this, but I was so focused, all I really knew was we went fast and there was a lot of traffic. So imagine my surprise when, upon disembarking from the bus, several lesbians vomited all over the sidewalk. Luckily we have no photos of that, either.

In fact, we had quite an appetite, so we went here, which is actually a picture of the yacht slum

taken from inside the restaurant,

.

and at my urging, Joyce used her French and got us lunch, and I got to take a break from linguistics duties for a while. And I don't remember exactly what I ate, maybe a salad and a pizza, but it was awfully good.

Then we went for a walk along the waterfront/yacht slum, even though it was hot and crowded, because we knew this was a place we could get some local art, even though we were warned not to. Here ia "our" artist with some of his art:

and here's someone else's art:

The cruise director said what they sell off the backs of the boats in the yacht slum is junk, but we like it because it's fun.

We also saw:

and we had the very best amirena (cherry) gelato ever, and went back to the ship and took a nap. That was a pretty good day despite the heat.

Do you know the way to St. Tropez?

2011-09-14T00:41:00.000-07:00

Oh, come on. You knew I would do that, right?

One way is, you go in on a ship. Some ships are too big to dock, so you take a tender. Luckily the water wasn't too bad and the ride was short.

You can fly into Cannes. Then you have to drive. Flying is as bad as driving.

Another way to go is to drive. That would be just plain crazy. So of course we took a bus tour. But of course, we couldn't just get on a bus. That would have been too easy. First, the tender, then, a stop in a parking lot to explain why the buses couldn't come any closer. Then, a stop at a port building to use the restrooms, which they didn't want us to do. But were there any other restrooms? No. How about on the buses? No. So they backed down, because we are TOURISTS. Of course, they want you to go into a restaurant and eat and use their toilet. Except it was too early for any restaurant to be open. Needless to say, finding a public restroom in Europe is never guaranteed, and then you usually have to pay. I like a lot of things about Europe. I like them even better than a lot of the things we have in the United States. But not that.

Following the pit stop, we hiked through the marina to where the buses were allowed to park. Now, St Tropez, to me, conjures up scantily clad people covered in some sort of grease, slowly roasting to death on the deck of a yacht. And to some extent, this is true. They also sit around with drinks, ride jet skis, and watch insects like us skittering past, unaware that they are occupying a floating slum.

That's right. The yachts moor stern in, touching each other's bumpers, those big soft things they hang over the sides. You are no further from the people on either side of you than you are in a tenement or a Motel 6. You paid umpty-doodle zillion dollars for your yacht with all the fancy electronic doo-dads on top, yet you are basically living in your neighbors' groins. Yeah, that's real special. So is the carbon footprint on one of these things. The plus side? Employment for a crew of six to twenty per copy. I wonder how many of these owners knew what the marina conditions would be like when they signed away their fortune for one of these monstrosities. Someone on the tour with us told a joke: The two happiest days in a boat owner's life. 1. The day you buy it. 2. The day you sell it.

We all got into a couple of buses and took off up the coast and then inland to see "Scenic Provence," the name of the excursion. The traffic was a dreadful mess, but we got to see lots of pretty and interesting spots, and stopped in one for drinks and to poke around.

Joyce was still trying to get Euros. On the ship, she cashed travelers' checks into dollars, no problem. But they had no other currency. She thought now, for sure, banks would turn dollars into euros. Boy, are we stupid. Trying to find a bank that changes money (for which they could charge money) is like trying to find a public bathroom. What we did find was some desperate enterpreneur IN A BANK where he couldn't get dollars. Match made in heaven. Another woman came in while we were doing this transaction in the lobby and he changed hers, too, with a very good rate! Merci beaucoup, etranger Francais!

Mediterranean fauna

French fauna

Yacht slum

I have more pictures and more blather to present, but Blogger in its infinite wisdom is not allowing me to attach photos, so I'll stop here and try again tomorrow. I have better yacht slum pics I wish to share.

Not dead; just lazy. And it's football season!

2011-09-12T01:52:00.000-07:00

One reason I'm so behind in posting these blogs is the topic I want to get into: absolute exhaustion! And this time I can't blame the altitude, or not having enough recovery time. We had plenty of nap time, and slept well at night except for that shithole of a train. And we were taking vitamin B tablets, which are real uppers to us. In fact, without them, I don't know what would have happened. Probably just wouldn't have taken those excursions, or gotten off the ship, or something. I did lose seven pounds and two pants sizes, but once we came home exhausted (and after the accident which isn't till the end so I can't discuss it yet) we were pretty beat. Pretty much from Auschwitz on, we were tired all the time. It translated into going to bed as soon after dinner as we could, and preparing everything for the next day before going to sleep. So we survived. Maybe next time we'll take one of those geezer tours, but here's the thing. My 80-year old aunt took a geezer tour of Germany and Austria last fall. She said she didn't really enjoy her two-week enlistment in the Wehrmacht, because that's what it felt like to her and my cousin, who went with her. Kind of reminded me of my ten-day stint in the Russian Navy in 2008.

Now, here's how you can tell Spain is socialist (and no, it's not an epithet; far from it). I needed moleskin and the farmacia had two kinds. I couldn't decide which (cut or uncut) so I said I'd take both. They refused to sell me both "in case someone else needed it." While it doesn't say much for their stocking practices, it was a very sweet example of how bad they are at capitalism. Viva Espana! I took the uncut.

We had a few little issues with the ship. One issue that really didn't bother us all that much was that the foward elevator kept taking vacations on our time. As long as we aren't in a great big hurry, we can climb stairs. Just gimme a railing.

In our cabin was a flat screen TV and an iPod dock and probably some other shit. We ignored all electronics. But also in our cabin, there were some things they should fix. Like, there are something like 16 lights in the bathroom. It's a real sauna in there when you take a shower, and great for drying laundry after. There's no such thing as turning some of them off. It's all or nothing. Also, they have these low-flow toilets, which are great for the environment. Except for one thing: plumbing engineers, do not make the bottom of the toilet bowl flat. If you can't guess why, let me just say it causes a lot of extra flushing.

Outside the cabin, there was the lounge issue. They kept it freezing in there for no discernable reason. Every night we told them to turn the air down. And then we told them to turn it down farther. People were bringing blankets from their cabins to see the shows. Every day it was the same until Joyce got hold of the captain. Speaking of the captain, he never shut up. All day long he would interrupt sleep and conversation with position and speed announcements, or tell us they were doing some drill or other. Our presence was never required, so why? Honestly, we expect you to get the ship where it needs to go. Don't bother us with details. If I need a detail like that, I'll ask for it. Not to mention, they had a whole channel devoted to showing where in the Med the ship was, the speed, the wind, the wave size. So please shut up.

One other thing that amused, but didn't effect me at all, was that some people apparently were trying to smoke in their cabins and somehow got caught. It was probably their stewards who smelled it and ratted them out. You know you can't smoke indoors, especially in a cabin, because the fabrics absorb the smell. The whole port side of the ship outdoors is a smoking area, and they have plenty of ashtrays, so what's the problem with going there? Joyce used to smoke and she never tried to sneak, so it really pissed her off.

Okay, here are some more ship pictures, since we're talking ship here:

People getting into a tender, taken from above. Joyce hates tenders.

Joyce refusing to get on a tender.

Me with nice people we met on the trip. In front of more ship art.

Answer to last entry's quiz:

Tomb of the Two Kings, Plock Cathedral, Poland

Close-up of the pen of the Anonymous Author, Budapest, Hungary

Some catching up to do

2011-09-05T20:51:00.000-07:00

Before I describe our next port of call, let me catch up a few things I should have mentioned earlier. There's no point going back to the exact blogs; readers don't do that. Just a few weirdos like myself would ever do it.

So, about the Olivia entertainment. I mean the shows they put on in the evening. Our favorites are always the comics, and of course, all of Olivia's entertainment is about women. The "regular" entertainers hired by the cruise line must go do something else, although they retained a combo and a vocalist for ballroom dancing every evening. We love it, and we can't do it anywhere else. In the Tampa Bay area, where we live, certain lesbian groups do organize dances sometimes, but it's always loud, sternum-pounding disco, heavy metal, rap or country western, as if all of us were under 30. We tried going a couple times, even wrote to the organizers, requested dancing music all night, and made absolutely no progress. For example, for a Valentine s Dance, they didn't even have "My Funny Valentine" available to play. So we don't give them our money anymore. And the "tea dances" the boys have on Sunday afternoons? No way. So, ballroom dancing on an Olivia vacation is very important to us, and we are always delighted to go when they have it.

As to the comics, of course their material is topical,either about current events, being lesbians, or both. This time, due to the age of the crowd, they all had material on aging, and it was hilarious. So Elvira Kurt, a Hungarian-Canadian, went on the first "real" entertainment night, and you can't help but see yourself. I think a lot of people wet themselves laughing. Unfortunately she also had some parenting material, which isn't as funny to us, but a lot of lesbians have kids these days. Yeah, they have a lot of means of doing this, God knows why! We always thought one of the great things about being lesbians was not having kids, and not having discussions about kids. Now they expect us to trot out pictures of the grandkids. No, we're childfree for a reason, thanks. But hey! Your kids are paying our Social Security, so we sure appreciate that! And we do enjoy the schadenfreude when we hear about the dear little ones' antics. No, really!

So, Joyce forgot to pack her snore stop, and though you can find a lot of things for nasal difficullties, including things with the name "Snore-Stop" in the local language, nothing works on Joyce's snoring like the real thing. I mean, we guess so, although since we have separate bedrooms, she doesn't use it at home, and we haven't tested it. Maybe by now nothing works. I usually whistle to stop her. The idea is it will disturb her enough to make her turn over without waking her. This is somewhat true, except she starts in again so fast, it's usually pointless. Not to mention she snores in every possible sleeping position. And we travel with sleep machines, drugs and earplugs and use separate beds and honestly, the things that have worked best for me are sleeping in the closet or the bathroom. She tells me I snore, too, and I don't doubt it, but apparently she can't hear me over her own snoring. I wake myself up snoring; she doesn't. Is it a bone of contention? It's the bone. If we tried to sleep together at home, we'd be long since divorced. Luckily, sleeping separately just makes us gladder to see one another when we get up.

One thing we always enjoy doing when we travel is people-watching, and because we are traveling, we see a lot of luggage and a lot of shoes. Women, please! What are you doing to your feet? You're only issued one pair for life, you know? Human bodies weren't designed to walk balanced on sticks. Get out of the ho-heels and be comfortable. And men, hello! You're in an airport: luggage, crowds, escalators, people movers. Flip flops are not going to protect you. And stop wearing those horrible black droopy socks with your sandals. You look like slobs.

We were going up and down escalators in some airport, I want to say Prague, when we came across a great big heel stuck in an escalator. The young man I was next to, and I, looked at each other and started laughing. Joyce saw it too, and I guess we were all wondering how that must have looked when it happened, and what she's limping around on now. I'm fine with people destroying their feet. It's their body and their life, but please don't endanger me with your foolish choices, and don't expect me to rescue you, either. You get stuck in something, you're staying right there until someone else shows up with the Jaws of Life.

And the luggage! We each have two pieces, a hold-all and a convertible suitcase/backpack. They don't roll. We can travel for months like that, and in varying climates, and bring back souvenirs. Some people, apparently, need a troop of porters for their trek into the jungles of . . . oh, I don't know, Puerto Rico? The first hilarious thing I saw was this poor guy lugging two huge pink suitcases on wheels, each large enough to contain a human body. Next to him was a female hauling one small black case on wheels, and carrying a pink pocketbook. Somebody's a dupe, and it isn't her. But she is a moron, because she doesn't yet understand what travel is about. That is, it's not about impressing other epeople with your wardrobe. It's about learning, maybe learning about yourself and how to be a human.

Another time, there was this couple. She had two enormous rolling bags; he had one medium. A porter went to pick up one of hers, and it was so heavy, the handle ripped right out of it.

Finally, the French wedding trip. She has a cart piled high with about five suitcases, including an enormous garment bag for the wedding dress. He has a shoulder bag and a skinny little garment bag for his tux. We're in line waiting to check in, and she's on his case about moving her crap. Joyce leans across the velvet rope and whispers in his ear: "Run." He actually nodded, as if he had already been considering it. She had long nails, hair out to Mars, ho-heels, and was screaming on a phone. Believe me, if he doesn't run, they're both morons.

Despite the fact that you're reading this on the internet, we're no slaves to technology. I can barely get Joyce to carry her ultra-simple cell phone out of the house, and we didn't have any on this trip because neither of ours works in Europe. We had a tiny crappy netbook that was just great for e-mail but not at all tempting to use otherwise. So when we got to hotels and the TVs were these huge honking HD flatscreens with mulltiple menus and remotes, we just turned them off. I don't travel to watch TV. Even when they attempt to greet us by name "Good evening, Mr. Lesbian!" I'm not impressed. You want to talk to me? Call me on the hotel phone.

As we made our way through a typical day, there was a lot of self-talking and reminding. We would always be asking ourselves questions: Did I take my pills? Do I have my passport? Did I lock the safe? Am I travelling with an idiot? Joyce called this communication with our other selves and used it as an excuse for her corporeal self to forget anything my corporeal self said to her, claiming I must have actually been speaking to one of her alternate personalities at the time, the one currently off-duty, apparently. This led to having the same Q & A sessions over and over again, mostly while trying to get ready to go somewhere. If anyone had been eavesdropping on us, they would have been quite justified in thinking we were unqualified to be wandering around in countries not our own.

Well, that's enough catching up for one entry, so let me throw in a couple of pictures, and you guess where they are. Answers at the bottom of the next entry.

All at sea

2011-09-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

This was our first, and only, such scheduled day, although we sort of got one more later. In my opinion, the best cruises have two for every seven days. There's nothing I would like better than a nice, long, repositioning cruise with no stops at all. The only thing that might bother me there would be running out of fresh fruits and vegetables. Maybe other ships could re-provision us along the way?

And unike the big party cruises, our day at sea was relatively quiet. People slept late and laid around on the decks (the lounges, not the bare wood), and swam and ate. Lots of napping going on, too. Joyce and I did all of those things, but I think napping took the prize. I like to read and I was doing it but I just fell asleep.

And we took some more ship pictures. Actually, this one is from before we sailed, so we're at the dock in Barcelona.

Everything is a potential picture to Joyce. Here we are, still in port, when she wasn't taking pictures of cranes and trucks. Black really is slimming, isn't it?

And of course. Joyce is all about remembering how hard everyone works so we can have a nice vacation, like this guy.

And here's some ship art, that represents the work of at least three people. Be thankful she didn't photograph all the art. the Windsurf is full of it.

This is the lounge. See the happy crew? Crews love lesbian cruises. They get guaranteed big tips (we pay those ahead, too) we bring no children, and we aren't violent drunks. It's almost like a vacation for them, too. So if you are a childfree (at least for a week) female and a non-violent drunk, call Olivia for a good time!

Minorca, or whatever you want to call it

2011-08-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

It's the smaller sibling of Majorca, anyway, and has several names. I'm using the one I consider most authentic. It's a very cute little place most of us wouldn't visit except on a cruise. The British do, of course, because it's a Mediterranean island close to home, and it's very laid-back. You have your beaches, your Roman ruins, your unique geology, your pretty little towns, restaurants and shopping. And let's not forget perfect weather. If I were from Europe, and I wanted to plop down someplace warm for a week, Minorca is as good a place as any. It may or may not have night-life, but for me that makes no difference at all.

We had no excursion scheduled, so we slept late, got off the ship and wandered around, which for us meant up and down the main street along the water, because this

was the alternative. Yeah, right? Are you shittin' me? Very picturesque. I'll stay down here, thanks. Presumably the shopping was better up there, but you know me; I don't shop. They had sandals and bottle openers and postcards at sea level. Also local draft beer.

Sandals, see?

And inexplicable signs. This one was on a closed garage door. It was Sunday, so maybe no ice cream in front of their business on Sunday?

Or how about a cheese?

Sausage?

More cutesy pictures from ground level:

The last one is Joyce again. All foolish pictures are to her credit.

And now some from the ship:

I'd like to show you all of them, but you know what? Go see for yourself. I didn't know anything about Minorca before I got there. Now I think a cruise around the Balearic islands would be a great vacation. I don't know why "they" don't tell Americans about this stuff, but maybe they're trying to preserve the peace and quiet. But now you know, so go check it out.

First day on the senior Windsurf

2011-08-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

The first thing we noticed on this cruise was the age of the cruisers. On big party ships, like in the Caribbean, they are a lot younger, or on the Mexican Riviera. We used to do that. That's a lot of fun, too. And older people go on those as well. Just a different kind of fun. The pace of life on this ship was going to be a lot slower and quieter, the way we like it. There was one extremely young couple for the Oldy/newlywed Game, we found out later, and I think they had been married like, a week, but had been together maybe a year. They were the only ones in their 20s. Even the other "newlywed" couple was in their 40s, because it wasn't their first marriage.

Anyway, we enjoyed being in a group of people who just flat out don't make a lot of noise. A little rowdy, sure, espcially when we sailed away. That's always a crazy time because most of these people's vacations were just starting, and a lot of them were escaping from their jobs, unlike those of us who are retired. Honestly, we work harder on trips than at home.

The party was on the deck outside where we were eating, and the speakers faced OUTSIDE, so we could continue to eat and chat, and also hear the music and and watch the fun. This is making me want a beer. But at the time, I had a pinacolada, which is like, an annual indulgence. In fact, I think I had two. And there's a steward for every pair of guests. Ours was named "One," which we guess was an Anglicized version of his Indonesian name. Very sweet fellow, as was our cabin steward, Mayun, and all the lovely ladies at the concierge desk. One wasn't our ONLY steward, nor was he really assigned to us, but there were so many stewards, it felt like we all had one.

The food on this trip, except the fish, was spectacular. We sent the fish back twice, but they always had something better ready to replace it with. Somebody finally got our message that every meal must include at least one form of chocolate. Been saying that for years on cruises where they load you down with flan, vanilla pudding and empty pastry shells.

There were four restaurants on the ship. You had to have reservations for two of them, one of which was outdoors, so we never went to that or the other one, because our favorite restaurant was "The." That was it's name. "The" had all the kinds of food we like on ships: escargot, beef tartare, carpaccio, and so on. Even the night of the "barbecue" on deck (think hot, messy, waiters forced to sing and dance, loud music) we ate at "The." We also ate at the Verandah (yeah, with an "h") every day for lunch, with their fantastic buffet. And although most ships have a midnight buffet, this one didin't, and it didn't matter, because we were always in bed by 10 PM. Not big on partying, especially if there's an excursion the next morning. Anyway you could get room service 24/7, and it's included. Joyce said breakfast was always good, too, but I never saw it.

Let's see if we have any ship pictures:

See, there's one of my pinacoladas. Picture taken by One.

And two party pictures.

That night, the "entertainment" was a list of what the entertainment would be for the next week, and a bunch of announcements. After that, the DJ (more on her later) took over the lounge and we went to bed to read for a while. We had already unpacked, the bed was turned down, and everything was just about perfect. That's the way the start of a cruise ought to be.

Anchors aweigh

2011-08-28T02:27:00.000-07:00

I know, very catchy title. But I use it because most people don't know how to spell "aweigh," nor do they know what it means. So I grab any chance I can to use obscure words correctly. Gnomon.

We've been on many cruises, but we never get tired of them, possibly because we always go someplace new. We don't go for food, entertainment or shopping (especially not shopping!) but to see a new thing. The only place on this cruise that we'd already seen was Civitavecchia, which is frankly not a tourist attraction, but you have to go through it to get to Rome. And Joyce had already been to Pisa, but who cares, right?

So this was our second voyage on the Windsurf. Last time we took it from Rome to Venice. It's been 11 years so they've added a spa, which means fewer people, which is fine with me. It only holds 320 people right now, all women, most of whom know how to behave very nicely. Now that we are older, our idea of misbehaving is not taking your meds and being a bitch. This is a lot easier to ignore than drunken screaming and fighting, and far easier to overlook than children running amok while their laissez-faire parents ignore the carnage they wreak.

So, here's the ship.

It's an MSY, or motorized sailing yacht, and is the largest such ship in the world. There are certainly tall ships with more canvas, but they have no motors to assist them.

Getting aboard a cruise ship is a special feeling unlike any other. It just reeks of possibilities for fun. It's a beginning, a new adventure, and you paid for it already, so that's over. Used to be, you were also isolated from news of the world. Not any more. CNN is running all day. I didn't watch it, but Joyce did occasionally. I feel the world can get along without me just fine, and vice versa.

Usually boarding a ship means standing in a lot of lines and being herded all over like cattle, but on a ship this small, there aren't as many lines. They gave us cold drinks and we walked right on. The three or four little lines were on the ship itself, in the lounges. Except for one hairy moment when Joyce lost her passport (actually I was holding it, having put my own away, but I sort of forgot, and she forgot she had given it to me) it all went smoothly. We got our ship ID, our room key, signed our lives away for shipboard charges, and signed up for our hot stone massages. Then we were free to wander and eat.

On deck of a docked cruise ship is probably the hottest place on earth, so why they hold the sail-away parties outside, I'll never understand, except at night. So we went to one of the inside food spots, a buffet, where we could see out, but not go out, until the ship was actually moving, and there was a breeze. This wasn't going to happen for four hours anyway, so we could eat, explore the inside of the ship, go to our cabin and all that sort of thing.

Here are our sail-away outfits.

And our cabin. The kids are having such fun, aren't they?

See the plain white door (hatch) on the left? That leads to the bath. It's enormous.

We met several very nice couples on this trip, and I hope they're reading this and will get in touch! We lost some e-mail addresses somehow, and have only managed to contact one pair. So if you're from Pennsylvania or Texas, you know who you are! Please leave a comment. Sorry to be such dorks.

Last night ashore

2011-08-24T00:39:00.000-07:00

After Sagrada Familia, we were drained, so we went back to the hotel to swim. We had the pool to ourselves for about an hour and got out to have our daily beers up there on the roof. Then the man-boys showed up with their female entourage, and basically took over the entire space with their whooping and splashing and hollering. This is why we cruise with Olivia.

But we had at least been able to "swim" every night (I mean it's a plunge pool, but you can still enjoy cooling off in it). It was funny the previous night when we got up there around 7 PM and there were no towels. We called for some from the bar, and they said the pool was "closed." We were in our suits and the hotel robes already, se we laughed and went in anyway. I mean, there's nothing and no one to stop you, and when we called for beer, they came up and served us and could see we'd been in. No one said anything.

I have noticed in Spain and Italy that they "close" their pools very early, even in the middle of the summer. Why even have a pool? But I will have an even better pool story about Rome. Just you wait.

So, the previous night, again, after swimming in the "closed" pool, we decided to eat in the hotel restaurant. It cost the earth, but it was so convenient and so good! The usual rule is, don't eat in the hotel restaurant, but I think that has changed in Europe. I still wouldn't do it in the United States.

Anyway, we came back from the cathedral, swam, had our beer and decided to try a restaurant across the street. There were, like, four, within a block. We chose this place called the Mediterranean Pub, or something. Wow, was that fantastic! We had been planning to always eat fish in the Med, and this was our third fish in row, and it was the best. But the others were very good, too.

We could have eaten outside, where the Spanish equivalent of la passegiata in Italy was going on, but it's still too smoky in Europe, and it was too hot, for that. This place also has tapas, so people came and went the whole time we were there. It seemed pretty popular with the locals. Actually we were the only foreigners in it. See, here's us with the "kids."

Then we went to the local farmacia to get more moleskin, returned to our room, and packed. We had a really good time in Barcelona, and recommend it highly. We also recommend Granados 83 because it does not cater to families with children. It's a little strange, but the staff is terrific, and the beds are great. Great location, too.

A note on smoking: it's still more prevalent in Europe than in the US and Canada, but a LOT less prevalent than before, and there's no smoking indoors in any of the countries we were in this time. We were concerned about that, but I think everyone's getting the message that second-hand smoke will kill you. However, if you want to smoke in Europe, you still can. Just take it outside, and no one will bother you.

La Sagrada Familia: Not Just a Drip Castle

2011-08-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

For years I thought that's what it looked like. You know, you sit at the edge of the water, on the beach, dig down and make a drip, or maybe you call it a dribble, castle. It's the easiest kind. You don't need anything but your hands. From any distance at all, that's exactly what this cathedral resembles. You have to get up really close to see that it's something else.

We knew it was an important cathedral, because cathedrals simply aren't built any more. Some cathedrals in use now are still under construction, such as the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York. Washington National Cathedral took over 80 years to complete. Cathedrals can take centuries to build, and they are clearly enormous enterprises that will not be completed in the lifetimes of those who begin them. Sagrada Familia has been in the works since the 1880s. So I guess you can say we went there to see history in the making, a sort of homage to such an effort, and also because Gaudi was clearly a nutjob.

I don't mean this in a bad way. Artists are frequently like this; they see things differently from the rest of us. Gaudi saw buildings as living things, and designed the inside of this cathedral to look like a forest. We knew Gaudi's work was all over town, but we couldn't see it all. Despite Barcelona being a lovely city with fantastic weather, you still don't want to do much in the summer heat. So we skipped Park Guell, a housing development he designed, and went for the cathedral. It's a good thing, too, because it took the whole day.

Let's put the link right up front. Blogspot has a new edition in which you can do that.

Okay, it won't let me, so screw it. This is the URL:

http://www.sagradafamilia.cat/sf-eng/?lang=0

We slept in after the previous day's marathon and took a taxi to the cathedral's neighborhood and immediately ate lunch, by which I mean Joyce drank coffee, and then we ordered a meal, sat there and gaped at the cathedral. You simply can't grasp the immensity (not the enormity) from any one place except maybe a helicopter. This is likely to be the first thing you see:

These are the ticket windows in front of the Passion facade. It's almost done. Gaudi lived to see the Nativity facade almost done. The Glory facade is still in its infancy, and he knew that styles would change, and left no specific plans for the later two. Smart.

Listen, if you don't have a sense of wonder, don't go anyplace, okay? If you can't be awed by anything anymore, stay home. Travel is for the open-minded, and it will open your mind even more. Sagrada Familia is a wonder. It's not a drip castle, it's not a church, it's not even just a cathedral. It IS a living thing, and it's growing right there in front of us. It's not nearly done, either, although they consecrated it once they got the roof on. So go, see a cathedral being built. See a birth in progress.

And we also found souvenir t-shirts right there by our little cafe, cheap, and grabbed them. We wore them to board the ship the next day, so you'll see them soon.

The line to get into the cathedral stretched caround the block, and we're talking an enormous block, but it went very fast! Maybe 15 minutes. This gave us a chance to guzzle water, buy more water, and guzzle that. There was shade, too. Anyway, you never, ever, want to be touring around anyplace without your water bottle firmly attached. One reason is the heat, another is there are no water fountains. If you happen to find a restroom with agua potabile, fill up!

So we bought two tickets, two headsets and one elevator ride for guess who. Only a few of the 18 planned towers are built, and you can go up elevators in two of them, cross a teeny, tiny little stone bridge, and come down the stairs inside of two others. This is not for the faint-hearted, but I love to get up high, so I went.

But first, the headsets. Every place should have these, and yes, they disinfect them. We saw them do it. Even Joyce can operate these. You can choose your language, and then you can choose your location, and then you can choose how much detail you get. You can go in order or backwards or whatever. I have tried several other of these self-guided systems but this is the best. It gives you the most flexibility. Okay, you can't ask questions, but you can go find someone and ask, or look it up later. And because there's so much detail available, you probably won't have any, anyway.

So inch by inch we started to go over it. Like sculptures? You'd better love them, because they have a million of them. This is our absolute favorite:

It's on the Nativity facade, where the sculptor thought it important to include ALL the animals in the stable on Christmas Eve. We think so, too, because we have a dog from Oberammergau in our creche. The Nativity facade is all about animals, and the few required people, but animal sculptures are everywhere. This may be one good reason to bring a child, but for goodness sake, don't overdo it. A place like this can overwhelm an adult, so show the kids the animals and the baby Jesus and get out, please. Come back in a few years, look at something else.

Like, for example, this crazy hanging Jesus over the main altar. It's very interesting, but could frighten the unsuspecting. It also looks suspiciously like a monument to Bacchus. Perhaps the wine motif was taken a little too far? If you can't see it well, use the link, above. It also has a great shot of the nave which looks like a forest. Nothing either of us attempted shows it as well as that.

While we were there, the organ was being played, maybe for practice, and we sat and listened to that. They also recited a rosary, which I think they do every hour. We especially enjoyed the stained-glass. The entire place is just spectacular, and after we had worked our way back outside to the other side, and examined the entire Nativity facade, Joyce decided it was time for a break while I took my elevator ride. Here are a couple of shots from way up high on that tiny little bridge.

The second one is from behind the Tree of Life in the Nativity facade. Speaking of that, compare the stone in the two facades. The dark one, Nativity, was completed in the 1920s. The Passion isn't quite done yet. They need to get the doors on and a few other touches. See how dark the older one is?

It's not just a matter of different lighting or the distance from the lens; the older stone has weathered. Goodness knows how many centuries before the entire cathedral is the same color.

Joyce found a bench and put her feet up while I first took the elevator up the tower, and then climbed down these stairs,

and when I fell out this door, she insisted I do the same.

So we just sat there and gaped at it for a while, and we knew we'd never really appreciate it all. I mean, how can you? And none of the pictures we took will ever convey the beauty of this place, but they will help us remember.

I don't care what religion you are, or if you have none. It doesn't matter. Cathedrals are not just for people with religions, anyway. This is art for everyone. Go see.

The Dali Theatre Museum

2011-08-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know I said we went to Figueres in the last post, but we didn't exactly get there until this post, but it was the same day in real time, honestly.

So we arrived in Figueres and tramped all around the outside of the museum to get into it. Just piss-poor parking planning, that's all. And why "theatre"? Because that was what the building was before Dali moved into it and made it into a home and studio, and now a crypt. But that's only one little bit of it. They tried to convince us there is a floor plan and that you could follow some sort of scheme to get around it, but we pretty much gave up on that and just wandered. That means we probably saw some of it several times and perhaps some of it not at all.

Once again, there were screaming brats-in-arms, toted by clueless idiot parents. Listen, geniuses: most educated adults can't really grasp Dali. You think your darling DNA trophy in a poop-bag is going to get it? Yeah, right.

It was very hot and crowded but luckily, air conditioned, and we tried to tune out all the distractions and just enjoy the crazy work. Here are a few shots.

The outside:

Back:

Front:

And all the miscellaneous junk that seems to be strewn randomly all over the place? That belongs to the museum, too. As big as it is and as many displays as it has, it's hard to believe it's not the world's biggest collection of Dali, but it isn't. That's right here in Florida. We saw it when we first arrived, and now they have a new one, even bigger. We're going to see it next week, and I'll make that the final entry to this entire trip blog.

But back to the one in Spain, well, Dali is weird, and everything in the museum has some inexplicable aspect to it, and that's why it's fun.

Here's one of my very favorites. It probably has a formal name, but I call it the "Dripping Ship."

Here's something Joyce likes, I guess.

Here's a courtyard:

And a weird painting with some of the same objects it it as one we have at home.

And finally, a distant shot and a close up of a sculpture that's really eerie, yet attractive.

After all that, we had had enough stairs, and Joyce asked them to reverse the front turnstile to let us out, which they did. We went around a corner to the Dali jewelry exhibit and went in through a dark revolving door into a dark exhibit area, where you had to let your eyes adjust before you could see anything. When we were ready to leave, we saw the exit was up a lot of stairs again. Remembering the revolving door, we decided to go out that way. Well, the sentry, who was outside, decided, no, we weren't and started screaming in Spanish. For a moment, she trapped Joyce in this thing, which was as dark as a grave, but Joyce is big and strong, and forced her way out, yelling, "Let me out!" at the top of her lungs. Of course I felt it stop, then I heard the yelling, then I felt it go forward again (all while in the dark), and I burst through, whereupon the woman tried to push me back in. She didn't know me. I pushed her out of the way very easily, yelling, "No!" and "Stop it!" I have no idea even now how she thought she could physically trap us in her part of the museum. And to what end?

Then she started swearing at us and insulting us in Spanish and told us to go back to our own country, and we said we would be only too happy to do so, if this was how we were going to be treated. And then we went back in the other way and reported her to the museum, and also to our tour guide.

As I said several posts back, every once in a while we would encounter someone really mean. And this kind of thing can have a negative effect on our desire to travel. I mean, what if such a person was the first one someone met when going abroad for the first time? How much more of that would you like to absorb in the name of exploration of other cultures?

So it behooves us all to be nice to visitors in our own countries. You want to make a good impression and keep those tourist dollars coming? Be nice. Be nice anyway.

You went where?

2011-08-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

Figueres! We went to Figueres! And no, we never heard of it, either. We were way the hell back in the planning stage of our trip, when all we had arranged was the cruise, and we were looking at what to do before and after. We don't do this Olivia-style because we prefer to be a lot more independent. Joyce, especially, is prone to wandering off spontaneously, something she never does at home.

So we were watching the travel channel and guess what! A show about Barcelona came on, and they started talking about Dali and Gaudi and Sagrada Familia. We love art. We have been to the Dali Museum here in St. Pete. We actually have Dali's work hanging on our walls. And so they say, as we are watching this program, "If you go to Barcelona, you must take a day trip to Figueres, to tour the Dali Home and Musem."

So we watched this show, and we saw it, and we also saw a lot of work by Antonin Gaudi, who was clearly an insane genius, and Joyce said, "Well! We have to allow extra time for that!"

Of course. So I found a wonderful site called viator.com that arranges local day trips from afar, so you don't have to bribe the concierge or wait overnight in lines for big attractions. And we got our day trip to Figueres that way, and added a day for that and another for Gaudi's work. I mean, otherwise, we would have landed in Barcelona one day, and sailed the next. We didn't know Jill about Barcelona. Now I can reveal it's yet ANOTHER big ol' whopping European secret. You should go. Everyone should go.

From Barcelona to Figueres and back by bus, this bus:

is a very long trip, so they make it longer by throwing in Girona on the way. Like Figueres wouldn't exist if not for Dali, Girona wouldn't exist except for Figueres, because this is where we stop for a tour and lunch. So, we had never been to Girona, either, and you had to go there if you wanted to see the Dali Museum, so we went there.

Girona is a really pretty little town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. We entered on a level place, and it was all uphill after that.

We lost Joyce after several flights of steps masquerading as streets, but not very convincingly. We knew they were steps. You can't fool us! She handed over the camera and disappeared, I thought perhaps in search of beer, but I learned otherwise later.

On the way to the top, we saw many picturesque, medieval things. Here are some of them. This is a pretty little river or canal which isn't navigable, but apparently attracts wading birds.

Here's the legendary Witch of Girona. Click to enlarge the picture, scroll right and cock your head to the right. See? She's a gargoyle. Apparently she was mean to children and was turned into this. Childfree people are always made into villains. Anyway, I like her. She probably wasn't really as mean as she was intolerant of their nonsense.

And here's a bronze memorial to the rebuilding of the cathedral. It's a half-person (probably an architect) half-unfinished church (with an open nave).

This is the very top. I climbed over the broken city walls to take this picture.

When we got back down, Joyce was waiting on a main square they evidently told her we'd pass through. She had spent the entire time trying to cash travelers' checks (which are MONEY) into Euros. She visited every bank within walking distance. There's been some issue with counterfeiting, so no one would do it. Luckily our hotel did it for us when we got back to Barcelona.

We ended up here for lunch, and then drove about half an hour to Figueres, which deserves a whole entry of its own.

You may be wondering why the spacing has changed all of a sudden. I haven't got the foggiest God-damned idea.

Flying and flying and flying to Barcelona

2011-08-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

I hated leaving Budapest. I am now obsessed with getting back there someday. I can't recommend it as a destination too much or too often.

But we had to move on, so we took a very early flight to Prague and then on to Barcelona from there. We didn't exactly expect what happened on the way, but then, you never do.

We couldn't see the plane from our gate, because our gate led to a bus. Well, that's no big deal; it happens all the time. So we got on the bus, and rode and rode and rode until we were at the furthest taxiway from the terminal, and there we found a tiny turbo-prop plane, which I thought was an antique. And I wasn't wrong; but they still fly it. We had already checked one bag each, but when we arrived at the plane, they took the other one as well. Whatever! It was only an hour flight. I still had my shoulder bag.

The little old plane was, indeed, able to hoist itself into the air, and we chugged on over to Prague. At some point, Joyce got the idea in her head that either because of a time change or a screw-up, we were an hour late and might not make our connection. We did a wild charge through the lovely new Prague airport, arrived sweating but not quite naked at our gate, only to discover she had mistaken the boarding time for the take-off time, and I never had a chance to stop and actually look at anything because we were so frantic to make the transfer. And then, of course, we left late anyway. Next to our pen, I mean, waiting area, there was a flight to Tel Aviv getting ready, including several dozen brats shrieking all at the same time. I bet their parents had bought them ALL one way tickets.

And that wasn't the only flying thing we were dumb about. There really was a time change between Budapest and Barcelona, someplace, and our brains were so fried at that point, we just couldn't figure it out. I thought we had a four hour flight from Prague to Barcelona. It wasn't even two! Oh, and again, at the gate, they took our unchecked bags, saying they were too big. It's true, they don't fit the little measuring box at the gates; but they never have. They fit just fine in the overheads, though. And plenty of people who boarded after us carried huge things on. Ours are quite small in comparison; small and soft, not the those enormous hard-sided things on wheels with a laptop strapped on top. Ours hold about 25 pounds and convert to backpacks. We aren't big enough to carry more. And we don't have that much crap, anyway.

But that gave us the strange experience of walking through the Barcelona airport entirely unencumbered by bags. I would never have checked everything on purpose; we all know what happens to checked bags. But gee, it was a relief for a change. And the bags did show up, and we got into a taxi, and our entire time inside the Barcelona airport, from de-planing to taxi, was 45 minutes. Incredible. I guess they got it all fixed up for the Olympics, and it's fantastic. Paris should send observers from Charles De Gaulle airport to see how it ought to be done. In fact, everyone should. A model airport for sure.

And a good omen for our stay in Barcelona, too. It's a long way from the airport donwtown but they have great roads and there's lots to see. Our driver gave us the tour in Spanish. I would guess we understood about half of it. It was enough. We kept saying to him how beautiful the city is. It's got to tbe the best place in the world to study architecture, but if you studied there, you would never build anything of your own. It's just too intimidating.

We had nothing scheduled for that evening so we went for a swim and to dinner. This was our first-ever boutique-y little hotel. Its name and address are the same: 83 Granados. The staff dress like mafia with urban camouflage t-shirts under black suits.

Here's a look down the elevator shaft from the fourth floor. That's the lobby, the reception desk, and some objets d'art down there.

This is the elevator shaft from the roof:

And here's our room. Camera's gone blurry again.

And the rooftop bar area and plunge pool.

Finally here's the tapas bar we ate in. These are such cute little places, and they are all over the place, just like pollerias in Quito. Although we ate in, dining on the sidewalk is always an option.

Barcelonans stop here on the way home from work, sit out and talk with friends. When they are with other real humans in the same place, they are not on their cell phones. They actually pay attention to whomever they're with. Imagine that! Oh, and they walk around a lot, just for recreation, and to see each other, and talk. In person. They use their cell phones when alone, not with others. I can't emphasize that enough. For those of you who don't get it, think harder. This is what all humans used to do before cell phones. They met in person and talked face to face. These people still choose to do that.

Downtown to Pest again

2011-08-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

Yet another exercise-filled day. We took a cab to the day-trip pier area and hung around there, looking at the Duna, the other sights and the people, until it was time to get on our boat. We had thought we'd go up to Margaret Island (think Central Park) and wander around but it was both hot and raining, so we didn't get off there. But we took even more pictures, and it was on this ride that the camera somehow cleared up. We still have no idea why, and sometimes it reverted to blurry, but we never figured it out. Possibly because I never felt like looking at the directions. Now Joyce wants a new camera, but really, one of us ought to look at the instructions first. One of these days.

Anyway, here is a suddenly clear picture. Can you see the building in the middle? Remember it? Of course you do!

When we got off the boat we took a taxi straight up to the Basilica of Szent Istvan, wandered in and out, and then went out in what might be called "Old Town" and wandered around some more. As I said, Hungary is very old, and they have so many layers of history, it makes your head spin. So in no particular order, we saw:

1. The memorials for the failed 1956 revolution.

They have marked the bullet holes from weapons fired from above and behind where I am standing (see my arm), and killed a whole lot of people right there. Instead of covering it or repairing it, they leave it as a reminder.

A hero of the 1956 revolution, Imre Nagy. He's shown halfway across a bridge because he was executed after leading the 1956 revolution. In effect he is saying, "I have brought you this far; you must go the rest of the way yourselves." And in 1989, they did.

They have a lot of cool modern statues over there. Here's a link to a different angle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Imre_Nagy,_Budapest,_facing_Parliament.jpg

2. Parliament

This is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, and I think the third largest parliament in the world, after the US Capitol and Westminster. It's the result of an architectural contest. The first and second runners-up got to design a couple of other government buildings across the street. This thing is so grand we mistook it for a church at first.

Although you can't see it well, they fly a Hungarian flag (on the left) with the Soviet crest cut out of it, something they did in in the 1956 revolution. When it flies straight out, the hole is clearly visible.

3. Szent Istvan, or St Stephen, the Basilica.

They have his hand somewhere inside. You know, a relic. We didn't see it.

4. More statues

5. More palaces

6. More architecture

7. Gerbaud's Cafe and Restaurant. Well, we finished there and then took a cab back. The rest is just in order of the pictures you see above.

We don't have a picture of us, but here's the link.

http://www.onlineprogramshungary.eu/Restaurants/gerbaud.html

We actually ate in their outdoor cafe, and got some of their ice cream, as in gelato, after. Gelato is the most available ice cream all over Europe. Eat it while you're there, and fuck your diet if you're on one. They don't have flavors like that back here.

And here is another cafe on the same street, of which it amused Joyce to take a picture. No comment.

Buda-side: all the way up

2011-08-10T20:02:00.000-07:00

So I guess they built the fortifications up here because of the heights. That's the usual way, isn't it? I don't know what the Pest-ites did for protection; there's nothing on that side of the river to hide behind. Anyway, on the Buda side, lots more World Heritage stuff because it's old, old, old, and nothing has gone unrestored. The only trouble is, in a couple spots along the riverfront, on each side, the Communist government allowed some newer buildings, as in hotels (as in capitalism) to be built in newer styles. They are visually disruptive. I'm talking about YOU, Sofitel. I would never stay in these eye-sores. Over in Buda, at least on the street side, the modern hotel has to conform to the appearance of the medieval architecture around it, but overlooking the river, it's also crap.

And way down the river on the Pest side, they have a new arts and entertainment complex that makes no pretense about being old, but it's off by itself. It can look like whatever, and it does. But even there, they incorporated some much older buildings inside of it. This is all since 1989, when they decided to revive the older styles rather than bulldoze them.

Here's the modern construction. Since the old stuff is way inside, you can't see it. But if you are close enough, you can see new stuff sticking out of old things, lots of glass, and all that. The bee-hive thing is trying to mirror the Bastion on the Buda side, I think.

And here's the seriously terrific really, really old castles. This is Fisherman's Bastion, right here.

The Bastion itself isn't that old. It was designed in the late 1800s, in a Moorish style, to unify the actually really old stuff, such as cathedrals and castles that were already up here on Castle Hill. You can see some of the terrific view behind us, and also here's the Danube way down below.

We came up here not only for the view but because the fun-loving Pest-ites, of which I am hereditarily one, came over here to party in the big palaces and the fun little coffee-houses after school and on weekends and what not, and there are more fancy baths over here, too, and much older than on the other side. And still more and more museums. It seems in the past, Hungarians spent a lot of their liesure time naked. On this side is also where the rich and famous built enormous houses overlooking the Danube, and in some cases, the women's naked subathing garden at the Gellert Baths. Here's their view. Just of the river.

You could spend days exploring this place, and if I ever come back, that's the plan.

Buda-side: even further into the past

2011-08-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

After the park and the baths, monuments and so on in Pest, we drove over to Buda, which is really like a whole other world. While Pest is living in its 19th century glory, Buda is medieval. They have all the castles and towers and royal palaces over there, as well as many of the universities, where, the guide said, my ancestors probably studied. And they have lots of entertainment on this side, too.

But before we went up into the hills, we had a special stop to make right down along the river. Our guide had found us a 19th century Hungarian Lutheran church. The Hungarians were the first country after Germany to jump on the Reformation bandwagon back in the early 16th century, which they likely got news of quickly from being connected via the Duna. So there are bunches of churches, and she figured this one, still in use and very popular during the 19th century, was very likely to at least have been visited by my forebears. It had the added benefit of being half-renovated and of a very unusual octagonal style. Our pictures aren't much, but they had postcards! And I found their site for the second inside shot.

And here is a link to a Hungarian Lutheran choir singing "A Mighty Fortress" in Hungarian. (Scroll way down). It's a different church (but also in Budapest), and the sound starts out too soft but it picks up. I thought it would be fun to learn a couple of verses. It's not so hard. You get used to their rhyme scheme in a hurry: nk nk nk. Sing along!

http://www.lutheransonline.com/servlet/lo_ProcServ/dbpage=page&gid=20083118477763822901111555&pg=20091374958555345901111555&mode=display&start_count=1

Joyce took these of the outside. You can see from the postcard exterior, above, and a couple of these, how they are partway through their restoration. The renewed parts have all the shiny tiles, and the older, unrestored part is brown. But they're working on it. It appears again later in my pictures from along the Duna on another cruise.

Pest-side: Land of my Father's Ancestors

2011-08-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

So, this is the other half of my DNA, the part I know practically nothing about. Here we also hired a private guide and gave her advanced notice of why we were there. She picked us up along with her driver, Lucasz (our third driver in Europe by that name) and whisked us off to Heroes Square. The Tomb of the Unknowns is also here, but it is unguarded, and so far that seems to be working out okay! No break-ins to speak of.

This is the Pest side of town, inland (east) from the Duna, where my ancestors lived. My grandparents emigrated from here in the early 1900s, which was the Golden Age of this place, to the Bronx. I have NO IDEA why they would have left such a magnificent city.

Their families were doctors, lawyers, musicians and engineers. My grandparents themselves were furriers. That would have been a decent job then, because all those wealthy people wore fur. And my grandfather, who was apparently mentally ill (he got locked up here in the US after my father was born) played the violin. Fat lot of good it did him. The only reason I can think of for having left here in the early 1900s was that someone was already nuts. However, that said, Hungary had a pretty bad 20th century between 1914 and 1989, so the American branch of my family avoided that at at any rate. I guess things happen because they're supposed to, but in 1902 wild horses couldn't have dragged me out of Budapest.

Oh, look. Here are some now:

This park, which is right behind Heroes Square, is, and was a rowing lake (with floating art) in the summer and an ice rink in winter. People got all dressed up in their ball gowns, tuxedos and furs and went skating here. They don't dress up so much today, but they enjoy the same things.

They also went to the public baths a lot, and they still do, just like this fellow:

Perhaps he was having this:

Joyce is a grown woman and I can't stop her from doing this stuff.

So, a great deal of the city has been restored to its former glory and whole big chunks of Budapest are World Heritage sites. It's easy to see why. But I'm not sure why they are keeping themselves a secret! It's easily accessible and very Western-friendly. We would come back here in a heartbeat and probably will whenever we get around to that Duna river cruise. More on those cruises later, because we had another one. This was our one land day. Next: Buda-side!

Danube/Donau/Duna

2011-08-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

"Duna" is the Hungarian word for the river, so let's use it while we're here. When I lived on it in Germany, we called it the "Donau." When in someplace other than home, do as the natives do.

Also, it's an easy word to say in Hungarian. Hungarian isn't a difficult language, it's darn near impossible, and to our ears, even the best thing doesn't sound very nice. "I love you" is "szeretlek" (sha-RET-lek). That's almost worse than the German "Ich liebe dich." Better stick to the Romance languages for the best-sounding romantic talk.

However, practically everyone in Hungary speaks English, and they just about have to speak at least one other language, because no one outside Hungary speaks Hungarian, and it isn't remotely related to any other language in the world today. Technically it's related to Finnish. Yeah, they both love "k" sounds, but have fewer than 200 words in common. So forget that. On the other hand, if you meet a Hungarian who doesn't speak English, you may be able to communicate in German, the third most-frequently spoken language after Hungarian and English. And may I just say to my father and grandmother, thanks for nothing for not teaching it to me. It's so damned unusual, knowing it would be the coolest freaking thing on earth.

Anyway, I went there armed with the necessary politeness phrases, and using these gets you all kinds of good will, and willingness to speak in English or German. So if you're going to some nice country with some bizarre language, do yourself a favor and learn enough to be polite. It makes your stay a lot more pleasant.

After we awoke from our lengthy nap, we grabbed a cab downtown. The cabs in Budapest are just outrageous, so be prepared to spend your money on that. Everything else is reasonable. And being on the border of East and West means you can find lots of strange and wonderful things there, like blood-orange gelato. Never saw it before in my life. We were very, very early for the cruise, so we hung around downtown taking seventy thousand pictures of the Chain Bridge.

All my life I thought it had a chain motif, you know, with huge links or something. Not even close. That's the name of the guy who got it built in 1849, and so unified Buda and Pest into one. The official name is Széchenyi Chain Bridge. The sound "chain" is in the surname, but it doesn't mean anything like "chain" at all. This is the West trying to re-make the Center and the East. Like, Peking, or Bombay, or Ceylon, because we can't be bothered to learn. We suck.

Like Warsaw, most of Budapest was destroyed in World War II. Unlike Warsaw, most of it is back the way it was originally, and the Communist Bloc architecture is found only in things built after 1945. One of the other cool things here is roof tiles. They have the most fantastic array of colors, and they don't fade. Remember, "Pest" is "kiln," so their specialty is ceramics. The Buda side is renowned for fishing. They've had a very friendly rivalry going on for over 1000 years. Hungary is one of the oldest continuing political entities on the planet, and the earliest all-Hungarian document dates back to 1162. Since then, it's been drawing further and further away from all other languages in the world. They're hardly isolated there, so I don't know how come. Just stubborn? As a half-Magyar, I can understand that!

So, while we were waiting for the cruise to begin, in front of the designated meeting point, which was a hotel called "Duna Palast" (See! You can read Hungarian! Just say it out loud. Surprise!) we started seeing all these women tarted up like whores, with glitter makeup and ho-heels and carrying garment bags. Some of these were see-through and inside we could see lots of gold chains, sequins and so on, and thought we had stumbled across a hooker convention. So we paid attention and eventually discovered it was a huge belly-dancing school recital and graduation. Well, to each their own, I guess!

So then we trekked down to the river and got on a boat ominously named Millenium and if you don't know why that's ominous you will just have to go read my Galapagos blog.

The trek from the hotel to the ship was actually quite long and involved a lot of handrail-free stairs and several trolley tracks, so we were last to board and got the worst seats on the boat, or so I thought until we saw the others, where people were jammed in sideways with total strangers. Our seats didn't have any backs, but they had a great view, and our table was set for four, but we were the only ones there. so we got twice as many "free" drinks.

On the ship was a little string trio who played lots of Hungarian and European music, none of which was the trashy popular stuff from this or the preceding century. They did know some show tunes, though, so we got them to play "As Time Goes By" for us, which is one of our songs. They went around and asked everyone to suggest a tune, and so they got lots of tips. And the photographer came around and took, and then sold, pictures (It was, after all, a three-hour tour, plenty of time to print out and frame a couple hundred). Joyce hated ours but I loved it, so we bought it, and here it is, along with the other side of the folder it came in.

Would I prefer to show these side by side? Of course! Will this program let me do that? Of course not! Don't be silly.

A Helia good time!

2011-08-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, this was probably our favorite hotel. No wait, it was the best, and also the least expensive. There are many spa hotels in Budapest because of all the hot springs all around the place. And this particular one, although it didn't look like much (Communist Bloc architecture) had everything we needed or wanted except that darned 110 volt outlet, but a transformer and an adaptor solved that.

It wasn't downtown, but, like I said, we wanted a pool that worked. That's an important part of our vacations. When we arrived at maybe 9:30 AM, way early, we were just so relieved that we could go to our room, that we didn't even care that the POOL WAS CLOSED. But just for that day, which was Sunday. We were able to use it every other day. And I should stop saying "it," because there are FOUR of them. Yup, count 'em, four pools of varying shapes, sizes and temperatures.

One of the two warmest bubbled for fifteen minutes, then was off, then was on again. Some of the reviews said this was a "hotel for old people" as if that was a bad thing. The pool rules were so restrictive that most children couldn't enjoy it. When some young men tried to jump into one of the pools, the attendants stopped them. You have to act like an adult here. An adult with no cell phone, because that was also verboten. Boo hoo.

You can check it all out here. We'd go back in a minute if we could:

http://www.danubiushotels.com/en/our_hotels/hungary/budapest/danubius_health_spa_resort_helia/spa_and_wellness

So our visit to Hungary basically began with a five-hour nap to make up for the miserable lost night's sleep. And then we had tickets for a Danube River cruise that evening, so we grabbed a snack in the hotel's cafe and went to bed. The room was really nice. Joyce said to go ahead and spring for a river view because it was so cheap to begin with. Here's the room after we crapped it up:

And here's just the view itself at sunset. We're looking from the Pest ("kiln") side over to the Buda ("hills") side.

Lots more on Budapest soon!

Night(mare) train

2011-08-02T00:15:00.000-07:00

We must be nuts. We have had many an odd train experience in the US and abroad, but apparently we fail to learn.

This particular train runs from Warsaw to Budapest overnight, or the reverse. I tried for months before going to find out if this was a good idea. The info I found on the rail sites looked good. They imply a first class six-berth compartment you can get for just two people if you are willing to buy the whole thing.

We tried to do that but only got half, three berths, one side, and there was no private restroom. In fact there were no bathing facilites. There was one restroom on each end of the car, but in different places (one in the vestibule, one in the corridor) so that in the middle of the night, I tried several times to get into a locked utility closet. Then I would give up and go to the one on the other end. The restrooms ran out of toilet paper several times a night because they would only put in one skinny roll at a time. The flush didn't always work, nor did the sinks.

Of course the agua was non potabile so we had to use bottled water for everything in the compartment, where we had a sink that also chose when and when not to work.

There was no restaurant car, not even a snack cart. All we got was a pre-packaged chocolate croissant and coffee for breakfast. Luckily, we had that enormous meal back in Warsaw that afternoon, and we had trail mix with us, and while waiting on the platform in Warsaw, Joyce got potato chips and I got chocolate covered nuts to add to the trail mix. And of course, we're not going to starve, like, ever. But it was simply not what we expected and certainly not what we paid for. Compared to the beautiful trains between Warsaw and Cracow, it was a rolling slum. We were thinking more along the lines of the Orient Express, or maybe the Trans-Siberian. Forget it.

The compartment was already made up for two when we boarded around 8:30 at night, which was fine, but it was never made up the next day so we could sit comfortably. Each berth had one, tiny, thin pillow, although we were able to add the seat cushions which were not in use for the sleeping configuration. The only way to get the extra luggage out of the way was for me to sit in the top bunk to grab it from Joyce (who was holding it over her head, just barely high enough for me to get hold of a strap) and then heave it nearly up to the ceiling. If you were short, or weak, forget it; you were sleeping with your luggage.

A couple of glimpses of our luxurious accommodations:

Sometimes the train went so fast around curves we were levitated out of our berths. Other times it stopped so abruptly we were almost flung out. Lots of adventure and discomfort, no sleep. And when we arrived at Keleti Station in Budapest, there wasn't a porter or even a cart the entire length of the platform, which I honestly believe was a quarter mile long from the last car, where we were, to the doors leading outside.

You can fly in either direction in about 20 minutes. Don't take this train. Since it's a night train, you won't miss seeing anything, I promise.

Oh, by the way, we went theough Slovakia. Here it is.

Farewell to Warsaw

2011-07-31T22:12:00.000-07:00

Awwwwwww. Yeah, we really enjoyed Warsaw, and what little else we saw of Poland. I can't imagine we'd ever go back, just because of our age and limited income, but never say never, I guess. It's a beautiful, friendly country. The landscape is mostly rural and in the summer, at least, reminds me of Missouri and Iowa; anyway the greener, hillier parts of the Midwest. The people, with exceptions (nasty men on trains) are very nice, and as for children, we only saw a few on Corpus Christi. None of them were American, and none of them bothered us. Good job, Polish parents! As far as the unpleasant children we encountered in the concentration camp (for God's sake!) they were not Polish. And their parents are idiots.

By nasty men on trains I mean they just don't make any room for you to pass, unless you get very physical with them. I'm not sure what the cultural issue may be there, but I am quite capable of throwing a block. But although those two or three incidents stand out, they are remarkable for their infrequency. There are nasty men (and women, and children) everywhere. Poland has fewer than most. One of our guides told us that the primary reasons for Polish tourism are: ancestry, culture and history such as the Holocaust. There are actually tours of all the major camps and other sites in Europe. So that's one way and one reason to see Poland, although anyone with a smattering of common sense and languages can do it independently, as we did. Oh, and Cracow at Christmas is supposed to be wonderful, but bring long underwear.

Because we had no real timetable, we didn't get up until noon or so. Packed and stored our luggage in the hotel and took a taxi to what we thought was the Holocaust Memorial. Well, it actually was one, but not the one we wanted. However, when we told the driver "Stare Miasto" (Old Town) instead, we ended up right in front of the Heroes of the Ghetto Uprising statue anyway, which is what we had been looking for.

It's very large and spread out. No one picture can capture all of it.

And in this case, the bit of blurriness gives a feeling of motion, which is appropriate for these figures, who had to move urgently, coming up from the sewers, and then escaping again. Unfortunately the uprising was crushed, but it took the Nazis by surprise and cost them a lot of resources. They never did finish their purge before they had to run from the Red Army.

It was another alternately sunny and rainy day, and when it started raining near the statue, we looked for a restaurant and found this one. We thought it was so cute and oldy-worldy. Not to say that it wasn't, but later we found out it was part of a chain. It figures, right? But the food was terrific. Clog your arteries right up, and much better than the best fast food we have here. Just what Americans need: fatter asses.

So after we ate a hugely substantial meal (this matters later) we began walking through the Stare Miasto. It's a lot like Cracow's Old Town, because when we were looking at pictures of both places, Joyce couldn't tell them apart until I told her I didn't see any big black head lying on its side in Warsaw. So that's how we knew which ones were Cracow.

There was an amber shop on every block, so Joyce finally got what she was looking for, and I found a small carved rabbit, and we won't see this stuff again until Christmas. We also bought postcards and magnets and looked at things we didn't buy, such as these slippers which were very much like the ones Joyce's mom, Wanda, used to make. It made me feel bad that this thoroughly Polish woman never went to her ancestral land, but she embodied every good thing there is about Poland.

And here's the amber shop. In middle of the window, you can see a whopping piece of amber about the size of a dining room chair cushion. The best amber has "stuff" in it, and since it's resin, it doesn't weigh very much. Well, we thought it was interesting!

More walking, more picture-taking, a coffee chop (a Polish "Starbucks") and a Chopin concert outdoors. That was a nice surprise.

We popped out of the Old Town right near our hotel, and went to the bar for juice this time, and just hung around until it was time to go to the train station. And even now, I wish I had had more time in Warsaw. And everyplace we went. It's probably just a mind trick, but I feel more like I "belong" in Europe. After all, we are not indigenous to North America, we actually are Europeans. Maybe we should spend more time there. As soon as they build the North Atlantic Bridge, I'll look into it.

Cracow: the cultural heart of Poland

2011-07-29T19:35:00.000-07:00

Like Auschwitz and Warsaw, a must-see but for different reasons.It was relatively undamaged in the wars, and is smaller and cuter than Warsaw, bigger and richer than Plock. Unless you have business in Warsaw (such as digging up dead people) Cracow is probably easier and more interesting to see. I liked them both. We saw three capitals of Poland in three days, anyhow. I don't know how many more there are.

By the time we reached Cracow again, I had a blister from my penance tour of Oswiecim ("Oz-vee-ain-chim" Again, run it all together fast.) We drove through the Jewish ghetto and around several other sites, but I told the guide to drop me in a pub while she and Joyce did a walking tour of the old town. I found my friend Zywiec and we had a nice chat in my journal.

To get to Auschwitz from Warsaw, you take the 9 AM (weekend) train, reach speeds of 90 MPH, and arrive in Cracow around 1130. You grab Polish fast food (imagine a spicy chicken pita sandwich) and drive an hour way out into the beautiful countryside to reach the camps.

You spend however much time there, then drive back to Cracow. Then you spend as much time as you want in the Old Town before catching one of the late trains back to Warsaw. I want to emphasize that these trains are VERY nice. They have great seats, a dining car, a snack cart, and a little readout that gives your location, the time and the speed along with other things. It's much more impressive than AMTRAK. (Ugh). And we actually had no intention of going to Cracow OR Oswiecim until the concierge at the Sofitel told us (via e-mail a week or so before we left) how easy it was. Realizing the chance to do it again was very slim, we decided to woman up and see what humankind hath wrought upon itself. And as I said, we're a pack of idiots. Let's hear it for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. ("Live long, die out" is their motto)

So, while Joyce went sightseeing and amber shopping, I sat in the pub and drank my little beers and caught up on all my writing. She said the market square was very lively and crowded and she didn't buy anything because she couldn't take enough time to look. I had a good time not shopping. I'd rather have a root canal than shop. I actually have had a root canal so I know this for a fact.

After Joyce caught up on beer, we asked our guide to take us back to the train. We shared a sandwich and slept, returned to the hotel very late and collpsed with NOTHING on the agenda until the 8:30 overnight train to Budapest the next evening. We didn't set an alarm or a wake-up call for the first time since leaving home.

Auschwitz/Oswiecim

2011-07-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

Yeah. What can you say about it that hasn't already been said? I refused to take pictures at all, and I bought only a book written by a survivor, not only of Auschwitz, but Birkenau (which is next door), Majdanek and Ravensbruck.

It's just horrible. Neither of us had been to a camp before, although I lived, like, 40 miles from Dachau at one point. They made the American schoolkids go there, but I had a choice and I wasn't ready yet. I think I wasn't mature enough yet to be that ashamed. You've never had a nightmare as bad as this. The weather helped a lot by being four kinds of miserable. It was cold, raining, hot, muddy and dusty. They haven't done anything to repair the streets since the 1940s, I think to make you miserable enough to get a clue. Just imagine standing in that shit for a two-hour roll call. We were bitching from 15 minutes of standing around in the rain/heat/mud. Shame on us. And shame on the parents who brought screaming babies in arms and toddlers to such a place. What the hell is wrong with you?

I didn't know the camp was brick, which was because it was a Polish Army installation at one time, so it was built to last. I bet it was a pretty little spot at first, and then came the gas chambers and the ovens and the gallows and so on. They cleverly have turned some of the barracks buildings into museums in which they display all the stuff (only a fraction, they constantly remind you) they pulled off of and out of Polish and Hungarian Jews: clothing, prostheses, teeth. The hair was the worst. I ran for the window because I was sure I was going to heave. I didn't but it was way too close. Piles of luggage and toilet articles and toys. The hair was used to make tank seat upholstery. No waste allowed!

One building housed the torture cells: starvation, suffocation, and standing all night before being made to work the next day. Sonderkommandos were the Jews who were made to run the gas chambers and crematoria. They killed them all off every six weeks or so and started over. At the end, several (but not nearly all) of the Nazis who ran the camp were captured, tried, brought back and hanged there. Really? They just hanged them? Why didn't they brick them in, like they did to the Jews?

The human race is disgusting. Go see for yourselves. Look here, of course, but go in person to a camp. We all need our asses kicked.

http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/

Let me make one suggestion: not only are the streets rough but the floors are slippery and there aren't enough handrails. I wish they would correct a few of these things to make the site more accessible to everyone. In the meantime, though, go prepared with good shoes and a walking stick.

Back to Warsaw

2011-07-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

We arrived back in the big city around 3 PM, or beer time. Or time for the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, because that happens every hour. We could see it from the bar. Straight out the window is the Tomb, although you can't see it here:

But we also wanted to get pictures close up. We made it out of the bar for the 5 PM change.

The soldiers guarding the Tomb are like, three or four years old, just tall for their age. I saw no females and we must have seen the guard change at least a dozen times. Here are some baby guards.

As we approached the Tomb, we saw what we thought was an interesting architectural commentary on young lives cut short. I thought the columns were left unfinished to represent these incomplete lives. Joyce thought the columns were made to represent candles that had burned out too soon.

Here's a link to this great picture. Wikipedia gets all the credit for it. We didn't get any nearly this good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grob_Nieznanego_Zo%C5%82nierza_w_Warszawie_2010_(2).JPG

Well, it turns out there's no architectual significance. It's the remnant of the Saxon Palace that still stood after the Second World War. It had been the site of the Tomb since the early 1920s, so that's all they preserved, or there would probably be nothing. Around 75 - 80% of Warsaw was destroyed in World War II, and they have rebuilt a lot of it, really. Some of the blanks are still blank, though, and other blanks were filled in by Communist Bloc architecture. And some are now archeological digs. Our hotel window overlooked one of them.

We didn't want to spend another fortune at the hotel restaurant, so we asked our guide to suggest something within walking distance. Here it is:

Here we discovered the Polish answer to chicken fried steak: the most gigantic Schweinekotellette (or pork cutlet) ever. I don't know what size it is when they start beating it, but whenever they get done, it's about a foot across. It's so tender and thin you don't really feel the size of it when you eat it. It came with a pile of sauerkraut I couldn't even stand the smell of (I'm allergic to it) so Joyce got all that. The dessert was nothing to write home about but this is authentic Polish cuisine in a dilapidated old restaurant on Pilsudski Square, very reasonable, too.

That did it for us. I think we were in bed by 8 PM, because next day, we had to take an early train to Cracow, and Auschwitz.

Corpus Christi in Plock

2011-07-26T23:18:00.000-07:00

After leaving Ulaszewo but before arriving in Plock, we detoured slightly to Wyszyna (see the pictures in the previous entry) because our guide thought we might find a church there which could have been attended by Joyce's ancestors. We found the church, but the old one had been destroyed, and a new (1928) one had been built on the same spot. It was interesting it itself because, heck, this is Poland! I was never in Poland! Everything is interesting! But it was just a few minutes prior to the big Corpus Christi mass and the stations of the parade were in absolutely pristine condition, having been decorated by the girls of the most recent First Communion class, and guarded from predation (as in little boys) by grown men who used this sentry duty to stay outside and enjoy the beautiful weather.

Here are a few shots. Blurry, but you get the general idea.

Plock ("Plwotsk") is the adminstrative center for Ulaszewo, and Jadwiga ("Yod-vee-gah") thought we'd enjoy seeing it because it's a medieval city on the Vistula. By the way, if you don't know much about geography, you should check out a map to get a decent idea of where and how Poland is situated. Here's a hint: Warsaw is on the same latitude (roughly) with Amsterdam, north of London, well north of Quebec (the city). In other words, gets cold and dark early. You don't want to visit there past October, our guides said. But in the summer? An excellent place to visit. Perfect if you've been broiling in Florida.

As to Plock, it was at one time the capital of Poland. Today it's one of those small, charming places with city walls and castles and churches just like everywhere else in Europe. See?

Except for the church, however, everything was closed (except the tourist train) because of Corpus Christi. At the risk of insulting your intelligence, Corpus Christi is Latin for body of Christ, and yes, we have one in Texas. It's the official celebration of the Last Supper at which Christ transformed bread and wine into his body and blood, according to the Christian tradition. So I said to Jadwiga, "but that happened on Maundy Thursday, in Holy Week." And she said, "Yes, I know, it makes no sense at all." Catholics agree that the actual first transubstantiation took place during Christ's Passion, but they celebrate it on a Thursday in May or June anyway. Maybe it's like the Queen's official birthday in England: the weather is likely to be better.

At any rate, here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Christi_(feast)

Of course, I tried to put it in as a link, but in this program that's always a crapshoot.

And so we arrived on the main square in Plock right at the beginning of the Corpus Christi parade. It was probably crowded by their standards, but we were able to get a great spot. All the great spots were wide open.

We watched all this with great interest as Jadwiga explained it to us. I felt like I was in Chicago or someplace else with lots of Poles. There was a girls' high school band, nuns, brothers, priests, and a really important priest (but not a bishop) carrying a monstrance (containing conscrated host) with a canopy over the top, carried by acolytes or some similar group. Girls ran in front of this throwing flower petals in its path. At the appearance of this phenomenon, everyone genuflected as far down as they could, some leaning on fire hydrants, cars or each other to do it.

I found this devotion kind of sweet in one way, and in my cynical laissez-faire Protestant way, a trifle (but only a trifle) disturbing. I mean, I have my beliefs, too. Nothing so publicly devoted as that, but yeah, I remember when I was like that, right around confirmation time, I think.

Here are some of the possibly less blurry shots of the devotion:

Like I said, they always look better from a distance, or if tiny. They look really good in the teeny weeny icons.

My favorite part was when I winked at a really old nun, and she winked back. Something about simple faith is a little contagious, I think.

Raising the dead

2011-07-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

This was the long-planned for day when Joyce would finally visit the very soil her ancestors had once farmed. We guess. You see, we tried to hire an "expert" at Ancestry.com to find out for us, and they wanted hundreds of dollars to reconstruct an entire family tree. No one wanted the job of saying, "Yeah, this (or that) was your town." So we went with the census information I was able to find on my own.

Neither the guide nor the driver had ever heard of Ulaszewo. But there is such a place. Here you can see a sign to it.

When you get there, you can't find any signs that you have arrived. We had to stop and ask people.

We asked here:

And they directed us to here:

which is a very fine restoration of the kind of farm house Joyce's ancestors probably did live in. It's now being used as a vacation retreat. Feel free to squint at these pictures. We didn't figure out all the camera doo-dads till partway through Budapest, and even then we sometimes messed it up. Not to worry, there's a whole lot of fuzzy pictures that aid clear memories. Which we have and you don't. Sorry, we wish we would have done better, too.

Although farming continues in this area, a lot of people from Warsaw are building weekend getaways out there. We rode around the neighborhood for a while with our very enthusiastic guide, Jadwiga, asking everyone we saw about the history of the area. We came across this roadside shrine which has been on the same spot in some form or other for centuries. On this day, it was decorated up for the Corpus Christi celebration, and there'll be lots more about that later.

Don't forget to squint! Or get up and stand across the room. It looks much clearer that way.

But wait! There's more!

2011-07-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

That was hardly the end of our day. Although we had been told, by the Warsaw Sofitel, like two days before we left, that the freakin' pool would be closed for our entire stay, it was too late to do anything about it. We had also booked several trips from there and the location was perfect, so we still went. They told us we could walk to a nearby hotel and swim there for 50 Euros a day. Gee, what a deal. At first we thought we might try to negotiate a better deal, then decided to skip the whole thing. But we did tell them we had booked the hotel for that reason, and we weren't happy. And of course they didn't give a crap, because they already had our money.

Here is the architecturally unlovely Warsaw Sofitel-Pilsudski Square:

Since they use a calendar, and not a thermometer, to decide when to do pool maintainence, we suggest you give them a big fat miss. I mean, come on, it was JUNE. That's what God made March for. There are some good things about the place, and we'll describe them, too, but there are other hotels in the area that are probably not so expensive and maybe they even give you what you pay for.

Another sad note, there was once a beautiful palace on the same site, but the Communists demolished it to make room for this unfortunate pile. And it was here, not only at this hotel, but in Warsaw, that we learned what "Communist Bloc" really means. Oh, sure, it often refers to a Cold War political entity, but it's actually a style of architecture. You need 1500 Communist blocs to make a hotel. Three and a half blocs make a medium apartment, 5792 and you have a train station. Communist children didn't play with Legos or Lincoln Logs, they played with Communist Blocs. Batteries sold separately.

So, what's good about the Warsaw Sofitel? They have a nice bar that looks out onto Pilsudski Square where all kinds of interesting things go on. There was a flash mob there our first day. The rooms have 110 volt outlets for recharging American things. The restaurant, while crazily expensive, is very good, and the hotel staff is pretty nice. They did set up our day trips in advance (for outrageous prices), but when you don't know the country or the language and you want to do something unusual, like dig up your ancestors, that's what happens.

We settled in our room and then went to the bar, where we always drank the same beer because we had made a pact to drink only local draft on this trip. That turned out to be an easy promise to keep! Ate right there in the restaurant and went to bed at 8:30 PM local which was after, like, 36 straight hours of not sleeping. Luckily, our private trip to Ulaszewo (Oo-la-SHAVE-oh)the next day wasn't until 11 AM, so we didn't have to worry about anything for a while. But hey, it was just the first full day.

Marathon Women

2011-07-25T00:13:00.000-07:00

We did it on purpose. We made our longest day of flying the first day of the trip. We flew to the farthest point on our journey, and worked backwards. That way, we reasoned, we would never have to spend such a long period flying again. And we were right, not that it made a shittin' bit of difference when all was said and done. That's called foreshadowing. Please take note. I don't want to foreshadow for no reason.

So we took the shuttle from the Hilton to Air France for our flight to Paris. We checked in nice and early to avoid problems and complications and all that. We ate in Chili's because we really didn't know if and when we would eat again. Sure, they actually feed you on foreign carriers, but what, and when, we had no idea. That was around 3 PM and the flight was scheduled to take off at 6 PM or so.

A thing about scheduling. Let's say you book your trip through some consolidator such as Expedia, and you book it far in advance, like, when you think prices will be best. You lock in your rates. But you don't lock in flight times. Every month between when you book until you actually go, sometimes more than once a month, you get notifications of flight changes. Add an hour. Subtract half an hour. And on and on. Just a few days before we left, we got news that our layover in Paris was going to be longer. I mean, it's good to know but there's nothing you can do about it. More foreshadowing there, as you'll see.

To keep up with this, we "invested" in a tiny, miserable netbook which I hoped would help us keep abreast of this sort of thing without being any fun so I wouldn't be tempted to use it a lot. It weighs about a pound and a half and fits in my shoulder bag. It has no memory worth mentioning and is very slow. I hate it, but I bought it to hate it so I would look at the sights and interact with my spouse and not always be staring at some stupid screen. Well, so I have to have wifi for it, of course. And I have to be able to charge it. So in the hotel I paid maybe five bucks for wifi. In the airport it cost me another five bucks for half an hour. Then I had to sit on the floor behind a pillar and fill it all up with American electricity. Many people do such things in airports.

Oh, I know, why not get an internet enabled cell phone? Because that means contracts. We use TracFone which has no contracts and is very cheap for the way we use a cell phone, which is basically to call 911. Thus a crappy netbook requiring wifi and recharging is better for us. And it worked very well for what I needed it for, which was checking reservations and professional e-mail to find out I didn't have a job. But that's not important right now.

I had an actual paper journal with me and a variety of pens with which I took notes in writing so I could produce this blog later. It's a much more pleasant way to spend time in Europe, or anywhere, than hunched over, staring at a screen with a keyboard so small only a five-year-old could use it easily. So I wrote in this journal at every opportunity, and I still fell behind, but I took many notes which I can barely read. All this, and the pictures, and the tickets I saved, and the daily cruise programs, will be very helpful, I'm sure. Because my brain is fried and Joyce's isn't much better.

It got close to time to board and suddenly my name is called. "Here, you're getting different seats," the agent says cheerfully, handing me a new boarding pass. While I'm trying to comprehend this, Joyce flies over the counter and strangles him. Actually all she did was make them give my original seat back. They thought I wanted to be able to hear the audio for the movie and whatnot. No, I can read, and prefer to. If that happens, they should ask you first rather than split up a family.

So, with that out of the way, we boarded yet another flight from hell, which is to say it was perfectly average. We had the oddest seats, two aisles, and the two next to me were empty! A young woman decided she wanted the window seat. Joyce also wanted it. Fight ensues. I play peacemaker. She's an economics student and is studying for finals. The center and aisle seats are extremely not conducive to studying. We relent. We really prefer aisle seats anyway. So she gets all her gear out and starts studying. We take off, level out, and they serve dinner. We eat it. She gets up to go to the loo and never returns. I get up to go to the loo and find her playing craps or something in the kitchen with six or seven young men from Ethiopia or some such place. Maybe Morocco. Several hours later, I go to pee again and find her asleep with them in a tangle of arms and legs. One more item to add to the list of things I don't understand.

A zillion hours after take-off, we land the next day in Paris, and discover that Charles DeGaulle Airport is really a poorly disguised biathlon course. Of course nearly every airport in the world is under constant renovation. So you grab your bags and run 500 yards, stop to pant and they shoot at you with signs that point in the wrong direction and people who work in the airport but know nothing about it. Run another 500 yards with bags. All turn around at once and run back. Most of this is happening in dimly-lit corridors with low ceilings on slippery flooring. Even if you can read French, you soon realize the information was for last week, when everyone was routed in the opposite direction. Grab your bags and run up and down several escalators, half of which are not working. End up in a dead-end tunnel. Turn around and realize that a narrow passageway you passed a while back is the official escape route. It ends at a security station. They take your water bottle, but it's empty by now anyway. Even though you never left the international part of the airport, they treat you as if you had just arrived from Somalia with a hand grenade clutched in your sweaty fist. On the other side, you put all your clothes back on, sometimes inside out, and finally stumble onto a concourse. Look out the window and see your bags being transferred merrily onto the plane to Warsaw. They rode while you did the airport obstacle course. Next time I'm going as baggage.

Suddenly we realized that, if our stopover had been any shorter, we wouldn't have had a snowball's chance of reaching the gate in time. Could this have been done on purpose? No way. Bought new water with credit cards because we still had no Euros, because they don't do Euros in Miami, boarded and collapsed.

The flight to Warsaw isn't terribly long, but we got to nap a little. The plane was half-empty besides, and it was a small one. And it was a good thing, too, because they used a ladder when we landed in Poland. As crazy as Paris was, this is even crazier. We walk off the tarmac into the terminal, and immediately begin climbing a long set of zigzag ramps. Higher and higher we go, until, at the very top, we have a lovely view of the runways. Then we walk some distance on this top level, until we arrive at a long series of working escalators to carry us down, all the way down to ground level again. Okay, that's really Polish, and I am allowed to say so because Joyce is Polish and she said it first. Climb up and ride down? Why not just walk straight across?

We collect the checked bags and go out, through no customs, no passport control and no security, into a waiting room where our little man with a namecard collects us with a cart, and we just walk out. Welcome to Poland!

Flying to Miami . . .

2011-07-23T23:47:00.000-07:00

. . . with Hertz, same as last year. One less encounter with the TSA is always a good thing. Also one less claustrophobic ride, one less chance to lose luggage, one less chance to be treated like self-loading cargo, one less fee to pay. Screw you, domestic United Statesian airlines.

We were booked at the Miami Hilton because it's comfortable but even they can't control the weather so we didn't swim because it was raining. But we did enjoy their restaurant very much. I had a cold (rare, as in almost tartare) steak salad and Joyce had some other such thing. We generally order things when we travel that Joyce doesn't make at home. This is why I almost never eat chicken abroad but I do eat steak or whatever they have for a specialty. And I never eat veal in the US, but I get it when I can in Europe. Not that you can find a lot of veal here anyway.

So, a very uneventful stay that consisted mostly of reading Stephen King's Duma Key and charging batteries. Even Joyce was reading a collection of stories by Faye Kellerman. "Halleluja! It's a miracle!" (Bob Gunton's Warden Sam Norton in Shawshank Redemption.)

My spouse and I went to Europe and all I got was this headache.

2011-07-23T13:04:00.001-07:00

I need that made up into a t-shirt. Anyway, yes, we're back, and I'm almost ready to start this blog. It looks like I actually am starting already, doesn't it? I'm really not. This is just my list of excuses for not starting it.

I have several hotel complaints to make. Some are for mere inconvenience, others are for injuries, so I can't mention any names yet. We were also harassed by a Passport Control Agent in Miami, for being gay. Then of course, the injuries persist. I'm not going to die of them, but they make it hard to do stuff, and to concentrate on stuff.

Finally, I have a bunch of things to review on line. They won't reach the level of an official complaint but it's necessary to get the information out there for the sake of other travelers. At least I got that part started, but for legal reasons, some will have to wait. because if some organizations come through, I want to give them credit.

So to give you an idea of how things went in Poland (Not too bad at all! But it seems like years ago) here is our first picture from our trip:

It's pronounced "Ziv-ee-itch." You say it real fast.

Na zdrowie! ("Nas-drove-ya")

Train tickets

2011-05-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

Have you ever tried to make a train reservation online? I've been trying for months to get us on the night train from Warsaw to Budapest. It works like this: only one site, Travelocity, does train reservations at all. I know:

1. Why not go to the Eurail site? Because you can't use it from the US.

2. Why not go to other travel sites? I went to the US ones. Some of the other European ones can't be accessed from the US, either, and others simply don't work.

3. Why not wait until you get to Warsaw? Because the travel sites tell you to make you overnight train reservations "well in advance."

But even Travelocity had its limits. For the first serveral months, I tried to make the reservations, went partway through the procedure (up until you try to pay) only to be told it was too early. "But fill out this form and we'll notify you when reservations for that date are open." Fine. I filled it out. Twice.

To be on the safe side, I didn't wait for the notification. Instead, every week to ten days, I would visit the site and try again, discover I was still too early, and receive a message asking me to fill out the notification form. But I figured twice was enough.

Finally, just after midnight on May 1, I tried again, and voila! I was allowed to make a reservation. AND pay! So I did, and you know what? A private sleeper is a luxury-level item. Okay, yes, it does include room, board AND transportation. Those are good. The adventure is good. It's unique. Because we're not doing it again.

But here's the kicker: you can't have your tickets. 1. You are in the US. You can't wait to collect them in Europe. 2. You can't print them off the computer, because you are in the US, etc.

Then how the hell do I get my freakin' tickets??? Anyone want to guess?

Snail mail. In fact, UPS Second Day service. That'll be $20, please. They arrived yesterday, three tiny little pieces of paper with CARBON obviously typed on a TYPEWRITER.

And I still haven't gotten my notification that reservations are now being accepted. Welcome to the 21st century.

ETA: The notification that tickets were available finally appeared on May 10. Way to go, Travelocity!

Anticipating Europe

2011-03-05T21:55:00.000-08:00

Well, one of us is and the other isn't ready but she's been writing the checks so I guess we're going.

As so often happens, some simple little trip idea has grown into a monster with a life of its own. We thought we were just taking an Olivia cruise of the Western Mediterranean, originally. But no one goes to Europe for just a week if they can help it, and we know we need to rest more now that we are older. So we're resting in Poland, Hungary, Spain and Italy.

Doesn't sound restful? Yeah, well, that sort of went by the wayside. We decided to go a couple of places we'd never been, places formerly behind the Iron Curtain, which have since come out to play. So we're flying all the way to Warsaw the first day, spending a few days, and taking a night train to Budapest, spending a few days, then flying into Barcelona a couple of days early. At the end of the cruise, we'll spend a few days in Rome. All hotels have spas in them this time, and we have built in enough down-time to use them.

My goal between now and then is to get certain parts of me in better shape, specifically my back and my gut. The back needs to be stronger since I end up schlepping most of the luggage, and the gut needs to be smaller, so I don't have to schlep that, too. And the unfinished travel details, like that train reservation, have to be firmed up. Right now I have visions of riding in the baggage car.

I'll post a few updates before we go, hand-write the blog while away, and start posting when we get back. Stay tuned!

A final word about children: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

2010-07-12T23:09:00.000-07:00

While we were in South America, we encountered only a few USAian children. There were plenty of South American children, but they are unobtrusive because they learn how to behave in a civilized manner at an early age. We saw them dressed up and going to school, working farms, working in the markets, and traveling on foot and waiting at bus stops. In other words, they were busy, not hanging around being useless, noisy pains in the ass.

Of course there were none on the Millenium, except the large Continental children who don't all know how to behave, either. But at least their parents aren't there to run interference for them.
As to the American children, there were two boys misbehaving in the hall of the hotel our last night in Quito, and we took turns opening the door and asking them if we should call management, since they were screaming for help and there was no adult in sight. I don't think anyone had ever challenged their out-of-control antics in their lives. They ran in their room and slammed the door. They were at it the next morning again at 6 AM. We were already up, so we took the trouble to explain to them they were not in the USA and this is not civilized. So they ran away again. At that point, we didn't know for sure there were no children on our boat, and we were concerned they'd show up, but we never saw them again, thank God.

The next one was at El Monasterio in Cusco, This was the screamer I referred to early in the trip blog. He was maybe two and screamed so long and so loud that Joyce finally told his parents to shut him up. Remember, she is large and sounds larger. So they took him out. What the hell was he doing in the restaurant anyway? Why was he even there?

The last ones were two delightful kids with their parents and grandparents on that hellish ride back from the train up Machu Picchu, back to Cusco. You couldn't even tell they were on the bus. We complimented their parents and learned these kids had been in travel training from infancy. Their mother had herself been schlepped to India and Turkey when she was eight and eleven, so she knew how to do it. Now if she, and her family, could do it, why can't other American parents do it? Huh?

This is why, American travel industry, we will be leaving the country AGAIN on our next trip, in a lesbian cruise (On a ship we've sailed on before. With elevators!) of the Mediterranean, where no children are allowed. And then probably on to Kracow and Budapest, where we hope American parents will not venture with American children. If you can't shut the buggers up, leave them home until they figure out how to escape. We'll take it from there.

See you next summer!

Lessons learned: sick of it.

2010-07-12T21:31:00.001-07:00

I'm sick of learning lessons when I travel. I don't mean lessons like, every now and then, the school children of Cusco stage environmental demonstrations that shut the whole city down for ten minutes at a time. That's fun learning, like the mating habits of blue-footed boobies.

The kind of lessons I'm sick of is that boats in the Galapagos don't carry marine toilet paper, and you apparently can't fix a damaged railroad track in four months, and you get charged out the ass for every airport you fly through. Or that catamarans are not more stable after all, or that there are no benches in any museum in South America. I could go on, but if you've been reading, you have learned these lessons, too. I hope they help.

We don't have any immediate plans to return to South America. We would like to try an Amazon cruise, but we wonder what lessons we might learn there that we couldn't discern while still at home, sometime before making a down payment.

Here's a big, important lesson: get a good in-country travel agent with a private guide. I can't say too much about Galasam. http://www.galasam.com/index.html

From now on, I will be a lot more aware of and prepared for airport departure taxes. We want to leave, so we pay. Like luggage fees on US domestic carriers.

From now on, if a boat is involved, I will ask how high all the steps are, and if they use marine toilet paper. In my own defense, I DID ask if they had laundry, and they said yes, but they didn't. Likewise computer facilities. So sometimes knowing what to ask, and actually asking, don't help at all. For one thing, actual lying may be going on, and by that I mean, the Millenium people TO the Galasam people. The Galasam people did their level best, but they can't go out and ride every boat every year. Sometimes they may be hoping, but they don't know. Sometimes they are telling the truth, and the truth changes. The washing machine breaks. The engine quits. They don't have what they once did. Or they have something new: silverfish and waterbugs.

From now on, I will ask how many animals we can expect to see, and how hard or easy it is to see them. As we learned in Africa, seeing a white rhinoceros doesn't mean up close, or frequently, or even "white."

I did know to ask what kind of people go on a given kind of trip. But there is no control over which people go on YOUR trip. We knew we'd be on a small boat with 14 total strangers for eight days and no means of escape. That's the chance you take. Again, adult Eurotrash beats kids hands down. It could have been so much worse. It could also have been better.

We did pack right. We didn't starve, although there were times we didn't eat very well. We didn't get very sick. We didn't sustain permanent injuries. It didn't kill us. If the steps on an Amazon river boat aren't too high, I might go. But not if there's no marine toilet paper. That's too much even for me.

Some final thoughts next time.

Home again. Jiggety-jig.

2010-07-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

We had asked for late (as in 1 PM) checkout, but come 9 AM, we were both awake and dying to see the dogs. We got up and packed, and that was when I found something funny: the security guy in San Jose had overlooked all my other batteries, around 12-15 of them all in various places around my carry-ons, including the one he went through. Joyce thought he just needed some batteries.

The last week or so of the trip, I had been wanting a sandwich. I know it sounds strange, but we were always eating such formal meals, even on airplanes. All hot, all the food groups. So as we left the airport, we ate breakfast in Burger King, our first fast food since we ate in McDonalds' on our way down. And we haven't had any since, either.

Off to Hertz, canary yellow Aveo this time, and much better directions through town to I-75. Did you know cars can fly? Well, this one did, except for those fancy coffees they sell at McDonalds. We didn't even eat lunch. They weren't quiiiiiiiiite ready for us to turn in our car, so to save time, we zipped home and got the van so we could go straight to Dora's and get the kids.

That's when we discovered the AC had died. And we thought "Fuck." And we said it, too. Joyce immediately called for emergency service, but no one could come until the next day. We had no time to fool with it, so we dumped off the rental, got the dogs, brought them home and tried again. And I did all the trouble-shooting steps, too. It didn't work, but Joyce said, "Well, leave the house-fan on, and at sundown we'll open everything up."

We were sitting on the patio drinking ice water under the fan when we heard a funny noise. Circuit breaker? House breaker? Went in and felt cool air coming out a vent! Couldn't believe it! Temperature stared dropping a degree an hour. Yippee!

We'll never know what it was. We watched it like hawks and nothing happened, so we cancelled the service call, left loads of crap in the living room, didn't unpack or clean anything, just made sandwiches and went to bed.

Tomorrow I'll deal a little with lessons learned and reveal the location of our next trip!

Heading North

2010-07-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

We knew this would be a long day. One thing that makes days of flying long is, sometimes, you have to retrieve all your luggage. You can't check it all the way through. Other things are so many stations of the airport cross, where you pay and show ID, and pay, and show ID. And nothing is ever next to anything else. They get your itinerary in advance and re-arrange the airport so this can never happen.

First flight: Cusco to Lima. We hiked all through all the stations and when we got to the gate, we had to go outside and climb up the steps to the plane with our carry-ons. That did it. Joyce finally cried, and that was about my lowest point, too. So we sat there and cried together. I think it honestly helped, because somehow it never got that bad again.

Then along came a smelly little man. I have so sense of smell, but Joyce does, and he was on the aisle and turned toward us constantly trying to see out the window. His first flight ever, I think. So we rearranged ourselves and he sat at the window with me in the middle. So what? It's just an hour.

At Lima we had a LOT of time so we spent our last Peruvian Soles on some keychains and just waitied anxiously, wanting so bad to get on a plane and go home. You know it's bad when we want to get on a plane. This happened right on time, as usual, and we flew to San Jose, same as when we flew down.

And this is where we had a small adventure. It seems, perhaps, for some reason (they tell you nothing) there was some sort of security problem in San Jose. They had the whole airport blocked off into sections and a cop of some sort every few feet. We had to empty all our luggage onto tables while they picked through it. They were very nice, really, and we had to laugh at how they reacted to some of our stuff and then they would laugh, too. The had an incredible pile of contraband on the floor and Joyce whispered she thought she would lose all her medications and liquids, and she had even forgotten to check her toenail scissors. So we waited anxiously (again. A lot of anxiety on this leg) to see if she'd be hauled off or something, but they took nothing from her. Meanwhile, the guy going through my bags confiscated four rechargeable AA batteries from my underarm bag, which was not a big problem, because I hadn't been able to recharge them and they were probably dead. So I said, sure, take them, and we went from there to a body search, (they had a very attractive young officer for us) and onto the plane, which was being held because of the security delay.

So as soon as all the passengers had transferred, we took off for Miami, and again, got a meal and arrived on time. We had reservations for the airport hotel, because we knew damn good and well we'd be going nowhere fast after such a long day and a late arrival.

There was a tremendously long check-in line, a surly porter and a crazy person in the lobby, but we blew all that off and just had a drink and went to bed. The end. Almost.

http://www.galasam.com/index.html

No, you didn't fix it.

2010-07-10T22:29:00.001-07:00

Next day, before we left we took pictures with the kids in the hotel gardens.

The hot tub is just up the stone path behind her.

After lunch, we went back down the mountain early in order to see the town and go to the market before getting on the train.

This is the center of town with a statue of an Inca king and a couple of those figures of ancient Inca to pose with. We chose this one because she could hold the kids. Click to see how clever this is.

This is the flag of Cusco City and Province. We like it a lot. Guess why.

The market here is gigantic and you can get lost easily in it. Because they want you to, because you will buy more stuff while trying to get out. But we did get some neat, cheap stuff, so we're really not complaining. In the train station waiting room, we met one of the backpackers from the Millenium. He had broken off from them to get up to MachuPICCHu alone. He was more pleasant by himself. They all were, to give them credit. In a pack, they are a huge nuisance. Individually, they are just people.

Now, we have to backtrack a little bit. After our harrowing ride and climb the previous day, I told the people up at the Sanctuary, who are also in charge of the train (it's all Orient Express, and so is El Monasterio), that there was no way Joyce was going to climb all that way up that horrible hill, and I wanted someone to meet us with a wheelchair or a dolly or an alpaca or whatever. I expected porters to meet us as well, because they showed up before and helped us down. We reviewed this with train personnel at the station. Someone would be there to help us.

Well, they weren't. They lied again! Not only was there no one there to meet us, there were no porters at all! Not even for luggage. Joyce got out her stick and I took both bags and started up the hill. We were a third of the way up before one poor clown in a train uniform offered to help with the bags. Not with Joyce, just the bags. I was livid, or as they say in Great Britain, incandescent. Furious. I rose hell and hollered bloody goddamn murder all the way up the hill. Meanwhile, porters came out and physically carried a severely disabled woman up. But no one helped Joyce. She had to do it herself, and God bless her, she did. I asked her after how she could possibly and she said, "It was a ramp. If it had been steps, I never could have. Period."
Well, Elson got an earful after that insane bus ride back in the dark through herds of cattle. Luckily on this bus was an American family, three generations, including kids, who had obviously travelled together a lot, and they made us laugh all the way back with their commentary on the godawful aspects of everything that was happening. Pretty soon we were joining in and laughing, too. Anyway Elson raised hell at El Monasterio and we got some discounts off our bill to sort of appease us, but that was just fucking inexcusable. So screw Orient Express. We are done with them forever.

That night we were back in our same room as before, the one with this reproduction of the Pirate Madonna and Chucky. You have to click it.

We totally repacked everything, making sure we carried all souvenirs, checking all other baggage. Elson had arranged a later flight for us because we had a lot of time between stopovers. Too bad the sleep machine batteries chose that night to die, and as much as I recharged them, it never worked right again until I charged them at home. So not a lot of sleep again. But onward! Only two days to do, and only one required flying. Yay!

There! We fixed it!

2010-07-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

They lied. They lied about having fixed the train tracks after the February landslide. The tracks are still under it. What they did do was to invent a fantasy that they fixed it. You used to drive about five miles out of Cusco and pick up the famous train and go about 40 miles to Machu Picchu. Now you drive about 60 miles in a miserable cramped minivan over the roughest roads, absolutely not navigable and completely unsafe by American standards, and then hike down a steep gravel path at a temporary train station where the toilets don't work, and take the beautiful train about 12 miles to Machu Picchu.

Were we pissed off? You bet. It would be one thing if they told you this in advance, and offered a refund if you declined to go, but they didn't. Peruvian vans are made to fit Peruvian people. Joyce couldn't even move her legs all that time, and neither could anyone else over 5'6". Then with her bad knees and labyrinthitis (courtesy of a high-performance jet ride when she was in the Air Force), she was expected to haul her own luggage down a small landslide to the train at a very high altitude. Luckily the locals discovered an opportunity here, and hired themselves out as porters. So all we had to carry was ourselves. They told us it was definitely going to be fixed by June 29. I bet it's not, but I don't care enough to find out.

The train itself was good, but the way they arranged to get to and from it stank. Not everyone who wants to visit Machu Picchu is an agile young backpacker, but they have no accommodations for anyone who isn't. We arrived at Aguas Caliente and were herded through the train station market to real buses to take us the last eight miles up. So if they had real buses for this crazy, narrow switchback, why not for the endless crazy ride to the temporary "train station"?

We got up to the top, to the Park itself, and there was the Sanctuary Hotel. Yeah, it's five stars and just outstanding, but even THEY don't have a friggin' ramp up to the front door. And no elevators, either, not even a dumbwaiter for luggage. Our guide met us there, we checked in, and prepared to see the site. We went through the gates and took a look, and Joyce turned around and left. The "steps" are huge and uneven, and not a railing to be found. With any balance or mobility problems, you are not going there, period. They don't accommodate you, and they don't tell you. Their only "accommodation" is that if you are limited, you may use hiking poles. That's just not enough, folks. Some ramps and railings, some leveling of the walking areas, would not destroy the authenticity nor the ambience of the site. Shame on Peru for this. Failing any accommodation, let people know that this is not something everyone can do. Even though it's a valley, it's still high in the Andes. It would be hard even if it were at sea level.

I spent about two and a half hours with the guide myself. I made an immediate rule, two up and two down from the entry level. I would not even attempt anything higher or lower, and I had to rock-climb my way up and down the walls most of the time as it was.

Here's that postcard picture that everyone takes when they arrive. Look carefully. We'll be returning to this later.

This is right at the entrance, which is paved and level. After that, forget it.

See?

People should know several other things before going. It may be very hot (our first day) or very rainy (our second), for which we were prepared. It may be extremely crowded, and you may not be able to enter. This didn't happen to us, but it does happen. You must carry water and there are no bathrooms. These are understandable, but you should be aware well in advance. Not everyone was. Some people had no clue.

As to the Park, well, it's beautiful. The Inca made sure of that, and the archaeological authorities have done a superb job of restoring it, even though it is far from generally accessible. You know what Machu Pichhu is? Probably the royal Inca summer home. And they did a lot of astronomy and artisan work up there, too. So this was an indication of the advanced nature of their culture, that they could create a basically superfluous site for the pursuit of self-actualization, at least for some people. It's a really, really nice spot for these purposes. All those pretty terraces are agricultural. They were pretty self-sustaining up there.

I like this site:

http://www.about-peru-history.com/facts-machu-picchu.html

Cleverly, the authorities of today realized llamas eat grass, are gentle and visitors love them. So guess who does the gardening? They really are adorable. Just don't step in the llama shit. They avoid the stone steps, so this isn't a big issue. Don't forget to click on the pictures. You can see a lot more detail if you do. Like the baby llama.

Here's one of my favorite things, the reflecting telescope.

It may look like two dog dishes, but the concept is you use it at night to look at the stars and chart their movement. Only works when it's clear, but I guess it worked often enough since their calendar and star charts are flawless.

Some other interesting shots of the restoration:

The top one of these three is the Temple of the Moon, the bottom is the Temple of the Sun, and the middle is a pretty picture of the landscaping originated by the Incas. They had beautiful little gardens all over.

Following my exploration, we had lunch and then a very long nap, after which we were scheduled for the spa. When we made that reservation we had no idea how high we'd have to climb to reach it, but guess what. When we got up there, we had the same view of the postcard I mentioned above! A little further back, a little higher and not as bright, but Joyce got to see the Park after all. And the hot tub was stone, and we had it all to ourselves with fuzzy robes and slippers. We only got out when the mosquitoes came to supper.

That night we had a fantastically elegant dinner including music by local Inca musicians. I bought their CD and have actually been playing it since we got back. You can see them here:

YouTube - Allpa Machupicchu

Joyce ate alpaca and swears it tastes like veal. I had alpaca burger in Cusco, and I thought it tasted like beef. Very rich. For Joyce, the evening was the highlight of Machu Picchu so I'm glad we stayed up there, and that she enjoyed it so much. At this point, I was feeling terribly guilty about the difficulty of the trip, and both of us pretty much wanted nothing more than to go home. Knowing the next couple of days were very likely to be pure hell, we went to bed about nine and slept twelve hours. Damn good thing we did.

Marching through Cusco

2010-07-04T21:24:00.000-07:00

I think I said earlier that all flights to Cusco from Lima are in the morning. And there are about a dozen of them! Anyway, we got back across the street to the airport from the hotel (awful breakfast, by the way) and went through several confusing interludes attempting to get boarding passes, get our luggage checked, pay the departure tax, find the gate. It really was hell because our Spanish isn't that good and our experience with automated check-in quite limited. Finally a LAN agent checked us in manually. If not for her, I think we'd still be there. And we had to get Peruvian momey at some point, too. Then it turned out they took dollars. I gather the US dollar is becoming the Euro of South America.

The flight to Cusco is very short. They still managed to serve breakfast, take off and land on time, and so on. Every flight there is a nail in the coffin of US domestic airlines. The more USAians that fly foreign carriers, they less they are likely to put up with crap. So fly foreign, everyone!

http://www.galasam.com/index.html

We were collected at the airport by the best travel agent in Peru, Elson Espinoza. He had an air conditioned van parked inside the airport. Imagine that! And they took us to the first five-star hotel either of us ever visited (I guess the Swissotel Quito is a four), El Monasterio.

Here are some pictures:

Ignore my exhausted expression and ever-present cup of coco mate tea and just look at how beautiful these surroundings are. The building dates to 1495 and became a hotel in the 1940s. They play tapes of Gregorian chants all day and have a small but fantastic chapel still in use. Here's their site:

http://www.monasteriohotel.com/web/ocus/hotel_monasterio.jsp?c=ppc&p=worldwide&cr=mon_brand&gclid=CMjOztXY2KICFcxj2godMAkyzA

They did our laundry and held our extra baggage while we were up in Machu Picchu. This is how they say it there: MachuPICCHu.

After a couple of hours rest and some soup (during which we encountered that horrible screaming child in the restaurant), Elson put us on a bus for a whirlwind tour of the Inca and Spanish and archaelogical sites of the area. Unfortunately, we arrived right in the middle of the Feast of the Virgin where they carry the huge statues through the streets. Traffic was awful, it was crowded, and they tried to take us into way too many sites. Joyce and I only actually went through maybe three, and stayed on the bus otherwise. You really need much more time than this to do Cusco properly, which we didn't really know and wouldn't have done if we had known. But if you are interested in Inca culture, you should plan accordingly. I enjoyed Sacsayhuaman, an ancient Inca site, and the Cathedral best.

Here's the main square, with the Cathedral, from up a mountain outside town. THE Cathedral is the one whose towers are on the left. The other one is just a local one that happens to be right next to it.

Here's why there are so many cathedrals cheek-by-jowl in South American cities: they were established by four different orders: Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits and somebody. Lots of competition for souls.

More photos:

Taken from where we took the previous picture.

Sacsayhuaman.

Both of the above are the main square right around sunset.

You can't take pictures inside the cathedral, but it houses the famous Cusco Last Supper. Here's a link for the cathedral:

Cusco Cathedral - Cusco, Peru

And here's a link to the painting. You have to scroll down. It's hilarious.

The Cathedral Of Cusco Peru Travels And Tours Pictures, Photos, & Information.

Look carefully. In addition to the cui on a platter, there's a bottle of chicha (Andean Viagara [the local rotgut]) on the table, and the face of Judas (lower right, looking out) is Juan Pizarro.

Next morning at the butt-crack of dawn, we were scheduled to take the train to MachuPICCHu. So as soon as we got back to the Monasterio, we ordered room service, re-packed (you can only take one bag each on the train) and collapsed. Getting to be a habit.

Easier to say than Eyjafjallajokull

2010-07-03T13:59:00.001-07:00

And slightly easier to navigate around, too! Meet Tungurahua!

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/28/ecuador.volcano.evacuations/index.html

We had heard about the eruption earlier, while at sea, but what the hell can you do? So we didn't worry. Franklin told us we would be met by a Galasam representative in Guayaquil.

That morning, we went to another sort of museum. No animals this time, just story boards and a few relics of early colonization attempts, and the World War II installation, and so on. We also wandered around downtown eating ice cream until it was time to drive to the airport. All the Americans got off, leaving the Brits and Israelis to finish their trip.

The flight was pleasant and uneventful as we had come to expect in South America. And when we got off in Guayaquil, there was our representative with a letter. He helped us get to our next flight, which was first to Quito and then to Lima. Everything had to be re-routed around the volcano, and the airlines did their very best to accommodate everyone. They escorted us through the airports and held the planes for us. You would never see the in the US. Never. Even when Joyce was struggling in the Quito airport with the altitude, they all slowed down to help her. And somehow we still took 0ff on time. And the flight wasn't full and the entertainment was free and they fed us and you know the drill.

http://www.galasam.com/index.html

In Lima, the hotel I chose was straight across the street from the baggage claim and there was a representative again to meet us and help us with our luggage. It was very late and we went right to bed because we had to get up at the butt-crack of dawn again to fly to Cusco. It was the worst of all the days except the day we flew back to Miami. Fortunately, due to just plain dumb luck, every hotel I got us into was the best, so we were able to rest between bouts of tourism.

More details on those coming soon!

Hybrid Iguana Island

2010-07-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

The Plazas are two teeny weenie islets, one of which (South island) supports both marine and land iguanas. Unfortunately neither island supports average foot traffic, but the lizards hang around the tiny landing, so I went.

And here are some pictures of an iguana. According to the sites I saw, hybrids are darker than this, but I have no explanation for a land iguana OR a marine iguana with these markings.

The white stuff is all petrified guano. Very slippery, which is what makes walking so difficult. So right after I took this picture, I went back to the boat.

Hybrid iguanas are all sterile, the product of marine fathers and land mothers. You can read about it here:

Plazas Island Galapagos

Our final stop was Santa Fe, which is just overrun with sea lions. And while I was there, and the others were hiking, I filmed an attempted sea lion rape by a juvenile male of a still infertile young female. No one likes to see or hear about this sort of thing, but it happens. I have tried to upload some videos but Blogger won't allow it. There have been a lot of recent incidents, according to the log, so we'll see. I'll keep trying.

But here's a still anyway.

Our plan was to pack before bed that night and put the luggage out. It's less formal and hectic than on a big ship. You can see where your stuff is all the time. They can't lose it. Unfortunately Millenium, or the ocean, or the Captain, had a different idea. and so began the night from hell. We couldn't stand up or walk in the cabin, so we had to set the alarm for 5 AM to pack. It wasn't Drake Passage rough, but there was no sleeping and no moving except to try to keep from being thrown out of bed. Luckily, we just don't have that much stuff with a rule about no more than we can carry. But it was godawful, and we knew it would be a long day, flying all the way from San Cristobal to Lima. Unbeknownst to us, it was about to get longer.

Hangin' in the Mangroves

2010-06-28T22:53:00.001-07:00

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

First stop today was Bartholome, another small island just east of Santiago and my favorite beach and place to look at. It has this weird lava formation called the Pinnacle. And a rainbow beach. Best swimming we encountered on the whole trip. We love sea lions, but you know, they foul the beach. However, it's their beach, so it's not right for us to complain. But when they just don't happen to be there, well, that's not always a bad thing.

After Baltra, we headed to those mangoves Franklin promised to show us. This is a good place to be on a hot day, one of the few places in the Galapagos where you will find any shade at all. Here we are with Franklin. He's smart, funny and very cute. Joyce didn't like him as well as I did because he picked on this one young guy, but it was just male bonding.

And this was where we got to see those marine tortoises up close, without snorkeling. Look at the nice reflections.

And here's a tortoise.

After this, we had an endless ride back to Millenium because she could not come in any closer to pick us up. But if not for that ride, we wouldn't have this great sunset to show you:

Next: our last day in the islands.

http://www.galasam.com/index.html

Abandon ship! Pinzones!

2010-06-26T23:03:00.001-07:00

Or not. It was just the lifeboat drill. We had it on our fifth day out. Thank goodness nothing happened before that! I wondered why we weren't having one but convinced myself it was because the water out there is so shallow, they didn't need to. I didn't want to say anything lest it force us into the pangas for no good reason.

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

In fact, they did want us to abandon ship to refuel at Baltra. Apparently having passengers aboard during refueling ops is a no-no. My retired fuels officer spouse says so. But there was no place for us to go, so we had to hide and be quiet. We were supposed to have been taken off to a mangrove swamp during this, but because of the blown engine, it would have taken too long for Millenium to backtrack for us, to say nothing of the hit-or-miss motor on the one panga. So we agreed to nap and shut up about it.

We did go to the mangrove swamp eventually, though, and we got to see marine tortoises because they hang around the surface there. I'll save the photos for that post. In this post I'm putting all my pinzones, which are finches, Read on for details.

Right after Santa Cruz we went to Rabida, a tiny island just due north of Perto Ayora, whose distinctive feature is red sand. It's also a good place to see finches. Before I post finch pictures, some information is helpful. You will not see finches unless you are QUIET. Well, 16 people and a guide can't be quiet. So the thing to do is let everyone else get away, way away, from you, and then stand in a thicket and make bird noises. Seriously. Just stand still and they'll come out. So I saw more finches than anyone else. Finches, however, are not "pretty," but they are important because they were Darwin's key to natural selection. Here are several kinds. They are very hard to see, so click the pics and scroll around.

First, the red sand beach.

Before I show the finches, check out this bird. Be sure to enlarge the photo. It's some sort of a frigate bird, which you can tell from the body and the white wing stripe. The red head indicates it's a juvenile. Since it takes over a year to raise one, they grow as big as their parents before leaving the nest. This one is quite large, and is probably waiting on the nest to be fed.

Now, the finches. These are from around all the islands, not just Rabida.

In the photo below is a ground finch. You have to click and look carefully. They're not supposed to be easy to see. If you don't like finch pictures, that's fine. Skip them. You have no idea how many I had to take to get these. They are so fast and jump around so much, it's nearly impossible. It was like trying to photograph the Least Chipmunk last year in South Dakota. I had to take 20 to get one.

There are two in this next one.

Here, at the end, is a juvenile Oyster Catcher, also on Rabida. Franklin said this was rare.

Sombrero Chino, our second stop of the day, had a lot of animals. too, kind of like Espanola. Coming up you'll see the Ruddy Turnstone Crab, a hawk, and a crazed sea lion mother calling her pup. The hawk was one of my finds from standing around alone, quietly, like the finches. This was why I never cared if I didn't finish a hike. I saw a lot just by being patient. I was the only one who saw this sea lion drama, and one other on our last day there.

Here, you can see where the island got its name. It's just off the southeastern tip of Santiago and doesn't appear on most maps.

Zoom in to see the crabs.

And the hawk. See how effective protective coloration is!

And here's mom.

Note there is another seal in the photo, but that is not HER baby. He or she arrives a split second later and they settled down to nurse right there on the rocks.

Finally, we took a little panga ride to go penguin spotting. Remember, penguins are black with little streak of white, and they hang out on black lava rocks streaked with white guano. So this, believe me, is an excellent picture of a Galapagos penguin, which, by the way, are the third smallest in the world.

As always, enlarge for detail. The little head and face are pointing left.

Dueling pharmacies, dueling cultures

2010-06-26T12:51:00.001-07:00

I found one of the oddest things about Ecuador was how there was a whole set of the same kind of store in every block: farmacia, polleria, alimentaria and on and on. It makes SOME sense, considering all the walking they must do, but they're still all awfully close together. But even crazier is when there are two, or even three, of the same kind of store in a row. So we went ashore with Franklin and he took us to two pharmacies, side by side. We got half of what we needed in each one. And here's a tip: if you must get a cold, do it in Ecuador. They have nothing like our FDA. I don't know what was in the stuff, but in 48 hours the whole thing was gone, and in between, all the symptoms were totally under control. It was like I didn't have a cold at all, once I got that stuff. I don't ask questions I can't stand the answers to.

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

The next day we went by bus up into the highlands of Santa Cruz. This is where the big land tortoises live, and their habitat is a national park. Again, we didn't see a lot of them, and we wasted a tremendous amount of time watching people trying to get into, and move around in, a toroise shell, minus the original occupant. One or two would have been sufficient, really. This was the cutest.

So then we started hiking all over to look for them. Joyce went, too! We had our walking sticks, as always. The light conditions for tortoise-picture taking weren't the best, because they go under the bushes, but I caught one out in the open.

Franklin said they may be slow (They certainly are!) but they can cover three miles or more a day, especially when highly motivated by things like mating. We watched a slow-motion chase that went on the whole time we were there without reaching resolution. He was bigger but she was faster. And did you know that turtles (land or marine, any size or species) can't die of old age? They can only die of disease, injury or predation. They know these creatures are hundreds of years old, but exactly how old, they can't tell. You can assume at least some of them, the ones who hid well and weren't eaten by humans, were around when Darwin visited. They date the ones that are born now, but as far as the ones already there, no clue.

Anyway, it finally got too hot for hiking so we got back on the bus and went to a lava tube. That was down a lot of steps, again with no railings, and sounded too messy with not enough payoff, so we passed on that. Then we returned to Puerto Ayora to panga out to the boat for lunch. Even though this was a built-up area, it has the most beautiful water I've ever seen. Franklin says it has to do with the algae and the depth and the position on the equator. I mean, look at this.

And then when we got back on the boat, there was a tortoise in our cabin!

Well! That was exciting! After lunch we went to the Charles Darwin Research Center where Lonesome George lives. He wasn't out, though; too hot. But we saw his relatives.

And neighbors. This is a land iguana. All the dark ones are the marine type. There's one island where they mix and you can see some hybrids, maybe.

After the Research Center, they told us it was just a mile back into town. Yeah, over broken sidewalks in 98 F. No thanks. We called a cab. Then one of the pangas was down for maintenance so we all crammed into one. It was a long, low ride, but the water was beautiful!

At the dock, we said goodbye to our gaggle of backpackers. That makes this a good place to discuss some things we learned about how Ecuadorans view their guests from around the world. Americans, Canadians, Australians and and Kiwis are all welcomed with open arms. However, they HATE Western Europeans, thinking they're a bunch of arrogant, useless slobs. Oddly, the British are not included as "Europeans" although we USAians often group them together. British people are lumped in with Canadians and Americans for Ecuadoran purposes.

Of all the Europeans, they hate the Germans most. And right up there with the Germans are the Argentineans, the Texans of South America. They apparently never shut up about how big and rich they are. Ecuadorans and Peruvians don't like that. This year, lacking a team in the World Cup, Ecuador is cheering for Brazil, Argentina's arch-enemy. That's all for today's lesson on prejudice around the world. Seems like we all have them.

Next: Hide! Hide! They're refuelling outside!

Floreana. Santa Maria. Whatever.

2010-06-25T20:52:00.001-07:00

Many of the islands have more than one name. This was one of them, which we reached after another overnight cruise.

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

We went for a hike at 5:45 AM, before breakfast, on the off chance we might see sea tortoises leaving the beach. Alas, no such luck. We hiked clear across the island and back, though, all of us, including Joyce. We did see some other things. We saw endemic flamingos, which are hard to find, especially this time of year. When we were in Africa, we saw thousands, all in one place, like that airplane scene in Out of Africa. Here we saw four.

Also, in the Antarctic, we saw what seemed like millions of penguins. Here we saw six, and we're not sure it wasn't the same three, over and over. On the other hand, here we saw hundreds of sea lions on every island. In the Antarctic, we saw three on three separate occasions. So there you go.

On this island, we also heard a long, boring story about attempts by crazy people to colonize it. They all failed or died or disappeared. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, "Heigh ho."

When we got back to the boat, we had a real American breakfast with all the trimmings for a change. It was a nice surprise.

Later the same day, same island. at another wet landing, we saw Post Office Bay, an informal historic post office begun by whalers where travelers drop off and collect mail and hand-deliver it to total strangers they happen to live near. We have five and plan to take some day trips as excuses for eating out. We didn't leave any. We don't know anybody. Several of our companions, however, sent cards to themselves just to see what would happen.

Then they snorkeled and we swam a lot. It was yet another really beautiful beach with warm, calm water.

If you just sort of hung in the water, all kinds of fish would swim by, and boobies and frigate birds were everywhere, diving for food. It was just fun to float around and watch.

It was here that my cold and sore throat symptoms began to manifest themselves, but I still went on every landing, kept on hiking and kept on swimming. I had no intentions of ever coming back, so I just doped myself to the gills and kept going. If I wasn't ashore or eating, I was in bed, propped up in my corner against a tower of life preservers, rolled-up blankets, extra sweatshirts and pillows. And every day the steward thoughtfully dismantled the entire thing. We learned in a big hurry that they would fold anything they found out in the cabin. Anything. Let your imagination be your guide.

Meanwhile, the battle of the sluts continued on land and at sea. I'm sure they looked at us as fat, stupid, old women , but we amused ourselves with what their lives will be like when they ruin themselves with children. Karma is a real bitch. Now, to be fair, their male traveling companions were sullen, greasy and rude; in other words, hardly any more appealing. But the men were far less dramatic. The lot of them had been together for a while by the time we met up, so perhaps they were just exhausted. Poor things.

There's room here for a little snorkeling commentary. I passed on doing it anymore because it just wasn't that enjoyable, and the cold I caught would have made it impossible anyway. But watching the others do it; especially, prepare to do it, was informative. There's a lot of equipment. You obviously need a mask and snorkle and fins. Many of them, especially the women, wore wet suits. They were always squealing about how cold the water was. Really? If you say so. Seems there's a use for the fat layers we carry around, then. They also help you float. Many of them said they also needed the suits for sun protection on their backs. We wore our worst t-shirts for all landings, and I left mine behind when we disembarked. It was a wreck. But a lot easier to get in and out of than a wet suit. And then there was crap to spray in your mask, and the underwater cameras. Putting all this stuff on takes lots of time and tugging and attaching, and then you have to laboriously swim with it all on to the reef du jour. I suppose maybe all this gear and carrying on gives the sport some sort of cache, but I'll stick to swimming and kayaking.

Next: Puerto Ayora and the twin farmacias!

Espanola: Spanish for Spanish

2010-06-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Espanola was probably our best stop, because it had a lot of stuff and you could get around it pretty easily. Too bad it was "Ms. Toad's Wild Ride" overnight to get there. Here's a pretty decent map. And I added this link to every entry about the Galapagos, so no one has to hunt for it while reading.

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

and don't forget Galasam http://www.galasam.com/index.html

If this doesn't appear in large format, click the white square and it will. You can't see Los Lobos, but it's just off San Cristobal to the southwest. and then Espanola is due south of that. The boats all pretty much go around in a little square among the central islands, rotating passengers every four days at Puerto Ayora and Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, and refueling at Baltra. Wherever you go, you see other boats. Our companions mostly were the Mary Anne, the Sagitta and some Celebrity thing. Dedicated dive boats disappear for a week at a time and never touch land.

Speaking of diving, we didn't do any. The Millenium site said snorkeling was available, but it didn't say you had to snorkle, or that the trip was based around snorkeling, or that you had to be young and fit, or that it was inconvenient and dangerous. I mean, why would they say that? So they didn't. We found out on our own.

But all the problems don't mean we didn't have fun, or didn't see anything. That's just the way travel is, especially adventure travel. You have to expect some difficulties. The problem is, you never know which ones will appear.

So, on to Espanola. As was always the case, there was snorkeling and a hike at two different landings. I would go ashore, walk around as far as I could, take pictures, and then go in the water. Franklin soon realized his idea of an "easy" trail was not the same as ours. I mean, we never intended to climb the volcanos, we thought we'd stay on the regular trails. Well, there's nothing regular about any of the trails. I'm not suggesting they pour cement all over the islands, but if you want to SHOW them to people, make a few simple accommodations, like a flat landing platform, safe steps and some railings on the landings. You know the water taxis in the islands have railings? Imagine. You could maybe supplement the paths with open pavers for stability.

Moving right along. On Espanola some sea turtles were hatching, and some frigate birds were killing them. I couldn't look. However, I got some terrific pictures of marine iguanas. Check it out. Don't forget to click the pic.

Joyce and I hiked the whole length of this beach, a wet landing, taking pictures, mostly of nursing sea lion pups. Here's one.

While everyone else went snorkeling, we went swimming, and although we don't have pictures, we lucked out and swam with a penguin. Even Joyce went swimming. If she came ashore (on a wet landing. She made all of those) she swam as much as I did, for a couple of reasons. Sea lions have flies; lots and lots of flies, primarily horseflies. Flies don't bother you as much in the water. And, it was HOT! We were on the equator! In the summer! The water may have seemed a little cold at first, but because it was so hot, you got comfortable in a hurry. You better go swimming.

The kids also enjoyed Espanola.

We actually landed at several different places on this island. Here we were told we could see sea lions surfing. Well, you could, but it was too tough to take a picture. I did get a nice shot of the waves, the Millenium, and a bit of the ships in our little gaggle.

On this beach, which was a dry landing, I was able to hike part of the way until we reached a lava boulder field, and on the way we found blue-footed boobies. Here they are.

Nearby we were treated to a rare glimpse of the Literate Marine Iguana, endemic only to this particular island.

Here is a group of the far more numerous Lazy Marine Iguana. They're waiting for the movie.

Between landings we ate lunch, napped and did our laundry in the bathtub. One reason we napped was utter exhaustion. The other was to avoid the Euro-trash drama. A third was, it was a lot cooler in our cabin than in the public spaces.

The food was usually disappointing. It was served buffet-style and of the three entrees, I could usually eat some of one. I made sure to always get fruit if they had it, because the vegetables were often inedible. There was only ever one kind of salad dressing, and we had a dessert with chocolate in it just once out of 16 dessert-bearing meals. Of course they served fish. It was usually horrible. I don't think it was fresh. You know why? Only indigenous people are allowed to fish the waters there, and none of us were.

So between the endless exercise and generally unappetizing food, it was easy to lose weight. One thing I won't complain about.

Not exactly

2010-06-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

We were told there was laundry service on the ship. Not exactly. There was a washing machine, but it didn't work. We could do our laundry in port, except we wouldn't be there until Sunday, and then the laundries were closed.

They said there was WiFi and computer equipment on the boat. Not exactly, and we didn't need WiFi anyway, but Franklin let us use his computer to download photos from our camera onto our flash drives.

They said there was gourmet food on this ship. Not exactly, but they had two chefs who never ran out of tree tomatoes. I mistook a glass of orange colored juice for actual orange juice one morning, and was not happy to discover I had been tricked into ingesting the nasty stuff yet again. I was a lot more careful after that.

They said a catamaran was the most stable kind of boat for a trip around the islands. Not exactly, but the passengers who didn't get sick had plenty of meds for the ones who did.

They said the boat was called Millenium, but we forgot to ask WHICH millenium it was named after.

It looked good on the travel site. It's called a luxury class yacht. Okay, just not by American standards, maybe? The beds were comfortable, the room was big. The air conditioning worked fine. There was plenty of storage. The crew were really great. We just loved them.

But there were issues. The toilet tissue issue was several-ply. The "disposal" of same was a pretty disgusting problem. They never brought enough, not grasping there were two WOMEN in the cabin and we have to use it for everything, not just once in a while. So it was "Por favor, (name). Yo quiero mas papel del bano." Brief wait. "Muchas gracias." We didn't speak one another's languages well enough to make the situation more graphically clear. Then, guess what. They turned off the water at night. So you go to flush and nothing. After two nights of this, Joyce and Senior Greg raised hell with the captain so it was left on.

At some point, one of our two engines failed. This made for a slow, long, bumpy ride from island to island. When you have to use your muscles to keep from rolling out of bed all night, you can't get a lot of restful sleep. A catamaran has, as we know, two hulls for stability, but apparently only one is in contact with the water surface at any one time, rather like a toddler or a drunk trying to run. It lurches from side to side until it gets where it's going. And with only one engine running, it's even less balanced. Speaking of engines, we had two pangas, one of which had perpetual engine problems. Like parent, like child. Oh, and only one panga could be hauled aboard, so one banged along behind us all the time, not just on short hops.

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

Here's a link to the Millenium. Take note of how it looks, in case they change the name of it.

Galapagos Islands Cruise - Galapagos Millennium Catamaran - Vacations Galapagos Islands - Galapagos Luxury Cruises - Galapago...

We really wanted to like it. But we didn't. However, we made the best of it. For example. Joyce adapted a song to sing on the toilet to help us remember what to do:

"A tisket a tasket; The paper goes in the basket."

I added a second verse:

"A tasket, a tisket; It's not a chocolate biscuit."

Joyce complained that was gross, but hey, it worked all but twice each, and that apparently, was not enough to bring the plumbing to an inglorious end.

So, as I said, there were 16 of us aboard to begin with. Six were from the US and had made specific reservations for this ship at this time. All the rest were backpackers who were doing the world and just grabbed whatever boat was available. I wonder what they paid, but they had to be willing to take pot luck, and we were willing to buy certainty. One couple was from Australia, and they got engaged their last night on the boat. Another couple was from New Zealand. The rest were a sort of gaggle from Europe, and I don't want to mention their countries because they were not representing their nations very well and since I love those places, I will not embarrass them. Of the ten younger people, two unattached young women, who attached themselves to a couple of younger men, caused enough drama and foolishness to script several Housewives shows for a year. It was like an endless contest to see which one could out-hooker the other, especially by wearing the least clothing. One of them acted up so badly on a landing that Franklin had to give her a time out! And one of the young men was so rude to Joyce that I had to publicly reprimand him for being a boor. I won't tolerate that sort of thing. I don't care what you think of us, but you will not interfere with my enjoyment of a trip I paid good money to take.

I could tell a lot more horror stories, but it's a waste. They were only there the first half of the trip, and then they rotated out and we got three people from New York and some nice Israeli and British backpackers and everything was very peaceful after that. As nearly as we could tell Joyce was the senior person on the boat. Senior Greg and Teresa fell between us, and Junior Greg and Candace were a lot younger. The backpackers as a group fell in their twenties to early thirties. The folks from New York were a lawyer in her 30s, maybe, and couple in their 50s, we guess.

If you go back to the dining room picture, you can see there are three round tables, and it was just sort of "sit wherever" each time, so we got to know folks a little bit, though we tended to hang out with the couple from Tennessee, who were by far the funniest Republicans we ever met. As to the tables, they were, of course, bolted down, and in front of semi-circular banquettes. And for some of us, they were WAY too close. They needed to add extra chairs anyway so we usually sat there, or on the ends of the benches. The other people who sat on the ends were seasick. We missed several of them for days at a time.

So while all that nonsense was going on, the cruise itself was proceeding according to schedule. After Los Lobos, still the same day, we headed for Espanola, an overnight passage from where we were. Tomorrow I'll post a link to a map.

Getting there is half the fun! Really!

2010-06-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

Just a little flight out to the Galapagos. Onto the ship and off to visit the islands. What could be simpler, right?

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/lgcolor/gpcolor.htm

Staying home, actually. But we were already there, so we did the usual airport mambo. We had an escort, which was a good thing, because we had to go to four different places to get out of the darned place. In case you're unaware, you have to pay to leave EVERY airport in South America, domestic (to them) flights included. So you pay, and you check in, and you get a luggage inspection, and you show your ID someplace else, and a guy from the travel agency trots around with you to make sure you hit all the stations in the right order. Thank goodness!

Once we passed through the security station, we found ourselves in an enormous departure lounge. And our flight was cancelled. And then on again, and then off, and then consolidated with another one. Okay. Fine. It still left on time. And it STILL wasn't full. Forty minutes later we were in Guayaquil. I don't know why, but the deal is, all flights to the Galapagos take place in the morning (and so do all flights out of Lima to Cusco). So no matter when you arrive in Ecuador (Quito or Guayaquil) you have to stay there overnight, at least, and fly the following morning again. I suspect it's a way to get tourist dollars, but you know what? I don't care, because we had a great time around Quito, and I don't even LIKE cities. Some people stay in Guayaquil instead, which is a beach town, and supposed to be very nice as well. You can't lose.

Off on time again, another meal and an hour and a half later we arrived in San Cristobal, one of the two airports that serve tourism. They have two others as well. They have, in fact, EIGHT entry points into the Galapagos, which kind of shocked me. It's a lot more populated than I thought. But it's also very restricted, which protects the environment.

The airports are not modern. By this I mean, you climb up and down in and out of the planes and walk across the tarmac into an open-air terminal where your luggage eventually ends up thrown on the concrete floor. They do, however, have the computers needed to check you in and take your money for the National Park, which is, essentially, all the islands. You can't go there and not go to the "Park."

Our guide, Franklin, collected us all in one spot for the bus to the harbor. There we met Candace and Greg and Teresa and Greg. So that made six, and no one else showed up, and the boat, Millenium, carries 16 passengers. He warned us to be prepared to encounter a very unpleasant couple. We thought this was odd, coming from a professional guide, but it turned out to be good advice. Franklin said everyone else was on the boat already so we assumed they had arrived that day on an earlier flight.

Not so. They had arrived four days earlier on a different island, Baltra. Enter the Euro-trash. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The bus with no air conditioning took us through the town to the harbor. I mean, it was very close, like five minutes. And as soon as we got off the bus we saw that, instead of dogs lying around, sea lions were lying around, all over the docks and the sidewalks. Well, better than dogs! Franklin told us not to step on them.

We went down a ramp to where a panga awaited. A panga is the same thing as a Zodiac, or, if you like, a rubber dinghy. The way you get in is, you grab two crewmembers and leap: pier - rubber gunwale - hard step - hard deck. You also get out that way. How much of a leap depends on how calm the water is. Or not. It's not that hard for me, even though I'm heavy. I'm strong and have good balance. The problem is, the crew doesn't get it at first how big I am, and it takes a couple of times before they don't get knocked on their butts.

Here's one of our "hard" landings, which means bow first onto a more or less dry surface.

In this one, you can see there's nothing but other humans to grab onto, and no mooring of any kind. It may not look like much, but it's one of those things you don't think to question in advance. We had already been in and out of Zodiacs, and all landings were wet. The height of the jumps to the various levels weren't an issue then, so we didn't give it any thought when we booked.

For Joyce, the problem is different. She doesn't weigh as much, but she is tall, (and Ecuadorans are shorter by far) and has bad knees. The Zodiacs in the Antarctic didn't pose as much of a problem because they were secured to the boat better and there were things to hold onto. To hold a panga to the boat, you just run the engine real hard in "forward." So that began, basically, a week of terror for her. She was never sure she wouldn't slip between the panga and the Millenium, disappear and be killed. Luckily this never came even close to happening, but when you think it might, that changes how you feel about going ashore.

A wet landing is stern in, and you roll over the side into the water. You get back in the same way. But every landing onto the boat itself is dry. And when the waves are high, you may not be stepping up onto the boat, but down from the panga onto the boat. It's tricky and the timing has to be perfect.

Okay, so we cleared that hurdle, and at the same time, developed a system for disembarking: let everyone else off first. Then Joyce approaches the bow, and when she says "go," I shove her up the step, over the gunwale and onto the deck while the crew catches her. Hope they ate their Wheaties!

Our cabin was right inside the main deck fantail, very handy for when you crawl back aboard. But we didn't go there first, we went to the salon for lunch and a briefing instead. The lunch was an omen. It was small and bland. I ate the pasta out of it. Warm water was served, with paper napkins. And this was supposed to be an upgrade from our original reservation. Only the new people ate, because the ones already on the ship had eaten earlier, and were hanging out in the salon, waiting for us so we could get the briefing. At that point we couldn't really tell who they were.

Here are the dining room and the two sides of the salon/lounge.

The side with the bar has the whiteboard where Franklin draws whatever we're going to do. The seasoned travelers were there, and the rest of us had to sit on the other side where we couldn't see, until Franklin told them to move or make room. This was our hint that we came from different civilizations. And here is a link to some definitions of that other civilization.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=eurotrash

At the first briefing we learned two things. The boat was going to a protected reef where the newbies could check out their snorkeling gear, and you can't flush paper down the toilets. On a boat. Hello? Ever heard of marine toilet paper? So that was unpleasant as all hell. Ashore, if we accidentally flushed, we weren't staying there, but if we did it here, the whole boat would be plunged (ha) into chaos. There was a basket, of course, which they said would be emptied twice daily. We immediately said it had better be more often than that.

But first we had to go swimming. and the boat was already under weigh, so we had to run change. There were a lot of other little rules having to do with shoes and the environment and safety and so on, but they're way too numerous and boring to list, and they really didn't have much of an effect on the trip, so forget about those.

Joyce immediately opted out of snorkeling. Said she had tried it and didn't like it and the water was too cold for swimming, so forget it. I said I would at least attempt to snorkle, and the water was not too cold, so I would swim, too. For Joyce, the water has to be giving off steam in order to be warm enough. That changed real fast, but not the first day.

We anchored off Los Lobos Island. I went alone with Franklin to re-learn snorkeling, and I did it. I saw marine tortoises, fish, coral, rocks and starfish. And then the next day or so I came down with a cold. Wonder how well they cleaned that snorkeling gear. As usual, we were carrying an entire pharmacy, so I was able to take care of it until we hit our next port. Anyway, back to the rest of our itinerary.

Here's our cabin, and our two bathrooms, one for showers and one for other ablutions. Guess which is which. We also had a patio, but it was impossible to take a picture of it.

Snazzy, huh? We were lucky. The closet door never fell off till the last day, and I saw only one waterbug. That explained the can of Raid in the salon.

After the snorkeling, we had a hard landing on Los Lobos to see sea lions, blue-footed boobies and a frigate bird rookery. The "landing" was a crumbling chunk of cement, again, with no railings and no means of securing the panga or yourself, after which one was supposed to walk over black lava rocks that looked like irregular bowling balls, and felt just as stable. I managed to jump over a few rocks to a sandy area, and wound along a path with the others, not realizing Joyce wasn't behind me. She couldn't make those jumps, got off the cement, got stuck on the rocks, and eventually managed to get back up. In the meantime, we reached another pile of broken bowing balls with no end in sight, and I said, "I don't care what's on the other end, I'm not wrenching my knees to see it." I mean, there's no doctor or medical facilities on that boat.

So I worked my way back through the sea lions, taking pictures and wondering what had become of Joyce. I was thus able to see her efforts to right herself. She was up before I could reach her, and pretty pissed, too. We had no idea there was no way to land without killing yourself, and that there were no paths that could just be walked on instead of rock-climbed. I even had my walking stick with me, but there were no places to plant it securely to use it.

Here are some of the very first pictures I took in the islands. You can't really see how many, but there are numberless sea lions under the trees and around the rocks. They yell and cough and spit and holler all the time. As one of our traveling companions said, "It sounds like a tuberculoisis ward."

Regardless of their noises, they're very good about posing. People don't bother them at all, as long as they don't feel surrounded or cut off. Then they bite.

So, after that abortive attempt at looking around Los Lobos, we waved to the Millenium and they sent a panga over. We took our beer up to the top of the ship and waited for the others to return. They said the entire hike was like that, very hard to manage your footing. Later we asked Franklin if there were any landings we could actually do and enjoy, and he said yes, especially the wet ones. So we were still game to try going ashore. After all, we were there to see the animals, and there weren't a lot of options.

After the snorkeling and abortive hiking, we were happy to go unpack and go to bed right after dinner. There was another landing the next morning at 8 AM!

Ecuadoran Geography

2010-06-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

In case I have been giving the impression I don't like Ecuador because of the toilets and lack of railings and stray dogs, that isn't really true. Ecuador has pretty much everything: beaches, the Galapagos, the Andes (including eleven volcanos) and the Amazon rain forest. And it's all packed into a tiny area so that you can see everything South America has to offer in basically one spot. No matter where you are, you're within a day's travel of everything else.

http://www.galasam.com/index.html

Also, they have customer service nailed. They are multi-lingual, polite, prompt, neat, hard-working and just as good-natured as anyone could want. Nothing is too much trouble, except, maybe, that dratted toilet paper. For example, in some banos, there is community toilet paper on a roll. You take some before you go into a stall. And then you know what happens next.

They also have community sinks, like in Mexico. All the sinks are outside the stall and urinal areas, so men and women use them together. I do like that idea. This way the men are changing diapers, too. Nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, if you love geography, geology, indigenous peoples, antiquities, adventure, wonderful scenery and lots of animals, seriously consider Ecuador. It's not that far away.

So, on to the Mindo Cloud Forest, our last day trip before flying to the Galapagos. This was more of a day about what we were supposed to see, not what we actually saw, but the drive alone was worth the trip. A "cloud forest," by the way, is basically a high-altitude jungle, that's all. But it sounds prettier.

We had a new guide today, David, pronounced as in the name of the French painter. Very cute! He had an agency car which was the best yet, an updated Chevy SUV. The Ecuadorans are just crazy about Chevys. I have no idea why. So he gave us a very detailed geological description of all the areas we drove through. Here is a geological picture.

Look! Sedimentary layers lifted up into a syncline! Taken while standing on an anticline! But I already knew that before he told us, because I love geology. In fact, when we were up Cotopaxi, I found both ash and pumice for my collection. It's had to find volcanic/igneous rocks except on volcanos. I hid them in a pill bottle. Ha ha.

Joyce likes plants and she took a particular interest in how the vegetation changed from one area to the next. Here's a shrimp plant from the jungle. And some red bananas. Don't forget to click to see close up.

We were supposed to see a hummingbird sanctuary, but they had migrated for the season. No one told us about the tubing, so we didn't have bathing suits with us. When we went to the cable car platform, we learned it was shut down because just the previous day, the engine had quit, suspending people over the chasm for two hours. Gee, sorry we missed that!

So we went to see the butterflies instead. I know this will seem like too many pictures, but honestly, they are so adorable. And especially check out the shot where the chrysallises are hanging and hatching. You don't get to see that very often.

Then we had the great trout lunch in the town of Mindo, which is vanishingly small. The trout are caught right there, and even though I don't usually like fish, I know when to eat it. a. It's filleted and b. It's fresh.

Then we drove back and we stopped in this one place where you can see two completely different eco-systems just by turning around.

Dry

Wet

"Wet," by the way, is the crater of yet another volcano, Pululahua, which has been under cultivation by the indigenous people for centuries. They now have it lined with sensors and can evacuate them just in case.

Here are two postcards we bought there, so you can see the exact same place in the two different seasons:

So that was our last excursion on mainland Ecuador, and believe me, you don't want to miss it. We would have missed it had Joyce not seen the article in the AAA rag about market towns. We only saw a couple of those but the rest of the stuff was pretty fantastic. We learned so much more about Ecuador than we would have if we'd only gone to the Galapagos.

If any Ecuadoran travel agents are reading this, you need to increase your advertising in the USA. And you also need to do something about public toilets where you can expect a lot of visitors, likewise the safety aspects. And fix those stray dogs, please. You have a lovely country that, with just a few tweaks, could become an absolute tourist gold mine for you. There would be no more "competition" with Costa Rica. You would win.

http://www.galasam.com/index.html

Tree tomato pie

2010-06-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

You know, I never go anywhere without doing serious research first. So I discovered Ecuador has lots of exotic fruits we don't get in the US, and was eager to try them all. High on the list was the tree tomato, a traditional favorite.

Tree Tomato

I had tree tomato juice my first morning in Ecuador, because the hotel puts out a huge breakfast buffet including an egg and pancake station which will make anything to order. And they always have eight different juices. Orange and pineapple are always availble, and six more on top of those.

So, it was okay, but nothing special. Next day, I had the tree tomato compote. Same story. At the same time, we discovered the wonderful babaco, which apparently never leaves the continent. I would pay well if someone would import it. Seriously. Here is the babaco.

Babaco or champagne fruit - Carica pentagona

At the Rondo I had tree tomato pie. As far as I was concerned, that was it for me and the tree tomato. It tasted basically like nothing. Hoever, the next morning, I tried something by accident, having mistaken it for canteloupe. Tree tomato. I almost lost it. Horrible. Well, so I thought I had given it a fair test, and saw no need to try it again in any format.

Anyway, I was having a lot of trouble eating breakfast. I don't know if it was the altitude, or what, but basicallly all I was eating was fruit. I cleverly intuited I couldn't keep anything else down, so I didn't even try. Every morning it was orange (or blackberry or watermelon or pineapple, etc) juice, canteloupe and babaco. For that and other reasons, I actually lost four pounds on this trip. One reason had to do with haring all over creation from 8 AM until 6 PM at high altitude. And, as I said, still other reasons. You'll see.

So this was our day to go to Otavalo, a famous market town, and other sites along the way. We had an extra guide that day, Luisa, who was apparently the shopping expert. Poor thing. I hate to shop, and Joyce is frugal in the extreme. Believe me, this is good or we couldn't afford to go on trips like this at all. But it also means most of our souvenirs are the pictures we take.

Our first stop was a farmacia because we needed some stuff it was good to have a woman along for. There's a farmacia in every block, and an alimentaria (grocery store) or two as well. They have no stores of the size we find "normal" in the US. Every shop is a tiny hole in the wall. Each block has a whole string of tiny little stores because few people have cars and they must carry everything they buy on buses or on foot, so they want to shop as close to home as possible.

Then it was off to the dough ornament store. Seriously. Everything in the store is made out of dough, baked and painted. Here are the kids with a small "Equator Monument" because we forgot to take them out for pictures at the real Mitad del Mundo.

Everything on that shelf is made out of dough. Really. Luckily, they had baskets full of Christmas ornaments, which Joyce is always looking for. She sends them to her family for St. Nicholas Day. I can't tell you exactly how many we came away with but maybe 32, and only a handful are staying with us. And they all made it back unbroken, thanks to yards and yards of toilet paper. See, I knew they had it someplace. Turns out it was all in that shop for wrapping breakables.

Although we weren't supposed to stop there, we spotted another real equator monument (every town has one) and stopped to take pictures with the kids. So now we have both dough and the real deal.

Then we went to a bakery where they make a local delicacy that looks like absolutely nothing. There are only a few places that make this nothing.

So we decided to try the nothing but they had no nothing for sale at that moment. Luisa promised we would find places selling nothing on the way to the next volcano, so we started off again.

Soon we were at a famous overlook to see the Imbabura volcano at Lago Mira. The souvenir shop there sold the baked nothing, so we bought a bag. Criminy! It was delicious! It's amazing how a little stick of nothing actually tasted like something. Joyce found it dull and dry but the guides and I ate the whole bag. Too bad it's not something that travels well. In this picture I have a secure grip on my nothing, to keep it away from Joyce. That's Lago Mira and Imbabura.

At long last we arrived in Otavalo, which in Quechua means "ponchos for everybody" and may I be stuck down if they didn't honestly say this, and anyway, I found it on line.

We didn't need or buy any ponchos (but we got those scarves again!) and we took pictures of their ponchos. It was very colorful, as you can see. Also, the indigenous people are very lovely, and quite small.

Then we went to a hacienda for lunch. We were there four days and hit three different haciendas plus this excellent local restaurant only a guide would know. But that's the next day.

Anyway, haciendas are always lovely and always a good deal. Here's a link to Ecuadoran haciendas. Some of them include a hotel, but all are restaurants. They are just all over the place, and have beautiful gardens. There is NO excuse for eating KFC or McDonald's in Ecuador. We apologized to many Ecuadorans for having exported this mess.

Ecuador Hosterias and Haciendas in Ecuador

Our last stop was the leather-selling town where Joyce got a wallet. Luisa wanted to take us to some other shopping places but we are just not big shoppers so we went back for a swim instead.

Mitad del Mundo via GPS

2010-06-17T23:23:00.000-07:00

Another early start, this time to tour the Old Town, Panecillo, the tram and Mitad del Mundo. Jose-Luis picked us up and said he'd be taking us to the Rondo restaurant for the "Welcome" dinner that evening as well.

First stop was Old Town, and guess what! It was a major national holiday and all decorated and full of people. Lookit!

And this is a detail of the National Cathedral. Yes, those are tortoises as gargoyles. All of the gargoyles on the cathedral are animals endemic to the Galapagos. Click on the photo to see the details.

May 24 is the observation of the Battle of Pichincha, which was where the last Ecuadoran soldiers fell in the last battle for independence from the Spanish in 1822.

In this photo taken from El Panecillo, the hill in the middle of town, you can actually see the site, where the flag is, which has become their equivalent of Arlington.

They hold ceremonies out there in the morning and have parades in town later on. Here's a link to last years' activities:

YouTube - Chávez y Morales acompañan a Correa en la conmemoración de la Batalla de Pichincha

As you can see, El Presidente Correa of Ecuador is buddies with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Interesting.

And Joyce said no more than one church visit, and we weren't allowed to take pictures, but I bought these postcards. This is the Iglesia de la Compania. They have cleverly placed a cheval glass in the transept so you can see the dome (the top picture) without having to lie on your back on the floor with binoculars.

And this is the magnificent San Francisco, but we didn't go inside. Too many steps!

Our next stop after downtown was El Panecillo, or Little Bread, the hill in the center of town, where they have the Flying Mary. The statue is fairly new and incorporates a whole lot of symbolism. So they say.

Then we went to see the Mitad del Mundo. This is what they call the equator in Ecuador because "Ecuador" means "equator" and it would be confusing. There are several "Mitad del Mundo" sites all along the actual line of the equator.

Now, take a look at this. Those silly French! They even created a monument (the mounted ball in the background) to their own inaccuracy. But we all make mistakes and this one isn't that bad, just 200 yards. Even though the indigenous Quito people knew all along where the equator was, and they told anyone who cared to learn, they weren't always taken as seriously as they should have been. And that's how you get pictures like this: the French "equator" marker taken from the REAL one, right where they always said it was.

They have a variety of tests and demonstrations they do right on the line, and then off to the side of it, so you can feel the difference between standing on the equator or not. Here is Joyce on the toilet at the center of the earth.

She didn't realize what it was when she sat on it. Cute, isn't she?

We also put our phony wedding rings right on the equator and took this picture. We left all our good jewelry at home in response to various things we read on the internet about robberies and muggings and that sort of thing. But honestly, we never saw even the least sign, or heard any story of it actually happening. However, it made an excellent excuse for buying a silver and malachite cross that day in the market downtown.

After Mitad del Mundo, we were supposed to take a tram or cable-car up another local mountain, but the fog never burned off, so we asked Jose-Luis to take us to a market instead, to make up for the one we didn't get to the first day. There were tons of stuff there: jewelery, leather, wools from alpacas and vicunas and linens and hats, wood carvings, stone carvings, you name it. Lots of native crafts, all very colorful. The problem is, they won't let you LOOK at it.

The minute you get out of the car, all the vendors are on you like flies on shit. There's no such thing as browsing. It's all "Senora! Senorita! Missus! Madam! You come here, you see, you buy. You number one GI! Hey, Meester! You wanna do my seester?" and so on. There are a gazillion stalls all jammed together with barely an aisle between so you can't exactly get a up a good head of steam and run away. Besides, you're there because you want something, so you stay at least a little.

The previous day we bought a whole bunch of their beautiful scarves (light, cheap, easy to carry) near the cathedral. So we bought another pile of those, plus the aforementioned cross and some other small goodies. Joyce is very good at haggling. I just say, "Get me that," and slither away. Since we live in Florida, there's not a lot of need for woolens and leather. Eventually we extricated ourselves and went back to the hotel to rest before dinner.

The Rondo restaurant is some sort of strange institution in Quito. It's apparently a place to which American tourists are taken or sent and no Ecuadoran ever eats there. And they claim to speak no English, and the menu is in Spanish, so if you really have no concept of any Romance language, good luck with that. Between Joyce's French and my Italian, we made it out, and we both had some delicious pork. The food is half-Spanish, half-indigenous and while we were eating it, a tiny mariachi band (four guys) came in and serenaded us. I wish I knew the etiquette for that! We were so relieved when they went away.

Then there was the great "How the hell do we get out of here?" caper. The meal was on the travel agency, but we ordered wine, and Joyce figured they were embarassed to tell us we had to pay for that. So we all just stared at each other until I worked out, "May I have the wine bill?" in my fractured Spanish, and everyone was all smiles as we packed up the remains of the bottle, tipped everyone, and left.

Tomorrow: Tree tomato pie and other delicacies.