Animals of the Mediterranean

It has been almost a month since we arrived home from the trip, and I am having fun looking through the pictures, sorting through the souvenirs and gifts, and making a calendar!

YES! I did something sort of crafty that involved absolutely no cutting and pasting with real paper. I made a calendar of some of the animals we saw on the trip. While in Mykonos, Carol decided I needed to publish my own (or our own) calendar of the "Cats of..." variety that you see all over Italy and Greece. We did not really see many cats in Italy, but in Istanbul and Mykonos it seems we saw cats everywhere.

Also, in Pompeii and in Athens, there were dogs that accompanied tourists around the various ruins. In fact, in Pompeii there was a dog with a limp that came up to our group when we first arrived. He was whining and crying loudly like he had just been injured and everyone was shocked when the guide spoke sharply to him (a brown lab-type dog) and pushed him out of the way. It turns out that that dog was a great actor and had figured out how to get -- attention? handouts? None of us really had any foot, although Judy did feed him some nuts. He followed us around for most of the time we were there, lying down to sleep while we enjoyed the sights. Eventually, when other people arrived, he wandered off -- before I had a chance to take his picture. There was another dog, however, that joined us and napped with us for a bit. And then there was this dog on the Acropolis in Athens.

Anyway, I got the calendars printed at Shutterfly.com, and for those of you not on my snail mail list, I will try to post them in a sharing mode some place where you can see the rest of the pictures. Soon. I promise. No cutting or pasting required.

We missed the really bad acqua alta

When we arrived in Venice the was some discussion about the water being high, but it did not seem to be a problem for delivering us to our hotel. When we left the hotel we noticed what appeared to be tables about three feet high that stretched across our little Campo d'Moise. Hmmm... What could those be?

When we reached St. Marks we realized that the tables were in fact the walkways that were used during the acqua alta. In the square there were large puddles of water, and several places people were using the walkways or wading through the water (5-6 inches deep). The large puddles were easy to avoid, but as we were leaving the square we noticed water bubbling up or down the drains in the middle of the square. All over the town we saw the walkways ready to be deployed in case of high water, but we were lucky and the weather was beautiful.



However, the weather was just waiting for us to leave! According to the news, this is almost the worst acqua alta in memory! Ack!

Friday at home...we have disembarked

I can't believe it has been almost a week since the end of the cruise and that this is my third day at home. The cat woke me up this morning at 5:00 a.m. by barfing on the bed. This did not happen on the cruise!

Plus, where is that room service when you need it? I think I am addicted to sweet little croissants and things that just do not appear here at home.

We sailed into Venice last Saturday just as the sun was rising.


After this view of the Serenisimma, the disembarkation was such a zoo! You have to put your bags out the night before and then get up (assuming you have slept) and be ready to go by an assigned time. You meet in one of the lounges and when they call your color and number you get off the ship. Then you are supposed to meet your luggage in a large terminal, where they have been grouped by color and number.

We had changed our color/number to "Red 15" with a disembarkation time of 9:00 a.m. At 7:30 a.m. our cabin attendant knocked on the door and asked when we were leaving. When I said sometime before 9:00 he gave me his patented blank stare and said we had to be out by 8:00 a.m. What?? No one else knew anything about this.

So you can see we were well prepared for the chaos in the cruise terminal building where we found all of our luggage except for one of my bags. Lesley and I stood in line to get two carts for all of the suitcases and then realized that one was missing. Lesley did finally find my bag somewhere all alone because all of the tags had been torn off!

The private taxi service that we had worried about was not as straightforward as we had hoped. You had to pay the dispatcher at a stand at the exit for the terminal. He took the money, gave you a receipt and told you which taxi to look for. Our taxi was 129. "Just go to the last floating dock," the dispatcher said pointing back in the direction we had come.

So about half of the passengers (the ship held 2,000) were crammed into the area of the floating docks, and several dozen water taxis (motor boats to you) were floating in the water waiting their turn to pick people up. I went off and found 129 floating in the middle and somehow made eye contact. He was a nice looking man about our age, not the sexy blond in taxi 145. Number 129 quickly starting angling toward one of the three places where you could board the taxis, we began trying to thread our way through the crowd of people and luggage tolleys, and in pretty short order we were on board.

There had apparently been "acqua alta" that day which you could sort of tell from the waves spraying up as they hit the floating docks. The driver said something about it being possible (or did he say impossible?) to get to the dock for our hotel. When it is high water there are some bridges that you cannot pass under, so we were lucky. The trip to the Hotel Violino d'Oro was amazing as is any trip around Venice by boat. And we managed to give the guy two tips, so he was probably a very happy driver.

Later

Mykonos

Mykonos is just like you imagine it to be - little white houses and blue doors and shutters scattered across the hills. The hills are rocky and mostly barren, just a few trees manage to grow in the nooks. The old town is stretched out along the harbor with more town, "Little Venice," in the next inlet and then maybe even more modern establishments.

We only made it to the old town and the view of the windmills in Little Venice from a distance. Our shipped docked a short distance away from the town and we took a shuttle bus. The we wandered. This is not a good place to get lost from the group, better to wander on your own or with one companion. That way when you find a little alley to go down and find some wonderful view, you don't have to worry about the companions left behind.

The other occupation of the Mykonos-ians is selling stuff like jewelry and other souvenirs. In preparation for going home Lesley and I and several others bought a new suitcase. I hope this works out. Others were looking at the beautiful jewelry, but most of us managed to resist this expense.

Carol and I were in search of the post office which of course closed at like noon and did not reopen while we were there. We got conflicting info about whether we would find stamps for postcards anywhere. So we wandered in a mostly residential area and then found this great little hotel, Elena Hotel. When we asked if they had stamps the man said he would mail the postcards for us. So we trusted him. Then we picked up the brochure of the place. It seemed charming, and we are busy making plans to return to Mykonos when it is warmer.

This is the very end of the season for Mykonos. Many of the restaurants were closed, and some of the shops were also closed. Some shops that were open had limited stock on hand. They are definitely getting ready for winter. The best months are June, before it gets too hot, or September. November is a bit cold, but some ladies did take off their shoes and see if the Mediterranean was cold. They said not.

The other activity on Mykonos was the kitty sighting. We found cats in most of the cities we visited, but the ones in Mykonos were trying to be particularly photogenic. Carol wants me to make a calendar of the cats. Okay.

More later.

If its Friday we must be...somewhere in the Adriatic

Cruising is such an interesting experience. Last night was our final formal night and three of us got all dressed up in our finery, went to a cocktail party and then a show, and then the late dinner seating. (Lesley was sick in bed with a cold.)

During our sea day yesterday we had experienced some sort of engine trouble and the ship was actually stopped for a while. I was not aware of this because I was having a hot stone treatment in the spa so did not even notice that the ship was particularly quiet or still.

Then during the show the ship seemed to start rocking a bit more than it had been. During dinner they announced that the ship had lost one of its engines, or thrusters or something so that instead of 24 knots we were only going about 15 knots and thus would not have time to get to Split on time on Friday and still make it to Venice on Saturday. SO... We have an entire day to obsess over packing and weather in Venice and other such information while we sail up the Adriatic Sea toward Venice. Just sea as far as the eye can see (unaided by binoculars). (Not "ocean" as we ignorant Californians tend to call these large bodies of water.)

Or to go on to the internet and think of you.

We are all getting ready to reenter the real world, first on land in Venice (that can't be called the real world, yet). Then getting home. We were talking about what we would be doing next time this week - cooking, cleaning house, blogging.

Home soon. Later

Istanbul!

Here is a map of the section of Istanbul that we were in.


View Larger Map

I thought that the pink arrow is where the ship docked, at the tip of the "Golden Horn," but in fact that is not where we docked. But it did not matter because we took a ship excursion. This was our first ship excursion. There were hundreds of people trying to get onto busses at the asme time. Once we were on the bus, the traffic was pretty bad, but the tour itself was great. Also we did not have long lines in most of the places because we were the only ship here. Sometimes there are three or four ships here at the same time!.

The green arrow is the Topkapi Palace.

The yellow arrow is the Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia as the guide called it.

The purple arrow is the Blue Mosque.

The aqua arrow is the Grand Bazaar.

After the Blue Mosque we went to a carpet making lecture (or sales pitch), then walked to the Grand Bazaar. There are 4000 shops in the covered bazaar and about 14,000 in the area. Wow! mostly they were tourist shops of souvenirs mixed with tourist shops of jewelry, leather, carpets, spices. Pashminas are the tourist item de jour.

Oh no! She is speaking french. I know no Turkish. Sorry.

More later.

If its Tuesday it must be... where are we?

If it is Tuesday it must be Istanbul. Or it is Wednesday? Well today I forgot what day of the week it was, but I did know that I was in Istanbul. Yesterday we went to the Topkapi Palace which has this amazing exhibit of jewels. The Topkapi dagger, featured in the movie Topkapi which we will all have to rush out to rent, was particularly amazing with three egg sized cabachon emeralds so green it did not look like anything you had ever seen. That was preceded by a large coffer of emeralds of the same size. Then came the rather "boring" (according to our guide because of the emerald cut) 55 carat diamond, then the rather spectacular 86 carat diamond (with a brilliant cut).

Okay. We also saw Moses' rod, St. John the Baptist's arm surrounded by a gold case, and other relics. Things wars have been fought over. You can really imagine those crusaders charging through here. Then we went to St. Sophia which was the largest building at the time it was built as a church (I think). It is now a beautiful museum/monument. Today we went to the Blue Mosque (pictured). It is still a mosque, so we had to take our shoes off. We were not there during a prayer time.

One of the most striking things about Turkey is that it is a secular government, not religious, and according to our guide most of the citizens are not practicing (or strictly practicing) Moslems. So there was not a rush of men to the mosque when the time of prayers were called.

We drove across the bridge to Asia, just for the view back toward the old part of the city, and to be able to say we had been to Asia. Fun day.

Oh yes, and the bazaar. Well, more later.