Time to go home ... and Charming Sorrento

Time to go home... Packing to go home is not nearly so traumatic as packing to go TO somewhere.  Bos is, as I write, throwing things in suitcases, ready for the 11 p.m. deadline outside our door.  And, with as little clothes as possible, we leap out of bed at 6:30 a.m. and have to be off the boat by 8 a.m.  We will be in Rome, so off to Rome’s airport for the 10-1/2 hour flight to New York and another flight to St. Louis, with memories all intact.  We hope, very earnestly, that you have enjoyed our daily blog with color pictures (courtesy of Bos!) during this trip.  I have enjoyed the blogging much more than I expected --it made me look at places, people and things through different eyes!  So you will probably be “stuck” with blogs on all our trips from now on!! (No, I don’t mean the trips to the Lake, silly!!)

But, while we are certainly ready to come home, we can now turn to the adventures on our last day in Italy,  Today we are in Sorrento, which is near Capri, Amalfi, Mt. Vesuvius and, of course, Pompeii.  We have been to Pompeii and, while we would like to return to the site someday, today was not the day for that sort of hike. We were dragging, finding it hard to put one foot in front of the other!  So we opted for a ride south on the Amalfi coast, a breathtaking ride on narrow cliffs, sides of volcanic mountains, and crashing waves below.  When one thinks of Italy, oftentimes one has a picture in one’s mind, of this coastal part of Italy.  Since Italy is made up of lots and lots of city states and actually didn’t become a country until 1877, each region is distinctly different and has its own character, food, wine and lifestyle.  

Sorrento and the Amalfi coast is noted for a very casual lifestyle.  If you need a car repair, you might -- or might not -- get it this month.  And if you go to lunch or dinner, better have planned for an entire day, or not, depending!  A lot of Italian directors and Italian movie stars like Sophia Loren have summer homes perched above the ocean on the hillside.  In fact, Sophia had a chairlift installed from her house to the highway above the hillside, so she didn’t have to climb hundreds of stairs! 

We stopped at Positano for a gelati at an outdoor cafe in city center, where we could watch the people shop. We could, we decided, get into this casual lifestyle quite easily!  No one here needed a gym membership or an alarm clock. Time just didn’t seem to matter.  You could sit at your table all night and noone would make a move to oust you! Sons were walking with their mothers, even when the sons were 50 years old and mama looks 90! Small children were running through the square; old ladies were coming from church, even though it was Thursday, not Sunday.  Interesting...

We stopped again an hour later for lunch, which in Italy would be equivalent to our supper. Seems Italians love to eat anytime anywhere!!   In many of the countries we traveled through, the big meal is at noon.  Then shops close for siesta time and reopen around 5 p.m. until 8 or 9 p.m.  And this is certainly true for Italy.  The leisurely way of life is something to admire and try to emulate!  Lunch was perfectly cooked spinach canneloni with cheese sauce, a salad of greens with just olive oil and vinegar, and a fish we have never heard of -- followed by an exquisite cream cake.  Wine?? Of course... Then back to the boat, with memories of Italy and Sorrento.

So .... you have followed us  through 19 ports and 9 countries in 27 days.  We have experienced everything from Russia and Turkey to Egypt and Greece, each with a very different lifestyle and way of looking at the world and us!  A learning experience? Yes.  What we wanted from our trip?  Absolutely.  What we expected?  Yes and no.  People are the same all over, but their views of the world are distinct.  When one travels, as we have just done, it opens your brain to how others look at us -- and how we need to be more open-minded as a country, if we are to exist in this increasingly international world!

“Sicilian” Means More Than Mafia...

WInding up the trip.  Toes are hurting.  No shoes feel comfortable.  Hard to drag oneself out of bed at 6:30 a.m. to go AGAIN! And we’d been to Sicily once already.  So why put ourselves through this once more??!!  So, trying to liven up our visit, we forked over the bucks (or should I say “euros”) for a private car and guide for the day. And to answer your last question first, “No, we saw no vestiges of the Godfather or the Mafia here.  But we were assured they still exist and the police look away.”

First on the agenda was Catania, with its outdoor market.  Absolutely marvelous! Maybe the day wouldn’t be such a drag.  All the fish, all the cheeses, all the meat, all the vegetables were from Sicily.  We saw specimens of fish that were ancient and even close up looked like they were wearing tinfoil, not scales. We also saw octopuses, shrimp, sardines, every kind of imaginable fish -- some we would never have imagined, if we had tried!  And, at the meat counters, we saw tiny little lambs, skinned and ready for lamb chops, rabbits skinned, chicken feet, chicken legs, whole chickens, ducks, and on and on.  We saw cow’s intestines, cow’s tongues, cow’s tails just hanging there, flies buzzing around. 

 And we saw vegetables. Heaps of vegetables and fruits everywhere!  One of the vendors, who seemed to find us amusing, gave us a bite of prickly pear (lots of seeds, but I guess Sicilians don’t even care!).  We passed by stands with long long zucchinis, snails, eggplants, skinny little asparagus bundles, and even Sicilian “fast food”, which means the meats had already been prepared, even rolled up and ready for the skillet.  Our guide told us that the signs that said “2.5 euros per pound” in the morning would be reduced to 25 cents (or some such equivalent) at noon, when  most of the customers had bought and wandered away.  

Nearby were old men who meet daily under the ancient arches to play cards and gamble.  It is like going to the club, only open air!

After leaving the market, we were in the town square, which is always denoted in Italian towns by the location of the Duomo.  It was near noon and a service was in session, so we started walking down the promenade toward the second largest square where the local college was located.  Which meant that there were lots of outdoor cafes, teen clothing stores and people strolling back and forth -- few cars allowed.  I told our guide about the Sicilian contingent in St. Louis and the”hill” there, where we could get cannoli.  So we plopped down at one of those outdoor cafes and had a cannoli and “Coca Light”.  And he had an expresso and stuffed croissant.  I must admit St. Louis’s cannoli are really good.  But nothing beats a huge cannoli while sitting at a cafe in Sicily on a warmish Wednesday morning!

Next we strolled into the church of St Agatha next to the cafe.  Smaller than the Duomo, but much more charming.  It had been a convent, but now was an active church, with all the gorgeous gilt, carvings, painted ceilings, and stained glass you expect in an Italian church.  Who was St. Agatha, we asked.  Apparently, she was tortured by having her boobs lopped off.  So now she is the patron saint of Catania.  And, at the little cafe we visited, they have a pastry that is round with red icing -- in commemoration of those lopped off boobs!

Next up the Duomo. Not nearly as impressive, although it was bigger.  And by now the crowds were starting to press in.  So we left ... and decided to drive into the hills to an Italian winery for lunch.  The winery, a long way from Catania, overlooked Mt. Aetna and the owners swear it makes their wines extraordinary.  So, for lunch, sitting with a view of the mountains and the sky, we tried their wines along with a light lunch of olives, sun dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts in olive oil, and eggplant in olive oil.  Of course, we had the prescribed bread.  But we also had a variety of cheeses and sausage to go along with the wine.  All home made!! The name of the winery?? GAMBINO. No, it is not that family, they protested.  But the wine was excellent and they told us where their U.S. distributor was located.  So, with luck, we can get enough to do a reprise of the light lunch in St. Louis. I must admit that, after 5 tastings of different wines, my toes were not nearly as painful as earlier!!

Then it was back to the ship for a quick nap.  Memories of that winery, the fish market, the little cafe will stay with us for a long time.  The luxury of the Italian way of life is something for Americans to reflect on and adopt!!

Knights Don’t Just Exist in England...

Today we were in Malta.  Never really thought about Malta before, but Bos happened to be reading a book about the first Crusade, so this visit fit right in.  You see, Malta is a really strategic location for traffic in the Mediterranean and was very important not only for the Crusades in the 16th century, but also critical during World War II.  In addition, there are vestiges of Roman ruins there, as well as other cultures through history.

Malta owes its fame to the Knights of St. John, who, during the Crusades, planned the city as a refuge to care for injured soldiers and pilgrims involved in those ventures.  You’ve heard of the Knights Hospitalers? Well, they were here.  And, because they realized they needed to defend the island from others who recognized its value, they were able to get Pope Pius V and Philip II of Spain to fund the project, which included a massive fortified city with lots of defenses.  

The head man of the Knights of St. John was called The Grand Master and he lived in a palace worthy of a Grand Master.  There are more palaces here than the 300+ churches! And the island had 38 Grand Masters until Napoleon threw out the last Grand Master when Napoleon was on his way to Egypt.  The city of Valletta was named for Grand Master La Valette, the gallant hero of the Great Siege of 1565, when the Ottomans tried to take the island and lost to the Knights.

The cities on the three islands that make up Malta have the feeling of Moorish Italianate cities. THe buildings are very Italian in my eyes, but with moorish style. I know that sounds strange, but even their language, which is unique to Malta alone, has a mixture of 80% Arabic and the rest is a polyglot of Spanish, Italian, and ENglish.  And this is the only country where it is spoken.  However, nearly everyone here speaks English as well.  And they drive on the “wrong” side of the road, as the English were the last people to govern it before it got its independence.  

During World War II it was the most bombed city, they maintain.  And, in fact, we saw a domed church  that is the third largest in the world next to St. Peters and St. Pauls.  In WWII the Germans dropped a bomb through the center of the dome, it dropped to the floor, rolled around and never went off.  There were three hundred people in the church at the time.  That occurred on the birth of Mother Mary.  So the citizens of Malta always celebrate that day as the day they were saved by Mother Mary!

Conclusion:  It is a very friendly little country. It feels more like Europe than like Libya, it’s neighbor.  It might be good for a quick holiday for Europeans.  But all around you feel the history of particularly the Knights Hospitaller!

Santorini is Synonymous With...

Hills...sun...shopping...hills...sun...views...hills...whitewashed buildings with blue domes...hills! Last night we had dinner with our VERY charming Cruise Consultant Michael.  He not only works for Regent, but also has a newsletter and e-newsletter about cruise lines, cruises, and locations he has visited.  So it was natural that we asked him what was at the top of his list.  His answer: “Santorini”.   “Why,” we asked.  He said there was nothing better in the world (and the world is a very big place, we’ve learned!) than sitting in a restaurant on top of the hills in Santorini, drinking a glass of wine and eating a meze or two --- and then going to another restaurant on top of a hill and having another glass of wine and more mezes and going to a third restaurant etc etc, while laughing and relaxing with friends.

That pretty much describes Santorini.  It is built on the very tippy-top edge of what was once a volcanic island.  The caldera (or center part of the volcano) blew itself off and is now in the ocean, so you can see where it used to be -- but is now blue blue ocean -- and the view from the volcano’s rim, where the towns are, is amazing -- miles and miles of blue azure Aegean sea stretching as far as the eye can see.  That is the view part of this review.

Now, all these quaint little towns sit around that rim, so you have the view out to sea.  But, if you turn around, you will see thousands of little shops, primarily jewelry shops, but also touristy shops with tourist stuff as well.  And, if you stand still, you will be surrounded by wave upon wave of tourists pouring into all the little towns, ready to shop at those stores, with cameras clicking. I should mention that the little towns have been rebuilt several times, which is why they look so pristine now, thanks to that volcano!

The day we arrived, the “Monster Ship” came along.  When we were in Alexandria, Egypt the day before, we saw IT for the first time.  Our guide there said, “They have 6,000 people on board.”  Well, he was wrong.  They only have a little over 4,000 people on board, if you count the crew.  But our ship (maximum 490 guests) looked like a “baby ship” next to the behemoth!!  The Monster actually has a real grass lawn on the top deck...and it has a shopping mall with 14 stores.(I should tell you that that cruise line is building another ship to take 8,000 passengers!)  So, when we got to Santorini, all the passengers from the Monster Ship also got to Santorini.  Talk about hordes of people coming ashore!!

But: WARNING!!  If you go to Santorini, be prepared to “soldier” up the mountains. And that is no small feat!!  You see, those darling towns and those cozy little restaurants are all at the peaks of the volcano’s rim, where the view is! And I mean AT THE TOP!!!  So you need to be prepared to mountain climb up and, if you are lucky, you get to take the funicular down to the port.  You can walk down 600 steps that are slick with donkey doo or try to ride donkeys down.  But, they warned us, it is dangerous! You see, the donkeys don’t particularly like to take tourists up and down all day long -- so they try to rub you off on the stone walls on either side of the steps!

Our adventure at the funicular (or, to be more precise, getting to the funicular!) is worth mentioning.  You remember those hordes of people?  Well, after sweating up the mountain, because the bus left us at the BOTTOM of the mountain, we were told to follow the cobblestone path (no, not the “yellow brick road”!) to the funicular.  I know.  The view was still there.  But so were 184 gift shops, mostly jewelry, as we wound our way to try to find the funicular at the veryyyy long end of the cobblestone uphill gift shop row!  Bos said, “You know, the exit from all tourist attractions is through the gift shop!”  And he was right here...only they set up the street for many many gift shops, not just one...

  When we FINALLY chugged up to the funicular, sweating from every pore in our bodies, we had a 30 minute wait, with a long snaky line behind us, in the steamy hot sun.  Finally, when we were in reach of the door to the funicular, we heard angry yelling, screaming, pounding, clapping behind us!  It seems a Japanese guide had pushed her way ahead of the line and bought tickets for 30 of her clients and was waving them ahead of the line, rather than waiting patiently as everyone else was doing.  Those Japanese people, to add insult to injury, were laughing as they pushed forward!  But Bos, bless his heart, blocked the Japanese just in time for he and I to get into the funicular and take the ride down!  Talk about angry tourists!!!

We did have lunch at one of those special Greek Santorini restaurants, where the owner never used a cookbook, but learned the recipes at her mother’s knee -- and she demonstrated Greek cooking.  But the vegetables were really strange looking -- white round eggplants, white round zucchinis!  And that is because the island is all volcanic with little or no rain, so things grow differently.

And the view was just what Michael had said -- miles of aqua water stretching forever -- allowing you to relax and dream!!! Was it the best place in the whole wide world?  Michael thinks so, but I’ll leave it to you to decide.  Personally, we’d put Bermuda in that first place position!!

Egypt: What We Saw and What We Learned

We were quite excited to be going to Egypt!  The land of the Pharaohs!  Where people talk in THOUSANDS of years B.C., not just hundreds.  So we decided to “pop” for a private car and guide to show us personally what we needed to see and know about this ancient country.  Furthermore, the ship was docking at Alexandria for two days.  So we decided to go to Cairo 3 hours away with our two days’ worth of time -- because that’s where it’s at!

So promptly at 10:30 a.m. we walked through the dock’s terminal to meet Idel, the guide who was a Nubian from Nubia by the Aswan dam (“I am a village person”), and Mahmood, the driver, who spoke little English, but showed us pictures of his two kids and his wife.  While driving we noticed lots and lots of date palms with ripe dates and the Egyptians were selling them from stands all up and down the highway, like we sell tomatoes in the summer from stands.  And we saw these conical plaster objects that were between 30 and 50 feet high with little holes in them all around.  Looked like an upside down ice cream cone, only huge!  Sometimes you'd see one and sometimes you'd see three or four above a house or a long building.  When asked, Idel said they were pigeon coops.  Egyptians love to eat pigeons and these were either family pigeon coops or coops for sellers of pigeons!  Strange, huh.

Observations:

Both Alexandria and Cairo are cities with lots of smog, trash on every corner, dirt along with the trash, destitute people (some with teeth but more without!), apartment buildings that look like they are abandoned-but they are not- with clothes drying from clothes lines draped from building to building.

The streets have equal numbers of donkeys with carts, horses, and cars, busses, vans jammed with tourists.

The streets are also jammed with lots and lots of soldiers and police, each one carrying an AK-47 rifle made by the Russians.  Very visible!  Very scary!  In fact, when three minivans full of our shipmates toured Alexandra and then Cairo, there was a policeman in each van, armed, and a motorcycle policeman in front of and in back of the caravan.  I guess they weren’t worried about us!!

You’ll ask about the pyramids and the sphinx.  We saw them.  So did 20,000 other tourists that afternoon. They look like the pictures. No better, no worse. They are big. They are nearly in the city of Cairo, but there is lots of blowing sand, lots of heat, lots of walking.  And the walking includes men hawking camel rides on the hundreds of camels there and hundreds of donkeys there. And horse rides as well. Pickpockets, we were warned.  And little kids selling water, soda, pictures of things--just to make a buck.  And camel dung (I stepped in).  And donkey dung.  And horse dung.  Same thing for the sphinx, except the sphinx was much SMALLER than we thought!  One interesting thing: the Greeks named the Sphinx, not the Egyptians,  and the word “pyramid” also comes from the Greek, named after a triangular kind of bread in Greece.

History lesson:  We learned lots and lots of interesting things we won’t bore you with -- like how to embalm a mummy. And about 3200  B.C. when the upper and lower kingdoms joined together under a Pharoah and learned to write a language.  And about all the different periods of their development -- Cleopatra (who was of Greek heritage--and she did not marry her brother, they called each other “brother” and “sister” like we mean friend!) And how all these years we have denigrated the Egyptians with misinformation on the pyramids.  The guys who built the pyramids were not slaves, according to the Egyptians.  They did it because they wanted to! They were HAPPY to do it.  Because when they died, they would follow their Pharoah -- yay Pharaoh -- into his kingdom in the afterlife and he would love them and keep them happy!  It was either their job as a worker for the pharaoh, or they were hired as a part-timer for a couple years.  And there were villages that sprung up around the projects that the Pharoah paid for where they slept, got food, drink and lived.  And they had names such as “Pharoah’s Buds” or “Best Builders for Pharaoh Cheops”, kinda like our St Louis Cardinals or Chicago Cubs, I guess.  

And they didn’t bury their wives or slaves with them.  They made little clay copies of their slaves and buried THEM with them, along with every darn thing they needed to live in the afterlife, since they became king of the afterlife when they died.  AND they started building their tombs, either like a pyramid or like a tomb inside a mountain, when they became pharaoh.  So King Tut was 12 when he became pharaoh and died when he was 19, probably of an infection from falling off his chariot.  His tomb was already built or almost built when he died, ready for him.  Wives?  Well, Idel was vague about that and said something like, “She disappeared or was murdered or something.”  But I will tell you that Idel, our guide, definitely had a misogynist bent: learned early he didn’t want to talk to me, only Bos!  But, in Egypt, that is probably common!

Done with history for now.  Back to Cairo:

Lots and lots of women all over on the streets.  All covered.  I mean ALL COVERED!  Some were carrying bundles of things on their heads. In fact, they carried all kinds of things on their heads.  It was kinda amazing!!   Always with little kids trailing along. 

 On the other hand, most of the men were dressed in western wear -- jeans, polo shirts, etc.  So all I could think of was “subjugation of women”.  It was better when the men were wearing their djelabas also.   Then I could see the cultural wearing of garb for women also.  But not the jeans things with their women totally covered.  And it was hot and humid!! One of the women guides told another tourist that men in Egypt are lazy and women have to do most of the work.  She said that farmers, in particular, will have more than one wife to help with the work.  But you don’t want to be the second, third or fourth wife.  Because only the first wife has authority in those families.  And girls as young as 13-14 will be made to marry. Since they are mainly strict Muslims, they don’t drink.  Maybe if they did, they’d loosen up a bit!!

The heat, the long walks, the traffic,the dirt and trash:  none of that mattered to the women or the men, apparently.  The women, with their bundles on their heads and their little ones following, looked like beasts of burden rather than wives! Scratching out a living on the streets, in their little street gardens, their children begging from tourists.  Made me think how lucky we are in the states!

After hours and hours of looking at sites and dirty streets and dirty apartment buildings and people trying to have gardens around the apartment buildings with their little herds of goats or cows (in the center of Cairo, mind you!) Idel took us to his boss’s country club for lunch, although it was 3:30 in the afternoon!  From a gravel road with tin cans, paper, dirt gathered around walls, we entered the City of Oz,  because behind those walls was a wonderful oasis of flowering trees, shrubs and a country club that could be in the U.S.  What a contrast!

Lunch.  Well, in Egypt their big meal is “lunch”.  So they have breads,  mezes, salad, main course like steak or chicken, dessert. Bloop...  Dinner is usually smaller and no earlier than 9 p.m. or 10p.m.

So  after lunch we were back to the dirt and the beggars and the soot on buildings.  And, after a visit to a papyrus making shop (where they tried to sell us paintings on papyrus), we decided to go to our hotel.  Longggg drive to get there although it was in town on the Nile.  The hotels were in a complex with gates and fences.  And each gate (and we had to go through 3) had a guard with a dog and a guard with an AK-47 on his hip.  Once we passed those gates, we were at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza and back in lalaland.  It was as beautiful as the Four Seasons George V in Paris.  And after a shower to get the sand and dirt off, we opted to go to the lounge for a BOTTLE of wine and to compose our thoughts.  No dinner that night.

By the way, when we checked out of the hotel the next morning, there were 2 Saudis also checking out.  You can tell by their white djelabas and their headgear.  But what I noticed is: THEIR DJELABAS HAD FRENCH CUFFS!  WOW! Never thought about that!!

Anyway, after sweating our way through the un-air conditioned, jam -packed (with tourists) Egyptian museum, we trundled back to Alexandria, or as the locals call it “Alex”.  Along the long straight sandy road, we saw many many people in traditional garb, including women all bundled up, thumbing a ride.  Some were walking to nowhere -- because the road to Cairo is barren.  Don’t know where these people were going. We saw tumble-down shacks made out of straw, abandoned house, abandoned shops in the middle of nowhere.  Small busses were picking the travelers up, we suppose.  But the men sit in front and, if there are women, they are in back.  And the busses are not air conditioned!  We were so glad to get back to the boat and our own little protected world.

What Did We Learn??  

That Egypt, a very devout and conservative Muslim country, is trying to trade on their illustrious past, but has a very long way to go to become a modern country with modern living standards.  And it didn’t appear to us that they had the desire or stamina to do the work it would take! It takes more than monuments...