Hey!
Last week was our first week “alone” on the ship. By “alone”, I mean without our producer, director and our producer’s assistant Monica. So there’s still the whole cast....
Here’s a quick breakdown of what we did each day:
Barcelona: We walked everywhere - the Gothic section, the old Roman section, a pastry shop and we found the Picasso museum.
Sea day: Not much. Sleep in, relax, gym and some Gloom.
Malta: We wandered to the city center. Lots of photos.
Naples: Archeological museum of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pizza. Walked 4 miles.
Rome: We saw Vatican city, Castle of the Angel, Piazza Nuvona, Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, Piazza di Coloumno and the Spanish Steps. Walked like 6 miles. Also gelato for 15 euro.
Pisa: The tower, the cathedral, a bit of the city and purple is the color of the year in purse form. Walked 4 miles?
Villefranche: handmade soap shop, cappuccino on the waterfront, we learn about the bus to Nice.
And now for some highlights....
It was raining in Barcelona so the first thing we did was get a cappuccino and a Spanish Omelette sandwich. We walked all of the La Rambla - taking in all the sites. From there we kind of just wandered all over the Gothic and the Roman sections of the city. In the Gothic section we heard some wonderful music - a soprano singer and an excellent spanish guitarist. They were both great and the setting - the gothic section - was just magical.
The day in Barcelona was about getting our bearings. We found the archeological museum and the Picasso museum but we didn’t go in. Instead we found a lovely piazza and got a glass of local wine and later we found a fantastic patisseria/bomberia called La Colmena and got some local pastry. The pastry is great and we went back again this week.
As I mentioned above we went to the Archeological museum in Naples. The museum wasn’t very well organized - everything was labeled in Italian (of course!) but the English labeling was very random. One cool thing was they were moving a rather large statue and working on some new rooms so we got to see that. We also managed to find the room of artifacts of.....sex. Yes. It was called the Secret Room and it was filled with ribald lanterns, paintings, beds and uh, statues. The statues were very....upright.
Naples is like the NYC of Italy. I mean there are people everywhere and scooters, taxi’s cars, construction and garbage. Still, it is an exciting city. The people aren’t overly friendly but we have noticed one phenomenon. We got lost twice. Both times a middle aged man, usually dressed nicely, stopped to help us. They went out of their way to give us directions - one man almost missing his bus to do so.
Rome was a great day and a long day. As you can see from the list above, we saw a lot of sites in one day. The whole day was amazing. My favorite site was definitely the Trevi Fountain. I’ve always liked fountains and this was a fountain on a grand scale.
I did have one mildly unfortunate event happen to me. We were close to the Spanish Steps and we decided that some gelato would be good. So we stopped in a shop and Brett got a cup of gelato that cost him 5 euro. I’d spied these good looking cones with dark chocolate on them and asked for one of those. The clerk told me it would be extra and I said okay. He proceed to create an enormous cone of gelato embellished with creme freche, cookies, caramel sauce, little cones, a mini paper umbrella and a purple sparkly thing. I thought, “oh, this is nice.” Then he gave me the price - 15 euro! 15. Euro. I had been suckered. I paid for it and luckily it was excellent. I did find out that this happened to some other passengers which made me feel a little bit better. I’ll post a photo of it later.
Pisa - what can I say - the tower was great! The cathedral by the tower was beautiful. They also had several great stalls that were selling purses. I walked away with a great purple handbag. The clerk told us that purple is the color of the year.....we thought she was pulling our wallets but now I’ve seen purple everywhere!
Villefranche was an easy day which is just what we needed after Italy.
This week my step sister, Michele, and her husband, Jay, are on board. We showed them around Malta and today we went to Herculaneum. What’s Herculaneum? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s a city that like Pompeii was destroyed/covered by the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius. Instead of being covered by ash, Herculaneum was covered by lava. The lava was somewhat cooled (relatively speaking) so some wood, papyrus and clothing survived as well as a bunch of mosaics and sculptures.
But I’ll write more next week....
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