Archive for June, 2007
June 27, 2007 at 10:22 pm · Filed under Disney, Travel, Mediterranean Cruise
It was an extremely sleepy day. The sadness of the finality of the cruise was lessened partially by the fact we were continuing on to Disneyland Paris but mostly by the fact we never really woke up.
A final inspection of the room, a final shower (sans the liquid toiletries not provided by the ship, so chewing gum was a must) and we made our way down to Lumiere’s for our final breakfast at 7:45 in the morning.
Laura and Andy were late, as they had promised they would be the night before, so we spent some more time getting to know the people at the table to our left. We had talked to them intermittently throughout the trip, mostly sharing our love of gluttony and need for sleep. They were a couple from New Jersey with their 17 year old daughter. They had been on tons of cruises, including a Disney cruise 10 years prior, when their daughter was 7, which immediately caused me to subtract 10 from my age and then not feel so old. As you may have already noticed, I’m not good with names at all. My mother is the oldest of fourteen children and each of her brothers and sisters generally have at least three children, with a bunch having four (no one’s broken five, yet) so that I’ve got so many cousins we don’t bother learning their names until they start talking. As a result, I don’t remember anyone’s names until I’ve seen them and used their name at least a dozen times. Don’t feel bad if I mention you here and don’t remember your name, you obviously left an impression, it’s just that I’m an idiot. Anyway, the man next to us worked in Nyack, which isn’t too far from where we live and home to the Palisades Mall, which we frequent. It was surprising how many people lived or worked near us throughout this cruise, who knows how many times we’d seen them before we got on a boat in Europe together. The couple and their daughter were spending some more time in Barcelona before returning home. Almost everyone had some sort of continuation plan spawning from the idea “Well, we’re already here”, even if they frequent “here”. A couple in the elevator on the way down to breakfast were spending a few days in Spain before returning to Italy for another two weeks. I briefly considered the Hannibal Lecter-style skinning and taking their identity, but I didn’t have any sharp utensils and I really didn’t have the murder lust that early in the morning.
The dining room was alive, but nowhere near as alive as it had been during the cruise. It was full of people with matted hair, glasses where there had been contacts before, no makeup and their worst outfits. If anyone had walked into the room for the first time they would assume that we were refugees instead of vacationing. There was some life: Wilson, our server, and Melroy, our Assistant Server, were ready and raring to go. I asked if they got some good sleep and they laughed. Melroy had gone to bed at 3 the previous night only to check back in for work at 5:45. Wilson was able to get a luxurious 3 and a half hours in before working up the energy that I don’t have after 10 hours in bed. This was the life they led daily, not an aberration: four hours was lazy Sunday and five hours was unthinkable. The fact that they were able to do their jobs as well as they do, let alone be the liveliest guys in the room, dancing and singing their way through the shift, easily doubled their tips from us, and I’m sure most of the people who had the pleasure of their service. Both Wilson and Melroy would be working again if we were to cruise next year, and their presence made that idea more appealing.
We ordered…well, Wilson ordered for us: although we had been to breakfast in the dining room only once before, he had memorized both our orders and recited them for us before we could open our mouths. He’s damn good. He also was leaving the ship that day for a visit to his in-laws who live in Barcelona. It’s a welcome respite from ship food and a lucky coincidence for him, since he can mitigate the long and lonely cruise with bi-weekly visit to family.
Laura and Andy joined us, looking so exhausted that we seemed like speed freaks in comparison. They were in the same boat as us (sorry) with a flight to Paris 6 hours in the future with Disney kicking them out to the airport far too early. They were spending the remainder of their honeymoon in Paris proper, something that made Lisa insanely jealous, but I truly believe that we’re the kind of people who need an “in” to a place before we can enjoy it on our own and the small window allotted to us in Paris would leave us more disappointed than satisfied.
We wolfed down our breakfast, joking around with Wilson, Melroy, Laura, Andy and the people next to us for the final time. Well, maybe the final time, since we seem to keep running into Andy and Laura throughout Europe. We said our fond farewells and stumbled our way to the elevator, carry-ons in tow.
We picked up our bags in the Chip & Dale lot. We knew that insane excess baggage fees were in our future, so we stopped at UPS. It would be at least 280 euros to ship only one of the bags home, so that certainly wasn’t an option. In retrospect, it might’ve been a steal. More on that later.
The bus ride to the airport was uneventful. I much prefer the depressing Magical Express ride to Orlando airport as at least the depression is accompanied by a DVD. Lisa slept most of the way while I finished Miranda July’s new book and played Puzzle Quest, an insanely addictive DS game that combines the simplicity of Bejeweled with the micromanagement of an RPG to create a monster that I’ve had to force myself to put down on more than one occasion.
We got to the airport at 9:00 and dragged our bags to the line to check in for Easyjet. After a good half hour of waiting, we had our bags weighed for check-in. We knew we would have to pay excess baggage fees as we were allowed 20 kg per person which we had just barely exceeded with our two bags and now we had an additional 20 kg in gifts purchased for everyone back home. We were prepared to pay a token amount for Easyjet since their website said we would have to pay a reasonable additional baggage fee for excess. We were more concerned with Ryanair as it had an insane baggage limit of 15 kg each with an 8 euro per kilogram charge on top of that. Of course, since the odds were against us with one, the other decided to get in on the action: Easyjet’s restrictions changed at the airport and we were forced to pay 180 euros just to get our bags on the plane, probably more than we paid for the flight itself. Lesson learned: don’t fly the cheap airlines within Europe unless you’re backpacking. We’re not looking forward to Ryanair.
Security in the airport is at an absolute minimum. The security guard that was manning the entryway to the gates was more concerned with keeping the line moving than anything else. Lisa was trying to show him the boarding passes when he yelled for her to move. The actual security check is fairly standard, but the liquid restriction doesn’t seem to be rigorously enforced and they don’t check the shoes at all. The airport security all over Europe has been like this (except in Dublin, when I needed to get it over with quickly) and even in the US it took less time to get through security on my way to Europe than it does when I’m flying to Florida.
Time passes slowly when you’ve got 5 hours to kill at an airport. There are only so many Toblerones you can consider buying before you’re driven insane. The airport had designated WiFi areas which we took full advantage of for the hour or so before the laptop battery died. The rest of the time was filled with snacking (a Snickers bar for me, a sandwich for Lisa), people watching and Puzzle Quest playing. As our flight time got closer we finally got a Gate number and then we realized that we had no seat numbers. I sent Lisa up to check on this and the next time I looked up from my DS, she was at the front of a line stretching one end of the terminal to the other. It had been fortuitous timing on our part: despite a lack of announcement, boarding was about to begin.
The line for boarding was a standard line, something that I feel comfortable now calling an American Line in light of what was about to happen, people standing one behind the other, single file. This must have been a mere formality, for as soon as the boarding began, the entire line went to the front, forming a mob in front of the single attendant taking tickets. People not previously standing in line snaked into the crowd and everyone was pushing forward to board. An American family in front of us was shocked by what was going on but the father’s disgust led him to force his way to the front. The sheer force of his American determination somehow parted the mob of inconsiderate passengers and Lisa and I rode in their wake, among the first 10 or so people on the plane. We still had no idea what our seats were so we asked the bold American father if he had his seat numbers and they informed us that it was open seating. This helped explain the chaos we had just witnessed but honestly, what happened to common decency? I understand the desire to get a good seat but people were literally shoving children aside to get to the front. The American family said this is how Southwest Airlines does it in the states and I hate to be all ethnocentrist again but I can’t imagine the people behave the same.
We sat four rows from the front on the right side of the plane, me on the aisle, Lisa in the middle. A few minutes after we sat down, an elderly woman asked for the window seat and we gladly gave it to her: she couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds and so didn’t crush Lisa. She was quiet for the entire trip, which Lisa and I slept through in alternating shifts, not by any conscious decision, it’s just how it worked out. It was probably because the first time I fell asleep I started to drool to the shock and horror of Lisa, who promptly woke me up. I think she decided to remain vigilant for the rest of the 1 ½ hour flight. The rest of the passengers were wholly unremarkable with the exception of the woman on the aisle across and one row back. She spent the entire flight, and I’m not exaggerating when I say the entire flight, blowing her nose. Long, wet blows that were accompanied by visions of the superbug I would contract from her airborne snot globules, so I held my breath and imagined kicking open the airlock and throwing her out, leaving her to rethink flying while sick, or at least considering going to the bathroom where she couldn’t infect anyone else.
ORLY airport was nice, but we weren’t there to admire it, we were there to leave it. We gathered our luggage (everything, thankfully, in one piece, so far) and searched for the VEA shuttle to Disneyland Paris, which was, of course, not where the website said it would be. The transit map said it was out Door G, Quoi 2. Each successive door leaving the building had a letter assigned to it and we made our way to G, passing food that was calling out to us, because it was 4:32 and the bus was scheduled to arrive at 4:30. Quoi 2, thankfully, was labeled clearly once we got out, but the bus was nowhere to be seen. We accepted that it probably had left already, knowing that Disney’s legendary efficiency comes through only when we don’t want it to, and sat on the bench to wait.
The young family that had been sitting directly across from us on the plane came with their bags shortly after we sat down. They, too, had come from the cruise and they, too, were heading to Disneyland Paris. I delivered the bad news about the hour wait and they offered a glimmer of hope: they had seen what appeared to be the Disney bus at the corner in the distance, seemingly headed this way. Lo and behold, it was headed this way, and it pulled up to cheers from us and the only other family waiting for it. A squat little fat man with more hair on his stubbly face than on his head popped out of the bus to help us load our luggage underneath the bus. As soon as he had done so, he informed us in French with liberal gesturing that he would return in 20 minutes and we couldn’t get on the bus until then.
Over an hour later, he returned. In the time he was gone, we learned that the young family was Leo and Jamie with their son Jack. They were all from Chicago and had enjoyed the cruise as much as we did, their first Disney cruise ever, and were considering the Caribbean for the following year. We talked at length, comparing our various excursions and experiences, while Jack, with boundless energy, constantly tested the attention and restrictions of his parents. Despite the pleasant company, all of us were constantly checking our watches in disbelief over being abandoned. I theorized he must be napping in the bus, but he wasn’t in the driver’s seat, which is nice since that would’ve been all that more insulting since we couldn’t get on the bus. The time passed incredibly slowly, but when he showed up, we were just happy to be on our way and didn’t utter a single complaint, at least not to the driver. He had, of course, now put us square into rush hour, and so our journey took over an hour, with the industrialized zones on either side of the highway offering little to appreciate in the way of scenery, so that the most interesting moment of the journey was seeing a McDonald’s.
The entrance to the Disneyland Paris Resort area does nothing to get you excited. There’s a faded sign, clearly aged by time and weather, that is a bit smaller than the road signs, only on the right side of the bus, that would be easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. There wasn’t much in the way of pre-show, and suddenly we were at the first hotel, the Newport Bay Club, a hybrid Beach Club/Yacht Club that was big and boxy with just enough themeing to evoke the seaside resort it was aiming for. This seemed to be the norm here: our hotel, the Sequoia Lodge, a hybrid of the Wilderness Lodge and the Grand Californian, was big and boxy and themed just enough to evoke the National Park lodges it was aiming for. The interior of the lobby was more impressive than the outside, though, and I left Lisa to take (terrible) pictures of it while I checked in.
The people working at the front desk were multilingual, with at least French, Spanish and German spoken before I got up there and they spoke English. The long wait to get there, though, was long, but it was moved along by Mickey, who had come out to the lobby, seemingly unattended (a cast member came out from the shadows when it was time for Mickey to go), and dancing to the lobby music whenever he wasn’t entertaining a child. He was lively, far livelier than the people checking into the hotel, and when he was alone except for one little girl, he danced a waltz at length with her, making her day. The check-in process went smoothly: any fear of a language barrier was nonsense, the only fear you should have is of the shame that these people can speak most of your language while you struggle with just a few words of theirs.
We had booked through DVC and so our admission was included. Originally it seemed that the stay was a bit pricey point-wise but once I factored in the admission it was actually more than reasonable. The stay also included a continental breakfast every morning of the stay and I had opted for the breakfast in Fantasyland that would allow us to get into the park an hour early. I was handed two vouchers (we would be leaving too early the third morning to take advantage of the breakfast) that would get us into the park. Nothing really seems to be linked up here: in addition to the vouchers, I was given a room key, two park tickets, and two separate “Hotel easy-passes” that seemed identical but one proved that I was staying in a Disney hotel for Extra Magic Hours (which were only going on the night we checked in, when we didn’t plan on taking advantage of them) and the other allowed us to charge things to the room. Back in good ol’ Walt Disney World, all these are rolled into the room key, which, of course, I prefer.
We were in the Yellowstone Lodge, the first of six buildings off the lobby, in room 119. It was just through a covered bridge over a stream, complete with little waterfalls. This, combined with birdsongs that we’re unsure were actually real, gave the place the charming nature feel that we’d hoped for. The Yellowstone Lodge wasn’t so charming, though, with moldy doors that stuck when you tried to open them and a dark hallway with ugly wallpaper. The room lock was the card-reader type, but it was almost impossible to slip the card in properly, so that you feared snapping it in half as you tried to find the millimeter slit that was secreted away in the middle of the box.
The room itself was serviceable, but nothing special beyond its spaciousness (relative to the only other hotel room we’d stayed at in Europe, in Barcelona, where the small space was mitigated by its sharp decoration). There was a very nice bathroom with a tub and shower that seemed brand new, which was nice. I don’t remember if this was considered a “Moderate” resort (I think it was), but since Wilderness Lodge back home, its spiritual sister, is a Deluxe Resort, we were expecting more than the sparse decoration. I may sound down on the hotel as a whole, but I would actually stay here again (I’d like to try Disneyland Hotel next time, it really is built on top of the park) but with more realistic expectations about what we’d be getting.
There was no time to dawdle in the room: I had made reservations at King Ludwig’s Table, a German restaurant in Disney Village (their Downtown Disney) that Lisa had latched onto as a place she HAD to eat at when she was looking at some review sites in Barcelona airport. I had tried to convince her otherwise, especially after the clerk at the Front Desk told me that it wasn’t owned or operated by Disney, but she was steadfast in her resolve. My inability to read an analog watch (I don’t know why I wear them, especially the one I have now which has no numbers, leaving me to guess what time it is plus or minus an hour. Don’t ever ask me the time, I’ll stare at my watch for far too long, panicking, and then I’ll finally give you the first number that comes to my mind, regardless of its relation to what I’m seeing on my wrist) meant that we were rushing from our hotel room at 7:30 PM for a 9:00 PM reservation, thinking it was 8:30 PM. We made our way through the hotel lobby (we would later find on our own that it was quicker to avoid the hotel lobby altogether and just head down the path alongside the waterfall stream) to the Promenade du Loc, the walkway surrounding the main waterway surrounded by the Sequoia Lodge, the Newport Bay Club and Disney Village. There were shuttles that left the Sequoia Lodge every 12 minutes, but unless you’re able to get on the shuttle without waiting, it was actually quicker to walk, which we did.
The walk from the Hotel Lobby opens up to the Promenade du Loc after you pass several pine trees, which cover the grounds of the Sequoia Lodge. Directly in front of the hotel is what seems to be a dock, but it is unattended and seemingly unused, as no boats of any kind are in the water. There are vestiges of a time when watercraft may have been out on the lake: buoys with solar powered lights floated near bridges with ample headroom underneath. I wonder, though, what the purpose of the boats might have been, as the lake isn’t all that big and it doesn’t connect in any way to the parks. What is probably the former dock that accepted the boats near Disney Village currently holds a giant hot-air balloon celebrating the 15th anniversary of Disneyland Paris. The balloon is pretty well moored and is also unattended, though it looks as if they might fly it during busier times of year.
The walk is fairly quiet by the Sequoia Lodge, with only a few signposts directing you to the action lining the sides. Once you cross a bridge toward the Hotel New York, a hotel designed to resemble the New York skyline (which fails miserably), it becomes slightly more lively, with a concession stand selling ice cream and several concrete steps leading down to the lake (with no barrier at its edge, forcing tons of parents to chase their children, eager to join the many ducks lining the banks, down them). As you walk further, the place livens up a bit more, and the strangeness of the Disney Village becomes apparent.
Lisa said it reminded her of Six Flags, which I can understand. There’s a sense of cheap opportunism in the barely-themed attractions you’d expect to find at a State Fair than in anything Disney, although I guess there’s precedent in the fairly awful Midway at California Adventure and the equally bad (in parts) at Dinoland USA at Animal Kingdom. Nothing is free, which would make it more tolerable, so all you’re left with are overpriced children’s rides that look like they were rented for a birthday party of a spoiled child. There’s the ever-popular trampoline-and-bungee-cord thing, the kiddie go-karts complete with dingy-plastic dividers, and a tiny plastic mall carousel. Then you reach Disney Village.
Disney Village was our first introduction to the bizarre view of America that was pervade the entire Disneyland Paris property. The USA is made up of, in its entirety: New York and Hollywood, populated by Cabbies, Celebrities, Cowboys and Indians. I imagine it’s the same as imagining the streets of London filled with cockney urchins or Paris with lanky beret-wearing men with pencil-thin moustaches in black and white striped shirts, baguettes under their arm. I guess we come out pretty unscathed, but that might just be because I live in New York and get some recognition, despite my lack of cowboy boots.
The love of the Wild West is evident everywhere, with a Wild West dinner show, a country western saloon, and Billy Bob’s snacks and Tex-Mex buffet. Representing the New York side of the US is New York Style, proudly offering Pastrami and Corned Beef. The Hollywood side is represented by Planet Hollywood, which seems to have a stranglehold on Disney properties, despite its total lack of modernity. Its facade is covered in cutouts that probably seemed dated when it opened in 1992 especially with its not one, but two appearances of Wesley Snipes in his embarassing White Men Can’t Jump costume. There’s also a shoutout to the 1950s, our go-to decade for Americana, with Annette’s (a reference to Annette Funicello, I’m sure), a diner that Lisa tells me is their version of the 50s Primetime Café in MGM Studios. There are also, of course, shops mostly Disney merchandise but also outposts for Planet Hollywood, King Ludwig’s and the Wild West Saloon. There’s also a McDonald’s (which, like in America, you’d be shocked how many people run to as if it’s the first they’ve ever seen) and a Rainforest Café, but the less said about both, the better. There was some insane entertainment in the middle of it all, with a giant woman on stilts with fruit on her head slow-motion chasing three smaller men, two with smaller stilts and one with no stilts at all. Their actions were broad, as if they were mimes, but they spoke a lot in French. I’m not sure it made sense even to the people who understood the language.
A digression: a stunning amount of people, men and women alike, had the tiny mohawk (is it really a mohawk if you keep the rest of your non-mohawked hair?) with frosted tips that Sacha Baron Cohen has when playing his Bruno character. It’s insanely stupid-looking. It takes all the non-conformist rebellion of the mohawk, throws it out, and replaces it with “Look at my big, dumb, gay head”. Okay, now we may continue.
Our destination was King Ludwig’s Castle, contained in a stuccoed beige castle that didn’t do anything to assuage my fears about eating here. The menu was a thorough meat and potatoes affair, though, something I look for in my German food, and I didn’t feel like walking anymore, so we went in.
Lisa committed the mortifying faux pas of immediately speaking to the woman seating us in English without asking if she spoke it, or even greeting her. I had taken the reigns so far, mainly because her pronunciation of French was horrendous, but for some reason she felt comfortable enough to force herself on this person. Seemingly everyone here (in Disney, outside they still speak it but the vocabulary varies from person to person) speaks fluent English, so I can understand why, but I was still caught so offguard that when the woman looked at me I couldn’t respond, like a deer in the headlights, and only after a few seconds was able to spit out a proper greeting and a polite request for a table for two. We were seated and Lisa, who had noticed my horror but hadn’t put two and two together, asked me what was going on. I explained it to her as if it had happened the other way around, and how you probably wouldn’t be all that offended, but you’d certainly wonder how smart a person who talks to you in a non-native tongue right off the bat must be.
We greeted our waiter, asking him if he spoke English properly this time, which of course he did. We ordered an appetizer whose unpronounceable name and bizarre ingredients would never lead you to believe it was the flatbread pictured alongside it. I ordered the Choucroute Royale, a plate full of sausage on a mountain of sauerkraut that got my pick because along with the sausages was a slab of thick cut bacon, and bacon is good. Lisa ordered the Choucroute Wagner, which also had a ton of sausages but didn’t include any bacon, and so I passed it up. We took in the atmosphere: it was a two story dining room lined with tapestries knights doing knightly things and those little flags that knights ride into battle with which I know the name of and would blow you away with my refinement and intelligence if I remembered it and busted it out, but since I can’t, you’ll just have to take my word. It was nice, but not so nice that you didn’t consider the possibility it might be the Outback of German restaurants. The bathrooms were atrocious, cavernous affairs that managed to have only one or two actual toilets that produced a swampy floor. The garbage by the towels was overflowing, looking like the trash can of someone with a head cold. This held true of bathrooms throughout the resort: seemingly abandoned after an initial cleaning every morning.
Our flatbread was amazingly good, which was wholly unexpected since we chose it based solely on its weird name. It was delivered by a person other than our waiter, something not unheard of in the states, but this person was one of many that would serve us that night. In fact, we would never see the same person twice, making ordering more drinks impossible as we expected to see our waiter at least once more during the meal, but it was only when he appeared about twenty minutes after we had finished that I was able to flag him down from someone else’s table. The poor service (although, again, this would be our experience again the following day, so it might just be the norm) was more than made up for with the great food. The sausages were exactly what we were hoping for from a German restaurant, in great variety, all tasty. They were served alongside some miraculously tasty boiled (!) potatoes that complimented them wonderfully, moreso than the mountain of sauerkraut (that’s what it was called on the menu, a mountain, and it truly was) that the sausages were served on top of. We were filled to the brim by the end of it all and skipped dessert, just wanting to get back to the room to unpack what little we had to unpack and get to sleep.
Well, Lisa unpacked while I typed recaps and watched the Top 10 Disneyland Paris channel. Lisa absolutely hates these channels in Walt Disney World (Top 7 there) for their corniness and relentlessly cheerful hostesses, but I eat it up like candy. The Top 10 channel in Disneyland Paris is her worst nightmare: not only is the hostess relentlessly cheerful, there’s more than one, at least five that I’ve seen so far, each speaking a different language. There’s two channels, one rotating between French, English, German and, I think, Dutch, and the other rotating between Spanish…well, I’ve spent more time on the first channel so I don’t know what else is playing on the second one besides Spanish.
If you’re of the mindset that Disney is all innocence and eternal childhood, read no further. Seriously. You might even be creeped out if you don’t think like that and read it anyway. Go ahead, here’s your chance to click away.
Okay, so there’s a widespread consensus, couched in euphemism, double entendre, and sly phrasing, but widespread nonetheless, that the Top 10 channel girls are the best batch material in Disney. You’ll find debates in the forums and download sites about which girls are preferred for satisfying the baser needs, with most men preferring the previous Walt Disney World Top 7 girl to the current one for her, shall we say, larger assets. I prefer the current one, but I can see the appeal, as I lean that way generally, but there’s something about the new girl, perhaps how much “Pretzels und Beer!” annoys the hell out of Lisa.
Anyway, the Disneyland Paris Top 10 is a wonderland of women with its bevy of beauties, exotic in their foreign tongues. The hottest is the German one, who sounds perpetually furious at Disney because of her native tongue, and I annoyed Lisa by throwing out awful euphemisms like “I’d Cruise her Jungle”, “I’d take her to Fantasyland”, and “She can ride the Tower of Terror any day.” She wondered aloud why she ever married me and I told her it’s because I rocked her small world.
We went to sleep after that.
June 26, 2007 at 7:40 pm · Filed under Disney, Travel, Mediterranean Cruise
The final day at sea was necessary, but perhaps it was a necessary evil. Is there anything more depressing than a day dedicated to coming to the realization that it’s all over? We took solace in the fact that it was not, in fact, over for us, that we had four more days ahead of us, with Disneyland Paris opening its arms wide to greet us. This was little consolation, as exciting a prospect as it was, because we wanted to be here. We wanted to sail on. Maybe we could join the crew, Lisa waiting tables while I did a little softshoe as one of Disney’s many portly characters onstage. There was enough tension in the air, what with all the frenzied laundering and packing that it was obvious that a mutiny could be carried out quite easily. Disney had broken us all, though, and our bodies were only working through sheer force of will. We would have to face it: the cruise was over.
Lisa and I had our obligatory packing argument. I’m unsure what it is about putting things into things that gets us all riled up (although when I put it that way, perhaps I can see why), but there’s always a knock-down drag-out argument when it comes to packing. Things would go much smoother if I just left the room and came back when she was done, but because she had lugged half our belongings across the Atlantic, I couldn’t since I had to be the official mover of heavy things. The room, which had previously seemed so spacious as to cement itself as the room category of choice for future cruises, now seemed to be roughly the size of a matchbox. We would’ve thrown things at each other if we had the room to maneuver our arms.
The only reason we made it out alive is that we had Bingo to look forward to. As always, the impossible rules in place to keep the snowball jackpot snowballing had worked, and the Walt Disney Theater would be the meeting place for every single person on the cruise that believed they would take home the 8k+ jackpot and was willing to kill to ensure their victory. Lisa had purchased, against my advice, two 6 packs and two final-jackpot-only 3 packs (in non-Bingo jargon this means a total of 18 playable Bingo boards), further cementing Bingo as the most expensive onboard portion of the cruise. Allow me to obsess a bit on the Bingo portion of this cruise:
On our previous cruise, you played three Bingo games with varying win requirements (regular Bingo, only diagonal, only the four corners, etc.) and then a final game where you had to punch out every square on a single card to win. Each of these games had their own card on which to play, so the first game would be the yellow card, then the next the orange card, and so on. This cruise you were only given a single Bingo card on which to play all four games, so that you would have to fold the numbers you’d poked out in the previous game back onto the card in order to play the next game.
This sucked.
This especially sucked during that final game where you had to punch out every square on a card in order to win, because those numbers you’d already folded in the previous three games had a tendency to easily re-fold as you maneuvered around the other numbers. Bingo, based on what they charge to play ($25 bucks for a 3 pack and $35 bucks for a 6 pack) and what they pay out (usually starting around $100 for the first game and ending no higher than $300 for final game for most sessions except the final one) has to be insanely profitable for them, so cutting corners on the goddamn game piece is just a slap in the face to all those gambling their money away.
Anyway, this insanity is important because for the first three games of the final session, I was on my own. Lisa had gone to an art auction, something she had fallen in love with after attending one of the previous auctions, and it was apparently running long. I had to feverishly scour the 12 available Bingo cards, poking and folding and trying not to refold, running a number behind all-too-often which wasn’t good, because if they go on to the next number and you had Bingo, well, you don’t have Bingo anymore. This wasn’t helped by the fact that, despite it being the final session, they were calling Bingo numbers faster than ever before. There were numerous shouts of “Slow down!” throughout the entire game, but this did absolutely nothing to the pace they were going at. Were they afraid that, when we realized we couldn’t all win the jackpot, we would rush the stage and demand our money back? Probably, and with good reason, as the person who won the final jackpot won it incredibly quickly, far before anyone else was apparently close to winning, so that we didn’t even have the satisfaction of suspense.
Yet, we’ll still play Bingo on our next cruise. Born suckers.
Dinner was, oddly, greek-themed, perhaps a holdover from a port that was planned and fell through? Greece seemed like a no-brainer on a Mediterranean cruise and, fittingly, everyone that we told about our Mediterranean cruise asked if we were going to Greece. I had the Herb Marinated Chicken Tenders with Greek Tzatziki (as opposed to that other kind of Tzatziki) the Wild Forest Mushroom Soup, the Grilled Beef Tenderloin, Garlic and the Rosemary Marinated Lamb Sirloin. Lisa had the Grilled Tuna Sushi Roll garnished with American Black Caviar (which she didn’t like), the Spicy Tomato, Olive and Basil Bruschetta (which she did like) and the Chicken and Mushroom Wellington.
It was the Till We Meet Again Dinner, so Donald, Mickey and Goofy, all dressed in their Mediterranean attire, came out to wish us all goodbye. They brought out the chefs, who carried flaming baked Alaska, and it all concluded with the march of the servers. Wilson and Melroy, of course, had the loudest cheering section. Andy, after much cajoling, was able rangle Wilson, Melroy and our head server Chetan together for a picture and we said our goodbyes to each. We worked out Wilson’s on-ship/on-shore schedule to make sure that we could get him again on our next trip, which seemed closer and closer every time we thought about booking another one.
We said our goodbyes to our tablemates, too, but we all knew that Disney was forcing us to breakfast the next morning, so we saved the real goodbyes for the following morning.
Laurel had left us a boring old standard Swan as our final towel animal. I guess he wanted to make sure we didn’t get our hopes up and mutiny.
June 25, 2007 at 7:35 pm · Filed under Disney, Travel, Mediterranean Cruise
9:00 AM. I don’t know if this was planned on Disney’s part, but after peaking at La Spezia in Italy, the meeting times for excursions suddenly became reasonable. We even had time to eat a reasonable breakfast (with proteins!) before making our way down to Studio Sea. I’ve never been to Studio Sea of my own volition, but I’ve had almost half my excursions meet here, so much that I discovered the tables, inlaid with a design of a film canister with a movie title and director’s credit, are all inside jokes with founding castmember names on them. I’m guessing they’re all founding castmembers, actually, since I found our captain’s name on one of the tables.
It was time for another tender. On the port excursion presentations playing on TV that I had watched endlessly while I wrote, they had made a big deal about how Villefranche was the captain’s favorite port and that he’d pull right in so that he could enjoy the marvelous view. They weren’t lying. We were surrounded on all sides by hills and the town built into them (all our harbors are flat affairs back in the states…what entices you to get off a boat to climb a sheer cliffside?) that made for a view that was, well, marvelous. Brightly painted villas nestled into the rocky hill alongside terraced apartment buildings, each only six stories or less, with the most beautiful, vivid purple flowers cascading like ivy off every surface in between. We were the only large ship in the harbor, dwarfing the yachts and sailboats floating idle in the early morning light. We were not in the main port, the Port de la Darse, but the port of the old town, and the tiny little dock that our tender pulled alongside gave the entire place a unique feeling of quaintness that had been lost at a lot of the other, far more industrial ports.
We emptied out into a parking lot that was still active with commuters trying to navigate through the sea of lethargic tourists just standing in clumps wherever they saw fit. There were at least 5 tour guides waiting for us here, and the small space to maneuver meant a lot of milling about as people slipped between each other as the groups tried to sort out. There was a tent set up by Disney in the back of the lot, but its intended use as a meeting point was immediately discarded when huge throngs of people, deciding that 10 minutes off the boat they were already sick of the sun, gathered beneath it in no particular order. Everything sorted itself out eventually and we followed our guide, who said he would introduce himself once we were on the bus and out of this madness, led us away. We walked toward the citadel, the massive 16th century castle that runs alongside the port, and ducked our heads as we passed through an archway to walk uphill to the waiting buses. There were more buses here than seemed logically possible: the small winding path inside the citadel that served as the road in and out opened up to this parking area, but the face was so cramped it looked as if at least one of the buses had been constructed there on the spot because there was no other way it could’ve gotten there. I had faith in our driver, though, since if I had learned one thing about driving in Europe, it’s that no space is too small to fit a vehicle in.
Once we had situated ourselves on the bus, we were introduced to our tour guide, Frederic, pronounced as you’d pronounce Frederique stateside, a tall, thin, balding-but-making-it-work man whose lively demeanor made him seem far younger than he probably was. He introduced us to our driver, whose name I have since forgotten. The driver didn’t speak much English, so our tour was bilingual, English on the mic and French off when Frederic would explain what we were all laughing at. He was quite funny and seemed to take great pleasure in going “off-script”. He was quite happy when he found his running joke quite early in the day: the early morning was hot and it was only going to get hotter, so he promised not to tell anyone if we wanted to chuck the whole tour thing and just go to the beach. Throughout the day, as we got back on the bus increasingly exhausted and sweat-drenched, he would take a beat and then say “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the beach?”
The sliding puzzle of the parked buses was sorted out and we were on our way to our first stop, a panoramic view of Villefranche overlooking the Port de la Darse. I don’t know what it is about vacationing, but I can’t get enough of these stops. There’s tons of them along the lesser highways back home but I’ve never once stopped of my own accord to take pictures, but I snap a million of them when a bus lets me off at one. It was a wonderful view, the harbor in the foreground, enclosed by rocky outcroppings, a lighthouse perched at the end of a long and narrow wall extending out into the deep blue water. Nice lay along the shore in the distance, a huge concentration of buildings built right on the edge of the water, as if they were being forced into the sea by the overcrowding. As you got further away from the shore, buildings became more and more interspersed with trees, until you reached the mountains in the hazy distance.
After snapping my zillion pictures, I looked down at the graffiti that had been etched into the rock wall keeping us from falling over the cliff we were standing atop. Right in front of me, written in black:
LiiLOU ♥
LOVE YOU
FOR A LiiFETiiME*
I called Lisa over to see it and we shared our tender moment overlooking the French Riviera, thanking whoever loved Liilou for a liifetime for enshrining our names here, too.
We boarded the bus again and were off to Nice. It had become accepted that whichever side of a bus you sat on, the interesting things to see would be on the other side. We chose poorly in our seating arrangements and were able to see the bottom half of the war memorial and the sea-front side of the Promenade des Anglais. We would only tour the Promenade des Anglais on the bus and I don’t think we missed very much: it was a seaside town popular with the English upper class in the 19th century and has remained one of the main places that quite a few wealthy people and quite a few more people who like to pretend come to feel glamorous as they bask in the sunlight. In other words, something not really all that interesting to me or Lisa. There was a cute story about the Hotel Negresco, Nice’s most posh hotel and a historic landmark which is owned by a single little old lady. Its opulence apparently caught the eye of Bill Gates, who handed the old lady a blank check as his offer to buy the place. The old lady refused since she loved the place so much and she figured she didn’t have nearly enough time left on earth to spend the money anyway.
The bus parked alongside a beach, but it was not our destination: we were crossing the street, through an archway that smelled of urine, to enter the Cours Seleya. The Cours Seleya is, on most days, a flower and produce market where gardeners and farmers from miles around come to hock their wares, filling several blocks with heavenly smells and dazzling colors. On Monday, the day we were touring it, it becomes an antique market. This was genuinely depressing, but not because we were missing out on the cornucopia of yummy foodstuffs (although I guess that was a part of it), but because this was the final port and we were pretty much tapped out on funds. Antique in Europe makes the antiques to be found in America laughable: these were not the pots and pans our great grandmothers used, these were actual things from antiquity. The dust that had settled on half these things was older than the oldest offering you can generally find stateside. We followed Frederic through the marketplace, weaving our way through the stalls and blankets daring us to knock over their delicate offerings. He was giving us a quick tour before we had some free time to wander about. He made it clear that the tour was only optional, but that didn’t matter to most as they had already wandered off into the labyrinth of ancient wonders.
We ducked down and alleyway and were about to make our way past a non-descript building when Frederic stopped us to point it out. This was the Chapelle Sainte Rita and, despite a barely-decorative faux-columned entryway, could very well have been mistaken for a warehouse, if it was given any consideration at all. It was common for churches to have these nondescript facades at one time so that the impact of the interior decoration would have that much more force upon entering. Once Frederic led us through the doors, it was easy to see what they were trying to achieve: every inch of the interior was covered in gold and marble, with paintings and frescoes adorning the walls and the ceilings. It mirrored our experience at the Vatican: how did your average peasant, covered to the waist in cow manure, stand a chance against this? It was a bit excessive, actually, and Frederic noted that although it was Baroque, he considered it Rococo, which, if we were at a dinner party, would probably have gotten him laid.
We were left to our own devices from that point on, and Lisa and I wandered dejected through the antique market, depressed that we couldn’t afford anything we wanted, and even if we could, we probably wouldn’t be able to transport it home. I had my eyes on a collection of phones that were seemingly designed in the times before they had actually nailed down what a phone should look like. Lisa went even more impractical, coveting entire dining room sets that looked like they once held an official food-taster. We eventually broke away from the market and went into the tacky tourist shops that lined the Cours Seleya to buy some trinkets that we didn’t really want but at least could afford.
As our free time dwindled, Lisa decided she needed to use the restroom, so we stopped at a café and ordered an espresso. I sipped at it while she was away and the first sip, undoctored, was so strong that it forced my right eye shut in protest for a few seconds. I dropped in the sugar cubes that they’d served alongside it and found it quite palatable after that, so much so that Lisa returned to an empty cup. When she went up to order a second cup I told her to order Crepes au sucre as well, as staring at the menu while waiting for her I had worked up a craving for one. It was after we had ordered that we realized that free time was over in 5 minutes. We had already breached etiquette: Lisa had ordered the initial espresso at the bar since we were just running in and out, but now we had settled at a table and were circumventing the waiter with our second bar-order. Now we were running late on time and had to ask for the crepe and espresso to go! They were more than happy to oblige, but we over-tipped and left with our tails between our legs just in case.
As is always the case, when you rush, there’s no reason to rush. The bus had not arrived yet, and the group had gathered in the pee-smelling entrance to the Cours Seleya. There were artists lining the entryway now, and our milling about meant less foot traffic passing by their wares, so we were either going to throw a few coins their way or get a move on. We moved across the street where the view was much better anyway: a nude beach. Well, semi-nude, as it was more an option than a requirement. It was, surprisingly, full of families, with fully clothed adults and children weaving between the topless and bottomless sunbathers. My initial discomfort with the tons of children running around faded as I caught my excessive puritanism and shamed myself for it: was I really uncomfortable with a child, hell, an adult seeing a naked human body in a nonsexual context? Well, for them, anyway, we were staring at the naked people like hungry dogs. Luckily, the bus came first and we were on our way to have lunch in Eze.
Well, almost.
We had specifically chosen this tour because it included visits to Nice, Monaco and Eze, three places we really wanted to see and didn’t want to have to choose between. All the tours available seemed to offer some combination of two of the three, but Nice and Monaco had lunch in Eze in its tour description and so we went with that. Everyone we told were shocked that we had gamed the system in this way: they were looking to do exactly the same thing but had to give up one of the options, and were shocked when we showed them the part about lunch in Eze on our tour. We thought we’d lucked out, especially since as we learned more and more about our destination Eze had inched up in our estimation and then completely overtaken Nice and Monaco once we saw how much we enjoyed the other Medieval towns we’d visited. As we approached Eze on the bus, we even considered skipping lunch altogether so we would have more time to explore the town.
To say that we had lunch in Eze is to say you had been to New York City because you’d seen it across the way from New Jersey. We were eating lunch in Eze, alright, but not in the charming Medieval village perched high on a clifftop overlooking a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean. We were in the Eze on the opposite side of the bottom of that cliff, with no view of the Mediterranean whatsoever and only the very tip of Eze visible high up above us. We were in the tourist trap town that had sprung up at the bottom of the steep road leading to Eze, the point where the bus dropped you off if you were going to visit, and worst of all, we were forbidden to go up to Eze proper because of time constraints. Instead, we were to eat at the Auberge du Cheval Blanc, whose promising menu was not on offer to us. Neither was assigned seating, and the crowded restaurant seemed ill-equipped to seat the crowd milling about at its door. We were left to find our own seating, and we found ourselves outdoors, overlooking an uninteresting street. We sat and sulked until we struck up a conversation with our tablemates, a couple from Miami who had cruised about seven million more times than we had. They were very nice and were equally disappointed about the false advertising in this Eze lunch, especially since the food was as big a disappointment as the lack of atmosphere. When the meal ended, I wandered away in protest and bought some frites from a stand that seemed to be catering to some locals, which pleased me greatly but shocked Frederic, who had everything he’d heard about the fabled American gluttony confirmed as I boarded the bus wolfing down my fries.
After a bit of a drive, we were in clean, modern, upwardly mobile Monaco. Literally upwardly mobile, as the .75 square mile country has a limited amount of space on which to build and so the only place to build is up and, in the case of Fontvielle, out into the Mediterranean. I had thought Monaco’s charm would lie in its comically-small size but what it lacks in real estate it makes up for in density. Every possible inch of land that could be built upon has been built upon and thus the charm is lost, unless you’re a big fan of apartment buildings, which is what we drove past for most of the bus-bound portion of our tour.
We parked in an underground parking lot built into a cliffside, purportedly one of the few public parking areas in all of Monaco, and made our way up to the Musee Oceanographique, more commonly known as the Cousteau Aquarium, for Jacques Cousteau, who directed the museum for 17 years long after it had been already established, but he became so famous during this time that he and the museum have become inextricably linked, so that it is officially unofficially renamed for him. We were, unfortunately, not going inside, but were instead using it as a meeting point after our tour and free time, since, although the bus would still be in the same parking lot, it would not be where we left it and thus we needed Frederic to guide us. We walked past the Jardin Exotique on our left and a gorgeous row of those rich purple-pink flowers that were spilling over every wall in Villefranche on our right. Frederic informed us that these flowers were called Bougainvillea and that the purple-pink coloration was not from the flower itself, which was tiny and white, but from the leaves immediately surrounding the flower. The row of Bougainvillea led us directly to our destination, the Cathedral of Monaco.
The Cathedral of Monaco was built in 1878 and isn’t really noteworthy for its architecture or decoration. We were here for a bit of death tourism. The Cathedral of Monaco houses the remains of several centuries worth of Grimaldi lineage (the ruling family of Monaco), most notably that of Princess Grace and the late Prince Rainier (well, they’re both late, but he’s later than she is). Princess Grace, for those of you not in the know, was American-born Grace Kelly who met Prince Rainier while attending the Cannes Film Festival. She one-upped the American dream by living the Disney dream by becoming a Princess and living happily ever after. The tombs are at the back of the cathedral and the line forms comically around the unused central portion, where the worshipping usually would take place. There are guards here, not for any security purposes, just to keep the line moving. Every so often they would shout loudly one of two things: keep the line moving, or be quiet. Shouting “be quiet” never ceases to be funny to me. We shuffled disinterested past the grave sites much in the same way you walk past the rest of a graveyard on the way to visit a deceased relative’s tombstone: interesting, hey, look at the date on that one, that’s a hell of a name, that sort of thing. Although I’ve seen most of her films, perhaps I was too young to be so enamored with her princess-hood to garner much awe for her gravesite.
We made our way back out into the sunlight and walked up a narrow street to the Place du Palais, the Palace Square. We would have some free time here before we made our way back to the bus to be brought over to the Casino. Directly in front of us was the Prince’s Palace which was impressive for being so unimpressive. The entire thing looked like a second-rate theme park knockoff of what a palace should look like, down to the chintzy castle-looking portion. This is because that’s essentially what it is: a recreation of something authentic that once stood there, and the cheesy castle portion, meant to replicate the original 12th century fortress that originally stood there, is actually the most recent addition. There’s a statue out front of Francois Grimaldi, the founder of Monaco (I guess), who took over the castle that formerly stood here in the most non-heroic, devious way possible: he dressed as a monk, begged its occupants for shelter, only to murder the guard who let him in with a sword he had stowed under his robes. He then called his cousin, Rainier I (whose descendants rule Monaco to this day) and a contingent of men to slaughter everyone else inside. This is, of course, honored by the statue of Francois Grimaldi in his monk’s robe, complete with swords, and also by the coat of arms above the door of the Palace, where two monks with swords keep watch.
The Place du Palais offered the best views of every part of Monaco that you weren’t already standing on, being high up above the rest of the country on the section of Monaco known to the locals as le Rocher, the Rock. The cliffs on either side are great photo opportunities and we took full advantage of them. We were left with enough time that Lisa did a little shopping. Frederic had told us not to bother comparison shopping here as all the souvenir shops here were owned by the same person and that the prices in one place would be identical to the prices in another, something that Lisa checked on anyway and found to be true. I killed my time by wandering what few sidestreets there were and was disappointed to find they all offered nothing special at all. Dejected, I spent my last few moments snapping pictures of the lone guard goosestepping before the palace door no one seemed particularly interested in entering, despite the raised palace flag’s indication that the Prince was home.
We made our way past the Bougainvillea, unfortunately avoiding the Jardin Exotique because Lisa had had enough of steps for the entire vacation, and sat in the shade by the Cousteau Aquarium while we waited for everyone to return. Frederic wasn’t taking us down to the garage using the elevators. Instead, we were walking, because there were still more views to be had. It was worth the extra walk (and the plentiful stairs) because we were able to see the backside of the Cousteau Aquarium. It’s not readily apparent from the front, but the Cousteau Aquarium is built into a cliff overhanging the Mediterranean, and the steps we descended offered us a beautiful view of the rich blue and emerald green waters crashing against the cliff’s face, swirling in pools in the eroded rock, a waterfall whose origin I’m unsure of cascading down the rock and into the sea. The view was so beautiful that Frederic had to assign some of the younger members of the tour as cattle herders, running back up the steps to get the stragglers taking pictures through the small windows that offered the amazing view.
The bus took us to yet another underground garage, this time beneath the casino and hotels. We made our way down long hallways to the outside and then up ornate staircases whose designs were overlooked because we were walking up them and not down. We passed the casino, its statuary and wrought iron being temporarily ignored on the way to our final destination before our final spate of free time: Le Café de Paris. Earlier in the day, Frederic asked us all whether we would like ice cream or a cold beverage here and most of us chose ice cream after a bit of hesitation, wondering how thirsty we’d be after the day’s sightseeing. The answer was not very, since there wasn’t all that much strenuous walking and we had just come from lunch a short time ago, but it was all for naught anyway, since anyone who got ice cream also got water. The ice cream wasn’t quite ice cream, but it also wasn’t gelato, so I don’t know what to call it. I’d like to say it was sorbet, and it probably was, but whatever it was, it was delicious: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, topped with whipped cream. All the flavors felt not like artificial approximations, but the rich, natural flavors, unfolding on our rapidly freezing tongues. After we had finished our ice cream and had lingered enough in the misting fans, we were set loose in Monte Carlo.
This was the second biggest disappointment of the tour.
You can’t go anywhere in Monte Carlo. The casino has two barriers to entry: there’s an admission fee to the casino (pay to lose money? I though I was doing that by gambling!) and you have to check your camera (which I didn’t want to). The posh hotel across the way didn’t allow anyone in who wasn’t a guest. The other, not-as-grand casinos don’t have the same admission fees, but they still won’t let you in with a camera. We were left to wander the streets, not having the interest or the funds to go into the designer label shops that lined the surrounding area. A Disney Cruise Line photographer was there to take our picture in front of the casino we couldn’t enter, and after that we just sat in the garden until it was time to leave. As mentioned above when I talked about Nice, watching the rich and the people pretending to be richer than they are is probably the least interesting thing in the world to me (which makes a lot of the screwball comedies far harder to watch than they should be). I don’t begrudge anyone their money, but I don’t have it and thus I don’t see why I should care. Thus, Monte Carlo was pretty much a bore.
We made our way back to the bus and back to Villefranche. We wouldn’t be leaving port until around 11:30 pm, mainly to accommodate the people who wanted to pretend they were rich in Monte Carlo. Frederic noted our wealth of time in Villefranche and made a few suggestions as to sights to see before returning to the boat. He mentioned the rue Obscura, a road hidden from view from the harbor, allowing residents to maintain active lives while giving the town an outward appearance of abandonment to anyone looking to pillage from the sea. We wandered around town looking for it, finally finding an old sign pointing down a set of poorly lit stairs that we felt would be the last thing we saw before our murders. The rue Obscura is exactly what you’d imagine a dark, enclosed alleyway built in Medieval times to hide from invaders would look like, and we were more than happy to get out of it as quickly as possible.
We wandered up and down the street facing the sea, Lisa begging to eat in one of the many restaurants lining it, me arguing that we still had Disneyland Paris ahead and we’d already almost tapped out our finances. As we went back and forth, each of us knowing that the other one had a really good point but not wanting to concede, we bumped into none other than our tablemates, Andy and Laura, who were running back to the ship to make their Palo reservation. They had done the day on their own and had even managed to see Eze, which they loved, which made us briefly consider pushing them off into the rocky surf beneath us before we thought it better to just be happy that someone had gotten to enjoy it.
In the end, I won out, a hollow victory as I would’ve probably enjoyed a nice French meal more than Lisa did. We tendered back to the ship, Lisa below deck, me above, taking the requisite seven thousand pictures of the port and the Magic. Laurel had finished our room early again, and a Peacock awaited us on our bed, along with the 8 millionth DVC advertisement. These people were nothing if not persistent.
Dinner was actually one of the best yet, as it was Lobster night and the feeling was right. I had the Smoked Salmon Parcel with Baby Spinach and three, count ‘em three main courses: the Baked Lobster Tail (which Melroy cracked for me and then drenched in butter, that handsome devil), the Oven Roasted Veal with Madeira Sauce, and the Grilled Venison in Stilton and Red Currant Jus. Lisa had the Lobster and the Veal, accompanied with a French Onion soup that she enjoyed thoroughly and I intended to order but forgot, thankfully, since it was too strong for me to like it anyway. Wilson brought out Blue Cheese and Asparagus Risotto as a side and it was so good I made Lisa order her own. Aren’t I a catch? I didn’t take a picture of the desserts, but I know I had Peach Melba, among, probably, several other things. I ate all this while dressed in my tux, for even though it was semi-formal night, the previous semi-formal night was interpreted by everyone but myself as really-formal night. I wasn’t caught off-guard this time.
This was it, the final port of the cruise, and the sadness was tempered by the elation we both felt over how wonderful the entire trip had been. Still, we couldn’t help but talk about how disappointed we were in the final excursion: the way-to-touristy-and-not-too-interesting Nice, the who-cares-haughtiness of Monaco, and the complete lack of Eze. We got some great photos, and Frederic was so funny that he was probably the best tour guide of the trip, but I wish we had chosen differently for our final tour, or maybe Disney had chosen differently for their final port.
June 24, 2007 at 5:59 pm · Filed under Disney, Travel, Mediterranean Cruise
The meeting time for our excursion, Arles and the Olive Mills of Les Baux, was the latest we’d had yet at 8:45 AM. We had set a wakeup call for 7:30 AM to give us enough time to sleep and to have a leisurely breakfast. Lisa woke up even earlier than she needed to and was well into her shower by the time Mickey called to bother us. We still managed to miss breakfast. In fact, we were in the room at 8:43 AM, both blaming the other one for being so late (I had clothes on at the time, so I believe I had the upper hand). We’ve got an even later wakeup time for Villefranche at 9:00 AM, though I doubt we’ll learn from our mistake.
We were meeting in Diversions and were the last to check in, meaning we were on the second bus. Luckily, our DIS friends from Florence were late enough risers that they were on the second bus as well. We milled about a bit as the first bus group its way out and then followed them down to Bus 18.
Sandrine, a vibrant, fashionable French woman in a polka dot dress, would be our tour guide for the day. She waited alongside our bus with our driver, Terry, a pony-tailed and stubbly man who Lisa said was a quintessential Frenchman. I assume his name was Terry but I never saw it written anywhere. Sandrine pronounced it “Tee-yery”, so perhaps I’m anglicizing it the wrong way. They took our tickets and we boarded the bus, sitting by the back part of one of the large windows so we could take pictures.
The buses have become progressively less comfortable as we’ve continued on our journey. I theorized in Olbia that the buses that start in Rome get shipped off to Palermo, then Naples, then 10 other places, then finally Sardinia. I would’ve given my right leg to be in the luxurious Olbian bus during the hour ride to Arles, mainly because my right leg was being stabbed constantly by the raised reclining lever. I can only assume it was sticking out (of every seat, not just mine) to allow easier access, since on most buses finding the recliner is akin to deciphering Sanskrit. The problem was that it was sticking out just enough so that your leg would still spill over it instead of pressing against the side of it, as if just the right side of your body was undergoing torture. The leg room on the bus was false advertising as it implied any room at all. The lack of space would only worsen as we collected bag upon bag of souvenirs. More on that later. For now we were just traveling uncomfortable to Arles.
There were a lot more children on this tour than any of our previous excursions. At the very least, there were a lot more noticeable children. Sandrine started her spiel as soon as we left the port (for the second time, the first time a couple with a baby showed up as we were pulling away from the boat. They were wayyyy late, but they were given a free pass since their kid was adorable and didn’t make a fuss the entire trip) but half the bus remained chattering in defiance of her. We were only three rows from her and we could barely hear her over all the noise. Thankfully, some non-terminally polite people shushed the offending groups and we could learn a few things about Marseilles that we would promptly forget.
Our ride took us past a lake that could be (and was by me) confused for the Mediterranean since the cities crowded its shores as if it were a port. The lake was originally the domain of Fishermen and salt farms but the World Wars converted it into an important industrial center. Although there were few remaining, there were still salt farms and we saw a few on our way. We also saw the Little Venice of Marseilles, a town built on an island at the edge of the lake. The island is criss-crossed with canals filled with gondolas, making for a charming little town that would definitely merit a visit on a return trip. All of the French countryside was charming, though, with hillside villages off in the distance and the farms just off the side of the highway. We passed countless olive fields (orchards?) On our way, in neat rows and separated on either side by tall trees that went back so far they seemed to converge in the distance. The effect of all of it was Marseilles and the surrounding area had the second most beautiful countryside we’d seen in Europe after Sicily.
We arrived in the main street of Arles (pronounced without the “es”) and parked alongside the Office du Tourisme which had a charming little carousel beside it that said it was from 1900 but looked as if it was built yesterday. It was here we would converge after the free time following our tour or, if you chose to explore Arles on your own, after about two hours. Sandrine was very accommodating to anyone who wanted to explore places on their own wherever we went, most likely because we were visiting only sleepy little places today, far removed from the insane hustle and bustle of the big cities. I don’t know if this courtesy extended to other tour guides on the same tour, but if the idea of Arles and Les Baux appeal to you but you’re more a do-it-yourself kind of person, take advantage of this excursion to get you there and give you a really nice lunch in between. More on that later.
Arles, located alongside the Rhone river, was an important stop for traveling Romans. It had the first bridge crossing the Rhone and so became an important port for trade, only declining in importance well into the 16th century, so that most of the marvels built throughout the ages are still intact, with Roman and Medieval structures standing right alongside one another. Our first stop, down a narrow road off the main street, offered both.
The thing that draws your immediate attention as you enter the Place de la Republique, the Republic Square, is the large Roman obelisk perched atop a fountain in the center of the square. It was originally part of a Roman Circus here in Arles, but it was lost to the ages until flooding dredged it up alongside the Rhone. It was placed here atop a fountain decorated with lions, the symbol of the city, and the running water of the fountain combined with the echoing music of the flautist who had set up shop in the corner made for a relaxing scene that made our Sunday mornings seem pathetic in comparison. A few Arlesians had gathered around the fountain to eat their breakfast while another man ate while his dog slept beside him on the steps of St. Trophime Church. Named for a bishop who brought Catholicism to Arles, the church is most notable for its ornate entryway, known during the Middle Ages as the Poor Man’s Bible for its graphic depiction of the Final Judgement. Jesus sits in the center, flanked on both sides by animal representations of four evangelists and the twelve Apostles at his feet. He’s passing judgement on the teeming masses represented on either side of the entryway: on one side, a shuffling line of clothed men and women marked for heavenly descent, on the other side a chained line of men, naked, consumed by the fires of hell. The intricate detail on the church’s face was uncharacteristic of the time as they tended to be plain affairs with little ornamentation, as demonstrated by the concrete slab with a lone bust above its door that was the entrance to the church across the way.
We waited in the square in front of the Town Hall, called here a Hotel, which we learned did not necessarily mean what you’d think it meant and depended on the modifier for clarification as to its purpose. We were waiting for the people who had to use the restroom, as these were the only public restrooms we would see for a while. You would think that the ship had no working bathrooms since the line for it went across the square, almost to St. Trophime. We waited for an incredibly long time so that even Sandrine grew impatient with the people whose resolve to pee was greater than their desire to see the sights they had paid for.
Once the last person had rejoined the group, we made our way through the Hotel Town Hall and into Yet Another Charming Alleyway (YACA) that opened up to the Place du Forum, another square, though this time packed on all sides with open air cafes. We stopped alongside one called the Café la Nuit which had been painted 119 years earlier by Vincent Van Gogh during his time in the Provence region of France. He had spent a year in Arles and this was among the many pieces that came out of his time here. There was a replica of the painting standing alongside the café, which looked much as it did a century earlier. This was not due to fortuitous aging but a restoration done in the 1980s that restored the café to appear as it did when Van Gogh captured it. Life imitates art in this case, though, as the walls are painted a mix of green and yellow that would look shoddy if you weren’t aware they were capturing the colors of Van Gogh’s work.
Down YACA led to the Roman Amphitheater and another painting from Van Gogh’s time in Arles. The Amphitheater had experienced a revival as an entertainment venue in Van Gogh’s time after serving other purposes for several centuries. Van Gogh was not interested in the bullfights featured in the amphitheater (the upper right corner of the painting has the bullfighter and matadors depicted almost as stick figures, painted in a few light brush strokes) but was intrigued by the attending crowds, especially the women in the bottom right of the painting, which are depicted in great detail in contrast with the rest of the audience.
The amphitheater itself stands looking ancient surrounded by the charming village. Although its antiquity would lead you to believe it is unused, like the Colosseum, it’s still used today for bullfighting and posters advertising upcoming events line its walls, the matadors names listed like the billing for a concert. There were two events: the Fetes d’Arles (or Cocarde d’Or, one or the other), which was more sporting, in which the bull had something on either horn or on top of its head that needed to be snatched by the matadors in order to be victorious. The bulls remained unharmed for this, unlike the other upcoming event, the Feria du Riz. The bull would be killed at the end of this festival and its blood would be spilled to ensure a good rice harvest.
We made our way into the amphitheater, the 12th largest of the Roman amphitheaters as proudly proclaimed by a sign on the wall, and sat in the modern bleachers. Much like the Colosseum in Rome and so many other ancient structures, when its original intent was lost to the ages, it became a quarry, so that the original seating was lost. The arena’s center was filled with sand and the exoskeleton of the modern structure lay atop the ancient building, making it even clearer that the amphitheater is alive and well, enjoying constant use throughout the year. It has been restored continuously since the original restoration in the 1800s when its historical significance was recognized. During the Middle Ages, the open archways were bricked up and the amphitheater became a walled town of 200, crammed impossibly into its center.
We moved out of the amphitheater past the Theatre antique, where we peaked through the iron gates at its remains. Another victim of opportunistic builders, what remains is still in use today, housing 3,000 for performances on a stage backed by two lone Corinthian columns. The backstage area for the performers is now visible, its ceilings and some of the walls now removed. One wonders where the modern performers hide when not onstage.
YACA took us to the Place de la Republique again where we disbanded for an hour of free time. Today was our designated souvenir day, having had no time at all to shop in previous ports where we wanted things to bring home and way too much time in others where all that was offered were run-of-the-mill trinkets. After picking up a few full bags to lug around with us, we made our way into a bakery and sandwich shop where everything looked incredible. Our eyes both settled upon a sandwich that was entirely covered with melted cheese with a buttery-looking clove of garlic at its center. We took it over by the carousel near the Office du Tourism and wolfed it down. Lisa was concerned that the sandwich hid sliced tomatoes within its cheesy confines, but the hunger I had built up during these lengthy excursions saw me eating meal after meal I would turn my nose up back at home. I still stand by the notion that the things I dislike back home are just better here, something that’s been backed up by several people without me goading them to give the right response.
Lisa, who avoided the insane bathroom line in the Place de la Republique, now had to go urgently. We made our way into a McDonald’s across the street (there were representatives of American culture almost everywhere and most were embarrassing) where I briefly considered ordering a Royale with Cheese before we settled upon a small Coke that was accompanied by a receipt with a magic code that would allow Lisa to pee. When she returned it was time to board the bus again.
We left Arles, passing the Aqueducts that fed the city when it was an outpost for Rome but were now lined the roadside, divided by roundabouts. A monastery was one of the lone sights on our way to the Olive Mills of Les Baux.
The Huile d’Olive Moulin du Mas des Barres was nestled, of course, in the middle of endless olive fields, its entryway marked by two white columns with sculptures of olives on top. It was quiet, almost abandoned, and this was because we weren’t visiting during the harvest or production of the olives. I imagine that this was the main draw for the many families with young children on this tour and so our guide standing in front of silent machines explaining what they would be doing if they were working was a disappointment. The harvest doesn’t take place until December and, while it was interesting for the adults, the children seemed fairly restless with all the talking, so those expecting different take note.
The disappointment from the lack of the milling of olives at the Olive Mills was quickly abated by the promise of lunch. We made our way back out into the blinding sunlight (the dusty white ground reflected the beating sun directly into our eyes, so sunglasses were a must) and through the olive fields to a large courtyard. They immediately won all the adults over with trays full of a drink that I’m unsure how to spell (sounds like “Keer”) made from black currant and white wine. Lisa had fallen in love with this drink in its Royale form (made with champagne instead of white wine) in Epcot, so she was in heaven. They were delicious, and I drank at least three. They brought out two types of Teppenade, one made from black olives, one made from green olives, that were so delicious that everyone didn’t just go back for seconds or thirds, but eighths and ninths. There were a few holdouts, having been burned by olives back where they came from but I was totally converted. Our guide from the dormant olive mills was handing out samples of the olive oil produced here on small spoons, encouraging us to treat it like wine, keeping it in our mouth to allow the flavors to unfold.
After we all got drunk in the sun, we were escorted inside to the dining room. A slice of olive loaf (I’m not sure that’s what it was called, but it’s my best guess) sat floating in a sea of olive oil, an olive on either side. The olive loaf was soaked in what I guess had to be cream as the bread was so soft as to be gelatinous, melting in my mouth. A few people were scared away by it, but it was their loss. There was a basket overflowing with bread in the center of the table and almost immediately it was emptied, everyone using the crusty pieces to sop up the delicious olive oil. There was wine, as always, and a tasty one at that, dangerous as we had already downed too many outside and still had the town of Les Baux to explore. We decided we’d explore it in a haze and enjoyed it thoroughly. The main course was lamb (we think, we knew when we were eating it) served alongside some amazingly tasty gratin potatoes. They followed this up with some truly delicious goat cheese, another thing I’m not ordinarily fond of, and some dessert which I promptly forgot about since I followed it up with some more great goat cheese. Overall it was our best overall meal since Sorrento, and the goat cheese was so good I wonder if I enjoyed it more than the best single dish we’ve had this trip: the lasagna in Rome.
We made our way through their shop and bought them out, bringing the excess baggage fees we’ll pay on Ryanair from expensive to ridiculous. We lugged it all back onto the bus, making it so the minuscule amount of legroom we previously had was now non-existant, filled with souvenirs, so we were forced to contort into positions usually only seen in ancient relationship manuals. Our next stop was Les Baux proper, the medieval mountain town.
The region seemed to be completely surrounded by mountains at every side but in truth they were only hills whose sparse vegetation and large swaths of bare rock made them appear to be mountains in the distance as opposed to hills in the foreground. The hills were home to Les Baux, its castle built into the rocky hillside, well-fortified far above the valley. We were headed to the more “modern” lower town, though, whose sloped, winding main road was reminiscent of Segesta, though the shop-lined corridor called to Lisa’s inner consumer far more actively. We passed all these as well as some ruins laying outside the pay-only Castle area and made our way to St. Vincent’s church. Built in the 12th century, this Romanesque church was small but had its charms, including some stained glass windows donated by the Prince of Monaco. The most interesting piece in the church was the nativity cart that sat off to one side, used once a year on Christmas Eve to carry a lamb up the main road and into the church where its first bleat would signal the birth of Christ. The lamb is usually sleepy at the midnight mass, though, and its reluctance to bleat is solved by a swift yank on its tail.
Sandrine let us go at this point, knowing the shops were calling to us, but not before recommending the breathtaking view to one side of the church as well as the Chapel of the Penitents for the nativity scene painted on its walls. The view was indeed spectacular and the Chapel of the Penitents was beautiful, with the walls painted from floor to ceiling by Yves Brayer in the 1970s, depicting the local legend that Jesus was born in Les Baux.
We spent the rest of our time in Les Baux wandering in and out of shops, spending the money that had previously sat safely in our bank account. We ended up in the most dangerous place possible at the bottom of the hill, La Cure Gourmand, a bakery and candy shop filled with wall to wall delights. We bought one of every kind of cookie on display and spent so much time coveting everything that we were the last to return to the bus.
It was about an hour’s ride back to the bus and despite our awkward seating we slept through most of it. The length of the tour meant we had enough time to get freshened up for dinner, Pirate’s night at Parrot Cay.
My costume I used for the previous cruise, the frilled shirt from my tuxedo unbuttoned in a piratey manner, seemed ill-fitting and creepy, so I went with the regular khakis and a polo shirt. Lisa went with a Jack Sparrow t-shirt accented with the heavy Jack Sparrow eyeliner. Laura and Andy were non-piratey as well, despite Laura trying convince Andy to bring his Jack Sparrow Halloween costume across the Atlantic. Melroy turned out to be an expert pirate dewrag tie-er and so they both had instant pirate costumes. I like Melroy, but I was uncomfortable with having a man fuss over my head for so long, so I folded the bandana and tucked it in my pocket for a corporate pirate look.
We had our requisite two of everything and I made my token walk around deck before falling asleep. Lisa’s constantly disappointed by my after-dinner coma and could probably stay awake if I she stayed up on her own, but as soon as she followed me back to the room, where a giant alligator Laurel had cleverly made with the assistance of one of the rounded couch pillows awaited us, we fell asleep almost immediately.
Our last excursion for the cruise was the following day: Monaco and Nice in the port of Villefranche, France.
June 23, 2007 at 10:13 pm · Filed under Disney, Travel, Mediterranean Cruise
Another early morning, our earliest of the entire cruise. There wasn’t even time to argue about how early we should get up. 7:15 AM left no wiggle room for extra sleep. It was a sentence handed down from a hanging judge for wanting to see Michelangelo’s David so damn bad. Worst of all, it was all for naught. We gathered in Studio Sea only to find out that pretty much everyone else was gathered in Studio Sea, too, so the meeting time and the departure time were far, far apart.
It was the first tender to a port, so everything moved more slowly. So far, you were divided into groups depending on when you arrived to check-in and those groups would be called in numerical order to follow a Disney Cruise Line castmember down to the bus. These were called one after the other, so that after the final member of, say, bus 19 was out the door, bus 20 would be up and ready to go. Since there was no pier for everyone to shuffle out onto and only two tenders (one forward, one aft…look how nautical I am!) to carry everyone ashore, one group would be called and then 10-15 minutes later the next group would be called, all the while the castmembers running the show would be talking into the lapels of their jackets to a crew downstairs that would update them on the traffic situation. Meeting points all around the ship were sending their groups simultaneously so the coordination on this one was far more involved than just dumping people out to waiting buses, so the wait, while frustrating, was understandable.
Once you were called, you made your way out to the tender, whose gangplank rose and fall with each ship. This held up the line far more than it should have, as the rocking on the water now had a visible counterpart to go along with the vague feeling of motion and odd creaking you’d hear when it was quiet. People were hesitant to step onto the thing, as if they would be instantly bucked off, as if they doubted the steadfastness of their own legs. Disney Castmembers and the crew of the tender were prodding people to action, though, more or less tossing the people from one end of the platform to the other, resembling the support team on one of those empowerment retreats for businessmen where you walk on coals. Everyone clap for Jenny, she needs your help!
My desire to sit on top of the ship in the open air was trumped by Lisa’s desire to not walk any more than she had to and we sat on the bench running alongside the walls of the boat. Chivalry was dead at this hour of the morning and, while I tried to give up my seat a few times while the ship was not too full and was politely refused, I noticed that no one else was extending such a courtesy so I hunkered down and enjoyed my seat. Everyone else either slept or stared out the window.
My need to photograph dragged me out of my non-comfy chair and out onto the front of the boat. La Spezia, like pretty much all the Italian ports we’d docked in so far, was inhospitably hilly, so that you wonder how long you’d have to have been on a boat before you decided that you’d rather climb your way onto land than to sail to somewhere flatter. You couldn’t deny its beauty, though, especially on the morning of our arrival, with the shadows of clouds darkening parts of the hillside while others shimmered in the sunlight.
We got off the boat onto the long pier of the marina, the hundreds of sailboats and other seacraft of the La Spezians in their designated area off to the side. The Disney Magic sat in the distance, alone in the water except for some unsightly industrial ship, daring everyone with a camera to stray from the group to snap their pictures. Everyone with a camera did. The distraction was welcome, though, since our buses waited on the street and the street and its accompanying sidewalk were separated from the pier by a seemingly unending stretch of grass and foliage which the native La Spezians were allowed to cross at will but us tourists were forbidden to set foot on. Our guides led us several hundred feet from where we got off the boat to a clearing in the greenery just out of sight from where we originally stood.
Our bus was comfortable, but not comfortable enough for a two hour ride this early in the morning. Luckily for Lisa and I, no one had claimed the four seats in the very back of the bus and, after giving large families ample time to take residence there, we scurried to the back and made it our own, each sitting at the window, our legs draped luxuriously over the seats between us. Everyone else was a sucker for not thinking of it first.
Our guide for this leg of the journey was a genial Italian woman with a funky accent and an apologetic nature for what we were about to embark upon. My commute every morning is over an hour, so two was not daunting in the slightest, but others shifted in their seats, preparing for a journey of epic proportions. The guide informed us that we would have a rest stop in the middle of the trip for those with weak bladders or confinement issues and we were off.
We ascended into the hills. Where else was there to go but up? Every so often the rock walls flanking the highway would give way to trees and these trees would give way to a view overlooking a valley, where a town or a city lay nestled below. Sometimes there would be flat land for miles, and you could tell how happy the residents were to find it. The towns first clumped together, exhausted and happy to be down on the ground, at the base of the hills. Then, slowly, as the land unfolded before them and they realized there were no more inclines to surmount, the space between houses grew and grew, until, in the distance, more hills caused them all to clump back together into a city again.
We drove and drove. The fact that the highway was an impression in the hills meant that there was nothing much to see at all, so that when we made our rest stop only Lisa got off the bus to stretch. I had Puzzle Quest and Deep Vein Thrombosis was an acceptable risk. Lisa assured me once she got back on the bus that the rest area was a wonderland of culinary delights, with Italian motorists, in respite from their crazy driving, gathered around espresso machines and chatted amongst one another, some with helmets slung by their hips. They were enemies on the road but friends here and they united in gawking at the American tourists who were buying up all the paninis and snack foods for the remaining hour’s drive.
The bus dropped us off in a designated bus drop-off area that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, on a sidestreet that seemed randomly picked to be a receptacle of tourists. Here we met our guide, a spry woman with several years under her belt and an accent that couldn’t be placed on a map. She led us out of the unremarkable sidestreet and, after a few blocks, onto the Piazza di San Marco. It was only to look at, though, not explore, for we had an early morning appointment at the Galleria dell’Academia to see Michelangelo’s David.
The entrance for the Galleria dell’Academia, at least the entrance for the tour groups, is in a narrow, pedestrian-only street lined with little shops determined to sell you a reproduction of David. Enterprising street vendors would stop alongside the line to enter (there was still a line despite the appointment, but we waited a maximum of 15 minutes, tops) and lay out their paintings at our feet, giving the impression that we were arriving here as the town was waking up. Their setting up to sell was no an indication of a late start to the day, though, it was because they were doing this illegally, and soon the cops were along to shoo them away, only to have them return as soon as the cops strolled out of sight. It was charming, but we found out later from people on different excursions that this was not the norm: elsewhere, at the first sight of the cops, the merchants would sweep up their carefully laid goods into their arms and run like hell so they weren’t tackled to the ground and handcuffed like one slow seller they witnessed.
There weren’t any pictures allowed in the museum, so you’ll have to take my word alone on what we saw inside. We were first led into a room that at first seemed to be grandly appointed, with a beautifully painted fresco on the domed ceiling and highly ornate walls, with alcoves and beveled edges poking out at you. If you caught it at the right angle, though, or studied it further beyond your initial impression, it became clear that it was all just painted on four flat walls and the flat ceiling, which was impressive in spite of the disappointment that came along with it. We weren’t in Disney, we were in Florence, we weren’t expecting reproductions, we were expecting the real thing (although, as we’d see later, a surprising amount of what we see are quiet reproductions). There was a giftshop taking up half the room, an odd location as no one would exit here, only enter, but it seemed to be doing good business. We weren’t interested in it, at least not yet, not before we saw David.
We shuffled through the door opposite the entrance (the door to the left would lead us directly to Michelangelo’s David, but we weren’t ready yet) and were standing in a room full of paintings that were to be ignored because at its center was Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Woman. The sculpture depicts a group of three nudes, a struggling woman held aloft by a young man intent on carrying her away, an elderly man held helpless and horrified underneath his foot. The sculpture was a demonstration of Giambologna’s ability, sculpted from a single block of marble (the vertical alignment of the figures spawned from this) and demonstrating his ability to create a sculptural group that can be viewed from any angle, a technique that had come into vogue recently (historically, at least) in response to traditional sculpture, which was meant to be viewed from a single, privileged vantage point. Lisa and I circled the statue, pointing out the details to one another: the folds of flesh where the old man was hunched over, the depression where the flesh of the young woman yielded to the grasp of the man’s hand. It was one thing to look at a photograph of a sculpture, entirely something else to walk around it up close, something that would become even more apparent in the next room.
The tour guide led us into the hallway beside this room and suddenly there was David. Michelangelo’s Slaves, plaster casts of some of Michelangelo’s unfinished minor works, lined the hall leading up to David and our tour guide stopped at each one to speak on each. We did not stay with the tour group. Instead, we inched our way toward David, mesmerized by the sculpture, pulled forth until we finally broke free, standing beneath it and basking in its magnificence.
There’s nothing I can say that could express what it felt like to stand beneath it. Everyone has seen it. I’d seen it thousands of times before I actually saw it, and it sounds hokey and hyperbolic, but I really had never seen it until I was there in its presence. Nothing was in the immediate area surrounding it, and the ceiling was raised to accommodate it, the sunlight shining through the windows of the dome illuminating it. The sculpture looked every inch of its 17 foot height. The Empire State Building is the tallest building in New York City, but it doesn’t look all that impressive because of the massive structures surrounding it. Perspective would even lead you to believe that some of the other buildings are taller. There’s nothing like that here, nothing to diminish from its immense size, so that as you crane your neck to bask in its glory it fills your vision, all that there is to see is David. I may have used the word “chiseled” to describe someone with a particularly impressive musculature before, but now I know what it truly means. Every inch is strength, composure, perfection, captured in the moment before battle, the moment where he realizes, “I can take this guy…”. We weren’t allowed to take pictures, and now, as I sit and look at pictures of it on the internet, I realize why: you can’t capture it. You just can’t. You have to stand beneath it, see the veins on its hands, look into its eyes, feel small and awed, to understand why we consider it art, why it’s the most recognizable statue in history.
We could’ve sat there all day just looking at it, understanding the human form better through something inhuman, but at the same time more human than we’ll ever be. We could’ve, but we couldn’t. We were given 15 minutes free time before we met at the exit. We wandered back to look at the Slaves, but we were cheating on them, glancing back at David, still not done admiring it. There were a few more rooms to explore, including a room full of sculpture and marble busts that was locked off from the public by a gate, so that you could peek in the room and marvel at its offerings and wonder why they would taunt you like that. They were showing an exhibit on decorative instruments throughout the ages, but we walked through it in a haze: all our admiration had been spent on David, something I’m sure they realized was the case for most who entered the museum, as the place is actually quite small: no more than 10 rooms.
I made my way through the gift shop, troubled as always by the seeming cheapness of the trinkets on offer in comparison to the magnificence they tried to capture. I settled on two bookmarks, one for myself, one for my mother, and a book detailing the entire collection of the museum with, thankfully, pictures. After a quick bathroom break for myself, we rejoined the group and were on our way.
Our next stop was the Santa Maria del Fiori cathedral, home of Brunelleschi’s Duomo. We lined up along the side of the cathedral facing a street, and the motor traffic that was constantly barreling past the church was showing on its white, green and pink marble. The entire side of the building was caked in soot, still magnificent in its ornate construction, but looking as if it was left to the ages. It could do with a good power-washing. After about a 10-minute wait, we were inside the church with the third longest nave in the world (the nave is the main hall of the church, where all the congregation would normally sit…they always make you walk for the good stuff). We made our way directly to the Duomo (most of the art was in the attached museum, which we wouldn’t be venturing into) which was covered in one of the Renaissance’s largest paintings, the Last Judgment, a favorite of the church to remind the faithful what being on the winning team meant (and where the losing team went, too). The real showpiece was not the inside of the church, but the outside, and that’s where we went next.
This view of the church had only pedestrian traffic alongside it and so the white of the marble was blindingly white as intended, with the greens and the pinks a bit faded by time but still serving their purpose beautifully. Here we gathered against the wall of a building directly across from the church to allow us to take as much in as possible. The dome was an architectural marvel, the largest masonry dome in the world, created using techniques invented by Brunelleschi. The use of concrete seen in the Pantheon was long forgotten by Brunelleschi’s time and so he built his out of bricks, requiring special tools invented by Brunelleschi (Da Vinci even got in on the action, inventing a special hoisting mechanism designed specifically for the Dome’s construction). The dome, however, was not the only marvel to gaze upon here. We stood in the shadow of Giotto’s Bell Tower, the campanile, looming above us, covered in sculpture and colored marble. It seemed from where we stood taller than the Duomo even though it isn’t, as the structure is unchallenged by its much smaller surroundings, fairly slender in its hugeness, while the Duomo is wide and massive, placed on a giant support structure that makes it seem squat in comparison to the campanile. The sky was ridiculously blue and so the tower was framed against it, glinting in the sun, making our true admiration for Brunelleschi’s achievement have to wait for a return trip.
We made our way to the front of the church, the true entrance, and stood between it and the Baptistery and faced the Gates of Paradise, golden doors designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti with ten panels depicting scenes from the Old Testament. The panels are richly detailed, with numerous techniques used to make the mostly flat panels appear three dimensional, so that the figures depicted seemed to be miniature sculptures set in a boxed scene receding into the door. The face of the church across from the Baptistery was also free from the pollution of the traffic by the side we entered on, so that it retained the beauty that was created for it in the late 19th century (it had a different façade when originally finished in the late 16th century, but it was dismantled when its design fell out of fashion and attempts to build a new one were marked by scandal, so it was left bare).
We walked down several little streets, passing a triumphal arch, the Orsanmichele (St. Michael’s church, once a grain market, now with statues by Donatello lining its walls) and, both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, a Disney Store, until we entered the Piazza della Signoria. Here we would have our second round of free time, with plenty to see: the Palazzo Vecchio stood before us, massive (is there another adjective so overused in describing the monuments of Europe?), its lone castle turret towering unchallenged above. It’s the town hall of Florence but it was once the home of the Medicis. We weren’t going in, but we were standing at the steps that were flanked on one side by the mundane Hercules and Cacus, a response by the Medicis to the replica that lay across from it, Michelangelo’s David. David, of course, outshone it, but here in its original spot, towered over by the Palazzo Vecchio, it seemed smaller, less special. Perhaps it’s because it was a replica, perhaps it’s because it’s significantly more filthy than the original. Either way, we were able to get some pictures of it, pictures that don’t do the original justice, furthering my theory that’s why pictures weren’t allowed in the first place.
We took some time out for Gelato before we headed over to explore the Loggia del Lanzi, the open air columned structure that housed quite a bit of statuary, including a copy of the Rape of the Sabine Woman we had seen in the Academia. It was equally impressive outside than in, perhaps because it wasn’t dwarfed like David was. We admired the other statuary, unfortunately at a loss for their names as we were at it alone with no guidebook in hand (I do remember asking about Perseus, hoisting aloft the head of Medusa, the Gorgon he had just slain, and finding out its name was…Perseus) and snapped a few pictures by the fountain of Neptune alongside the Palazzo Vecchio before returning to the group.
We walked through the Uffizi Courtyard, flanked on either side by Florentines who changed the world as we know it:
- Giotto, who built the campanile we had seen earlier
- Donatello, whose sculptures we had passed at the Orsanmichele
- Leonardo Da Vinci, unfortunately untouched by our tour except for his association with the Duomo
- Michelangelo Buonaroti, who forever enshrined the essence of mankind in his David
- Dante Allighieri, who we would visit later in the day, making me regret I stopped with the Inferno, reminding me to dig the others out of the book closet
- Macchiavelli, looking like the devilish bastard he was
- Gallileo Galilei, who we’d also visit later in the day, revered to this day in his spot at the end of the courtyard, with many leaving the group just to get a shot of his statue
And plenty more who escaped my camera on the quick walk through. At the end, before we exited the courtyard, was a piece of renegade art that had startled our guide: a red drum with two gold-faced figures hanging from its sides that she assured us had not been there the previous day and probably wouldn’t be there the next.
The Uffizi Courtyard ended at the Arno River, where we were afforded a view of the Ponte Vecchio. It was a great view of the famous bridge, but we longed to go visit it, despite the warnings of tacky tourism.
It was time for lunch now, but not before a stop in the square where Santa Croce was located. We would return to this spot after lunch for our final bit of free time before ending the tour, and they wanted to get us a bit acquainted with the area before they abandoned us to it. I, of course, wandered away from the group to take pictures. It was here the oddest coincidence of the vacation so far happened: I was taking my pictures of Santa Croce church when I lowered my camera and Andy and Laura were standing in front of me. They had done Florence on their own and they not only happened to be in Santa Croce square at the exact moment we were, but they happened to be in front of the exact spot I had wandered off to take pictures from. They had noticed me first, and I laughed and said I must’ve had them center frame without even realizing it, and sure enough I’ve got Andy recognizing me in the bottom left of one of my pictures. We talked for a bit, they were enjoying Florence immensely, having much the same experience we were: it was a lot less crowded and a lot less hectic than Rome and therefore a lot more enjoyable. There was a Disney castmember on their bus to Florence and they had offered to show them around a bit and take them to a good place for lunch. They didn’t seem to be too enthused about the whole idea, but I thought it was cool they got a tour for (relatively) free. We parted ways when I realized that I had been left behind, and it was only the extended Mickey hand that let me know where to go.
We passed by the place where Michelangelo lived as a child, which would’ve gone unnoticed except for the plaque saying it was so. It wasn’t impressive except for what it once housed. We didn’t linger here, though, as we had been promised lunch, and all desire to experience history and culture is set aside when food is offered.
We would dine in the Palazzo Borghese, a real, honest-to-goodness palace. Here was the last place we would see our Florentine tour guide, which made for an awkward goodbye as we were all more concerned with filling our stomachs than tearful goodbyes, and the tips given to her seemed more in the spirit of “leave us to eat, please” than thanks. The palace was, well, palatial, with chandeliers and art in every room, and there were plenty of rooms, so many that there seemed to be rooms whose sole purpose was to exist and be pretty. The dining hall where we ate was grand and lavishly decorated, every inch of it gilded or painted or sculpted. This more than made up for the lackluster food we were served. The good company also helped, as we sat with fellow DISers (more active than we are, but that’s not hard). There’s a better chance that Lisa will remember their names, but she’s not here at the moment, so you’ll have to settle for a husband and wife, one of their mothers, whose name I believe was Irene, and their two sons. The father and the sons were desperate to have pizza before they left Italy. They had failed in Sicily, Naples, Rome and even Olbia, and this was their last chance before we headed off to France, so they excused themselves to go on a quest for pizza. (A quick aside: the pizza place they settled on, one of who knows how many in Florence, was the same pizza place that Andy and Laura had been taken to by their tour guide for lunch) We chatted with the mother and Irene about how wonderful the trip had been so far. They had quite a few more speedbumps than we had, including a tour guide that didn’t feel like speaking above a whisper and a driver who tried to hide his alcoholism by holding his wine bottle out the window, I guess where he believed it invisible to the passengers. We talked about politics, and Irene had some strong opinions that had the DISer wife (this is where I regret not knowing names) making some makeshift earmuffs for her and regretting that the subject was even broached. Damn that crappy little faux newspaper they shoved under our door in the morning!
We were, I guess, entirely too leisurely about our chatting, since it turned out that our guide coming over to our table several times to say she would accompany us personally back to Santa Croce square was not good service, but a subtle hint that we were the only ones left from our group still in the place. At a break in the conversation we looked up and the entire half of the huge hall was gone except for us, leaving only non-Disney tour groups in the other half. We hurried our way out back to the exit. It turned out our guide had found some stragglers in the immense bathroom line (the resolve of people to stand for literally half-hour long waits for bathrooms amazes me) so she couldn’t accompany us but gave us the direction that we were making a left out of the palace and turning right at the second stoplight.
There was, of course, no second stopl
