Elliot Ritzema

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  • Day 5 – Corfu

    After Dubrovnik, we sailed down the Adriatic to the Ionian Sea and the island of Corfu, off the west coast of Greece and Albania (you can actually see Albania across the strait from Corfu Town). Up to this point, the trip was not incredibly fast-paced. We were in Venice for a little while, then we had a day off on the ship, then we stopped in Dubrovnik. But after Dubrovnik: 7 ports in 7 days. And these were not just Caribbean ports, where (I’m told) the only thing to do at some of them is find the nearest beach. No, these were Mediterranean ports, with thousands of years of history behind each one. Most of the time, we got off the ship as quickly as possible and rushed into town.

    Corfu was no exception. The ship was docked just north of Corfu Town, so we walked the 15 minutes or so into town. The first thing I noticed about Corfu was the scooters. Scooters everywhere. Everyone had a scooter. This turned out to be not just the case in Corfu, but just about everywhere we visited in Greece. At least in Corfu Town, one reason for this may well be the narrowness of some of the streets. The first sight we walked by was the “New” Fortress, built about 400 years ago.

    As you can see, it was a nice, sunny day, and not too hot (well you can’t see that it wasn’t too hot; I’m just telling you).

    Old Town Corfu is a quaint little place, and wonderful for a stroll. It was named to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2007, so it was the third World Heritage Site (with many more to come) that we saw on this trip. The first two were Venice and Dubrovnik’s Old Town.

    After walking through the town for a bit, we went to the Old Fortress (which was originally Venetian, just like the New Fortress, but a bit older).

    From there you can get some great views of Corfu Town, the water and Albania.

    There is also St. George’s Church, which was originally an Anglican church built by the British when they occupied Corfu in the 1800s, but is now a Greek Orthodox church.

    After the Old Fortress, we wandered around the town some more (it really is a great place for wandering), and we each bought some Orthodox icons from a shop next to the church of St. Spyridon, the patron saint of Corfu. Then we went inside the church, and sat down to watch while a baptism was going on. The family and friends of the family of the baby were all gathered around the baptismal at the front, and the baby got dunked (as is Orthodox practice) rather than sprinkled.

    We walked out the other side of the church and into a street of souvenirs, and discovered that Corfu is well known for its kumquat products. You can get almost anything imaginable made from kumquats: kumquat jelly, kumquat liqueur (which I tried), kumquat candies… we bought some kumquat nougat to chew on.

    Around the time we were in the kumquat store, there began a torrential downpour that lasted for just a few minutes. We stayed in the souvenir shops long enough for it to pass, then walked back to our home away from home. In the evening, after sitting by the pool as we sailed away and before going to the dining room again for dinner, we found out that there had been an earthquake in Greece that day, though we did not feel it.

  • Day 4 – Dubrovnik

    The ship got to Dubrovnik in the morning and anchored out in the harbor away from the dock. Instead of being able to walk off the ship directly onto the dock, we took tenders to shore. In case you didn’t know what a tender is (apart from the chicken variety you get at Burger King), here is a picture:

    The ship takes six of these everywhere it goes, attached to the side just to the aft of the lifeboats.

    Dubrovnik is the only port we visited on this cruise that I had been to before. In March of 2004, I rented a car with Judi, Sarabeth and Abi and drove from Budapest to the Adriatic coast for spring break. We drove through Zagreb to get to the Croatian coast, where we stopped at Zadar, Split and Dubrovnik. Then we turned around and headed back north further inland. On that trip, I read a history of the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999) in which I found out that the medieval center of Dubrovnik had been shelled by the Yugoslav Army for no apparent reason. The authors of the book characterized it as bitter country boys in the army taking out their frustrations on a rich resort town.

    Whatever the reason, Dubrovnik was a strategically unimportant town that was damaged. But you wouldn’t know that to look at it now. A lot of the roofs in the Old Town look new, and you can’t really see anything that is obviously war damage.

    Princess was kind enough to offer free shuttle service from the dock to the Old Town, which we took advantage of. When we got there, the first thing we did was go up on the walls and walk around the city. It was cool and overcast (much like the first time I was in Dubrovnik), but it was not a bad time to be up on the wall. If it had been hot, we would have been baked by both the sun above and the stone below. By the time we went all the way around and came down, the weather was better and the line to get up on the wall was looooooong.

    The Old Town was crowded, since there were three or four cruise ships in port that day. We went to a Dominican monastery and then the Cathedral, which houses the head, arms and foot of St. Blaise. You have to pay to see those, though. Since none of us is a devotee of St. Blaise, we decided to skip that.

    When I’m traveling around, I like to buy just a few things: on the cheap end, patches (to sew on backpacks), stickers (to put on water bottles) and magnets (to put on a refrigerator, in case I ever own one). I also like to look into buying things that the place I’m visiting is known for. I heard that they produce lavender products in Dubrovnik, and that the necktie originated in Croatia, so I looked for the two of those. I bought a small bottle of lavender oil at an outdoor market right after we left the Cathedral, and then looked around for a tie shop. My dad and I looked all around the Old Town for a tie shop, and finally found one, but the cheapest ties there were 57 euros. So much for buying an authentic Croatian necktie.

    After walking around for a little longer, we took the shuttle back to the dock, and the tender back to the ship. In the evening, we went to Michelangelo’s again. After this, we went to one of the dining rooms just about every night rather than the buffet. We usually had a four-course meal, with the menu changing each night. It usually took about an hour and a half, and it was a good way to relax after the long day of walking around ports all day, trying to get the most out of the short time we had there.

  • Day 3 – Venice (and at sea)

    We left Venice at about 9 a.m. on June 6. The Emerald was docked on the west side of the city, and we went out through the Guidecca Canal, past St. Mark’s Square and Santa Maria della Salute (the dome with all the scaffolding) on the left. It was overcast and spitting rain, but the deck railings were packed.

    It took about an hour to sail out of the lagoon that Venice is in, and then we were out in the Adriatic until Dubrovnik the next morning. The day passed with reading (Since we were going through the Mediterranean, I decided to be ambitious and bring along The Histories by ancient Greek historian Herodotus. By the end of the trip, I was about halfway through), participating in a muster drill, going to the fitness center, buying a Naples shore excursion, and going to a port lecture on Dubrovnik. In the evening, Mary and I went to one of the restaurants on board, Michelangelo’s, for formal dress night.

    I found a couple of YouTube videos to give an idea of what the ship was like. Here is the plaza on decks 6 and 7:

    Here’s a video of the ship moving through the Guidecca Canal in Venice:

  • Day 2 – Venice

    Mary, my dad and I got up early (two words: jet lag) and wandered around a northern district of Venice called Cannaregio (our B&B was just across the Grand Canal from this district, in Santa Croce). Since it was early and we weren’t at St. Mark’s, it was quiet as we walked up and down the canals. We saw a couple of churches (San Girolamo and Chiesa della Madonna dell’ Orto, where Tintoretto is buried), but neither were open that early. This area holds the dubious distinction of being the oldest Jewish ghetto in Europe, and there still appears to be a small Jewish community there. Even though it was mild and overcast for most of our meanderings, on our way back for breakfast it started pouring rain.

    After breakfast, we took the vaporetto to St. Mark’s Square. There was a long line, as there apparently always is, but it moves fast. There are some beautiful mosaics inside, though it was dark and crowded.

    St. Mark\'s Cathedral

    Afterward, we walked around the square to soak it all in (it was still drizzling), skipped the Doge’s Palace next door and walked to San Zaccarias, where John the Baptist’s father Zechariah is allegedly buried. There is also a shrine to St. Athanasius there, which I was surprised to see. It looked as though Athanasius was buried there as well, but after the trip I looked it up and apparently he used to be, but isn’t any longer. His body was buried in Alexandria, taken to Italy (where I suppose he was buried in San Zaccarias), but in 1973 Pope Paul VI gave his remains to Pope Shenouda III (of the Coptic Orthodox Church). Now he is buried in the St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo. It’s great for the Coptic Orthodox Church, but too bad for me, because I was excited to see his tomb.

    Why was I skeptical about Zechariah being buried there but excited about Athanasius? I am (at least initially) skeptical about most relics and remains that I encounter from the earliest years of the Christian era. My reason is this: for many years, Christianity was a very small movement. It wasn’t until later that Christians were able to build churches set aside for worship, and place relics in them of special significance. So in many cases, there is a long gap between the life of a particular saint and the finding of the relics associated with that saint. For example, Constantine’s mother Helena discovered pieces of the True Cross about 300 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. I think that the longer the gap, and the greater the desire of Christians to discover relics, the less likely it is that those relics are genuine.

    By contrast, Athanasius lived well into the Christian era (c. 293-373), in a time when saints’ relics were already being venerated. He was also very popular in his own lifetime. So although I’m not certain, I think that the likelihood of the body people think is Athanasius being his body is greater than the likelihood of the body people think is Zechariah being his body.

    After San Zaccarias, we walked back toward our B&B across the shopping district around the Rialto Bridge, where Mary bought a scarf. We also went inside another church: San Polo, where there are some nice paintings of the Stations of the Cross by G. Tiepolo. And a Tintoretto, of course. Then we got gelato again and sat in a square for a bit before we got our bags and set out toward our cruise ship, the Emerald Princess. I will not relate to you the harrowing journey that we took, lugging our suitcases, to get to the ship… but suffice it to say that it would have been MUCH easier had we known that Princess ran a shuttle to the ship from St. Mark’s Square.

    But we made it, and spent the evening exploring the huge (3000 passenger), shiny and new (started service April 2007) ship.

  • Day 1 – Travel (and Venice)

    Mary and I began our Mediterranean cruise by getting up in the middle of the night and boarding a bus for the Seattle airport. It took 2.5 hours to get from Bellingham to Seattle, and we were dropped off at 4 a.m. Our flight to New York left at around 6, and that passed without incident. We met up with my dad in JFK, had some lunch, and after two gate changes and a 3-hour delay, we got on our flight to Venice (I don’t remember having a lot of problems at JFK in the past, but after my most recent experience there, I never want to go there again. We experienced long delays both going and coming, and these delays were mostly because of traffic jams on the tarmac). We stumbled off the airplane, dazed and with only 5 or so hours of sleep over the last two nights, at 11 a.m. the next day.

    We took a bus from the airport (on the mainland) to Venice, and were dropped off about a 10-minute walk from our B&B. On our way, we saw a typical street sign in Venice:

    “San Marco and Rialto: Wherever.”

    It takes a while to learn how to navigate Venice’s poorly marked and oddly numbered alleys, but there are lots worse places to get lost. We did find our B&B, dropped off our bags, and even though we felt like taking a 15-hour snooze, we went out on the town.

    Our first stop was the Basilica di Santa Maria Dei Frari, a 14th-century brick Franciscan church with lots of tombs inside – some tasteful and some hideously baroque. There is a two-story tomb adorned with statues of skeletons next to an equally large tomb shaped like a pyramid. It also seems that a church just isn’t a church in Venice without some work by Titian or Tintoretto, and sure enough, the Frari has Titian’s “Assumption” above the altar.

    After the Frari, we went to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the most famous guild hall in Venice and the only guild still in existence. Instead of Elks and Masonic lodges, Renaissance Venice had these groups pulling strings behind the scenes. Tintoretto filled this hall with paintings upstairs and downstairs. It was nice to sit down, admire a painting, take a five-second nap, wake up, and admire the painting some more.

    In order to avoid passing out in front of paintings, we walked around Dorsoduro, one of Venice’s six districts. We walked into another church, we got gelato, we did whatever it took to keep moving. In the afternoon, we decided that we had stayed awake long enough to ensure that we were now on European time, so we returned to the B&B for a celebratory nap. In the evening, we had pizza and took a vaporetto (water bus) down the Grand Canal to Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square) and back.

    Mary on the vaporetto

    Quintessential Venice shot: Rialto Bridge with gondola (and water on my camera lens)

  • The Return

    Mary and my dad and I have now returned from our Mediterranean cruise. Soon, I’ll begin blogging through the trip day-by-day, giving a rundown of what happened and some pictures as well. But tomorrow, Mary and I are leaving to attend a wedding in Spokane, so there will be no blogging for a couple of days. But for now, I will leave you with a little taster of things to come: of course, it is a funny sign:

    Get your genuine fake watches here! Accept no imitations!

  • Grad Photos

    I moved away from Vancouver on Friday, and have been spending the last few days in Bellingham until we leave for the cruise on Tuesday. On Friday, I received an e-mail saying that pictures from my graduation have been uploaded here and here. Here are a few that I picked out and downloaded:

    This is me receiving my hood. You can only see the top of my head because for some reason I decided to put my head down as if I were being knighted.

    Shaking hands with the president:

    My good friend Matt, who was the student speaker:

    Iain Provan, who was the faculty speaker:

    The row that I was sitting in, during the closing prayer:

    The faculty sitting at the front:

  • May 2008: Books Read

    Aight my peeps, it is that time of the month once again where I tell you what my nose has been buried in for the past 30-31 days. The end of last month saw me graduate from my master’s program, so there has been a change in my reading habits. Not much of one, though. Here they are:

    The Reformed Pastor1. The Reformed Pastor, by Richard Baxter. Like After Virtue last month, this was a book that I started reading earlier this year, but had to put down because of other pressing obligations. It was written by a 17th-century English Puritan, who wrote it in response to a request by a ministerial association for a little talk on the nature and task of pastoral ministry. He was ill on the day that he was supposed to give this lecture/sermon, so he stayed home and wrote this tome instead (they didn’t call him “Scribbling Dick” for nothing). Despite having been written over 300 years ago, this book is still in print because Baxter has some sound advice for those in pastoral roles in any age. Two things that he stressed which will stick with me were his call for ministers to minister out of living, genuine faith, and his call for ministers to visit each family in their parish annually and take interest in each person’s spiritual state. Not everything Baxter said can be translated directly to our own day and age, but his is a serious call to an energetic pursuit of pastoral work which shouldn’t be ignored in any age.

    2. Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter’s by R.A. Scotti. This is an entertaining look at the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, 1506-1626. I read it in preparation for the trip I’m taking which starts next week. It was particularly interesting to read, for perhaps the first time, a book about this time period in which the focus was not on the theological (or even historical) implications of what was going on. It’s just a good yarn about the building of a cathedral, and the lives of the popes and the artists who labored over it for so many years.

    Ring for Jeeves3. Ring for Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse. I’ve already sung the praises of P.G. Wodehouse once this week, so I don’t need to go into it again. This is your basic book about an English aristocrat who needs extra money so he disguises himself and works as a bookie, and who wants to sell his country estate to a wealthy widow whom he finds out is an old flame, which makes his current fiancee jealous, not to mention the hunter who wants to marry the widow, and who by the way was cheated out of his money at the race track by the aforementioned English aristocrat. But everything works out well in the end.

    Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World4. Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World: Lessons for the Church from MacIntyre’s After Virtue, by Jonathan R. Wilson. I read After Virtue earlier this year, and discussed it in a group led by Prof. Wilson, so I thought it would be helpful to read the book he wrote on the subject. And it was. The book is short – just 78 pages – but it has exerted a disproportionate influence on account of its call for a “new monasticism.” This, I think, has resonated with a lot of people in our culture. In the book, Wilson draws out several lessons from MacIntyre:

    1) that the church must learn to live with its history (distinguishing among the church, the kingdom and the world),
    2) that we live in a fragmented rather than a pluralistic world,
    3) that we live in the midst of the failure of the Enlightenment project in the church and the world, and the effects of this failure are often difficult to discern,
    4) that we must revitalize our ability to give a Christian account of “the good life,” to draw on the living Christian tradition, to engage in practices that grow us in our character as disciples, and to live in community,
    5) and this finally leads us to the recovery of a “new monasticism.”

  • P.G. Wodehouse: English Literature’s Performing Flea

    One of the good things about having graduated from school is that I get to read fiction again. And one of the great things about reading fiction is the work of P.G. Wodehouse.

    Wodehouse (pronounced WOOD-house) was an English writer of comic fiction. These days, he is probably best known as the creator of the butler Jeeves and his incompetent master, Bertie Wooster. He was also a playwright, and wrote lyrics for musicals. He was called “English literature’s performing flea” by playwright Sean O’Casey, and embraced the nickname as his own. (He even published a volume of his letters under the title Performing Flea) I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Wodehouse when I was a kid, because he is one of my mom’s favorite authors and we had several of his books around the house.

    What I love about Wodehouse is not that he writes books that are profound works of Literature. He is a wonderful writer in terms of his style, but he chose throughout his life to devote his great talent to writing, as he called his books, “musical comedies without music.” If you, dear reader, are looking for some summer reading to pass the time while you lay beside the pool, there can be no finer choice than a book by Wodehouse. And he wrote 96 books over his 73-year writing career, so there are lots to choose from. One of my personal favorites is Joy in the Morning (sometimes published in the U.S. as Jeeves in the Morning). It is a typical Jeeves and Wooster book, featuring the main characters immersing themselves in all kinds of trouble, with everything ending happily in the end (and it probably features an engagement, as many of his books do, but I can’t remember).

    One of the more entertaining aspects of Wodehouse’s prose style are his similes. Here are a few entertaining samples from Wodehouse’s works (you can find more at the Random Wodehouse Quote page):

    “Alf Todd,” said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, “has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat’s left ear with a red-hot needle.” – Ukridge (1924)

    Chimp Twist was looking like a monkey that had bitten into a bad nut, and Soapy Molloy like an American Senator who has received an anonymous telegram saying, “All is discovered. Fly at once.”

    She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd “Emu” in the top right hand corner.

    He uttered a sound much like a bull dog swallowing a pork chop whose dimensions it has underestimated.

    He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consomme, and the dinner-gong due any moment.

    The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin. – Mr Mulliner Speaking (1929)

    Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, “So, you’re back from Moscow, eh?”.

    He looked like a bishop who has just discovered Schism and Doubt among the minor clergy.

    Do yourself a favor and go pick up some Wodehouse at the nearest used book store with all speed.

  • A Dead Dog Story

    My friend Sarah told me this story last night at a BBQ on Jericho Beach. She heard it from a friend at a wedding last weekend, and claims that it happened to a friend of a friend. I’m pretty skeptical, and think that it’s probably an urban legend. But still, it is too good not to pass along…

    So there’s this college-age girl out in Victoria who is house-sitting for a family while they are away on vacation. The family has an elderly yellow lab named Fluffy, and they know that Fluffy might not survive until they return. So they tell the girl that Fluffy might die while she is house-sitting, but not to panic because Fluffy has had a long life and the family has already said their goodbyes.

    A couple of days into the house-sitting gig, sure enough, Fluffy is not doing so well. He is tired and listless, and it is not long before he dies. The girl, panicked, calls the family and asks what to do with the body. They tell her to take Fluffy to the vet, who will be able to take care of the body.

    Hanging up the phone, the girl remembers that she doesn’t have a car, and since it is a few weeks after the end of school, she can’t think of anyone still in town whom she might call to take her and Fluffy to the vet. Looking around the house, she finds a large suitcase, and she decides to put Fluffy in the suitcase and take him to the vet.

    She manages to get out of the house and to the bus stop, rolling the suitcase along. When she tries to get on the bus, the suitcase is too heavy for her to lift, and a stranger comes along and helps her out. Having shared this experience of getting the suitcase on, the two sit next to each other and start chatting. The stranger, having noted how heavy the suitcase was, asks what is in it. The girl, afraid to tell the truth for fear of seeming strange, says that she is moving her stuff out of her dorm room and that the suitcase contains clothes, books, her computer, etc.

    When the stop for the vet is coming up, she reaches up to pull the cord to request a stop, but the stranger does it first, saying that it is his stop too. The girl panics, thinking that he will want to accompany her where she is going, and still not wanting him to know what is in the suitcase.

    Then the bus stops, and they both get off. To the girl’s relief, he starts off in the other direction, and she starts to lug the suitcase toward the vet’s office. But then, after the bus has driven away, she hears the stranger behind her call out, “Hey!” She turns around, he punches her in the face, and she falls to the ground unconscious. When she comes to a little while later, a couple of people have gathered around. Immediately she looks for the suitcase and can’t see it. She asks the people if they’ve seen it, and they say no.

    So the stranger, thinking he was getting a suitcase full of this girl’s worldly possessions, got a suitcase full of dead dog instead.

    What do you think? Could this story be true, or is it an urban legend?