Elliot Ritzema

Tag: mediterranean cruise

  • 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)