The funny thing about vacations where you actually go places is that you then need a few days of vacation to wind down from your vacation. There's a whole pile of random chores and stuff I should do, but really I don't want to do any of it. Except the room-cleaning, which is progressing well (closet has been reclaimed from junk repository to actual useful space). What I want to and have been doing is curl up with my video games (80 hours and counting into Mana Khemia, successfully found the 2nd disc of Summon Night :3) and Photoshop (I'll say one thing about sightseeing, it is excellent for artistic inspiration) and models (Space Hulk arrived while I was in Europe. We'll see if my painting skills can do justice to the models...).

And I've found that I like getting up 20 minutes before my alarm instead of groggily crawling out of bed zombified for most of the morning. Drifting off to bed at 10 might not be such a bad idea after all.

But, as promised,

The Setup

This particular venture was a cruise trip with Norwegian Cruise Line (abbreviating to "NCL", which means something entirely different to me), which is actually based out of Nassau in the Bahamas. I've never been on a cruise before, though I did have some idea of what it entailed - mostly a moving hotel, possibly with a side order of iceberg if you were unlucky. Fortunately for us, the Easter Mediterranean is relatively free of icebergs, pirates, zombies, tsunamis, or other such hazards.

The trip involved stopping at various port towns along the coast of Spain, Italy, France, and Malta, though since not all places of interest are coastal cities, there was also some busing/training involved in getting to more inland locales.

Days 1-2: Barcelona - Attack of the Supermercats

The funny thing about Spain, or at least the bits we visited, is that it's exactly like the photos you see in the travel brochures and postcards - white/beige houses, narrow streets framed by 4-5 story buildings, a proliferation of palm trees and various vegetation, cloudless azure sky.

The first couple of days were spent in a villa about an hour's drive from Barcelona itself, courtesy of harinesumi's cousin. It gave us a bit of time to catch up on jetlag and enjoy the very pleasant weather - it's hot if you move around a lot out in the sun, but in the building itself and at night it's pretty perfect shirtsleeve weather.

The villa itself and surrounding countryside wasn't too big, but had a really neat curved architectural style that made it look a bit like some sort of large lobster. We also met up with harinesumi's parents at the villa. As they were actually residents of Europe and spoke most of the languages in the countries we visited, their help was invaluable in not getting horribly lost on the trip when we decided to eschew the guided ship tours and venture out on our own.

We also had a bit of time to poke around Barcelona itself. Many European tourist cities seem to have a common tour bus scheme, where you buy a ticket and then just get on/off whenever you feel like it, so we took a bus around Barcelona and gawked at some famous buildings designed by a man named Gaudi.

It's hard to explain this without appropriate pictures, but the buildings (including a very large, unfinished cathedral, the beginning of ketsugami's quest to photograph the scaffolding of Europe) were exactly what I would imagine you might design for a modern Dracula movie - complex, organic, twisted, looming, and quite possibly daemonically-possessed.

Day 3: Malta - 1001 Knights

It's probably sad that the first thing that I thought of upon viewing the (inapropriately named, as our guide reminded us) Maltese cross was Warhammer 40k. Then I mentally ran through a slew of tabletop and jRPG heraldry before finally arriving at the proper historical reference.

The people who built the various churches, castles, and other tourist attractions were very into bling. As someone mentioned, when you're stuck in a monastery with nothing to do for decades but wait for wars to happen, you may as well start filling every available wall space with carvings, paintings, and little glittery frescos. The main specialty of the tourist take-away stuff seemed to be locally-produced glassworks, though I didn't buy any myself due to the potential hijinks involved in long-distance travel, glass, and luggage.

However, the one souvenir that I did buy on the trip was purchased in Malta - a small furry paper-mache cat perched on a pillow, with a label saying "MALTA" on it. I'm not sure what cats have to do with Malta (given the tour, I would expect a Maltese cat to be armored in full plate with crosses on it, possibly riding a small dog) and can only assume it was simply designed to attract tourists who were suffering from cat withdrawal. Successfully, I may add.

Day 4: Naples - Something About Pizza

There are a few things that I'm definitely not a big fan of, and physical exertion is one of them. Walking around a city is alright, hiking up a mountain not so great, so when the rest of the group decided to book the Naples-Pompeii hiking tour (up Mt. Vaarsuvius Versuvious), I decided that was going to be my take-it-easy day. Sometimes I get the feeling that not taking full advantage of the touring possibilities after coming all the way to Europe would be somehow missing an opportunity, but it's really about what you enjoy doing, and I was fairly certain hiking up a mountain in the summer wasn't it.

I did poke around Naples a bit, though the heat discouraged me from exploring further afoot. The one thing I do regret is not having the presence of mind to order some real Italian pizza while I was there, though ketsugami & co assure me it was delicious.

Day 5: Rome - Think Big

In terms of actual sightseeing, Rome was probably the highlight of the trip; for all the extravagance of Malta and Naples, nothing really compares to the grandeur of St. Pietro and the Basilica. The engineering and mathematics involved in their construction is mind-boggling considering the tools the builders had to work with, and, as with many cases of ancient Chinese and Japanese architecture, I wish that modern buildings had the time or energy to devote to such lavish construction. Maybe one day our technology will become so advanced that each home owner can remodel their house into a modern version of a classical cathedral.

Romans apparently thought big. Very big. While the Maltese castles covered everything with gold leaf, tiny carvings, and other somewhat gaudy decorations, the colors of the Roman cathedrals and buildings were much more subdued, mostly in shades that stone normally comes in - white, beige, pink, green, black. The most impressive part of these attractions is the form - the scale of the buildings and the detail given to the statuary.

Also, if anyone really wanted to learn basic drawing, particularly of human figures and poses, there is nothing quite as good as classical sculpture as a reference; if some day I wind up with a bucketload of free time, I could spend hours in the church just drawing the statues. I've expressed my particular views on art in this regard before - making up a display piece consisting of bits of wire, paper, and soda cans and saying there's some deep symbolic meaning to it doesn't hold a candle to the skill required to recreate a life-like creature out of stone.

And somewhat amusingly for historical attractions, the buildings and statues in Rome aren't fenced off in their own corner or anything, it's all very open to the public. Some of the statuary you could just walk up to and touch, and there were a fair number of people leaning against the walls etc. in St. Pietro.

Day 6: Florence/Pisa - With Complimentary Pigeon

All of the ancient statuary in Florence will always have an obligatory pigeon perched on top, whether it's the David replica, Perseus slaying Medusa, or any other number of famous works of art. It's just part of the landscape.

Florence itself is another one of the traditional European cities with high buildings and narrow streets, though there were quite a number of tourists traps and stalls. In particular, there was one street across a bridge that was completely filled with jewelers of various varieties, to which we lost harinezumi's mom to window shopping. Like Rome, however, the monuments in Florence were also more or less out in the open - you'd turn a corner and then there's just a square full of ancient statuary. It's particularly neat because I'd seen replicas of most of those sculptures in the art museum in New York years ago.

The other major highlight of Florence was a small Italian restaurant that we were recommended by harinesumi's dad, which turned out to be very good food and had a friendly waiter who explained all the dishes to us in English and thus enabled us to avoid accidentally ordering, eg, chicken neck or lamb brains.

There's basically one tourist attraction in Pisa - the leaning tower. What most photographs, logos, and other images always fail to mention, however, is that there's an actual cathedral attached to said tower (or rather, the other way around, as it was originally built to be the belltower of the cathedrdal).. As well as may expansive lawns, of which "Keep Off The Grass" ws probably the most-ignored sign I've ever seen.

Florence was also one of the more pleasant legs of the tour because we'd paid a cab driver to take us to Florence, wait for us in the city, then take us to Pisa and back to the ship. Travelling mostly in an air-conditioned cab helps quite a bit with hot Mediterranean weather.

Day 7: Villefranche dur Mer/Monte Carlo - City of Stairs

The architectural style of France is yet again different from the Italian cathedrals - less ornate on the outside, but with more curlicues and rounded edges. Villefranche and Monte Carlo's buil.dings were also mostly a pale orange color, compared to the many shades of off-white we've become accustomed to in most of our other destinations.

There aren't a whole lot of sightseeing thing in either location, and we were too early at Monte Carlo to visit the big casino, but it's a very pleasant city, with excellent weather and decently well-organized streets (read: the traffic was only making a moderate effort to kill pedestrians). Not really a tourist city par se, but probably somewhere you might want to retire to, provided you have a lot of money.

Monte Carlo is also built on a very steep hillside, which means a lot of stairs and slopes to walk up. The prince's palace is at the top, and while the palace itself wasn't really open to visitors, they had a changing of the guard ceremony every hour or so, which put me in mind of a life-size replica of one of those clocks with the perfectly synchronized toy soldiers.

Shipping Lanes

The cruise ship itself was well-equipped with a variety of restaurants, theatres, pools, and other things. Of which I really didn't see much except for the food (mostly quite good), since the geek instinct is to hole up in your room. I actually brought my PS2 for the trip as a last minute decision (resulting in a lot of lugging of luggage I might otherwise have checked, because I certainly wasn't going to entrust my precccccious to the cargo hold), and managed to plug it into the cabin TV. Said TV used a component cable, however, so while I could get image and sound, the image was black and white and had funny lines across it, particularly unfortunate as I was playing a game that required some amount of color recognition. Nevertheless, it ran, and I wasn't particularly inspired to march around the ship looking for other sources of entertainment, even if walking hadn't been a bit of a chore after the first few days.

The same can be said for most of the party, as ketsugami, harinesumi, and Ian finished off Simoun over the trip, and as far as I can tell siliconrose and her husband spent most of the time wired permanently into their DSes. harinesumi's parents, on the other hand, did venture to see some of the shows that would begin blaring through the walls around 9 pm, though they seemed not to be up to expectations.

The cruise line has various tour packages it offers for the ports of call. It's normally more expensive than if you did the same activities yourself, but these tours are helpful if you don't speak the language and/or have no idea where you're going, with the additional guarantee that the ship will wait for you if your tour arrives back late. We took ship-organized tours for the first couple of days, then started going off on our own after that.

While the Mediterranean is reasonably calm at this time of year, the last couple of days the ship was either going faster than usual, or there was a bit more wind - on a ship that size, the stabilizers generally do a fairly good job of negating any motion, but those days you could feel it rocking up and down on the waves. And if you went up on the top deck, the wind was strong enough to physically push you around if you weren't careful. All of this was, of course, immensely enjoyable.

All in all, a fairly interesting and enjoyable trip.