Mykonos

Today was a good day. Although the ship docked at Mykonos, Greece fairly early, we didn't get off till some time after 9am. We were planning on a relatively low key day and decided against going to the nearby island of Delos, where most of the archaelogical finds are. As a result, we spent most of the morning wandering around Mykonos city, exploring the tiny tiny streets and the multitudes of stores. We ate lunch on the beach (at Platis Gialos), and spent the rest of the afternoon in the water. It was absolutely beautiful; the sun was out and the water was that wonderfully Aegean blue, cool, and crystal clear. Everything was just absolutely perfect.

Kusadasi

We had a short day today. The ship docked at Kusadasi, Turkey at 8am this morning and we went ashore soon after. Jeanne had done some research ahead of time and got us a private tourguide, so we were up and running pretty much immediately.

The main points of interest that we visited were the Temple of Artemis (the largest building of the ancient world and one of the seven ancient wonders), the House of the Virgin Mary, and Ephesus. Ephesus was amazing. By comparison, Pompeii is a mere shadow.

After lunch, we got sidetracked at a rug store, where we all ended up buying something. We spent so much time there that we had to cut our tour short and return to the ship since the last boarding was at 5pm.

Right now, I'm back on the ship and sitting in the Explorer's Lounge where they're holding an art auction. I think I'm going to bid on a couple pieces...

Santorini

Today's stop was Santorini, Greece. It's a beautiful island, and I wish I had more time to spend here. Instead of sightseeing, I decided to go scuba diving instead. This is my first dive outside the US (everything's in metric!) as well as the first one in a long time where I have not used my own equipment. And eventhough the sun didn't cooperate (it was overcast and cloudy all day), visibility in the water was still excellent (easily over 60ft).

My first dive was at the New Volcano. There aren't many fishes out here, and the ones that are swimming around are all small/young. According to some other divers, this is because the area has been overfished. The most interesting fauna I saw were fire worms, which were rather fun to watch. The highlight of the dive, however, was the wreck (my first) at the end, at a depth of 30ft. It's supposed to be one of the first steel ships in the area. No one knows why it sank, and the top two theories are sabotage and insurance fraud, with the latter being the heavy favorite.

My second dive was a wall dive off Caldera Beach. The highlight of this one was when we stopped to feed the fishes some bread. I literally had a swarm of little fishes around me, nibbling at both the bread I was holding in my hands and my hands themselves. They were so intent on the bread that I could actually reach out and smack them around ;)

The trade off for scuba diving was that I didn't have the time to go to Oia. Apparently, lunch was simply amazing according to my mom and my sister. *sigh* At least we have a few more Greek ports on the itinerary.

Day at Sea

Spent the day at sea today as we sail for Santorini, Greece.

My major accomplishment? I slept for about 12 hours...

Naples and Sorento

We woke up in the Bay of Naples this morning. We finished breakfast just as the ship finished docking. From the top deck, looking into Naples, the Castel Nuovo dominated the foreground. Behind us, Mount Vesuvius sat crowned in a halo of clouds.

Our original plan was to catch a taxi to the train station to get to Pompeii. When we got to the taxi stand, however, the cabbies started selling us on taking the taxi directly to Pompeii. Much discussion and attempted haggling ensued. To make a long story short, they stayed firm on their prices and we agreed to hire one to take us to Pompeii, then Sorento, and then back to Naples. We soon discovered that this was a wonderful stroke of luck genius on our part.

On the way out of Naples, we got to see some pretty crazy driving. Traffic going the other way was backed up (rush hour traffic), and to get around that some drivers were actually driving down our side of the road...

Honestly, I thought Pompeii would get old pretty quick. I mean, how many ruined buildings do you really need to see? I'm happy to report that I was wrong. We spent two and a half hours wandering around, and could easily have spent another two. My personal favorite was the small amphiteatre, where if you stood in exactly the right spot every sound you made (hum/whistle/sing/speak) would be echoed back to you. Move even a bit in any direction and you wouldn't get the effect. The amphiteatre is your standard Greek half-circle amphiteatre that seats about 5,000, and the spot is the center of the perfect circle inscribed by its outer rim.

I did notice one thing that Charity would not like about Pompeii: there were dogs all over. I believe they're were strays, and would find one dozing pretty much around every corner.

From Pompeii we headed to Sorento, and it's an absolutely gorgeous drive along the coast. This was also when the cabbie started proving invaluable: he knew all the vista points to stop at for us to take pictures.

When we reached Sorento, our thoughts had turned to lunch, but the cabbie advised us to walk around downtown before the stores closed for the afternoon, which we did. We met back up with the cabbie at 1:30pm, and asked him to take us to a restaurant where the locals would go. We were not disappointed. Lunch was absolutely spectacular. I had a caprese salad (huge chunks of mozarella in between thick slices of tomato with olive oil and herbs), spaghetti a vongole (the best spaghetti I've ever had, in a clam sauce that was just perfect), and cozze alla Pronvecale (mussels Provencale-style). Mmm...

The last time I was in Italy, I was sorely disappointed in the food. This one meal made up for all the past disappointments. I guess we must have been really unlucky last time and just picked sub-par restaurants.

After lunch, we headed back to Naples, where we wondered around downtown before boarding the ship. All in all it was a great day, with the highlight definitely being lunch.

Livorno & Pisa

The ship docked in Livorno early this morning. We woke up to a wet and drizzly dawn and it pretty much stayed that way all day.

The first thing we did was to catch the train out of Livorno to Pisa, where we did the tourist thing. The leaning tower is definitely a sight to behold. Pictures do not do it justice, and I was suitable awed. Definitely worth the visit. The Duomo (cathedral) was also very interesting and worth the price of admission. It's a bit harder to say the same for the Baptistry, although seeing (or more accurately, listening) to the acoustics demonstration was nice. As for the Campo Santo (cemetery), in its current state of repair/renovation, it is eminently skippable unless you're a real fan of tombstones and sarcophagi.

A minor disaster occured at the top of the leaning tower of Pisa -- the battery in our camera died. Jeanne had bought a new camera (the Canon PowerShot SD700IS) for my mom and no one thought to charge it up the night before... Incidentally, this little camera has been absolutely terrific so far.

From Pisa we went to Lucca and wandered around its old, twisty streets and plazas, sticking our heads into the odd church or musuem that were scattered about. Unfortunatly, we only had about 90 minutes to spend here since we'd taken our time in Pisa and had to get back to the ship by 5:30pm. Nevertheless, my mom and George loved it. While Pisa might have the more spectacular attraction, they prefered the Lucca's ambience.

I learned a three unexpected (and disappointing) things today:

1. There's grafitti everywhere. And I do mean everywhere, which detracted from the sights.
2. Italians are serious about their siestas. Except for the stores selling tourist souvenirs, almost all other stores are only open from about 9am-1pm and 4pm-8pm. Since we have to get back to the ship by around 6pm or 7pm, that basically means we've got to do any shopping we want to do between 9am-1pm, and we're usually focused on seeing the sites first so shopping is pretty much not an option.
3. There's a feeling of getting nickle and dimed at some of the attractions. The worst example of this is at one church where they had lights set up to illuminate the paintings on the walls. The catch? You had to pay to turn the light on!
4. I am not a big fan of the time limitations we have to operate in due to the cruise format. We basically have nine hours (plus or minus an hour depending on the port) to look around, and if we want to travel out of the town we docked in, that really doesn't give me as much time to sight see. It's a constant struggle deciding between quantity or quality, and it can get quite stressful the close it gets to the departure time.

By the time we'd gotten back to the ship, we were all bone tired and immediately hopped on to the hot tub/steam room/sauna circuit. Bliiisssss...

Go directly to bed. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Mah Jong Parlor

I'm quite amused that the Chinese on the cruise have taken over the games room and converted it into a mah jong parlor. Five of the ten tables have been monopolized, and I can hear the oh so familiar click-clack of the tiles from where I'm sitting.

Bad Weather

So much for Monaco... The captain woke us up at 7am this morning with an announcement that we would not be stopping at Monaco due to inclement weather. Apparently there's no sheltered docking available there. I ran up on deck just in time to snap a few foggy shots of Monaco in the distance.

We're now chugging our way to our next stop, Livorno. I'm staring out a window on one of the lower decks and the waves definitely look pretty big.

First Post (from Italy)

Finally landed in Rome after some 15-odd hours in the air. Caught the train to Civitavechia, where I spent the night at a B&B. The second B came in the form of a ticket for a free breakfast at a cafe down the street, Nero Bollente, which had some wonderful pastries.

I made my first language mistake here -- asked for a latte and got a cup of milk! A not altogether unpleasant surprise -- the milk was steamed and had chocolate powder sprinkled on top. Unexpectedly good.

Met up with my mom, George, Jeanne and Jim a couple hours later and boarded the cruise ship, and spent the afternoon exploring. The important discover: there's a wireless network available, but it's $0.35/minute. *ouch*

It's a little after midnight now and I'm typing this from one of the top decks in the aft. It's pitch black outside the radius of the ship's lights, and I can just make out a few lights twinkling in the distance.

Our first stop will be at Monaco, and it's time I went to bed.

Flight

Woot! I'll be leaving for Italy in a few hours! I also just found out last night that my trip will be extended for three more days as I'll be going to Japan for a conference.

Movies

Managed to catch a few movies recently...

Went to see a preview of The Guardian, starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher. It's pretty much your standard training movie (e.g Top Gun, An Officer and a Genlteman) for the Coast Guard. OK, OK, the elite Coast Guard rescue diver program. I'm no Costner fan, but I actually found him doing a creditable job in this movie. I give this a 3/5 - worth renting.

A much better choice was The Illusionist. I don't want to give anything away, and it's probably best if you go in knowing nothing about it anyway, other than it is a very well-crafted story. Definitely worth watching - 4/5. I think this is Edward Norton's best film since Fight Club, and Paul Giamatti was very good as well.

Speaking of fighting, I had an attack of bad judgement and watched The Protector. It's really only worth watching if you really enjoy fight sequences. The plot, if you can call it that, is totally fractured and only serves to connect one fight to the next. If I hadn't known better, I'd thought this was some Street Fighter spin-off. There seemed to be a fighter dedicated to almost every martial art style, with the protagonist being the Muay Thai expert. Definitely NOT recommended: 1/5 - only suitable as background noise.

Aaargh!

I'm finally done moving everything from my old notebook over to the Inspiron 9400. I've only just started to do some real work on it and am already appreciating the extra horse power and memory. The 17" screen is pretty nice too, but a little too reflective I think, making it feel more like a plasma screen than an LCD screen. I wonder if this was done for cosmetic reasons? If so, it was a bad choice.

One major problem that I've discovered so far is that it doesn't have a built-in mic. For crying out loud, how much more could this component possibly be? I'd take a built-in mic over all these multimedia buttons any day. I've gotten quite used to using Skype, and the lack of a built-in mic is a major pain in the rear.

From what I can tell from the Dell support forums, I'm not the only one to have been caught off guard by this. Apparently they've stopped including the built-in mic for quite a while now. I've griped before about how Dell has been dropping features from their notebooks (specifically, the mouse nipple in the middle of the keyboard and real docking station support). Grrr... These are features I'd pay extra for, but they're not even an option!

Ludlum Schmudlum

I really need to stop reading stuff by Ludlum. The first time I read any of his stuff was right after the first Bourne movie came out, when I read his three Bourne books (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum). By the time I'd hit the third one, I'd realized that I really didn't care for the way he developed his characters, or the way his characters spoke. The story was interesting enough, he's certainly good with plot twists and pacing, but the characters just never seemed realistic.

But apparently I didn't learn my lesson. I still picked up The Aquitane Progression, which is totally forgetable. Definitely not recommended.

L'Opera

We're doing the opera thing again this year, and since we'll be travelling so much in the next month, we've had to move up a couple shows. As a result, we went to see both Strauss' Die Fledermaus and Verdi's A Masked Ball this week at the SF Opera.

I thought the music in Die Fledermaus was nice, but the production emphasized the slapstick elements of this operetta so much that it rather turned me off. It was also sung in English, and since many parts of the dialogue was spoken normally rather than sung, it really felt more like a musical than an opera.

There were no such problems with A Masked Ball, which actually had a pretty decent plot. Combine that with amazing singing and beautiful sets made this one of the better operas I've seen in a while.

Dell Inspiron 9400

Woot! Christmas came early this year: my shiny new Inspiron 9400 just came in today...

Goa!

Went over to Danny's house on Saturday and played Goa for the first time. I've been playing a lot of Puerto Rico lately so it was a pretty nice change of pace. Nice enough that I decided to pick up my own copy today...

Beef with (Protestant) Churches

Charity and I have been hunting for a church to get married in the past few weeks, and what I've come to realize is that pretty much all Protestant churches only operate during business hours. That's 9am-5pm if we're lucky, and most aren't even open that long.

This just seems totally odd to me. Are those of us who actually have to work pretty much out of luck till Sunday? Some churches aren't open on Saturdays either, or if they are, it's usually only from 9am-12pm.

I guess the church as a place of refuge (and therefore open all day) is primarily a Catholic idea. I'm beginning to see the benefits of a professional clergy...

Labor Day Weekend Labors

Went white-water rafting over the long weekend (props to Bryan for organizing the whole thing). We rafted down the class III-IV rapids along the Upper Klamath for the first two days and spent the third in kayaks on the Middle Klamath near the Tree of Heaven camp site. It was definitely a fun time.

Cell Phone Goodness

Finally stumbled across a couple cell phone services that I might actually use:

• 1-800-FREE411 for free 411 lookups (you'll have to listen to an ad though),
• and Frucall, which allows you to to look up the cheapest online price for an item based on its bar code.

A New Beginning

After much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, I've decided to stop running my own web server and to move my blog over to Blogger. In the end, it was just more hassle than it was worth.