My Oyster, The World

Good news and bad news

2011-07-12T10:20:00.004-05:00

Shall we start with the good news or the bad news? Normally I would start with the bad (I prefer to get these things out of the way early) but we're going to switch it up tonight.

The good:
1. I just moved to Istanbul.
2. I decided to restart blog, mostly so I won't later forget all the little things or take the experience for granted.

The bad (which isn't really bad at all):
3. My blog is now here. Come join me? Pretty please? Do I have to say it in Turkish?

And now for a short break...

2010-06-09T23:23:00.003-05:00

I've decided to put my blog on hold. It started out as a lark but has since evolved to a "should do" on an endless, joyless to-do list on the path to chasing a career goal that I'm not sure is even my goal anymore. Clearly, I'm having a crisis and I haven't reached mid-life yet. I might come back to it next month to document my (hopefully fabulously awesome) adventures in Turkey and Italy, but until then, the blog is on pause. :)

J.Crew in Guatemala

2010-05-26T14:18:00.013-05:00

I feel like I just blogged about J.Crew's latest travel catalogue, featuring Turks & Caicos. Not a month has passed and the next has already arrived. This edition is a bit Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego since it's the first I've seen (since I started paying attention) that doesn't offer the location up front. J.Crew's June cover features a luminous model on a boat while the shots that follow feature the same woman modeling various bathing suits in front of an anonymous body of water (my guess: Lake Atitlan. But I'm getting ahead of myself...).

It isn't until page 19 that we find out that J.Crew's June's catalogue is set in glorious Guatemala. (I hear it's glorious, anyway – it's nearing top 5 on my list but I have yet to go.) A different, but familiar, model takes over and poses around the city of La Antigua, according to the handy Travel Note. I get the feeling that La Antigua is Guatemala's (cheaper) version of San Miguel de Allende – founded in 1543, it's also got the wonderfully preserved colonial architecture, a UNESCO World Heritage designation, and a plethora of Spanish schools. For the most part, the model lounges against walls or ambles between stonework.

At one point, a Travel Note mentions that they used La Antigua's Convento de las Capuchinas as a backdrop. The convent was severly damaged in a 1773 earthquake, which also took out much of the town. But according to TripAdvisor, "Now open to the public, tranquil gardens, sparse nuns’ cells and a terrific view from the roof make this a popular attraction." It's the only location identified in the women's section.

J.Crew's Guatemala photos end on page 41, only to be recontinued on page 100 with the guys. The lone male model spends his pages hanging out in the north part of the country, at the Mayan ruins of Tikal (also, incidentally, a UNESCO World Heritage site). According to the UNESCO website, it was a major center and inhabited by the Mayans for 16 centuries. According to the text in J.Crew, it was also one of the settings in the original Star Wars.

Apparently, Tikal doubled as the moon Yanvin IV, from which the Rebel Alliance based their attack on the Death Star. I didn't remember any of this, but a quick look at the movie (which I have – yes, I'm a closeted Star Wars geek) jogged the memory. The one Travel Note in the men's section mentions that some of the guys on the shoot were so excited upon hearing this trivia that they geeked out and used their iPhones as light sabers.

Glee-ful Cruise Ships

2010-05-19T22:44:00.008-05:00

Another night, another TV show making cruise ship references. This time it's Glee! Yes, happy days are here again.

In the latest episode "Dream On," Bryan Ryan returns to McKinley High to crush Mr. Schuester's ambitions. Once upon a time, the two men were themselves high-school Glee Club rivals – and Bryan Ryan got all the solos and all the girls. Unfortunately, though, the intervening years have not been kind. Instead of making it as a Broadway star, Mr. Ryan let a song go out of his heart and now he's just a bitter school-board member looking at ways to cut the budget. Take it away, boys...

Bryan Ryan: We’ll probably cut the Glee Club.

Mr. Schue: But you were in Glee Club. Show choir was your life!

Bryan Ryan: It was, Will. And after I graduated, I hit the big time. I was a featured soloist at Kings Island in the Doodle-Dee-Doo musical review. We were a smash. Then for three years I did the cruise ship circuit. When that dried up, I realized that I had been sold a bill of goods. Nine years later, I woke up on a urine-stained mattress in the West Lima crack district.

Hmm, I hope it was the hairdo that killed his mojo. It couldn't have been the cruise ships. Nooooooo, not the cruise ships!

Grey's Anatomy Cruise-Ship Love

2010-05-14T10:20:00.003-05:00

This is Henry Stam. Henry was a patient at Seattle Grace on Grey's Anatomy last night. The poor guy had boarded his Alaskan-bound cruise but fell down the stairs before the ship even left port. In one of the episode's funniest - and perhaps not meant to be overtly funny - lines, he told the doctors that his children had given him the cruise as a present so that he might meet a nice lady.

Henry wasn't able to go on his cruise but don't feel too bad for him - he ended up running into his long-lost love at the hospital and they rekindled their thwarted romance. So all's well that ends well, even if it didn't end in Alaska.

LMN's Deadly Honeymoon

2010-05-03T21:17:00.006-05:00

It took me a week to get around to watching Lifetime's World Premiere Movie, Deadly Honeymoon. LMN is not usually my network of choice but this was a cruise movie - and one ripped from the headlines. Despite the disclaimer that the movie was not based on real people and/or events, the plot of Deadly Honeymoon was loosely constructed around the story of honeymooner George Allen Smith IV, who mysteriously disappeared from Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas in July 2005, somewhere in the Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey.

Still, despite surface similarities, the film mostly skipped veracity in favor of drama - and gave the cruise industry quite an (undeserved) thrashing in the process. Deadly Honeymoon beats the "omg, cruise ships are deadly, scary, crazy places!" drum pretty hard, but for no purpose...since the wife is partly responsible for his death. It's domestic violence, not a mysterious crime wave at sea. Yes, mostly likely there is a cruise line(s) that has made a mistake(s) - but is this the only arena where a crime has been mishandled or covered up? I just think it's kinda ridiculous to suggest that it's this huge, industry-wide, purposeful debacle. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In Deadly Honeymoon, newlyweds Trevor and Lindsey Forrest opt for a South Pacific cruise on the fictional Emerald Cove Cruise Lines after a destination wedding in Hawaii. They seem like the perfect couple - but only for about five minutes. Lindsey gets upset when Trevor befriends some young Hungarians (whom she dislikes on sight, as they've been cast in the "suspicious foreigner" roles). Then on one particular evening early in the cruise, events spiral out of control - Trevor gambles in the casino with his new friends, Lindsey drinks herself nearly into oblivion and gets cozy with another guy, they fight, separate...Lindsey wakes up in a halllway and somehow Trevor ends up overboard. (It's not terribly far off from the real-life Smith case, as you can read in Bryan Burrough's excellent piece for Vanity Fair.)

Let the cruise-bashing begin:

Example #1: Present inaccurate figures

As it happens in Deadly Honeymoon, an FBI agent just happens to be sailing that week, and she lends the ship's security officer a hand with the investigation. And as they're walking through one of the corridors, Officer Alan Sherrington explains to her why it was so easy to ID the three Hungarians. "Over the last few years," he says, "more than 30 people have disappeared on cruise ships - and that's not including suicides and accidents, that we know about." But you know the problem there? That statistic isn't actually true. According to cruisejunkie.com, a cruise resource maintained by Canadian professor Ross Klein, 39 people have gone overboard on cruise ships in the last 3 years (is that a "few"?). Of those, only about 15 had unknown causes as presented - he didn't necessarily follow up on every story, so the number of mysterious deaths is probably even less than that. With the remaining cases, the people who went overboard were either rescued, had been seen jumping/falling, or had left suicide notes. The point is, that's far less than Alan Sherrington's 30.

On average, that's five people a year. And 13.35 million people were estimated to have cruised last year, according to CLIA's 2009 Marketing Overview. I'm pretty sure that more than five people have already died under mysterious circumstances in Dallas this year - and we don't have a population anywhere near 13 million. It sucks, yes, for everyone involved but the point is, crime happens everywhere.

Example #2: Present lots of victims

Later on in the movie, the grieving Lindsey visits her cruise-friend Kim (from Dallas!) in her cabin. Kim has apparently been surfing the Internet and discovers a bunch of cruise-victim websites. She tells Lindsey, "Well, they're out in the middle of nowhere, no cops around. Look at this website right here - it's all people who went missing from cruise ships. There are so many of them!"

Yes, there are websites dedicated to cruise victims and there are a lot of grieving families. I'm not taking issue with that - it's just at this point in Deadly Honeymoon, it's starting to look like Lindsey might be hiding something. She's certainly already tried to blackmail the captain. So really no need to keep bashing cruising itself.

Example #3: Give faulty legal information

Trevor's disappearance apparently isn't the only crime that takes place that cruise -Kim confides to Lindsay that one of the Hungarians raped her (which is actually a legitimate cruise ship crime and a subject that might have been more appropriate for LMN to tackle). After Lindsey makes a scene at the pool, Kim is forced to discuss her legal options with the Captain and Alan Sherrington. They essentially tell her that the Tahitian authorities will arrest him and if she wants to see justice served, her only option is to go to Liberia - where the ship is registered - and take him to court there. As a victim, Kim is already completely traumatized and the conversation just makes it worse.

I am absolutely NOT an expert on this, but I do know that their advice is not completely accurate. Since Kim is a U.S. citizen, the case does fall under the FBI's jurisdiction. According to the Cruise Ship Law blog, published by a law firm, "Federal law allows for the prosecution of those accused of attacking U.S. citizens on the high seas." The blog stated this in connection with a 2009 case, where a passenger accused - in a Los Angeles court - a Portuguese crew member of sexually assaulting her on a Princess cruise.

So yeah, you might say that Deadly Honeymoon is only a movie and I shouldn't get so worked up. But I tell you, it really pissed me off. When you're making a "fictional" film that's so obviously based on real events, I think you have some responsibility to stick to the facts. Yes, crime occurs on cruise ships. But crime occurs everywhere - cruise ships are not black holes of death and despair, and I'm getting a little tired of this meme that wants to paint them so. Especially because in the end, Trevor's death is a result of a domestic dispute! There is no crazy murder on the high seas - just a little adultery, a few drugs, and an accidental slip over the railing.

Ironically, at the end of the movie, the Captain counsels a distraught Lindsey, who's freaking out over some headlines she's already seen on the Internet about her husband's disappearance. He tells her, "You shouldn't be looking at that junk. Those people, they're just using you as fodder for innuendo and speculation."

Would "those people" happen to be you, LMN?

J.Crew in Turks & Caicos

2010-05-03T13:05:00.006-05:00

Usually I'm a big fan of the J.Crew travel catalogues but May's book? Not so much. The catalogue was shot in the Turks & Caicos, apparently chosen after Creative Director Jenna and her family spent a lovely holiday there. I can corroborate this sentiment - I raved about Grand Turk after spending a few days there during Christmas. So then, with all this, why do the models look like they're having no fun at all? Cheer up, girls, you're being paid to visit the Caribbean!

Seriously. With the first model, I can just imagine her saying, "Daaaaaaaaddy, stop trying to, like, take my picture!" The second model looks like she's mourning the boyfriend who just got washed out to sea. The J.Crew models don't always look cheery but I think these ladies come across as more glum than usual.

Added to that, most of the photos in the front part of the catalogue seem to use a heavy flash (or were taken at sunset), which really dulled the background - often turning Turks & Caicos variegated azure ocean to a pastel mush. I guess it's an artistic thing, but I'm just not sure why you'd spend the money and manpower to stage a shoot in the Caribbean and then not utilize the location's beauty, you know? I've posted one of my own photos to help you out. See what you had to work with?

But then, finally, the outlook starts to brighten on page 82, after we've had about 40 pages of studio shots to forget what happened up front. In the Weddings & Parties section, the wedding party - gasp - looks like it's actually having fun. The girls are smiling! And why shouldn't they? The sun is shining and the sea grass is a-blowin'. And their friends are getting married for what, like the 5th time in catalogue-land?

So yeah, the May catalogue...not my favorite. And not just because they skipped the fun travel notes this round, either. But I have faith in you, J.Crew, that you'll work on this problem and return to redeem yourself. And hey, I still like your sweaters.

Guanajuato: Day Five and Final

2010-04-24T10:05:00.011-05:00

Originally, we had big plans for our last morning in Guanajuato, before we had to leave for the airport at 1pm. We had contemplated fitting in two museums, the Museo Olga Costa-Jose Chavez Morado (home of the muralist) or the gardens at the Ex-Hacienda de San Gabriel de Barrera, or maybe even the mine that once made Guanajuato the richest city in the New World.

And then we realized we just wanted to quietly enjoy our last few hours so instead, we went strolling and shopping. We started off by taking photos on one the town's most colorful streets, where all the houses are a different color, and sometimes, multiple colors. (From looking at the map, I think the street's name is Matavacas which translates to, oddly, "kill cows.") I really can't stress enough how awesome Guanajuato is - it's just so beautiful.

Then we headed to the Jardin de la Union. The scene there had completely changed from Easter weekend. The thousands of people were gone and the few remaining were just enjoying the leisurely pace of life, sitting on the benches in the sunshine or getting their shoes shined. A few blocks down, two nurses were giving out H1N1 shots. It was an interesting contrast; in our five-day trip, it was like we got to see both festive Guanajuato and ordinary Guanajuato.

Also interestingly, on Friday and Saturday, we hardly saw any other American tourists - and we felt like people definitely stared at us, because we really stood out. The city felt undiscovered, in contrast to San Miguel. But then now, on Tuesday, we saw American tourists all over the place - and I don't know if it was just that they had recently arrived or stood out more without all the crowds.

Well, I suppose we weren't just leisurely strolling; we were also on a mission to come up with 4,000 pesos to pay our B&B bill. We had brought credit cards and U.S. dollars and figured we would at least be able to pay with one of two out of three forms of tender. But then the morning before, the B&B owner pretended to ask us how we wanted to pay before telling us that he only accepted cash, in pesos. Which was fine - but it would have been nice to know beforehand...and it would have been nice if he'd been willing to discuss payment. When Emily tried to talk to him that morning, he walked away from her, essentially telling her he couldn't be bothered because he was too busy with his new guests. (I seriously don't understand why this guy has the top rated B&B in the city. He was such an ass.)

Anyway...after we settled on just using the ATM, we walked in the direction of the Mercado Hidalgo, a huge warehouse/market built by Gustave Eiffel. On the first afternoon, I had seen some cool wooden earrings with geometric cutouts, so we were on a mission to try and find them again. And eventually we did, at one of the stalls right outside the Mercado. We also strolled through the mercado - it's a utilitarian market, as opposed to touristic, so we just kind of walked around, looking at all the food stalls and checking out the people. Emily even had a glass of horchata, this strange rice milk drink we'd discovered in Mexico City.

And that was pretty much our morning. We bought some souvenirs as the prices were fair to low, and the shops had really unique artesanias. Emily got a tin angel and I bought a calavera head and a nicho featuing Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge:

And that's it! We left for the airport at 1pm and got to Leon in plenty of time. We spent the next two hours in the airport playing Phase 10, checking out the Christo Rey statue that we could barely see on a distant hillside, supposedly at the very center of Mexico (and that we forgot to take a photo of), and laughing over this funny, no-smoking sign:

Thanks for reading about our adventures. Hasta la proxima, until next time!

Guanajuato: Day Four

2010-04-23T13:32:00.012-05:00

Monday was our last full day in Guanajuato so we decided to spend it by leaving Guanajuato - we took a 10-hour tour to the towns of Dolores Hidalgo and San Miguel de Allende, with some other places thrown in, for less than $20 each.

We thought the tour was mostly San Miguel, with a little sightseeing along the way, but we were totally wrong - really it was the other way around, a bunch of other sites with a little San Miguel thrown in. Our first stop of the day was a cemetery outside of Dolores Hidalgo where the (apparently) famous singer Jose Alfredo Jimenez is buried. The monument to him is actually really cool-looking; they built a huge sombrero with a rainbow-tiled artsy wave that sort of reminded me of Gaudi. But after that, we didn't care that much, mostly because we'd never of Jimenez or his songs before. At the cemetery stop, our guide also took the time to approach us, the only gringas on the bus. He essentially said that he hoped we would enjoy the day and spoke enough Spanish to understand him, since he didn't really speak English. But so far, all was well, as I'd understood most of his narration up to that point.

Then we got back in the bus and headed into Dolores proper. My Rough Guide praises it, saying, "it's an elegant little town," and recommends it for a one-night stopover, so I was pretty interested in checking it out - as the birthplace of Mexican independence, I felt like we'd really miss something if we didn't go see it. We started with the Museo de la Independencia Nacional, which was kind of a sad little place. The Rough Guide says, "vibrant, graphic murals depict significant scenes from Mexican history" but in fact, there were no murals, just paintings and a few artifacts. With all the people, it became hard to hear our guide and really, it was WAY more detail than I ever wanted to know, so I started to tune him out. The most interesting painting we saw was this one, below right, depicting the fight at the Alhondiga that I mentioned in Day Two.

After the museum, we walked to Father Hidalgo's church, Our Lady of Sorrows Parish Church, which stands prominently across from the Plaza Principal. After our guide explained the baroque details of the facade, we had about 15 minutes to wander around on our own. It seems like Mexico is really gearing up for the bicentennial celebrations in September - at dawn on September 16, 1810, Hidalgo rang the bell at his church, issuing the famous "Grito de la Independencia" that started the rebellion - and right outside the church, there's a countdown clock, much like the ones that counted down to Y2K in 1999. We couldn't go very far inside the church since there was a wedding taking place, but there's nothing in particular to see, anyway; the original bell is either in Mexico City (according to the guide) or was melted down (according to the Rough Guide).

After the church, Emily and I walked around the Plaza Principal. It was a beautiful sunny day, the purple jacarandas were brilliantly in bloom, and we just sort of checked out the locals doing their thing. Dolores is definitely a different sort of town from Guanajuato or San Miguel, as we would see; it seemed to be a lot simpler and actually reminded me more of Texas and New Mexico than the other cities. It was also a lot dustier - when I think of it now, the predominant color in my head is beige. Everything was just a blah beige (so thank god for the jacarandas).

After our little stroll through the plaza, we met up with our group at an ice cream stand at one of the corners. Dolores is apparently quite famous for its bizarre flavors and the vendors will pretty much let you sample anything. Between us, Emily and I tried tequila, beer, cheese, shrimp and octopus, corn, pinon, in addition to "regular" ice cream flavors like lime, vanilla butter, and Bimbo chocolate cake-ish. I eventually settled on Beso de Angel, a strawberry ice cream that had peaches, raisins, nuts, and perhaps other things mixed in.

After the ice cream, we walked back to the bus for a trip to an artesanias shop. Like all tours like this (including those on cruise ships), we had reached the part of the day where our guides tried to augment their salaries through commissions on our purchases. We were supposed to just have about 20 minutes in the shop - which sat on the outskirts of town, so there was no escape - but some people in our group were apparently enthusiastic for the seemingly ordinary wares (which looked like they could have been made in China) that we spent at least 45 minutes there. Ugg. After that, it was a late lunch - it was nearing 3pm at this point - at a spot seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The food was okay but it was buffet-only for 90 pesos - which was quite a lot, considering, again, that we were in the middle of nowhere! Suffice it to say, we were getting a little cranky at this point and just wanted to get to the star attraction, San Miguel.

But we still had another stop first: the Santuario de Atotonilco, a church about 15 minutes or so outside of San Miguel. The little town of Atotonilco pretty much revolves around this building, important in Independence history because Hidalgo stopped by here on his way to fight in Guanajuato and took the church's banner as his flag. (Plus, Ignacio Allende, one of his buddies and the man who gave his name to San Miguel, was married here.) According to Mexican wikipedia, Padre Felipe Neri had just arrived in Atotonilco from Dolores and decided to take a little nap under a mesquite tree. He dreamed of Christ with a cross on his shoulder and decided to build a church on the now-holy spot; the first stone was laid in 1740. The sanctuary's walls were covered in murals by a local named Miguel Antonio Martínez de Pocasangre over a period of 30 years. But, even though the santuario was blessed by the appearance of three rainbows at the same time (according to wiki), it eventually fell into disrepair and is currently undergoing a lengthy restoration; at one point, it was on UNESCO's 100 most endangered monuments list. The Santuario de Atotonilco was certainly interesting - no doubt our guide told us all this information and more, but I had tuned him out hours before; it just took too much brain power to try and translate all the detail, especially when he was half a room away and turned away from me. Emily and I were seriously ready to just move on (though I did get a kick out of the souvenir self-flagellation whips on sale outside).

So, finally, FINALLY, we reached San Miguel. We were supposed to have a few hours of free time there but by the time we got there, it had been winnowed down to about 55 minutes. Our guide brought us main plaza, home to the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcangel church, and after the briefest of explanations, let us go free. I slipped into the church for a few minutes but mostly Emily and I just spent our time wandering. We ducked into a few of the shops - which were all exquisitely decorated, like something out of a magazine - and then ended up a few streets away at a little creperia, where we had coffee drinks and empanadas.

San Miguel was certainly cute but I have to say, I just don't understand what all the fuss is about. (Granted, I'd also say the exact same thing about Santa Fe.) I have no idea what you'd do there on a vacation besides eat and shop so in that, Guanajuato has it beat, hands down. In Guanajuato, you can eat, shop, and go to a bunch of (significant) museums. (Interestingly, when we discussed this at breakfast on our last morning, everyone else at the table liked San Miguel better - but they were also all significantly older, so maybe it's an age thing?). I don't know, or perhaps San Miguel just didn't get a fair shot, at the short end of a very long and cranky day.

After that, we headed back to Guanajuato, and after we dropped people off at various hotels, we ourselves got dropped off back in town, probably around 8pm or so. It was so nice to be back in Guanajuato. It was like returning home; I felt instantly perked up. Before heading back to the B&B for a few rounds of Phase 1o, Emily and I decided to grab dinner at La Capellina, an Italian restaurant with a patio set up on the street. And it was lovely - we had margharita pizza with a side of our favorite new chimichurri sauce, a great dinner for our last night.

Guanajuato, Day Three

2010-04-22T19:13:00.012-05:00

We woke up on Sunday to the clamoring of bells: Hallelujah, it was Easter. We didn't have much of a plan for the day, except to take it easy. After all, the trip was supposed to be a bit of a vacation. So that's what we did.

We started off by taking a tour of the Teatro Juarez, across from the Jardin, mostly because as we were walking by, it was open. We'd certainly noticed the exterior - with its Doric columns, Greek muses, and bronze lions, the building demands attention. The interior did not disappoint - the main theater was awash in red and gold, and decorated with intricate Moorish designs. The entryway and second-floor smoking lounge were equally lavish.

Taken all together, it was awesome but perhaps a bit too much. Which I guess should not surprise - the theater was built during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, a man who liked his buildings European and ostentatious. (He really did; he is also the man who laid the first stone of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, perhaps the coolest and most extravagent building that I have ever seen in person.)

Porfirio Diaz officially opened the Teatro Juarez, in 1903, (about seven years before he gets ousted for this sort of thing during the Mexican Revolution). Opening night featured a performance of Aida.

After the theater, we strolled toward the Basilica, hoping to catch some of the Easter celebrations. But Guanajuato had suddenly gotten quiet; it was like everyone had packed up the night before and left town. So when we got to the church, not much was going on - there was a small crowd of people around the baptismal font, waiting to get their babies baptized like it a holy assembly line - but it seemed pretty casual.

We only stayed in the Basilica for about 20 minutes before wandering back - via random alleys and encountering a parade of VW bugs -to the Jardin and to Starbucks. Our intention was to enjoy the sunshine and dip into the novels we'd been lugging around, but neither of us could read - the people were just too interesting. There were certainly a lot less people than before but still, it was fascinating. We eventually headed back a couple of blocks to the area around the Quixote museum, where we'd found a little Zen shop offering inexpensive massages. (I told you we were on vacation.) It was heaven for half an hour.

Since clearly all we wanted to do was eat, drink, and chill out, we wandered next back to the Jardin, where a man was performing a comedy show on the steps of the Teatro Juarez. He was pretty funny, with his striped shirt, suspenders, and black clown nose. We sat down in the audience and not too long after, he motioned to me to participate in one of his skits. Luckily, it was mostly mimed. When the show ended - with me giving him a little kiss - we opted for El Cafe Galeria, an eatery that had a cluster of tables set up at the foot of one end of the Teatro steps. I can't remember what we ate, but we definitely sat there through a couple of drinks. (We tried to ask for chimichurri sauce but since we didn't know the name yet, the waiter didn't understand what we were talking about.) Before long, our friend the comedian returned to the steps and started a second show. He asked me to volunteer again. He asked me to volunteer in the third show, too. (Yeah, okay, we sat there awhile.) And maybe even a fourth - I started to lose count.

Eventually we headed back to the B&B - climbing the stairs, a total mistake - to "freshen up." But instead, we ended up taking a little snooze and it was dusk before we woke up. I'm not good at re-energizing after a nap but luckily, this one didn't knock me out completely, and we decided to head back into town for dinner. We ate an Italian restaurant right on the Jardin, on the second-floor of a hotel, so from our balcony table, we had a great view of everything that was going on below us. And there actually was quite a bit going on - the estudiantinas, or wandering students minstrels - were putting on a show.

The estudiantinas are apparently quite famous in Guanajuato. They dress up in Cervantes-era costumes and lead singing tours around the alleyways. Even though we were a little tired, we decided we shouldn't miss it. So we bought a ticket and waited for our particular group to be called. First, our guys (and it should be noted that they were mostly not students; the B&B owner told us that the tradition had dwindled enough that now, only one estudiantina is actually required to be a student) - anyway, first our guys performed a couple of love songs there at the Jardin, ostensibly to attract paying customers. Then they filled our ceramic mugs and off we went. We'd walk a little then stop while the estudiantinas would either sing a song, tell a local story, or both. It was kind of fun.

At the end of the tour - which was around midnight - we ended up at the Callejon del Beso, or Kissing Alley, which is so narrow that you can reach out the balcony of one house to touch the one across. As the tale goes, the love of young Carmen and Luis is thwarted, Romeo and Juliet-style, because her father evidently doesn't approve of the match and sticks a dagger in the wee suitor's chest. Alas. But the Callejon del Beso was actually my least favorite part - partially because it was so late, but partially because it was so ridiculous commercialized. (We'd heard that during the day, people were making Easter tourists pay to walk down it- which is crazy, since it's a public street!)

Our callejoneada ended there and Emily and I trudged home. And we truly did trudge - the furnicular had closed at 10pm, so we tackled those 300-ish steps for the second time that day. Not surprisingly, we were quite happy to see our beds...when we finally reached them.

Guanajuato: Day Two

2010-04-20T19:45:00.016-05:00

We got up decently early on Saturday because we had a full day planned; like Mexico City, we had an ambitious itinerary that involved almost all of the museums in the city.

But, well, our plan was immediately hijacked by the B&B owner who, after breakfast, said he would walk down into town with us. I understood this to mean that we would all walk down the alleyway's 300-odd stairs together and then part ways at the bottom; evidently he meant to give us a tour. On the one hand, it was lovely and I saw things we never would have discovered on our own; on the other hand, I don't think it ever occurred to him that we might have had other intentions for our morning, since he didn't ask.

But enough griping...He mostly showed us in and around Guanajuato's tunnels. As I mentioned yesterday, the city is built at the bottom of a ravine and when it rains, the water gushes down the streets following its natural path to the river. Today, the water apparently still runs down the alleys and makes its way to the river, which has now been conveniently re-directed under the road. But in the past, if I understood correctly, the people just built the outside walls really high and pathways across the river to form a tunnel for the water to flow through. They placed their bathrooms on the side facing the river too and just let it swallow everything up. Sometime in the 1960s, I believe, they converted the tunnels into the main road (which takes most of the traffic in Guanajuato), and so now you can pop down these stairways and check out the tunnels.

After the tunnel adventure, we retraced our steps from yesterday and made our way to the Alhondiga de Granaditas, where the B&B owner told us the story of the battle there (which I'll get to later), and then he deposited us at the Diego Rivera museum. That wasn't where we were intending to go - seriously, he had no interest in what we actually wanted to do - so from there, we made our way to the Museo de las Momias, or the Mummy Museum, at the western edge of town. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of walking...and we took the long way around. After about 45 minutes in the heat and midday sun, we arrived and found a huge, long line. We made it into the building after 20 minutes only to discover that we weren't at the ticket booth, just at the beginning of the enormously long line that wrapped around inside. So we gave up and decided to leave it for another day - but ended up having a bit of good fortune. We refreshed with snow cones and started back, until this random Mexican guy told us it was shorter to go the other direction. So we went that way, only to run into the director of the museum, who told us that if we went through the old entrance, inside the cemetery, we would be in the museum in five minutes.

And he was right. We bought our tickets at the booth just inside the cemetery gates and within a few minutes, had descended the circular stairway into the museum - a museum, I should point out, that is probably the grossest thing I have ever seen. There's apparently something in the dirt there that preserves these bodies - some still had hair, teeth, and clothing - and they basically picked out the ones with the most horrific stories and put them on display. There were even little baby mummies. I can barely look at my photos now without feeling nauseous. In the photo to the right, the three mummies from the left to right died from being buried alive, drowning, and a stab wound.

After that adventure, Emily and I headed back to town and made a visit to the Alhondiga, the huge square building that the Spaniards used as a fortress during a battle for Independence. In 1810, Father Hidalgo led troops to Guanajuato and a major, bloody battle ensued. As the story goes, he couldn't gain traction until a brave young man, nicknamed Pipila (which my guidebook says translates to "turkeycock"), offered to set fire to the doors, using a slab of stone to shield his back. He succeeded and Hidalgo's troops won the fight but eventually, the place would come back to haunt him; after he was captured, tried, and executed, his head was hung in a cage from a hook on one of the corners of the building as an example to the people. (They hung the heads of his three co-conspirators on the other corners.) Today, the Alhondiga has been converted into a museum and a memorial. In addition to some large bronze heads honoring the fathers of Independence, two of the stairways have been painted in patriotic scenes by Jose Chavez Morado, famous Mexican muralist and longtime Guanajuato resident.

At this point - it was perhaps 3pm - we were pretty wiped out and took a lunch break at the charming Tasca de la Paz, across from the Basilica. There we re-discovered our favorite orange-red, slightly spicy sauce from lunch the day before, one that we would look forward to for many meals to come. Someone told us it was chimichurri sauce - eaten here with bread - but I can't confirm this on the interwebs. (Google tells me chimichurri sauce is usually green and comes from Argentina, and I definitely don't remember this delightful orange version from my semester in Buenos Aires.)

Anyway, after our lunch of chimichurri with a side off French bread and pork fajitas, we dragged our exhausted bodies to the Casa Diego Rivera, or the house where muralist Diego Rivera lived until he was four. There wasn't much to it; the first floor was recreated to look as it might have when his family lived there and the second floor had a small collection of his works. None of the paintings were famous; mostly they were early works, and some from his years abroad, and it was interesting to see how he was influenced by other styles, like Impressionism, before finding his own.

After that, we headed to the Jardin de la Union, where we sat around some more - but this time, at Starbucks. Guanajuato was still totally packed with people so we just sat and watched the world go by. I also snapped a lot of random people pictures - musicians, little kids, balloon men - so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when this guy approached us and asked if he could take a photo with us. (As I mentioned before, we totally stuck out.) He came back a second time and asked to take a photo just with Emily - we're hoping his intentions were pure and her head isn't now stuck on some porn body for all the Internet to see. :)

We finally motivated - we had a dinner reservation at 7pm at El Abue, made for us by our B&B host - and headed to the Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato, mostly because we felt like we should. We made a beeline for the Baroque chapel which has since been redecorated with another mural by Chavez Morado. It was definitely eye-catching upon entering the chapel but overall, not as impressive as the murals at the Alhondiga. We then wandered through some of the galleries but with not much enthusiasm.

El Abue was just down the street so off we went to dinner. It was nice - and especially nice to have pasta after an endless stream of enchiladas and fajitas - and mostly empty.

Before heading back to the B&B, we decided to take in a little bit of the outdoor movie, playing at the steps of the University, about halfway between us and the Museo del Pueblo, so really just a few steps away. From the posted schedule, it looked like they were showing nightly movies over two weeks surrounding Easter and tonight's pick was a Spanish film called La Verguenza, or Shame. We arrived about half an hour into it, so I couldn't totally figure out what it was about - but this helpful website tells me it's about a couple who want to give their adopted child back, like a story ripped from the headlines.

So we weren't so into the movie - it was a lot of conversation taking place in just one apartment - but the atmosphere around us was awesome. People were sitting on the steps, under the stars, just enjoying the night air and being together. In fact, it reminded me of something out of a movie, like A Good Year or Cinema Paradiso.

After that, we headed back to the B&B, exhausted and with seriously achy feet. We managed to take a quick look at the Pipila statue and its view of Guanajuato, all illuminated in the black, before returning to our room for a vigorous round of Phase 10 and sleep!

Guanajuato: Day One

2010-04-19T18:15:00.012-05:00

What is this blog thing? Oh yes, right, a place where I am supposed to write and record my thoughts and travels. I'd momentarily forgotten, clearly...

So I'm back, most especially to tell everyone about our fabulous Easter trip to Guanajuato, Mexico! Emily and I sort of stumbled upon this city randomly. First, we wanted to go someplace for Spring Break - maybe Guatemala or Nicaragua - but all the airfares just seemed ridiculous. So then we changed it to Easter and somehow decided to go to Mexico again, I suppose because we had a great time the first time around. I think then I suggested San Miguel de Allende and Emily discovered its neighbor Guanajuato in a guidebook. Or something like that.

We left on the Friday and arrived in Leon just before noon. We took a cab from the airport ($40-ish total for a 45-minute trip) and after sitting through traffic on the narrow, windy hill up to the Pipila monument, finally made it to our hotel. After some consideration, I've decided not to name the B&B where we stayed - it had its goods and bads, but I've already posted an average review on TripAdvisor, which elicited a strange, convoluted email from the owner, and I frankly don't want to get into it again. (But if you really want to find it, the place is ranked as the #1 B&B in the city.) Anyway...

We spent that afternoon wandering around the city. Guanajuato has a population somewhere around 80,000 and the city - not to be confused with the entire state - is nestled into the bottom of a ravine. The layout is actually kind of long and narrow but most of the important spots (for a tourist anyway) are clustered together, within walking distance of the Jardin de la Union, the social hub of the city.

Since it was Easter weekend, the city - often referred to as the cultural capital of Mexico because of its famous Cervatino festival - was packed with Mexican tourists. In some places, it was like wall-to-wall people. So we wandered and just kind of discovered things along random streets and alleyways.

We ended up having a late lunch in the Plaza San Fernando, at one of the little cafes there. We simply chose the one that had an empty table. The hostess came over to clear it off - she picked up the bowl of used tortilla chips, brushed the crumbs off the tablemat, and then put the chips back down. It didn't bother me that much but Emily was totally grossed out (not that it stopped her from eventually eating them). However, this was probably the scene of my most disappointing meal - though I should have remembered from Mexico City that ordering a cheese enchilada gets you a hunk of barely melted cheese inside a tortilla. I also ordered ice tea, thinking it would be bottled - but the waiter brought me a cup of cold water and a tea bag. Although the B&B owner had told us that the tap water was fine, I didn't really want to chance it and could only bear to take a few sips (which probably would have been enough to do damage, I realize). From that point on, we mostly drank beer - it was always bottled and always cheap.

After that, we made our way back toward the Jardin de la Union, with its bright green manicured trees, and spent dusk parked at one of the outdoor restaurants there - this time, if memory serves, I had a mojito. The Jardin was bustling with families and musicians and rug sellers and we just watched it all go by.

Somewhere along the way, we'd heard about the procession for Holy Friday, which began at 8pm somewhere around the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, or the yellow church in the top photo (and also, incidentally, the home to a wooden statue of the Virgin that's more than 1,000 years old). So we made our way over to the church and just sort of waited for awhile, essentially twiddling our thumbs. (We definitely stood out as gringas everywhere we went and as we sat on the church steps, this cute little girl decided to practice her English out on us.) Somehow we got the bright idea to go looking for the procession - I think we saw a flickering of light at the end of the street. And it actually was a good idea because, despite all the people sitting near us on the steps and curbs, the procession was in full swing all the way down there - and wouldn't have reached us until the very end, two hours or so later.

So off we went to join the parading masses. I think this procession might actually be the coolest thing I have ever seen. There were hundreds of barefoot women dressed as nuns and they were carrying these three large biers with one illuminated, standing figure on each (I'm guessing the two women were the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene but I don't know who the one male was supposed to be). In front of them, hooded men with thick ropes around their necks were carrying a final bier, with a statue of Christ laying atop it. The procession through the alleyways was moving fairly slowly so Emily and I were able to join in and we walked along with them as they circled through the city, past the Alhondiga de Granaditas and back up to the church. The outside edge of the procession moved along, almost like a current, and we eventually made it to the head of the group, where we found musicians and men dressed as Roman gladiators leading the pack.

We broke off from the group after at least 90 minutes of processing and made our way to the furnicular, so we could get back to our B&B at the top of the hill. The ride up was pretty uneventful except that the town's one skeevy young dude (seriously, I think there was just one - we saw him and only him multiple times) boarded our littly furnicular car and was obviously drunk. Emily was a little freaked out and wanted to get off, but it was all fine and we made it back to the B&B in one piece.

Norovirus Shout-out

2010-03-19T15:48:00.004-05:00

Even though my blog is obviously public, sometimes is feels very anonymous and lost out there in the infinite world of the World Wide Web. So I'm laughing to find I got a little shout-out on cruiselawnews.com in regards to my post on Norovirus - which is still, incidentally, affecting the Celebrity Mercury. The Charleston Regional Business Journal (and others) report that the Mercury will stay in its home port of Charleston for four days, until this Sunday, to undergo extensive cleaning.

Aruba Ads

2010-03-19T15:10:00.006-05:00

About ten days ago, I blogged about the ongoing, grassroots travel boycott against Aruba. In general, I don't feel like I hear much about Aruba, so I was really surprised days later to find front-of-the-book full-page ads touting Aruba in the March issues of both Budget Travel and Travel + Leisure. The ad campaign - with the tagline "90,000 Friends You Haven't Met Yet" and featuring comedian Lewis Black - apparently kicked off in October 2009 so I either hadn't seen or noticed it before. But it seemed like a weird coincidence, which is why I bring it up.

The campaign features ordinary people who live in Aruba and seemingly love their lives. In the T+L ad, Mary Ann is a masseuse who moved to the island about five years ago after falling in love with it on a visit. In the Budget Travel ad, Osmar is an Aruba native and dive instructor who once managed to recover a newlywed's wedding ring from the sandy bottom. (I kind of laughed at this ad because it reminded me that I had the single worst dive of my life in Aruba.)

But what's really interesting about this campaign, I think, is its interactive, social-media component. If you go to Aruba.com, you can "friend" the people in the ads and send them messages, like on Facebook. You can also set up a profile for yourself. These sorts of open social networks (ahem, MySpace) seem to have a lot of skeevy dudes floating around - which is the last thing Aruba wants or needs - but who knows, maybe this sort of networking is the future of travel (or at least, a future aspect of travel). I hope not, but stranger things have happened...

Scary Cruise Ships

2010-03-11T20:45:00.007-06:00

Like all sectors of the travel industry, cruises get good publicity and bad publicity and it's all just part of the mix. But aside from the continuing hype surrounding the Oasis of the Seas, it seems like in the last few weeks, the cruise lines just can't catch a break. Three stories of hell on the high seas:

1. Disease: Norovirus is on the rise, according to MSNBC and the CDC. So far there have been eight suspected outbreaks on six different ships this year, compared to nine confirmed cases (plus another six cases of unknown or varying origin) in all of 2009. Queen Victoria passengers were sick for most of January while Celebrity Mercury guests were struck both in February and March. If you look at the CDC list, you'll see the outbreaks often happen on the same ships - the Mercury, for one, had multiple outbreaks last year and in 2006 - which is no surprise, considering how hard norovirus is to get rid of. (And egads, I see I just missed an outbreak over Christmas - I worked on two of the company's three ships, and the third one had it.)

Norovirus is the last thing you want to contract, from what I've heard. I worked on a cruise ship at the beginning of 2001 and we had a lengthy norovirus outbreak - interestingly, the ship did not make the CDC list for that year. Perhaps because we were far away in South America?* Or perhaps it was because we were instructed to deny, deny, deny when any passenger asked: No sir, you're mistaken - the dining rooms are all closed because all the guests are off on tour...not sick in their beds along with half the staff. (Yeah, I was never able to look anyone in the eye and say that.) I never got it, thank God - I always chalked it up to the fact that my roommate and I didn't interact with that many people, since we were also co-workers (and just the two of us) and we worked in an isolated area on Deck 11 and there were almost no kids onboard. We pretty much hid out in our room for a month.

*As I was looking at links for point three, I read Gene Sloan's blog post on the Mercury. He mentions that a Royal Caribbean ship has reportedly had an outbreak on a South America itinerary but that that it's not being tracked by the CDC. Which totally makes sense - I'm pretty sure they only get involved when the ship docks in a U.S. port during the cruise. (Which in turn makes me wonder...as cruise ships shift to more exotic itineraries, a current trend, have there been far more cases than people realize?)

2. Freak Waves: At the beginning of the month, two passengers were killed and another 14 injured when a 26-foot-high wave hit the Louis Majesty as it made its way from Barcelona to Genoa. (I worked on the Louis Majesty when it was the Norwegian Majesty, for the better part of 2001, incidentally right after I got off the norovirus ship.) The "rogue" wave broke some of the windows in a public area, and according to the NY Post story and the cruise line's spokesman, the two passengers "suffered fatal injuries from the glass shards and ripped-out window frames and furniture."

I'm surprised (and saddened) by the fatalities but the freak wave thing though, not so freak. While it's never been something I've worried about, off the top of my head I can think of several incidents where high waves broke windows on either the tender or the ship. Over Christmas, one of the ships I worked on had a shattered (but still intact) window on the bridge - so we're talking, like, Deck 10 - that occured the week before, during an Atlantic crossing.

3. (More) Fatalities: Maybe it's because of Twitter (and thus, the availability of small news stories) but I feel like I have seen a LOT of stories lately involving cruise ship fatalities. USAToday.com reported two weeks ago that three crew members were killed when the Costa Europa slammed into the pier at Sharm El-Sheikh while it was trying to dock in the early morning hours. (Incidentally, the Carnival Miracle ran into the pier in St. Kitts at the end of January, causing a 15-foot gash though no injuries were reported.)

A few days before the Europa incident, a passenger was killed in Tortola when the tour bus flipped over during a cruise ship excursion. Two others were reported to be seriously injured. A few days before that, a Texas woman named was found dead on the Carnival Ecstasy and the FBI is now involved. Kipi Holcomb was apparently traveling with her boyfriend and the first story I read suggested domestic violence; however, now it seems like that version is being refuted (though incidentally by the same source). Okay, this is depressing me so I'm going to stop now.

I was going to end on a cheerful note but I can't think of anything to say, so I'm just going to go watch Grey's Anatomy now.

Travel News I Don't Understand

2010-03-09T16:37:00.005-06:00

In the last week, I've heard three pieces of travel-industry news that I don't quite understand. In no particular order:

1. Mo' Money, Mo' Problems: Delta and JetBlue are fighting against a new Department of Transportation tarmac rule that goes into effect on April 29 and limits how long an airline can keep passengers in a grounded plane. The airlines are asking for a temporary exemption - though the AP story doesn't specify how long "temporary" might be, and let's be frank, in airline parlance, that might actually mean forever (but I digress...). The airlines argue that with the JFK runway closure, flights will inevitably be backed up and the AP story calculates that a full Boeing 737 could run up a $3.5 million fine at one go, since the airlines will be fined $27,500 per passenger. USA Today reported in December that JetBlue's response to the annoucement was to say f-you to passengers and aggressively cancel flights since seats are prepaid. (According to the article, in 2005 and 2006, JetBlue cancelled about 254 flights a year; after they instituted their own four-hour limit in 2007, that number jumped to 1,223.)

But I digress, again. What's shocking about today's story is that by asking for an exemption, Delta and JetBlue are actively seeking permission from the DOT to keep passengers in a grounded plane for more than three hours. If they get this exemption, that will be okay - which just seems crazy to me, closed runway or no. I mean, isn't this rule going into effect to stop this sort of thing? I get that this is a business and the airlines want to stay in business, but there have been a lot of changes lately (specifically in the area of fee hikes) that have benefitted the airlines and have distinctly harmed the consumer. And it's lame.

2. Mo' Money, Mo' Problems (Part Two): Last Friday, The Guardian reported that the United States plans to charge incoming tourists $10 in order to pay for a marketing campaign promoting travel to the U.S. President Obama signed the 2009 Travel Promotion Act into effect last week; the legislation creates an Office of Travel Promotion within the Commerce Department, in an attempt to bolster U.S. tourism, which has dwindled even though travel numbers around the globe have increased. Now you might argue - as The Guardian does - that charging people even more money (it's $10 on top of visa fees) could actually hurt tourism, and maybe it will. But what bothers me - because let's be frank, I'm an American and I'm already here - is the effect this legislation will have on American travelers who want to go abroad. It means that we pay more, as other countries hike their own fees in retaliation. Which is incredibly annoying, especially as airline prices rise and the value of the dollar falls.

I've experienced retaliatory pricing once, when I was on study abroad in Argentina. My friend and I went to the Brazilian consulate to get a visa for a weekend trip and I remember perfectly how the woman told us, with a gleam in her eye, that a visa was free - except for us. She said that the price of a Brazilian visa was tied to the price of an American visa for Brazilians - and when our price went up, so did theirs. I'm pretty sure we had to pay $50 in 1997 - according to the Consulate website, it's now $130.

3. Aruban Crime and Punishment: AOL News last week published a story on one woman's grassroots campaign to maintain a travel boycott on Aruba until authorities "solve" the Natalee Holloway case. The boycott website doesn't exactly say what it will take to end the boycott and the AOL story is also vague - on the one hand, Michelle Harstad-Simonsen says that she wants justice for Holloway but on the other hand, admits that the case will most likely never be solved. So I guess the boycott goes on forever? Personally, I've always found Aruba to be a little boring but it seems extreme to boycott an entire island for something that was done by a small number people five years ago.

I think what most bothers me is the subtle idea, once again, that foreigners are out to get us and if they're not doing it our way, they're doing it wrong. It's the same thing we saw in the Amanda Knox case (and even in the Schapelle Corby case, though that was Indonesians going after Australians). Certainly the Caribbean has problems - in 2007, the World Bank and United Nations released a report that said the region has the highest violent crime rate in the world - but we still have to respect the way that Aruba chooses to conduct its investigations, while also allowing that no country, including our own, is perfect. I can't imagine the reaction if another country tried to butt into our internal affairs - hell hath no fury like an America scorned.

In an undated brochure released by Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi to combat inaccurate information on this very subject, he (or his rep) writes, "From the start, Aruban law enforcement officials have carried out a highly professional, extensive, and intensive effort to find Ms. Holloway. Aruban police began and continue to consult with both the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Dutch police experts. Aruba’s Plenipotentiary Minister to the U.S., Henry Baarh, has addressed the issue with all 50 U.S. governors by letter and will continue to remain in contact in order to keep U.S. government officials informed. We are asking them to respect our highly professional police investigative process just as we respect their right to investigate their own situations." If you care to read it, the brochure also lists numerous ways police and locals alike tried to solve the case.

Again, I just don't understand the point of boycotting Aruba. I am not much of a cynic and I have no doubt that Aruba would solve this case and charge someone with a crime if they could. The fact of the matter is that there's a significant lack of evidence in this case because they were never able to find her. And that is a fact, whatever else you believe, and not a distortion of fact.

Enough with the Vampires!

2010-03-09T12:42:00.005-06:00

Even though we are between Twilight movies and the book series has ended, people still flock to my website in droves to read about the Volturi vampires. Why, I ask, why? (Really, feel free to comment below on your reasons.)

But there's no stopping the people when they want something (hello, French Revolution) so on that note, last week's National Geographic email promised intel on Venetian vampires. As it turns out, there's a book to promote, Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins, who Amazon.com says is chief historian of the National Geographic Society’s archives.

You can actually read a good chunk of the book on Amazon - and it seems both well-researched and interesting and not at all academic in tone. From what I browsed, the book is about how vampires have permeated pop culture and the actual, historical stories underpinning the legends. But what caught my attention was the excerpt on the National Geographic page, describing in detail how Dr. Matteo Borrini discovered the 16th-century female "vampire" skeleton in Venice about a year and a half ago. It explains how Borrini came to theorize that the skeleton was a suspected "after-devourer," at least in the minds of the dead woman's contemporaries. The vampire was believed to eat its shroud, then its fingers, and eventually its living family members - and in order to stop it, the people would unearth the skeleton and stuff dirt in its mouth so it couldn't chew. They might throw a brick in, just to be extra-sure, which is what happened in this particular case. It's grisly and fascinating, no?

The accompanying photo, by the way, is thought to be the burial site of Vlad Tepes, Bram Stoker's inspiration for Dracula, at Snagov Monastery outside of Bucharest, Romania. Even the tomb has its own legend surrounding it. When archaeologists opened the grave in the 1930s, it was empty except for some animal bones. They found the remains of a man in another grave under the church, but since this person still had his head - Vlad was famously decapitated - it couldn't have been him. This skeleton had a golden ring tied on to its coat with a golden thread - a clue to identity, perhaps, except that the ring has since been lost, alas. So where is Vlad? No one knows, but the legend of Snagov continues. :)

Super Natural BC (and Its Living Roof)

2010-02-13T10:44:00.007-06:00

During the second hour of the Opening Ceremony last night, NBC showed a commercial extolling the beauty and joys of British Columbia. Some of the wonders were natural - forests, vineyards, vistas - and others were produced - ie Michael J. Fox, Sarah McLachlan, Ryan Reynolds, Eric McCormack, Kim Cattrall, and Steve Nash. (Did you know they were all Canadians? Me neither.)

But, do you notice what was in the bottom right corner of Steve Nash's frame?

Yes, it's the Convention Centre's living roof! And at a much better angle than my amateur shots. How exciting that the green roof got a supporting role in the commercial - though I'm guessing most people had no idea what it was. (The commercial, by the way, was the only time NBC showed the roof last night, even though some of the broadcast took place inside the Convention Centre. Alas.)

I quite liked the ad - British Columbia is beautiful, like Canada's version of Oregon (which is not surprising, I suppose, considering their geographic proximity). But I kinda have to giggle at Tourism British Columbia's tagline: Super, Natural British Columbia. When you use a pun like that, it's got to work both ways - within both the original meaning AND in the new, creative spin. (Remember Atlantis and their dubious choice of "Family Planning" to advertise the condos?) And I don't think they meant to say that B.C. is also supernatural. I suppose you could argue that the word is equivalent to magical, but I feel like supernatural has more ghostly or eerie connotations. (Merriam-Webster defines it as, "of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil.")

Oh well. At least we can warm our cold, cynical heart with Ryan Reynolds by a fire. I think that alone would be worth traveling to British Columbia for... :)

Cruise Ships You Can Sleep On

2010-02-12T19:18:00.004-06:00

There was much cruise-ship-as-hotel chatter this week:

USA Today reported the unfortunate news that Dubai World might be looking to sell the QE2, nixing its original plans of refurbishing the historic liner and turning it into a floating hotel at the Palm Jumeirah. On the one hand, a sale seems like a good thing as reports emerged at the end of 2008 that the company planned to strip the ship instead of returning it to its former glory, as promised. But on the other hand, when NCL couldn't fix the s.s. Norway - which was previously the historic s.s. France, a classic liner with amazing Art Deco-style lounges - or sell it after 2003's boiler explosion, the ship was sold to the scrappers and eventually dismantled at Alang. (I'd put up Norway photos from when I worked onboard in 2000, but alas, they're all in storage.) With the economic downtown, I'm not sure who has the money to buy the QE2 right now, so it doesn't bode well for the former Cunard ship (that, incidentally, my grandparents met on). But it makes me so sad when the classic liners are destroyed; cruise ships are built in such a different way now (see: Oasis of the Seas) that once these gorgeous vessels are gone, there will be nothing out there like them anymore.

So, on the bright side, I am happy to say that the s.s. Rotterdam is scheduled to open as a floating hotel in Rotterdam on Monday! The former Holland America flagship started life as a transatlantic vessel in 1959 and then became a cruise ship 10 years later. Holland America eventually sold the ship in 1997 to Premier Cruise Lines, which renamed it the ss Rembrandt. (But alas, Premier famously went bust overnight in 2000, literally folding up shop mid-cruises and leaving all the passengers and crew stranded wherever their various ships happened to be - some in Halifax, others in Barcelona, still more in Freeport...) Anyway, the Rotterdam Dry Dock Company bought the ship in 2003 and after some ups and downs, the Rotterdam has been restored and will open as the Cruise Hotel on February 15. I sailed on the ship once, on a two-week Caribbean cruise over the 1996/1997 holidays. I don't remember that much about the ship itself except that there was a lot of gold decor. (And alas, this photos too are in storage.)

And lastly, on the Olympics front, the New York Times blog reported a week ago that the company that planned to use the Norwegian Star as a floating hotel in Vancouver has cancelled the accommodations, because sales were slower and costs higher than expected. The last-minute decision left the booked visitors - including 11 children from the Make-A-Wish Foundation - with Olympics tickets but nowhere to stay. (Although it looks like everyone else in Vancouver has stepped up to solve the problem.) According to Consumer Protection BC, NewWest had chartered the ship from February 6 to March 6 and have now guaranteed refunds. I don't know how these things usually work but I'm totally wondering, now that NewWest will have no revenue from the endeavor, how will they pay NCL for the use of their ship for a month? Even if they don't actually use it, that's a whole month that NCL wasn't able to use the Star for its own cruises, so I feel pretty sure that the company would still like to see its fee.

P.S. Are you at all wondering why I chose to illustrate this post with Canadian geese? When I took the photo in Stanley Park, the geese were purposeful, the background was just by chance. But the background happens to be Vancouver's North Shore port area - which was the intended home for the Star during its Olympic stay. As the New York Times post helpfully points out, it's "otherwise best known for holding large, yellow piles of sulfur."

Vancouver's Living Roof

2010-02-12T16:01:00.008-06:00

As part of its Olympics planning, Vancouver tripled the size of its Convention Centre and opened the new facility last April. The building - which has a fantastic location on the water, in the heart of downtown and right next to Canada Place, the cruise ship port - will serve as the broadcasting center and home of the international media during the Games. Which probably means it will pop up on TV now and then...so make sure to check out its roof!

The Convention Centre was built by LMN Architects to LEED Gold standards and it features a six-acre living roof, which makes it both the largest in Canada and the largest non-industrial green roof in North America. It has 400,000 indigenous plants, intended to provide homes for birds, insects and small mammals - and according to a 2008 Vancouver Sun story, that's more plants than are found in all of Vancouver's 200 parks. The Journal of Commerce reports that it already has its own colony of European honeybees, some 60,000.

I can't remember how I first heard about the green roof but I spoke to one of the landscape architects about it a couple years ago (early 2006, I think) and he explained the multi-year process of getting the plants ready. If memory serves, they had to first collect the plants (or seedlings) and grow them at ground level for a period of time (over a winter, I recall) before they were able to install them on the roof the next spring. And I guess were still installing parts last summer...

So not surprising, I was really excited to check out the roof in person last summer. The building seems to be tiered; from the Canada Place side, to see the roof you have to look upward, like three stories or so. But coming back from Stanley Park - where I spent a lovely and sunny Canada Day - I noticed that from the other side, you can see the roof quite clearly. And then when you're at the Convention Centre itself, there are planted sections at eye-level. Up close, it's not much to look at - though perhaps it will look completely different in a couple of years - but it's such an awesome concept. (And frankly, it wasn't really planted as eye candy, was it?)Visually, it seems to be more striking from a distance...although interestingly, from the water - at least in the afternoon, when I took the last photo during sailaway a few weeks later - the entire Convention Centre seems to blend into the apartment buildings behind it.

P.S. The Convention Centre also apparently has an underwater reef structure built around its foundations, to be a home for tidal creatures like starfish, crabs, and mussels. I guess it's no surprise that Vancouver really is the greatest city in the world.

Let It Snow?

2010-02-12T15:34:00.005-06:00

In the end, we got 9.8 inches of snow yesterday, a record. And Dallas now looks like a winter wonderland - except for all the downed trees. Does this happen on the East Coast? Or are our trees just little weaklings? Huge branches are hanging precariously over my neighborhood, taking down power lines (an estimated 206,000 people are without power) and even, from what I saw, a streetlamp. But now that the temperature is above freezing, the snow is falling out of the trees/off roofs/etc in huge bangs and clumps. I should probably go out and make a snowman before it all disappears...

See that car? Yup, that's my car. I have a nice little dent from the half-a-tree that fell on it. My antenna is also bent but oddly enough, the worst damage is to the driver-side mirror, as the whole thing broke (but yet is still attached to the car, it's very weird). I guess something else must have hit it too. Alas.

Let It Snow!

2010-02-11T20:55:00.002-06:00

I know that no one on the East Coast wants to hear about our piddly little snow, but for Dallas, it's very exciting! I can't ever remember a day - seriously, in my entire life - when it snowed here all day like this...

J.Crew in Portugal

2010-02-04T11:10:00.006-06:00

I just received the spring J.Crew catalogue in the mail and I'm happy to see that they've once again decided to go with a travel theme! It just makes ogling the clothes all the more fun.

For the winter catalogue, J.Crew sent the models to snow-drenched Chile. And while I actually liked those photographs better - the prehistoric Monkey Puzzle Tree and Don Hernan and his horse just strike me as more interesting - I think J.Crew did a better job this round of capturing the travel aspect. In both issues, the editors incorporated random travel notes which explained the people/places in the background, but in the winter edition, they used two right up front, continued on with just Chile-set photos, and then the travel bit gave way on page 34 to the regular catalogue (which goes on until page 143), with just a few Chilean shots in the men's section.

But not so with Portugal. The travel theme pretty much dominates the entire catalogue and the travel notes - which features places like the town square's fountain, Praia da Adraga beach, the Alfama neighborhood, etc - are spread throughout. I love the travel notes - I think because they didn't have to do them (as they have nothing to do with the clothes), but it just added another layer of interest.

Lizards and Other Travel News

2010-01-28T13:28:00.003-06:00

Now, I love geckos as much as the next girl (seriously, I do), but putting 44 of them down your pants? A German man was arrested and jailed for 14 weeks in New Zealand for poaching 44 geckos and skinks and concealing them in a hand-sewn package that was hidden in his pants. He was caught at the Christchurch airport. Apparently the geckos can fetch as much as $2800 each in Europe, but man, what a long flight that would be.

A woman traveling on the Carnival Inspiration last weekend has reported to cruisebruise.com that she was sexually assaulted by a man with a knife. She apparently has not reported the incident to the FBI or Carnival though. The victim believes that the attacker was a crew member, I assume, because he had a foreign accent. I do not doubt the incident but I am skeptical about whether or not it would have been a crew member - mostly because he came out of a passenger elevator (totally forbidden) and because, frankly, a crew member has a LOT to lose. These jobs are very precious to the employees who do the non-fluffy work. Having said that, and I've said it before, sometimes people do crazy shit without reason.

Yahoo Travel posted an article about the world's most delayed airports. But phew, Delhi has the worst arrivals record and Beijing has the worst departures record - I guess I don't have to worry much about it, as Asia is not often on my itinerary (unfortunately). A couple of U.S. airports - like Ontario, CA and Newark - fall into the top 10, though. Apparently, my hometown didn't take kindly to the list and effectively called the source bogus. I guess DFW didn't like its 6th-worst departure ranking.

Royal Caribbean: Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

2010-01-28T12:56:00.004-06:00

Royal Caribbean is all over the news lately...

USA Today published an AP story today further discussing Labadee. The basic gist was that RCI allowed AP reporters to visit Labadee last week but they weren't allowed to speak with any of the passengers or photograph them. I guess they were just supposed to enjoy the beach? But I mention the article because there's a really interesting quote at the bottom from Harvard ethics professor Arthur Applbaum. He said that while it takes moral sensitivity to be conflicted about vacationing while people are dying, proximity is irrelevant. "The people of Haiti are suffering whether you take your beach vacation in the Dominican Republic or in Hawaii and it is a failure of the moral imagination not to be equally troubled in Waikiki." I couldn't agree more. It also seems like a moral failure to only care when said country or subject is trendy.

The company also today announced profitable fourth-quarter earnings. Apparently this was quite a surprise - Dailyfinance.com posted a story yesterday entitled, "More Rough Seas Ahead for Royal Caribbean." However, according to USA Today, RCI's Chairman and CEO said during a conference call with Wall Street analysts that while Oasis of the Seas has done well, the company probably won't build another mega-ship like it after its sister, Allure of the Seas, debuts at the end of the year. Which is probably a smart move - I think a large part of Oasis' appeal is novelty and while it's an incredibly impressive novelty, I imagine it will be hard enough to fill the combined 13,000 berths a week, week after week and year after year, without radically changing the design to recapture the novelty factor. (Yikes, that's a lot of people.)

Royal Caribbean and Labadee: Revisited

2010-01-25T21:19:00.002-06:00

We discussed last week whether or not Royal Caribbean made the right decision to resume visits to Labadee, Haiti just a few days after the earthquake struck. The Christian Science Monitor and the Huffington Post both ran articles today on the subject, as pointed out by Gene Sloan of USA Today. I don't think any of the stories is saying anything new; they mostly rehash the question of right versus wrong, with quotes from both sides. The comments are the most interesting part - once you wade through the spam, almost every commenter supports RCI's decision, pointing out that Royal Caribbean has brought much-needed food and supplies to Haiti. Some also point out that RCI can't win either way - if they'd nixed Labadee, no doubt they'd be criticized for using and abusing Haiti and abandoning them when the Haitians needed them most.

So then, if most ordinary people don't see a problem with Royal Caribbean's quick return to Labadee, why was this even a story in the first place? It's interesting that a single newspaper - The Guardian - was able to create such a controversy, isn't it? I've seen multiple headlines proclaiming that PR experts think that RCI made a disastrous decision (no pun intended, really) but if the average person doesn't see it that way, and the average person is the RCI customer, then isn't it just a lot of empty talk?

The Florida Panhandle

2010-01-21T21:24:00.002-06:00

So the cruises were done and I was flying home and I saw the greatest thing. Seriously. It was the start, the initial curve, of the Florida Panhandle from the Gulf of Mexico side. You know that I am a true geography nerd to get so excited...but it was incredible to see something from a map that was so clearly identifiable below me. I don't think the photo really does it justice. You'll just have to trust me on this one.

Port of Call: Nassau, Part Two

2010-01-21T21:10:00.004-06:00

I should stop giving Atlantis a hard time, but I can't resist pointing out the error in this marketing sign advertising residence in a resort condo:
Do you know what the error is? Ten points for whoever said that clownfish do not live in the Caribbean. Or the Atlantic. If you buy a condo and hope to see one outside of the aquarium, you are going to be verrrry disappointed. A better bet would be investing in a beach hut in Thailand since Nemo lives half a world away in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Alas. I guess in this situation, cuteness trumps correctness.

Port of Call: Nassau

2010-01-21T19:52:00.009-06:00

And here we are, at the last week's last port. We were originally scheduled to spend the afternoon on the beach at the private island but since the weather had turned cold and rainy, the Captain changed the itinerary and steered us toward Nassau instead.

My roommate and I ended up escorting a tour to Atlantis, although all we really did was shepherd the guests onto the ferry over there then go on a mini-tour of the resort and aquarium before being set loose to roam as we so chose. It had probably been 10 years since I'd been to Nassau and I'd never been to Atlantis (and remembered it as much, much further away from the port) so I was pretty excited to go check it out. I'd kind of wanted to go since seeing After the Sunset with Salma Hayek and Pierce Brosnan a few years ago. It's not the world's greatest movie but it is about retired jewel thieves living in the Bahamas who may or may not want to steal a diamond off a visiting cruise ship. (And it turns out, as I just found out, the ship in question is the Navigator, our home for the last 10 days. The sound you now hear is that of worlds colliding.)

So, when we got off the ferry, we walked about 10 minutes through the Marina Village - an assortment of shops and eateries including Dooney & Burke, Starbucks, and Johnny Rockets housed in brightly colored Bahamian-style buildings - until we reached the actual resort. Then we were split into smaller groups of about 15 and our guide pointed out things here and there - like the Dale Chihuly chandeliers in the casino - as we made our way through the crowds and immense halls to the aquarium. If I had to sum Atlantis up in one word, I think I'd have to go with Vegas:

The aquarium - which is apparently called The Dig - was interesting, but it was almost impossible to hear our guide because his microphone was bad and the area was chock full of people...so mostly we just wanted to get through it and get out of there. Which is kind of too bad because I feel like we missed a lot of stuff out of frustration with the crowds.

The aquarium is themed after the myth of Atlantis but they pretty much leave out the "myth" part - I seriously started questioning whether or not I'd forgotten some essential chunk of history. (Looking it up now, I see that Plato told of Atlantis as this utopian place that started warring with its neighbors and eventually sank into the sea in a single day long before he was born.) At the aquarium, you start in this dimly lit expedition room that's outfitted with desks and maps. Then you move through the lost city and it's supposed to be like the marine creatures have taken over parts - so the lobsters are hanging out in the waste disposal area and the moray eels are slithering through the pots in the storage room. In all the tanks, you see "artifacts" just sort of lying in the sand.

Atlantis says it has some 50,000 marine animals and looking at the website, I see that we missed a lot of the other tanks, which seem to be located in and around the resort. (At the Mayan Temple Shark Lagoon - which we only saw signs for - you can apparently go down a enclosed water slide that shoots through the shark tank.) Once we were through the aquarium, we walked outside and passed by some of the other tanks - we saw fish-feeding time, which attracted an alarming amount of seagullls, and the Hibiscus Lagoon (I think), with a tiny turtle that had part of his flipper missing. We also saw one of the stingray lagoons from a distance - we could see them flap their sides out of the water as they swam around, but could never figure out how to get over to where they were.

So while Atlantis was nice and very fancy, I'm not sure I'd ever want to vacation there. But perhaps the resort never had a fair shot...it was only about 60 degrees out and quite windy, so everyone was crammed inside and fairly peeved about the weather. Clearly we never got the full extent of the aquarium so who knows what else we missed. So perhaps Atlantis and I will meet again and on that day, it will be love. But until then...

Should Royal Caribbean Ships Be Visiting Haiti Now?

2010-01-20T11:44:00.007-06:00

So, there's a bit of an uproar taking place on the interwebs right now about whether or not Royal Caribbean made the right decision in already sending its ships back to Labadee, Haiti. The visits resumed last Friday with the Independence of the Seas, three days after the initial earthquake on January 12. But here's the real question: When was going to Labadee ever a socially conscious thing to do?

The current fuss started with a Guardian article published on Sunday. The story's first paragraph reads, "Sixty miles from Haiti's devastated earthquake zone, luxury liners dock at private beaches where passengers enjoy jetski rides, parasailing and rum cocktails delivered to their hammocks." Although the article points out that the ships are bringing pallets of food and the company has pledged to donate $1 million to the relief effort, it also quotes passengers as saying they were sickened by Royal Caribbean's decision. A third article on Tuesday acknowledged that the company has set up a makeshift hospital 15 miles away while it "continues to deliver tourists." The articles acknowledge both sides but the tone comes off as pretty critical.

Royal Caribbean defended its decision on its website, saying that about 500 people work at Labadee when the ships are in. Royal Caribbean's CEO Adam Goldstein said, "Because being on the island and generating economic activity for the straw market vendors, the hair-braiders and our 230 employees helps with relief while being somewhere else does not help. These 500 people are going to need to support a much larger network of family and friends, including many who are in (or are missing in) the earthquake zone." The comments are worth reading; most people seem to support RCI's decision, while a few question why, if aid is a main goal, the company didn't cancel a few cruise and donate a ship or two for emergency housing. (Carnival, for example, gave FEMA three of its ships in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a "profit-neutral" arrangement.)

It's an interesting ethical quandry and frankly, I'm torn. On the one hand, bringing tourist dollars to Haiti IS a good thing, absolutely. According to a Christian Science Monitor article from 2006, Royal Caribbean is the largest source of tourism revenue to the country and at the time, gave the Haitian government $6 for every passenger. (Keep in mind, their smallest ships carry some 2,500 people a cruise, and combined, they make multiple stops in Haiti a week. It's quite a bit of money, all told.) And after Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, the mayors of New York and New Orleans begged tourists to come back as a way to get the cities back on their feet. So I think there's a real validity in keeping the ships in Haiti.

On the other hand... When is too soon? I doubt I could personally justify my rum cocktail when people are still buried under rubble, at that very moment, less than 100 miles away.

But here's the rub: When was going to Labadee ever a socially conscious thing to do? The duality of these ports is an issue that dogs a good part of the Caribbean - and it's an issue that most cruise ship passengers (and all-inclusive resort-goers) tend to ignore. I've never been to Labadee - or on a Royal Caribbean cruise, for that matter - but from what I understand, you dock in this fortified area that you can't leave (and ordinary Haitians can't enter) and so you're completely isolated from the realities of day-to-day life in Haiti. For all intents and purposes, you could be in Key West. You're "visiting" Haiti but you don't see it. The same holds true in ports like St. Thomas, where people search for bargains on $5,000 watches but never see the violent crime that takes place just behind the shopping area; or in Roatan, where passengers walk past the teenage prostitutes on their way to the beach taxis but don't notice them. (And I, too, recognize that I've just spent the last week blogging about working on a cruise ship and visiting beautiful ports, including St. Thomas, over the holidays. There is absolutely a duality there.)

Yes, today, the people of Haiti are struggling in the aftermath of a massive earthquake and its aftershocks. And maybe Royal Caribbean shouldn't be going to Labadee so soon - but yet, a month ago, five months ago, passengers were still ziplining the afternoon away while children died daily, in one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, for a lack of clean water and food. So I ask: Is it really that much of a difference?

Your thoughts, please...

Port of Call: Tortola

2010-01-18T20:54:00.004-06:00

We were in Road Town for New Year's afternoon/evening and my roommate and I, along with the ballroom dance couple, went to Cane Garden Bay to hang out at the beach. There's not much to say about it except that it was glorious to sit in the sun and listen to the pounding waves, so I'll let the photos speak for themselves:

Port of Call: San Juan

2010-01-18T20:08:00.013-06:00

So now we're on to the second cruise and the port of San Juan, which we visited on New Year's Eve! We were docked there from about 1pm to 4:30am, so my roommate and I spent the afternoon wandering around old San Juan, which may just be my favorite place in the Caribbean.

Since Andy had never been to Puerto Rico before, I basically led her around to my favorite spots in the city. We started at the Castillo San Cristobal, a World Heritage site and apparently the largest Spanish fortification built in the New World. Then we walked along the wall, on the Atlantic side, until we reached the most awesome El Morro, a key fortification started in 1539. It was an overcast day and the wind was up, so there were a couple of people out on the large grassy area flying kites (which is something I've always wanted to do there, but never managed).

Next, I dragged Andy around old San Juan, blindly searching for my most favorite sculpture in the entire world, La Rogativa. (In fact, I have to apologize to La Rogativa for the photos below; the cloudy day combined with my skillz just aren't doing much for her.) The large bronze statue by Lindsay Daen depicts a Catholic procession that took place in 1797 during an attempted British invasion, beseeching St. Ursula and her virgins for help; legend says that the Brits thought the commotion was reinforcements and fled the scene. According to the Puerto Rico Herald, he gave La Rogativa to the city in 1971 to commemorate its 450th birthday. Now it stands more or less above the San Juan Gate, a door in the wall that allows you to move from the height of the old town to the walkway by the water.

We managed to find La Rogativa without much trouble and along the way, we also found - quite by accident - Lindsay Daen's house, commemorated with a plaque. Since the streets had no signs, I am sure I would never be able to find it again. It was quite a street, though - in addition to his plaque, there were two pieces of spray-painted graffiti declaring "Resistencia!" and a couple of homemade Christmas greeting hanging from the thick wooden doors.

After that, we wrapped up our tour of old San Juan with a walk along the water, under the towering wall, through the Parque de las Palomas, and to Senor Frogs, back across from the cruise ship pier. I associate Senor Frogs with late nights in Cozumel, but at 4pm, the atmosphere was a little more reminscent of Chucky Cheese. They even gave us balloon hats. :)

After that, we had to go back to the ship to get ready for the evening's work with the kids. Later that night, we went up to the pool deck for the big New Year's party, which was a lot of fun. We were lucky that it didn't rain and the crowd seemed to have a great time dancing to the showband. At midnight, fireworks went off all around the harbor, in a 360-degree ring of light. It was really amazing and a New Year's to remember!

Port of Call: Turks & Caicos

2010-01-16T14:18:00.014-06:00

Like St. Barts, I had never been to Turks & Caicos before...which is a real shame because it's fabulous. So lucky for me we went there both cruises!

The first week, I went on a one-tank dive with the ship and Oasis Divers to Coral Garden, a dive site about a 15-minute boat ride from the pier. Even though it was a little overcast, the visibility was great and we saw a couple of gray angelfish, enormous crabs (like, dog-sized), Christmas tree worms, and my perennial favorite, the flamingo tongue.

There weren't a ton of fish - it was mostly sand with some coral outcrops and fans - but we did see a lionfish. Which I didn't realize was a big deal at the time, so I didn't bother to take a photo since he was hanging out under a ledge. I'd seen them before, most recently in Australia, and they're really interesting but it didn't occur to me that I'd never seen one in the Caribbean...mostly because they don't belong there! According to the Nature Conservancy, they've started appearing in the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos over the last ten years or so, most likely from U.S. aquarium owners dumping them into the ocean. (And huh, this guy maintains an entire blog about hunting them.) So it turns out this is a serious problem and I was just the little scuba diver finning ignorantly along...

After diving, I met some friends at Margaritaville, a bar/pool complex right next to the pier. The first week, we were the only cruise ship in port and Margaritaville to be this lovely, peaceful haven with an endless stretch of unoccupied deck chairs and a blissfully empty pool. Ha - not so the second week. We were docked with the Carnival Destiny and it was like spring break in Cancun. My roommate and I had lunch there and were treated to a contest where guys with fat guts chugged beer. :)

But back to the first week...after lunch, some of us decided to take a little stroll and see what we could see in Grand Turk. Which actually isn't much - it takes about 20 minutes to even get out of the pier area and most of what we saw looked hurricane-ravaged. But at the time, we didn't know that and had heard that the island has not only wild donkeys but flamingos. So we set off to find them. We managed to find two sets of donkeys, some space debris (above), but no flamingos, alas. At some point, we gave up and cut back to the beach, the glorious white-sand beach. I think I could definitely spend a holiday (or two) there...

Port of Call: St. Kitts and St. Maarten

2010-01-16T13:25:00.006-06:00

These two are together in one post because we A. visited the ports one after the other and B. nothing much happened.

St. Kitts might actually be the most boring place in the Caribbean. And I'm sad to say it, because I've always wanted to like St. Kitts -- my most favorite college professor, novelist Caz Phillips, was born there, so I want to say good things about it. But, alas, there's nothing really to do in Basseterre, no real historical sites to visit, and the beach is a taxi-ride away and not so great when you get there. So, this day, I didn't do much, just went out to lunch with friends (and then, actually, I ended up eating on the ship later, so lunch was really just a social hour).

Oh, but I must mention the men with monkeys on the pier. A guy approached us as we walked through the pier-mall area holding a diapered baby monkey and said we could take two photos of it for $5. He said that he'd captured it somewhere out in the St. Kitts jungle and would return it to the wild when it got too big (and had presumably outgrown its usefulness). Somehow, though, I don't think you can just "put it back." The whole thing just made me sad and I wanted to hit him over the head with a bagful of diapers. :( I'm sure you all already know this but DON'T GIVE MONEY TO PEOPLE LIKE THIS! It only encourages the taking of wild animals for ridiculously stupid profit schemes.

The perpetrators:

Next, we visited St. Maarten, a port I quite like, but it was a gray and not-so-warm day. Plus, five ships were docked there (including one of the enormous Royal Caribbean ships with some 3,500 people aboard) so it was like Times Square on the pier. Through a miscommunication, I missed going on a snorkeling trip, and no scuba diving was available for that day, so in the end, I just went to lunch and the beach with my roommate and two other friends. The day improved, though - it was Christmas Eve so once back on the ship, we had a holiday party with the kids, sang "Jingle Bells" at the holiday show, and had a rollicking crew party into the wee hours...

Port of Call: St. Barts

2010-01-14T11:21:00.011-06:00

...or St. Barths, depending on how you feel like spelling it. I'd never been to St. Barts before -- only seen it from a distance -- so it was exciting to stop here, not once but twice. And, bonus, both weeks I managed to go on a tour!

The first cruise, I went on a "trekking" tour to Colombier beach. (I feel compelled to put trekking in quotes since we only walked along a path for 20 minutes.) But it was lovely nonetheless. Even though St. Barts is located within sight of St. Maarten and near enough to a bunch of cruise favorites like St. Kitts and Antigua, it's amazing how different each island looks from its neighbors. St. Barts has the cacti like St. Maarten but it's greener, more like the British Virgin Islands, and yet it's so very French.

We didn't do much on the tour - we walked through half-desert and past cacti as yellow butterflies swarmed all around. When we reached Colombier beach, it was completely empty. We had the white sand and the crystal-clear water all to ourselves. And I thought, how awesome, to find an under-the-radar beach. Hahaha - on the way back, as we passed family after family after family, I realized that the emptiness was merely due to the early hour (i.e. 10am). After the tour, I walked over to Shell Beach but didn't stay, mostly because it was so ridiculously hot out. (In trying to find Shell Beach, which is not easy, I stumbled across something called a Mancelinier tree. According to the sign, the fruit is poisonous and the leaves will burn your skin. Yikes!)

The second week, I went on a short snorkeling tour on the Blue Cat, I think it was called. We didn't go out very far, just to the rocks out in Gustavia harbor, and the snorkeling itself wasn't great but it was wonderful to be in the water. I didn't see much, mostly just a lot of blue tangs and a few baby fish (the area is apparently a fish nursery), but I got pretty excited when I found one of my favorite underwater creatures, the flamingo tongue, a colorful little snail about an inch-long that likes to hang out on fans. I even managed to snap a few photos, not an easy task when you're snorkeling and the object of your desire is about 10 feet below you. :)

After the snorkeling trip, I met up with some friends at Shell Beach and this time, I stayed for a little while. As you might guess, Shell Beach is covered with shells, and when the water rushes in, the pinkish shells tinkle like a song.

So, St. Barts is desert-y but lush, tres French, and to top it all off, very swank. Seriously swank. When we were there the second week, Jimmy Buffett's boat Continental Drifter III and Roberto Cavalli's strange gray hulk were at anchor. Rumor had it that a ton of celebrities were in town over the New Year's holiday (we were there on Jan. 2) to hang out with Cavalli and party like rock stars. But I'm sad to say, Google is now making me call foul on the Cavalli story, and in Italian no less. If you google his boat, a completely different vessel pops up. Still, someone did swear to me that they passed Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas along the esplanade.

Roberto Cavalli's boat? You decide.

Update: After a little help from the zoom function, I discovered that the name of this monstrosity (sorry!) is Ocean Emerald. Google tells me this boat was designed by and belongs to Sir Norman Foster, the same gentleman who incidentally built Dallas' new Winspear Opera House. Gossip = useless.

Port of Call: St. Thomas

2010-01-13T22:05:00.015-06:00

I had every intention of blogging over the holidays as I spent three weeks working in the Caribbean, but unfortunately, things didn't work out that way...mostly because I forgot to bring the cord to download my photos. Alas. (And yes, I know you can blog with just words, but aren't the photos the most interesting part?)

Over the 20 days, I worked on two different cruise ships (same company, though) and did a 10-day cruise on each, both starting and ending in Fort Lauderdale. Our first port of call the first week was St. Thomas, a place I have been to many, many times, especially when I spent a summer on the s.s. Norway and we went there every single week. There's almost nothing I haven't done in St. Thomas, seriously. Name a sight and I will tell you all about it...

So the first week, I didn't do much but shop, which is pretty unlike me but ended up being a lot of fun. We docked at Havensight Mall and since I was there last, they've built a swankier outdoor mall next to it, called Yacht Haven Grande, that has shops like Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, and White House Black Market. I spent most of my time in BCBG though, where I bought an amazing purple velvet dress for 80 percent off. :)

Now I have to eat my earlier words: During the second cruise, I managed to do something new! My roommate and I negotiated our way out of a mandatory boat drill and headed to Magens Bay, the world-famous beach that I had never bothered to go to. (At some point in the past, National Geographic picked it as one of the world's ten best.) And Magens Bay was lovely, with crystal-clear water and a curving patch of white sand, but world's best? I don't know...I think there are probably ten beaches in Australia alone that could top it. (Or maybe I'm still just slightly obsessed with Australia...) It was a Sunday morning and while we spent a few nice hours there, lolling around in the sand and sunshine, a minister was holding a church service at a picnic table near us.

When we got back to Havensight around 1pm, the pier was in utter chaos. The cruise ship parked next to us, the Celebrity Summit, was on lockdown after apparently finding a suspicious package in a crew area. Celebrity wasn't letting any of the passengers or crew back on, so there were probably 200 people milling around outside behind the police tape, plus 10 or so police cars and ambulances. (Which begs the question...if there's a bomb scare on your ship, do you really want to be anywhere near it?). According to some posts on cruisecritic.com, in the end it turned out to be nothing. Over at our ship, all was fine the whole time...

Amanda Knox: Fair Trial?

2009-12-08T23:07:00.008-06:00

Yes, we are discussing Amanda Knox again. I have just been so fascinated by the coverage this case has received - it's so interesting to me how it's biased on both sides, but neither side seems to recognize that, especially when criticizing how biased the other side is. (And yikes, the Telegraph is really taking America to task over this.)

On that topic, ABC News titled a recent segment Did Amanda Knox Receive a Fair Trial? It's an interesting clip because in theory, Diane Sawyer is exploring that question by interviewing three different experts. But in reality, if you watch the clip, you see that everyone has already made up their minds, and they all agree that the answer is no. (Surely ABC could have found someone to provide a different viewpoint, no?) The bias is subtle, but for example, when Elizabeth Vargas discusses the three key pieces of evidence against Knox, she mentions that the DNA - belonging to both Meredith Kercher and Knox - that was found on the knife might not be admissible in a U.S. court because the defense wasn't allowed to test it. Which is another way of saying that Italy's not doing it right, no?

The second guest, criminal defense lawyer Theodore Simon, wisely avoids answering Sawyer's questions about anti-Americanism in the trial and instead says we should all focus on the forensic evidence, or lack of. (Which is true - the evidence of her guilt is, in my opinion, quite compelling but ultimately circumstantial.) But at the same time, Simon brings out the "nice-girl defense," as I like to call it. He says, "The theory of the prosecution really wasn't made out by the evidence. All you have to do is ask yourself, here you have a youthful college-exchange student with no prior record, no history of violence in her background, and yet somehow she's miraculously transformed into a satanic, ritualistic, evil, premeditated murderer."

On the one hand, I agree with him - I think the main theory that Amanda Knox was a nymphomaniac temptress who lured these two guys into a murderous sex game where she is the knife-wielder is ridiculous. But - and this is what I haven't heard anyone say - why does it have to be all or nothing? There IS a middle ground between vixen and innocent. My own personal theory is that things just got out of hand. For whatever reason, Rudy Guede is in the apartment with Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and maybe they're on drugs (Knox's current alibi is that she and Sollecito were smoking hash at his place), and they start messing around, and someone gets the bright idea to bug Knox's roommate, who's apparently there working on a paper. Maybe Knox and Sollecito bow out at some point, and they just stay in the apartment, but whatever happens, it escalates until it ends in Kercher's death - and then the three participants freak out. That is a scenario that I can see a "youthful college-exchange student" being involved in.

One of things people keep saying in Knox's defense is that she doesn't have a motive. But really, what is Rudy Guede's motive? He was a 21-year-old drifter and alleged petty thief from the Ivory Coast who may have been interested in Kercher; there's no real reason for him to have picked Meredith Kercher as a victim, but he did it anyway. His motive is that sometimes people do crazy shit. In the ABC News segment, Vanity Fair writer and third guest Judy Bachrach also says that the court was already prejudiced against Knox because she was an outsider. And maybe that was true, but Guede was also an outsider - and the defense is more than willing to point the finger at him as the sole perpetrator. Don't get me wrong, his DNA was abundantly present at the crime scene; my point is, I think these same criticisms of Italian justice-system misconduct can be applied to Rudy Guede, but that man is actually guilty. It begs the question: Was there really misconduct? Or do we just flinch at justice systems that don't operate the same way that we do? (And hey, for all the anti-American babble, we're pretty good at putting away innocents, too.)

As I've said before, I'm not an expert and I can only form an opinion based on what I've read. The last thing I'll say on this is that there's a lot of compelling circumstantial evidence and I have yet to see any of it significantly mentioned in the American press. There's the supposedly purchased bleach and the fact that someone appeared to have cleaned the crime scene up. It also seems like the break-in at the apartment was staged, since the broken glass was found on top of the presumed-ransacked clothes (the occupant of the room testified that she had left it tidy). Guede really doesn't have a reason to return to the crime scene and half-heartedly clean it OR fake a break-in to an apartment he doesn't have the keys to. And then, of course, Knox and Sollecito changed their stories multiple times, occasionally after the details didn't pan out. For anyone interested in reading more about this, I would suggest heading over to truejustice.org. The site is dedicated to Meredith Kercher and is both exhaustive and seemingly neutral when it comes to presenting the facts/events of the case.

Alright, I'm done. Your thoughts?

Amanda Knox: Guilty

2009-12-04T18:59:00.006-06:00

Breaking news: The AP and others are reporting that Amanda Knox has just been found guilty of murdering her study-abroad roommate, Meredith Kercher. The Italian court sentenced her to 26 years; the prosecutors had asked for 30. Her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who was on trial with her, was sentenced to 25 years. I have no doubt that everyone will appeal, and Rudy Guede already is, so this saga is far from over...

Previous post on Amanda Knox here.

Amanda Knox: Innocent or Guilty?

2009-12-02T18:08:00.004-06:00

The verdict in the Amanda Knox case is expected either tomorrow or Friday, bringing to a close a very strange and twisted two-year story. For those who don't know, the short version is that Amanda Knox - a 22-year-old Seattle student - stands accused of murdering her study-abroad roommate, Brit Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy in the wee hours of November 2, 2007, allegedly during a sex-game gone awry. (Vanity Fair has the long version.) Knox's then-boyfriend, Italian Raffaele Sollecito, is on trial with her, while a third person, Rudy Guede, has already been sentenced to 30 years. Prosecutors are also asking for 30-year life sentences for Knox and Sollecito if found guilty.

Knox and Sollecito have been in jail since November 6, 2007, and they have been on trial since January of this year. Websites and blogs are sharply divided on the question of their innocence/guilt, and tabloids and newspapers in Europe are obsessed with the story. But the weirdest thing about this circus (and I think it's fair to call it a circus) is that there seems to be no real, clear answer. I'm leaning towards thinking they're both guilty but it's all pretty circumstantial.

The most compelling pieces of evidence, in my opinion, are that police found a receipt in Sollecito's apartment for bleach bought the morning after the murder; footprints in blood made visible by chemical agent luminol that are compatible with Knox's and Sollecito's (this also means that the crime scene was tidied up, which connects with the receipt); and Knox and Sollecito have changed their stories a bunch of times. At one point, Knox told police that she was in her room when she heard another guy, Congelese bar-owner Patrick Lumumba, murder her roommate; he has since been proven innocent but says the accusation and negative publicity ruined his business, and now he's suing Knox for it. (Speaking of lawsuits, the Italian police are suing the Knox family for what they say are false statements made about how Amanda was treated.)

Most interesting, though, has been the conflicting portrayals of Amanda Knox and the trial in the media. The European media has often called her "Foxy Knoxy," picking up the nickname she used on her MySpace page, and has shown her as this wild, promiscuous party girl. Here in the U.S., she's been mostly portrayed as an innocent locked up unfairly abroad. The June New York Times opinion piece by Timothy Egan is a great example of the hometown support; in the piece, titled "An Innocent Abroad," the Pulitzer-Prize winner writes, "In Seattle, where I live, I see a familiar kind of Northwestern girl in Amanda Knox, and all the stretching, the funny faces, the neo-hippie touches are benign." While Egan does discuss actual evidence, he also uses the "nice girl" defense - as in, how could anyone think a nice girl could do such a heinous thing? But hey, crime is always shocking, isn't it? Everyone thinks the perpetrator was a nice, quiet person before the true story comes out. Nice isn't proof; it’s an assumption based on surface qualities. If the Europeans are bent on portraying her as a monster, we’re hell-bent on portraying her as wholesome – and neither one makes her guilty or innocent.

I'm interested to see what happens. With all of the allegations thrown around about the mis-collection of evidence and the prosecutor's vendetta, I doubt the verdict will be universally embraced as the truth. Really, unless someone comes out and says something other than "I didn't do it," I don't think there will ever be a true resolution in this case - which, in the end, is pretty tragic for all involved, but most especially for Meredith Kercher.

easyJet's Magazine Faux Pas

2009-12-02T13:37:00.010-06:00

News broke in the U.K. ten days ago - and seems to have just trickled over to our side of the pond - that easyJet, one of Europe's major budget airlines, pulled all of its November issues of its inflight magazine Traveller from the planes because of an inappropriate photo spread. The magazine featured at least two fashion photographs that were staged at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 5.5 acres of gray concrete pillars of varying heights opened in 2005 near the Reichstag Building and the Hotel Adlon (where, incidentally, Michael Jackson hung his baby out the window).

Since the magazine is contracted out to an independent publishing company - and apparently that publishing company doesn't show the magazine to the airline beforehand, unlike another inflight we know - easyJet said that they were unaware of the content. New Statesman, which broke the story, says that the airline made the decision after being contacted by the magazine, presumably on or just before November 20. So, like, no one at easyJet looked through the magazine for 20 days? A Telegraph article said that because the shots are closeups, it's a little hard to tell where the setting is (although the spread's accompanying text, citing the memorial, seems specific enough); the New York Daily News had easyJet saying that it takes awhile for things to get through customer service, although the Guardian says that so far they say they've had very few complaints. Anyway, not sure how much good pulling the issue did, since customers had 20 days to get riled up about it (apparently people flying to Tel Aviv on easyJet's new route were the most incensed) and only spent 10 days with nothing to read. Was it worth the bad publicity, I wonder? (This is a real question, btw. Because of the fuss, didn't more people end up seeing it?)

A good number of the articles mention Denis MacShane, a British Labour politican, journalist at the Guardian, and chairman of the board of a think-tank dedicated to anti-semitism. He was quoted as saying, "This is further evidence of the banalisation of anti-Semitism and the trivialisation of the genocidal massacre of Jews in the Second World War." Seriously? The shit-stirrers at the Telegraph even used part of the quote in their headline. The photo shoot was crass and insensitive, absolutely, but "hostile" or "discriminatory," as the definition of anti-semitism goes, seems quite a stretch. Rather, Mr. MacShane, I would think the banalization comes from throwing around serious terms when they don't really apply, no?

Anyway...The easyJet magazine is published by Ink, which apparently calls itself the largest publisher of inflight magazines in the world, and has offices in London, New York, Atlanta, Hong Kong, and Singapore. (Looking at their website, the boast seems to be valid: They publish, from my count, 27 inflights, including recent acquisition United's Hemispheres.) And according to most of the articles, easyJet is "reviewing" its relationship with the publisher. Anyone know a custom publisher that might be interested in picking up a new inflight title? :)

New Moon and the Volturi

2009-11-22T20:25:00.007-06:00

There's a little movie that came out this weekend, New Moon - heard of it? Hahaha. It apparently raked in $140.7 million in the U.S. alone, making it the third-best domestic premiere of all time. I haven't seen it, although I will likely succumb sometime next week. (Which is surprising, as I found the book version incredibly whiny. I know Bella loves Edward but my god, the girl's gotta figure out how to sail her own boat, you know?) My 16-year-old neighbor loved the film, saying it was better than Twilight. Joy Tipping of the Dallas Morning News - presumably an adult - said the exact opposite, in a fairly hilarious review that's worth a read.

But anyway, I bring up Twilight and New Moon because of my blog. I have a slight obsession with looking at my visitor statistics, and for whatever reason, 98 percent of the hits I get are from people Googling the Volterra vampires. (The post about Charleroi, Belgium is a distant second.) Really, vampires? Since I’ve written a couple of posts about the fanged lot, I decided to put everything in one place (though here is the post that started it all. Or, er, maybe it's this one. I don't know, but both are about Twilight and Transylvania.)

But let's start off with the answer everyone is looking for: VOLTERRA HAS NO VAMPIRE LEGENDS. In this instance, Stephenie Meyer didn't go looking for a city with some links to the her imaginary legends. On her website, she says that she'd already made up a Tuscan city called "Volturin" with a piazza and a clock tower. When she pulled out a map, she discovered that voila, Tuscany already had a city called Volterra and apparently it looked a fair bit like the city in her head (though the piazza lacks a fountain). So she scrapped the idea of a fictional town and went with the name of the real one. (In comparison, she's said that while she'd already had the idea for Forks and the Quileute tribe, she went in search of a real place to match what her imagination had come up with.) However, most of New Moon's Italian scenes were shot in the more scenic town of Montepulciano.

But back to the Volturi...Don't get me wrong, it's not like the Italians of yore didn't believe in the existence of vampires; a team working in Venice unearthed the 16th-century skeleton of a “vampire” last year. Every continent, save Australia and Antarctica, has versions of bloodthirsty monsters rising from the dead. According to the book Legends of Blood, vampire legends - in the form of the ekimmu, a restless soul - predate Christ by 3,000 years, having been found in Assyrian and Babylonian mythology. (Speaking of Jesus, how strange, really, the conflicting messages in legend about drinking blood - it's horrific or holy, depending on who we're talking about.) Despite the lengthy tangent, the point is: New Moon's story about the Volturi trio - Aro, Marcus and Caius - and their minions is absolute fiction and based on nothing but one writer's prodigious imagination.

The truth is, the hysteria around Twilight strikes me as a little silly. I liked the first book well enough but Robert Pattison is just an actor and you will not find him or Jacob or Bella should you make the journey to Forks, Washington like a good number of readers have. (Meyer never went to Forks before writing the book, fyi, so despite the availability of tours, there are no authentic Twilight sites to see.) We've already established that you won’t find the Volturi in Volterra, either. So what’s all the fuss about?

But I guess what seems silly today could be tomorrow’s legend. After all, Bram Stoker never went to Transylvania. Instead, he took a historical hero, Vlad Tepes, and transformed him into a fictional monster. And yet, for whatever reason, the "story" of Dracula endures...and a large tourism industry has grown up around silly visitors like me who want to see Transylvania's vampires sites anyway. Speaking of, the photo at the top of this post is the so-called Dracula's Castle in Bran.

Stuck in Antarctica

2009-11-19T17:43:00.003-06:00

So there's a "cruise ship" currently trying to free itself from Antarctic ice in the Weddell Sea; I use quotes because the vessel is really a refurbished Finnish-built icebreaker that looks more like a cargo ship than cruise ship. The 101 passengers are all fine and according to the New York Post, they've mostly been using the time to get out the helicopters and sightsee. The only negatives seem to be that they'll be a couple of days late arriving back in Ushuaia, Argentina and some of the passengers didn't wear enough sunscreen.

But the reason I posted this is that I get a kick out these Antarctica stories - all due to a brief item I wrote on Antarctic cruising for Outside's January 2007 issue. At the time, the Golden Princess was about to take 2,600 passengers scenic sailing in the area - and it was by far the largest ship ever to do so and wasn't really built for that kind of hard-core sailing. (Most of the ships, like Captain Khlebnikov - the ship in question above - are former icebreakers carrying 200 passengers or less.)

Anyway, during the fact-checking process, apparently a company spokesperson got a little upset that I and the magazine were about to suggest that Antarctic sailing wasn't always smooth sailing. (A scientist I spoke with at the time said that unpredictably changing weather conditions and not-so-well-mapped seas are generally what creates trouble.) In the end, the Golden Princess was fine but not every ship was so lucky, which totally proved my point. (Am I allowed to say, I told you so?) That month, January 2007, the Norwegian ship Nordkapp ran aground off Deception Island; all of the passengers were fine and transferred to a sister ship but some fuel leaked into the ocean. Then in November of that year, the m/s Explorer sank after hitting submerged ice. According to a May 2008 Globe and Mail article, even the Captain Khlebnikov has gotten stuck before. And so on and so on...

Having said that, I totally want to go on an Antarctic cruise. Because how else are you going to get down there? What can I say, I am full of contradictions. :)

Tortugas!

2009-11-11T21:58:00.003-06:00

Okay, I can't resist posting a picture of my little hatchling. Isn't he the cutest? He looks like he's getting ready to fly...and hopefully he learned how to swim out in the big blue.

InStyle's Cause Celeb

2009-11-11T21:26:00.007-06:00

In the last few months, I've started to notice InStyle's one-page story on a celebrity and their cause - I totally thought this was a new feature, but the website has a slideshow 16 entries (although I'm thinking it used to be way in the back?).

So my bad, but I think my sudden interest is all due to the lovely ladies who have lately talked about the underwater world. A few months ago, January Jones discussed sharks, her affiliation with Oceana, and a childhood desire to be a marine biologist. I wish I could tell what month it was because November's issue features Kate Walsh and her work with Oceana. I'm a little surprised by the repeat (actually, the double repeat, since Kate Walsh's home is also featured in this issue) but I'm all for raising awareness about our marine environment. In her story, Walsh travels to St. Croix where she swam with turtles and watched little hatchlings find their way to the sea. (The Oceana newsletter has a longer Q&A with Walsh.) The bottom-left photo - where she looks like she's free-diving - is gorgeous and makes me want to don a snorkel right now. I don't know how much these sorts of stories affect the average reader, but I think it's awesome to see beautiful, upstanding, hip actresses promoting this cause.

As an aside, I once went on a cruise ship excursion in Mexico where we visited a turtle hatchery. So if you ever find yourself near Acapulco, go because it was the greatest experience ever! During the "liberacion de tortugas," we were each given at sunset our own little hatchling who had been born the night before. We had to stand behind the roped-off beach area and then we let them go and watched as they "raced" to the water. I'm proud to say that my little bebito made it first. :)

Berlin's 20th Anniversary

2009-11-11T19:49:00.007-06:00

So, yeah, Germans celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Monday but I think everyone knows that. I've been to Berlin twice, both times in 2004, and what I was most surprised to hear was that there was a decent number of Germans on both sides who missed the Wall, as in wanted it back. At the time, I remember that people said West Germans resented having to pay some sort of tax and East Germans felt they had less opportunities and basic infrastructure hadn't improved.

But since this was all hearsay and years ago, I was curious whether or not this sentiment still existed. And sure enough, despite all the celebratory stories, there were a few articles that discussed lingering resentments. A Pew Research poll compared data from 1991 and 2009; while 45 percent of East Germans found reunification "very positive" in 1991, only 31 percent feel the same today. On the other hand, "somewhat negative" rose from 7 percent to 13 percent. A Der Spiegel article in July said that 49 percent of East Germans thought that life was good in the Eastern Bloc, and 8 percent thought it was better than today's reunified country. A New York Times story from June about the remaining economic gap between the two sides is titled "In East Germany, a Decline as Stark as a Wall." And lastly, Delia Lloyd at Politics Daily pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole thing while discussing the 2006 film, The Lives of Others (which, perhaps not surprisingly, is up 41 percent in popularity this week, according to IMDB).

Anyway...Berlin is a wonderful city although I think it has sort of an architectural identity crisis. On the one hand, since the war, there's been reconstruction of old monuments: The linden trees were replanted on the Unter den Linden in the 1950s and the Reichstag building was reconstructed in the 1990s exactly as it was before the 1933 fire, though now it has a very cool, futuristic glass dome designed by Norman Foster. On the other hand, the Wall has been knocked down in a lot of places (often replaced by a metal strip in the sidewalk) and Potsdamer Platz is like a mini-Tokyo (though, granted, the area sat as a wasteland for a long time). I am certainly not an expert but there seemed to be conflicting styles at work. (Ha, apparently GridSkipper agrees.) More than anything, you can really see the difference still between East Berlin and West Berlin; they obviously can't knock down every old apartment building, but it's interesting how you can immediately orient yourself based on the architecture. The New York Times has a cool photo feature that compares old and new Berlin.

Another architectural choice has been to leave things as they are. It's pretty easy to find bulletholes if you know where to look, but my favorite example - and my favorite building in Berlin - is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The church was bombed out by the Allies in 1945 and the city ultimately decided to leave the remaining shell as it was, and commissioned a new, modern church to be built next to it. The mosaics inside the old church are unbelievably stunning - they're so intricate, but a most of them have cracks running through them, and some are missing large chunks. It's really one of the coolest and yet most melancholy buildings I've ever seen. I'll end this treatise with some photos:

Dallas Arts District Grand Opening

2009-10-18T18:42:00.006-05:00

This afternoon, Emily and I headed downtown for the Winspear Opera House/Wyly Theater grand opening festivities. The weather was gorgeous - sunny and warm - and there were free tours of the venues, performances at a temporary outdoor stage, and free admission to some of the nearby museums!

We did a self-guided tour of the Winspear Opera House since you could just walk in and stroll around (at the Wyly, you had to wait in an enormous line that wrapped around three levels of walkway to go in for five minutes). The Winspear is a cool-looking multi-level building, designed by Norman Foster, that uses a vivid scarlet glass, visible on the interior and exterior. When we walked into the auditorium, some students were performing modern, hip-hopish dance to Pachelbel's Canon.

Of course, the Winspear will be hosting opera; this season, Dallas Opera will be putting on famous productions like Otello, Cosi Fan Tutti, and Madame Butterfly. But not being much of an opera buff, I'm more looking forward to musicals like Spring Awakening, on at the end of March. The Hip Hop Broadway show, starring Erykah Badu, also sounds pretty cool. The Dallas Theater Center, at the Wyly, seems to have slightly more avant-garde productions on tap, like musicals about basketball and Superman.

Anyway, after the Winspear, Emily and I took a brief stroll through the Nasher - which has an exhibit of Norman Foster architectural models on display - and then headed to the Dallas Museum of Art. We were mostly just wandering without purpose and we ended up going into a modern gallery (home to the Buddhist-inspired LED work Counter Ground, by Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima) and All the World's a Stage. The exhibit, up until February 28, is definitely worth a look - organized in honor of the new additions to the Dallas Arts district, it's about the art of art. There were plenty of paintings, but I liked that it was more than that; there was also an ancient Roman mosaic (I think it was Orpheus taming wild animals), festival costumes and masks from around the world, a sculpture combining a piano and potatoes, and a "music bar" where you could listen to music related to various works of art. Now, having said that I liked the multi-media aspect, my two favorite works were probably paintings: Degas' Aria After the Ballet and the wall-sized, hard-to-ignore Illusionist, by Sigmar Polke. (The link unfortunately doesn't do Polke's work justice - the colors pop from the canvas, demanding attention from halfway across the room.)

In other unrelated-except-it's-Dallas news, we're getting a Pinkberry in November. It's going where the Merge clothing store was at Preston/Royal, next to the Barnes n' Noble. Now...where's our H&M?!?

Australia Photos Up!

2009-10-16T23:14:00.004-05:00

Alright, so I finally managed to organize my photos, create some albums, and load them onto my blog. The first album is a chronological accounting of the trip; the second comprises my underwater photos. You can access them here, via my website.

I also created this little map that shows, more or less, where I went. It's funny, because while I was in Australia, I felt like I saw a ton. We were constantly on the go and heck, we drove 2,000 kilometers. And then I made this map, outlining my itinerary with the red line...and realized that I barely saw anything at all. :( Oh well, it will be a great excuse to go back.

Ten Things I Learned About Australia

2009-10-12T15:16:00.003-05:00

So, to wrap up my trip posts, I thought I'd put up a list of ten random, weird things that I learned - but for some reason no one ever mentions beforehand - about traveling in Australia. (Or maybe just east coast Australia?)

1. Napkins are incredibly hard to come by. Forget about paper towels. I'm guessing it's an environmental thing (Australians started using canvas shopping bags over plastic about a decade ago) but you almost never get napkins in restaurants. Occasionally they were on the counter and anytime I found some, I would grab a couple and keep them stashed in my backpack for emergencies.

2. Everyone has a cell phone. Which I guess is mostly true here in the U.S., but people looked at us in absolute shock everytime we said we didn't have one. (Our phones are the only ones that don't have removable SIM cards to eliminate this problem.) Everytime we booked something, the vendor would demand a mobile phone number. And when we rented the car, the lady told us she wasn't allowed to give it to us without a cell number...so we ended up giving her the number of Adrienne's friend's friend. (What can I say, we'd planned everything around the car...)

3. It is VERY difficult to find a public toilet. Most restaurants don't even have them.

4. Travel with an ample amount of cash. I sort of assumed that I would mostly use my credit card but most places had charge minimums. Usually they were small, like $10 AUS, but I really didn't expect it. Generally, too, there were fees tacked on, usually 2 percent of the total cost. I ended up using my credit card anyway - the fee was usually less than the $4 ATM fee my bank would charge, and was still much safer than carrying around wads of cash - but I started to feel resentful about all the extras.

5. Pumpkin is a very popular food in Australia. I have no idea why - maybe they grow it in excess? I was surprised by how many times I saw it on the menu - in soups, pastas, etc - but I was most startled by its appearance on pizza. Pizza, really? It tasted alright, though, even though it sat in huge, orange chunks on the top.

6. Australian airport security is still much more casual. You don't have to take off your shoes and you don't have to carry your miniscule liquids/gels in little ziplock bags (unless you're flying to the U.S.). You don't have to show ID to get your ticket or enter the departure area. If you're willing to pass through security, you can still meet people at the gate. It was so 1988. And yet, they'll still confiscate your itsy-bitsy nail file. Why, I ask you?

7. Speaking of airports...domestic and international terminals aren't in the same building, or at all near one another. The Brisbane terminals are two kilometers apart. To get from one to the other, you have to take the sky train that links to the city. And it costs $5 AUD. (According to my Rough Guide, Sydney also charges $5 for the pleasure, although Qantas moved me and my fellow travelers along gratis.) Again, why?

8. I've said this before in other posts, but Australia's birds are strange-looking, extremely colorful, and LOUD. And the noise is generally not delightful chirps - usually it sounds like they're being strangled to death. More than Australian told me that when they leave the continent and travel to other places, they're shocked at how quiet it is.

9. Food is generally expensive in Australia, but the price of bottled drinks is shocking. I eventually got over the food prices, but couldn't deal with the liquids. A liter of bottled water costs $4 AUD. Any kind of bottled drink - like Gatorade, juices, etc - in the 20-ounce range also costs around $4 AUD. On the plus side, their tap water is totally drinkable from the get-go. I don't even think that restaurants expect you to buy a drink - the waiter (or often, counter person) rarely asks and instead gives you a carafe of tap water (although sometimes you have to ask for it).

10. Most Australians haven't traveled around Australia. I think it's mostly due to the continent's size and what one person described to me as "island fever." But everyone - on the east coast, anyway - seems to agree on their favorite spot: Byron Bay, the continent's easternmost spot, at the top of New South Wales. We didn't end up going there, since we mostly heard this info when we were in Noosa (our last road-trip stop) or in Sydney (post road-trip). But I heard about Byron Bay so many times that it may find a spot on a future itinerary.

Alright! So with the exception of posting a link to some photos, I am really, truly done boring you with my adventures Down Under. Well, until I go back to explore the middle section and west coast, that is. :)

Australia: Dust Storm, Bridge Climb, and Opera House

2009-10-08T11:30:00.009-05:00

Alright, now we're really getting down to it: my last day in Australia! Over a three-plus week period, from Cairns to Brisbane, the weather had been spectacular. But then, when we got to Sydney, it all changed - sporadic and sudden rain, hot and cold, and then the worst - the dust storm. Apparently it was the worst dust storm in 40 years, covering the city in this eerie red haze. The newspaper headline that night read, "Life on Mars."

So, unfortunately, I had already booked and paid for a bridge climb for 9:25 am - the one where you climb like 1,000 steps to get to the top of the famous Harbour Bridge. Even though many Sydneysiders were wearing masks and you couldn't see a frickin' thing, the company still decided to run the tours, no refunds - and it was too expensive not to go. But it was kind of ridiculous - the weather was bad enough that ferry service had been cancelled, but they were still taking us up 440 feet on this bridge. (The newspaper quoted a health spokesman as saying, "Everyone, especially people with heart or long disease, should avoid outdoor exertion and stay inside (if) possible.") So yeah, I went, but I found the whole experience to be a big disappointment. Multiple people had told me to skip it and take in the view from Sydney Tower instead, and I'm thinking I would have to agree with that.

That evening, I met up with my friend Derrin, who I used to work with at NCL and who now works at the Sydney Opera House, for the second time. The night before, he'd given me a thorough backstage tour of the Opera House, from the green room to the super-special Utzon Room. (The Utzon Room is the only venue that looks as architect Jorn Utzon intended; the designs were changed after he was fired from the project in 1966.) Derrin even made me go into the bathrooms, which I highly recommend - the sinks don't have basins, instead just a stone slab, and it looks like the water is going to just go everywhere, but of course it doesn't. It was pretty cool. After that tour, we went to the nearby Customs House to have (awesome) pizza at Young Alfred. The Customs House is pretty cool - built in 1845, it has swastika symbols all over the entry floor, put in there before the Nazis corrupted it, when the symbol was a fylfot and meant something completely different. The Customs House also has a miniature model of the Sydney Central Business District underneath a glass floor. Anyway, Derrin was a great tour guide - as we strolled back to Base Backpackers, he showed me all kinds of little, random pieces of Sydney's history.

The second night we met up, we kind of dorked out and took a ton of photos of the Opera House (the red haze had dissipated around 2pm). People say the Opera House looks like seashells or waves, but oddly, I think it really looks like three Conquistador helmets. Do you see what I mean?

The next morning, I had to get up at 4:30 to rush over to the train station to get to the airport. I was scheduled to fly from Sydney to Brisbane on Jetstar and then after a three-hour layover, from Brisbane to LAX and LAX to Dallas on Qantas. But when I got to the Sydney airport, it was packed, still total chaos from the dust storm the day before. My Jetstar flight was delayed an hour and they weren't going to fly us to Brisbane - instead, we were going to the Gold Coast and they were going to then drive us an hour to Brisbane by bus. There was no way I was going to make the trans-Pacific flight. I'll spare you the details of my long morning -I talked to a lot of people, got a lot of "sorry, can't help you" or "this will cost $900," shed some tears, and eventually got both flights changed to the next day and a free night of accommodation at a nearby hotel courtesy of Jetstar. So I ended up staying in Sydney for another day, although I didn't do anything - I napped, enjoyed this cool thing called television that I'd forgotten all about, and worked on a freelance story I had due the next day. Then, before I knew it, I was on the plane, and here I am now: home!

Australia: Sydney, Sydney, Sydney

2009-10-08T11:08:00.005-05:00

I really liked Sydney - it seemed like it had New York's energy, Seattle's harbor vibe, and oddly, some aspect of Tokyo that I can't really put my finger on. But at the same time, there really isn't that much to do. There are some museums but I'm not terribly interested in Australian history. Is anyone besides an Australian interested in Australian history? (And hey, no disrespect - I feel the same about U.S. history. I dig the Liberty Bell and the Betsy Ross House, but I don't expect some French person to go bananas over it, you know?)

So, anyway, one of main excursions in Sydney was to the Sydney Aquarium and Wildlife World, two attractions located right next to each other at Darling Harbour. Although I generally go crazy for aquariums - and this one was pretty impressive - I think maybe I liked Wildlife World better. Mostly for its interactive components - I got to pet a koala AND a kangaroo. (It was during the feeding/talk and they only let a couple of people into the enclosures. So if you go and you want to nab a coveted spot, my advice: Be aggressive!) The other thing I liked about Wildlife World is that it only featured Australian animals - venomous snakes, lizards, crocodiles, wallabies, etc, etc. The suburban Taronga Zoo is supposed to be nice, with all kinds of exotic animals, but I felt like I could have seen the same lions, giraffes, and elephants at home.

Australia: Sydney

2009-10-07T12:13:00.008-05:00

As of Sunday, I was on my own which was a sad and sort of lonely feeling. After I moved from the YWCA hostel to Base Backpackers, I decided to spend the day as I would any other normal Sunday - which mostly meant hanging out, drinking coffee, and reading a book. After three-plus weeks of constantly moving, it was a nice break.

So after walking through Chinatown and around Circular Quay, I headed over to the Royal Botantic Gardens, which were established in 1816 when the European settlers attempted to grow themselves some food. The park is enormous and has all kinds of sections - a rose garden, herb garden, cactus garden, fountains, greenhouses... Although I'd meant to make it over to Mrs. Macquarie's Chair - a rock lookout point - I took the first path I came to, and just kind of followed from one to the next, whichever struck my fancy. (Not surprisingly, in the end, I had no idea where I was.)

The gardens were AMAZING, and are located right in the middle of downtown, near the Opera House. (Those Sydneysiders sure are lucky.) It's spring now in Australia too, so all the flowers and trees were brilliantly in bloom. I spent a good chunk of my afternoon sitting in the grass, in the sun, reading - it was awesome.

But I also spent a fair amount of time transfixed by the giant fruit bats. I'd seen them before, in Townsville or walking to the Opera House the night before, but it was usually just one or two at a time. The gardens, on the other hand, were FILLED with them and they looked to be the size of small dogs. For the most part, they were hanging from the trees, sleeping; in the photo below, everything large and teardrop shaped is a bat. But then there were a few that were flying around, trying to find a spot, then bickering with other bats, and flying off again. The whole thing was kinda eerie and kinda cool.

Australia: Adventures in Sydney

2009-10-04T20:28:00.007-05:00

Noosa was the last stop on our road trip and so we returned the car on Friday (the 18th) at the Brisbane airport and flew to Sydney. I had never intended to go to Sydney, actually, and had not at all packed for cooler weather. I'd kinda thought about spending my last week in Uluru, but it seemed like a logistical nightmare to get there from Brizzie - not to mention incredibly expensive - so I opted to follow Adrienne south. We both had friends there and it seemed like a nice way to end the trip.

We arrived in Sydney around 5pm and headed straight for Circular Quay in the Central Business District, to take the ferry to Manly Beach. The plan was to meet Adrienne's friend, Alli, at the Manly Wharf Hotel bar. I don't know what I expected but I thought it was going to be fairly low-key - but we totally stuck out, all raggedy from traveling and with our luggage, amongst the trendy Friday post-work crowd. The bouncer - who kinda looked like Jake Gyllenhaal - actually made us sit outside on the patio, in the cold, because of our bags. When Alli arrived though, we put our luggage in her car, and then we spent the rest of the night bar-hopping around Manly with some of her friends. It was fun but I was pretty tired, so I was excited when we headed "home" for the night - to Alli's friend's beach house in the nearby town of Newport.

The next day we had breakfast in Newport and then headed into Sydney. We spent the afternoon in the Rocks area, the historic quarter and the site of Sydney's founding in 1788. There wasn't a lot to see - Australia doesn't have much in the way of history, as compared to, say, France - but we spent a fair amount of time strolling around the weekend artists' market.

That evening, after checking into the YWCA hostel near Hyde Park, Adrienne and I headed to the Opera House to see a show! Now, I did not pick the show, Adrienne did - and she opted for Hiroaki Umeda, this Japanese guy who was performing a solo dance show. (Although I don't think he called it dance - it was dance-inspired movement, or something like that.) The press release calls him, "a rising star on the international dance scene," but it was a little weird for me. He mostly danced in coordination with these electricity-like zaps of white light on a video screen behind him. (This photo gives a good idea of the show.) By the end of the hour, I just found that my mind was wandering - and I don't think I was the only one, as the audience was definitely restless. But, on the plus side, the guy had amazing control of his body - I was impressed by the way that he could move his arms/hands around so rapidly while keeping the core of his body completely still.

Anyway...after the show, Adrienne and I met Alli and we headed to an area called Balmain, on the other side of the harbor, to go out again. Some of her friends were throwing a "P" party - it was a pub crawl but everyone was supposed to dress up as something that started with the letter p. Since our wardrobe choices were limited, we opted to go as ourselves - "perfect." A lot of the guys went as pimps and wore the faux animal-skin jackets that we are modeling in the photo.

The guy with the pink hair, Pete, has recently started a company in China with some of his friends to manufacture these suits. :) Anyway, it was fun night out. We felt especially compelled to have a good time since Adrienne was leaving for Canada the next morning.

Australia: Surfing

2009-10-03T19:01:00.005-05:00

So surfing...I figured I should give it a try. Adrienne had discovered the Learn to Surf school somewhere (maybe in her Lonely Planet) and it was also the surf school affiliated with the hostel, so we joined them on our second day in Noosa for an afternoon lesson.

I had Stefan, this French guy with a very deadpan sense of humor, as a teacher. (I mention his sense of humor because I think it confused the non-native English speakers, which was everyone but me.) It was a group lesson and I think there were seven of us, and surprisingly, mostly girls. We started in the sand where we learned the 1-2-3 method of popping up - basically you use your left leg to arch your body up (1), plant your right foot on the board just in front of you (2), and pop your left leg in front while standing up (3). After we practiced this for awhile, we then moved out into the itsy-bitsy waves, where Stefan would give us each in turn a push - and we would attempt to actually stand up. Easy, right? Hahaha. The first couple of tries, I did alright and managed to stand up and more or less stay on the board until I got to the sand. But the more times I did it, the worse I got and mostly I was just falling right off. Maybe I was tired - the waves just relentlessly pound you out there - but I think it was that the harder I thought about the technique, the more unnatural surfing became. I also managed to knock myself on the bean once with the board pretty good, too - I thought for a moment that I'd lost a tooth. :(

But despite all this, I kinda liked this surfing thing, so the next afternoon, Adrienne and I took another lesson. Our teacher was Stefan again and this time, our class only had five people in it, though two of the people were little kids. I started out doing alright but then Stefan got a bloody nose so we had to fend for ourselves for a little awhile. That meant that we had to catch our own waves - which had proved impossible for me the day before. (If you're too early, the wave just rolls past you; if you're too late, you get caught - and usually flipped up - in the churning foam.) But for whatever reason, I was more successful the second afternoon...and started to realize why people think surfing is so awesome. When you catch the wave just right (and keep in mind, I am still talking about these baby waves right next to the shore), it just propels you forward with this incredible speed - it was so thrilling!

In the end, Stefan wasn't able to come back so we got Merrick as our teacher. Merrick Davis is the owner of the surf school and also a former Australian surf champion and world surf champion. He stood on the shore the whole time and watched us - and I totally thought he wasn't really able to watch all of us, but then after each try he'd give each of us really detailed advice that was absolutely spot on. To me, he said to stay down and keep my fingers on the board, since I was popping straight up, losing my balance, and falling off. And it worked and then I was even able to control the board enough to turn to the left and to the right. So I felt pretty successful and it was a LOT of fun and now I totally want to go on a dedicated surf vacation.

So that mostly sums up our Noosa adventures. We spent most of the rest of our time just kinda hanging out and enjoying, with morning coffee at the hostel, strolls through town, and afternoon ice creams at Royal Copenhagen (yum). The photo below, by the way, is our surf beach at sunset...

In the last post, I talked about how we didn't see a koala at Noosa National Park, which was kind of a disappointment. So I am pleased to report that I did actually see one in Noosa! The second night, we were walking back from dinner at this Thai place in Noosa Village up the hill and our friend Issam spotted it across the street - and it was walking/running across the grass! Which is amazing since they sleep some 22 hours a day.

Australia: Noosa Adventures

2009-10-03T18:01:00.007-05:00

I wasn't so keen on the surfing, as explained in the last post, but I was totally excited by the prospect of spotting another koala - my Rough Guide suggested that they might be lurking in the gum trees above the Noosa National Park car park.

So off we went on our second morning in Noosa. I kinda looked around in the parking lot as we walked through it, but didn't see anything - I figured they'd just sort of be around on the path and as we strolled, maybe we'd spot one. But about five minutes into our walk, we run into this older Australian guy who's totally excited and he tells us there's a "pod of wilds!" up ahead. I just stared at him - I had no idea what he was talking about but started to imagine a flock of kangaroos. The guy can tell I'm totally clueless because he keeps shouting "wilds! wilds!" at me, louder and louder. I was just like, what are you talking about? Then he says, "you know, big fish" and at this point, I'm totally picturing tuna. Finally, Adrienne shouts at me, "Whales!" Ohhhhhhhhhh. This is the thing: You'd think the Australian accent would become easier to understand after a month in the country, but it doesn't.

So with that, we started walking faster - the guy told us the whales were around a bend, about 30 minutes ahead. We passed some gorgeous outlooks along the way - at the beginning, we were at eye-level with the shore but the path got steeper and steeper and eventually we could see all the way back to town. It was really incredible. Because we were walking quicker, I didn't stop to take many photos because I thought we'd make it back there another morning or afternoon, but sadly, we didn't, mostly because we got totally lazy the last couple of days. (We'd had an idea originally of walking all the way around, from our starting point at the car park, past Alexandria Bay - apparently a nudist beach - and to Sunshine Beach, rumored to be nice and quieter than our beach of Hastings Street.)

After about half an hour, we made it to the point of Noosa Heads, which was an exposed rocky outcrop with about a 300 degree view of the ocean. We hadn't seen any "wilds" on the way but summers in Alaska have taught me that the key is to stand still, wait and watch - so that's what we did. And success, we spotted one off in the distance! I don't know why I got so excited - it was just a tiny speck of black in the middle of a very large expanse of blue. You could definitely see its blow hanging in the air and sort of make out a tail when it went down, but that was about it. The sailboat next to it was about the size of my fingernail.

We were in a bit of a rush to get back, since we still had to eat lunch before heading off to our afternoon surf lesson (I figured I should at least try it once...). But Adrienne had to pee so when we hit one of the stairways heading down to the beach, she went to go use Mother Nature's toilet while I waited at the top. And when I was sitting there, I met this surfer guy, Issam, from Brisbane who became our pal for the next couple of days. :)

Australia: Noosa

2009-09-21T00:31:00.013-05:00

We spent the last four days of our road trip in Noosa, which is only about an hour and a half from Brisbane and famous for its surf scene. It was never on my itinerary (although my original itinerary was mostly west coast Australia) but Adrienna was dying to go there because she wanted to attend a surf camp. She'd surfed before in Costa Rica and Hawaii, but was intent on becoming consistently good at it. Personally, I wasn't too keen on trying it - mostly because of the sharks. Now, I'm not really afraid of sharks; it's hard to be when you scuba dive regularly and see that they really have zero interest in you. It's just that it's ALWAYS the surfers that get eaten because paddling on the board makes you look like a seal, blah blah blah. I just wasn't interested in being the seal, you know?

We arrived probably around noon on the 15th and it took us a good hour to locate the hostel - even though the town is essentially one street long, along the beach. On first glance, it was immediately apparently that Noosa was unlike any other place we'd been so far - it was just so fancy. It's what I imagine Palm Springs looks like, but with water. We got a good look at it that first afternoon as we drove up and down Hastings Street, hitting the beach parking lot at one end and the national park at the other. But finally we found the hostel, Halse Lodge, with an amazing location just 5 minutes walk from the beach.

That first afternoon, I didn't do much; I was totally exhausted from driving and just wanted to chill out a little bit. So while Adrienne took a surf class, I hung out on the balcony of the hostel and read my book, while listening to about a dozen lorikeets squawking away in a nearby tree. Like all their Australian friends, they were LOUD. And colorful - I thought they were parrots. :)

Australia: Driving

2009-09-21T00:02:00.008-05:00

After Airlie Beach, we were pretty tired. We had grand plans to wake up at 6am and tackle the 1,000 km drive between the Whitsundays and Noosa Beach. Are you surprised that it didn't exactly happen like that?

Actually, we had vastly underestimated the driving distances on this trip. It really didn't look that far between Cairns and Brisbane on a map; we later found out it was a good 2,000 km. Oops.

So we finally got up and going at around 11am to start the main part of our driving. Surprisingly, it hasn't really been that hard to get around here. At first I was a little freaked out by driving on the right hand side of the car, on the left side of the road, but after a few hours it was routine - if in doubt, I would just repeat my mantra to myself: Stay left, stay left. It seemed to work. The hardest part about driving is the turn signal and windshield wipers; they're on opposite sides from our cars and I probably hit the windshield wiper to indicate a turn 30 times on the first few days before getting it right. (So far I've done most of the driving, since Adrienne left her license in Canada.)

Anyway, so off we went. I don't have much to say about the drive except that it was long and since the road doesn't hug the ocean, we mostly just saw farms. Like the one above, just outside Rockhampton, Australia's beef capital. Australia does have awesome billboard signs, though. They are few and far between, but are generally either about improving your sex life ("Making Love? Do It...Longer!") or warning you that long drives can kill (accompanied by graphic illustrations). I've never seen anything quite like it.

My real goal for the day was to see a kangaroo in the wild; I'd heard that you can often see them just hopping across the roads. So far though, we'd only seen dead ones, mostly with their legs sticking up rigor-mortis style from the brush on the sides of the road. But lo and behold, we had some successful (live) spotting! First, we saw a little one eating at the side of the road at around 3pm; since it was still light out, we saw him pretty clearly. Then, after dark, we saw a whole mass of them. We came across two or three in the headlights on the side of the road, and then suddenly there was like 2o of them, in little groups here and there as we drove along, for about a mile...followed at the end by a good dose of fresh roadkill. (Not from me, of course. That would have been incredibly traumatizing.) Admittedly, these animals could have been wallabies. They were about half the size of a large kangaroo; still, I'm going with kangaroo. (Happily though, the guy at the hotel later told me they could have easily been small joeys. He thought that was most likely.)

The other highlight of the drive also came after dark, when we drove through this bush fire. For about five minutes, everything to either side of us was on fire - trees, bushes, ground. It was the strangest thing. I have no idea if it was intentionally set (we've seen a lot of smoke clouds as we've driven along, as it's spring here and farmers are clearing land) but it was just so weird!

Well, no surprise, we didn't make it to Noosa. We were passing through some small towns - when we saw a town - and around 8pm, noticed that things looked pretty shut up. We could have stayed in Childers, which looked so pretty as we drove through in the dark, with its town center all lit up, but decided that it had bad karma - a hostel fire there had killed 15 people in 2000. In the end, we stayed in Maryborough, mostly because we were just too tired to drive any longer. The town was dead quiet when we got there at 9:55pm and I think we managed to get into the only open place, a hotel whose reception was closing at 10pm. It was a relief, and also really nice to stay in a real hotel room after two weeks of hostels!

Australia: Airlie Beach, Part Two

2009-09-20T23:28:00.008-05:00

We were planning on leaving Airlie Beach this day, which I believe would have been Saturday, to head down to Noosa, but everyone kept telling us how awesome Whitehaven Beach was, so we decided to stay another night and book another trip. This time, though, we decided to try out Fury, which was this yellow jetboat sort of thing.

There were maybe only 15 people on the boat, so lots of empty seats. But I definitely preferred this day; it was just a two-man crew who were a lot nicer, and the whole excursion was just a lot more casual. First we headed to Dumbell Island to go snorkeling. The day was a lot windier and the waves a lot choppier but the site was pretty sheltered. The water was fairly cold but I got pretty into it once I spotted a large clownfish and a baby hiding in an anemone; I spent a good amount of time trying to dive down and get a good photo. (I wasn't terribly successful; thus, I'm not posting the results.) After that, we had a quick lunch (of awesome pasta salad for me), and then headed to the star of the afternoon, Whitehaven Beach.

So, it turns out that this beach is pretty famous and apparently often ranked in the world's Top 10. The sand is this really pure silica and the guy on the boat was telling us that you can polish your silver jewelry with it. It's also where the quintessential Whitsundays photo of the tides is taken (although from the ground, we of course didn't really get to see it this way). Anyway, the beach really is as amazing as everyone says and my photos just don't do it justice.

On our trip, we'd met some Australian guys who were in Airlie Beach for their friend's bachelor party and we spent a good part of the beach time hanging out with them, playing Frisbee and a beach version of cricket. (I managed to score 6 points.) It seemed like a very Australian summer afternoon, even though it's not really summer here yet.

When we got back to Airlie Beach, after a little boat tour around some of the nearer Whitsunday Islands, like chi-chi Hamilton Island, we went back to Magnums (after walking by this beach wedding) to get cleaned up and ready for the night ahead. We had been invited to the bachelor party. There were only 5 guys, so it was a pretty small affair. But when we got to the guys' lodging, a rented condo on the hill, one of the guys came out to apologize...they'd thought we weren't coming and had hired a topless waitress, who hadn't yet arrived. (Yes, welcome to Airlie Beach.)

The girl arrived with this enormous security guy, who stayed the whole time, sort of watching over the situation. I think she was there for about two hours and the whole thing was pretty awkward. She was REALLY young (maybe 22) and seemed really uncomfortable - she didn't do much, and kind of hid herself in her seat at the table and watched the rest of us play cards. One of the guys told us later that she'd felt especially uncomfortable because we were there. Anyway, so it was a little adventure. After she and the bouncer left, we hung out a little more and played card games, and then eventually headed out into town. I was pretty tired and mostly just went because it was getting me closer to my bed at Magnums. :) For awhile, we went to shady club, Evolution, on the main strip. But it was pretty trashy so I ended up leaving after about half an hour with two of the guys and we just walked around the boardwalk for awhile. I think I finally made it into bed at 3am.

Australia: Airlie Beach Again

2009-09-20T23:08:00.009-05:00

For our first real day at Airlie Beach (and at the time, it was going to be our only day), we decided to go on a day sailing trip out and about in the Whitsunday Islands. We went on the Ragamuffin Maxi, which is apparently a quite well-known ship because it participated (and maybe won) the famous Sydney to Hobart race that I'd never really heard of.

The trip started out well. It was about 25 people, a mix of foreign backpacker types like us and older Australian couples. We spent most of the day hanging out with these two American guys from Ohio, one of whom now lives at Bondi Beach, and this young Australian guy who was in the Whitsundays for a friend's wedding.

On the way to our snorkeling site, Blue Pearl Bay, there wasn't really any wind, so we had to motor there. It perhaps took about an hour to get there. The day before, when we booked the trip at Magnums, the girl had raved about the snorkeling site, saying it was one of the best out there. As a result, we were persuaded to try the diving. It ended up being TOTAL CRAP, and kinda ruined my impression of our excursion and Ragamuffin as a company. Partially it was our fault; the dive ended up costing a shocking $90 AUS and we should have asked beforehand. (We'd been shown like 7 brochures the day before and had remembered the price as $60.) But it was also partially Ragamuffin's fault. The dive guide on the boat also raved about the site, although she must have known the coral was all dead and likely that the visibility would be bad. Plus, our tanks weren't filled all the way (and they totally brushed it off) and our 60-minute dive got chopped down to 40 minutes because there were three groups that wanted to go out and only one dive guide. Ragamuffin must have made a fortune on the whole thing - we ended up paying nearly $300 AUS for a day trip, which just seems ridiculous, and it pissed me off that they cut corners. Since they didn't seem to give a crap, I thought I'd post my complaints on my blog for all to read. :) I probably would have had a better day if I'd just gone snorkeling (I would have seen the exact same things) and saved myself a, ahem, boatload of money.

Anyway...that night we had our first experiences with the Airlie Beach backpacker scene. After a nice dinner at a restaurant whose name I can't remember, we started out at the bar at Magnums where we met up with our new American friends. Then we moved to the place next door, Beaches, which was totally packed with guys (just guys, seriously), and had this awesome Swiss band playing. I wish I could remember their name - it was something like Screech - and they were playing a mixture of rock and funk. We ended up staying out until about 3am. I won't embarrass anyone, including myself, so I'll just say that Airlie Beach is quite the scene. I guess because people are on vacation, they just think that it doesn't matter what they do? All in all, though, it was fun.

Australia: Airlie Beach

2009-09-15T20:39:00.008-05:00

The next morning, we left Townsville early and embarked on our five-or-so hour drive to Airlie Beach, gateway to the Whitsunday Islands.

There's not much to say about the drive but we did stop in the town of Bowen, where they filmed Australia. According to the Lonely Planet, Bowen stood in for wartime Darwin, even though the cities are about halfway across the continent from one another. We kinda knew we wouldn't recognize anything from the movie, but took a drive into town anyway. Sure enough, there was nothing but a water container on a hill that reads "Bowenwood." Apparently the mayor had it painted on. The only thing we really did in Bowen was stop at the Woolworths for supplies and a bathroom break; they had a display case of Australia DVDs with a sign that said, "See anyone you know?"

We made it to Airlie Beach around lunchtime. I've long had the impression that Airlie is the height of the backpacker scene in Australia, and it did not disappoint (though more on that later). When we got there, we checked into a hostel, Magnums, right on the main street and then sorted out our sailing tour for the next day. We didn't really do much in the afternoon, just went to the lagoon, which is the artificially built swimming area. We also had Baskin Robbins, which I believe was just over $4 AUD for one scoop!

We spent a fair amount of time at the lagoon watching the birds - the seagulls were chasing the cockatoos around and everyone was squawking mightily. The birds in Australia are unreal - they're all sorts of bright colors and some of them look pretty funny, with long beaks and whatnot. They're constantly making noise but it's hardly peaceful birdsong - they often sound like they're being murdered in the trees. A lifeguard that we met that afternoon said that when he leaves Australia, he's always surprised by the lack of noise other places.

Australia: Magnetic Island

2009-09-15T20:23:00.004-05:00

So wow, this day I'm about to blog about was a week ago. How time flies and yet seems so far away. This particular morning, we started out with a visit to the Townsville aquarium, called Reef HQ. It's part of this big museum complex on the waterfront and is fairly talked up in my Rough Guide, so I expected it to be this big fabulous place. It was a bit of a disappointment. It discussed the Great Barrier Reef quite extensively but the displays were nothing spectacular. Part of the problem, I think, was that we had just been diving on the outer reef so little plexiglass exhibits just couldn't compare. As Adrienne said, probably the best part of the experience was seeing this large Aboriginal family that was touring around behind us.

After that, we met up with our Swedish friend Marten and took the 20-minute ferry over to Magnetic Island. The island is so named because when Captain Cook sailed by there in the late 1700s, his compass went all haywire due to the island's granite core. The reason why I wanted to go over there, though, was to spot a koala in the wild. Marten suggested that we take the Forts Walk, so we took the local bus over to the stop and set out in the blazing midday heat for our two-hour walk. On the way, we ran into a couple who told us they had seen a koala but their directions were a little vague - the woman told us it was about 20 meters past the "bumps."

On the way there, we didn't see any sign of wildlife. The views were really nice - we could occasionally see beaches and other islands from our high trail. (It was just gorgeous - blue sky, blue water, white beaches, little sailboats bobbing in the coves...) The trail itself was pretty brush-y. At the end, we reached the main fort area, which had been used in WW2 to protect Townsville from an attack.

However, on the turnaround, we had much more success. I started walking REALLY slowly and scanning all of the trees. Eventually, I spotted a koala! (Can you find him in the photo?) He was really high up in one of the trees just off the path and was curled over himself sleeping. Standing directly under him, we could just see his little face. He woke up for a moment, altered his position, and then went back to sleep. It might just have been the highlight of my trip. :)

After that, we finished up the trail and headed to one of the beaches, at Refuge Bay. It was a long stretch of sand and almost completely empty. It was awesome. After about two hours of hanging out, we took the bus again to the main part of the island, Horseshoe Bay, where the few restaurants are located. We ended up eating at this Mexican place that had the most phenomenal nachos...well washed down with a pitcher of strawberry margaritas. :) We could see the sunset, across the street at the beach, from our table. When dark fell, we caught the bus back to the ferry terminal and headed back to Townsville.

Australia: Townsville

2009-09-10T03:43:00.007-05:00

When we left Mission Beach, we headed first to Petronella Park, which is this ruined castle that was originally built by a cane farmer, Jose Petronella. It was supposed to be reminscent of the castles in his Spanish homeland. I believe it was built in the 20s, and I have no idea why it's such a mess today, but it's a complete stone ruin. The Rough Guide made it sound interesting, so off we went. The reality was a little disappointing. It looked interesting enough but cost something around $25 AUD to get in...and it really is a total ruin, and much smaller than in the photos. On the upside, you can still cross the suspension bridge and get most of the view that way. :)

We spent most of the day, Tuesday, driving. For lunch, I convinced Adrienne to stop in Ingham, which has the largest population of Italians in Australia. Being part Italian myself, I thought it would be fun. There wasn't much to town, so we made our way to the Olive Tree Coffee Lounge for a quick lunch. I had pesto gnocchi. The food was okay; the best part was meeting some of the locals. There were only a couple of people inside, but they were all chatting when I walked in and I got roped into this little prank - one of the men told this young guy that I was his niece, and it launched about 20 minutes of revelry. It's one of my best memories of Australia so far, as I think it really represents just how nice and friendly the average Australian is.

We made it to Townsville around 4pm. Lonely Planet calls it one of the most underrated towns in Australia and I think they're right - it was really awesome. We got there about an hour before sunset and ended up walking to the top of Castle Hill, this massive red rock that looms over the "downtown" area. At the top, there was an amazing view, pretty much 360 degrees, of thethe town, the water, and the outskirts. Then that night, we ended up eating just off the Strand at a nice Thai place, with our new friend, Marten, a Swedish guy who's been working as a dive instructor in Townsville and living at the hostel. At the restaurant, we sat next to these Canadians and found out that they used to live in Santa Fe...next door to my old boss at Outside. How weird is that?

Speaking of our hostel (which was really a converted house)...there was free laundry, which was awesome. But there wasn't a dryer so you just had to put your stuff on the line. The woman warned me, though, that you had to take it down at night because the bats in the mango tree in the backyard would probably poop all over it during the wee hours of the night. :)

Australia: Daintree

2009-09-10T03:22:00.004-05:00

I ended up meeting a Canadian traveler, Adrienne, on the dive boat and we both wanted to do the same thing, which was rent a car and drive down the coast. So that's what we've been doing since last Friday, nearly a week now. First, we actually headed north, to the Daintree and Cape Tribulation, which is a UNESCO heritage site because of the rainforest. You have to cross the Daintree River at one point and the only crossing is on this little car ferry that seems to get across by means of a big mechanical wheel. The drive took about 3 hours from Cairns, and we stopped in cute Port Douglas for lunch. We made it to Cape Tribulation around dinnertime and stayed for two nights in a little cabin (with 5 bunks) in the middle of the jungle, right where the road ends. (You can keep driving to the tip of Australia at Cape York in a 4WD, across crocodile-infested rivers and on an unsealed road.)

The next day, we spent hiking up Mt. Sorrow, which took about 6 hours, mostly a steep uphill. On the way out of the hostel, we had to sign a registry; at the bottom of the clipboard was a newspaper story about tourists who had never returned from the hike. (The story was a little ridiculous though; in the most recent case, a few years ago, the hikers' car was also misssing, so it appeared they had just not re-signed in.) Anyway, the brochure promised a spectacular view at the top but it was mostly a lie! It was nice, but nothing we hadn't already seen from much more approachable look-outs. Still, it was nice to trek through the jungle, even though we were totally sweaty and gross. We did have a moment of panic, though; around 4pm, we suddenly lost the trail. We had an hour before sunset but the jungle was already pretty shadowed. After a few moments of "oh crap, we shouldn't have laughed at that story!" we managed to find the trail again and successfully headed down. We signed back in at the hostel just before 5pm. The woman said that was the time they generally started looking for people. :) We didn't see much in terms of wildlife, just large flies and an eager mouse chasing our crumbs at the top. Cape Tribulation is prime cassowary country but none deigned to make an appearance. The Daintree is also home to crocodiles, but we didn't see any of them either.

We left the area on Monday and headed down to Mission Beach via Mossman Gorge and the Atherton Tablelands. Mossman Gorge is a little swimming hole that apparently can be quite treacherous during the rainy season - there are multiple signs warning that tourists have gotten swept away by the current. In the late afternoon, we drove through the Atherton Tablelands, which is a lauded area to the southwest of Cairns. It's mostly farmlands but some of the towns are supposed to be cute and arty. We didn't stop but it was nice to see the scenery...lots of cows and fields and trees.

Originally we were going to stop and sleep in Innisfail, which is a small town where a lot of backpackers apparently find work at the local banana plantations. When we got there, maybe around 6:15pm but after dark, the guy told us that they had no room and the hostel had a waiting list for months. Which was absolutely shocking, considering that the building looked like something out of a horror movie. (Adrienne compared it to Hostel, which I haven't seen.) As a result, we ended up driving another hour to lovely Mission Beach and stayed at the same hostel I'd stayed in about a week before.

Australia: Food

2009-09-04T06:05:00.004-05:00

I think I've already mentioned how expensive Australia is, but most shocking has been the price of food. It's incredible. I went to a restaurant today and a fountain soda was $4 Australian dollars...or $3.40 US. (As a point of comparison, you can get a room in a hostel for $20 AUS.) And it's not just eating establishments - in Mission Beach, I went to the supermarket and bought a small yogurt for $3 AUS (compared to about 55 cents in the USA) and a big bottle of water for more than $4 AUS. I'm not even sure what the reason for this is. I mean, they grow things here. It's not like everything has to be imported.

Anyone have any insight?

Australia: The Great Barrier Reef

2009-09-04T05:18:00.009-05:00

I've just gotten back from the four-day, three-night Great Barrier Reef trip and I tell you, I am exhausted! Diving four times a day will do that to you, I guess...

I went with Taka Dive, mostly because they were offering a discounted rate. I booked a twin room share but as it turned out, there were only 10 passengers (the maximum is 30), so I was upgraded to the upper deck and had a lovely cabin all to myself. It was fantastic! We probably left the pier around 5pm and headed up the coast, to the Cod Hole, the site of our first two dives. As the name implies, we saw some cod. But we did see other cool things like a white-tip reef shark, a turtle, and even some baby clownfish. This top photo is of a red bass - it's usually silver until it gets excited (in this case, the cod feed) and then it turns red. In the afternoon, we headed to Pixie's Pinnacle where I spent a good amount of my time trying to get a decent photo of a lionfish.

Speaking of photos...I decided to take the PADI photo speciality course, so I spent an awful lot of time with my camera underwater. But I think the results turned out well! See for yourself...

The first evening, we also went on a night dive...my first! I was absolutely petrified. I'm not sure I belong in the middle of the ocean at night. Basically, you jump in with a flashlight and you swim around - when you see little red eyes on the reef, you've found some kind of little crustacean; when you see green eyes in the distance, you've likely found a shark. But (luckily), we didn't really see much...a moray eel swimming along the bottom, a cod breaking apart the coral to get at some critter, and a flatworm swimming. But when we turned off our flashlights, we could see little bioluminescent specks as we waved our hands around.

I won't bore with the details of the other sites...The best was probably Steve's Bommie, which is basically a circular piece of coral coming up from the sand; when you dive it, you start at your bottom depth and work your way up and around. The top of this site, though, totally looked like an aquarium. There were just a million fish swimming in and around the corals and anemones. It was really incredible.

I have to admit though, I was pretty psyched for our trip to end as I got massively seasick on the last night. I'd felt a bit queasy throughout, but with the way we were pitching and rolling...ugg, I won't go into details. Needless to say, I was so excited to see land again!!!

I'm spending the night tonight in Cairns but heading out again tomorrow. I think the plan is to rent a car and head up north to the Daintree but it's still up in the air...so we'll see!

Australia: Mission Beach

2009-08-31T23:38:00.007-05:00

I headed to Mission Beach on Sunday by bus, mostly just to chill out and get over the jetlag. I was hoping it would be laid-back and thank godness, that's exactly what it was. It's just a tiny little area - it's actually five little communities, and the one I was in, Mission Beach proper, was only about three streets long and one street wide. I spent a lot of time just hanging out on the wide, golden beach.

However, Mission Beach is one of the few places left to spot cassowaries, the large bird that looks like an emu. So yesterday, I ended up walking about 4 kilometers to the Bicton Hill Walking Track, as the woman at the hostel told me that people had recently been seeing cassowaries there. The track seemed completely isolated - except for the animals. I kept hearing things rustling in the undergrowth and I managed to spot a ton of tiny lizards, two big ones the size of iguanas (goannas, I think), and even a porcupine. I admit, I actually got a little freaked out - I had been reading Bill Bryson's In a Sunburnt Country over the summer and he spends a lot of time discussing all the awful things that can maim and kill you on this continent. So I was very excited, after about another 2 kilometers, to reach the summit and hear voices. At the top, I met a German backpacker and then an Australian couple. I ended up walking down with the German girl and realized the rainforest was a lot less intimidating with someone else. It was just after noon when I finished the track and emerged back onto the road, and I had started the hot, 4 km walk back into town when a delivery guy pulled over and asked me if I wanted a ride. I only had to think about it for less than 2 seconds and gratefully accepted...my first semi-hitchhiking experience.

Anyway, after two days in Mission Beach, I am now back in Cairns and about to embark on a four-day scuba diving trip into the Great Barrier Reef. Stay tuned!

Australia!

2009-08-31T23:13:00.010-05:00

Here I am, Down Under. It's hard to believe that I've only been here for four days because it feels like forever! Perhaps because it took forever to get here? The flight from Dallas to Los Angeles was about an hour late because the plane had come from abroad and needed to be thoroughly checked (or that's what the flight attendant said). Then the flight from Los Angeles to Sydney left about 2.5 hours late because someone had a medical emergency as we were sitting on the runway for take-off. We were on one of those gigantic Airbus beasts - two levels! - and it took awhile for them to get it turned around and back to a gate. As a result, I missed my connection the next morning from Sydney to Brisbane which meant I missed the connection from Brisbane to Cairns which ultimately meant I spent about 7 hours sitting in the Brisbane airport. Fun! I arrived finally in Cairns at midnight on Friday. Yeah, I left Dallas on Wednesday evening. The only real highlight of the air travel, besides the personalized inflight entertainment on the Airbus, was a spectacular view of the Harbor Bridge and Opera House as we left Sydney.

I don't have much to say about Cairns. Frankly, it's like backpacker hell, and sort of reminds me of the Koh San Road in Bangkok. It's all hostels and tour-selling, not so much friendly or laid-back. It's also incredibly hot and there's not much in the way of attractions, either. During the day, the "beach" area is mudflats pretty much as far as you can see, and the only people enjoying that are the birds, including some rather large pelicans.

There's also a large sign warning you that crocodiles might be present. Did you know there are two kinds, freshwater and salt water? I didn't. Apparently they can just be swimming around in the ocean. But thank goodness, the only ones I've seen so far are these guys. Anyway, so not loving Cairns, I basically just spent Saturday here, walked around, booked a dive tour, and then hightailed it out on Sunday to Mission Beach, about two hours south.

First Port: Ketchikan

2009-08-24T20:19:00.005-05:00

Ah, Ketchikan, my least favorite port. I suppose it's always been last on my list because there's not a lot to do there and then, when it rains – which is pretty much all the time – there's really nothing to do. I'm not exaggerating the town's liquid charms, either; Ketchikan gets on average more than 12 feet of rain a year. So yeah, it's mostly wet.

However, when you work on a cruise ship you get to go on tour for free, so I tried to go on tour as much as possible in Alaska's First City. Why is it the first city, you ask? Because it's the first town you come to as you move north through Southeast Alaska. Ketchikan is also home to Sarah Palin's "Bridge to Nowhere." Since it's located on Revillagigedo Island (that re-villa-gig-aye-do) and an island is by definition not connected to anything, Palin wanted to spend $398 million on a bridge that would link Revilla to the airport on Gravina Island, just across the way, so residents and visitors could avoid taking the ferry. (I've taken the ferry once; I have to say, it's kinda fun.) Anyway, factoids aside...

The first tour I went on, during week two, was the Bear Creek Zipline Adventure. I hadn't really thought of what I was getting myself into until we actually got there – and suited ourselves up with belts and carabiners and helmets and then hooked ourselves onto two small wires. Oh, and then stood looking far down at the ground from a wooden platform. (Supposedly there was a chance of seeing wildlife, like bears, from up there but I didn't see anything but hard objects like rocks and sticks.) Outwardly, I managed to keep it together but the ziplining was pretty nerve wracking..and yet totally exciting. The tour featured seven zips (from platform to platform) and it probably took me about five of them to get the technique right. You jump off the platform and then hurtle across the open space until you get to the next platform. You're supposed to trust the instructor at the other end and only use the hand brake when you're more or less on the platform but I kept stopping myself early...and then I'd be dangling about three feet away from the platform and have to pull myself in by hand. Oops. By the end, I more or less had it together and kinda wished we could try it again so I could test out my new skillz. But alas, the tour ended...with a white-knuckle, potato-sack slide down an enclosed chute. At the end, we had to wait about half an hour for the bus and in the downtime, I saw some bald eagles, both flying around and on a nearby tree. In in its favor, Ketchikan has some great opportunities for random bald-eagle spotting.

Two weeks later, I had the chance to go ziplining again, but this time at the other facility in Ketchikan, on the other side of the island. It was raining when we left left downtown, which didn't bode well for our combo bike and zip tour, but by the time we got to the end of the road (driving past the airport) nearly 20 miles later, the sky had cleared. First, we took a mini-hike into the 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest, which was gorgeous - there was beach and a waterfall and of course, enormous Sitka spruce. Then we biked along the road until we got to the ziplining facility. This one was a little different than the first: The zips were a lot closer to the ground, it was more like an obstacle course, and frankly, we weren't monitored - or tied in - quite as much. But it was still a lot of fun and we all lived!

Vancouver Adventures

2009-08-17T23:15:00.019-05:00

Since I totally failed to blog my eight-week Alaskan adventure working aboard a cruise ship –and I'm about to head off to Australia, where I will attempt to do a better job – I've decided that I'll write one summarizing post about each port of call. Let's start with Vancouver, shall we?

Sadly I only got to hang out in the awesomeness that is Vancouver three times during my eight-week stint since we only docked in Canada once every two weeks and the first and last times I spent the bulk of my time at YVR airport. Originally I was excited about our one-week Vancouver to Seward and then one-week Seward to Vancouver return, mostly because it was something new in my 5th (!) Alaska season, but then I realized that Vancouver is really the only city up there that you can reliably count on for good weather and reasonably priced basic necessities. Alas.

In fact, my time in Vancouver can pretty much be summed up in four words: Stanley Park, Pacific Center. Yes, I either spent time walking around the park or shopping at the mall. Instead of exploring new Canadian things, I chose to spend my time at old favorites, often with a Starbucks in hand.

The first Wednesday that I really got to enjoy in Vancouver was July 1, better known as Canada Day. As soon as we got off the ship at Canada Place, we were thrown right into the street-fair mayhem. There were a ton of booths, offering everything from free food, entertainment in the form of acrobatics, and even information about working the upcoming Winter Olympics. Not suprisingly, there were also a ton of people milling about and most wearing face-painted Maple Leafs and red clothing. Man, those Canadians are patriotic! I wandered around the booths for awhile with some friends but mostly we were heading to Stanley Park. Vancouver is my favorite city in North America and it is 100% due to this park – a 1,000-acre penninsula of trees and grass on one side of downtown. It's a great place to walk or bike, and if you start at the pierside and walk all the way around, you end up, after like 5 miles, at some of Vancouver's beaches. But more about that later...

The next time I was in Vancouver, two weeks later, I had to work in the afternoon, so I was only able to get out and enjoy the city in the morning. I headed to the Pacific Center – hello, H&M! – and ran into a friend along the way. Then, not five minutes later, who did we see but actors Joshua Jackson and Diane Kruger! I knew it was them instantly, although my friend was less convinced. So we followed them into the Apple store for a better look. (Disclaimer: Celebrity stalking is generally not my thing. But it was Pacey!) Anyway, I was mostly surprised by just how ordinary they looked. Which is not a bad thing – it's just that they looked like average people of very average height. They weren't head-turningly attractive. Which reminded me again of how arbitrary and made-up the celebrity thing is. Shame on you, US Weekly!

Before heading back to the ship, I had some time to stroll down Robson Street, whose downtown section is lined with shops. And I saw a guy with a Ginger Man tee-shirt on! I couldn't believe it. (For those who don't know it, the Ginger Man is a bar in Dallas that's right around the corner from my former office.)

I spent my last real day in Vancouver, not surprisingly, at Stanley Park. The first week, I'd walked just a little bit into it and then turned around and come out the same way, but this time, I decided to walk all the way around. Other summers I'd biked the 5.5 miles and in the future, I'll stick to pedaling my way through it. The walking was just exhausting. But lovely. At one of the beaches, I even found some Canadian geese wading in the water.

But near the beginning of the park are a cluster of eight totem poles, all of which are reproductions, I believe. My favorite is the Chief Skedans Mortuary Pole. The original Haida pole, from about 1870, contained the chief's ashes in a little box behind the wood flap at the top.

However, my absolute favorite part of the park is the Lion's Gate Bridge. I guess it's not that exciting when you're actually in the park – it looms over the water and at one point you walk past the concrete base – but it's seriously cool on a cruise ship when you leave Vancouver in the afternoon. The ships are so tall that it feels like you can almost touch it, and there's a weird, muted whoosing sound as you go under. I took the last photo from our balcony (one of the perks this summer as a temporary employee was having a guest suite!).

And that about sums up Vancouver, wonderful city that it is. Next up will likely be Ketchikan, our first and most boring port of call!

News in the News

2009-05-26T20:24:00.002-05:00

I've been ignoring my blog lately, so here are a few stories that I've meant to blog about in the last few weeks and then didn't:

* The AP wrote a story in March about the future of the QE2. A few months ago, Dubai developer Nakheel had alarmed the classic liner's many admirers when the news leaked out that the company planned to gut the ship during its upcoming renovation - despite Nakheel's promise to preserve the QE2's history. But with the economic downtown, speculation arose that Nakheel wouldn't be able to afford a massive renovation and was considering either selling it or scrapping it. According to the AP, though, Nakheel shot down the rumors in a statement, saying that they're currently examining the ship and will proceed with a "restoration." The ship is now docked in Dubai and apparently may be opened to the public in the meantime. So, it seems, the economic downturn is not all bad. In the best possible scenario, the ship is opened to visitors in its original state and never gets "fixed" and stripped of all its best parts.

* The economic downturn has also affected Alaska. Cruises are cheap!

* And then, my most favorite: An American couple anonymously returned a small piece of rock by mail that they'd picked up near the Colosseum during a trip to Italy 25 years ago. An accompanying letter said that they'd always felt guilty for taking it; Roman authorities said the fragment was insignificant but praised the gesture. All was well and the couple in question would have remained anonymous...except that they put their return address on the box. Oops. With enough effort, you could even decipher it for yourself in MSNBC's photo. Not surprisingly, the media tracked the couple down and the wife was identified as Janice Johnsen of Greensboro, North Carolina.

Michelangelo's Torment

2009-05-26T18:49:00.009-05:00

A few weeks ago, the Kimbell Art Museum announced the purchase of a Michelangelo painting entitled The Torment of Saint Anthony. Apparently Michelangelo painted it when he was 12 or 13 years old, although it certainly doesn't look like it was done by a teenager. The painting is fairly small but detailed - although he looks calm, St. Anthony is being spirited away off a cliff by what looks like nine demons.

The painting is especially important because, despite the majesty of The Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo only produced four known on-a-moveable-surface works (in this case, a wood panel). None of the stories say why this is - were paintings lost over time or did he just not paint? - but since Michelangelo was apparently not fond of painting and considered himself a sculptor, I'm going to go with the latter. The Torment of Saint Anthony will also be the only Michelangelo panel on display in the United States, so go Fort Worth. (However, it won't arrive here until the fall, after it's completed its stint at the Met.)

I first saw this story on the AP or Reuters, and whoever it was said that the work had been attributed to the artist, but didn't give much more explanation. So if you're interested in the behind-the-scenes story, check out the Kimbell's version. The press release says that, according to Michelangelo's biographer, the artist was replicating an engraving by German artist Martin Schongauer that he saw in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, whom he was apprenticed to. The Met owns the engraving and the similarities are ummistakable. (Huh, Google St. Anthony and his temptations and you'll see that many, many artists have been inspired by the story of the world's first hermit. There's Dali, Jacques Callot, Hieronymus Bosch, a follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder...)

Back to Fort Worth, the Kimbell is an interesting little museum. Although it's probably my least favorite of Fort Worth's triumvirate (I prefer the Amon Carter for its awesome collection of American works by artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Grant Wood, and Thomas Eakins), it has a kick-ass collection. Instead of focusing on one genre of art, the Kimbell keeps less than 350 works, and picks pieces that display some kind of excellence or special interest. Basically, it's a small museum of masterpieces. It's mostly older works, like religious art and Renaissance paintings, but they do have a few Impressionist works by Monet and Caillebotte, plus this very pink painting by Edvard Munch, Girls on the Pier:

Oh, and if I can promote my own work for a moment, I wrote a story on the Fort Worth museums for Spirit in 2008. So yeah, read it. You know you want to. :)

Lost in the Hills

2009-05-26T18:28:00.005-05:00

Since I refuse to watch The Hills (I absolutely positively hate this show), I am most grateful to outlets like The Soup and Jezebel.com who watch The Hills for me and provide fodder for ridicule. :) The show has always been a bit geography-challenged, but this week's episode clip was the best.

In the clip, Spencer and Heidi go out for a meal with Heidi's father and an unidentified woman. For some reason, Spencer decides to tell him about a bar fight he'd gotten into with his sister's ex-boyfriend a few episodes ago. (I seriously don't watch the show, all evidence to the contrary.) But instead of voicing displeasure, Heidi's dad tells him that it's okay to look after your family and says that perhaps it's "the code of the West." Dumbass Spencer nods sagely and enthusiastically and says, "I'm going to move to the West."

I think you know where this is going, but I'll let the ever-awesome Joel McHale take over, since he can say it much better than I can: "Move to the West? You live in Los Angeles. Furthermore, the restaurant you're eating in is on the beach, so by all means, move to the West. And deeply inhale." Hahahahaha.

If you care to watch the episode, I believe this is it: http://www.mtv.com/videos/the-hills-season-5-ep-8-father-of-the-bride/1611419/playlist.jhtml

Nefertiti Statue is a Bust

2009-05-06T19:25:00.006-05:00

According to the AFP, Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin recently revealed in his new book that he believes the famous Nefertiti bust is a fake dating from the 1912. I say "according to the AFP" because I could not for the life of me find the name of this new book, or anything else about this story besides what the AFP reported. (Okay, now I take that back - France's version of Amazon.com has the book, the aptly named Le buste de Néfertiti : Une imposture de l'égyptologie?) As an aside, Amazon.fr also says Stierlin was born in Alexandria (Egypt, I assume, not Virginia).

Anyway...the AFP story says that German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt had an artist create the bust and used ancient pigments to test out the colors - which is presumably why later testing indicated that the bust was 3,400 years old. When a German prince admired the bust in 1912, Stierlin believes that the archaeologist didn't have the guts to tell him it was a modern creation. According to the article, neither French archaeologists nor their notes mentioned finding such an important treasure, and the bust didn't appear in a report until 1923, despite its alleged discovery in 1912. The AFP story says that Stierlin had been researching this for 25 years.

But more interesting is what the AFP story doesn't say. Ludwig Borchardt is the guy who (now supposedly) uncovered the Nefertiti bust in the Egyptian sand and then smuggled it out of the country. A few months ago, according to Der Spiegel, a document came to light that suggests that Borchardt wanted the statue for Germany so badly that he passed it off as a worthless piece made of gypsum when it came time for the Germans and Egyptians to divvy up the finds, per an agreement, in 1913. Oh, and this "new" document - from 1923. Are both these articles referring to the same thing? Are wildly different theories being proved with the same document? Because if so, um, Houston, we have a problem...

If the Nefertiti statue is indeed a fake, it turns one of archaeology's biggest fights on its ear. The bust lives permanently at the Neues Museum on Museum Island in Berlin. (However, it's being housed as the Altes Museum until the Neues reopens in the fall after a lengthy restoration.) Egypt wants it back. Apparently they've wanted it back for almost a century but Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has started up a fiery debate in recent years by loudly criticizing countries who won't return Egyptian artifacts. I know he's also after the Rosetta Stone, now at the British Museum, and at the King Tut lecture in Dallas, he spoke about the fight to regain a 3,200-year old mask from the St. Louis Museum of Art. (By the way, this debate surrounding these "stolen" antiquities is my FAVORITE subject. But that's for another post...) But back to Nefertiti: What happens if the bust is a fake? Everyone lays down their arms and goes home?

PS. Interestingly, just about a month ago, there was a flurry of stories about the bust, after scientists gave the sculpture a CT scan - and thought they discovered wrinkles under the painted and pristine exterior.

Buenos Aires Gets Fashionable (Again)

2009-04-20T22:00:00.008-05:00

Another month, another magazine featuring Buenos Aires as the setting for a fashion spread. O: The Oprah Magazine devotes eight pages of its May issue to the Argentine capital. While, for the most part and like Lucky, the backgrounds aren't terribly recognizable (and yeah, I guess the point is a focus on the clothes), the editors added a decent amount of location information on every page. In my humble opinion, they did a good job of combining the need-to-know fashion details with interesting facts about the city -- and in limited space.

This first photograph was snapped outside of Bar El Federal. From the photo, I though it was this historic bar near Recoleta Cemetery, but Google tells me it's on Carlos Calvo in San Telmo. Which means I should know where it is, since our very awesome program director, Mario Cantarini, lived on that street. In fact, I think he still does.

This second photo was taken in Palermo Viejo, the neighborhood that I lived in at the end of my junior-semester exchange program. Originally I lived with a family in Belgrano, further out, but after a series of mishaps (like the dog pooping all over the apartment and the housekeeper going through my things), I moved in with a very nice widow in Palermo. Besides the peace and quiet, I appreciated the fact that Palermo was on the metro line (and at the time, Belgrano was not), which saved me many hours of bus travel when going to class.

The only thing strange about the story was the travel information page tucked away at the very back of the magazine, on page 216. With the brochure-like photographs and advert speak, it reminds me of the travel credits you see at the very end of game shows, like Wheel of Fortune, when they thank the companies that donated the airfare and hotel. There is also absolutely no reference to this information anywhere in the eight-page photo spread. Which makes me wonder...was O "persuaded" to choose Argentina? They wouldn't be the first magazine to take freebies or dance the line between editorial and advertisement but still, it strikes me as strange and a little false. Which is too bad, because the photo spread is really lovely.

Anyway...apparently good things come in three: after Lucky's previous Buenos Aires feature in March(http://myoystertheworld.blogspot.com/2009/02/lucky-in-buenos-aires.html), the May issue with Elizabeth Banks on the cover also features B.A. as the Shopping Report destination. It's officially a trend: Buenos Aires is en fuego! I'm also thinking that it's a sign - I haven't been back to Buenos Aires since early 2001, when I worked on the Norwegian Dream. That's much too long. (Though when I looked at airfare, Australia was about $200 cheaper and I REALLY, REALLY want to go to Australia this summer. And short of dismemberment or dengue fever, I am going!)

Visit Zimbabwe?

2009-04-05T18:19:00.006-05:00

I came across this funny-but-not-meant-to-be-amusing article on the Yahoo! travel page the other day about Zimbabwe and the government's pleading for more tourists. Apparently the government recently put on a tourism convention in Harare and the Vice President urged Western nations to lift the current travel warnings. (The United States implemented a warning on December 12, 2008 due to "deteriorating safety and security conditions" and "the near collapse of the country's public health system.")

I think I found the story amusing because of the quotes. Like this one, from VP Joyce Mujuru: "Let us all publicly and emphatically condemn violence of whatever form and jointly celebrate achievements of the new political dispensation." The story notes that she's a loyal Mugabe supporter. I'm sure they would love to have big numbers of tourists back but it doesn't seem like anything has really changed in Zimbabwe, despite this sudden burst of PR.

Cholera has killed more than 4,000 people in every region of Zimbabwe since the initial outbreak in August 2008. In a February 26 story in The Guardian, the writers said, "The president declared the epidemic over even as the numbers of dead were growing ever more rapidly, and claimed the spread of the disease was all a British plot." The story continues by citing Doctors Without Borders, who said the previous week that the situation was spiraling out of control - while the writers noted Mugabe was about to spend $500,000 on celebrations for his 85th birthday. A World Health Organization update, from March 23, noted that while cases were decreasing (only 2,000 reported the week before, compared to 8,000 a week in early February!), there is a very real possibility that a new outbreak will begin in and around Harare.

You'd think cholera would be enough. But Zimbabwe really hasn't done much to rectify the other reasons they've gotten a bad rap...like, say, creating this weird, kinda fake, one-dimensional "coalition" goverment so Mugabe could stay in power even though he lost the election and instituting a failed land reform/seizure program that destroyed their agricultural production and their economy.

So yeah, sounds like fun, right? But actually, I couldn't have said what Zimbabwe's attractions once were (although this time, I at least knew where it was on the map). So once again, I teamed up with my friend Google. MSNBC actually chose it as one of their 29 places to visit in 2009 (Although there's an editor's note after the entry, it warns about hostilities in...Israel.) MSNBC acknowledged the political issues as a valid deterrant, but pointed out that a safari in Zimbabwe comes at about half of the price of one in neighboring South Africa. Zimbabwe is also home to Victoria Falls, the world's largest waterfall, and the cool-sounding Great Zimbabwe Ruins, built between 1250 - 1450 AD, thought to be a royal compound, and containing Ming Dynasty pottery. Plus, I would imagine, a trip to Zimbabwe also holds the promise of danger/adventure and the thrill of traveling to a place that few other people have been to. I like those kinds of places though I think I'll hold off on Zimbabwe for awhile. :)

Read the story:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20090325/ap_tr_ge/af_travel_brief_zimbabwe;_ylt=As.ZHYNeDLK65ZukemmllVr7Uc0F
MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27806454/page/3/

Is Charleroi Ugly?

2009-04-05T16:19:00.008-05:00

While surfing the Internet the other day, I came across a story in the Sydney Morning Herald (which may have originally come from the Telegraph) about an "urban safari" in Europe's ugliest city. The place in question is Charleroi, an industrial city in southern Belgium, that I've only vaguely heard of. (If pressed, I probably would have said it was in France. Zut alors!)

According to the article, the Carolos (people of Charleroi) themselves acknowledge that the city may be the most depressing place in Europe...though I'm guessing there are parts of Eastern Europe that could give any town in Belgium a run for its money. But anyway, the urban safari focuses on a couple of notorious places: The place where artist Rene Magritte's mother committed suicide, a memorial garden that used to be the site of serial killer Marc Dutroux's house, an abandoned factory, and slag heaps. While it's not necessarily a place you'd go out of your way to visit, the story mentions that people unwittingly pass through it on their way to Brussels if they fly Ryanair, since "Brussels" is "Charleroi" in budget-travel speak.

I've got In Bruges on in the background right now, and Colin Farrell has just told his love interest Chloe a Belgian joke about chocolates and child abuse. I loved this movie, mostly for its no-holds-barred, cringe-inducing humor. To get back at him, Chloe says that one of the girls "they" murdered was a friend of hers. I've never understood this reference, but now I'm wondering if it's Dutroux and his associate? The dates and circumstances (which I refuse to mention here) seem to fit.

Anyway, interestingly, the story (or any of the sites that linked to it) doesn't name the tour company or give a link to its website. But Google fairly quickly solved this problem for me. The company is Charleroi Adventure. It sounds like the company got a bit of flak after the story came out since there's an explanation/apology in French at the top of the page. It essentially says: We never meant to hurt anyone and we actually find the landscape of Charleroi to be quite inspiring - and we thought attracting people with the negative would in fact be a good opportunity to show people the positives (notably a burgeoning art scene) that would help change their opinion of Charleroi.

I guess we'll have to go on the tour and see for ourselves. The photo on the homepage makes Charleroi look - ironically - quite beautiful.

The tour: http://www.charleroiadventure.com/index.php?page=home

SMH story: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/dreary-one-day-depressing-the-next-20090330-9h11.html

Diamond Hunting

2009-04-05T15:16:00.006-05:00

The other day I found myself on minonline.com and intrigued by a headline: Obama, Pitt and Arkansas Diamonds Hike Site Visits. I guess I didn't read it right because I totally thought it meant that Brad Pitt and President Barack Obama had traveled to Crater of Diamonds State Park together. How did I miss that?

Haha, I didn't. The "Arkansas Diamonds" refered to this fascinating Smithsonian story - The Curious Case of the Arkansas Diamonds from January 2009 - about an amateur diamond prospector who may have planted diamonds at the park to be able to claim big finds. Basically, this 33-year-old carpenter, Eric Blake, would visit the park a couple of times a year and on one occasion, in October 2007, found 32 diamonds in less than a week. Keep in mind that a fair number of people visit the park and never find anything. (I have no doubt I would be one of those people.) Anyway, Blake's 3.9-carat diamond is worth about $8,000 - if it came from Arkansas. If it didn't, its value plummets to a few hundred dollars.

I had no idea that provenance played a role in a diamond's worth. According to writer Brendan Borrell, "Arkansas diamonds fetch about ten times more per carat than comparable stones, largely because collectors value the diamonds' American provenance and unique character. Many of the stones are smooth and rounded like a drop of glass, and they are among the hardest in the world." Diamonds from different parts of the world also look different. The only comparable stone to an Arkansas diamond comes from a specific mine in India. Who knew?

Back to the story, people became suspicious but there was no proof that Blake did anything wrong. Then a few months later, a diamond dealer accidentally discovered a link between Blake and an Indian dealer. Eventually, the two guys worked together and they now claim that Blake's famed 3.9-carat diamond really came from a guy in Belgium. For his part, Blake denied that he had done anything wrong, but also agreed not to return to Crater of Diamonds. The story is pretty convincing, but the truth, alas, remains unknown.

I've been dying to go to Crater of Diamonds for a couple of years now. (Since I read a story about someone's fabulous find, in fact, and it may actually have been this one.) And I really have no excuse - Murfreesboro is only about a four-hour drive from here. While I have the absolute worst luck, I don't have high hopes, but how awesome would it be to find something? And despite the name, there are a variety of gems to be discovered, including my personal favorite, agate. Fun!

Read the story:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Curious-Case-of-the-Arkansas-Diamonds.html?c=y&page=1

Zahi Hawass in Dallas

2009-03-25T15:30:00.010-05:00

Last night I went to another Arts & Letters Live talk, this time with Dr. Zahi Hawass, archaeologist and Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, at SMU's McFarlin Auditorium. The last time I was there was for a Pearl Jam concert. :)

I ended up going last minute with a friend who had an extra ticket. I'd considered getting one earlier and while I had wanted to hear him talk generally, I thought it would be a rehashing of the Tut exhibit - which I wasn't terribly keen on - since the lecture was titled "Mysteries of Tutankhamun Revealed." But the lecture was awesome and not really about Tut at all.

I think most of the audience was surprised when Laura Bush introduced Zahi Hawass. My friend and I had spotted Secret Service in the parking lot but thought that the Bushes were just attending the lecture. (It didn't look like George was there, in the end.) Anyway, apparently this was Laura Bush's first public appearance in Dallas. She talked a little about her two trips to Egypt when she visited with Dr. Hawass. She looked good - eight years in the White House doesn't seem to have aged her much, unlike the toll it takes on the boys.

I thought Dr. Hawass was just going to speak at the podium, so I was pleasantly surprised when he accompanied his talk with a slide show. He talked about so many things, and gave so much information, that I can barely remember it all. There were a few times when I didn't completely understand what he was saying - although his English is pretty darn good - but he was funny and interesting. I've also realized that I need to go back to Egypt NOW. I only went to the Sinai when I was there in 2004, and while it made the most sense because I was only there for a week, I also regret not seeing the Pyramids. I guess I kinda thought that I'd have gone back by now. :(

So Dr. Hawass talked about a variety of different projects. I always assumed that they'd found the majority of the tombs - and all of the important tombs - but Hawass said that they've probably only found about 30 percent. For example, they're still looking for Nefertiti's tomb and the side-by-side tombs of Antony and Cleopatra.

While Hawass is clearly passionate about all aspects of archaeology - and may have the most fantastic job in the world - he said his number one goal is to find Nefertiti's tomb. After excavating and exploring the tomb sites of her family - which includes her stepson, King Tut - they think they've finally zeroed in on her location. Unfortunately, it's located right underneath the very nice-looking Antiquities office they've built into the rock. Hawass said he'd just given the order to have it razed so they can start looking.

He also spoke briefly about the search for Antony and Cleopatra. They've narrowed it down to a few possibilities near this ziggurat-looking temple to Osiris, in Alexandria. During the question-and-answer period, he also mentioned a French expedition's search for Cleopatra's palace, which is now underwater. Apparently they've found some pillars but they have no inscriptions.

Hawass also talked about excavations at the tombs of Seti I and Shesestet. One of them had this amazingly detailed walls, covered in colorful and vivid hieroglyphics. I had no idea it would look like that - I guess I expected them to be dull after thousands of years, although I suppose the sealed-for-eternity part helped preserve them. Hawass showed a lot of photos of him exploring, going down shafts using ropes and pulleys or climbing up these rocky passageways. He always looked like he was enjoying himself.

He also spoke about receiving a CT scanner a few years ago and how the machine has really allowed them to make rapid progress. ("Rapid" being relative, of course.) The CT, for example, disproved the long-held theory that Tut had been murdered - instead, it showed the broken leg that likely killed him. Hawass also talked about Queen Hatshetpsut's mummy that had been long misidentified. If I am recalling the story correctly, Hawass said that Howard Carter took "Hatshetpsut" out of the tomb, but left another mummy there. Hawass ended up taking that unidentified mummy out. (Apparently there are a number of female mummies that currently lack identities.) Then one night, he had a sudden inspiration to scan the liver/stomach from Hatshetpsut's (labeled) canopic jar. He found part of a tooth - and it exactly matched the broken tooth in this unidentified mummy's mouth. And thus, it appears that the real Hatshetpsut has been found.

Toward the end of the talk, Hawass showed slides posing with his celebrity visitors: Jeffrey Katzenberg with Hugh Jackman and his wife Deborah Lee Furniss, Chris Rock and Ben Stiller, Brooke Shields, George Lucas, Naomi Campbell, Elle MacPherson, Greg Norman and Chris Evert, heads of state like Bill Clinton, Hillary and Chelsea, Laura and Barbara Bush…

Then at the end, there was a short question-and-answer session (although the questions had been submitted on notecards before the talk started). Hawass tried to encourage visitors to Egypt, saying that a terrorism attack can happen anywhere and that Egyptians are friendly towards tourists, and Americans in particular. But in a following question, he said that he thought it should be more expensive to visit Egypt because the current cheapness brings the wrong kind of visitor. He advocated for fewer people who come specifically to appreciate the country. He said that if you can buy a pair of shoes for £500 and also a trip to Egypt for £500, then it seems that Egypt has relatively little value. I had to chuckle to myself. I bought an all-inclusive trip (with airfare!) from London to Sharm El-Sheikh for £500 - and I swear, I totally appreciated it and loved every second of it! (Well, except when this guy tried to pick me up by insisting he was a prince. But that's a story for another time...)

Vampires: Real or Imagined or Just Plain Undead?

2009-03-12T22:54:00.023-05:00

Some posts ago, I mused about whether or not Stephenie Meyer's Volterra vampires had any basis in reality. The answer seems to be no, but while I was trolling the Interwebs yesterday, I came across this crazy/strange/awesome story about the existence of a Venetian "vampire."

A forensic archaeologist from the University of Florence discovered a 500-year-old female skeleton that was evidently buried as a vampire while excavating a mass grave filled with victims of the Black Plague from 1576. She had a brick stuffed in her mouth because apparently people in the Middle Ages believed that "vampires" would feast on fellow dead and then rise up and spread the disease to the living. The brick prevented that. The discoverer, Dr Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence, was quoted as saying that people may have believed this because plague victims would dribble blood out of their mouths when they died. (But only women could become vampires.)

I guess I find this so interesting because it seems so ridiculous - to my modern mind, it's hard to believe that people took the idea of vampires so seriously that they would break dead women's teeth to protect themselves from it. I'm also always amazed at the seemingly far-fetched explanations that long-ago people came up with to explain natural and biological phenomena. Was the idea of undead people roaming the countryside really the easiest concept to believe? So weird, so strange, so incomprehensible, so FASCINATING. And it's also so mind-boggling to think about how we got from there to here over 500 years. I love history.

Okay, now I'll admit what my primal instinct says - Vampires are friggin' SCARY. When I went to Romania in fall 2006, I did a self-guided Best of Vlad Tepes (aka Vlad the Impaler aka Dracula) tour, visiting Dracula's castle in Bran, Vlad's childhood home in Sighisoara, and his supposedly burial spot in Snagov. Historical record shows pretty clearly that while Vlad was a mean man who learned a ton of torture techniques during his time at the Turkish court, his identity as Dracula stemmed from the wild fantasies of an Irish writer named Bram Stoker. Who never stepped foot in Romania, by the way. But nonetheless, Transylvania made me nervous. I felt especially creeped out in Sighisoara, this tiny medieval-looking town whose old core has brightly painted houses and cobblestone streets...and long shadows in the late afternoon. Even though I can absolutely debunk this myth with my rational mind, there is clearly something inherently frightening and persistent about the idea of vampires that has kept it going for more than 500 years. I don't know what it is...but I sleep with a brick under my pillow regardless.

Vlad Tepes is supposedly buried here at Snagov Monastery, which is this little church on an island about an hour from Bucharest that you have to take a rowboat to get to. Although the grave didn't have a marker, he and his father had both given money to the monastery and he was believed to have been murdered nearby. The corpse that was exhumed in 1935 was headless, which fit since Vlad had been decapitated. Fun times!

This is just a random photo of graffitti on the pillar inside the monastery. I was surprised that it was so defaced, since the monks were watching the visitors like hawks the day we went. Who knows when it's from, though...

This is Dracula's Castle in Bran. Its link to Vlad may actually be fictionalized - he's thought to have attacked it at one point. But it looks scary and stony perched on its hillside so now it's become Dracula' mythical residence. The interior is from the time of Queen Maria of Romania, who lived there with her family in the early 1900s. Nothing too intimidating about that but it does have a secret passage.

These last photos are all from Sighisoara, the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. In the first photo, you can clearly see the omnipresent Clock Tower; the orange house at the base is Vlad's childhood home. Today it's a restaurant with a dragon sign.

I went in with a Canadian guy I'd met on the bus from Sibiu. Sighisoara was really quiet that afternoon, so not surprisingly, we were the only people in the restaurant. The interior was painted a deep red, with low ceilings, wall sconces, and heavy wood furniture. We ate crepes.

Links:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126985.200-vampire-discovered-in-mass-grave.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1160548/Forget-stakes-Vampires-slain-bricks-500-years-ago.html

Elizabeth Gilbert Speaks!

2009-03-10T19:36:00.009-05:00

I completely spaced and forgot to post a post about attending the Arts & Letters Live talk two weeks ago featuring Elizabeth Gilbert! Which is ridiculous and silly because it was a great talk. And I got "my" book signed afterwards - "mine" in the sense that it was a Christmas gift to my mother that will no doubt eventually find a home on my shelves.

I've never understood the hate directed toward Eat, Pray, Love but theorize that it's a disguise for envy. One comment I've often seen on blogs is something along the lines of: Who does this woman think she is, getting divorced and then traveling around the world for a year? Which seems like such a strange ignorance; she was a successful journalist who had already written three books, and that's the way publishing works when it comes to getting sweet book deals. I guess people resent that she's an "overnight" success because of this kick-ass trip? But of course, there was no overnight about it, which is what I think the casual reader doesn't realize. So I found it funny, as I was Googling the date of the event, to immediately find that a FrontBurner reader proved the first point: "Sheesh, wouldn’t we all love to flit around the globe when ish gets tough, doing yoga and gorging ourselves on food and wine. but we don’t. we suck it up and deal with life like normal human beings." And then, right after, to see that Joy Tipping of The Dallas Morning News agreed with the second. Oh, I am en fuego today!

I don't know, I guess I don't see life as this competition where only one person wins - I believe that there's always room for another piece of good work. And if you work your ass off like she did, eventually the bookshelves will part to make a space for your novel too. Or whatever it is that you're wanting to do. This is the answer that keeps me going, anyway.

Anyway, Elizabeth Gilbert is a marvelous speaker. I'm guessing she says more or less the same thing at all events, but she managed to make it seem off-the-cuff. Sadly though, I'm having a hard time remembering what she talked about. It wasn't much about Eat, Pray, Love or a new book, though, which I found interesting. She did talk at the beginning about this illusion that success equals having it together. That people assume that because she took this voyage of clarity and then penned a bestseller and married her Brazilian, she's conquered life and now holds all the answers. Which struck me as funny-strange because on the drive over, I'd been talking about the exact same thing with my friend, how people we went to high school with appeared to have "figured it out" while realizing that was likely an illusion. I'm not sure it makes me feel better though - there is some comfort in believing we can cross the magical finish line into a life of ease and contentment, where it's all mint juleps and sunshine. Or is that just me?

Want to hear Elizabeth Gilbert wax poetic about creative genius? I first saw this talk - from the February TED conference - linked on Jezebel. Commenters were not kind, though I suspect that most didn't listen to the actual talk, and instead focused on the idea of helpful fairies and skipped the part about the hard work. And, like EPL - love it or hate it - she's undeniably honest. Here she talks about her freakishly successful book (her words), chemical engineers, and the fear that her best work is already behind her.

Anyway, esta aqui: http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

Travel + Leisure Wants Me to Take a Trip

2009-03-10T19:14:00.002-05:00

While I was surfing the Internet this afternoon, I landed upon Travel + Leisure's homepage...and discovered an awesome story about traveling despite the recession. I mostly thought it was awesome because it defends exactly what I have been thinking about doing for the rest of 2009: Sticking it to the economic woes and going on walkabout. The stock market won't improve because I sat at home dreaming of all the places I could be instead, right?

Writer Claire Berlinski says: "And while lachrymose columnists often paint employment losses as a personal tragedy, you could also look at the situation this way: fate has given you a clear directive to figure out what you most want to do with your one short life on this planet—and what better way to do that than to travel?" I totally agree—and wish I had thought of this pitch. I've kinda been the poster girl for this sort of wandering. T+L's website also has an accompanying slideshow with 10 work-travel ideas, like growing Kiwis in New Zealand (which I've heard is actually fun), writing a novel in France (more fun), or becoming a yoga instructor on Koh Samui (ugg, I hate yoga).

So yeah, at the moment, that's kind of my plan, and I'd like to thank Travel + Leisure for sticking by me as I've fretted over it uncertainly for the last four months or so. It seems sort of reckless to spend a good chunk of my savings; on the other hand, I always feel more happy/brilliant/possible/alive when traveling. And as a writer, I suppose I can always pretend it's for work, a sort of continuing education. :)

At this point, my travel itinerary is only half-formed. But I'm kinda thinking an element of scary/crazy (Dubai and Oman), tossed in with random wanderings across Western Europe to places I haven't been (Belgium, Amsterdam, southern Italy, most of Spain...), and finished off with a thorough exploration of Australia and New Zealand. All done on a backpacker's budget, with a side of freelancing. Doesn't that sound nice?

http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/top-vacations-for-the-newly-unemployed

Pay As You Go?

2009-02-27T18:09:00.003-06:00

This morning in Ireland, Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary suggested that passengers on his no-frills airline will eventually have to pay one pound (or $1.40 right now) to use the toilet in-flight. According to the AP story (below), no one knew whether or not to take him seriously because on the one hand, he apparently says outrageous things just to get media attention -- but on the other, he's a pioneer of the no-frills concept and continues to push the definition of that term.

The people quoted in the article seemed shocked and most everyone said or suggested that at Ryanair, profit is more important than passengers. One commenter suggested that the plan could backfire because passengers would stop buying drinks in order to avoid the loo. But after my initial whaaa?, I'm not sure it bothers me that much...as long as those airfares stay as ridiculously low as I remember.

I just looked up, out of curiosity, a flight from Dublin to Brussels on March 12. It was 3 Euros, plus tax, at a grand total of 26 Euros. I'm not sure you can beat that. Now, of course, that's not the end of the story: You have to pay another 5 Euros to make your online reservation, 5 Euros to check in at the airport (online is free, but you can't do online if you're checking a bag), and 10 euros to check in one bag. (You can check in up to 3 bags, the next two at 20 Euros each, but total they can't weigh more than 33 pounds. So why would you ever need three for 33 measly pounds? Anyway...) So in my scenario, with one bag, the total would be 46 Euros or $58. Compared to our airfares here in the States, it doesn't seem so bad. Personally, I don't need the drinks or the food in-flight and I can generally amuse myself. I can also pee in the airport beforehand - these flights aren't generally too long anyway.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090227/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_ireland_ryanair_pay_toilets

Grow Your Own Ancient Fun

2009-02-27T17:37:00.007-06:00

I was at Borders the other day and as I was waiting in line, I browsed the rack of mini-books, one of my favorite pasttimes. I own a couple myself - a mini-Buddha and a Grow Your Own Bonsai (which never grew). But the other day, I found my absolute favorite kit: Grow Your Own Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

It's just so random. Who thought of this? The book (and the photo here) make it look like fun, though prior experience tells me the stone bit will be even more tiny than you think and the seeds might be too old to grow. But still, it's an amusing idea. Who doesn't want to grow their own Ancient Wonder of the World?

That's about all I knew about the Gardens (that, and anything gleaned from playing Civilization) until I looked it up on my good friend Google. I couldn't find many reliable sites but it seems they were probably built by King Nebuchadnezzar II sometime after 605 B.C., when he came to power in Mesopotamia (or present-day Iraq). He is thought to have built them for his wife, who missed the flowery green of her unspecified homeland in the Babylonian desert.They're thought to have looked like the above, a series of terraces using some sort of irrigation system, but it's not 100 percent known. Interestingly, I also learned that Babylon housed the Tower of Babel, which I may have known once in some remote part of my brain but have since forgotten. The Tower of Babel was supposedly an attempt to reach heaven - but the God got pissed off and dismantled it and flung people all over the world and gave them different languages so they couldn't communicate, and thus cook up any more such harebrained schemes again. (Nebuchadnezzar's version was a re-build; presumably he learned the lesson and didn't make it quite as tall.)

Grow Your Own here: http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780762432424

Lucky in Buenos Aires

2009-02-27T16:56:00.007-06:00

The March issue of Lucky magazine uses Buenos Aires as the setting for its "Spring Trend Special," a 27-page story highlighting the trends we'll supposedly all be wearing in the upcoming months. It's lots of suits, florals, sporty and structured pieces -- but I was mostly just interested in the fact that they used Buenos Aires. So I excitedly turned to page 156 to see one of my favorite cities and briefly former home.

And then I got confused. Because in the photos, you can barely see the background. The setting doesn't look like anyplace specific. (In fairness to Lucky, you wouldn't know they'd gone to B.A. unless you'd read it in the tiny photo caption on page 70.) I guess I was just surprised that you'd travel all the way to Argentina with all those clothes, and maybe even the models (I recognize one from previous issues), and then not really use it in the images. Because Buenos Aires has some cool stuff. I'm guessing they wanted a locale that looked like spring (ie, without dead winter branches creeping into the background), but wouldn't Miami have been a lot cheaper...and a lot easier...if you weren't incorporating the setting?

I tried to take a few stabs at guessing where the locations are, but am failing miserably. There's one shot where the model appears to be standing on a balcony in front of a lake or river -- maybe Tigre?

Here are some other shots:

I'd consider betting that this is one of the big trees in the Plaza San Martin.

I'm going to say the Teatro Colon, but I don't think I'm right.

I'm pretty sure this is one of the wrought-iron bridges that are kinda behind the Casa Rosada, where the strip of really expensive steak restaurants is. How's that for memory? I can picture it, and can see the general area on Google map, while not really being able to descibe it. Alas.

On a final note, something else caught my eye in this issue. On page 122, cover model Camilla Belle talks about her favorite things. There's an $895 black dress, a $479 thin jade bangle, and that's all fine enough...I think they're supposed to talk about things the rest of us can't afford. (Isn't that one of the perks of being a celebrity?) But I was suprised to see that she picked Vera Wang's Princess perfume - and that Lucky chose to run a pull quote on it. Because Camilla Belle is the spokeswoman for that perfume, and these choices are seemingly supposed to be personal (and not paid endorsements). So what's up with that?

2009's "Cheap" Destinations

2009-02-17T17:07:00.003-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, Smartertravel.com had an interesting piece entitled "Eight Places Where Your Money Goes Further" (link below). I assumed it would be eight actually cheap places, like Central America or Eastern Europe, but instead the writer went with eight places with a better exchange rate than last year (ie relative value). As a result, she picked the United Kingdom, Iceland, Euro-using Europe, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, and Hungary.

It's an interesting philosophy, but I'm not sure if I agree -- or would pick these same eight places. Some, undoubtedly, are great values without condition: Argentina, Mexico, Jamaica, and Hungary all seem fair choices. Australia is cheaper than America, but I wouldn't classify it as cheap. But I don't know about the rest. On the one hand, there is something to be said for visiting these iconic places when it's as cheap as it can get -- as opposed to it ever being intrinsically cheap. Because fair enough, England will never be inexpensive to visit. On the other hand, paying $1.40 for a pound still hurts, especially in this economy.

I guess the biggest surprise on this list was the Euro countries. While I don't think you want to go a lifetime without seeing Paris or Rome, I'm surprised to find these countries on a list of value destinations. Since the euro's introduction, it's soooo much more expensive to travel in Western Europe. (I admit, I don't even get the euro. It doesn't even seem to benefit the natives outside of like, England and Germany. But anyway...) In this category, I absolutely would have chosen Europe's non-Euro gems - which more or less amounts to Eastern Europe. When I went to Bulgaria and Romania two years ago, it was ridiculous cheap (really, ridiculously), mostly incredible, and lacking tourists. Sounds like a winner to me.

I also would have added some Central American countries to this list. Argentina is awesome and supposedly cheap now (when I did my study abroad there in 1997, the peso was still tied to the dollar, yikes!), but the airfare still costs $800. I like it as a choice, while still pointing out the cheapness of countries like Belize and Guatemala, which you can fly to for around $400. And I love Europe, I do, but there's something to be said for being a tourist in a non-touristy country. The experience just always feels more authentic. And quiet.

Link: http://www.smartertravel.com/travel-advice/eight-places-where-your-money-goes-further.html?id=2813657&source=specialreport&value=2009-01-26+00%3A00%3A00&u=SLD9696789

Going Overboard

2009-01-18T14:28:00.005-06:00

There seems to be a lot of news lately about cruise ship passengers falling overboard. Perhaps I've just been oblivious for the last three years, but I don't think I've seen this kind of headline since 2005, when George Allen Smith IV disappeared from a Royal Caribbean ship during his honeymoon in the Mediterranean. Now, in the last three weeks, I've seen three different stories about missing people.

The first was about Florida journalist Jennifer Ellis Seitz, who disappeared from the Norwegian Pearl during a Christmas cruise in the Caribbean. Her family thinks she may have jumped. In the second case, cruise ship workers saw a fellow employee fall overboard from the Carnival Sensation during the wee hours of New Years Day about 20 miles off the coast of Florida. The 25-year-old, Anthony Matabang, was apparently standing on the rail taking a photo -- and he has not been found. And most recently, an unnamed elderly couple is thought to have fallen from their balcony on the Carnival Paradise, somewhere between southern California and Mexico, this week.

These stories make me sad, but I am glad to see that the anti-cruise ship frenzy has not started up again, like in 2005. I wrote a story about this for National Geographic Traveler for the July/August 2006 issue (you can read it on my website), arguing that cruising is one of the safest vacations you can take. I worked on ships for six years and never once did I see or hear about someone being pushed overboard. People fell, sure; I knew one guy who got drunk and jumped off the back of the boat in full view of like 10 other people (in retrospect, I see that having an outside crew bar was a stupid idea). I also heard of a casino employee on another of the fleet's ships jumping overboard after a break-up, and once we rescued someone from a little ship anchored right next to us outside Vancouver after passengers on deck heard her yelling from the water. These are mostly sad stories with unhappy endings, but never once was malice involved. I feel for Smith's family, but fixating on the disappearance as a crime would, I imagine, prevent you from accepting, fully grieving, and then moving on as best you can. (Yes, I know authorities did call his disappearance "suspicious.") Having said that, I haven't seen much recent news since his family tried to file a lawsuit against RCI in January 2007 that was dismissed. The only new story was from July 2008, when his wife, Jennifer Hagel-Smith, said during a court appearance over her million-dollar settlement that George had mixed prescription drugs and alcohol that night. It's a sad story all around, really.

If you're interested in reading more about the George Allen Smith controversy, Bryan Burrough wrote a fantastically researched piece for Vanity Fair in April 2006, entitled "Honeymoon Over." Vanity Fair doesn't have it on their site, but you can read a PDF here: http://www.bryanburrough.com/other-work/

The Times Online on the Smith case:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article762480.ece

As I've been Googling around, I see I've been wrong about the lack of recent disappearances. The Baltimore Sun published a list of incidents on December 29: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/sfl-1229overboardincidents,0,3999260.story

Jennifer Seitz Ellis:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081230/ap_on_re_us/missing_cruise_passenger

Anthony Matabang:
http://origin-www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-flpcruise0104sbjan04,0,3496700.story

Elderly Couple:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,480304,00.html

The Famous Vampires of Volterra

2008-12-13T18:06:00.006-06:00

...or perhaps not so famous. After reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, four books meant for a completely different generation, I started wondering whether or not the Italian city of Volterra actually had their own vampire legends. (Updated post here, by the way.) In Meyer's books, a trio of old bloodsuckers called the Volturi maintain order in the vampire world from their walled headquarters in Tuscany. I was more than a little surprised to find out that it was all fiction -- mostly because Forks, Washington is a real place and the Quileutes are a real tribe whose legends say they descended from wolves (not exactly werewolves, but there's some link to reality).

Actually, I am not 100 percent sure that Volterra has no vampire legends; it's just that when I google it, only Twilight-related links seem to pop up (along with links to Aro, Caius, and Marcus' MySpace pages). Instead, Volterra seems to be better known for its links to the Etruscans, the mysterious and ancient Italian civilization that I know nothing about. Actually, I'd never heard of Volterra before either, even though it's near cities I've visited, like Siena and San Gimignano. Conveniently, the New York Times is here to help.

If advertised tours are any indication, no doubt flocks of teenagers have descended upon Volterra looking for the Volturi. (Apparently the same thing has happened in Forks, with people looking for Edward and Bella.) Umm, kids? It's fiction. Bella Swan and Edward Cullen do not exist. But I suppose it's no worse than what Bram Stoker did, turning Transylvania into a vampire circus. Above, my photo of Sighisoara -- the town where Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Dracula was born -- at night. It's ghostly...but that might have been the fog. :)