McMediterranean

Why the interesting title you ask? Well, this cruise and probably the next cruise we have to take time in port like it is golden and cram a lot into little time AND we don't get a real paycheck or payday until the 30th. So in essence we get the drive thru of the Mediterranean. Fast, cheap, and common. No exploring the finer details, or experiencing things at leisure. It's what's popular and what's quick. That is because the first couple cruises (what in ship lingo is called changeover) are mostly rehearsal times. We arrived in Lisbon exhausted from our 12 hours of travel and loss of 8 hours in our day in the afternoon on Wednesday the 20th. We settled into our NY style hotel rooms at the Holiday Inn and decided to go out and find authentic Portuguese cuisine. We found a cute little "hole-in-the-wall" place the hotel recommended down the street. It was nice, but not so cheap. The Euro here is going to kill me. It exchanges at $1.00 US to a range of $0.75-0.81 Euro. Not good when things appear to be more expensive in the Euro dollar than they even are marked at the US price. Which just means they are almost twice as expensive. Yikes! Anyway, I had a good meal. By the way, coke and bottled water here average $3.00 Euro a glass!! Whoa!!! This ain't no supersize or refillable cup either. Just a small rocks glass for the coke. So we were so exhausted after dinner we didn't experience the night life or see the port since we had to be on the ship at 9am the next day. Bye bye Lisbon for now until we reach it again in June. The next day was Cadiz/Seville in Spain. I'll just have to wait until next time. I saw it from the ship, does that count? We had a sea day where we put up our first show which went well and then we got to Barcelona, Spain. Five of us managed to go off real early before rehearsal and we had a Spanish style breakfast at a little cafe. It was St. Georges Day there (equivalent to Valentine's Day in the US). The men buy the women flowers and the women buy the men books. It was considered a national holiday so a lot of the businesses were closed. The streets however were lined with flower and book vendors. It was a Sunday morning, so EVERYONE was out by the time 11am came around. The streets were packed. The architecture of these extremely old places just fascinates me though. I was enthralled. Also strolling the streets in spring weather with flower vendors all around gave me a nice happy feeling. The book theme was relevant to the holiday. Romance novels were a dime a dozen. Sex books were also very popular from the pop-up Kama Sutra book to your standard issues of Playboy-like magazines. We hurried back to port after a glorious 2 hour rendez-vous to the town for rehearsal. Awww. I missed Monte Carlo entirely since I had "In Port Manning" duty. From my previous stories, you know that 30% of our cast has to be on ship in port in case of an emergency. Our duty is to direct people to safety. Oh well. I saw the most beautiful port ever from the ship and I know we'll be there again twice more. Today was a quick trip through the little town of Livorno in Italy. It's the coastal portal to the Tuscan countryside. Florence is a mere 40 minutes away and Pisa is just 20 minutes. Both by train. HOWEVER, today is also some sort of national holiday so everything was pretty much closed or running off schedules. Trains weren't what the schedule said they were, shops in town were closed, and the city was pretty quiet. We tried to take an early train to Pisa, but the schedules were running too late and too infrequent. We would have missed rehearsal. That would have been trouble. Nevertheless, I did take in a lovely cappuccino at the train station and had REAL pizza in town. Yum!! One thing I must say about Europeans though and crowded busses. My friends think a stinky car in the Manhattan subway is bad, well that's pretty much everyday living over here. Whoa!! Someone needs to open a market of deodorant over here. Splashes of perfumes and cologne mixed with natural odors are not pleasant and sometimes they don't even do that. Oy! It was back to rehearsal and then we had some time afterward. Two of us made a mad dash to port only to discover that by the time we took the shuttle into town we would only have 10 minutes to explore. Awww. So, we went into town and discovered gelato!! Yum. I had chocolate of course and my leading lady had strawberry. Both were fabulously delicious. Tired from the day we got back on board and I took a nap before our late dress rehearsal. I can't wait to see more.