Cruising

Warning: the events detailed in the following posts are not necessarily presented in chronological order.  The writer of this blog is not responsible for any confusion this may cause the reader.

In May of 2010 we sent Pia and Silviu on a cruise of the western Mediterranean.  Unsurprisingly, they loved it.  As soon as possible they wanted to go again, this time with us.
In the meantime Mihai and I were trying to figure out the best method for transporting ourselves to Turkey and in the middle of one driving-versus-flying debate someone suggested an eastern Mediterranean cruise.  Herein seemed to lie the solution to everything.
Except I've never really pictured myself as a cruise sort of person.  Ladies who order rhinestone covered sandals off QVC are cruise people.  College-age Americans who drink themselves into embarrassing stupors at each port and crawl back on board like feckless reprobates are cruise people. None of my footwear sparkles and I disapprove of public inebriation so what business did I have taking a cruise I wondered?
I have friends who have cruised before and they tried to disabuse me of my misconceptions by pointing out that there is far more to it than wearing sequined garments and vomiting in trash cans.  "They've got basketball courts and arcades for the kids." they assured me. "There's a theater on board." and then the clincher:  "There's an all-you-can-eat buffet."
Mihai was sold, the kids were sold, and I was left to battle it out with that relentless affliction of mine: claustrophobia.
Who remembers watching The Love Boat back in the early 80s?  I recall some wizened adult looking over my shoulder at the TV screen and commenting "Cruise cabins aren't like that at all.  They're the size of match boxes and they stick you in the hull." For the past 30 years those words have been stuck in my brain and once Mihai actually paid for the tickets I started losing sleep over them.  I checked to see how much diazepam I have left in my panic-attack stash (turns out it expired two years ago but I still use them-I think the correct term for this is the placebo effect).
I considered going to the doctor to get a prescription for few preloaded syringes of lorazepam, 1.0-2.0 mg each which I could carry around with me and inject as needed like diabetics do with insulin.  Or something like an epi-pen only instead of a bee sting it would be the sight of the sleeping quarters that would send me into shock.
I wondered if worse came to worse if I would be allowed to sleep somewhere on the deck or if I would have to hide myself under a tarp like a stowaway.
On our last night in Rome I was tormented by images of dark, airless holes and kept sticking my head out of the bathroom window to suck in air as if I could somehow store it for the next six days.
Then we got on board and I saw the room.  A window.  Above sea level.  A bathroom almost as big as the one we use upstairs in Obedin.

Did I feel stupid?  Yes.
Having an irrational fear of something is really a drag.

I found out my friends really weren't exaggerating: there is a basketball court and a movie theater as well as miniature golf, pools, jacuzzis and a running track which, had I known I would have brought my running gear so I could have used it.  Its been far too long since I've broken a sweat over anything other than worrying over sleeping in small spaces.

Since I had no running shoes the only thing left to exercise was my brain so I spent most of my free time in the library where I ended up meeting a lot of nice people who were neither binge drinking nor wearing anything that sparkled.  It ended up being my favorite part of the ship (Luci joined me when the card rooms got too full of "old people playing mahjong")

Second favorite place: the dining room.  Mostly for the unexpected pleasure of meeting yet more very nice people who work on board: Indians, Filipinos, Turks and, lo and behold, Romanians which was actually very cool since one of them was our waiter.  What are the odds?  (actually there are a lot of Romanians working on cruises so the odds are not bad at all that we would meet a few but I didn't know that beforehand)

The dining room was awesome except for the fact that it aways made me feel like I was dressed like an unmade bed.  Guess I should have packed with greater care or paid more attention to The Love Boat.

 A few views of the boat.  Population and square footage-wise I think it's bigger than Obedin.

Views from the deck.

Needless to say, I can see why my in-laws were so thrilled the first time around.

Rome

When in Rome: drive on crowded streets, get on crowded buses, eat in crowded restaurants, visit crowded tourist sites.  Then go to your friends' home and relax and enjoy yourself in the peace and quiet that can come only from a private residence.
Yes, we drove on the streets of Rome.  We received many words of warning from well-meaning friends who had witnessed the madness.  But they'd never driven the streets of Craiova or Bucharest and while I have no interest in creating a competition between whose city streets are the most harrowing and where it requires the greatest amount of courage and/or insanity to get behind the wheel, let me just say that there was nothing in Rome that I hadn't seen on a Romanian road already.
Rome has scooters, Romania has wagons and potholes large enough to bury an average sized farm animal. I think that makes them even.
So...Vatican, fountains, restaurants filled with shouting waiters and shouting patrons (it is Italy after all) and all sorts of old and important stuff which we saw on a night tour with Sorin, Ioana and Paul (marathon walking that was) while the kids stayed back home with Sergio and Ioana's parents and they all watched soccer matches and played video games.  A perfect arrangement for us and them the although they missed getting gelato but I won't tell if you won't.

Rome by day and Rome by night is lovely but this is where the magic really happens:

at home with friends.  Can't beat it.

Bologna

During the past few months we've spent a good deal of time driving around here and showing the sights to visiting friends and relatives.  The result is that I have been essentially posting the same content over and over again but trying to disguise the fact with interesting photos of Romanian road conditions.  Were you fooled?
It's not as if I was deliberately setting out to make this blog repetitive and boring but you know the saying, "Write what you know" well, heh heh...
But now we're off on a 3-4 week adventure to see sights heretofore unseen.  I won't tell you where exactly because that would spoil the fun and quite possibly ruin whatever chance I might have had for capturing and holding anyone's interest.
We still have Linda in tow and because she's never seen Budapest before, we made yet another tour there.  What can I say?  I love that city and it's right smack in our path whenever we journey westward.  As for the merits of visiting the same place so many times I will quote Linda who said "Budapest far surpassed all of my expectations".  So there.
But I won't bore you with photos of it again.  Photos in the rain no less.  Because yeah, we're traveling in late October and you just never know what you're going to get weather-wise.  But we are not fair-weather travelers so we are unfazed.
So past Budapest, west through Hungary and Austria (once again, territory we've already covered but wait, we're getting to the new stuff) and into Italy!  850 km in one day and this is a testimony to how anxious Mihai is to see this country that he was willing to drive it all in one go.
For the most part it's a lovely (though long) drive but admittedly those out-of-the-car-window shots are never very inspiring and even less so when its raining.  So we didn't take many.  We just sat back and did what normal people should do: watched the landscape rush by and listened to music and ate our apples and salami and the special U.S candy that Linda brought for the boys.  Snug as bugs we were.

At Linda's recommendation we settled on Bologna (seems to me Michael and Lisa used to live here-does my memory fail me?) as the first city on our Italy tour.  We arrived on schedule but discovered that the restaurants (the sit-down type) don't start serving until 7 which left us with time to hop on a very crowded bus and wander through the city looking for a bank.  The leftover Euro we had from Barcelona was too pathetic an amount for pricy Italy.
Even in a cold rain with a hungry belly the historic downtown Bologna is beautiful and luckily not that complicated to figure out since we had very little idea of where we were going or how to get there.  You know that bewildered feeling you get when you first arrive in a new city, darkness and rain notwithstanding.  For the most part I would say that we did a very admirable job of maintaining our good manners and civility even though we were cold, wet, hungry and disoriented, bravo for us.   The toll that the aforementioned circumstances took on us can be seen from the rather pathetic photos we managed to get that night.  Usually Mihai is a champion of night shots but there was something about the combination of the rain and the repeated statements of "let's eat, let's eat, let's eat" that kind of threw a damper on his creativity.  Sorry.
Italians have a habit of closing up their businesses whenever the mood strikes them and normally I am totally in favor of this sort of business practice since I think the American model of "make money at all costs" is destructive and unappealing.  However, when two of the three restaurants your concierge has recommended turn out to be randomly closed for the evening and when it's getting close to eight and you're wet, you know what it does...?  well, actually, what it does is make that third recommended restaurant such a welcome sight that you find everything charming and warm and lovely and delicious and you just want to grab and kiss every darn Italian waiter that pours your wine or hands you another plate of bread.
Or maybe that's just the result of the red wine on a really empty stomach.
The next day things get drier and a little less confusing and the photographs come easy.
So.  Bologna.