17 July

We spent the next day at sea, which, unfortunately, meant formal night. Ingrid is into that sort of schicky micky tam tam but it’s a waste on me. I had the suit. I wore it. At least this time we didn’t share a table with silly old American couples painfully discussing the pros and cons of different cruise lines. Formal nights in the Rembrandt dining room always made me long for the casual ease of the Lido. There I could always count on geezerly Americans teetering around aimlessly, stumbling into me in their cluelessness. I’m not making fun of them because they were old and disabled. Their physical limitations were no issue. The fact was that they never seemed to know where they were headed and would bounce back and forth indecisively like a 90s screensaver. I suggested the Lido would make a good video game like Pacman, because while you grabbed your food, you also had to dodge the wait staff. Any number of blue shirted Indonesian staff were always milling about like Pacman’s ghosts. They seemed to maintain a 2:1 ratio with the passengers. Their main goal seemed to be to stand where the passages were narrow and/or clogged with clueless people. Because I was clearly at an advanced level of Lido Pacman, they had an extra task with me. Like I said, they usually just stood around, maybe talking amongst themselves, but always standing in narrow areas. When I came by, they sprang into action, asking, nay demanding, that they help me. If I did not physically resist, they took my tray out of my hands. I tested this once. I let the evil blue Pacman ghost take my tray. I didn’t give it t him. He said, “Let me help you” and took it from me. Then he put the tray at a table where I didn’t want to sit. I thanked him and picked up the tray and put it next to the window. One time, between the salad bar and the table, a distance of maybe 10 meters, I was told I needed help seven times! That takes training.

I know these guys were instructed to offer help at every turn, but you’d think, after being rejected by me meal in and meal out over ten days, some would lose their persistent edge. But even on the last day, I was accosted as the first. I was in line one day with the director of hotel operations and I should have told him to instruct his staff: “if you see a guy without hands, do not help him.”

The final element of this Pacman involved the food itself. There was one server in particular who was baffling. His English was serviceable but he had the shortest attention span ever. I’d say, “Can I have this sandwich please?” He’d point to the same sandwich. “Yes.” Then he’d look away for a second and then look back at me. “Soup?” he’d ask. “No, still this sandwich thanks.” He’d nod and put the sandwich on a plate and then forget to give it to me. It was remarkable.

Before I caught on to his antics, I had asked him what the brown sauce in a wrap was. “Thai peanut sauce?” I had suggested. “No, pesto” he replied. “But pesto is green, not brown,” I insisted. Without a word he walked away and through a door. I waited. He returned a minute later. “Thousand Island,” he confirmed. I nodded and took it. It was Thai peanut sauce.

Kiel was simply a port they added to the cruise to round it out. It’s a nice town and all, but it doesn’t really warrant a Baltic cruise stop by itself. It was bundled in conjunction with a tour of nearby Hamburg, which we didn’t need. We walked around the Kiel downtown. That took about ten minutes. Some locals were sitting in a biergarten and I agonized about joining them. It was before noon but the bier was simply too tempting. By the time I first sipped, though, it was afternoon – by a few seconds.

Our cruise concluded the following morning in Copenhagen. They swept us off the ship and hurried to get ready for the next batch of passengers. Unfortunately the line for the taxis took nearly an hour, and, by the time we got to the hotel, Analyn had been waiting in the lobby for quite awhile. It was great to see her after being at sea so long with 2000 of AARP’s best.

16 July Stockholm

The next day found us in Stockholm. We cajoled some befuddled American septuagenarians to share a cab with us into town. They were muddled over the new currency while my mother tried her Swedish with the cabbie. Unfortunately, he was from the Middle East and boasted speaking many languages since he’d lived in Sweden 15 years. However, neither his English nor his Swedish were able to bear the burden of actual communication. Maybe he could sing along with songs?

We dropped the befuddled Americans off at the Royal Palace, which my mother disclaims to be the ugliest in Europe before anyone else can criticize its grey blockiness, hulking on a small hill like Lenin designed it. We wandered through Gamla Stan, which Ian pronounced like a Central Asian country. “Let’s see Gamla Stan,” I said, “I hear it’s near Afghanistan. I sure hope the Americans haven’t destroyed it too.” But they hadn’t. The Swedish postcard and t-shirt and Viking hat industry already had.

We stumbled upon the Nobel museum and I was curious to learn more. We later won a trivia game point by knowing that the awards are in six areas: medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics and peace. I’d like one in peace or maybe literature. The museum explored the history of the prize to some extent and touched on a few winners briefly. But mostly it was about Alfred Nobel and his life, which was remarkable, but not nearly as interesting to me as the former winners.

To complete our Nobel tour, we also visited the City Hall where the prizes are given. A very chipper Swedish-Chinese young lady guided us around and showed us how to walk down the staircase before accepting our prizes.

15 July

But my point remains; our floating hotel was docked in Helsinki the next morning. Being old veterans of Helsinki after our last conquest in the early 90s, my mother and I esteemed ourselves to be beyond the shore excursions and bus rides to the center of town. We wandered through the docks to the public bus and rode it downtown. Finnish, incomprehensible as it may be, was much easier for us than Russian. I had been puzzling through the Cyrillic by process of elimination and scouring my databanks since I had the script memorized in 1990. Suddenly now everything was in Roman script and there were cognates from time to time to guide us. Heck, we could pronounce some of the words! Most people seemed to speak either English or Swedish.

We had decided we wanted to see the church dug out of a rock. We did. It was. See pictures.

Helsinki is nice. It’s clean. It has some things to see. We walked around a lot.

Ian, the shore excursion director, had recommended a certain bus line in Helsinki. Ian, you see, was available 24/7 on the ship’s closed circuit TV, talking about our next destination, looped over and over. We found said bus and it promptly drove us away from the city center. The buildings were getting smaller and smaller and ever less interesting. Ian, you see, was wrong. But he was a pompous Brit (sorry, is that redundant?) and neither of us wanted to correct him. Plus, we had gotten second place in Ian’s Travel Trivia and didn’t want to jeopardize our shot at first – which we won the second time around. Luckily for us, the bus eventually looped back into town. That was enough Helsinki for us.

14 July The Hermitage

In the afternoon, we tackled the Hermitage. There are three things you must know about this visit:
1. It was hot
2. The Hermitage is huge
3. It was damn hot
4. The Hermitage has great art
5. It was fucking steamy I tell you
6. Only 3% of the art is on display and none of it seems well preserved so go now if you ant to see this stuff.
7. Still hot as hell

We saw some Rembrandts, Cézannes, Picassos, Monet, Da Vinci (2 of his 20 paintings) and some other great crap that if I list here I’d put in even worse order than I already did. I’m not the biggest painting guy but this shit was for real. I was impressed.

But most of the art was just hanging there on the wall. I mean there were no cords, no glass, and security was a portly old Russian woman fanning herself in the corner looking out the open window. Sunlight hit paintings, and I was certainly afraid for the heat. Apparently, a few years ago, some guy went at a Rembrandt with acid and a knife. They stopped him before he could render it utterly unsalvageable. The Russian authorities wisely put glass in front of this restored painting. But the ten other Rembrandts right next to it are completely unprotected. I could have licked it without consequence.

Ingrid and I left deeply concerned, not only for what we saw, but also for the untold treasures in some vast cellar. If this is how they treated the “best” 3%, what did they do with the rest? I can only advise you, dear reader, to hurry to St. Petersburg to see this art while it lasts.



It would be dramatic to say the sun set on us leaving St. Petersburg and rose on us in Helsinki. However, at this latitude, the sun didn’t ever fully disappear. Sure, it dipped below the horizon somewhere just before 11 and rose at probably 3, but the sky never got fully dark. You might not be able to read a book outside at 1AM, but you could certainly see a nearby island.

14 July

The next day we woke early to catch a bus to Catherine’s palace. Had I written this the day after it happened, I might have told you for sure if it was Catherine I or II. But, for now, I’ll go with II. It’s another big amazing palace with gobs of gold and Versailles imitations right and left. This one even features the Amber Room. I had never heard of it, but that hadn’t kept it from getting apparently quite famous. Anyway, if you like palace type stuff, I recommend this one. Our guide was good, the garden was pretty, etc. Blah blah. See it or don’t, but me describing it is an injustice to everyone.

One point I will pick up on, however, is the evil German soldier. Apparently he is guilty of destroying much of Europe – Peterhof and Catherine’s palace among them. I have no beef with the story of the evil German soldier except that it always seems to stop there. Why did the soldiers tear up the amazing wood floors of the palace? Well, because they were Nazis. Period. Nazis do that sort of shit.

I have uncles who were evil German soldiers so forgive me if that answer seems a bit too easy. Did the soldiers realize they were destroying expensive and beautiful art? Were they ordered to? Were they freezing? Were they starving? I guess we don’t care. They were Nazi soldiers doing what Nazi soldiers do.

It’s a huge pity all that stuff was destroyed. And there is no doubt who is responsible. But the discourse is a bit odd. When we got to Kiel, the shore excursion director spoke about how so much of the medieval part of town had been destroyed by the RAF. It was a pity, but he couched it in terms of it being the German’s fault for building a fleet there. Had they not, of course, the Brits would not have been compelled to bomb it to smithereens.

In this Allied Good Guys and Axis Bad Guys story, however, the main points get lost. The plain fact is that war sucks. It demolishes history, art and culture, in addition to human lives. I care far less about the agent doing the demolishing. Generally those who are strong and want something from the weak, take it. This can mean theft, rape, murder, war and genocide. This is the human problem.

Moreover, when we talk about war between nations, we are not seeing the larger forces at work. Germany and Britain and Russia didn’t fight. The elite from each of those countries forced (at gunpoint or through brainwashing) the average man to fight and the average woman to clean up the mess. These are the people who miss their beautiful medieval town center. I’d say they’d miss their intricate palaces, but I doubt most Russians ever saw those from the inside anyway.

After we finished our tour of Catherine’s palace, we were treated to a lovely chicken supper. They sat our boatload of hundreds of Americans in a small dining room and began serving us. Unfortunately the excellent service and sumptuous food was entirely upstaged by the heat. It was noontime and the temperature outside was nearing 40. Inside we had a couple hundred bodies in a small room with windows nailed shut (presumably against the cold) and no air conditioning. Doing no more than moving their forks to their mouths, people were dripping with sweat. I don’t use that phrase lightly. Everyone at our table had splotches of sweat on their shirts and beads on their foreheads, which would occasionally run down their faces and onto the table or their laps. At some point you just had to laugh and stop worrying about it.

13 July

(written 8 August)

I last left you, gentle reader, somewhere in the Baltic between Tallinn and Saint Petersburg. This episode will be composed along the lapping shore of Lago Maggiore. I exaggerate; I am really 2 km from said lapping shore. Actually, I am in the Locarno Youth Hostel, vaguely responsible for 25 American college students. Two little girls are on the lawn below, counting how many consecutive passes they can make with a – with one of those things you hit with a skinny racquet and it’s shaped like a cone with a rubber tip and fake feathers. Badminton?

Anyway, I digress. Get used to it. To catch you up I need to go back about three weeks. When one travels, as I have remarked often before, time somehow seems to slow. It seemed much longer than three weeks ago. I think this conflation of time and space in the form of travel is related to the Aboriginal concept of Songlines but don’t press me for elaboration on that connection. I sing in the car.

St. Petersburg was hot. Unfortunately that’s the first and last thing anyone can say about it. There are one trick ponies, there are single-issue voters. Our sojourn in St. Petersrburg was a one-adjective stay. It reached 40 degrees. That’s over 100 Fahrenheit. It usually only shoots up to about 22-24 in the summer. That fact, combined with a shitty economy, means, you guessed it: no air conditioning. Plus, this is no airy fairy loosey goosey California dry heat. This is the real McCoyshavic.

Regardless, we had a great couple days in St. Petersburg. The first day featured the fore-referenced S- trip to Peterhof, Peter the Great’s palace. We shoved all my mother’s charges into steamy busses and sat in traffic. St. Petersburg is much like how I left it in 1990, but with some selective polishing. The tourist areas are spruced up but the vast majority of the city is soot-covered grey Leninist apartment buildings. I appreciate Lenin’s attempt to provide adequate housing for all people, but the aesthetic consequences are appalling. Ironically, the tourist attractions are all vestiges of everything pre- and un-Communist: churches and palaces. It didn’t seem like anyone had dolled up a grey block building for clumsy octogenarian American tourists to sample the spectular wonders of the proletariat.

Peterhof is a big palace with lots of gold shit and paintings in it. It’s nice. I recommend it. You have to put hospital slippers over your shoes so as to not mar the ornate wood floors. Our guide had given us all short-range radios, but, as I was in charge of our busload, I had to walk in back and make sure no one got left behind. Not only did I fall often out of range, I was constantly holding back the onrushing tide of a massive Korean tourist group. They could have kicked our group’s ass and I think they might have wanted to.

Nevertheless, we escaped the amber mirrors and Dutch porcelain ovens of the stuffy halls out into the stifling sunshine where we had a few minutes to admire the fountains, which, supposedly, somehow run on gravity. And I am talking about the type that squirt up in the air. I got too ambitious and went all the way to the Baltic shore and had to sweat profusely to get back to the bus.

Ingrid joined our bus for the return and got enmeshed in a conversation with our biggest complainer. I fell asleep in the muggy heat and traffic stench.

About 45 minutes after we got back to the ship, we were due on another bus to take us back into town. Not only were we aware of this, we had made all 63 charges aware of this. We had some minor Lido lunch artifacts with us, but I wanted more so I tried to dart back aboard. Unfortunately, as I was immigrating back on to the ship, and I do mean waiting in line to be examined by a customs official, I remembered that Ingrid had my ticket to the next trip and she was lounging back in the waiting room, legally in Russia. Although only having one shore excursion under my belt, I correctly surmised that without this ticket, I would not get a landing card nor bus ticket back on the Eurodamm. I asked the stiff customs officer (I guess since she’s Russian that’s redundant to anyone who remembers Elton John’s Nikita video from 1986) if I need another landing card to re-enter Russia in 30 minutes. Of course I did and she wanted the one I had with me. Thinking quickly, I said I wanted to not immigrate but to remain in Russia. I was tempted to use the word “defect” but this tough chick had no sense of humor. She told me I had to now embark on the ship. I knew this would mean missing the next shore excursion so I grabbed my passport out of her hand and pushed back against the line. The Americans in line, being proponents of vast personal space, let me through despite the customs officer’s protestations. But I dodged away quickly and was free! Back in the USSR! Well, the waiting room anyway. I quietly and humbly finished my pesto wrap from lunch.

For the evening they bussed us to a big theater in the middle of town. The newcomers from the ship on the bus were clean and fresh smelling in the evening musty air while Ingrid and I stank like we had just crossed the Sahara. It was fun. The 15-20 busses from the 5-7 cruise ships pulled up to the theater and channeled us in like cattle. An accordion player pandered to the audience by playing “America the Beautiful” and “The Saints Go Marching In.” I don’t think his ploy worked.

We sat in the auditorium for about an hour before the performance started. As the wooden seats filled up, the air got warmer and thicker, eventually disappearing altogether. The thermodynamics were well suited to St. Petersburg 360 days of the year, just not that night. I eventually passed out – during the slow number right after the Cossack dancing.

The show was actually quite good. They sang and danced and played “folk” music. It might have been from the Hit Parade for all I know, but it sounded authentic to me. I’m sure the Viking-Pilgrim lady was convinced anyway. The costumes were resplendid in millions of colors and the songs were catchy and fun. I fell asleep during the ballads. They were great but I had run out of oxygen and needed something kinetic to keep me alive.

Perhaps not so obviously, the great convenience, indeed, the principle behind cruise ships, is that my same bed was waiting for me that night. The same bed that greeted me after the Warnemünde victory evening and where I slept after exploring Tallinn. Everything was where I left it, save slight alterations made by Ron and Yus, the stateroom stewards. They might have added a piece of chocolate and twisted a towel into a peacock or monkey for some aesthetic frivolity.

12 July 2010

A cruise is a strange event. The logic is clear: a floating hotel where your stateroom can be in seven European cities in ten days. The food is plentiful, the entertainment abounds, and nearly every day you have a new port to explore. Maybe you can even befriend the Smiths from Des Moines over a Scrabble game.

Yet the socio-political ramifications of this septuagenarian Shangri-la are staggering. The amount of water, electricity, gas and people-power consumed are beyond reckoning. The opulent and corpulent Americans boss around the grinning obsequious crew from Indonesia.

Today my mother and I explored the old town of Tallinn. We sat in the shade of the City Hall and watched an international folk music and dancing competition. An Asian-American woman sat next to us and carefully mouthed to us, “Do you speak English?” I told her we came off the same ship as she did. Tallinn isn’t very big and the ship holds 2000 people. Plus, it’s not real hard to spot an American tourist, especially one of Asian descent. She was shocked I knew. She asked what bus we came in on and we told her we walked. “Oh my God, how did you find your way so far?” she gasped. Well, you could see the old town from the ship and it was a twenty minute walk. Sensing we were experts, she pushed things up a notch. She pointed to some of the folk dancers waiting for their turn to take the stage. “Don’t you think it’s warm for these people to dress like that?” I carefully explained to her that these were folk dancers and that tomorrow they will be dressed much like us. She nodded thoughtfully. “Are these what you call Vikings?” My mother later told me I did a stoic job of keeping a straight face. “No, I think they were a bit earlier and not quite from here.” She nodded again. “I see, so more like pilgrims, then?” My mind raced through all the possible interpretations of that word and I figured the simplest answer was to just agree. She nodded again, clearly edified by our interaction, and wandered off into the crowd with her husband.


People have asked me why I would be ashamed to be an American. If she, or the sparring couples last night at the formal dinner bragging about how many cruises they’ve been on to places like CanneS, were the only American ignoramae other than our former President, I might not feel so strongly. But this exchange in the shade of the Tallinn City Hall was merely emblematic of a much deeper darkness in the aging Empire.

Ingrid and I have been working hard as the representatives of her travel consortium. In fact, Ingrid is haggling with Onshore Excursions on the phone at the moment. We are “responsible” for some 68 people who have booked though a S- travel agency. S- is a consortium of agencies that have come together to increase their collective buying power. Our job has included running around the ship the first day, greeting all our people. It may not sound like much, but you try running up and down a 2000 person cruise ship, locating some 30 staterooms. It took us two hours, and some major patience as a lot of people had a lot of complaining they needed to do. It’s fun to see Ingrid in her professional capacity, assuaging clients’ concerns, fielding questions and listening patiently to how cruise lines discriminate against single people because they have to “pay twice as much per room.” Hmmmm.

Yesterday we hosted a cocktail party where we had to greet people by name, field questions, and explain the free S- tour tomorrow. Of course, I also had the honor of distributing the invitations room by room to said party. But my mother explains the logistics. We are precariously close to having earned this “free” cruise.

Two days ago we were in Warnemünde, which is a German Baltic sea resort. I have heard of such places all my life, but to finally see one was something special. Especially on a Saturday in July during a heatwave – it must have been about 32. It’s fair to say I saw Warnemünde in full swing. The beach was packed, the promenades were full. But it was great to have an afternoon in Germany, especially this particular Saturday. For at 20.30 the third place game between Germany and Uruguay started. After a leisurely supper on the harbor, reveling in my favorite food and beer, I had asked a few locals where I should watch the game. I found my place at the bar and ordered a hefeweizen. Customers greeted the owner informally and by name. Life was good.

I’d never watched a German World Cup final (not qualification) game in public in Germany before. I had never really been surrounded by such partisan fans before. When we, and it was “we,” scored the first goal, the tiny seaside resort town erupted. Die Mannschaft was playing aggressive, attractive football, and everyone in the world knew it. When Uruguay equalized, the mood dampened, but we were still optimistic. A few minutes before half time I had to run for the bus to take me to the ship. The streets, which, 45 minutes before had been almost too crowded to walk, were now nearly empty. Third place game or not, it mattered.

It was the same bus driver who had driven us into town. I had chatted quite a bit with him before. He didn’t speak English and had been a bit lonely driving these ship passengers back and forth all day. We talked about how much Warnemünde/Rostock had changed since the reunification in the last twenty years.

Once the bus pulled up to the ship, I heartily shook hands with my new friend and ran to the ship. The harbor security guys knew who I was and why I was running. I raced right into the second half onboard the Eurodamm. The fans were mostly the non-American minorities onboard, watching the BBC via satellite. The BBC somehow erased the score and time that the South Africans put on the screen. So I was shocked when the people next to me told me it was 2-2.

As is typical of a “neutral” audience, they were strongly anti-German. It seemed a bit annoying since Germany has played some of the most attractive football of the Cup and we were in Germany. But, the game was exciting and colorful on both sides, and, of course, I was pleased with the result. Maybe I’d been a bit more pleased had I been able to stay in that little bar in Warnemünde.