News

Big Weekend

2008-05-20T18:35:00.003-04:00

So you may say, "Sarah and Greg, it has been ridiculously, absurdly long since your last update; what are you hiding from us?" And for most of that time, the answer would be "Nothing." We get up, we go to work, we come home, rinse and repeat. But seeing as it's more than two months since the last post (and a few days before our eleventh monthiversary), I believe I'll tell the story of this weekend.

Friday we went to a super cool event called Savor (and in fact we are visible, if not recognizable, in one of the photos now cycling on that page). Forty-eight craft breweries each brought two beers, and a catering company supplied canapes, soups, and chocolates for pairing. Rather than just wandering around and tasting at random, we attended a class (sorry, a salon) on beer and cheese pairing, presented by just about the most knowledgeable beer guy we'd ever heard. His name is Garret Oliver, he wrote the award-winning book The Brewmaster's Table (a good Greg gift if you're in need of one), and if he's giving a presentation within 100 miles of you, go.

After the class, then we wandered around and tasted at random.

Saturday was Wine in the Woods, where we also refrained from wandering and spent more time in classes. Even though the event wasn't overly crowded (it was the same day as the Preakness), it's still frustrating to push through clots of people for a measly ounce of wine, so we attended all four demonstrations, where you sit comfortably while people bring you two ounces of wine. Now we're talking. The presenters in the demo tent are from the local branch of Tasters Guild, and every year we leave the demo tent, brochure in hand, with every intent of joining. Maybe this year.

We went to the "Wine 101" and white wine classes, then left the tent briefly for provisions (cheeses and jerky), returning for red wines and dessert wines. We were unimpressed with the desserts they chose, and one of the reds had been selected for demonstration specifically because it was so bad, but we always enjoy the presentations themselves, and we always learn something. This year it was how to open a champagne bottle (and, conversely, how to open a screw-top with at least some level of panache--apparently something sommeliers have been concerned about for some time).

After the demos, the event is only open for another hour and a half, much of which we spent dancing to a fun band called King Teddy, who had brought a following of dancers from northern Virginia. Once the area in front of the stage became too muddy, we grabbed a few more samples and headed out, making this the first wine festival we ever attended without buying anything!

Sunday we participated in the first ever Washington Post Hunt, organized by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten, and Tom Shroeder, who have been doing a similar thing for 20 years in Miami. We met up with a bunch of folks from the National Puzzlers League (another club we're not members of), divided ourselves into teams, and had a good time despite not coming close to winning. The hunt began with five puzzles to be solved in three hours, followed by a metapuzzle to be solved as quickly as possible. We solved the first group in about an hour (and most of the time was taken up by walking from one clue to the next), broke for lunch with an air of confidence, and then everything went downhill from there. If you're interested in a play-by-play, Eric Berlin's experience was very similar to ours (although his team did get one notch closer to the finish line).

After the hunt, the NPL crowd + us went out for dinner, then visited a bar near where I went to school that I had mysteriously never visited. The legendary Brickskeller boasts an astounding beer list, which we subsequently chipped away at for several hours. Our waitress was phenomenal: we're give her ideas like "I like Harp" or "less hoppy than that last one," and she'd flip through the list for a few seconds before coming up with something great...or at least unique.

We ended up having so much fun with the NPLers that we missed the last metro out of town! The bad news is, getting a cab in DC at midnight on a Sunday ain't easy, but the good news was it wasn't nearly as expensive as I had guesstimated.

And as if that weren't enough already, on Monday Sarah learned that her project team for her technology class had been selected as runners-up for the annual Dean's Award for their final project, "Recipe Republic." It's hard to feel bad about coming in second when (a) you didn't know about the award to begin with, and (b) the people who beat you are PhD candidates.

So how's that for an update?

Quiet Spring

2008-03-16T23:53:00.003-04:00

More than two months since the last update? No wonder people complain. Fortunately, you're not missing much.

Earlier this month, we went to Illinois to celebrate Sarah's Uncle Don and Aunt Carol's 50th wedding anniversary. We stayed at the nearest hotel, which was apparently the fanciest hotel in town; the turndown service included cookies and milk, and they laid out our bathrobes and slippers, too, as well as starting a fire in the fireplace. Not bad. The bathroom was larger than our hotel room in London.

The official festivities were on Saturday afternoon (March 1), and featured a buffet lunch, a slideshow, and some brief but heartfelt speeches. Later, we adjourned to an Irish bar in St. Charles for many beers. Many, many beers. Sunday, we lunched at Mill Race Inn before stopping by the Olsons to hang out even less formally with the other out of town guests. There might have been beer there, too. Oh, and we picked up a few bottles at Fox Valley Winery, too. We're really not the lushes it may appear, but when the opportunity arises...did we mention Greg bottled a lager last week?

Sarah's still in school, although this week is spring break. Her completely pathetic (but completely mandatory) new personal home page is here. Don't laugh: she got 100 out of 100 on it. The other class is about how to be a better reference librarian; anti-Google rants are common, yet futile.

Today we finished up the at-home mail-in version of the crossword tournament. Preliminary results imply that Sarah might have beat Greg again, but we won't know for sure for several weeks.

Belated Christmas Update

2008-01-13T12:31:00.000-05:00

...and bonus belated six-month-iversary update. Post-Christmas, Sarah's amazon.com wish list is now only three pages long (in the condensed mode), she can take pictures of virtually anything from here, and Greg has burned off his soft palette with Blenheim's "Extra Hot" Ginger Ale. In tech news, the household gained an iPhone, a Wii, and a Nintendo DS, meaning that even if we do leave the house, we still have internet access and Super Mario. Last night, we went out to dinner and baked bread simultaneously, so this morning we had really really homemade French toast.

Last semester, Sarah squeaked out A's in both classes, so the bar has been set fairly high. Based on one of the textbooks for spring ("This is called a CPU. Can you spell CPU?"), hopes are high for a continuation of the trend. Plus, since Sarah has no Tuesday night classes, we can return to weekly Lindy Hop; last week was the inevitable "Hell Night," the first class of the session, where Greg's heart rate didn't return to normal until the next morning. Fun!

2007-12-02T18:13:00.000-05:00

As karmic retribution for having an otherwise dreadful work week, Sarah got an Army Achievement Medal on Thursday (for those of you not familiar with Army medals, that's basically one notch above a little pat on the head), and came in second place in the "chilled dough creations" category of a cookie baking contest on Saturday. It was kind of a neat idea: entries had to have 26 cookies, two for judging and two dozen for the USO to box up and send to Iraq and Afghanistan. We'd love to share the winning recipe, but we don't know which of the three entries placed. It's either something from verybestbaking.com, or "Cinnamon Stars," which is just premade sugar cookie dough plus some red-hots beaten to death with a hammer. It ain't art.

Happy...Whatever!

2007-10-03T22:52:00.000-04:00

Greg got a big shiny award today, from a project he'd worked on last year. The award has a name, but since it's been given for 17 years--to individuals and groups--and I can only find three mentions of it online, I'm guessing I shouldn't be the person making the fourth mention, you know? Anyway, congratulations Greg!

We celebrated with dinner at Iron Bridge Wine Company, a tiny but classy restaurant where we'd tried to go for my birthday, but failed. We used something we learned from Capitol Grille: instead of getting a bottle of wine and hoping it matched well with anything we might order, we ordered by the glass. This meant I got a super dry white with my appetizer cheese assortment, and a mild red for the beef entree. And a crazy Uruguayan dessert wine with my flourless chocolate cake. If you're gonna celebrate, celebrate.

The Capital Grille

2007-09-15T21:03:00.000-04:00

Look, don't even bother arguing with me here: no matter what you had for dinner last night, our dinner was better. This statement is non-negotiable.

As a wedding gift, the Simpsons gave us dinner at the Capital Grille Tysons Corner, over which Sue apparently wields an inordinate amount of power. This became clear when we walked in, and the folks at the host desk all but kowtowed when we introduced ourselves as the Clark party. The poor girl who tried to show us to a normal table was stopped by another host who explained, "Jocelyn is coming to greet them."

Marketing manager Jocelyn Fox took us through the restaurant into the kitchen and introduced us to chef Jeff Surma, a man who loves his job. We suited up with chefs' jackets as our server Walter poured champagne, and we began picking at the four appetizers waiting for us: bacon-wrapped scallops, asparagus wrapped in thinly-sliced beef with a very mild horseradish cream sauce, new potatoes with creme fraiche and caviar, and pastry pouches full of brie and almonds. We quickly realized the futility of trying to pace ourselves.

Jeff explained the restaurant's signature food, dry-aged beef. The beef is aged about two weeks in a locker kept at 32 degrees and 85% humidity; it reduces in size about 35% as the meat's own enzymes tenderize it and the flavors intensify with loss of water. We peeked into the locker, where "only" $35,000 worth of beef was waiting for butchering (as opposed to the $100,000 the New York restaurant normally stocks, since this smaller location "only" does about $7.5 million business annually).

Our first assignment was to make a citrus salsa for our first course. Greg and I were the first to try cutting the fruit as Jeff had shown us, slicing off the ends to make a flat surface for it to stand on, then running the knife just under the rind, then cutting out each section and discarding the seeds. What took Jeff maybe 90 seconds to demonstrate was taking us about five minutes per fruit. Luckily Walter was keeping the champagne glasses full. Greg surrendered his place at the cutting board to Jenn so he could get back to the appetizers, and Jeff immediately noticed she was a little more skilled than the rest of us. I think she did two or three oranges in the time it took me to cut one lime. I gave up and returned to the brie pockets while Jeff demonstrated dicing techniques and Greg struggled to follow. With three cuts, Jeff reduced a bell pepper to a flat rectangle, which he chopped into regular strips, perfect eighth-inch cubes, and decorative diamonds. He started mixing his salsa (mild, by request of Jenn and Brian) as Greg carefully removed the seeds from a Thai chili for his hotter version.

Meanwhile, since the four appetizers were nearly gone, Jeff had Walter bring us pan-fried calamari with hot cherry peppers, officially described as "Calamari sautéed in garlic butter until golden crisp. Then tossed with a house blend of peppers and scallions for a nice, fiery finish." Clearly this was too spicy for the champagne, so we opened a fun California wine called Conundrum.

Jeff heated olive oil in a small skillet over a little portable burner that had been set up for the occasion, and sprinkled black pepper and sea salt on some massive hand-harvested sea scallops, which Jenn loaded into the pan to sear. Once both sides had carmelized, Jeff put them in a 400-degree oven for a few minutes. When they were done, he brought over some huge onion rings which he set on plates, settling a scallop on each one. He added the citrus salsa, a cilantro cream sauce, and greens, and Walter brought a New Zealand sauvignon blanc called Tohu (he caught Jocelyn trying to drink the previous wine with this course, took the glass from her and poured it into the sink).

When we had finished our scallops, Jocelyn led us into the dining room where gift baskets were waiting on our table, along with our personalized menu for the evening, topped by a haiku from Sue:
Fine food, superb wine,
Newlywed celebration,
A gift sent with love.

We were now a wine ahead, so I don't know what it was that Walter brought with the "second" course (fourth, by my count), but of course it nicely balanced with the mild food, a perfectly round tower of grilled portabella mushroom and roasted red pepper layered with goat cheese, topped with a sprig of basil. When Jenn told the server she was allergic to portabellos, they scanned her brain and determined what she wanted most of all was a tomato and mozzarella salad. Okay, maybe there wasn't a brain scan, but that's the first thing they suggested, and it's certainly a Jenn favorite.

Jocelyn appeared with prints of some photos she'd taken earlier in the kitchen. By this time, we were already amazed by how great the experience was. Every one of us had a plastered-on smile (my face was starting to hurt, actually), and we were repeatedly rendered speechless by the food, the service, everything. When we were able to speak, it was generally pithy stuff like "Oh my God!" and "This is so great!" and "Oh my God!" again. At first I said I wanted the lifestyle where you eat like this at least once a week, but eventually we decided that even once a year would be fine. Fantastic, actually.

The third course was "oven baked barramundi with grilled asparagus, fennel, roasted tomatoes with lemon butter," and it was served with the first red of the evening, a tremendously fragrant pinot noir by Acacia. Definitely my favorite wine of the night. It was around this time that we noticed that each course was substantial enough to constitute a meal, and we hadn't even gotten to the dry aged beef yet! Now on the fifth wine, the rampant smiling was moving more toward giggling.

Next, "Kona rubbed dry aged sirloin with shallot butter and Sam's mashed potatoes" with a Beringer cabernet sauvignon. The potatoes were absolutely wonderful; according to the website, "We blend Red Bliss potatoes with sweet cream, butter and salt for a blissfully good side dish." We couldn't figure out what the steak had been rubbed with--Brian guessed cinnamon--until we looked at the menu; for a bunch of non-coffee-drinkers, we sure made some serious dents in the coffee-rubbed sirloin. Greg was the only one to finish his; the rest of us surrendered fairly early, and Walter neatly packed the leftovers.

I didn't really care what the "assorted homemade desserts" were, since I knew from the menu that they'd come with Canadian icewine. It turned out to be all of the desserts: eight full-size desserts for four people who had already been eating for two and a half hours. Jeff personally delivered one of the two trays, and I'm afraid we might have ignored him slightly, having been distracted by cheesecake, berries in creme Anglaise, coconut cream pie, double chocolate brownies with homemade mint ice cream, flourless chocolate espresso cake, key lime pie with pistachios, creme brulee, and chocolate hazelnut cake. It killed me how much we left on the plates! I, Sarah, was too full! We had hit Food Coma at least two courses ago, and were looking for a place to lie down for a few minutes. Greg only finished the creme brulee because he was shoveling it mindlessly into his mouth as though in a trance. Walter packed up anything that was likely to travel at all well, then brought a second icewine, presumably because I had literally applauded the first.

Jenn had been drinking sparkling water all along, and it became clear that she'd be the one driving home, bless her. We were on our eighth wine (some of which I for one had gotten refills on), and between that and the fact that our bodies were now wholly devoted to the task of digestion, we weren't useful for anything other than giggling. When we noticed we were the only customers left, we left a relatively paltry tip on the table despite Walter's protestation that it wasn't necessary ("we want to," explained Brian), gathered up our leftovers and gift baskets, and headed out.

Cheap Pics!

2007-08-30T13:04:00.000-04:00

If you're planning to print photos from kodakgallery.com but haven't gotten around to it, this is the weekend to do it. Enter coupon code LOVE2SAVE and take 25% off your order, including prints. I just saved over $46 with that code! Um...please don't do the math to figure out how many prints that means I got. Seriously.

Traditional 8-Week Update

2007-08-19T16:35:00.001-04:00

You didn't know it was traditional? What kind of wedding books have you been reading?

Sarah just moments ago completed the honeymoon blog updates, and Greg is working on a corresponding Google Earth overlay, because we're that technologically hip.

PHOTO AVAILABILITY SUMMARY
The photographer's pictures are available in three places, three ways:

A lovely flash-based overview

All photos for [expensive] purchase (password=chatham)

All photos, at Sarah's Kodakgallery, for slideshow and/or [reasonable] purchase (formals, preparations, ceremony, and reception)

Alan's photos are available from Alan, or see Kodakgallery for some of Sarah's favorites.
Jake, Erica, Jenn, and Amy's photos are at their respective hosting sites, and a selection of Cathy and KC's have been uploaded to Kodakgallery.

So...where are yours, hmm?

NEWS FORMAT CHANGE ALERT

2007-07-30T21:54:00.000-04:00

Just as you were getting used to the "one month ago" concept, we've up and changed it on you. As you may recognize from other hoo-has suddenly appearing on this page, the News page is now "powered" by Blogger. This will make it ridiculously, vastly easier for us to update it, and will also allow us to place the month-old information where it would actually appear chronologically.

So in this case, change is good. Trust us.

2007-07-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

Well, the good news is, we're apparently receiving mail again. Greg, for example, got two credit card offers today. The bad news is, anything that was sent to us in the last month or so was returned undeliverable. And the bonus bad news is that the condolences address we listed for Penny in the June 10 section is five years out of date, so anything sent there will also be returned undeliverable. We're just having bad luck with mail. We should reiterate, though, that we have not moved, and we're not avoiding you, and anything you would like to send us, as of today, should actually arrive as normal.

Now back to good news: in addition to the professional photos (password=chatham), a few pictures have been added to Sarah's Kodak Gallery page, mostly courtesy of Sarah's cousin Cathy. We'd like to take this opportunity to mention that if you've got photos you're willing to share, we're keen to see them. And we know more people brought cameras, because we can see you in others' snapshots. Nowhere to run to, baby.

Also, to stall you while we collect and upload other photos, check out the great new Puzzles page—home of crossword answers and new quizzes.

2007-07-15T12:00:00.000-04:00

Well, the honeymoon is over, in the most literal sense. We returned from Copenhagen via Reykjavik last night, having visited London, Oslo, Gdansk, Saint Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, Tallinn, Visby, and Lubeck along the way. We're nowhere near having photos posted yet, but here are some we know of:

From the professional photographer, Elizabeth Horne (if, by following various links, you need a password to view all the photos, it's "Chatham")
From groomsman Alan Wen (updated 30Jul07)
Cell phone shots from groomsman Jake Haller
From bridesmaid Erica Russo
From cousin-of-the-groom Amy Simpson
From friend-of-the-bride Jenn Bishop

Beyond that, the most important thing we have to say is the mailing address you have for us is probably right. We're not dumb enough to just post it right here on the internet, but suffice to say if you've sent something in the mail to the address from which your wedding invitation was sent, and it came back to you undeliverable, it has something to do with the hold mail order we put in for the honeymoon. Sarah has a great and glorious history of somehow screwing up this very simple half-page form (once resulting in the mailman dropping two bins of mail in front of her apartment door and yelling "Anderson! Where the hell you been?!"), so that's surely the reason. We should be able to get it all squared away early next week, so if you have a one-month-iversary card you're itching to send, that should be fine.

Speaking of one-month-iversaries, Sarah's current plan is to post wedding and honeymoon stuff a month after it happened, for two reasons. First, if you're a frequent visitor to the site, you can pretend you're getting the information as it happens. Second, it keeps us from feeling we have to put everything up all at once. So if the next post seems to be a month old, now you know why.

Copenhagen, Denmark (Day 2)

2007-07-14T12:00:00.000-04:00

Our last morning on the ship, we carefully packed our carryons before going to breakfast. At the appointed time, we reported to the theatre, only to find we'd gotten there late, and our tag color had already been sent to the gangways. On the dock, we reclaimed our bags from the "yellow" corral and shoved our shaving kits inside before joining the taxi line (why? because we didn't see the bus line). The couple in front of us in line had been with me during the St. Petersburg rift, so we shared a cab to the airport.

The line for IcelandAir snaked back and forth near the ticket counter for a while before extending around a corner, down a hallway, and (literally!) into another terminal. One by one, folks would be pulled out to attempt to do self check-in, and they'd either come back to smugly grab their families and bags and go, or they'd dejectedly rejoin the long line. After Greg's turn, he did the latter. Occasionally we'd pass Tom and Janet as the line hairpinned back on itself.

At the duty-free shop, we seemed to be 10 kroner short for every bottle of Aquavit, until we found a sampler pack of 8 tiny bottles in our price range. We walked around the airport for a while until we just couldn't anymore, then got lunch. The lunch counter accepted Danish and Swedish kroner, Euros, pounds, and dollars. We ran into Ann and Tim in the terminal, and they talked about their trip into Berlin since we hadn't seen them since then. A bit more walking, and two flights home.

Copenhagen, Denmark (Day 1)

2007-07-13T12:00:00.000-04:00

The docking at Copenhagen was very late, so we had a long line-up of morning programs and classes to attend. Fiona's port shopping seminar was surprisingly sparsely attended--normally you either get there half an hour early or you don't get a seat. We went to a cooking demo where a young, handsome, single (as established very early in the Q&A segment) polyglot chef made Rouladen, and were disappointed (in a sense) to find that the guest talent show had been cancelled for lack of interest. We grabbed an early lunch and finished up the thank-you notes, and made the big decision not to return to the ship for dinner. We had exactly two cards remaining after the thank-yous were done, so we wrote notes for our tablemates thanking them for their company and offering the URLs of our wedding site and my kodakgallery.com page. Moments after I carefully labeled them with the seating and table number, Janet and Tom happened to walk by, so I just handed them to them.

Once we'd docked, our first destination was the Little Mermaid. Why? Because it's required. She was dwarfed by tourists, just like when I was in Copenhagen in high school, and Greg was as unimpressed as I had been in high school. Having checked that off the list, we continued into town. We passed a fountain I remembered from high school, then visited the Freiheit Museet. Although it was interesting and well-organized, we didn't really find it to be as effective as the Norwegian equivalent. As I expressed it at the time, "When we left the Norwegian Resistance Museum, I think I had a pretty good idea of where Norway stood during the war. I'm not getting that here." On the up side, it was free.

Even without an organized tour, we knew where the important stuff was when we stumbled upon a clot of people with Celebrity Cruises stickers. That's how we found the Amalienborg castle, and nearby, the Marble Church. We continued into the heart of town, passing the cafes of Nyhavn and through massive shopping districts closed to vehicles. I was looking for a particular landmark from my 1990 visit: a huge thermometer on the side of a building facing an open plaza, which during that previous visit was struggling to reflect record-breaking heat. Not so this time.

We finally located the thermometer in the largest square, bordered on our left by the Radhus and ahead of us by Tivoli, our intended destination. Jackpot! I'd had a terrible time in Tivoli in high school, but I was willing to give it another chance (unlike, say, Paris, which the high school trip ruined for me). We got tickets and a map, and tried to decide which of its 38 restaurants to patronize, immediately discarding Hard Rock Cafe (desipite the fact that it was a ship-approved shop) in favor of a neat little cafeteria called Viften. After some confusion on how to order, we got some awesome smorresbrod and Carlsberg (the second Copenhagen requirement, after visiting the Little Mermaid), as well as some tremendous desserts.

After dinner, we broke down and bought ride passes so Greg could terrorize innocent Danish children on the bumper cars. Danish children are impossibly cute, across the board, but they pay for it later in life: we noticed an improbable number of really masculine women in Denmark. We also terrorized children in the fun house, but paid for that in aches and pains the next morning. After a Hans Christian Andersen "tunnel" and a number of basic carnival rides, Greg talked me into riding the Demon, but in exchange we had to ride the Star Flyer. I don't like up-and-down rides, and Greg doesn't like spinning rides (especially ones that are 80 meters high), so we were even. As a bonus, we were on the Star Flyer just as Tivoli's famous lights were coming on, so the views were doubly impressive.

And then...the Tower of Power concert started. The Copenhagen Jazz Festival is apparently run by people with a different definition of "jazz" than I have. We'd missed the George Clinton concert earlier in the festival, but by golly we were there for Tower of Power. We hung out at that for a while, then began the long walk back to the ship. I suppose if we'd known how to say the name of the port in Danish (or if we knew the name of the port at all, for that matter) we could've grabbed a cab, but there you go. We more or less retraced our steps, finding the Little Mermaid still surrounded by tourists, and getting back a little after midnight, as another couple left the ship for a night on the town, dressed to the nines. Maybe they were going to see Tower of Power.

There were two problems with getting back to the ship that late. First, our normal attendant was off duty, and the night porter wasn't entirely sure how to handle the insulin cooler. Second, our luggage was supposed to have been in the hallway for the porters no later than midnight. I frantically packed as well as I could, and our neighbors' bags were still by their doors when we set ours out.

Lubeck and Wismar, Germany

2007-07-12T12:00:00.000-04:00

Although the cruise line will tell you the next stop is Berlin, Berlin isn't exactly accessible by cruise ship. The dock is at a neat little town called Warnemunde, in the former East Germany, where there's room for five massive ships, and the whole town comes out to watch them come and go (our guide suggested that they were still enamored of the concept of travel, something nearly impossible in the communist era). Although the cruise line offered trips by coach, van, or train into Berlin, we chose a tour called "Lubeck and Wismar: Treasures of the Baltic."

We slept the majority of the drive to Lubeck, although I was awake for the utterly uneventful crossing into the former West Germany--if the guide hadn't pointed out the border (in this case, a small stream), none of us would have noticed. Almost immediately upon parking at the Musik und Kultur center outside of town, the other tourists started talking of nothing but bathroom breaks.

Our first stop was the massive Holstentor, a 15th-century gate. Any damage to the Holstentor over time was due to its size rather than, say, attack; by the mid-19th century, it had sunk into the ground because of its weight.

The second stop was a bathroom break. Already the guide had singled us out as "The Youngsters," and suggested we take the time the rest of the crowd was using to queue for a restroom at a McDonald's to instead run down an alley to check out St. Peter's church. We strode over to the church, photographed the enormous tower as well as a bronze bell on the ground outside, noted that the sanctuary was oddly curved, and made it back to McDonald's long before the group was ready to move on.

Lubeck's town hall is a bizarre conglomeration of room additions, facades, and chaotic stylistic mixes; in fact my notes from the tour say "Rathaus made entirely of room additions." In the town square, we actually made the guide cry (and not, as you might think, by asking when the next bathroom break would be); people who survived the communist era genuinely seem to want to talk about it, but sometimes they just can't.

A few blocks from the square is the Marienkirche, a 13th-century church gutted by fire on Palm Sunday 1942 and rebuilt 1947-1959. Outside the church is a statue of the devil, seated on a huge granite block. Legend has it that the devil asked the workmen what they were building, and they told him it was a beer hall, so he volunteered to help by bringing them stones and bricks. As the work proceded, the devil started to wonder (a) why this beer hall was so vertical, and (b) why it had so many windows. When he found out it was a church, he decided to destroy what had been built, but a worker convinced him to leave it as it was, and they'd build a beer hall next door. So they did.

Inside the church were reproductions of 14th-century frescoes, some of the originals of which were exposed when later plaster fell off during the fire. A reproduction of the tremendous Totentanzorgel, played by Buxtehude, was being tuned for a concert that night. Where the Totentanz painting would have been (ie, the Totentanzkapelle) was a smallish black and white photograph of it, and a reproduction of the church's astronomical clock was where the Totentanzorgel had originally been.

Of all the war memorials in the church--and there were many--certainly the most moving for me was in the Gedenkkapelle (remembrance chapel). Two bronze bells, dating from 1508 and 1668, and totalling 8 tons, crashed to the ground during 1942's air raid, and were left exactly where they fell, as a memorial. Then, of course, they were replaced by bells the Nazis had stolen from churches in Gdansk. It's kind of hard to feel bad for Germany when you hear stories like that.

Our next stop was the Niederegger marzipan factory, whose front window had a model of the town made out of pastry and marzipan (including the Niederegger building, which may or may not have had a model in its own window--we walked by too fast). It had a shop on the ground floor, a cafe on the floor above, and a museum of marzipan above that (with a fantastic view of the town hall). The museum was...self-referential, let's call it that. We first saw a map of Europe made out of almonds, then passed an exhibit showing how marzipan is made, made out of marzipan. Toward the windows were a group of small cases, each holding a single perfect piece of marzipan fruit, and along the fourth wall were life-sized marzipan effigies of about a dozen local celebrities. Yes, a life-sized marzipan Thomas Mann.

The tour broke for lunch after the museum, and the guide was not at all surprised when we told her we'd just meet her at the bus at two for the ride to Wismar. We walked across the street for lunch at the honest-to-Pete Ratskeller, where we were seated in the Dietrich Buxtehude booth, and dined on Wienerschnitzel and Jaegerschnitzel. By the time we noticed we'd left the map on the table, we were probably half a mile away, and by the time we returned, the table had been bussed and there was someone new seated there.

Fortunately, the cloister that Greg wanted to visit was on the main drag, so we just headed in that general direction. When we got where we thought it was, we found a vocational high school (closed) and a small cafe (also closed). (According to the internet, we were really looking for Saint Anne's museum: "Built into a former cloister complex, it rates as one of the most beautiful museums in Germany and displays one of the most significant collections of ecclesiastic art." Oh, well.) Given that we didn't really have a firm idea of where the bus was anymore (we were relying on the fact that it's hard to get lost in a walled city), and that even when we had a map, it wasn't drawn to scale, we decided that heading back toward the main east/west road was the best plan.

And that's when we ran into our tour group coming the other way. They were heading toward a cool-looking building we'd noticed earlier, so we just joined them. Said cool-looking building was the Holy Ghost Hospital, a 13th-century nursing home attached to a convent, which was in use until the 1970s. The first room was very church-like, with frescoes and a vaulted ceiling (and a girl on a scaffold restoring some of the artwork); behind it was a long, long room full of tiny cells less than five feet square, each with a shortened bed taking up one side.

We walked with the group back past the cloister to the Burgtor, the imposing northern gate, and were told that we were now in the bad part of town--exactly where Greg and I had been walking alone earlier. We returned to the bus via the narrow back alleys where the smaller houses were; the land had been the gardens of the bigger houses until they just ran out of places to put people. Funny thing about walled cities: not a lot of growth opportunities.

The bus returned us to the former East Germany to visit Wismar. Wismar is comparable in size and history to Lubeck, but Lubeck got a 50-year head start on Wismar when it came to recovering from WWII. Where Lubeck immediately started to rebuild damaged buildings (particularly churches), the communist government of Wismar looked at even the slightest damage as a great excuse to pull the buildings down. Of the three churches in town, only St. Nicolai remains intact; St. George has a nave but no tower, and St. Mary has a tower but no nave. Complicating restoration is the fact that any given structure can have three different people claiming it: after reunification, pre-war owners came back to town and tried to force out the folks who were now living in their houses.

At the town square, dominated by an ornate well, the guide walked us through a vegetable market, then took whomever was interested into a 1575 restaurant that had been a wine merchant's, to see the ceiling. She gave the group about 20 minutes for shopping in town, but suggested that we--"the youngsters"--run quickly down to St. Nicolai to check it out. We were warmly greeted at the church, and walked around looking at the artifacts it was harboring from the other damaged churches. A young man came up to us and spoke to us in German for three or four sentences before I could break in and explain I wasn't catching most of what he said, so he repeated it in his (according to him) "terrible" English (which was of course excellent): the church tower was going to open for tours in a few minutes, and we were invited to go up. Unfortunately, we had to head back to the tour--I'm sure the views would have been tremendous.

We drove back to the ship via Rostock, the nearest big city to the port of Warnemunde, in what seemed to be a bid for increased tourism. We dropped the backpack off in our room, then headed back out into town. Warnemunde was a great town for just wandering in, especially since the locals were all having a bit of a wander themselves. At a shop near the ship, we bought beer and candy--the beer was cheaper--and sat outside to drink and people-watch. Then we walked under the railroad tracks into the downtown area, where Greg got a Thuringer sausage and we shared some ridiculously yummy beignet things I think were called Quarkballen. In a bid to rid ourselves of extraneous Euros, we visited a newsstand and ran some optimization algorithms on the candy.

Back on the ship, we were treated to the music of a small German brass band from Rostock while availing ourselves of a sausage buffet. With four sausages and four kinds of mustard, we ended up not going to dinner that night. Notably, the German band played the same inexplicable Dixieland medley the Russian band had played the previous week. Figure that one out.

Visby, Sweden

2007-07-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

Visby was one of the towns we had to look up before we left, since we had no idea where it was. It's on Gotland, a fairly large island between Sweden and Latvia, and like virtually every town we visited, was a Hanseatic trading center. It was the only stop where we couldn't pull right up to a dock, so the ship was moored quite a ways out and tenders (actually lifeboats) ran shuttles back and forth all day.

Our tour, "City of Visby" was led by a tremendously fun high school English teacher named Jan Luthman, whose frustration with the Korean faction of our group was quite clear. I think he thought it was a language barrier problem, but the real issue was that they had different goals for touring than we did: they wanted to have their pictures taken standing in front of important things, and when there were no important-looking things to be photographed in front of, they'd just wander off or sit on benches and pout. Or, when there was an important-looking thing to be photographed in front of, they'd just start snapping away, oblivious to the fact that Jan was trying to teach us something about it. Also, they walked much, much slower than he wanted to.

We started out in Almedalen park near the tiny Gotland University, for a look at the city walls. A square 13th-century tower on the sea side was used as a lookout in case of pirates, then as a women's prison. The women were fed by having family in the town pass food through the large square holes in the walls, until the guards complained that the women were getting too fat; the holes were reduced to about the size of a bottle, and the guards complained that the women were drunk all the time.

Visby is known for its vast collection of ruined churches--every trading population that came through town built its own church, so there are plenty--and our first was St. Olaf. As far as we could tell, all that remained of it was one huge wall, overtaken by one really huge ivy plant. Parts of the vine were as thick as my arm. From there, we walked along the wall to Fisherman's Alley, the "most-photographed view in town," a narrow alley lined with ivy and flowers, with a church at the top. Opposite this was a traditional bulwhark house, built of timber coated in tar.

The nearby botanical gardens were founded in 1856 by a group of young men who liked to swim (which wasn't done at the time); started just as a cover for swimming activities, the club subsequently built a school for paupers and orphans in addition to designing and protecting this large park in what was certainly prime real estate. Near a well-tended rose garden was an interesting wooden bust of Linnaeus, whose 300th birthday was big news in Sweden. Around this time, Jan gave in to the constant badgering about bathroom breaks, and Greg and I walked along the wall for a bit and back while the rest of the group stood in line for the two public restrooms.

The bus took us outside the city wall and up to the east side of town, where the walls and gates were beautifully preserved. The original crenelation was visible, but the wall had later been made four meters higher (without crenelation). This, the land side of the town, was never intended for habitation; the upper terrace (of three) had no buildings, for fear other islanders would attack with flaming arrows. Later, the poor folk of town built their houses there, and even today the "terrace people" are treated with disdain.

We went through a large gate and stopped at a scenic overlook (where Jan utterly failed to get anyone's attention, standing alone with his Celebrity Cruises tour sign over his head, looking at his watch and muttering "don't they have any discipline in Korea?") before descending to the middle terrace to the town's one remaining church. St. Maria was built in the 1100s as a Lutheran church for German visitors to the town, and it's the only remaining church because it's the only one Germans didn't burn in 1525 when Visby was feuding with Lubeck. During the trading heyday, the upper part of the church was used for storage (there's a pulley on one end, like a barn), and the 12th-century statue of Christ in the crossing disappears into the ceiling every year on Ascension.

We breezed past more ruined churches to the Radhus, then cut through a green energy expo to return to the bus. Greg and I attempted to break off at this point, thinking the bus was heading back to the tenders, but Jan assured us we had one more stop. We drove south out of town, passing a former princess's summer house (now a YMCA hostel!) and a traveling circus whose elephant pen was laid out behind a huge monument to Olaf I. Our destination was a beautiful and incredibly quiet scenic overlook on a 40-meter cliff jutting out into the sea, one hundred kilometers from mainland Sweden. Jan came to talk to us, and explained Sweden's fantastic access laws: based on a medieval law, they allow you to camp for one night on anyone's property, and (this was noted specifically) eat their berries, as long as you stay 200 meters from the house. How cool is that?

The bus brought us back to the dock, and Greg and I took off running to get to as many churches as possible before having to return to the tenders. We visited St. Katherine, St. Lars, and Drotten, photographing madly, before rushing back to the dock. There was a long, long line for the tenders, since the last boat was supposed to leave in half an hour. Once we returned to the ship, we headed straight to 10 aft for lunch, just like a thousand other people. Greg occupied a table out on the deck while I went for food, and by the time I got back he had rented out the extra seats to a young Australian couple. People nearby with binoculars, standing alongside people with video cameras on tripods, probably to film the departure, reported that the line for the tenders hadn't gone down at all. We ended up leaving about an hour late.

My remaining notes for the day say "dinner includes baked Alaska insanity, later Le Grand Buffet insanity." I don't know what to say about these, really. After dinner, the shades were drawn, the lights dimmed, and the poor waitstaff had to promenade around to music with baked Alaska en flambe over their heads. I can't imagine how humiliating that must have been for them. The "Le Grand Buffet insanity" was even more disgusting: it was a buffet of foods shaped like things--a chicken-salad dragon, a pastry Viking ship, a chocolate piano--which opened at 11:30 for photographs, and midnight for eating. I'm actually kind of ashamed we went to see it at all.

Tallinn, Estonia

2007-07-10T12:00:00.000-04:00

In Estonia, we resumed the schedule of ship-sponsored tours with "Glory of Old Tallinn." The opportunity to visit Tallinn was probably the biggest factor in our decision to cruise the Baltic; while we'd been thinking of possible honeymoon sites, President Bush made a stopover in Tallinn, and virtually every news break included the phrase "magnificent walled city."

It was a short bus ride from the port to the gates of the upper city, historically the home of knights and landowners (ie, power), while the merchants (ie, money) stayed in the lower city. Catherine the Great had a small pink castle built just inside the wall, which is now the offices of Parliament. Opposite is the rather new Alexander Nevsky cathedral, which we entered from the side to find a service in progress--even the priest seemed bored.

Our next stop was the Lutheran church, which was surprisingly ornate inside. As in a theater, there were private boxes reserved for the nobility; we all immediately noted that some were higher and closer to the altar than the pulpit.

From there, we stopped in a side street for a longish talk about living under communism, and its long-term effects, before continuing to a scenic overlook above the lower city where we stopped for photos, shopping, and buskers. The oddest little salesman was offering Russian passports and an old gas mask (the others stuck to postcards, amber, and nesting dolls).

We crossed through a 15th-century gate and down a very steep street to the lower town to visit St. Nicholas church, notably the only building in town damaged in WWII (by friendly fire from Russia). On display was the only remaining portion of Bernt Notke's Totentanz, one of a pair of 150-foot danse macabre paintings. I spent as much time as I could at a temporary exhibit of historic church bells; I wrote in my notes that 200 Estonian church bells went "missing" after WWII, but later discovered the issue was bigger than that (link in German). We were treated to a short concert by a string quartet from the Estonian National Opera, featuring "light classics," arrangements of famous arias, and an inexplicable "Fiddler on the Roof" medley.

After the concert, we walked to the town square, near city hall, which was mostly populated by cafes and tourists. The city hall is topped by a weather vane called Fat Thomas, has brightly colored metal dragon head gargoyles added supersticiously after the upper city burned, and features manacles attached to the walls facing the square, for folks sentenced to the pillory. Shortly after we left the city square, our guide gave us the opportunity to ride the scheduled bus back to the ship, or stay in town to poke around. Of course we stayed.

We went to a popular-looking cafe for lunch, called Double Coffee, realizing too late that it was popular with obnoxious twentysomething American expats. At least the food was good. From there, we went back into the upper city (did I mention how steep the street was?) to mail thank-you notes from the Post Office opposite Alexander Nevsky. The cathedral was absolutely packed, with hordes spilling out into the street, and we were very glad to have gone earlier. The postal employees spoke at least three languages while we were within earshot, so getting airmail stamps for cards to the US was very simple, but wow was I disappointed with the design! Here I was, thinking sending our thank-you notes from Europe would be a really cool gesture, and I'm willing to bet a lot of the recipients didn't even notice they came from outside the US: what should have been ye olde typical Estonian stamp was in fact the Rotary International logo.

Back down in the lower city, I went sweater-shopping in one of the stores guaranteed by the cruise line; one of the two I bought was a one-of-a-kind prototype, and I just picked it out because it was pretty. Lucky me! We continued to a wool market just inside the city wall, where local handcrafters sold beautiful sweaters and other knits; that was one of the few cases where I really wished we had more luggage space for souvenirs. After that, we went rather quickly through a souvenir market just outside the wall, continued to a liquor store about halfway to the port, went through a mall at the ferry port, and finally returned to the cruise terminal thinking we'd just have to leave the country with our pockets full of useless Estonian kroons.

Parked at the cruise dock was a tractor-trailer from a local chocolate company, of which the side folded down to create a mobile chocolate store. Why every country didn't do this I shall never know. Each of the two ships carried about 3,000 people, none of whom had any interest in dragging kroons all over creation, and keen to exchange them for something more valuable, so why not chocolate?

Stockholm, Sweden

2007-07-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

We arrived in Sweden relatively late (typically the ship had been docked for hours by the time we awoke), and took the shuttle into town for another tour-free day. I was miserably under the weather, so Greg was assigned the task of planning the day's excursions. We went first to City Hall, where the Nobel Prizes are presented; given the choice of waiting an hour for an English tour inside or wandering the outside and moving on, we chose the latter.

Our next stop was Gamla Stan, the heart-shaped old city, which we reached via the Riksbrug--a small amount of German will tell you that's the parliament bridge, and indeed it actually passed through the parliament building. Gamla Stan was cold, rainy, and thick with tourists, and I was in no mood for any one of these qualities, much less all three of them, so I was certainly not a jolly travel companion.

Fiona had asserted that the best changing of the guards on our cruise would be in Stockholm, and of course she was right. The ceremony was long (and in some cases, bizarrely informal), but it was certainly fun to watch. When the band marched in with flip folders, I wrongly assumed they were just too lazy to memorize the two or three tunes I figured the ceremony would take; however, they ended up playing what could be described as a halftime concert in addition to your average marching music. Later, I begged the drum major for a photo op.

As had become a recurring event, Greg was getting dangerously low by the time we started looking for lunch. We looked in vain for a restaurant that would accept credit cards, then gave up and found an ATM instead, and had lunch at a neat little basement cafe off a side street, which seemed to specialize in quiches. Greg had wanted to visit the Vasa Museum which we'd heard quite a bit about, so we walked to the harbor to catch the ferry out to the museum. We looked at the ticket prices, struggled with the exchange rate for a moment, and finally decided to walk to the museum instead, since we could see it from where we were, and it didn't look that far. However, by the time we got there and got in the unmoving ticket line, we'd have had no time at all to enjoy the museum before having to catch the ferry, walk to the shuttle, and bus back to the ship. Reluctantly, Greg agreed to walk calmly back into town instead of rushing through the museum and rushing back.

We more or less stumbled upon the King's Garden, a wide mall in the center of town, bordered by Birgit Nilssons Alle on one side and Jussi Bjorlings Alle on the other--across Jussi Bjorlings Alle was the Opera House. We went in to check out the gift shop (so many Jussi Bjorling box sets, so little time), and found a small group of elaborate opera costumes on display. Then, using the valuable time we could've spent in the Vasa, we walked all the way back to the ship.

After dinner, Greg taught me to play cribbage; much beginner's luck was manifested.

Helsinki, Finland

2007-07-08T12:00:00.000-04:00

Helsinki was the first town where we hadn't scheduled any tours. It's fairly compact, safe, and English-speaking, so we grabbed a map we'd printed off the internet and headed into town via the ship's shuttle. Our first stop was Senate Square, where we arrived at the Lutheran cathedral about ten minutes after services started, so we couldn't go in, but Greg was amused by the eye in the pyramid which appeared over some of the doors.

We walked up to Finlandia Hall and wandered some of the trails through the surrounding park until the National Museum opened. There was an English tour beginning a few minutes after we got there, so that gave us a reasonable survey of the exhibits, and afterward we poked around on our own for a bit. The museum had a great program for kids called "Spot the Odd One Out." About half the exhibit rooms included something anachronistic: a display of wooden bowls included a soda bottle; a collection of old currency had Monopoly money in it. A group of stupid Americans fetched a museum staffer to complain about the wristwatch in the case with the sundials, and he pointed out the [huge, fluorescent yellow] sign next to the case indicating there was an Odd One Out. They read aloud the explanation, that the wristwatch indeed doesn't belong in the case because it was developed in 1910, then stomped off harumphing, "it should be in the 1910 exhibit, then."

A temporary exhibit in the basement introduced us to Aland, an "autonomous, demilitarized, monolingually-Swedish administrative province of Finland." We spent the most time watching a video [in Finnish] about the fortress of Bomarsund, a massive Russian fortification built in the early 1800s to house 5000 soldiers, and now barely visible as scattered stones overgrown with grass and moss. Historians photographed every inch of the existing site, and took plans, contemporary sketches and paintings, and even written references to a computer guy, who rebuit the entire structure in CAD. In another case, I was amused to see that despite the fact that they speak Swedish and occasionally (the last time was in 1917) try to have themselves ceded to Sweden, Alanders vehemently support Finnish hockey and football teams.

On our way to find some lunch, we found the famous Rock Church, absolutely mobbed by tourists; it's at a T-shaped intersection, and all three streets were completely blocked by coach busses. Naturally we decided to get lunch first. We walked much further than you might expect before finding a restaurant at all, and even further before we found one we could afford, so as Greg's blood sugar dropped more and more, we staggered into a Middle Eastern takeaway and ordered falafel. You know how every country takes another country's cuisine and makes it evil somehow? Like us taking Chinese food and making chop suey, or the Japanese putting anything that stands still on a pizza? Falafel in Helsinki has tomato sauce on it.

Back at the Rock Church, we figured out that the reason for the glut of busses was the church is only open to tourists for a few 15-minute blocks scattered throughout the day; we'd missed one by eating, and the next wasn't for hours--late enough that we'd miss the last shuttle back to the ship. Ann and Tim reported that it was "really cool," corroborated by the internet.

If the church is closed on Sunday, it must be time to go to the mall. We wandered through a large one in town, stopping at a jewelry store and an educational game shop, buying nothing. Instead, we walked to another church, the Uspenski Cathedral. Keeping the church-touring theme of the day, we arrived fifteen minutes after it closed for the day. We did get some neat photos of a rainbow over the onion domes, though. And since the church was closed...we went to a little market on the harbor, where we bought a considerably cheaper version of a neat juniper cutting board we'd seen in one of the boutiques in town.

Greg suggested we return to the Lutheran cathedral to see if it was open for tourists, and indeed it was. A female American organist from a church in France was rehearsing German music for a concert later that day, so we quietly videotaped as she ran through some Bach with a tenor. From there, we were lucky to squeeze on the third-to-last shuttle back to the ship--the penultimate and ultimate shuttles must have had people riding on the outside--then quickly walked about half a mile back toward town to photograph a really interesting (to me) stash of old street signs in some kind of storage pen near the dock.

St. Petersburg, Russia (Day 2)

2007-07-07T12:00:00.000-04:00

Our morning tour was "Rivers and Canals of St. Petersburg with Peter and Paul Fortress." It was the only one where our tablemates happened to join us; we were glad that Janet and Tom were assigned to our boat.

St. Petersburg's early history in a wee tiny nutshell: Peter the Great decided Russia really needed access to the Baltic, so he built the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva River and *poof* city. He was really progressive and really western for his time (basically he was the first Russian leader to really get out and about in Europe, and subsequently realized Russia was living in a hole compared to its neighbors), and he wanted...well, Venice. Because who doesn't? So St. Petersburg is on 100 or so islands, with 300 or so canals, and it looks for all the world like Venice.

Our guide pointed out many sights along the canals, and we dutifully photographed them, and immediately forgot what they were. I remember Europe's Longest Facade (about a mile), Peter the Great's stables, and the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is interesting because it's totally dwarfed by the Summer Garden. Tablemates Ann and Tim toured the palace, and mentioned how reasonable and low-key it was. Peter also really liked boats, so for years there were no bridges over the Neva. If it froze over, too bad.

We slowed as we passed the Aurora and the Hermitage, before docking near the Peter and Paul Fortress. The fortress was the first permanent building in town (1703), and was never attacked. Inside is a comparatively small but ornate cathedral with golden spires, where the czars from Peter the Great through Alexander III are buried. The crush of tourists was ridiculous inside the cathedral, and our tour group was divided on the way out: Greg veered left with the guide, and I veered right with the ship-assigned escort. Both groups waited for the other in place, mine giving up faster and returning to the bus. Fortunately Greg had the video camera, so when his group was treated to a carillon tune, he was able to record it. Meanwhile, I stood at the bus talking wedding planning with a couple from New Hampshire, while the escort and another guide called the tour office to try to get our guide's cell phone number. Greg (and Janet and Tom) call this period of time "while we were waiting for Sarah," but I refer to it as "the rift."

As our bus queued with dozens of others to drive the length of the port to our berth, two things happened: a trainload of containers stopped in the road, preventing all the busses from moving, and Greg's blood sugar crashed. The good thing about tending to be surrounded by retirees on these tours is that everyone knows someone with diabetes--the woman sitting in front of us had a daughter recovering from gestational diabetes, and when she heard our conversation, she leapt into action. The next thing we knew, our driver had gotten out to get some candy from the guide on another bus stopped nearby. Eventually the train cleared the road just enough to let a bus through, and we returned to the ship for lunch.

Our afternoon tour, "St. Petersburg Cathedrals," had a moderate amount of overlap with some of the tours we'd already taken, but we had spent close to a day going through all the possible combinations of tours, and this was the best we'd come up with. I was keen to get inside these churches, rather than blow past on a bus, and if that meant we got inside one of them twice, so be it.

The first stop was St. Isaac's Cathedral, built from 1818 to 1858, and like so many churches, never a place of worship--in fact it served as a state antireligious museum during the Soviet era. The dome is covered with 200 pounds of gold, but was painted gray during WWII so as not to make it a target (there are photos inside of the anti-aircraft guns guarding the cathedral, as well as the cabbage fields that surrounded it at the time). Inside, there's plenty more gilding, plus mosaics that were originally oil paintings; when the paintings started to deteriorate even before the building was completed because of the weather conditions, they developed a technique of reproducing them as mosaics. Also inside are models of the entire cathedral, cutaway models of the dome, and a model showing the groundbreaking technique used to raise the pillars.

We next returned to the Church on the Spilled Blood, where the tourists were just as horrid as they had been the day before, but I was able to get some better photos of the memorial to Alexander II. Unlike our earlier visit, this time we had a couple of gypsy children gently pawing at our pockets. To keep us alert, I guess.

From there, we bussed to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, a complex of buildings including multiple churches and Tikhvin Cemetery, which is full of famous Russians. We stopped by Borodin, Dostoevsky, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubenstein, and Tchaikovsky; unfortunately we found out too late that it also rather inexplicably includes the tomb of Leonhard Euler. Here was the only cathedral actually in use, so we were cautioned not to take pictures (when a stupid American not only took a picture, not only with a flash, but with the red-eye pre-flash flashing, she was appropriately tackled by about six other less-stupid Americans, bless them). Women in head scarves sold candles, lit candles, moved candles around, cleaned up candle wax, and otherwise busied themselves with candle-related activities; a few prayed. It was dark, stifling, and rather intense.

On the way out of the monastery, I bought our only Russian souvenir: a small, colorful painting of more or less generic onion domes. The writing on the back probably says "Russian-Looking Skyline 1A; suitable for sale to tourists." I asked the woman selling them, "how much in dollars?" and she quoted what I believe to be the largest English number she could come up with at short notice: twelve. I opted not to haggle, as it's not really my nature, she put the painting in a shopping bag Greg later noticed said "Dixie" in Cyrillic, and we hustled back to the bus.

St. Petersburg, Russia (Day 1)

2007-07-06T12:00:00.000-04:00

Russia's a little nutty about tourists, and since we didn't have a pre-organized tour for the first morning, we couldn't even get off the ship. When we dragged ourselves out of bed to check out the immensely disappointing view (it's, like, a port, y'know, cranes and containers and whatnot) we discovered that the lifeboat just below our veranda had been extended out over the side of the ship so that painting could be done behind it.

At breakfast, we intentionally sat on the opposite side of the ship, where the views were infinitesimally more interesting (the cranes and containers were in motion). On the way back to our room, we passed six empty hot tubs, and decided that was a perfect way to spend the morning. So for about an hour, we sat in a whirlpool, outdoors in a light drizzle, in St. Petersburg. Greg got all Nordic and hopped over to the cold pool, but I just couldn't do it.

We had lunch on the 10 aft patio, and timed how long it took people to get through the customs building. After all the buildup we'd heard, it really didn't look that bad. By 1:30, we were on the bus for our tour, "Russian Museum and Church on the Spilled Blood."

The Russian Museum is the largest collection of Russian art, housed in the former Mikhailovsky Palace. Our guide explained early on that usually people are interested in whatever the biggest thing in the room is, so that's what she'd explain, but whenever people asked about other works, she had a wealth of information about them, too. I have to think she was an art history student. We started with 12th-century icons (in rooms with open windows?!) and got a reasonable survey of art up to the present day. I think my favorites were mosaics made to look like oil paintings, and Greg's favorite was a sculpture of Anne, designed to show how cartoonishly extravagant she is.

After the museum, it was a short walk to the Church on the Spilled Blood, built on the site of the assassination of Alexander II. Like most of the churches we visited in St. Petersburg, it never actually served as a place of worship. It was begun in 1883, more or less as a memorial to Alexander, and served as a stable during WWII. After that, it was basically neglected until the 1990s, but was completely redone and opened to visitors in 2003. On the canal side of the nave, the cobblestones covered with Alexander II's blood are in a shrine of their own, and the rest of the church is literally covered with mosaics. Covered.

As promised on virtually every tour, we did get a chance to shop, but the local tourist market didn't have anything we really "needed" (although we did consider some Soviet-era gas masks, because why not?), so we headed back to the bus, and back to the ship.

Day at Sea

2007-07-05T12:00:00.000-04:00

Another day of sleeping late. We were finishing breakfast while the Seaside Cafe buffet was changing over to lunch, so before we left we got a neat plate of antipasti just because we could. We skipped the Finnish class, knowing that all of Scandinavia speaks better English than many Americans, and instead did the crossword before cha cha class and St. Petersburg history class. Then we walked a bit, then Russian class. That class ran over by 100%, only breaking up when the teacher, Renata again, had to run a bingo game seven decks down on the opposite end of the ship. Someone's question about the Soviet mindset had started her telling stories of growing up in the Soviet Union; I remember two. First, that there was rampant workplace theft, because things were too expensive to buy, so if you worked at a shoe factory and wanted a book, you'd steal some shoes, and hope to find someone who worked at a bookseller's and needed shoes. Second, that they found out Lithuania was starting to break apart from the USSR when a newsreader suddenly came on speaking Lithuanian; the Soviets violently overtook the station later that night.

We'd been looking forward to a High Tea that we'd missed on the other sea days, but were seated with a fairly dopey North Carolinian couple and a duo we almost immediately dubbed the Disagreeable Kiwis. The Disagreeable Kiwis could complain about everything, most notably the perceived lack of attention from the staff (the same staff that Greg sometimes found eerily obsequious) and the small portions. "I don't know how anyone can claim to gain weight on a cruise," she sneered, tucking into her third scone despite the lack of clotted cream, "the portions are so small." When we later told our dinner companions about that one--in the process of thanking them for not being like our lunch seating--I'm certain they didn't believe us. Anyway, we did enjoy salmon, prosciutto, tiny eclairs, and scones with jam and whipped cream...despite the Kiwis.

The last bullet point for this day in my journal is "walked around a bit more, then dinner, then walking, then new movie of 'The Producers.'" And that's that.

Pedometer count: 10,265

Gdansk, Poland

2007-07-04T12:00:00.000-04:00

We were up early to grab some food while the ship docked in Gdanya, then went to the Rendezvous Lounge to get our bus assignment for "Gdansk and Malbork Castle." Impressive-looking Polish officials (ie, they had really wide saucer caps) checked our passports before we disembarked.

Our guide, Elwira, talked about area history as we drove the two hours to Malbork Castle; we were definitely not the only ones who fell asleep. Malbork is the largest medieval castle in Europe, and was home to the Teutonic knights. About half of it was destroyed in WWII; some rooms have been restored and re-opened as recently as this year, but the massive St. Mary's Chapel remains relatively untouched (its roof has been temporarily repaired with concrete slabs, and that's about it). I thought photography was not allowed inside, but eventually there were so many people taking pictures, I decided to join them.

We were separated from our group while going through the newest exhibit: arms and armor, featuring enormous silk battle flags in surprisingly good condition. We met up with another couple and headed toward a very narrow, very long spiral staircase Elwira had warned us about earlier, and passed another guide from our ship who pointed us in the right direction. When we found Elwira, she was on a smoke break and very surprised to see us, since she'd already dropped the rest of the group off at the restaurant for lunch. Lunch consisted of soup with egg and sausage; roast pork, boiled potatoes, and cabbage; marble sponge cake; and bottles of beer on every table. Most of our table wasn't drinking, so hey, free beer.

Back on the bus to Gdansk, we fell asleep again (did I mention beer?), but did at least wake up for the stork sightings along the way. We entered Gdansk via the Green Gate, entering a city square that had been destroyed in the war but rebuilt to look like it had before the bombings (with modern buildings behind the facades), since that style of architecture represented the city's most prosperous period. Our first stop was at an amber store, where I watched a presentation on amber while Greg got in the long line to utilize the facilities. With all the amber available to us throughout the Baltic region (and particularly in Gdansk), the only thing we ever even considered buying was a pair of dice; unfortunately, when they get big enough to be something you'd actually be able to use, they start to get priced out of our range.

The Town Hall of Gdansk had gorgeous clocks on its tower, as well as a sundial. Also in the square is a statue of Neptune that has become an icon of the town. But what we were here to see was another St. Mary's, an enormous brick church with a floor made entirely of headstones. Originally a Catholic church, it then became more or less ecumenical until the protestants forced the Catholics out...and painted over all the frescoes. White paint. Frescoes. I mean, I'm all about protestantism, but that's just stupid. Due to the war, the organ and pulpit are from another church, and the stained glass is from the 1950s. Original features still in place, though, are a monstrously elaborate 15th-century astronomical clock, and a painting of the last judgement that everybody and his brother has stolen at one point or another (the painting is at one end of the church, and the bulletproof case the mayor had made for it is at the other; let the Polish jokes commence!).

We walked around the corner to the tiny church the ousted Catholics had built, and Elwira sent us all off to wander around on our own. We waded through the tourists and amber stores to a neat 15th-century crane over the river, then walked along the river for a bit and all the way across the original town to the Gold Gate before getting back to the meeting point. Back on the bus, we acquired four stragglers from another tour who complained mightily about their guide and asked pithy questions like "Who's Lech Walesa?" Pretty much if you have a history question I can answer, you've got problems.

Rush hour traffic back to Gdanya was ridiculous, and we got to the ship one minute before departure. We risked the glares of the dress code mavens by going directly to dinner. None of us realized it was the fourth of July until a table of presumably tipsy Americans on the opposite side of the room started singing "God Bless America."

Pedometer count: 11,708

Day at Sea

2007-07-03T12:00:00.000-04:00

Since we had the day "off," we slept late before grabbing breakfast in the cafe and going to Fiona's presentation on Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tallinn. Greg checked out a demo/cook-off among some of the ship's chefs, which included a sugar pulling demonstration by one of the pastry chefs. Most notable were the various factoids thrown about: only 5% of the food prepared on the ship is wasted (astounding, given what even we left on our plates), and the food storage in the hold of the ship has four forklifts for moving things around.

We did the daily crossword, then went to lunch in the main dining room where we were seated at a table for 12. Our tablemates were a couple from Colorado, a mother and two teenage daughters from Georgia, and a fascinating older couple from the San Francisco area. We could have talked to that couple all day, even before we discovered that the husband was an applied mathematician who had worked with pioneering nuclear projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1950s.. He mentioned their first computer, the Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine, ORACLE, and I asked that most important question, "How big was it?" Eventually his wife pointed out that usually "And what do you do?" "I'm a mathematician" is the end of the conversation. We were among the last in the dining room when we finally left.

After lunch, we went to a history class called "Highway of the Vikings," which I noted in my little journal as "short & kind of odd." Despite its brevity, it began with the ice age and worked forward; my notes include a sketch of a game board, and a traditional toast: leave no ale in the horn. Later, we snuck in partway through a Polish language class in one of the bars, where Renata, a really interesting Lithuanian crewmember, taught us colors, numbers, basic phrases, and the vital "how much does this cost" and "where is the bathroom."

We walked around the jogging track until we were just too cold, then climbed even higher to deck 12, found a pair of blankets on some deck chairs, and sat there until we got too cold; we sat on our veranda where the wind was a little less pronounced, and worked on thank you notes.

We had heard good things about an a cappella group onboard, so we sought them out at a diamond collection unveiling in the Emporium after dinner. Allegedly they had only been working together for six months (I never did find out whether they got the gig as a group or individually), but they were quite good. I was amused to find that in this case, the big guy was the bass; people always assume that it is, and I'd have to say this was the first time I ever knew that to be true. After their brief set, we returned to the room for more thank you notes, three kinds of CSI on TV, and sodas we'd been carrying around since Harrod's.

Pedometer count: 9,003

Oslo, Norway

2007-07-02T12:00:00.000-04:00

At our first port, we were docked spittin' distance from town, so we did a bit of walking before returning to the pier to meet for our very first tour, "Walking Tour With City Hall." The first thing we passed was an interesting and fairly recent memorial, to victims of a ferry fire in the area; the second was a barely recognizable statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in recognition of his harboring of part of the royal family after the king defied the Nazis in WWII.

Our first stop was the rather remarkably unattractive City Hall, which we'd seen from the water side on our quick walk. The entrance from the city side is a lot more interesting, with a fountain and some great wood carvings, but still pretty much an eyesore. It was built in the 1930s (in the old red-light district, of course), and the interior was nearly covered with frescoes. If you didn't know you were in Norway, the frescoes would probably make you think of Soviet Russia: angular, out of perspective, nationalistic, Glorious People's Frescoes. The least ornate room was the Munch Room; my notes for the tour aren't very detailed, but we seem to recall either he was just too frail to decorate the whole place, or he died. Either way, it was mostly wood paneling. Hallvard, the patron saint of Oslo, was killed by three arrows, and a motif of three arrows appeared on anything that wasn't a fresco (and some things that were); the walls in the senate chamber were covered with a fabric with the motif woven into it.

Continuing our walk, we passed the National Theatre, where a statue of Henrik Ibsen stood out front, and Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" was playing inside. As we headed down Karl Johanns Gate toward the palace, the sidewalk was inscribed with quotes from Ibsen's plays; he had walked that path daily from his apartment to lunch at the Grand Hotel (where the Nobel Peace Laureates stay when they're in town for the City Hall ceremony). We passed the downtown branch of the University of Oslo, a new-looking building in a classic style, and arrived at the National Palace. I'd seen a lot of pictures of it, but never without the Field Band formed up in front. It was originally planned to be about twice its current size, but it looks really tasteful the way it is.

As it began to rain, we stopped at a few more sites, and huddled under a tree to point at the oldest non-church building in Norway. We were kind of surprised at how "new" it was (it's only from 1680! I commented, "There's stuff in the US older than that!"), but the guide pointed out that when virtually every structure is made of wood, you get a few fires here and there. Our next stop was Akershus Fortress, begun in the 1290s and still in use as a military installation. It rebuffed eight attacks by Sweden, and was handed over to the Nazis without a fight, so the Norwegians like to say it was "never taken in battle."

Since the ship was virtually docked right at Akershus, that was the end of our tour. We'd decided to walk back into town for lunch, and fell in step with the tour guide again for a nice conversation. Leaving her, we went to Akers Brygge for lunch, a shipyard-turned-mall, then returned to Akershus to check out the Norwegian Resistance Museum we'd spotted earlier. It looked like a tiny house, but since most of the exhibits were about the activities of the Norwegian underground movement, most of the museum was fittingly underground as well. Virtually all of Norway seems to have been involved in the resistance; the first to openly defy the Nazis were the athletes, followed by actors, teachers, and the clergy (one Easter Sunday, 800 of the 850 bishops resigned en masse).

When we got back to the ship, there were two guys balancing on a small pontoon boat painting the hull. Back in our room, we sat on the veranda and listened to a nearby carillon playing "I Dovregubbens hall" (that's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" for those of you who don't read Norwegian), and rather nerdily took a photo every two minutes as we pulled away from Oslo.

After dinner, we turned in very early, believing we had an early tour departure in Gdansk the next morning.

We didn't.

Pedometer count: 17,367

Day at Sea

2007-07-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

Before bed on the 30th, Greg got me on Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, thanks to a series of time zone changes. But I kind of won, in the sense that the ensuing weepiness over "I don't have to remember to Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Dad anymore" took all the fun out of his triumph.

For our first full day at sea, I had gone through the daily newsletter and scheduled a busy day of activities. Instead, we slept in before picking up the daily crossword and catching breakfast in the Seaside Grill. Despite the vast selection, my breakfasts throughout the cruise were remarkably Germanic: cheeses, sausages, crusty rolls, and (once I found it hidden behind the yogurt) mueslix. All of the sea days featured a huge variety of classes, and the first we attended was on sushi making. I discovered that the amount of time it takes Greg to make a sushi roll is about 30 seconds less than it took me to run half the length of the ship, up two flights of stairs, into the room to get the camera, down two flights of stairs, and half the length of the ship again. Fortunately the sushi instructor was willing to pose with him later.

After about half an hour walking the ship's jogging track (a scenic if short third of a kilometer loop), we availed ourselves of free champagne by attending the party for couples on their honeymoons or anniversary trips. There were three honeymoon couples, including one who had married two days before sailing; and of the remaining anniversary celebrations, three were 50ths. They served a beautiful but bland wedding cake and played dreadfully mushy music to help us all "relive your wedding day," but it served more to remind us why we'd gotten a plain but tasty cake, and spent so much time working on the DJ's play/do not play lists!

Lunch in the main dining room was okay, not amazing, and we skipped the salsa class and Broadway Name That Tune I'd pencilled in, instead returning to the room to sit on the veranda and do the crossword. Greg scouted out the bridge scene (later reporting that you pretty much came as a pair or you didn't play), while I shopped the ship's "Emporium" in search of cufflinks for formal night. We met up for the Taste of the Baltic class, a presentation on shopping given by the port advisor, Fiona. Fiona had already developed a following from a class earlier in the day, and we soon discovered why: she knows everything, she takes crap from no one (ask a stupid question, she gives you a stupid answer), and as Greg put it, "she doesn't suffer fools. At all." I took extensive notes on shopping for amber, sweaters, furs, lacquer boxes, icons, jewelry, and crystal, even though I was pretty sure I wasn't even in the market for a lot of them.

We squeezed in another game of Scrabble before returning to our room to dress for our first formal night. I can't begin to imagine how much luggage some of our fellow travelers must have been schlepping. There were sequins, tuxedos, sequins, kilts, more sequins...even the obligatory punk kid had gelled his mohawk for the occassion. Greg wore his nicest pair of khakis, his only jacket, his only tie, and one of the "dress shirts for life" we'd gotten on Oxford Street, along with some cufflinks I'd gotten that afternoon. I wore a vaguely Asian suit I'd gotten years ago from a catalog and never worn. Because we're classy like that.

Since we were all dressed up, after dinner we visited Michael's Club, a piano bar inhabited by a hugely popular lounge act named Perry Grant. And when I say "hugely popular," I'm saying people follow him from cruise line to cruise line (one couple said "We used to see you on Holland America Veendam...or Rotterdam...one of those 'dam' ships."). He was cartoonishly gay--the kind of gay that gay people are embarrased by--but certainly entertaining. After the really talented dancers left, we got up the nerve to dance a bit ourselves. Eventually, I noticed he was moving stuff around on the piano (stuffed animals, that sort of thing) to block my view of him. When we got off the dance floor to find someone had taken our seats and moved one table over, he raised a music stand so he wouldn't have to look at me. Finally, he asked, "Are you feeling well?" I said I was, and he announced to the rest of the audience "She's been sitting there like a lump for four hours." So...that was weird. A song or two later, while taking a moment to create a more substantial wall of music stands between us, he grumbled, "I'm too old for mind games." We took the hint and left. From then on, every time we walked past the club, we'd say "Well, we could go in and ruin Perry Grant's night."

Pedometer count: 11,662