8/26/04
Belgrade – we awoke docked at Belgrade. Shore excursion fairly early again, and Mary Alice could not get the safe open. Nor could I. It was departure time and we had already collected our passports as we were to carry them with us on-shore. (No one ever asked to look at them),. She was in a panic because she could not get her money or her credit card, or her ID. We said the passport would be enough ID, and it presumably would have been, had the issue ever come up.

The tour consisted of a walk and lecture in the town’s fortifications, and a bus trip past some embassies and rich people’s homes. I could have given the homes tour a pass easily, had I but known what it was. Driving through the city, on the other hand, was quite interesting. The US had bombed Belgrade a couple of years earlier, and the damaged buildings were still there. Incredible pinpoint bombing – odd that we struck the Chinese embassy, isn’t it. We got off the bus in the center of town, not 4 blocks from the shop and got instructions about how to find the ship from that place. Turning that around we had instructions as to how to find that place from the ship.

I located a department store and on 2nd floor I found a shirt for 1600 dinar. It was 35% poly and warm from the start. Everyone was excited that I was there buying it, and I had a staff of 3 or 4 people waiting on me. Their English was better than my non-existent Serbian, fortunately, so I managed to get the shirt after some sign-language.

That afternoon Mary Alice, Jack and Vallery and I gave getting back into the city from a boat a try. The route opens with a 100+ stair climb. We missed our street but I was able to buy a second shirt for 1200 dinar & I wore it to dinner this evening on the ship. It is short sleeved. I imagine I’ll find another shirt in Budapest.

Why did I want shirts? Because I left a ball point pen in a shirt that I tossed into the washing machine, and all of my shirts in that load got oddly colored from the ink in the pen. Now I know about that.

Up at 6am and walked 7 laps on the top deck. Nice and warm, sun coming up over Romania, the river quite broad and the scenery lush on both sides. The Bulgarian side is higher, and we cruise much closer to it in the channel marked by the buoys. At 6am one man was on deck – Ted from Tucson, and about 1/2 hour later the attorney and her husband the computer security man showed up and walked their laps.

Camera batteries went dead shortly after I got up there but I had another set in the room which I charged overnight. Ted had his Mac laptop in his room he said but wasn’t sure if he could recharge it on ship current. It’s a G4 and I thought he could & suggested he look at the charger (I just looked at mine and I can use 240 v)

I took a lot of photos of the ship detail – the bell, the makers' plaque etc. I felt like someone would think I was checking it out for terrorists – everyone in the US officialdom has been so paranoid since 9-11. I remembered the security guy at the Del Norte County courthouse freaking out because I was taking pictures in the courthouse - he relaxed when he realised I was photographing the county seal.

I’m beginning to feel that I’m over the jet lag – going on all the trips early in the morning hasn’t helped because there was no time to relax – the events of the day seem to extend into the evening.

10:45 wheelhouse tour

The captain is a very large man from Germany with a dry wit. We’ve seen him in the lounge in the evening, but today he was in his command post and his explainations were short and interesting. The ship draws about 5 feet, the river here above the lock we passed about 9am, is 30 feet in the channel. No problem here but there are stretches which in the lowest water of the season are unpassable, even for a shallow draft vessel like this one. This year, fortunately, is a good water year and we are not expecting any problems with water levels. Everything runs from the wheelhouse – the engine room has no one in it. He has two radars, radio communication with other ships, telephone communication with the parts of the ship itself and sensors all over the ship to alert him to water or fire problems. And, unlike the Titanic, he has a button that closes all of the compartment doors in the ship. I don’t know that he needs them since the ship is as high above the water as the river is deep, so the top deck can't be submerged.

After dinner Jack & Vallery and Mary Alice and I went up on the sky deck and had a bottle of Romanian wine and watched the world. The most interesting event was that the two customs officials left and walked down the pier to a building at the back of the boat. Sometime later so did our captain. Jack was somewhat upset at this turn of events and decided that customs was treating the Captain unfairly. Fortunately his actions got no father than walking to the back of the boat and looking off in the direction of the town. Late to bed

Today we arrived at Ruse about 8 am and soon left for an all-day shore excursion while the ship continued up the Danube. We met it about 5 pm and continued up-river.

Or to put it another way, we had another 8 a.m. excursion call this morning and were not really happy with that since we had been up and out at 8 a.m. the morning prior and found that it really cuts into the schedule. In theory I’m up in the morning, off for a hike round the top deck of the ship 7 times to make my mile, had breakfast and a shower before taking off on any shore excursions. For the 8 a.m. shore call this means getting up at 6 a.m. which so far has not been in the cards. Why not? Well because we’ve been staying up too late, and still have not recovered from the jet lag

The trip today, advertised as the longest shore excursion of any river trip on the Danube (big whoop!) found us leaving the ship and immediately passing by a souvenir stand inside the small dock at Ruse. The buses were in the midst of a camp-out of what appeared to be kayakers (there is no white water on the Danube in this area). They were in their tents as we bused by. Bulgarian police were sitting in their car watching us, as well. For what? Probably so they could say that they monitor incoming traffic across their border. We rode thru the city, which had much less English language signage than the Romanian towns. Is that due to the Cyrillic alphabet (created, believe it or not, by Cyril)? Which doesn’t welcome English alphabet characters so easily, or just less English language influence? Fewer people spoke English than had in Romania.

We went to an orthodox church in Arbanassi. The entire inside was covered with religious paintings. The guide explicated The Wheel of Life at length and outside the gates was a guy with replications of it and other icons hanging from a board by the wall. The deal is that handpainted icons can only leave the country with a certificate showing they are recently made. These were quite expensive: $60 or so for a small one, $120 or so for a perhaps 11x17 copy. Mary Alice pondered getting one but I wasn’t enthusiastic and she didn’t, but she regretted it.

We got lost, there were so many tour groups that we followed the wrong one down a narrow village street.

Lunch at a nearby restaurant. We ate outside and had an incredible waitress. Got photos but they don’t capture the exoticness of her skin tones combined with her appearance.

Long bus ride, cancelled the castle tour.

I almost got left behind in the cobblestone market street because I found an antique store with a cover I wanted, and hung around looking at postcards hoping for something else. Time passed, everyone else walked down the street and got on the bus. The guide Sylvia (thin as they all are) came and found me. The bus cheered when I got on. Sylvia never did understand that I was looking for stamps for my collection, not the post office.

The road back was so poor that it slowed us down due to the large number of potholes.

After dinner we went up on the sun deck in the warn night breeze and drank in the half-moon lit night. A forest fire behind us on the Bulgarian side. Called Be on Jack’s cell phone. All is well, she’ll email. Lose an hour tonight as we cross the time zone (gain an hour, set the clock back)

This is quick, I hope to fill in the gaps later

Addendum in 2007: Mary Alice had really wanted that Wheel of Life replication so I tried to find it on the internet. I took a photo of the artist’s streetside stand and his name was on it. No luck. So I emailed the businesses in Arbanassi that I could find on-line, asking if they knew the artist. Eventually I got ahold of him but there was shipping costs and packing and the entire price seemed to be going up.

So a friend told me one day that he was going to take the same or a similar cruise, and it included a stop at Arbanissi. So I commissioned him to get the painting. But the day he was there, the artist was not. We still don’t have it, and probably never will. Moral: If you see something you like and you’re a long way from home, buy it. Its easier to get rid of something that doesn’t work out than getting something you missed.

The Interconnential Hotel is at University Square – we went for a walk for an hour or two. Behind the hotel was a small street with a building under construction and as we approached it, police guards. I assumed they were guarding the construction supplies, but it turned out to be the US embassy and security was high- although we had no trouble walking past it.

It was difficult to make any social assessment of what we were seeing. There is a woman in skimpy clothing. Is she a trendy student, a hooker, a woman in her 20s waiting for her boy friend? That bunch of skinny young men in their twenties at the bus stop we have to pass by: camera thieves, workers on their way home, students? What people wear and how they move their bodies send all sorts of social signals, none of which I was able to receive.

We wanted to cross the street but there were no crosswalks. Also few or no J-walkers? That took us some time to solve. We found a cross walk a block up and crossed over. On the way back we noticed the Metro had an entrance on each side of the street so we went down the stairs into the cavernous subway. We found a whole shopping mall under the University Square. You could get to the subway, but you could also go to McDonalds, exchange money, get your photo taken, buy clothing – it was similar to the New York Subways.

We went to McDonalds – sandwiches start at 20,000 (20K) Lei (about 60 cents) and cokes were 30K (90 cents).

English was everywhere: advertising slogans, signs on stores. Especially: “Fast Food “ “Mini-mall”, and “Non-Stop:” I asked our guide when we had one what Non-stop means and she didn’t know – I think she couldn’t understand what I was saying. The words show up on stores all over the part of the country we saw. I decided it meant “Open 24 hours”.

We were bused from Bucharest to Constanza, the port where we embarked on the River Duchess. Mary-Alice and I sat in the front row of the bus where we could see the road and traffic. There was a short freeway but the rest was a “state road” which means mainly a 2-lane road. Traffic coming against us was heavy – people returning from their weekend at the beach resorts said our guide. There were long lines of vehicles in the opposite lane with drivers pulling out to pass at distances that seemed to me as an American driver, suicidally close. We usually didn’t even slow down and they were able to pass one car and zip back into line as we approached. If not, we would move over towards the right a bit – if there was no obstacle there.

People use the land right up to the pavement. There were walkers, bicycle riders, people with boxes of fruit for sale propped up on the curb and extending into the roadway, live stock and everyone very nonchalant as we zoomed past at 60 miles an hour often within a foot or two of them.

At one point there was a third lane. In the US we make the 3rd lane a center lane open to drivers of either direction for passing or turning. Here the 3rd lane is the right hand lane and marked like a parking lane with a solid line dividing it from the driving lanes. If we overtook someone they would pull into the 3rd lane. If a driver going the opposite way was passing and couldn’t get out of our lane we would pull into the 3rd lane. Once we found on-coming traffic in all 3 lanes and our driver made a gesture, which seemed to indicate that this was improper.

When we got to the dock and went onto the River Duchess, our bus-guide, Marina and her apprentice, came on board, apparently in a fit of daring-do, to have a look at the ship. We are in 1st class and when I saw them in the hall I invited them into look at the room and figured out that they had never seen the inside of the ship despite, presumably, having guided many busloads of tourists from the city to the dock.

While you are on a tour your tour guide is, in effect, a friend who knows a lot more than you do about the local scene. You rely on the guide for information, assistance, for, in a word, guidance. Then the tour ends and you tip the guide. I do this, but it is a stark reminder that the social situation has reverted. We go to the comfortable and expensive shipboard accomdations, the guide goes back into the local economy where guiding is a better source of income than, say, college teaching, but where it might take a month's income to pay for a day on the ship. The illusion that everyone is sharing the same trip is even stronger on the ships because there you do not tip anyone indivually at any time. At the end of the trip you put a "suggested amount" of about $10 per person in your party per day, into a tip kitty which is divided amongst the crew of the ship- both visible and invisible. As the number of crew often equals or even outnumbers the passengers, this tip in the aggregate is not a lot of money per crewmember. I don't know how the split is done - not equally i would think. Remember in Moby Dick how the crew shared out their part of the proceeds - I believe Ishmael signed on for 1/1776th part of the profits. In China on the Victoria Princess (probably) I got our table to tip the waitress directly, because she had been very helpful during the 9 day voyage. We each gave her 100 rmb, or about $12.50, and she was very excited. I don't think wages are high on any of the cruise ships.

We drove to SF, staying at the Goodnite Inn where we could park the car “for free” by booking a room at either end of the trip and paying a rate about $20 per night higher. The management seemed to have just taken over and they had to guide us to the room. We got there late and got up c 5am to get the 5:28 shuttle to the airport for a 5:40 in-airport arrival for a 7:40 flight. Security was more pro-forma than expected but they did X-ray our shoes which we had to take off and run through the scanner.

The flight to DC was uneventful, as the flight to Munich. From Munich to Bucharest was a Lufthansa small jet, noisy with 2 seats on either side of the aisle. Lufthansa is not big on directions in the lobby to the flights, either and we almost got lost because the ticket said gate 21 and the flight left from gate 41

Quite tired on arrival, we were met at the baggage by a large sad appearing man from the airport who had already gotten out bags and cleared security for us. Outside we met Irene, from Uniworld. A thin young woman (she was 9 when the revolution of 1989 occurred so she is 24 now), met us. She spoke English reasonably well but did not understand it clearly outside of normal inquiries such as where is the hotel. We were struck by the billboards advertising industrial products like YKK zippers and some kind of thread but it wasn’t possible to get that across to her.

The Hotel Intercontinental is one of the luxury hotels of the city, built in the 1980s when things may have been thawing a bit. It had a US$ only casino in it that may have been foreigners only before the revolution.

Dinner was at the Pecarus (?) restaurant. We were a party of about 100, perhaps a few more, but in that restaurant we were just one of three parties that night. We ate at long tables in an outside patio. Across the way was a wedding. The band played Old Susanna for us. More later.

It's later. (2007) We met a couple who were sitting opposite us at that long table who turned out to be a retired California Judge and a Jungian psycologist, almost a perfect match for us. We spent the first 1/2 of the trip with them - they leftt in Vienna, and later went on our first trip to China with them. Now we're trying to lure them to go to Antarctica with us.