Day 7 – Tallinn, Estonia – Tuesday, September 4, 2012

When starting this cruise, I had high expectations for some ports of call, such as St. Petersburg, and low expectations for Aarhus and Tallinn, mainly because I knew nothing about them. So far my low expectation towns have been the highlights of the trip. (See Day 4 for Aarhus post.)

Estonia is one of those Baltic countries, along with Latvia and Lithuania, that we knew little about except they were unwilling Soviet satellite countries. Estonia has only 1.3 million people, of which 450,000 live in its capital, Tallinn, making it the same size as Cleveland in terms of the city, but of course we have over two million in our metropolitan area, so it's not really comparable.

Estonia has a lot in common with Finland, including a similar language (which means it is impossible to learn). Like Finland, it has been alternately dominated by much larger neighbors Russia and Sweden in olden days. They both got their independence in 1920 after WWI and were prosperous in 1940, but Estonia fell prey to the Soviet during and after WWII. In 1989 there was an amazing peaceful protest by two million Baltic citizens, forming a human chain from Vilnius in Lithuania to the south all the way to Tallinn, an unbroken “Baltic Chain” of 360 miles, singing patriotic songs! Our guide Liina said she was 9 years old at the time and was afraid to take part because violent reaction by the Soviet occupiers was feared. But her mother and father both were there and in retrospect she wishes she had been, too. (There was no violence, as the Soviet Union was already falling apart.) They got their independence in 1990 and have done quite well, joining the EU and installing the Euro last year. Check out www.singingrevolution.com for more of this amazing story.

Toompea Castle with "Tall Tower"

But enough history. The Tallinn PR folks have come up with the slogan, “A Medieval Gem,” and for once the PR people are right. The Old Town is divided into two parts, upper and lower. The upper town was the stronghold of the Estonian people and the heights made it difficult to capture. So the Toompea Castle (+ an 18^th century Russian addition) is still the seat of the Estonian parliament, dominated by high walls and the “tall tower.” Also on the upper town is the Dome Church, an odd mixture of Catholic-like structure and trappings, but it is Lutheran today.

Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral

Practically next door is the Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, obviously of great importance to the Russian population, which is about 20% of the population, a deliberate attempt by the Soviets to dilute the Estonian culture, Here's a little trivia for you, a new revelation to me. The so-called “onion domes” of Orthodox churches are actually representations of flames, as if permanent lit candles to God. Behind the Nevsky is a fantastic viewpoint overlooking the entire lower city and a view of our Emerald Princess at the dock, taller than any building in the old city, although they do have some skyscrapers in the newer part of the city.

That was the morning excursion, but Karen and I came back in the afternoon to walk around the lower old town, just a delightful city largely preserved the way it was in the 1500's or so. The buildings are colorful and quaint, and the cobblestone streets give you a great foot massage! If you tour Scandinavia, don't miss Tallinn!

Lower town from viewpoint

That night we saw a show with the ship's resident string quartet, which we had seen playing classical music several times, really good! This particular show was a bit different, but very entertaining. They were dressed in stunning gypsy outfits and playing gypsy music quite well, backed up by the ship's show band. The most amusing and yet amazing song was a very fast-fingered song (don't know the name, but you would recognize it), When they finished the lead violinist got a volunteer to come up and “play” the violin, which consisted of the volunteer holding the bow firmly in a vertical position while the violinist moved the violin up and down, strings against the bow while fingering the difficult song. It was a wow! feat.

Typical quaint street

Tomorrow – St. Petersburg.

Day 6 – At sea in the Baltic Sea, destination Tallinn, Estonia – September 3, 2012

In my last blog, I mentioned that we got to sleep in today. Our exhaustion from our Berlin outing, plus moving the clocks ahead one hour, meant that we woke up – at noon! Since we are at sea all day, that meant our most major decision for the day was: do we have breakfast now, or lunch? We decided upon lunch. We hadn't done much on board ship because every day has been a port of call. So we went to the fitness center and worked out for three hours. No, we didn't!

We did find out that there is a pops choir for passengers, so we went to a rehearsal and may perform in it the last night of the first part of the cruise, but listen up, Pioneer Ridge Glee Club: they are not up to our standards.

The Commodore and First Mate

Tonight was formal night. I was in my tux and Karen in her finest to show up for dinner. I think we looked good, if I do say so myself. We showed up at our table to share a bottle of champagne with our eating companions, as we celebrated our anniversary again. Princess showered us with gifts. No, they didn't! We got two balloons outside our stateroom and a little cake with a candle after dinner. Big whip! But our tablemates enjoyed the celebration, especially since I bought the champagne.

I mentioned in a previous post that initially we were at a table by ourselves, as the other couple never showed. I requested a change and we were seated at a table with two couples from New Zealand (where we vacationed last year) and the two men both worked in the computer industry, as I did, so we had lots in common to talk about and they are all most pleasant. We look forward now to dinner each night.

Cheers!

Tomorrow Tallinn, Estonia, which will be country # 38 for me... but who's counting? (I guess I am.)

Day 5 – Berlin – September 2, 2012

One of the great things about this cruise is that it has catered to our preference to sleep late and eat breakfast whenever. That all came to a screeching halt today when we had to take the train to Berlin from the port town of Warnemunde at the ungodly hour of 6:45 AM, which meant the latest we could get up was 6:00 AM and no shower or breakfast. (OK, we could have gotten up at 5:30 as many crazy people did, but give us a break!)

We endured the three hour train ride to Berlin in a comfortable car with one cup of coffee and some granola bars I brought on the trip, dozing on the way and arriving neither bright-eyed nor bushy tailed! But with the efficiency of both the German tour company and the Princess organization we were immediately on our bus and being given historical background of Berlin even as we pulled out of the parking lot. Our guide, Karin, spoke excellent English with very little accent and was quite sterling with her commentary.

Our first stop was at one of the few sites where the Berlin Wall still exists and is now protected as an historical site. At the invitation of the government, artists (not of the graffiti type) were invited to paint murals, all very interesting. The mural that Karen and I are standing in front of for the picture is artistic, but many of the others are more symbolic, like the one that shows a Trabant (East German car of laughable qualtiy) crashing through the wall. Or the one of Russian Premier Brezhnev planting a kiss on the lips of East German premier Erich Honnegger! (That actually happened!)

At the Berlin Wall - Galleria Section

We learned many fascinating facts about the wall, too many to recount them all here, One interesting fact is how long the wall was, and its construction. I forget the numbers, but although we tend to think of the wall as being between East Berlin and West Berlin, but of course the wall actually went all the way around West Berlin, so that East Germans could not sneak into West Berlin from the countryside. Not only that, there were actually two parallel walls most of the way. A bit of trivia I bet you never heard is that some rabbits were trapped between the two walls and, rabbits doing what rabbits do, there were soon thousands of them between the walls! When the wall came down, their descendants spilled out into the city, many of them finding their way to the Tiergarten, a very large park near the Brandenberg Gate. (Hey Pioneer Ridge Book Club: I was in the Tiergarten! “The Garden of Beasts!”)

Lunch (let's call it mid-day dinner) was at Nolle, underneath the elevated train tracks. Roast beef, vegetables, two kinds of sausage, sauerkraut, two kinds of potatoes, lager beer, and the best apple strudel I've ever had, added to my already corpulent state from only four days on the ship.

Then it was onto our cruise on the River Schnee which passes through many of the best parts of Berlin for sightseeing purposes. I was a bit disappointed in the boat because it hat a roof structure which made getting a clear picture of a building difficult. But it was pleasant enough.

Back on the bus and on to the Holocaust Memorial, a city block full of crypt-like granite blocks with victims names on them. It seems apparent to me that the German people, by and large, are very remorseful about the atrocities of the Nazi era, even three generations or so later, and seem determined to keep the memory of what they did alive so it will never happen again. Our guide was quite open and frank about this terrible time in their history.

Holocaust Memorial

We passed through Checkpoint Charlie, the only point of entry into East Berlin after the wall was built, drove around the Victory Pillar, then stopped at the Reichstag for pictures. That is still the seat of government, even though it was severely damaged during the war, both by Allied bombing and by the Russians in the Battle of Berlin that ended the war. It has now been restored to its prewar condition, a magnificent building.

Checkpoint Charlie

Herr und Frau Drachsler auf die Reichstag

Back to the train for the return to Warnemunde. There was a pimiento cheese sandwich on white bread, a cheesecake with no flavor, a sausage stick (which for the first two bites I thought the plastic covering was part of the food...), a small apple, and an itty-bitty candy bar. I turned up my nose at this fare, but my mouth and stomach overrode my nose and I ate every bite.

I have mixed feelings about Germans, and I probably am 50% or more German (actually Austrian, but same race of people). They have produced the greatest engineers in the world and are incredibly efficient in everything they do. Yet they were for several centuries a warlike people with tendencies toward racism. I guess they had to hit bottom with Hitler and the Nazis to realize they had to change their ways and now are economically powerful but seem to be purged of militarily aggressive tendencies. Sehr gut!

Tomorrow a day at sea on our way to Tallinn, Estonia. We can sleep in!

Day 4 – Aarhus, Denmark – September 1, 2012

September already? Where does the summer go every year? Why can't we slow down time for three months; Oh, well, what does time matter to me anyway? I'm just adrift in the Baltic Sea where time has no meaning. And we've had (for Scandinavia) excellent weather. The sun has shown for at least part of the day each day we've been here and the temperature has peaked at 20 or 21 degrees every day. (That's 68 or 70 degrees F for those of you still stuck in the English system of measurement.) Our guide in Oslo told us they had five sunny days all summer and that day was one of them! We got a glimpse of what is to come today in Aarhus, as it was in the low 60's to start the day, but the sun came out at noon and it warmed up to 70. (Yes, it's much easier for me to think in Fahrenheit, too, but I have come up with a simple approximation formula: 20 C = 68 F, add 18 to get: 30 C =86 F, and again 40 C = 104. In between those benchmarks, add or subtract 2 degrees F for each degree C. Close enough! Example, someone says 23 degrees C, add 6 to 68, giving 74 F, close enough to the precise 73.4. Close enough for government work, anyway.)

So what did we do in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city, which you've never heard of? It is in the Jutland part of Denmark, so named, I presume, because it's a part of Denmark that juts out north into the Baltic Sea. It is less of a tourist destination than Copenhagen,, so we experienced a little more authentic Danish life. We did not do a tour, figuring we could make our way around on our own. We did fine, but I have to admit I worry a little about Karen these days, as she does not have the stamina she did even a few years ago, so for the rest of the trip we will stick to the excursions, even though I hate tourist busses!

We began with the Aarhus Domkirke or Cathedral, 800 years old and the largest church in Denmark, 330 feet long and 330 feet high! It was originally a Catholic cathedral with exquisite frescos on the walls. But 16 years after it was completed, Lutheranism became the state religion, and everything including the frescoes were whitewashed over. In the 20^th century the whitewash was peeled off, revealing perfectly preserved frescoes underneath! The pulpit is in the middle of the church, common in Lutheran churches, so the front pews face the middle, creating an interesting problem for weddings.

Example of fresco 

Leaving the beautiful church, we found ourselves in the square where a music festival was going on. It being Saturday, the square was packed with people, most of them locals. We found what we thought was a nice Danish sandwich shop, only to discover it is probably a California chain, since the name turned out to be Sunset Boulevard. Duh! Nevertheless, good food at reasonable price (my definition of reasonable expands daily)

The most beautiful woman on the most beautiful street!

We then walked up the “most beautiful street in Aarhus” with tiny pastel cottages and hollyhocks or climbing roses on every house. That took us to ARoS, the art museum which was a memorable experience. The most famous work there is a squatting sculpture of a boy (titled... Boy, of course) by Australian artist Ron Mueck, 15 feet high, yet amazingly realistic, with eyes that seem alive and skin accurate down the the wrinkles on his elbows! 

Oh! Boy!

 We also saw an interesting exhibit of light and video art, pretty avant garde, but fascinating. Virtually all the art is modern. We then went up to the 10^th floor which is a rainbow ring walkway. As you walk around the ring you go from red tint to orange to yellow, etc. Viewed from the outside, the people in the ring are silhouettes walking around the ring.

Violet-Red (not shown: orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo)

We then walked up to Den Gamli By, an open air museum so popular in Scandinavia. However, it was getting late and Karen was getting very tired so we called a taxi and went back to the ship to rest.

Tomorrow – Berlin, Germany

Day 2 and 3 – Copenhagen to Oslo

Day 2 – Thursday, August 30 – Copenhagen and Boarding the Emerald Princess

It's been two busy days since I blogged last, so trying to catch up now. As I write this it is 10:00 PM on Friday and I am sitting on the balcony off our stateroom with a glass of cabernet and a full moon illuminating the Baltic Sea as we make our way from Oslo to Aarhus, Denmark. What could be better? OK, it could be a little warmer, but not complaining. Unfortunately, as I was told, the internet on board is very slow, yet very expensive (40 cents per minute). So it is likely that my blog will be mostly text this time, and the pictures will have to catch up with the text after I get home.

Wednesday morning in Copenhagen we arose, somewhat reluctantly at 8:30, had an outrageously expensive breakfast at the hotel (wait, I said I wouldn't whine, didn't I?) and headed off on foot to the center of the city, hoping to get in a walking tour with a pretend Hans Christian Anderson that I had read about in Rick Steve's Scandinavian Guide book. But we got there about 10:35 and he had already left with his group.

Hans Christian Anderson (not!)

I said, “No problem, we can just do the self-guided walking tour from the book, so we set off for the Town Hall, where the self-guided tour begins. As we approached the square, I saw him, dressed in a purple top hat and tails, leading a group into the town hall. “C'mon, Karen!” I said, “We can catch him!” So we double timed (well, maybe one-and-a-half timed) it into the hall and joined his tour.

He is a delightful fellow, an American named Richard Karpay who now lives in Copenhagen and has been doing this for many years; He mixes historical tales about the city and Denmark in general as he points out famous landmarks on the walk. The Danes are quite different from Americans, and even different from most European cultures. Some examples:

• Bicycles are the most common means of transportation.
• Danes not only love their queen, they love the government! (There is no Tea Party here!)
• They are quite happy with their life, and the pursuit of money is less important than a good life with a good job. There is much less salary differentiation between top management and the lowest laborer than in the US, minimum wage $17.
• Unemployment is well under 4% and to be unemployed more than six months is rare.
• They are taxed at about 50% of their income, and a hidden sales tax of 25% means that they forfeit about 60% of their income to the government. And they don't mind!
• In exchange they get: free medical care, a retirement pension, free schooling at all levels through Ph.D., six weeks paid vacation, maternity leave for both husband and wife, excellent cultural environment.
• Although 80+ percent claim to be Lutheran, about 2% attend church. It is a humanistic society in which religion plays little part.
• No one is permitted to have a weapon, including police, and crime is almost non-existent except for petty theft.
• Women have totally equal rights and earn the same pay as men. Women make up nearly 40 per cent of the parliament.
• The only fly in the ointment is immigration, especially from the middle east. New immigrants are slow to adopt Danish ways, and Islamic traditions are anathema to women's rights, for example. Once open, immigration is now tightening up dramatically.

So we learned more about the Danes in two hours than most Americans know about them in a lifetime. But now it's time to check out and board our ship!

The Emerald Princess is a huge ship, carrying 3,000 passengers. The check-in process was amazingly swift! I have not been on Princess before, but I remember from past cruises experiencing exasperatingly long lines to check in and board the ship. In this instance, we were in our room ten minutes after we got out of the taxi! Our stateroom is the size of a small hotel room, but that is great compared to most cruise cabins. And the balcony is delightful!

Karen on our balcony - leaving port of Copenhagen

After the obligatory life jacket exercise, we settled in and looked forward to our first dinner. The food was fantastic, the service was good, but we were seated at a table for four and the other couple apparently had switched tables to be with friends. I requested a move to be seated with some other folks, and that will take place tomorrow (Saturday). For me, getting to know other people is a part of the experience.

Day 3 – Friday, August 31 – Oslo

Breakfast in our room – delightful! The ship is docked in Oslo now and we explored a bit of the city on our own, especially the Town Hall, an absolutely beautiful building only completed in 1950. Murals on every wall tell the stories of Norway's history and culture. If you have ever watched the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize, it took place in the main hall of the building, a cavernous room. (The other Nobel prizes for physics, etc. are presented in Stockholm, by the way. Nobel was Swedish, but at the time of his life, Norway and Sweden were one country.

The history of Norway is interesting. For a good part of their history, they were a part of Denmark. At one point in the 17^th century King Christian, after rebuilding Oslo after a terrible fire that destroyed the entire city, renamed the city Christiania, after himself, of course. The name Oslo was only restored in 1925. Norway got independence from Denmark in the 19^th century, only to then become a part of Sweden. In 1905 it finally got its permanent independence upon an amicable separation of Norway and Sweden. But it had to suffer through Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945. Once they had their independence, they did not have a royal family, so they imported a prince from Denmark to be their king, and his descendants have formed the Norwegian royal family since, well loved by the Norwegian people.

In the afternoon we went on a bus excursion to see three of the most famous sites in Oslo. Our first stop was the Viking Ship Museum, where several viking ships have been partially restored. They are magnificent vessels, but hard to imagine them crossing the Atlantic, but they certainly did, settling in Iceland, Greenland, and briefly in Vinland (Newfoundland). A couple of my favorite beliefs about Vikings turn out to be inaccurate myths. First, they did not wear helmets with horns! Second, they by and large did not rape and pillage, but were primarily traders. I'll never read Hagar the Horrible the same again.

Viking Ship - I guess the Viking (Karen) should have been in the picture.

The most fascinating part of our trip so far was our next stop at Vigeland Park. Gustav Vigeland was a sculptor who convinced the Oslo city council to pay all his working and living expenses to create a park with hundreds of his statues, almost all of which are studies of the human form in life situations. Children were often part of the statues, usually in playful and loving scenes with their parents. None of the statues have clothes, as Vigeland said, “If I clothe them, I fix them at a particular point in time – I want these statues to be timeless.“ It is an amazing park over which he had total control, including the landscaping.

Our final stop was at their ski jump. For me this was mostly a big yawn. It is an impressive engineering achievement, but would not have been on my list. But the Norwegians are extremely proud of it, built for the 2011 world ski jump championships. Skiing is to Norwegians like baseball is to Americans. The jump is high on a hill overlooking Oslo and the Oslofjord, a beautiful view. I wondered if this is the hill where the Norwegian Lutheran pastor was inspired to write the words to “How Great Thou Art,” but never got a chance to find out.

What a beautiful setting Oslo is. It is at the end of a 50 mile or so fjord, with green forests and colorful houses. Leaving port was a glorious experience, as the sun set over the hills as we made our way along the fjord to the Baltic. Next stop, Aarhus.

Wednesday – August 29, 2012

DAY ONE – Copenhagen

In terms of European time, this day started in Newark. We were supposed to depart before 6 pm on Tuesday, which would have been midnight European time. But there was an outage on United's computers in Newark just before the original boarding time and NO flights were being boarded. (Did that make the news?) After a two hour delay, they started boarding international flights manually and then it took much longer to get the paperwork for the pilots to take off, then of course all the international flights were ready to go at the same time. We were finally in the air at 7:40 pm EDT, or 1:40 am in Europe.

Now the question was, would our flight to Stockholm arrive in time for us to make our connecting flight to Copenhagen? We watched “Mirror, Mirror” then I turned off my display to try to get some sleep, the kind where you wander in and out of consciousness. Karen never did go to sleep and I noticed that she watched “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,”a movie I want to see, but I was determined to get at least a few zzzz's.

We arrived at 8:30 and our connecting flight was at 9:15. We had to go through passport control, but not customs, as our luggage was checked to Copenhagen. We arrived breathless at the gate at 9:10, only to discover that the flight was delayed slightly anyway because there had been an SAS system outage in Copenhagen earlier that delayed flights there! Is that divine intervention or very weird coincidence? Or are our airline systems being taken over by extra-terrestrials?

So all is well that ends well, right? Wait, where is Karen's red suitcase? Trek down to SAS Services. Fortunately I had the baggage receipts and she said immediately, “That bag missed your flight in Stockholm but is coming in on the next flight in about 20 minutes. Finally, all's well that ends well!

The Tivoli Hotel where we are staying is very nice and relatively (by European standards) reasonable in price. They provided two complimentary tickets to Tivoli Gardens, which was high on my list to see in our limited time here. After a two hour nap, we walked to the Gardens, which were theoretically 0.6 mile away, but it seemed twice that far to me.

Tivoli Gardens is a world famous amusement park that is quite different from Disney or even Cedar Point. Its gardens are magnificent, with fountains and lots of green space. Yes it has rides, but they are not the attraction for most people. There are shows of various types going on all the time, but especially in the evening. Tonight there was a pantomime show, quite well done by obviously professional ballet dancers, but with a bit of slapstick humor to keep the kids laughing. That was followed by a rock concert, which we did not stay for (surprise, surprise). There must be 40 restaurants, all terrifically overpriced, but of course everything is overpriced in Europe, especially Scandinavia, as I'm learning. We had a nice small luncheon plate of fish, beef, and chicken salad, plus a beer for me and a Coke for Karen. $70! Most dinners would have been over $200! Everyone must be rich in Denmark! Who said, “There's something rotten in Denmark.”? Oh, right, Shakespeare.

But actually, it's a beautiful city and the people are polite and friendly. And everyone I met so far speaks English, which is very fortunate, because I know zero words in Danish. Tomorrow we are going to take a walking tour of downtown, then we board our home for the next four weeks, the Emerald Princess!

PS:  Reading back over the blog, I realize I was really whining a lot about the prices.  I promise never to do that again.  Of course, never say never....

Entrance to Tivoli Gardens

Just one of many beautiful gardens

The Restaurant where we had lunch = Faergekroens Bryghus

Hey, I have to get in at least one picture!

Pantomime Play

Blog – Tuesday, August 28, 2012

WE LEAVE FOR A MONTH LONG SCANDINAVIAN/ATLANTIC CRUISE!

I work really hard at being totally prepared for a trip – packing checklists, long to-do lists, etc. So it is disappointing when things go wrong, but of course they always do. Last week I upgraded my phone to a Droid RAZR so that I would have a global-ready phone. Mom's phone, an old (old meaning two years) flip phone, is already global-ready. It is an Escapade by Samsung that is no longer made. But it works fine, so I went to pack up its charger from the place in the kitchen where Karen always charges it. No charger in sight. And of course Karen cannot tell me what she did with it.

So I run around the night before we leave trying to find a charger for an obsolete phone – Verizon, Wal-Mart, Radio Shack, no one could help me. I found on the internet that I could buy one for $2.99 plus 5.00 shipping, but that doesn't help me now! So the plan now is to keep her phone off except in situations in ports of call where we could potentially get separated. Then we'll turn it on. Will it last a month? I doubt it. Oh, well!

Ken picked us up at 9:00 this morning and as we started out I said, “Sure hope we have everything!” Then for no good reason I said, “Karen, you have your purse, right?” (She is never without her purse, even in the house.) She said, “Uh-huh.” Uh-oh. So I turned around and said “show me your purse” and she shook her head no. So it's off at the next exit and return to the house for it. Fortunately we had plenty of time, so no harm done.

We are still in the afterglow of our wonderful 50^th anniversary dinner/open house at Pioneer Ridge! We had 75 people for the dinner and another 70 or so for the open house. Renewal of vows, a 13 minute slide show of our 50 years of marriage, heartfelt toasts by resident Bob Stanley and by our grandson Sam and by our son, Eric. I was beginning to feel like Jimmy Stewart in “It's a Wonderful Life.” One of the highlights (if I do say so myself, but it did get a standing ovation), was Karen and me telling the story of our wedding and honeymoon, both of which had their share of humor. Perhaps I'll publish it on the blog at some point. What was amazing to most folks was to hear Karen reading from our script with a voice clear as a bell and very little hesitation. They also got a kick out of her giggling from time to time. There was a lot of love in that room, and the memories will last for a lifetime.

As I write this, I'm sitting in Newark airport waiting for our flight to Stockholm. Long flights are not the fun part of vacations, but I go into a form of stasis until we land and it's OK. We change planes in Stockholm, then land in Copenhagen, where we have a day to ourselves before boarding the Emerald Princess.

Bye for now.