Left to Right: Adrian (Sydney, Australia), Valerie (Montreal, Canada), Anja (Poland), Daniel (Sydney, Australia), Me -- Andy Artz (Saint Paul, Minnesota), and Derek (Poland). Derek and Anja performed as the Everest Duo (a piano/vocal duo with backing tracks, playing general pop/dance material of all styles) until 19 August 2006. The rest of us comprised the Navigators, a quartet that played dance sets and backs up singers and other shows.
A Sorrento street scene.
Andy in Nice.
The Seabourn Legend, my home from August to October 2006.
WARNING -- It's big because I don't have software here to shrink it. Sorry!
Monte Carlo is beautiful and very expensive. Lots of sportscars and casinos. But the view is free, and I found a fun shot from the plaza outside the opera house, looking down onto the harbor with a colorful building in the foreground.
If you turn around and walk a few feet, you see the opera house...
Segrada De Familia is a cathedral designed by Gaudi, and has been under construction for about a hundred years. It's still not finished, but amazing nonetheless.
Deck 5 Aft is where the crew hangs out most nights. Technically, it's not a crew area, but passengers rarely find their way back here. I'll post a party pic later.
Eric Hadley (Left) just finished his contract. Here he is with our Environmental Officer, Izidor (Middle), sharing the love. Izidor helped out this officers' dinner by providing some extra vino out his own pocket. We obviously enjoyed it!
Enjoying myself in Pompeii.
The house where this picture was taken was under restoration at the time of my visit. It's amazing how vibrant the colors still are after all these years.
Looks like they had some serious interior decorators back in the day. Look at this beautiful polished mixed-stone countertop. Not sure what this place was for -- food or laundry perhaps?
This is the smaller theatre in Pompeii. It could still seat thousands, but I think it was pretty crowded -- good thing people were smaller back then!
This is a town square with a raised platform (on left) where court cases would be heard in public, with judges and all. Remember that modern law is descended from and based on Roman law -- evidence, testimony, and legal arguments were heard and then decided upon. If you were a citizen, of course. So if you were poor, foreign, a woman, a slave, a foreigner... forget it.
Some nice scenery in Portofino, Italy.
Okay, so to live in Monte Carlo it's the law that you have to be a Millionaire. For real. So there are lots of sweet cars out there. Here's two that were parked outside the Grand Casino. Maybe in my next lifetime I'll be able to afford one?
Went to the Vatican & Sistine Chapel. Here I am in front of my favorite piece of Renaissance art -- Raphael's School Of Athens. The two guys in the archway are Plato and Aristotle -- Plato (left) pointing upwards toward the Platonic Forms, Aristotle (right) with his hand straight ahead toward the real world.
Took the train to Pompeii... not enough time to go up on Mount Vesuvius, but had a few hours to wander around the ruins. Saw a 2000-year old brothel.
Here I am in Pisa with my German friend Gunnar. He's new on bar staff and had the afternoon off, so we took a day trip. He's addicted to McDonald's, so we went and got burgers. Then off to the tower to take photos. We barely made the train back!
In Elba, there's a huge fortress overlooking the bay -- very large but not terribly exciting. Better, though was Napoleon's house... there was an exhibition going on there with lots of his old books and furniture, etc. Here's his camping rig for when he led his armies into battle.
One of the Legend's sister ships, the Spirit, was in port next to us. A fun sight to see.
Cannes from an old fortress tower.
One of the largest churches in Europe, the Cathedrale Sainte-Marie Majeure, was built in only 40 years. It's in Marseilles and is large enough that it's hard to get a good picture of it from the street. But what's most impressive about this cathedral to me is the tile floor. The mosaics were designed by a single artisan, laid down in only four years, and cover the entire floor. My camera ran out of juice right after this shot of one of the smaller designs, still pretty intricate. This photo shows a pattern about two or three feet across.
And here I am in beautiful Portofino.
Okay, the last three weeks the ship has been chartered out to private companies -- they take over the entire ship, and in Motorola s case, they redecorate the entire boat in corporate logos and stuff and have special shoreside entertainment, like a private concert with Diana Ross. Now, I didn't get to go to that, but we worked a lot less and visited fewer ports with more repetition, so I had some extra free time to pull some older pics out for fun. Here they are, along with a few new ones...
Barcelona has its own Arc De Triumph on one end of a long pedestrian park.
A couple shots from Mallorca, of the main Cathedral. There's a sculpture park on one side with some cool large works.
While there are a lot of fancy cars in Europe, especially in Monte Carlo, there are also a ton of these (often rented) Smart Cars. I wouldn't want to take one on the highway in America, but they're great for parking on the narrow streets out here.
These Sicilian cops are having a pow-wow to figure out if they can both fit in the police car at the same time!
I didn't get to see Diana Ross perform in Elba, but they still gave me the red carpet treatment anyway!
An unfortunately named boat I saw in Monte Carlo... Makes you leary of getting on it. "...Hey, baby, want to go for a sail on my boat, the Hepatitis?" Ha!
Here's a ship docked next to us in Lavorno (I think). Looks a little like a Pirate ship, no? In 2005, our sister ship, the Seabourn Pride, was attacked by Pirates, but they were more modern. They actually fired machine guns at the ship, and took out one of our weapons right away when they saw it being brought out (a sort of anti-personnel sonic device that makes you violently ill, and can cause internal organ problems). They never boarded the Pride, but they left bulletholes all over, and even fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the side of the ship, destroying a couple of cabins. There were no injuries, though, because everybody had long since been moved to a safe location inside the ship. They tell me the pirates were actually laughing and waving during the incident, even when they were eventually driven off... Don't worry though, it's actually very rare for them to attack passenger ships -- they usually want to steal cargo, and it's more profitable to do that to container vessels. And "Pirates of the Mediterranean" or "Pirates of the Red Sea" just doesn't have the same ring... :)
Here's Adrian (bandleader/bassist) and Danny (pianist) enjoying themselves at an Officers' Dinner (there's one every Friday, and it's a great chance to get some real food and good wine). Obviously, Adrian has had one too many glasses of red for his own good.