Barcelona

After several most enjoyable days at sea, I headed off into Barcelona with my step-siblings KS and Bandini1 after an early Breakfast with the aim of avoiding the queues to get off the boat and on to the shuttle bus. After some deliberation we took the tourist bus with the rest of the family who had come to pay testament to a lack of queuing back at the boat. I can’t recommend the tourist buses as in my opinion they’re far too expensive and it’s difficult to return to a specific stop on the route without completing a cycle, which makes exploring difficult. We used this to get some bearings in Barcelona and make our way to La Sagrada Família, getting off fairly close to it and walking the rest of the way.  We then wandered around the city for a few hours before riding the metro back to the port. Overall, it was an amazingly vibrant place, and I would have loved to have spent more time there.

Just after leaving Barcelona I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and found what it had to say about the city very interesting, it’s certainly worth reading and sheds some light on things.

Monte Carlo

After disembarking the tender,  I noticed two things:

1. How hot it was.
2. How expensive cold drinks were.

In all honesty, I didn’t give Monte Carlo a fair shot; I don’t enjoy baking hot climates, and I didn’t feel like wandering aimlessly.

Rome

Although we did stop at two ports in Italy, I missed out on the first for some unexplainable and complex reason. The second was Civitavecchia where we took a taxi to Rome and had a whistle-stop tour of Rome. On [Craig’s] advice, I tasted Roman ice-cream and pizza, although never got a chance to sample to coffee.

Alghero

When I said I visited two Italian ports, I was sort of lying. Alghero is a town on the Italian island of Sardinia. (Wikipedia also tells me that it’s the second biggest Island in the Mediterranean) And therefore is my third Italian port, except we reached it by tender- so it’s not really a port.

It is however, a beautiful town and fuses all kind of influences. It also has some exceptional coffee.

Palma

Palma didn’t really initially strike me as likely to be photogenic, so I didn’t bring my camera as it would be a bit of a hassle when buying a suit. I did however, buy a fairly sharp suit for the entirely reasonable sum of about €80. I can’t really say much more about Palma to be honest, I didn’t spend all that much time there, although it was a perfectly nice city. I did see some kind of police motorcade which passed us by, that was pretty cool.

Gibraltar

I wasn’t overly struck by what I saw of Gibraltar, which was just the main tourist drag. Alcohol is both very cheap on Gibraltar, and for sale to anyone over 16. Which strikes me as slightly crazy. The boat arrived at about half two, and we had to be back by six pm; so there wasn’t enough time to visit the monkey sanctuary- which comes highly recommended by everyone I spoke to about it.

The journey back

The journey back was relatively uneventful, and gave me the chance to get to know some of the new friends I met onboard a bit better. I also won a pub quiz with Lembit Öpik, who’s cabin was just down the corridor from mine. I will end with a picture of us celebrating our win on the last night.