Letters from The Sea - Part VI: Tunis, Naples, Livorno and Villefranche

Pretty, pretty Villefranche

So here I sit in a Salon de The in the most gorgeous and charming Villefranche - a lovely little town on the French Reviera. It can only be described as "delightful"! Terracotta houses lining a lovely bay, 16th century citadel, little boats bobbing up and down, and two big cruise ships anchored some way into the sea - it was also quite fun that the only way off the boat is by little boat... And YAY!!!!! The sun is shining at LAST! Was planning to go to Cannes to get a photo of something I failed to photograph when I was last there, but missed the train station, and when I turned back and could finally see it from a distance, looked at all the people waiting on the platform and thought, the last thing I really want to be doing is hanging about trying out sunday public transport in France, so have now been sitting here for a while being charmingly ingored by the French waiters.


View from my Salon du The

By now I'm desperate to be home. I am SO bored I am no longer able to give a flying f*** about seeing the same resident singers over and over again, singing off the same "safe" playlist. I mean, they're lovely people, and great singers, but jeeeeeeeeezzzzzzz. Give me some variety! One of them did "Same Jeans" by the View the other day and it went down a storm! Everyone loved it. But it was pretty risky. I'm so glad it worked out cos that means they can venture into slightly less safe territory. Especially since the ship is aimed at 35-55 years olds... (Not that it's succeeding that well, everyone seems more like 65-85 to me...)

Anyway, only 4 shows to go! And all of them are proper "production shows" with dancers and acrobats and stuff, so much more fun for me.

So, backtracking a bit...

The morning we arrived in Tunis, I didn't even get woken by the anchor-lowering process... Had been up till about 5 AM having my ears bent by one of the dancers. See, the crew bar shuts at one. But everyone buys a stash of at least another three drinks just before closing, and we sit and nurse them till we're chucked out at 2. Then there is a general movement up to the Players Bar & Casino where a cheesy disco continues until the punters all finally stagger to bed, any time between 2 and 4AM. We can drink here at hefty discount. When that finally shuts, we either go to someone's cabin who has a stash of beer in their fridge, or we go to Plantation, which is the 24-hour burger bar, where LUCKILY they serve no alcohol. I'm always happiest in the morning when the latter course of action is taken, as it usually means an end to the alcohol consumption for the night. My first few days I was quite good, but lord above, one does need an escape from the dullness of life on board a ship, and since the poker night I don't think I've been to bed before 5... Except last night, but then my alarm was set for 7.30 so I could go on the trip up Vesuvius... I've sworn I will not set foot in Crew Bar after work tonight, but hey, late night's are my time of day and somehow I think it'll be hard not to... Wish me luck!

So Tunis was a non-event for me, and the weather sucked again, and my mood was awful and I had nightmares when I tried to get some kip around lunchtime, and all I wanted to do was GO HOME!!!! And we spent the whole afternoon setting up the band in Crew Bar for a party last night - which shouldn't really be a problem, except Crew Bar is on deck 2 midships - the lift only goes down to deck 4 - and all the gear is scattered between the various venues in the ship, which are generally on decks 7 and 8. So you can imagine how many times we had to trek up and down the stairs in order to get all the bits we needed... It took HOURS! Thankfully there are four stagehands who did most of the heavy stuff, but jeez... What a dull afternoon...

So the crew party was kinda fun, and I managed to drag myself out of bed to get on a coach to Mount Vesuvius. It was well worth it, and I was SORELY tempted to buy some of the souveneirs... I've seen some tacky stuff in my time, but OH-MY-GOD I've never seen anything quite this bad. A vast array of tacky little creatures carved from black lava, and then painted in GLITTER of all things!!! So imagine: two little bunnies hugging each other around a red-glitter heart. A tortoise with a green-glitter shell. An enormous roman soldier with all different colours of glitter festooning his person. I SO wanted to buy one, on the one hand, but SO couldn't bring myself to encourage that kind of industry in the end...


Bad Picture of Mount Vesuvius


The crater of the volcano

Then spent the afternoon wandering around in Naples, which was loads of fun! Insane traffic - crossing the road is an art: find a local and put him between you and the traffic and walk when he does. It works very well - I remember having to do something similar in Bangkok. It's got quite a buzz about the place. Feels vaguely dangerous, with some rough looking characters wandering around. The kind of place in which you expect to be pick-pocketed. And remind me never to wear a crop-top in Italy again. The men were SO leery and lecherous. Ugh. But still, it had that properly Italian look to it, castles and all, and I like a bit of edginess, me. And I managed to get connected...


Naples side-street

The Galleria Something in Naples

The we moved up the coast to Livorno, and descended into bad weather and huge swells - apparently something like 4 metres. But my trusty sea-legs did their job and even though the ship was listing at an angle of about 20 degrees I managed to only feel mildly dizzy.

Livorno was a bit of a mission of a day. It's a gateway port to Pisa and Florence, but I was sent into Livornio to try buy 2 multi-cd changers and a DJ thingy with MP3 capabilities. Yeah right. In a dodgy little Italian dock town? With not a single word of Italian at my command? In the piss-pouring rain? I managed to find two electronics shops, but they seem to have been lost since about 1985. SO much for that. Waiting for the once-every-half-hour (read: once-every-hour) shuttle bus was my next fun experience. So, an hour and at least 4 busses going to a different ship later, the queue getting longer and longer, and moodier and moodier, and the rain not letting up, a bus labeled Ocean Village arrives. It drops off 8 people, closes the doors and drives off! By now there were about 100 people in bad moods just wanting to get back to the ship. Another half hour or so later a coach finally arrives to pick us up, and we have to squeeze everyone in like a rush-hour tube. Bearing in mind everyone is fairly elderly and somewhat infirm, this caused much consternation. When we got back to the ship, I went to tell the manager of the shore excursions what had happened,and he just shrugged his shoulders and said "it was siesta time"... might have been nice if someone had MENTIONED there would be no coaches in mother-f***ing siesta time - everyone could have settled into a nice lunch somewhere instead of standing in the pissing rain. So much for customer care - it has been firmly proven that OV only really cares about the folks who go on their seriously over-priced tours. If you choose to be independent, they want you to suffer as much as possible so people are forced to aceed to the organised tours. Oh well.

But that was yesterday,and today all is fabulous. Just GORGEOUS! This pretty much makes up for a lot of the crap days. I love the south of France! so damn pretty...

Anyway, gonna take another stroll, see if I can find an internet caf and head back for work...

Lots of love
Dxxxx