Love and Marriage
THIS IS AN ADDITION TO THE EMAIL I SENT AFTER LEAVING OMAN. THE ORIGINAL EMAIL IS POSTED BELOW AFTER THE SERIES OF ****** My tour guide in Oman spoke briefly about marriage customs in his country but I wasn't prepared to take notes and the sound system in the bus was poor so I googled "Marriage in O...
A coincidence?
It's late in the evening and inside the Avenue Bar on the sixth deck, Carlos, a young and very talented Argentine guitarist and singer is doing an R&B set with three of the ship's musicians. They rarely perform together but jam as though they do it every night. They are daring enough to take request...
Interlude at sea
Another cruise for me; another cyclone to avoid. On our winter cruise aboard Oceania Nautica, you might remember a three-day period when the captain had to avoid a cyclone (hurricane) near Madagascar. The current cyclone is not a direct threat, but winds and high seas will not allow us to safely app...
Bumper Bop
So we discovered something almost as ubiquitous as sand in Egypt. Americans call them speed bumps. On the 155-mile, 3 hour-30 minute drive from the port of Safaga to Luxor, our SUV driver Hamed, navigated hundreds of them with great skill. Despite the fact that he makes this drive almost daily and s...
The 5.7 Million Ton Pyramid or An Old Geezer Visits Giza
The port of Soknha on the Red Sea is the closest one to Cairo. It's more than a two-hour drive on a highway across desert, across the Nile River and ringing the city to the area called Giza. As the highway loops north you can see the pyramids, looking like an amusement park set amongst dozens of sho...
The Rhodes Show
After spending half-a-day traipsing up the Acropolis of Athens, two days later one could say I was trudging up its little sister, the Acropolis of Lindos on the island of Rhodes. The Lindos Acropolis actually predates the Athens structure by about three centuries. It's smaller but has all the same e...
Greece is the World, is the World that you heard
It's got a groove, it's got a meaning Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion Grease is the way we are feeling What better way to start chronicling another adventure than a 45-year-old Bee Gee lyric. Smack in the middle of Athens for three days as the first step of this journey, I expected "...