Cruise day three Barcelona, Spain

Cruise day three Barcelona, Spain

                                                We spent a lot of time in lines today .<

On our second day in Barcelona I decided that we needed to hit all of the major attractions of the city. On the plus side the city of Barcelona has a fantastic subway system that will take you to any place in the city cheaply and efficiently. On the downside as they are the major attractions of an international city the lines and the price for entry were outrageous. We ended up going to many of the tourist destinations only to take pictures from the outside. Also there is the whole “mission creep” phenomenon. That is you see so many wonderful things it is hard for you to wait in line to see yet another wonderful thing. I have to say that I enjoy(ed) stumbling around and finding thing that may or may not be “major” destinations as much as if not more than hunting down specific “major” sites. It seems a bit more interesting to happen upon a site and then explore it. If it happens to be a “major” or minor site does not matter as you are just exploring having fun!

                                                         Sagrada Familia
That being said on the second day in Barcelona we decided to go after the big sites that we did not see the day before. I have to say right out that it was not as fun as the day before, but we did run into some fun things on the way and enjoyed them.

                                    David and Tita posing at Sagrada Familia- the kids refused !

The first thing on the bucket list was the Sagrada Familia the famous cathedral that is always being worked on!  “the Sagrada Família (Catalan pronunciation: [s?'??að? f?'mi?i?]), is a large Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, designed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). Although incomplete, the church is a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” It was a nice place to visit and see but the work on it was still quite extensive so the outside was as not as beautiful as it is in the pictures. AS far as going into the inside the line was something like ½ way around the building and it is a huge building. Also as I have mentioned before you get a bit of overkill on all the cathedrals and it just gets to be a bit too much of the same.

                                             Andrew waiting in line at the Picasso Museum

After our obligatory visit to the Sagrada Familia I decided that I wanted to actually go to a museum. You have to understand that all of us in the family have become opposed to going to museums and cathedrals as the majority of them are ok but far from worth the $20 per person entrance fee. But I was sure that the Picasso museum was going to be different! How wrong I was!  
The long wait in line at the Picasso Museum!

I was a much better Picasso exhibit ( at traveling exhibit) at the Detroit Institute of Arts back in 1989. And I have to say that many of his more famous works of art were not even in the museum, sure they had a bunch of his early work, but not much of the historical works. I did enjoy seeing his early work as it showed that he was trained in classical painting and sculpting. It showed a side of his work that is usually not focused on. I did not enjoy the countless rough sketch work as it usually did not include the final work just the rough sketches and the studies that he had done. It would have been wonderful if they had a full collection of a few pieces of his more famous art. That is it would have been great if they had the rough art, the sketches, the studies and then the buildup to the final piece of work, but usually they had the sketches and that was about it. What was most disappointing to me was the collection of his work from the Blue Period, at the Detroit show it had a poignant selection of this period showing the melancholy that the artist was experiencing. All in all the museum was almost random collection of his work that did not show the true genius of the artist, which is sad as he had spent some informative years of his life in Barcelona.

  As I said at the beginning the day was not as much fun as wandering around aimlessly like we did the first day. If anything I felt it was a waste of time and money to try to track down the “must do” sites and attractions of Barcelona. Well not a waste but the hype overs shadowed the actual experience of the big sites while the smaller “found” sites easily were worth finding.

                                                         Train Station Barcelona

Barcelona, Spain- Day 1

Cruise day two Barcelona, Spain

Well actually this was days 3 and 4 as I had a bit too much fun on the night before my birthday and we ended up staying in for day two of the cruise. Not that it was much of a deal anyway as I was not to excited about Monte Carlo, Monaco. Sure it would have been fun to get off the boat and explore some of a country we had never gone to but the kids were pretty tired after walking for 4 hours straight the day before and we had heard that Monte Carlo was good for two things shopping and casinos. The first problem was that the shopping they were talking about was for high fashion items and I am cheap person looking for a great deal. The second problem is that I do not gamble, not out of principle or anything like that but I am bad at it and I just end up giving my money to the person- again I am too cheap to do that more than once.

Did I mention the FOOD! I guess that was another reason we stayed on board, it was hard to get off the ship when all the meals were served all you can eat buffet style, granted some stations prepared your food to order. The quality and selection were amazing! I must have gained 20 lbs. on the boat in the 10 days I was there. Also room service was complementary so if you did not get enough at the trough of breakfast lunch dinner- which melded into one continuous meal with different selections- you could order room service 24 hours a day at no extra cost. The only two things that were extra on the cruise were alcohol and soda. And they were so expensive that we tended to avoid them, tended I did not say I avoided them totally because happy hour was buy one get one, hence my trouble the night before.

Christopher Columbus Statue

So the next time we got off the boat was on 30 July at the port of Barcelona, Spain. I have to say I really liked Barcelona and had a great time exploring the first day. We were in port for 2 days in Barcelona.  We started our wandering at the Christopher Columbus Statue (above) which then lead to Las Rambla which was a nice tree lined street with many off shoots in the heart of Barcelona.

I guess I had a better time on the first day because we just wandered around town not trying to see anything in particular. We ended up finding a lot of neat little churches and plazas that were nice and quaint and a bit off the normal tourist routes. One of the first little churches that we happened upon was St. Maria Del Pi. We found it in a nameless plaza that we had wandered into aimlessly.

  

 In fact we found our favorite building of the whole trip by wandering around aimlessly in Barcelona.

The Eyeball Building?

Actually the Palau de Musica was a good second contender for our favorite building on the trip as well. We- ok I – wanted to go in to get a full tour of the Music Palace but the tickets were $20 a person and there was no way I was going to cough up $80 to hear my kids bitch about being dragged through another museum/cathedral - and this was only day 2 for God’s sake!

I did convince the kids to go into the Cathedral de Barcelona, which was nice. It gave us some time out of the sun and they got to see a lot of wonderful architecture.  

The cool thing about the Cathedral de Barcelona was that it had a pound and pen for these swans! It was neat sitting in the plaza of the church watching the swans- granted they got pretty mean to one of their own - those priests need to raise them better.

Well we wandered around for the better part of 5 hours before we found ourselves back at the feeding trough – err I mean back on the boat to eat!

Pisa, Italy

Our first day on the cruise was a total surprise as we were almost not on the cruise. I had read the instructions to the cruise wrong and thought that we could not get on until 5 pm. Luckily Tita had read the notes carefully and saw that we needed to be on the cruise 4 hours before departure which was at 5 pm. Instead of taking the bus to the airport to the train station to Rome then to the pier in Civitavecchia , Italy we decided to take a private car (BMW 7 series) directly to the pier.

Our ship the ms Noordam

Our itinerary was …

Day        Date                      Port

0               27 July 2012       Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy

1              28 July 2012        Livorno (Florence/Pisa), Italy

2              29 July 2012        Monte Carlo, Monaco

3              30 July 2012        Barcelona, Spain ON

4              31 July 2012        Barcelona, Spain

5              1 Aug 2012          Palma de Mallorca, Spain

6              2 Aug 2012          At Sea

7              3 Aug 2012          La Goulette (Tunis), Tunisia

8              4 Aug 2012          Palermo, Sicily, Italy

9              5 Aug 2012          Naples, Italy

10           6 Aug 2012          Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy

I will hopefully post something for each day. I will post pictures of each day on my Facebook Account ( https://www.facebook.com/david.rumptz) if you want to see more than the few I send with the e-mail.

As you can see from the itinerary we do not actually land in Pisa, as it is not on the cost. We landed in Livorno then took a bus / train ride up to Pisa. This was actually very easy and very cheap. I was surprised how well they cratered to the tourist and how easy they made it to transit thought Livorno on your way up to wither Pisa or Florence. Not all cities were as easy to get around.

Once we got into Pisa itself we had to hike about 20 minutes up the Leaning tower area, which contains several structures in its walled area described below.

Pisa's Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo) is the area that houses the most well-known structures in Pisa including the leaning tower itself. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the bell tower for the Cathedral  that lies behind it in my picture. The cathedral itself is quite impressive outside and in but after a while you get a bit of cathedral overload and just do not want to see another magnificent cathedral. But props to my Gesu friends and after a while I came to realize what a beautiful church we had growing up and think that its majesty could hold it place to some of the cathedrals in Europe, some.

Well back to the other structures in Pisa's Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo), I was smart enough to ask the person selling tickets which would be the best places to visit and she mentioned that the small museum south of the leaning tower would be best. And she was right though the museum itself and collection were pretty lacking the private courtyard it had just in front of the leaning tower made up for it in spades. We were allowed to have a private view of the leaning tower with no crowds to contend with and let me tell you there were crowds in the main area in front of the tower.

Although the leaning tower is the most well know part of Pisa it is really a city of wonderful small plazas that we discovered on our way back to the train station. Like this one the Piazza Dei Cavalieri truly a cool place to see sadly the pictures cannot capture all the beauty of such a small plaza. Granted this is the same plaza that holds the University of Pisa. “Pisa is also known for its excellent university, which was established in 1343 and has become one of Italy's top schools.”

For those of you that want to know more about the area a quick look at this web site gives you an idea http://www.pisa.world-guides.com/

Dec 23rd
We headed off to the Sigiriya Rock Fortress a UNESCO world heritage site.
Our guide told us that this was the rock fortress - I am not so sure!

Headed off - not exactly travel to- as our guide did not either know exactly where is was so we ended spending a lot of time taking false leads to the site in question. When asked how long it was going to take or other pertinent questions the answer was " Let me think about that" invariable with no firm answer after his time of contemplation. Funny but annoying. After finally getting the correct road to the site we were stunned to find it was going to cost $150 US for us to see a bunch of old rocks! I have to say I have done a lot of traveling and I was shocked to hear of these prices. Even Norman who has traveled the world was stunned and amazed. This is when we finally cornered our tour guide and had him tell us the prices of all the sites on the itinerary. Well it turns out that most things in Sri Lanka cost about $100 to $200 for a group of 5 people! Again not to bore you but, I have traveled a lot in the Philippines etc. and never have I been asked to stump us so much for a tourist site. Heck most things in the UAE and Oman are free to visit or at very low prices. Well we had to do a major re-think on the trip based on this new information. I have to say that tour guide did show us some of the Sigiriya Rock Fortress for free and I have to say I would have been quite upset if I had paid $150 to see it.

The tour guide did take us on a free visit to a herb and spice garden and factory. It was an OK tour but the best part was we were given "free" messages with the herbal remedies that the spice garden makes. After which we were take to the sales room. I guess the fumes of the massage oils had done their magic because our free tour ended up costing us $80 in products!

Spice Garde work space

OK sorry about all the bitching but once we had established some ground rules the trip took a dramatic turn for the good and has been very nice since then and mostly free or inexpensive.
The hotel we stayed at in Sigiriya was nice and had a fantastic view of the rice field adjacent from it. The kids and I hit the pool after our day of travel and I have to say it was a very nice pool. Again the view from the pool was very stunning beyond the rice fields you see the forest and the mountains raising out of them. At night the kids were visited by the two bunnies that live on the hotel grounds.


The next morning the restaurant was visited by the giant squirrel of Sri Lanka which turned out to be quite tame. I had the chance to give it some bread and then the animal climbed up my arm and on to my shoulder. Not happy with just the bread the squirrel decided to give me a look over licking my face to get any left over crumbs. At one point the squirrel was trying to clean my teeth of leftovers!

Our favorite sign in the enitre ciountry! Thanks to the Hotel Sanda Diya - Sigiriya!

The customer is always wrong!

I do not know if this is just an issue with the UAE or is endemic of the Arab and Indian customer service experience. As the people I deal with are not Emirati, I believe that this is endemic of the Arab and Indian regions. My alternative explanation of this is that they must think that I am touched in the head and are treating me appropriately. Every time I talk to someone about an issue that needs resolving they treat me like a village idiot! I would say that this is just me but they treat my lovely wife the same way, and every foreigner I have talked to in the UAE has said they are treated this way as well. Sadly, it usually turns into a shouting matter for many westerners. I am not beyond that on occasions but usually I just go right for the supervisor and that USUALLY helps – as we see in the story below not always…

I bought a Nissan Xterra and in the sales brochure there is a page dedicated to the various ways that you can use the cargo area including the Utili-Track™ | Nissan .  As none of the tie down points mentioned in the sales brochure were installed in my truck I decided to ask about it at the dealer!!!  Now you have to understand that each department can be miles away in the UAE. The service department it is out of town in the industrial district, while parts are across town in the same district and sales are in town at the fancy show room in the mall.

I first asked about the parts at the service department while I was dropping my truck off. They had no idea what I was talking about. I mentioned that it was in the sales brochure, and they gave me a quizzical look and said I was surely mistakes as the only items they had for sale were listed on the card.

Then I went to the sales department and picked up a copy of the sales brochure and asked where might I find these items (as I could not find them at the service department) , they assured me that they would be available at the parts department.

At the parts department they flatly denied such a part existed before they even looked on the computer! HA HA ! IBUT I was prepared. I quickly pointed to the page in sales brochure that showed the items in question! “Utili-track® Cargo Channel System with 4 adjustable cleats and 4 Ceiling hooks and 2 side hooks. “ They still look at me and say no! So I ask to speak to the supervisor. The assistant-parts manager tells me flat out that these parts do not exist- again without looking on the computer. Then I asked to speak to his boss the parts department sales manager again tells me these parts do not exist without even looking on the computer!



Then the parts manager asks me why I am being so aggressive! I, for the umpteenth time point to the sales brochure and ask “Is this the sales brochure for the Nissan Xterra?”They agree it indeed is. Next, “Is this the sales brochure that was given to me by your company?” They look at it and again agree! So then the sales manager tries to give me an English language lesson! “It says possibilities; it does not mean that we have it.”  I point out that “it says you ‘…will have endless possibilities’ predicating that you have the part!” Now we finally go to the computer to actually look for the part in question, which by the way should have been installed as a standard component as part of my package! (That will be my battle call on Sunday) After looking the parts manager points at a part and asks me if this is what I am looking for!



“Eh I do not work for Nissan but it does look like the part to me.”



 “Ok, take the parts salesman out to your car and show him where it fits into it”



I want to scream “DUDE! I do not work for Nissan you figure it out!” But instead the parts man and I walk out to my car and take a look. He is as bemused as me as to where this part might go!



David “If you cannot figure this out I need to Speak to the sales manager as I need to understand why this brochure was given to me!”



Parts Man “He is right in there”



David “Please show me where he is”



Parts Man “I cannot go in there”



David “You do work for Nissan and this is the Nissan sales manager! You can take me to his office!”



Reluctantly the parts man takes me near the office and slinks away! While sitting with the receptionist all I can do is mumble “Why did I spend $40,000 for a truck that I cannot use!” and “It is in the sales brochure; why are they asking me to find it!”



After 5 minutes the sales manager greets me and assures me he has spoken to the parts manager and all will be fine! And he will even give me the best discount on the parts!



Back to the parts department! And instead of having found the parts on their own we play a game of Blues Clues to find the part numbers for the items in question. After about 2 hours from walking in the door, I am assured they know the part numbers and 6 of the 10 parts needed will be in tomorrow.



I went to pick up the parts yesterday and two of them were correct. Again they ask me where they are supposed to go in my truck! We go out and look at my truck and none of us are sure. David “You do work for Nissan, right? You can figure this out, right?”



Manager “The service department will know how to install them.”



( I wait in fear for this conversation with the service department!)



But sadly the other 4 parts were VERY wrong! They were cheap plastic rings!



Sales manager “Are you sure these are not correct?”



Out with the sales brochure pointing to the picture with a rope around the hook in question “Would you put a rope around a thin plastic ring like this?”



Back to the computer and playing Blue’s Clues. Then it hits me, Utili-Track™, that menas these are registered trademark parts only made by Nissan. Still no luck finding said trademarked parts!



In the end the parts manager recommended that I try at some of the 4x4 shops. After searching through 5 shops, it turns out that even they do not have an after-market part for the truck.



I am going to ask in my 4x4 group today when we go out. Sadly that means that my gear will not be that well tied down when we go out! But the good news is that we drop off most of our gear before we do the real challenging 4x4ing. I just hope that I can ty down what we have well enough and that none of the gear goes flying before we get to the drop off point.

 

Sri Lanka – 1st day Sigiriya

Sigiriya

Dec 21st - Dec 22nd

After dropping off the dog and cat to an Australian family we hopped a taxi to the airport.

Athaga Samadhi Buddha

The vacation started to get pretty rough, but has made a dramatic turn around. Our flight was at 9:40 pm and that is not a bad time to fly if you are going for a long flight like back to the states but it really is a drag when you are only traveling for 4 hours. A strange thing is the time zone is 1 and 1/2 hours different from the UAE. I thought that was interesting to have a 1/2 hour time zone.

Athaga Samadhi Buddha

In all my travels I had never experienced that before. Well we ended up getting into the hotel at 6 am and we were set to travel at 9 am that morning. Yeah! We caught a few hours sleep on the flight a few more in the hotel but did most of our sleeping in the ride up to Sigiriya.

As you can see from above our first stop was at Athaga Samadhi Buddha

 We decided after a 5 hour drive to take a pass on most of the schedule for the day as we were staying two nights in Sigiriya. We did take in an Elephant ride and that is where we came face to face with the true cost of the trip!

 The elephant ride ended up costing us $100 for the 5 of us- this was the picture that we used for our Christmas greeting. The ride seemed a bit expensive to me but Norman assured me this was a standard price he paid in Nepal, Thailand, etc. When we got back from the trip we took some photos in front of the elephant and as we were leaving the mahout - elephant trainer- turned and demanded a tip from Norman. I that it was pretty rude to DEMAND a tip after paying $100 US for the ride but then I was stunned when I heard from Norman that the mahout REFUSED his tip of 100 Sri Lankan Rupees and DEMANDED more of a tip!

 I know 100 Sri Lankan Rupees is not much but after you coughed up $100 US for a 45 minute trip it seems fair. In the end Norman had to give the mahout a 1,000 Rupees (about $10 US and way more than I would ever tip such a surly person who was far from nice to us or the elephant in question). The part that stunned me the most was when I mentioned in dismay the tip amount to our tour guide and he casually said "That's no problem." When I mentioned it was a problem for me that the mahout was so mercenary (well not in those words) the tour guide responds "That is no problem." I guess he did not understand me when I said it was a problem!