Liverpool

I pushed myself out of bed early today and went up to the 11^th deck to watch the ship pull into Liverpool. The ship tied up right next to the ferry that crosses the Mersey River, a nice way to start Liverpool Day.

In the breakfast buffet area I heard I couple of people sing the chorus of “Yellow Submarine”. (In the piano bar I sometimes announce that nobody’s ever written a song called “We All Live on a Cruiseship”………..and therefore “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine” is the next best thing. Which hopefully leads to an alcohol-fueled group rendition of Ringo’s memorable vocal.)

The ship had some “Beatles Tours” that were not available to me, and were sold out a long time ago. There was also a non-Beatles tour of Liverpool for those not interested in the Beatles. There was also a non-Liverpool tour for those not interested in Liverpool. For those people the tour bus went south about 40 miles, across the border into Wales to look at castles.

I had my own personal tour in mind, with a specific destination.

Any serious Beatles fan knows that John Lennon met Paul McCartney at St Peter’s Church Hall in Woolton (in south Liverpool) a few minutes before a gig that Lennon was doing with his group The Quarrymen, on July 6, 1957. The meeting was momentous to say the least, considering everything that it led to.

The story goes that Lennon was 16, McCartney was 15, Lennon didn’t know how to tune a guitar properly. After being introduced by a mutual friend named Ivan, McCartney took Lennon’s guitar, tuned it properly, then sat on the side steps of the Church Hall stage, showing off his talent to the Quarrymen. He played and sang “Twenty Flight Rock” and “Be Bop a Lula”, and impressed the hell out of the Quarrymen, especially Lennon. Then The Quarrymen got on the stage for their first set. McCartney listened to a few tunes and left pretty quickly. Within two weeks McCartney was a Quarryman.

I reached St. Peters church a lot later in the day then planned. I got off to a late start, tried to save some money (in this case pounds sterling) by using the Liverpool Rail and Bus system. The double-deck buses were fun, but I made a huge mistake getting off at a train station that was much further away from St Peters than expected. I was using a lousy map. Put it another way -- I underestimated the size of Liverpool, St Peters was a good 7 miles inland from the dock, in a nice-looking suburban wooded neighborhood.

I have to mention -- in my uncertain travels to Woolton and back, I approached two bus drivers and several local Liverpool people for advice and info, and they were absolutely gracious, patient, and helpful.

By the time I got there, mid-afternoon on a Sunday, I had the whole church area to myself. Downright quiet. No tour buses around. (I found out later that the ship tour didn’t even go to St Peters).

The Church Hall was across the road from the church itself. It was closed, locked. I then went across the road to the church itself. I walked around the church graveyard, looking for the famous Eleanor Rigby grave that supposedly inspired the song. There were many hundreds of tombstones, and I gave up almost immediately, feeling a little silly.

Just as I was leaving the graveyard, four young ladies walked past me, led by a man who looked and sounded like a tour guide. Instinctively I followed them, and in a few seconds I was at the Eleanor Rigby grave.

The four girls had paid this guy to drive them around on a private Beatles tour. The Cavern Club, the schools, boyhood homes, etc etc.

And then -- a very pleasant surprise. The five of them crossed the road back to the Church Hall which had been locked a few minutes before. But this time there was an old guy, some kind of attendant, who unlocked the door, obviously by some arrangement with the tour guide. I tagged along, nobody protested, in fact the tour guide stuffed a bunch of business cards in my hand.

The old guy claimed to be a teenage buddy of John Lennon’s, and claimed to have been standing right next to him when McCartney walked in -- a witness to this piece of history -- he pointed to exact spots where this & that happened. It was extremely interesting to this old Beatles fan, a tad spooky, and made my little trek well worth the trouble.

There’s a plaque commemorating the John-Paul meeting on the outside of the Church Hall, and the tour guide’s gaudy tour car was parked nearby. It was great that the tour guide turned up when he did, quite a piece of nice timing, otherwise I would have missed a lot. I’m developing a collection of small rocks from various countries during this gig, and the “England” rock was lifted from St Peters churchyard.

That evening in the piano bar it was Beatle Time, also Gerry & the Pacemakers, Peter and Gordon, and pretty much anything that fell in category of British Invasion. “Second Verse, same as the First.”

close-up of plaque on St Peters Church Hall

some promo for my favorite tour guide

"All the Lonely People..."

business is booming

view from top of double-deck bus. Note the traffic always stays to the left side of the street. Some of you know I'm already a careless pedestrian. With the cars constantly coming from the wrong direction, I nearly got run over quite a few times.

which way to Central Islip ?

Cockles and Mussels

"Dublin Day" was pretty much the biggest day of the whole 35-day cruise. For starters, the ship stayed in Dublin way into the evening, didn’t leave until 11PM, the only such late departure. Local Irish entertainers boarded the ship and put on two shows, at 7:45PM and 9:45PM. The showroom was absolutely packed for both shows, first time that’s happened since the long cruise started.

Word was out that the show was absolutely marvelous, and it WAS. The clogging “Riverdance” dancing style had a spike in popularity about a dozen years ago. I got a look at it in Radio City back then, but I appreciated it more tonight. The ship showroom is much smaller than Radio City, and the sounds and vibrations of these incredibly fast-moving feet…. were so much more….well, real and amazing. You feel their breathing, their straining, their energy and strength.

I only saw pieces of the two shows, during the few minutes of available break time. The chamber trio, the ballroom dance trio, and the piano bar guy did their normal hours, with sparse audiences in the early evening. In addition to passengers watching the Irish dancers, other passengers were still out on the town in Dublin, hitting the pubs. Still other people were already crashed out in their cabins from the day’s exertions.

Dorky tourist that I am, earlier in the day I posed for a photo with the statue of Molly Malone and her wheelbarrow in downtown Dublin today. An Irish cabdriver snickered at the idea of it, as I discussed it later in the back of the cab going back to the ship, with a fair amount of Irish ale in my bloodstream.

The statue was installed only 20 years ago, but any dorky tourist (me) with the “Molly Malone” tune in his head, will fancy himself standing in the same spot where the original Molly Malone strolled 100 years ago, or 150 years ago, or whatever it was. The cabdriver pooh-poohed this, saying “Molly Malone” just a nursery song for kids, with as much historical validity as “Yankee Doodle”.
Yankee Doodle did WHAT? Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni? Yeah right, that makes sense. In any case, Molly Malone is as fictional a name as Leroy Brown. But if there were a statue of ol’ Leroy in the South Side of Chicago…..I’d get a photo of myself with him too. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that tune since 1974.

Perhaps my favorite Irish souvenir is a 2’ x 3’ map of Dublin, blown up to show all the actual buildings, and with ALL pubs indicated. With cool pub names like Darky Kelly, Confession Box, Deaf Judge, Foggy Dew, Stags Head, Bleeding Horse, etc etc, the map was pretty entertaining. I only drank at 3 pubs, but I stuck my head in the doorway of another dozen as I wandered around, slightly buzzed. The map listed about 200 different drinking establishments in downtown Dublin.

The town was absolutely TEEMING with people on this particular day. (because it’s summer?) Not so much in the pubs, but out on the streets, in the daytime shopping area. Throngs, a la Manhattan. A huge amount of kids. I heard later on that 50% of Dublin’s population is under 30. And they were very Irish-looking.

I was very much in need of a nap when I got back from my little pub crawl, but my early start time tonight (5:30) only allowed a few minutes of snooze. Then -- as mentioned above -- it was pretty slow for a awhile. Once the Irish shows were over and the ship pulled out of Dublin, there was enough late night folks to make the last hour (11 to midnight) a lot of fun. The day’s events seem to call for an impromptu “St Patrick’s Day in July”, so we jumped in with both feet, doing Danny Boy, McNamara’s Band, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling , and of course Molly Malone.

Molly and Me

business is booming

obligatory pub hopping

footbridge over the River Liffey, right in the center of downtown Dublin

Chicken Nuggets

There was a 5-day stretch between that last idyllic day in Iceland and the “turnaround” day in Rotterdam. There was a sea day, then Shetland Islands day, which I completely missed.

On the third day, the ship reached a port town in Norway called Stavanger. Weather was lousy but everyone wanted to get off, there was a pretty developed downtown shopping area, also lots of highly touted Old World architecture.

Scandinavian countries didn’t join the European Union, so the monetary units of Iceland and Greenland, and therefore Norway and Denmark are either krones or krunas. Norway uses the krone, and on this day in Stavanger one American dollar = five krones.

There’s a Burger King, a MacDonalds, and a 7-11 nestled in amongst all the other shops. They looked like an ugly intrusion on the Old Norway look of the area. Yet I walked into the Burger King on impulse, looking for a snack. The prices, in Norwegian Krones, for Chicken Nuggets were as follows:

5 nuggets 35k, or 38k if you eat there
10 nuggets 50k, or 54k if you eat there
20 nuggets 93k, or 99k if you eat there

So that’s $7 for 5 nuggets, almost $8 if you sit down to munch. Throw in a drink and, well, you get the picture. With a ton of free food on the ship a block away, many people backed off on downtown snacking. I did break down and had a $4.50 cup of 7-11 coffee. There were $13 beers, $99 shirts, etc etc.

There was a 5-piece folk band playing on the sidewalk in the shopping area. The bassist had one of the strangest instruments I’ve ever seen, the 3-string balilaika-like thing pictured below. I listened to a couple of tunes and tipped them $10. I felt OK about it, until I realized that I’d given each of them the equivalent of one chicken nugget and a sip of coke.

Weather was even worse in Oslo the next day, nonstop rain for the four hours I was out there. I followed the crowd and visited Vigeland Statue Park, the number one attraction in Norway. 250 granite statues of thick naked people, unified in style. This guy Vigeland apparently chiseled all of it by himself and pretty much donated it to Oslo, so he’s a national hero.

This is a statue of Olaf Johanssen, first mayor of Stavanger, who

walked into City Hall meetings with his pet pigeon sitting on his head

Folk band in downtown Stavanger (one nugget apiece)

"What, you never seen two naked old bearded men before?"

Iceland

“There’s this round yellow thing in the sky today, giving off light” -- this and other such remarks when we finally got some good weather on Wednesday July 16.

On this day the ship was in the last and smallest of three consecutive Icelandic ports. The town was called Seydijofordur (pronounced Say - this - fior - thur). People went nuts with their cameras, not only in the town, but on the decks of the ship as it sailed out in the late afternoon

"Voyage of the Vikings"

….is Holland America’s 35-day (7/5 to 8/9) trip, from Boston across the north Atlantic to Europe, and back. It is now half over. The ship left Rotterdam (halfway point) this evening, with 25% of the passengers (300 or so) disembarking, having finished the eastward first half of the trip. They were replaced by 300 more, who paid for the (westward) second half.

There is another 900 passengers who bought the entire 35-day trip, and they are older than the half-trippers. The music required for these older people is vintage tinpan alley, Gershwin & Cole Porter etc, with little usable material from the 50s-60s-70s pop repertoire. They really hate “You’ve Lost That Lovin Feeling”. So sometimes there is a balancing act involved in selecting the right tune to play. You can run a string of noisy singalong stuff (ala Jolly Swagman) for the somewhat younger crowd, and the noise & singing will be impressive. It’ll look and sound like a piano bar should, right?

Yes, but one must always keep an eye out for the older and quieter types, even
if they’re outnumbered. In a perfect world, I’d have the two demographics in completely separate sets. There's also a midwest-ish countryish type, for them you play "16 Tons" and Hank Williams and such.

The 300 who just left were noisy enough to cause some trouble. Up above the piano bar, on the 9th deck, are staterooms, and apparently the piano bar noise can leak upward. There were complaints, and I was asked to tone it down. About a week ago a midnight curfew was enacted, to placate these folks on the 9th deck. Prior to this 35-day transatlantic trip, there was a series of weeklong trips in eastern Canada, and there was never a complaint from people living up above the piano bar.

Like a good tourist, I made it a point to get a look at a windmill in Rotterdam today. However the famous “dike” system is located in Amsterdam, which is an hour’s ride north of Rotterdam. As for wooden shoes -- there was of course a ton of them for sale in a large souvenir shop just a few feet outside the ship. They looked ridiculously big and clunky and overpriced and impossible to wear comfortably, and inconvenient to fit in a suitcase. I bought a miniature pair, that an infant could wear, maybe I’ll hang them from my rearview mirror when I get back. Hmmm. I miss driving.

“In Port Manning” (“IPM”) is the required practice of keeping a certain percentage of crew on a ship when it is in port, just case some emergency happens. There is a rotation of assignments, such that everybody has to occasionally stay on the ship on a port day.

On the eastward trip, I got IPM on the first Iceland port (Isofjordur), which didn’t mind at all, the weather was abominable that day. But I have IPM tomorrow (Cherbourg, France) which is somewhat disappointing. I’ll have to see France from the deck of the ship. C’est dommage.

photos from Qaqortoq

There are no roads out of Qaqortoq. The only way out is by helicopter or boat. By tradition everybody agrees to have a brightly colored house, just to cheer things up. The entire town is a mile from end to end. The purple flowers in the bottom photo are pretty much the Qaqortoq Botanical Gardens. Note the iceberg (Oh My) in the ship photo.

puffins & whales & bergs, Oh My

I wrapped up last night’s work around 12:30 AM with about 5 slightly tipsy patrons, and we all exited the piano bar and went to a big window looking out on the ocean. It was still totally light out because the sun had set only a few minutes before, at 12:11AM. Tonight it’ll set at 12:13AM, moving at an angle only slightly out of parallel with the horizon.

Then it’ll come right back up again at 3:00AM, as if it really didn’t go away. And it actually didn’t go away, with the evening twilight simply becoming the morning twilight.
So the sun is always there.

However, it is also never there.

It is foggy and overcast in this place (Isafjordur, Iceland) today, and the skies have been totally overcast for a full week now. But people are enjoying the weirdness of it all. They paid for something otherworldly, and they got it. Kansas it ain’t.

Two nights ago, with a minimal size audience around the piano, I decided I had enough of a critical mass to do Bohemian Rhapsody. I had tried it before, it has worked before. Three key people were leading the charge, singing “I see a little silhouetto of a man etc” when THEIR FRIEND came in, started showing them her PUFFIN photos.

The song fell apart, with me singing Galileo Galileo Galileo etc pretty much by myself like an idiot, while these four people are passing around a digital camera looking at PUFFIN PICTURES!! You DARE ruin my Bohemian Rhapsody schtick with PUFFIN PICTURES??!

….AND YOU, TIN MAN --YOU DARE COME HERE AND ASK ME FOR A HEART??! YOU CLINKING CLANKING CLATTERING COLLECTION OF COLLIGENOUS JUNK!!

Ok I feel better now. Speaking of clanking - or is it clunking- that’s the sound you hear when a small iceberg hits the hull of ship, and you happen to be right on the other side, down on B deck. This didn’t happen to me (I have an inside cabin), but it happened to one of my cohorts at 6AM the other day. He woke up, went upstairs with a camera, and found himself with a large group of people out on a cold and windy open deck trying to take the Ultimate Iceberg Photo. The ship has deliberately sailed into an iceberg field going into and coming out of Qaqortoq, and the next day did more of the same. Oh well, they’re big, pretty, majestic, otherworldly, and still capable of sinking a ship.

On the same night the Puffin Lady disrupted my Bohemian Rhapsody, I also had competition from whales. Word got out that there were whales around, so many folks went outside and turned their cameras toward that. I saw some of their photos, but they never got more than the tail of the whale. I act impressed, but it’s hard to top that scene from Moby Dick when that big ol’ white whale leaps out of the sea, head and all, like a dolphin. Show me that kind of photo. But not during piano bar hours.

Yes -- I did see “Wizard of Oz“ recently -- and the Wizard did say “colligenous“ -- I tried to look the word up, with every possible spelling, to no avail. Can anyone enlighten me on this word?

Qaqortoq, Greenland

I’ve been a Scrabble enthusiast almost all of my life. As intriguing as the game is, it can be very annoying when one’s luck is bad, pulling lousy letters out of the bag. A proverbial problem is getting stuck with the letter “Q” without the all-important “U”.

This would not be a problem up here. These Inuits (“Eskimos”) have the good sense to dispense with the need for a “U”. The letter Q apparently works like a K, so Qaqortok is pronounced Cocker Tock. I’m looking at a little map of Greenland, which has other cool Inuit names like Qaanaaq, Kalaallit Nunaat, and Nuuk. Not only would the letter Q cease to be a problem, but a trayful of vowels would also be no big deal.

Qaqortok used to be called Julienhab, a Scandinavian name. But in a rather nice gesture, the controlling Scandinavians allowed the re-naming of the town, in Inuit. This little map reflects both languages, even more so the Scandinavian -- names like Nyvestervej and Forstanderskabshuset……looks like the Danes don’t bother with the letter Q at all, which is another solution to the Scrabble problem, just throw away the damn Q.

So the Inuits and the Danes co-exist in this bleak place. The word Qaqortok means “stark white site”, which indicates what this place is like the rest of the year. The surrounding mountains have only the slightest hint of green, looks like moss. Certainly no trees, foliage, etc. Looking out toward the sea, there are some small icebergs here and there. So the name Greenland is a longstanding misnomer and joke. One-third the size of continental United States, and 85% of it is covered by glacial icecap. Or is it 80% ? Depends on the vintage of your encyclopedia.

Things are changing. The glacier is starting to melt, due to global warming, and they’re uncovering valuable new mineral deposits underground, where they were previously unable to dig. Looking down the road, they’re expecting Greenland to actually become a green land. So I might buy an acre of rock slab right now while real estate is still cheap, relocate here later, do gigs for the increasing population, and improve my Scrabble game.

photos from Eastern Canada

I knew nothing about “Anne of Green Gables” until this trip. But after six visits to Prince Edward Island I’ve been straightened out. This girl is Canada’s version of Huckleberry Finn. They run the Anne movie on the cabin TV’s, there’s an “Anne” store in downtown Charlottetown. There’s a girl dressed as Anne right on the dock to greet the visiting passengers, with a photographer of course. Out in the boonies, where the actual Green Gables are located, the tour of the “Anne” house is very popular, and a local mall offers this nifty statue of Anne.

The Big Fiddle (biggest in the world) is in Sydney, which is on Cape Breton Island, which is part of Nova Scotia, which is a Province of Canada


Highly prominent statue of Champlain in Quebec City. He founded the city exactly 400 years ago.

Looking down on the Maasdam on the St. Lawrence River, from Quebec City

Strolling in Quebec City

Day 50

7 weeks, 7 week-long cruises done, and it is Day 50, the Halfway point of this 98day contract. Geez, it goes fast.

Now starts the “Voyage of the Vikings” -- pretty dramatic billing, considering that the Vikings were legendary rough&tough adventurers/warriors, and the people on this cruise are mostly medicated, retired and almost expired.

That’s somewhat an exaggeration, but not much -- Holland America already has a reputation for older passengers, but especially cruises of this length (35 days) will attract mostly retired people enjoying their Golden Years.

The DJ at the disco figures this to be the easiest and quietest 35 days of his cruiseship career, with everybody going to bed early and the disco empty by 11pm. He also thinks there will be more piano bar activity.

Last year on the Ryndam there was a 23-day cruise, and I worried that I would run out of fresh material to maintain an audience for the 23 days. I was pleasantly surprised -- the piano bar patrons got to know each other very well, friendships were formed, and they kept on coming in to the piano bar, to see each other as well as to hear music. Kinda like Swaggettes actually, and I hope this kind of comraderie will develop during these 35 days.

Tonight I heard an Absolutely True Report that an old couple -- the husband in a wheelchair -- has been on this ship for 6 weeks now, AND is taking the 35-day cruise starting today………..
AND intends to stay on this ship until DECEMBER. AND intends to switch over to a different Holland America ship come January, and keep on living on HAL ships.

Apparently (from what I heard tonight) they sold all their properties, and think (quite accurately?) that they can spend the rest of their lives on cruise ships.

OK OK I know….if one of these geezers gets a serious ailment, that would be the end of this Golden Years Cruise Life, after all, a cruise ship ain’t no hospital. But it’s a pretty cool story, and I hope they last a long time. I guess they’re not too connected to their families or communities.

A notable passenger on the last of the Montreal-Boston runs was Dawn, who cheered me on in the piano bar night after night. During the day she was dazzled by Old Quebec City, perhaps the most charming place either of us have ever seen, and a long stroll around beautiful Prince Edward Island is a terrific thing

I’m looking forward to entertaining at her 2nd annual late summer party, on September 6. Last year’s was really great.

In a nice example of worldwide cooperation, people on this planet agreed to divide the world into 24 longitudinal time zones, each one of course being an hour removed from the adjacent ones.
So as we advanced eastward out of the Eastern time zone into the Atlantic time zone, we moved our clocks forward an hour.

Next -- as we move further east from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland, we will move our clocks……..

…….a HALF-hour forward? From 2AM to 2:30 AM?

Strange but true. Newfoundlanders are apparently a free-thinking bunch who don’t care to conform to Canada or anybody else. If they had their druthers, the world would be divided into 48 time zones of a half-hour each. As a western Canadian might say, “Stupid Newfies”.