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Wanderung 10

Boating around the Boot & Gallivanting through Gaul.

October 2005

Thursday October 13, Split, Croatia

I used some of the "extra" time in the morning to bring the journal up to date, and then we were off for breakfast. Thank goodness the breakfast buffet on the Astor offered the typical German items (see Wanderung 2), so I could eat a solid breakfast with a lot of protein. Afterwards we went to the forward lounge where we listened to a summary of the upcoming land tours in Naples and Rome, which helped us decide which ones we wanted to do. The presenter effectively gave an abbreviated slide show of each tour while describing the major sights and activities. It was really quite interesting, but by now my biorhythms were convinced it was really bedtime and unfortunately she had darkened the room to show the slides. She was talking in a monotone just like my old philosophy professor back in college, so Monika had to jab me in the ribs to keep me from falling asleep.

Immediately after the talk we had our "lifeboat drill" which was really more of a "how to put on a lifejacket" drill. The lifejackets carried on the Astor were the large foam block style and donning them correctly was not as simple as you might think, but we all practiced and after a bit got the hang of it. On other cruise ships we have been actually shown to our muster stations during this drill, but on the Astor they just told us to read where our muster station was from the literature in our cabin and left it at that.

By the end of our "training" we were ready for lunch, after which we went on deck to take pictures of the ship entering the harbor at Split, Croatia. The ship had to go backwards to edge up to a concrete pier with just some tires for cushioning, so getting it in without damage was a delicate process indeed. Even with the side thrusters that the Astor appeared to have, it was ponderous to maneuver. It was something like getting an elephant to dance, I imagine, or maybe like docking at the space station. In any case it was fascinating to watch the Captain work all the engine controls from the outside starboard bridge as the ship edged up to the pier, and I must say it was done perfectly.

We returned to our cabin just long enough to grab the camera, binoculars, water bottle, and a windbreaker before assembling once again in the forward lounge where we were assigned to a bus and tour guide for our town tour of Split. The tour, as it turned out, had two parts. The first part was a quick bus ride out through the town to an adjacent peninsula that has been converted to a public park. Along the beach were sporting clubs, playgrounds, and villas, one of which belonged to the old Yugoslavian dictator Marshal Tito. The interior of the peninsula consisted of a forest preserve with hiking trails, but we didn't have any surplus time to wander around the woods.

The second part of the tour was an intensive walkabout in the area that used to be Diocletian's palace around 300 AD, and it was quite a place. The palace grounds was a large area enclosed by a wall. On the south side was the palace of emperor Diocletian, in the middle his mausoleum and a temple to Jupiter and on the north side housing for the legionnaires who protected him. Of course, the ravages of time and the conversion of Diocletian's mausoleum to a Christian church had destroyed much of the original building, but what remained was quite impressive.


 

Some of the gates and arches from the original palace had been restored, and that plus our guide's vivid commentary allowed us to reconstruct to some extent the grandeur of that outpost of the declining Roman Empire. It was fascinating to see how the wide Roman arches and thoroughfares were converted into narrow streets during the middle ages when every square inch was used for housing. This addition and conversion of housing units was still going on, so thoroughly modern architectural designs had joined the brawl of styles left over from history.


 

I'm not quite sure why, but I was most impressed by the huge vaulted cellars underneath the part of the palace where Diocletian and his family lived. Those were really huge cellars, and I couldn't see how the huge stones in the cellar roof didn't just cave in on us. Fortunately claustrophobia is not one of my weaknesses (unless a 2-ton Buick is crushing my chest), so those thoughts were intriguing rather than disturbing. Our tour guide hastened to reassure us that in fact these cellars were some of the most stable structures in the town. She stated that she had led a tour group through the cellars a few months back when a 4.0 level earthquake hit the region, and neither she nor any of the tour group felt anything happen whereas when they came outside people were running around on the streets. That may be true, but I certainly would not want to test the stability of 1700-year-old arches in any future earthquake.

After about a two and a half hour tour, we were let loose for the last 40 minutes or so. If it had been for a full afternoon, I would have hiked some of those trails out on the peninsula, but time was short and we were tired and hungry, so we just bought a couple of hamburgers and sat on a bench beside the yacht harbor to eat. These "hamburgers", by the way, were different than a typical U.S. hamburger in being thinner but broader and having a correspondingly larger bun. The meat was apparently ground beef, but the patties were boiled rather than fried or grilled. Aside from staring down 3 pigeons and 5 sparrows that wanted my crumbs (the only beggars we saw in Split, by the way, which contrasted to numerous beggars in Venice), it was an enjoyable snack. The street fronting the bay had been converted into a pedestrian promenade but motorbikes were still allowed, so we watched the occasional motor scooter or motorcycle trundle by as we rested and ate.


 

We re-boarded the Astor before it pulled smoothly and gracefully away from the dock. .

During dinner that evening we all enjoyed watching the moonrise over the calm seas. We wrapped up the evening with a "welcome aboard" party where we met the Captain and essential crewmembers. The ratio of crew to passengers on the Aster was 292 crew to an actual 400+ passengers (492 is the ship's maximum passenger capacity), which I think compares well to any of the large scale cruise ships. Jim had talked with a passenger who had been on 12 cruises with that line, so obviously it was doing things right for at least some of its predominantly German passengers. The age composition was distinctly elderly; Monika called it a "Geezer Ship", and we saw only 2 children out of the 400+ passengers.

We returned to our cabin to get gussied up for the formal evening dinner. As I was knotting my (anachronistic) tie to put on my (anachronistic) suitcoat and attend an (anachronistic) formal dinner, I wondered exactly why we were doing all this. Was the meal more enjoyable because of the fancy clothes? I began to suspect that some cabal had conspired to maintain this odd custom on cruise ships, and I think I know which gender was responsible. Which gender, after all, dresses up dolls when they are young, shops for clothes as a full time avocation, and can't wait to try on the latest styles? Which gender plays in the mud with their trucks, couldn't care less about whether their clothes match their shoes, and wears ragged old sweaters or shirts because they are still "comfortable"? In any case, despite the clothes I had a nice dinner chatting with the others and afterwards I worked on the journal a few hours before we turned in for the night.

Copyright2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
October 2005
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 27 29
30 31
Epilog

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