A few photos appear

http://homepage.mac.com/rfenno/QE2/page2/page2.html

19 November 2007

Here I’m sitting at a sidewalk table in front of a Starbucks in Pireus, the port for Athens. Too much of a temptation after the ship’s coffee, which is total swill. It comes in a big box, and it’s liquid coffee concentrate. That’s all you want to know about it, other than it has no flavor and no jolt. This Starbucks, however has both, and it’s just a short walk from the ship. It’s a blustery cold day, though not by English standards, by which we are always judged on the QE2. We’ve had several run-ins with dancers, for example, who accuse us of playing our quicksteps too fast or our cha-chas too slow, like we were deliberately malfunctioning machines. Bands play at comfortable tempos, and that’s that. But consider that the whole of British ballroom dance is called “Strict Tempo.” I believe that’s because, as children, the English don’t have the advantage of being brought up in an environment where the rhythmic impulse is important. When they get to be of a certain age and discover the social advantages of ballroom dance (did I really say that?) they don’t have the goods to support it. There are actually recordings of limp sounding British (I assume) big bands doing renditions of the more important pieces of 20th century music, rendered lifeless by a click track--therefore, strict tempo. 

I want to tell the Old Dears that, contrary to their dance instructor’s belief, music is played with ever-shifting time, and to obsess about strict tempo is to remove one of the factors that makes music what it is. 

The ship is, after all, a sentimental journey for a lot of folks, where they can have one last go-round on the old queen. This cruise especailly there were more that a population’s share of 80 year olds and up, and they want things just so. Well, we try, but the ship is 40+ years old, and creaking at the seams. It’s just not the same ship they remember from the seventies and the eighties. (The calendar seventies and eighties, not their own.) Nonetheless there is a lot of bellyaching going on about the condition of the ship, the replacement of the polite English crew with equally polite Fillipinos and Indians (not to mention the Yanks in the band). It’s quite comic sometimes, but not always. 

Anyway, this cruise has gone well. We left Southampton and got in to Lisbon on Sunday the 11th, after the obligatory sea day. I went for a walk, but most of the day was spent hibernating. Then we hit Malaga again. Another walk. Sea day, then Palermo. We had a boat drill that dragged on and on, mostly because it was the first chance most of us had to see the life raft positions we need to be at when the life boats go away with the passengers. I walked in Palermo in the afternoon, but it was siesta time and there wasn’t much happening. The traffic, however, did not desist for siesta, and I had several opportunities to have a Fiat 500 or a Lambretta removed from my posterior. I hear Rome is worse, but I can’t understand how it can be. 

We left Sicily as the sun set, had a sea day, and we were in Alexandria, as in Alexander the Great and the lighthouse and the library. Of course the big attraction here was the pyramids. The ship sponsored a tour of Giza for $66 which was really well-planned and worth it for all we got from it: a bus ride on a deluxe Mercedes-Benz coach with an overactive air conditioner, a tour guide who was very well-informed about her country and her people, and an escort of military police so that the massacre that happened at that seaside tourist resort doesn’t repeat itself. We had an escort who was very dapper in his blue suit but made no secret of the fact that he was packing heat. 

Alexandria is about 3 hours from Giza, with goatherds, mosques, high rise apartments, hovels, a water park, an African safari ride, an industrial park with KPMG and Xerox offices, several KFC and McDonalds restaurants, and three toll booths with military police guarding them and inspecting papers of the average motorists between them. It’s almost a straight shot, though you get the feeling that there was someone on the take when they built the last leg of the highway, which goes by InterContinental and Le Meriden hotels. 

Then they loom. There’s no mistaking the pyramids. You come around a curve in the highway and there they are. They were higher than I thought they would be. They used to be covered with shifting sand when they were unearthed in the 1800’s, and you can still see the line where they were buried, which is just the last 10 percent of the pyramid’s mass. The Sphynx was totally buried then, and who knows what is under there. 

The location now abuts suburban Cairo, a city of 24 million--THREE New Yorks! The antiquities police are building a new museum to consolidate they holdings of the museum downtown and to hopefully show the goods currently in British, French and German museums which were taken in successive colonial periods. 

I hung with Jim Palaver, my bandleader (an English drummer raised in Australia who lives in Madrid, where he used to deliver groceries to Beckham) and Sian, who plays the harp and comes from Wales and so speaks incomprehensible English. We hung pretty tightly with the group and managed to repel most of the street urchins who had a unique way of making sales of their postcards and tourist claptrap--handing us the goods “for free, my friend” and then coming back a demanding money. Sian got trapped into buying a head dress made of gold-colored chains, which makes sense for a harpist to wear on Casual Nights. Jim fared a lot worse, ending up with scale mosels of the three Great Pyramids and a Bedoin headdress which looked odd under his red Ferrari cap. The kids wanted that cap, but Jim wasn’t budging. 

There were lots of kids there without anything to sell. They were there for school trips. They were bright, friendly and well-scrubbed. I took some pictures and movies of them, and I wish I had taken some of the urchins, because the contrast between the schoolkids and the urchins was so extreme. I bet the urchins end up running Egypt in a decade or so. They had very impressive language skills, like the kid who asked me where I was from, then hearing Texas, launched into “High-ho Silver away!” without a moment’s hesitation. The urchins seem brighter than the children of privilege, and I hope that their country finds them useful.

I did take a lot of pictures, and there is a group picture I’ll try to get from the Crew Office of the entire group (minus Sian, who was elsewhere) to post.

We spent three hours at Giza looking at the three main pyramids, the Sphinx and the obligatory stop at the trinket shop and hightailed it back to Alexandria in convoy in time to play another three hour adventure in strict tempo ballroom dance. I haven’t had a night off in six weeks, but my chops are better for it. Three hours is a long gig for a dance band. I am reminded of the line from Young Man with a Horn when Burt Lancaster is hired by a dance band leader, who calls him aside before hearing him play and says to him, “This is a dance orchestra. No blues or low-down jive.”

And so we went on, leaving Alexandria for Kusadasi, although 40 knot winds over the pier and high seas eliminated that port. Thus another sea day. I’ll be spending the day looking for wi-fi so I can catch up with the email and the blog. 

Then it’s off to Rome, where I’m booked on a crew bus to the Vatican. That should be fun, Lambrettas willing. 

1 November 2007

We’re in Tenerife today, on Thursday, November 1, a national holiday in this outlying Spanish island off the African coast. This is All Souls Day, the ecumenical version of Halloween, and most of the shops and all of the banks are closed. 

This week started in Southampton in the kind of weather that makes you understand why the English emigrate to sunnier climes. The rain was biting and cold, with clouds covering every inch of the sky. I went to the crew bus, which predictably went to a mall, where I found an Apple store and sorted through almost 500 emails, starting on the day I left the states. I had a sandwich at a Quizno’s in the food court, which was a little odd, but then again, English food being what it is, maybe not so unusual. I looked in vain for a cafe I heard had broadband, so I still haven’t put up anything on this blog.

Big changes in the band I play in. In the time when Jan’s folks crossed the Atlantic (1970s) the Queens Room band was 15 strong. Since Cunard was acquired by Carnival, the band is down to 6. Even making the six show up appears to be a problem, though. The piano player who was supposed to show up did not. This may be a case of confusion on the part of his Ukranian agent, especially if it’s the same guy who sent Vladimir to the Queen Mary rather than the Queen Elizabeth. (Vlad has since shown up, much to the relief of the guitarist, Stevie whom he is relieving. Stevie has been on this ship playing guitar and socking away money to make down payments on London properties for an astonishing 27 years.)

Anyway, we tapped one of the lounge pianists to play with us, but after two less-than relaxing days at sea, the replacement for Sergei, who in turn was to have replaced Adrian Cross, arrived from Cornwall. Bruce is on leave from the Mary, and was given 5 weeks’ contract here. He’s a fine and fearless piano player. 

Another change in the bass chair brought Pedro Martin Alvarez, who did a contract a couple years ago with the show band. He moved in to my cabin on Sunday. He’s been living in New York, so his English is pretty good. The horns are still USA: Stew is from North Carolina, Peter is from Plano, Texas, and me. Two Englishmen and a Spaniard make up the rhythm section. 

Anyway, if I were joining this ship and saw all the awful weather in Southampton last Sunday, I’d probably have some second thoughts as well. 

So we land in Madiera and are boarded my the MCA, the governing body of English ships at sea, and as all you seafarers know, that means an inspection in advance of the World Cruise. Sure enough, our drill falls on the morning in Madiera, and we are inspected by the MCA. The drill, which usually lasts an hour at the most, drags on to two and a half. After the drill and with the approach to Madiera at full-tilt waking me up around 4 in the morning, I was glad to retire to the cabin and sleep after lunch. I’ve been learning the wisdom of a siesta. 

But I did get to get off this morning and walk to the town of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which is a beautiful town. The landscape looks distinctly Mexican here, with dry brown hills and a large mountain in the distance. The town is occupied by retirees of every persuasion, including the English. The mountain in the distance is the highest peak in Spain, even though the Spanish mainland is several hundred miles to the north. 

Until today the only thing I knew about Tenerife was that there was an incredibly horrific and entirely preventable collision of two 747 aircraft on a taxiway in the Tenerife airport which resulted in several hundred deaths. Now I know there’s a lot more to Tenerife.

Paul Edison

On my first sea day, the phone rang in my cabin and I was surprised to hear Paul Edison’s voice. We were on the Star Princess together for several months in the Baltic a couple years ago. 

Unfortunately for Paul, his baggage was lost by British Airways, which has been unable to catch up with him despite two days in port. Paul has no clothing with him and, because of Cunard’s strict policy of dress on formal nights, he’s been a prisoner in his cabin for the two sea days. I saw him late this morning coming into town to do some clothes shopping, but I had to give him the bad news that, because of the holiday, most of the shops were closed. He told me that he’d talked to his wife back in Florida and the passing of the hurricane had left his house flooded. Some guys have all the luck.

27 Oct 2007

Well,what the calendar says is that I haven’t been on top of my blogging over the past week. On the 18th, when I last wrote, we were just getting into our second port, Cagliai, in Sardinia. That was the first place I got off the ship. 

I walked up the hill from the port to a cafe, where I had a real Italian Cappuccino, none of those Starbuck’s things, and a lot cheaper too at about a buck. No wi-fi though, and with the shops closing at 1:30 for siesta, I was obliged to head back to the ship without checking email. 

Athens was really Piraus, and I stayed on board because of scheduling the inductions took a little longer than I’d have liked, and besides, we’re headed back here in a couple weeks, when I can do the Parthenon and various other things, like buy olives. 

Then we went to Palermo. The weather didn’t cooperate, though and we were unable to make port there because of the wind and waves, but with the next day coming up in Naples, the captain decided to run there and rope the queen there overnight. So we arrived at about 10 pm local. After the gig was done for the night I joined a motley crew of crewpersons for a night on the town, within 4 blocks of the ship anyway. Naples has a reputation as a place where ship’s company tends to get mugged so we thought it prudent. 

One beer, bread and cappicola, all very good, but very expensive. Everyone’s share came to 21 Euros--32 dollars or so. Still, it was my first external adventure and that made it more or less worth it. Team building and all that. 

The next day in Naples was given over to an induction and IPM, the bane of every crew member’s life. On a seemingly random day, you are called upon to perform in-port manning, to make up the skeleton crew which hangs out on the ship while everyone else is going to fun places like Pompeii. I thought that I should make at least an effort at it before I figure out the devious ways to get around IPM, so no Pompeii for me, although I did get a nice shot of Vesuvio from the ship as we eased our was onward.

Another day at sea separated us from our next port, Gibralter. Nice shots of the rock as we landed from the Boat Deck. The rock is famous for monkeys who attack anyone they suspect of possessing food, so I decided that I’d just take a walk through town and have a look at how the folks live. I found an ATM machine that obliged me a few British pounds. (Remember that the folks here consider themselves British. They remind you if you forget.) I met a dreadlocked flute player from Philly by way of Atlanta who played a nice pentatonic lick as I walked by on his Yamaha 381. I looked in vain for an internet place where I could park my Powerbook and download what must be a ton of email by now. 

Walked through a supermarket of HEB proportions called Morrison’s on the waterfront, just to do it. 

Then it’s been two sea days here as we close in on Southampton. I’ll be getting a new cabinmate there, as young James returns to Illinois, so with Adrian Cross to Sheffield. Stevie is going too, as Vlady will finally arrive tomorrow so he can take his leave. All of the crew is turning over, churning madly until the World Cruise, which some love and some hate. Something about a new time zone every day that makes the folks around here clam up and roll their eyes.

First Thoughts on Arriving

I am lucky. I hit the jackpot,with the gig on the QE2 (is it THE QE2 or is it just QE2?), in the nature of the band I am in--a dance orchestra with a lot of blowing, in my accommodations. Now if I can only find a way to sleep life will be very good indeed, as the English say constantly.

The flight was pretty awful. I took a couple Ambien for sleep and acted so much like a drunk that the ground crew picked me out for a potential troublemaker, probably a stumbling drunk, and delivered a stern lecture about how I would not be served any more cocktails or coffee (now THAT will teach me!) while the plane was in flight. How I wanted to tell them they were wrong, that I hadn’t slept right in days and had ingested the equivalent of a hit of acid by way of sleeping pills which made me actually see double and less than sure on my feet. Instead I chose to nod and agree to the sentence, though never the crime.

Arrived in Heathrow and discovered that my folio of papers had gone missing. My passport was safe, however, so I managed to bluff my way through the customs. Surprise, no baggage inspection, whatsoever, in Heathrow! My medical certificate was gone. It was Saturday. I had no idea where those papers had gone, no way of tracing the missing certificate and I knew that the office must be closed, it being Saturday. Got into the Heathrow Holiday Inn at about 1 in the afternoon and threw myself down on the bed. Slept a couple hours, walked around the building and explored. 

In the evening I had dinner at the Indian buffet in the Holiday Inn (voucher) and went on a stroll to see the little town right on the edge of the airport. A quaint English village with the pubs and chips shops to prove it. Also a village threatened by the expansion of the airport I gathered.

In the morning we had breakfast (by then a busful of new joiners had arrived, including the new piano player who shared my room at the Inn), and we were whisked down the M3 to Southampton, where sat QE2 (there, I’ve made a decision), large and beautiful in her own way, yet dwarfed by the nondescript ship next to who, whose mission was to send Land Rovers throughout the world. Getting on a ship for the first time comes with a lot of trauma, and this one was more than most. There’s the security deal, although these folks were very nice and professional. Then you’re buried in paperwork to fill in. There’s a short meet-up with your boss, whose name is, improbably, David Pitchfork, who showed me to my room. James, the young bass player in my band, is my roommate, and the cabin we share is one of the best I’ve seen for a shared cabin on a ship. It’s a converted passenger double with a PORTHOLE! In the conversion, they added a couple closets, making an L-shaped hallway leading to the porthole, where they added an out-of-the-way desk, which had been cleared off by Steve, who I replaced. (Steve’s from San Antonio and replaced ME on the Dawn Princess.)

Oh almost forgot . . . in the process of filling out our papers the David asked me if I knew where the new guitar player was, and that was my old buddy Vladymir, the Ukranian Spike Jones! We shared a depressing cabin on Star Princess. Vlad was late for the Star by twenty days, which I benefitted from because he was to share my cabin. Late is a way of saying “snarled in a sea of Soviet-era red tape.” Transiting through Russia is never easy for a Ukranian. Looks like they snagged him once again, as David had to ask the bloke he was to have replaced to hang out for another go-round. But I assured him that Vlad was not the problem and was in fact worth the wait. He is still MIA somewhere, the person he’s replacing extending his stay until he shows up.

Here the naming of the decks is backwards. Seven deck is the bottom, then, going up, six, five, four, three, two, one, Upper Deck, Boat Deck and so on. I am on five deck, and the porthole looks to be about 40 feet from the sea. 

Then there’s the haul-ass factor. This is not just the fastest liner on the sea (and among the last), it’s one of the fastest vessels, period. Top speed is in knots is in the low thirties, and my guess is we do twenty-eight knots regularly. Most modern cruise ships do 22 knots. We’re right up there with the warships, which makes sense because QE2 was used by the Royal Navy to move troops to the Falklands after a brief retrofit. This fact explains why we won’t be calling on ports in the Argentine, as the people there have long memories.

We made our way to Lisbon. I heard a port lecturer on the tv say that we should get up early and see the sun rise over the famous bridge that spans the harbor. I obediently did so, regardless of my lingering jetlag. I took a couple shot of the bridge, which was alive with rush hour traffic, and of the statue of Christ which looms over both the bridge and the commuters. My sense was that it was early for the money shot. We parked at a terminal across (?) from the Christ statue, within shouting distance of the bridge. If only shouting could have drowned out the roar of traffic! 

This bridge is no stunner like the Golden Gate in San Francisco. I think the bridge it most resembles is the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which connects Long Beach and Los Angeles harbor. Still, the Portugese are proud of their bridge, and if they choose to rank it with the Golden Gate, who am I to argue the point? A bridge is defined by its utility in easing the passage of traffic, something I know nothing about. By looking at the bridge’s traffic load--both its upper roadbed of cars and trucks and its lower bed where double floored rail cars zipped along--I’d say it was a success.

All this theoretical thinking took its toll, and I went back to the cabin and settled in for another round of napping. Reducing the influences of life which deprive me of the most good, I am left with sleep and food, and sleep is winning out. 

James, my cabinmate, a short-termer who has been here since June and will be going home after this cruise, has mastered the art of sleeping. He’s been very generous in his knowledge of the ship and how its business is done.

Tomorrow we head into the Mediterranean, going through the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar at 5 in the morning. We have a day at sea tomorrow--what Princess calls a relaxing day at sea, and we pull into Cagliari in Sardinia day after tomorrow. In order to get there, the captain announced, we’ll be doing 28.4 knots. No sweat.

Random observations:

Despite being long in the tooth, QE2 has a lot of classy appointments. The walls are made from birch panels, not plywood at all and certainly not the plastic stuff that Princess makes its newer ships from.

The relationship with Carnival, if it is mentioned at all, is usually followed by an apology. So many of the standards of the liners are still intact here that the other fleet of floating Holiday Inns that plow the waters is just looked at as a vugarization of the breed. 

There are English musicians, some of whom can swing, some not. Dave Cutler is clearly one who can swing. Although not here, his reputation from when he was dominates. Stevie, who’s been playing guitar here for almost 30 years, knows Dave well and chooses to talk about his stay very little.

Speaking of vulgar, how about that all-Cockney crew staff? It’s no wonder that the English decide who’s who by the accent used to speak the language. 

There once were two saxophone players in the Queen’s Room dance band. They tried, for whatever reason, to work with one, and the plan took. That’s why I have to bring the whole pawnshop with me.

Laundry is not the rosy universe that it is on the Princess ships. We get our uniforms (tux for us) cleaned for free, but we have to pass them in on Tuesday or Thursday at 1 in the morning for a 4 pm pick up the following afternoon.

Adrian Cross is playing piano with us. A proper English bigshot, but still an awfully good pianist, he’s on for just this one 2-week cruise. How the parent company can afford to shuttle musicians on and off this ship is a mystery to me. I’ve found so far just one guy who’ll be on the ship for the world cruise--the Trombone player in our band, a Princess veteran who is from North Carolina. He’s doing it for the same reason I am, the opportunity to escape the trench of the Caribbean and to see places otherwise not offered. 

I have room in my cabin for my folding bicycle to be stowed. I hope it can be sent to me, to New York at the start of the world cruise. And after the world cruise I can mail it back from New York. 

The food is far better than pianist Vladimir reported (“Shit”) though not as good as Princess overall. 

My cabin mate James leaves at the end of this cruise, He’s been on since June, so it’s time to go home to Illinois. 

Oct 18 2007

Today I got off the ship for the first time. I didn’t feel up to it on the first port, Lisbon, a couple days ago. Today I felt like I had to do it, stretch the legs and absorb the Italian hospitality of Sardinia. I wasn’t disappointed. 

I got off the ship with Jim, the drummer and bandleader for our band, the Queen’s Room Dance Band. Jim is a Brit who was raised in Australia and moved back to England in his teens and now lives in Madrid, where he and his gal have a 6-year-old son. He knows a great deal about American cars, especially the Mopar Chryslers and Corvettes.

We hooked up with the piano player from the show band and had an amazing coffee at just another exceptional sidewalk cafe in Cagliari. I had a small cappuccino that beat holy hell out of anything I’ve ever had in Starbucks, Jim had a large cappuccino, and the piano player had a tea. I snapped a couple pictures of the buildings in the town and of a sign of interest to Leroy Rodriguez and any other person interested in the works of Philip K. Dick. Unfortunately, the Italians close their shops at 1:30 for a siesta, which is good for them but less than good for ships’ crew, so I went back to the ship, watched a couple movies, while drifting in and out of sleep. The one thing I missed out on that I regret is going into an internet place and getting my email.

Tonight is the first time we’ll be in long ties since the night we left Southampton. That’s because the captain here does not have his cocktail party for returning passengers (aka repeat offenders, though just to us), he throws a cocktail party for everyone, two a night, across three evenings. 

The suit I wear as a tux is not really a tux at all, but sufficiently formal to fake it. I might yet order up a polyester tux from Uniformshop.com. We’ll see how I hold out with the one suit. My plan either way is to be organized enough to separate my “excess” clothing, which is to say any stuff not nailed down that I can do without on the final crossing to Southampton, and mail it back from New York, or from Fort Lauderdale. Some, I guess, I guess, can even go back from Los Angeles. That’s a long time off, though. We have many waters to plow before then. 

Some of my winter clothing can go back sooner still, when we’re in New York at the start of the world cruise. I just needed it for the couple weeks we’re in the colder parts of Europe in December, before our famous Caribbean adventure--out a week, in the Caribbean a week, and back a week to Southampton.

The Dancers and the Dance

The English have a special way of doing ballroom dance. It’s more organized, more like a subculture with its own rules and regulations which are strictly adhered to. In fact, with things we play are called Strict Tempo Ballroom Dance Music, something that the folks back home could only dream of. It’s sort of like Ken Ragsdale with the drummer in a click track. Older James is the lucky fellow, Younger James (the bassist and my cabinmate) is the direct recipient and we follow them. There’s no push-pull in from the orchestra, though. There are three horn players: trumpet, trombone and me on tenor and alto. Word is there used to be another saxophone, but for whatever reason the alto and tenor player merged into one person. 

(Right now I’m watching the bridge camera on my tv as a tug pushes us out into the Mediterranean, leaving the sheltered waters of Cagliari harbor and into the rainy expanse of sea between where we are now and Athens, where we will be on Saturday. The tugs drop their lines and, after a pause, we are on our way and under our own power.)

The concept of Quickstep is also a little different to English dancers. Mostly we take fast, often 2-beat charts and play them even faster, usually in the neighborhood of 200 or 220 bpm. We have an excellent rhythm section that can hold any tempo, but the other horn players can easily get sucked into that tempo and only come out for air. Although I find myself depending on Sam Butera licks in the faster tempi, it seems to work for me. 

So then we do a waltz, maybe a 120 bpm swing tune, and we’re off to the races. We see the same full dance floors with the same folks every night to a great extent. We might have a ball or some other special promotion, such as a demonstration by the resident ballroom dance instructor couple that will bring out a greater, or ad least different, crowd.

Now, you can’t talk about this dancing situation without mentioning the Gentleman Dance Hosts. They have to pay their way onto the ship, and one of the six Hosts came from Oregon. They bunk them 2 to a room, and they work the room, asking ladies without escorts if they would like a dance then. One of the fellows looks like a cross between Dino Lee and a real gigolo, for you Austin homegamers. The rest are far closer to or beyond the retirement line. They glide across the dance floor, regardless of the tempo or the step, in their white coated formalwear most nights. For what? What would motivate them, I wonder? Maybe I’ll make it my business to meet one of them and figure out what his motivations are. 

They might be as innocent as my own, although they are shelling out the cash to dance, which no musician would ever do, I’d think. I’m sure somewhere there’s a model for bringing musicians on board just like the Gentleman Dance Hosts. Would it work? Maybe. There are enough amateur bands to fill up every cruise ship in the world in Texas alone. As far as that line of thinking goes, if we normalize relations with Cuba, 

The Ray Terry band is on board playing traditional jazz, or “Trad” as the Brits call it. Trad had a life of its own when our Dixieland fell from fashion in the early sixties. What I find odd, though is they don’t seem to use 2-beat at all, which is something that I look for as a bass saxophonist, with the very British accent on the second syllable.