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.
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