cruisin'

Hubby and I took a 3 day cruise over the weekend to forget about the war, forget about the kids, forget about the puppy we were fostering and the collection of his poo throughout the house, forget that we have jobs, forget that we have bills, faggedabout everything in fact.

The trip was to Alanya in Turkey and Limassol in Cyprus. It was our first cruise. And if we ever wondered where all the heavy people are in Israel, we found out where they were - right on the cruise with us. Maybe it was the 4 huge meals a day we were served by attentive Egyptian staff but alot of the 800 patrons were, well, big.

It took time to get used to the motion of the ship and I felt like a drunken sailor most of the time, and this was calm water season. I laughed at the spaghetti shaking around at the midnight buffet, recalling my friends telling me years ago about their acid trips where they would eat spaghetti their mother prepared for them and the spaghetti seemed to spin around in their plate. Yup - it was trippy indeed. The first night, I stepped around puke here and there on the deck and in the aisles - but people's stomachs seemed to have calmed down after that first night, praise the Lord. That seemed to make me more ill than the boat's motion.

We got to Turkey which suprised me at its very European look. I thought it would look more Oriental than European. European with mosques. Alanya was lovely and we sipped apple tea and Turkish coffee at a place in the mountains called Dim Cai - which had restaurant seating above a river where kids splashed down from a bridge. I walked around the modern bazaar and bought some Turkish music - Tarkan, Ibrahim Tatlises and an interesting Analolian mix, recommended to me by the cool sales guy in the cd shop. He simply abhorred Tarkan (too teenybop) and Ibrahim wasn't ethnic music (I told him I thought it was ethnic) - so he recommended something he thought was cool - and ethnic. Walking around it was amusing to hear the Turkish shopkeepers call out to us in Hebrew.

The next day we toured Limassol (nothing to see there) and took a bus to a quaint 800 year old winemaking village called Omodos. Others on our ship took a trip to the island of Napa but I wanted to see the sites... I had the local Frappe coffee, which seemed like a coffee milkshake. It's their speciality. And the women were making lace everything - doilies, tissue box covers, tableclothes, whatever. There was no bargaining in Cyprus whatsoever - a bit of a downer after the Turkish bargaining and Israelis do love to get discounts.

And before we knew it, we were heading back home - back to real life. The trip - was absolutely short - but lovely!