I find it hard to believe, but it’s apparently true: there are hotels in Las Vegas – several of them, in fact – bigger, way bigger than the Costa Diadema. Some of them so big they could possibly tuck the entire population of Efrat in their rooms, without anybody having to sleep on a love seat in the lobby or a blackjack table in the casino. Nonetheless, I’m going to stick with my preferred description of the ship we were sailing on: a huge Las Vegas hotel turned on its side, floating in the water.

On Wed. Sept, 14, the ship was sailing at its normal steady pace from Palma de Mallorca to Cagliari, the port city of Sardinia. The actual distance is 556 km. (346 miles), which means you could fly from one to the other in less than one hour (plus all the time in the airport!). By boat? Let’s just say that the ship left the one port at 1AM Wednesday morning (when we were all fast asleep) and arrived at the other port at 8AM Thursday morning (when we were having breakfast – with a whole day in between). The moral here is that this is not the way to travel if you’re in a hurry. Continue reading →

If it were you growing herbs on a rooftop of a building, would you consider your enterprise as agricultural or industrial? And then, why would it matter? (Third question: When are we returning to our cruise on the Costa Diadema? We will be back on board the ship, on its way to Sardinia, very soon. Do not worry!)

One of the places that Shelley Brinn, the proprietor of Tour Adumim, likes to take people to is a rooftop garden in Mishor Adumim, the industrial area close by to where we live. She was organizing a small group of residents and tourists to visit this place one recent afternoon, and why not? Continue reading →

Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza. We’re now a few years past 1957, at which time I was a junior at DeWitt Clinton H.S. in The Bronx. All of us were preparing for the regents exam in Spanish, assiduously poring over the Barron’s review book, which managed to condense three years of study into one yellow covered volume. Vocabulary, verb forms, grammar, idioms, questions about Spanish culture and other items of interest. How else would I have come to know about the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega? And then there were the Balearic Islands. For reasons I still do not understand, I was convinced that they were going to ask me to name the individual islands in this chain. And so, for days on end I went around repeating to myself Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza, Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza, until you could wake me at 3AM and ask me, What are the names of the Balearic Islands?, and I would repeat in singsong, Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza. Much to my surprise, they did not ask me about the Balearic Islands. I did muddle through the exam, and to this day I can still recite the names of the four principal Balearic Islands – which never seemed of any great importance in my life, except that the very ship I was on, the Costa Diadema, was now on its way (full speed ahead) to Mallorca – definitely a long way from E. 208 St. in The Bronx. Continue reading →

I could have if I wanted to, but I didn’t. There were plenty of opportunities for me to take a sneak preview of the ship we would be sailing on, the Costa Diadema. Plenty of on-line promotional material from the company: all about the ship, how big it is, how many decks, how many people can it fit, where it sails to, and the like. Plus…..in this day and age in which you can post anything (except undressed people) on YouTube, there are any number of videos taken by folks on the ship. So I could have done that, check out what a typical cabin looks like, the restaurants, the casino, the spa. But I asked myself the existential question: What good would it do me to know two weeks in advance? The answer I came up with was None At All. The promotional material from the AACI to entice us to sign up had a picture of the enormous vessel with more amenities than I would ever find the time or reason to use. The rest would wait until we arrived at the dock in Barcelona, which we finally did after the cable car ride, which I wrote about in a previous post – in the unlikely event that you don’t remember! Continue reading →

I have steadfastly maintained that Israel has the world’s smartest people and, at the same time, some of the stupidest. I should also add that Israel has some of the calmest, nothing will bother them people and some of the most neurotic, belligerent, in-your-face if they have to wait an extra second or two people on God’s green earth. The following episode will prove my point. Continue reading →

Free at last, free at last……… out of the oppressive airport – in which we had been cooped up for so long – into the sunlight of a late afternoon September day in Barcelona. Let’s get on the right bus and get out of here as fast as we can!

Weeks before we arrived, we were asked to assign ourselves for all the land tours to one of three buses, based upon our personal assessment of our mobility, as follows:

• Let’s pretend we’re young and spry
• We’re not as decrepit as we look
• We are as decrepit as we look

Each bus would have an AACI staff person as group leader, and each bus would have a different tour guide. Our friends The Levines were a lock for bus #3, and Barbara and I wound up on #2. Which meant that our guide would be Christian (not his religion, his name!), and he almost (almost!) made up for what had occurred before by being cheerful, well-informed, and speaking good English (even though he sounded like Ricky Ricardo [Let me ‘splain you]).   Continue reading →

And keep your sunny side up, up,

Hide the side that gets blue.

If you have nine sons in a row,

Baseball teams make money, you know!

(Ray Henderson-Lew Brown-Buddy De Silva)

 

If you don’t care for that song, how about:

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,

Keep on the sunny side of life.

It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way,

If we keep on the sunny side of life.

(lyrics by June Carter Cash)

 

Then there’s always:

Grab your coat and get your hat

Leave your worry on the doorstep

Just direct your feet

To the sunny side of the street.

(Dorothy Fields & Jimmy McHugh)

 

It’s pretty well known that I am an inveterate seeker for the sunny side of the street or of life or whatever. Still, there is little to be cheerful about when you’re leaving for the airport at 4AM – an hour which, in my book, should not exist. The only good thing I can say is that there is almost no traffic on the road at that absurd hour, and you can get to where you’re going lickety-split. Now you might expect – at least I did, foolish person that I am – that if there’s no one on the road, there surely would be no one on line in the airport. Perhaps they had all been camping out all night, but there were LOTS of people – hundreds of people, thousands of people – going through the very tedious procedure: get your boarding pass, go through security, check in your luggage, go through passport control – all the while, standing, standing, standing on one line or another, when all you want to do is curl up in some secluded spot and go back to sleep. Continue reading →