Rainy day recap.

What a rainy day.  Here we are in Belgium and I’ve slept through my alarm and when I do wake up I find that it is raining.  I probably won’t make it in to Brugge today, but that feels like less of a disaster because I’m feeling a bit under the weather, and also because the weather is being so uncooperative.  Just means that I’ll have to make sure to do it right in a couple weeks when we’re back here.

 

I ended up waiting for my friend Justin who had training this morning.  An excellent decision anyway.  We hopped on the shuttle and went into the little town near the dock.  I’m constantly amazed at the quality of beer and food that can be had when walking into any random café in Belgium.  At our first stop we had two interesting sour beers, one excellent, the Geuze Boon, and one ok, the Belle-vue Kreik Extra.  It was a bit sweet.  Oh and WAFFLE!  It was one of the best I’ve ever had.  Next time I’m getting it done right with strawberries and chocolate and whatnot.

The pastry shops were also out of control.  They were everywhere.  We are clearly in a town that is heavily touristed, but everything seems super high quality.

We walked along the waterfront and checking out the waterfront on a cloudy day, which, I must say, was hopping.   There were lots of school groups.  We heard one group of girls singing some sort of round in Belgian.  They all knew it and some sang louder than others but the overall effect was amazing.  The teacher was jumping around and the scene was of a public expression of joy that you don’t encounter every day.  At least where I live. 

 

After the beach we decided to get another beer.  This one was an abbey style belgian, dark, malty, sweet and strong.  Yum.

It’s a couple days later now and I’ve had another technical success!  Carl, who has replaced Tom as glassblowing team leader, brought a new battery for my computer, so I’m writing from a bus that’s headed to Berlin!  Imagine that!  It’s like I’m part of the modern world and whatnot.

 

I think today I’m going to look through my pictures and pull some good ones out that I’ve skipped over in the course of losing my ability to carry my computer to places with reasonable internet connections.

 

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is awesome.  I just finished a book, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, that was partially set here, but in the winter.  A lot of these pictures are taken in Christiania, which is quite a place to have in a major modern city.  I don’t know all the history, but at some point squatters took over the area and refused to be moved.  Not they have a very developed society and are very entrenched.  I remember they tried to kick them out a few years ago but there were massive protests, and they are  still there today.

 

The last two pics are of Tivoli, an amusement park in the middle of town.  As well as rides, they have nice gardens, a theater, and lots of decent restaurants inside, so lots of different types of people hang out in the park.  The city has so many different things going on.  There is a design scene, an amazing shopping street, and tons of parks, palaces and churches.  It’s definitely a favorite.  Oh, and free tourist bikes!

Day off. And More.

Happy Father’s Day Dad!

So today I’m taking a day off to catch up on many things.  Sleep.  Blog.  Etc.  Right now I’m trying to teach myself Microsoft Excel.  I think I did something wrong and now that part of my computer is eating itself.  Should have saved my work.  Oh well.  Maybe I’ll get to start over.

Yesterday, though, was pretty successful.  After taking the safety quiz, which is possibly the most badly written multiple choice test I’ve ever seen, I got off the ship and took the Crew Shuttle into the heart of St. Petersburg, where I met one of the other glassblowers, Bob, and we walked around.  He hadn’t seen the Church on Spilled Blood, so we walked in that direction.  It is one of the most magnificent churches I have ever seen.  It is built in the Russian style with the onion domes and lots of niches adorned with mosaics on the exterior.  Surrounding the square that the church is in are huge wrought iron fences.  Some of the sections are clearly restored.  The first time I came to the square I saw the redone sections and I thought they were the most amazing metalwork I’d ever seen.  This time I saw the old sections.  They are so much better.



Bob and I went inside the church, which I’d seen pictures of, thanks to my friend Annette.  The effect of the interior defies description.  Every surface is covered with the most amazing mosaics.  They begin at about 10 feet above the floor and cover the pillars, walls and ceiling.  Besides the scale of the work, the shading on the faces of the people in the scenes is phenomenal.  There are a couple mosaics that you can view at eye level, and even on close inspection the way the artists work subtle shading and gentle lines out of what are mostly hard straight edged tiles, is a bit mysterious.



After the church, Bob headed back to the ship and I found an overpriced beer and internet.  Annette also told me to try Russian fast food if I found it, and today I did.  It was  a little place on the main street that had a big orange spoon for a logo.  Everything I had there was inexplicably great.  They made fresh crepes which I got chicken and mushrooms in, and I also got borsht which seemed more tomato than beet based, but was very delicious, and they had a long list of tea to choose from.  I got the emperors leaves or something like that.  All the tea was loose leaf and came in a little teapot.  Also great.  Even after brewing for five minutes it didn’t get bitter.  Crazy.  All this for about six dollars, 180 rubles.

After lunch or dinner, whatever it was.  I walked around some more.  I’m confused about my days now because it’s always light outside.  I walked around the city till around 10pm and it wasn’t starting to get dark yet.  It’s like the sun doesn’t have enough time to get all the shining it wants to get done, so in the end it just resigns itself to not getting any sleep that night and then pushes on through the next day.  The sun does set for a few hours, but the sky doesn’t get even close to dark.

Hooray for internet.

Finally I’ve got the ship’s wireless internet working in my room, so I’ve got no excuse for not updating the blog.  I guess that is a good thing.  It feels good for now.  It IS busy out here though.

Today was pretty good.  The weather was about what I expected from the Baltic Sea.  So far it’s been pretty mellow.  Chilly, yes, but not uncomfortably so.  Today was not cold, but the wind is pretty amazing.  I think we’re looking at 30-40mph gusts.  It does a pretty good job of whipping the sea into a froth.  We see smaller ships nearby with the waves crashing over them.



We did an auction today.  Auctioned 6 pieces of glass and brought in over $8000!  $2500 of that is for breast cancer research.  The rest goes to a scholarship fund at Corning.  Gotta remember to sign up for that.  We also had a show which was very well attended for the weather conditions.  We raffled off a few excellent pieces of glass since it was our last show and people were braving the wind to show up.  The stage itself is incredibly well sheltered.  We were barely affected by the wind.  I’ve done shows out here when there is wind and rain and it barely makes the stage wet.

Helsinki, Finland

I must admit I couldn’t put Finland on a map before this trip.  The Baltic sea itself was something that I was only barely aware of.  So Finland.  I walked around a bit.  Didn’t have a lot of time because I had training in the morning, but I got to see a bit of the immediate area around the center of the city.  There was of course the new mall that looks like every mall in every place in the world, but outside on the street there was a great deal of interesting architecture.  The art deco train station was a highlight and there were several large old buildings that seemed in a baroque style.




Bike culture seems alive and well in Finland too.  There are lots of bike trails on the roads and some of the sidewalks also have bike trails with different surfaces to mark them.  So if you are walking on a concrete sidewalk you may then also have a paved bike lane on the same level and then a curb before the street.  It seems like many people are biking, not just young trendy people, though there are those as well, but older folks coming from the supermarket, or working class people coming home.  I noticed this in Germany as well.  I saw a lot of cool, very personalized bikes too.







We had a late glassblowing show after we came back to the ship.  But it didn’t feel late.  It wasn’t even dusk by 9pm when we started the show.  It actually got brighter around 10pm when the sun dipped below the clouds that were hanging just above the horizon, and the following two pictures are at midnight after the show.

Back on the Eclipse.

Hi all.  It’s definitely past time to get something on the blog.  Always is it seems, but I’m a few days into this contract and I’m sure people are wondering what is going on. 

So far it’s been a lot of training.  They seem to have beefed up the training a bit due to the recent troubles in the cruise industry, but most things seem familiar.  The glassblowing shows have gone well.  I’ve had some fights with large chunks of blue frit and the pineapple mold.  Yes I’m afraid it’s true.  But generally I’ve recovered well from my mishaps and things are progressing toward comfort and pushing toward better and brighter things.

So today there was lifeboat training in the morning, but we have the rest of the day off.  We’re in Germany today.  Berlin is striking distance from this port, but it takes all day to get there and back, so that will have to wait for another day.  Got off the ship and walked around a bit.  It’s a nice port, but near the ship it definitely has that touristy feel.  Looked like there were a couple nice places that the locals might frequent, but overall I’m guessing that a lot of the shops along the canal are tourist driven enterprises.





The two glassblowers that I’m working with on the ship are Tom Ryder, the team leader, and Bob Swidergal who has been blowing glass for a long time.  Tom was too tired to walk around in the afternoon, but Bob and I walked around the little port town.  Pretty touristy near the ship, but the town has a nice church in a central square and an long city park and just on the other side of the park is the waterfront.  It has a nice barrier dune and then a beach where three brave souls were kiteboarding in the surf.



A little later on we headed out to have some German beer and see what happens in the evening.  We went to a couple spots.  Nothing too noteworthy, but I got to hang out with some new people from the ship and on our way back a couple of guys in a sailboat that was moored by the canal called to us to come over and have a beer on their boat.  That was a fun adventure.  They were just a couple German guys on a short holiday, cruising the coast of Germany and having a good time.  All in all a good evening.