UVM Blogs

Yea! Kathy and I are going on another voyage! Fall 2012, Atlantic Exploration. http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyages/fall-2012/ 14 ports, 12 countries, 4 continents. We have our passports, with the requisite number of empty pages. We have our inoculations (including Yellow Fever). We have our visas for Ghana and Brazil. We have our anti-malaria…[Read more]

Friday 7am. We are back on East Coast time now approaching Norfolk. We had to pack last night. Our “checked” luggage gets lifted off the ship by crane. We carry the stuff we need today and tomorrow, plus any fragile items. We reunite with our bags after immigration and before customs. We are allowed to [...]

Tuesday. Last day in Morocco, last day in any foreign port. Next stop Norfolk. I must have gotten burned out on taking pictures. We got back from a short day of shopping and I have just four. My main objective for the day was to get postage stamps and to get postcards mailed. I did [...]

On Monday we wanted to get to a grocery where we could buy a few specific food items. A “western” style grocery. Rumor had it that there was a carefour in town but I couldn’t find it on google. And if it’s not on google…. I did find a grocery via google. It was in [...]

Sunday, Aug 8 th. We got some shopping for presents done today. We found a souk run as an artisans cooperative. They have posted prices and don’t bargain. (Well, they did give us a courtesy discount when we cashed out). The guy helping us is the owner’s son. He is a professor of accounting, but it’s [...]

More pics from our day 1 tour… starting with the rest of my King Hassan II Mosque…

Saturday, Aug 7th. We took a city orientation tour. We visited the Central market, then a public square, one of King Mohammed VI’s palaces, a cathedral with some awesome stained glass, the King Hassan II Mosque, drove through a “rich” neighborhood, and visited the seaside Corniche. Whew. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy. The King holds [...]

Friday August 6th. Ah. The Rock of Gibraltar.  Gibraltar is a British overseas territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean. We are stopping there but not touching land (well, except for our anchors). We need to take on fuel. Bunkering.  Gilbraltar was ceded to Britain by [...]

Each SAS voyage they hold the Sea Olympics. Opening ceremonies are the night before, with a parade of teams proudly carrying their banners and wearing their colors. Each team is named for one of the seas. Adriatic, Carribean..etc. This year the faculty staff was rebranded. Previously competing as the Dead Sea, this year, with increased [...]

By this time Big Red and True Blue had just about seen it all. They’d been up to the ITBR on the Detroit River. They’d been to Manhattan’s Pier 84. They’d been out to the spring Maritime Festival in Seattle. This time they were takin it easy and letting someone else do the driving. But that [...]

OK. Finally got the last Alexandria post up. Crazy busy on the ship. Students are doing papers, studying for exams… A few fried machines. A few lost files. A few corrupt iPhoto libraries. All F’ing printers suck. Academics should make accessing their scholarly work as easy as using Wikipedia. Proxy’s, pdfs, funky framed websites with disabled [...]

Saturday, July 31 st. Onboard time is 6pm. So we have to be careful not to go too far. Our plan is to get to the new Alexandria Library early, look around a bit, catch the 1:00 show at the planetarium, and catch a cab back to the ship. Traffic in Alexandria is a little bit crazy. It’s [...]

July 30 th, Friday This morning was a catch-up time. Kathy was grading papers, and I was sitting outside on deck 7 listening to the Friday call to prayers. They use PA systems in the minarets. Friday noontime prayers are the most important of the week and the call to prayer is more elaborate and prolonged. [...]

Thursday, July 29 th. Thursday morning we boarded busses for the ride to Giza.  Giza was once a small peasant village adjoining the pyramid field. Now it is part of Cairo as the two grow towards each other. There are 3 main pyramids at Giza in which were interred three successive pharaohs, Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. [...]

Wed, July 28 th On Wednesday we visited Alexandria University. We were welcomed by Mrs. Magada Hafez who is the Director of Student Activities. She invited in student leaders Mahamed Mostafa and Ahmed Maher Abdelaziz who participated in some Q&A and then escorted us on a tour of the campus. During our tour we were lucky [...]

Tuesday, July 27 th In most ports, Kathy and I have done an afternoon “city orientation” tour. This has worked out well. We don’t have to rush off the ship, and we can start getting an idea about parts of the city we might want to explore. Maybe we have a chance to hit an ATM and get [...]

OK. Whew! I got all my Istanbul posts done before we LEAVE Alexandria. Just a few hours before. We are 50 minutes away from “onboard” time. I of course, being timid, get back to the ship well ahead of the deadline. Upcoming? My Egypt posts. I wasn’t as active here. Seemed harder to get my [...]

Saturday evening. Leaving Istanbul.

Saturday, July 24 th. We started Saturday with another SAS day-trip. We visited two mosques, and a museum. First up, the Eyüp Sultan Mosque . It was the first mosque constructed by the Ottoman Turks following their conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It was built near the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, who was a close companion of [...]

Not many pictures with this posting. I apologize. Friday night we headed out with David and Lois to take a Turkish bath. Walk/metro/map-check/ask directions/ ah, we are there. We enter off the street, down marble steps, into a reception area. We choose what services we want. I went for the whole thing. So, first into [...]

Friday, July 23 Friday we headed out on foot/metro to see if we could get a look at the University of Istanbul. We ran into Tim Armstrong and he joined us for the first leg. We caught the metro at Tophane and took it into the old city to the Sultanahmet stop. We did a [...]

Thursday, July 22 On Thursday we took a bus ride up the coast and a boat ride back down. We went as far up the Bosporus as Büyükdere and visited the Sadberk Hanım Museum . The museum has two parts, archeological and ethnographic. Kathy thought the archeological section was fascinating; with my pathetic lack of interest in [...]

After our return from Sabachı, we had to come up with a dinner plan. We decided (aided by our Knopf mapguide for Istanbul) to walk on İstiklâl Caddesi . We walked a short distance east along the Bosporus and caught the metro at Fındıklı (the M2 line) and headed east 1 stop to Kabataş where we bought [...]

Wed. 7/21. Kathy and her students visited a “foundation” university. Foundation universities are the privately funded higher education institutions in Turkey. For some reason, “private” has the bad connotation of paying for your grades and degree. So “foundation” is used instead. All higher education institutions in Turkey must be non-profit. In…[Read more]

1650 years old. Famous in particular for its massive dome, it is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture. It was the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years. It served as the cathedral of Constantinople.  In 1453, Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks and Sultan Mehmed II ordered the building to [...]

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque is called the “Blue” Mosque because of beautiful blue ceramic ties on the walls. It may be noted that there are at least 6 other mosques known as “The Blue Mosque”. But this is an amazing building. It was built between 1609 and 1616, during the rule of Ahmed I. He appointed [...]

And now our first visits to beautiful buildings in Istanbul. First, the Şehzade Mosque.  According to my friend wikipedia: The Şehzade Mosque was commissioned by Sultan Suleiman I in memory of his eldest son, Prince Mehmet, who died of smallpox at the age of 21 in 1543, though the cause for his death is disputed. It [...]

Our first trip into Istanbul. Istanbul is a huge city, with a leg in Europe and a leg in Asia and a narrow strait called the Bosphorous in between. We will ride a tour bus and circle the European side. North, cross above the Golden Horn, follow the land-side defensive walls, and return along the [...]

OK. We just arrived in Alexandria, and here I am making my first Istanbul post. Kathy is catching up grading papers and I am catching up with postings. It’s 9am, and our first foray into Alexandria will be 2pm when we head out to the new Alexandria Library. Looking forward to that! Meanwhile, I hope [...]

I had great plans to catch up with blogging this morning. We left Istanbul last night. I got into the lab nice and early. Chaos. Broken printers, internet not working, broken monitor, broken keyboard…. Has Mercury gone retrograde??? So this will be a brief “I’m still alive” post. We visited Sabanci University in Istanbul. They give [...]

After our hot walk up to the Acropolis and the bus ride back to the ship, we took a short break, changed, and caught a cab to Marina Zea. That’s the small port in Piraeus. The waterfront is lined with restaurants open to the water. As we passed each the owners would read their menus [...]

OK, first, a confession. I’m not a big fan of antiquities. I love a beautiful building, a beautiful city, beautiful art…. But the fact that it was accomplished 1000 years ago is really only interesting to me in that I wonder what we need to do today to organize ourselves in such a way that [...]

7/11. We leave Croatia about 20:00. The captain nicely detours under the city walls for one last look. The next day, sailing south past Albania a brief announcement comes over the PA system. Crew notice, crew notice, category 0 drill, category 0 drill, man overboard, man overboard. And the ship takes a tight port turn. [...]

Saturday July 10 th. Day-trip to Montenegro. I felt kinship to Montenegro. Montenegro is black mountain, Vermont is green mountain. Sure, their mountains drop into salt water and ours into Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River, but pretty mountains are pretty mountains, and our populations are just about the same. They have less land, 5,000 sq [...]

When Kathy and I left ACMT we planned to return to the ship to change before a walk around the old city but we found the buses were crazy crowded and traffic was tied up.  There was a meeting in town of the foreign ministers of the Adriatic states in town adding to the usual [...]

On Friday, July 9 th we visited the American College of Management and Technology . This college was the first private college in Croatia when it was founded in 1997.  Today there are over 45 private institutions offering higher education in Croatia. ACMT operates collaboratively with the Rochester Institute of Technology and offers dually…[Read more]

It was hard for everyone to get back to work. Classes are held every day while sailing, so we had 2 class days on the way from Italy to Croatia. AND the Global Studies midterm was held. The exam fever on board was high. We arrived in Dubrovnik early and had our first night-time docking. [...]

Sunday we drove to Napoli to reboard the ship. We decided to drive along the coast. We were admiring the beaches… we didn’t consider what would happen at 4:30ish on this Sunday afternoon… All the beach-goers jump into cars and onto motorbikes and onto the 2 lane road that leads 90 kilometers into Napoli. 4 hours [...]

OK! Another catching-up day. This is actually our last day in Croatia (July 11), but this posting is about our last day in Tuscany. We stayed “in the neighborhood”, visiting the village of Radicondoli really for the first time. It’s an amazingly pretty town perched on the top of a hill. I’m sure it was the history, [...]

Wednesday we traveled again to Florence. This time for our cooking class. We decided to try the train to avoid driving into the city center. Allesandra got a train schedule for us for trains from Calle Val D’Elsa (hills of the valley of the river Elsa). This town was about 20 kilometers from Radicondoli. We [...]

We should have taken some photos from the start of this day. We had to be at the tour office in Florence Centro at 9:30. We calculated that it was a 90 minute drive into Firenze (Florence). Unless we got lost. Or couldn’t find the parking garage that Allessandra recommended. Or if we couldn’t find [...]

So, via the internet I had found this rental in a small Tuscan “hill country” village. The town is Radicondoli, and the place is called Borghetto Poggio Bianco. They don’t take credit cards, so I had wired 50% of the rental when I made the reservation and the 2 nd 50% just before leaving the states. [...]

On Sunday the 27 th we boarded a tour bus and drove about 90 minutes to Figueres. Dali’s hometown. Dali built a museum there and it is very cool. There are many stories about the many ways in which Dali was psychologically bent. Some are probably a result of his self-promotion, some are probably all too [...]

So, I am trying hard to keep publishing in chronological order. We had no connectivity in Tuscany so… no Italy posts yet. In fact, I am working on my last Spain posting, The Dali museum. But today is “catch-up” day, so we’ll see how far I can get. Meanwhile I will post 1 Italy picture [...]

The Paella Trip So, perhaps the signature dish of Spain is paella (pie eh’ ya). And you can make a paella in many styles. But the favorite is Paella Valencia. And Kathy was “tour lead” for our paella outing. We had a very good tour guide who was English and grew up in Barcelona. He [...]

Friday in Barcelona We started Friday with an informal visit to the University of Barcelona with the Student Affairs at Sea grad students. We met on the pier and grabbed the shuttle to town. It’s only a 5 minute ride but due to construction you can’t simply walk there…. We grabbed a metro up to [...]

Thursday after we cleared customs, Kathy and I walked up Las Ramblas, stopped for tapas in a square, baby fried fish, summer salad, spicy meatballs, CERVESAS! We walked back to the ship in time to board a tour bus with a local guide for a tour of various Gaudi buildings. Wonderful! Visionary! We saw one [...]