What am I doing HERE?

23 September 06

How did I end up getting stuck here in the Oklahoma City Airport? I feel like this whole thing is not even real any more.

I got on a bus in Copenhagen yesterday at 7 in the morning, because, after all, you need several hours to get on an international flight. Like from 8 to 3:30. Seriously.

Except for multiple catterwalling babies, whose parents I felt deeply sorry for until the flight, and the crying, went into extra innings somewhere over Greenland. Then I remembered one incident where Brendan couldn’t stop crying on a flight when he was about a year and a half old. The problem was that Holly had eaten Szechwan for lunch. I started thinking bad thoughts about this group of parents. By then we were in USA air space, where a big surprise awaited us, in the form of a map running on the in-flight “entertainment” system, which clearly showed that we were executing a square maneuver over Lake Michigan, just a few miles from O’Hare Airport. At first we laughed about it, thinking it was some glitch in the GPS system manifesting itself. As it dragged on, I looked out and noted that we were making 12 degree banks, the easy way to travel in square patterns.

Additionally the asses were sore from nine hours of sphincter-numbing, the baby crying situation, and so on. So the captain gets on and tells us, in Danish first, that we're being diverted to Milwaukee until we can get cleared into O'Hare, and here's the kicker: We're landing there because we're nearly out of fuel.

We land, and we're surrounded by emergency vehicles including an ambulance. Three passengers are allowed to leave the plane. It must have been a real emergency because the implications of not clearing customs and going straight to the hospital are clear.

So after about an hour we're up in the air again. We notice that most of our connecting flights left 20 minutes ago. Surely, I'm thinking, nobody would let a plane with a lot of old folks come in to O'Hare without a well-thought-out plan.

I thought wrong. By the time we cleared customs we found that our flights were long gone, and--worse still--that SAS didn't much care for dealing with the situation. As far as they were concerned it was the bus got there, delayed by weather. The connecting flights were on domestics anyway. Thank the stars for United, which, just coming off bankruptcy, has a lot to prove. And they did. They grabbed nearly every passenger and at the very least sent them off to a discounted hotel room with their bags checked. I had an ugly meeting with the station chief for SAS because of our company's policy of customer service. I suppose there were a hundred passengers on the SAS flight, but their attitude was dismissive, that it was all the fault of weather, and so on. Well, I bet about half of those people slept on the hard benches of O'Hare, and the SAS station chief could have cleared a lot up by calling a hotel, meeting us at the USA end of Customs, or SOMETHING. Weather happens to us at Princess too, but when it does we get right on the Best Possible Outcome, It's not always perfect, but the passengers KNOW they're being taken care of and by whom.

So I got a motel room, discounted, because of a nice lady at United. I'd been dreaming about a bath for a week. When I got to my room, the hot water wasn't working. The bed was great, but when I finally arrived there it was 2 in the morning, and the vans from 5 onward were reserved full (my flight was at 8). So I got a couple hours sleep anyway.

Security was a bit hellish, but I didn't lose anything at least. (The security in Copenhagen was wonderful.) Welcome back, they seemed to say in Chicago. We loaded up on a Canadian Regional jet, 70 passenger version, and headed down the taxi way.

A couple hours later the captain comes on and says we're going to Oklahoma City so they can look at an engine noise. So we tok off from ORD at 8 am, landed at OKA at 10 am, and we have a long wait for a part and don't get airborne again until 9 pm. I arrive AUS 10:30 pm, exactly 24 hours after I was scheduled to do so.

But I'm here and it's summer all over again.

Just 13 days to go!

OK, so I got extended for one cruise and now I leave on the 22nd of September, just in time to catch a few weeks of Texas heat.

Thirty years on the ships.

Neither of these normal-looking people in their mid- to late-thirties has a home outside of the ships.

Barry is the small fellow, the big guy is trombonist Rob. Each of them has about 15 years at this game. Think of it: 15 years of living in the space of a closet.

They have storage spaces and take their mail at their parents' addresses.

Maybe I got too late to thier game. I have a spouse, a couple grown kids who I went through parenthood with, a mortgage, pets, and and a thousand lumps of life these knuckleheads will never know as long as they take long contracts with cruise ship companies.

When gigs started interfering with life, that was it for me. Now I'm back at it. These two don't realize there's another alternative life out there.

For me, I know there is life out there, and the skill of integrating the polarities of life with the gig is where you show if you have the finesse to pull it off. Otherwise, you're just a cog in somebody's machine.

I like these guys, but I know my limits don't extend to their way of life. They stay up all night drinking in the ward room. When they run out of things to say they talk about they folks who don't. And that's the saddest thing of all.

Sunrise over Oslo

1 September 2006

When I was a kid a had a paper route in Santa Ana. I was around 12, just stretching my metaphorical legs out into the real world. I was given the worst route that the Santa Ana Register had, an afternoon throw through the orange groves from Edinger all the way to McFadden west of Grand Avenue.

My favorite days were Saturday and Sunday, because I got to get up before everyone, get my folding done in the dark and head out the mile or so where my first paper was thrown, at Cherry Rivet on Dyer Road, just past the sugar factory that’s now a hotel resembling, well, a sugar factory. By then the sun was coming up in the fragrant orange groves, the traffic ranged from light to nonexistent, and I was full of joy.

Don’t try riding no handed nowadays on Dyer Road.

What brought all this to mind is this morning, unable to sleep at 5:30 am I went out on the deck and watched the sunrise over Oslo, which is breathtaking in its own way. I was alone on the deck except for a few guys from the wipe-down crew.
There was a party in the hallway until 4. The revelers were still at it, more quietly when I went out. They missed it! I remember that feeling.

20 days to go if the creek don’t rise.

Might as well head down to staff mess, load up with breakfast and head back to sleep. We’re docking now, so there won’t be any sleeping for nearly an hour.

Dave Cutler

31 August 2006

When we started these cruises we had a drummer name Chaba from Prague who left lots to be desired. More than anything the drummer can make or break a band. This drummer decided that ship life wasn’t for him and paid his own way home. So Brian in the office hustle up a new drummer, which caused gloom to descend, especially when we heard that the new guy was a 52 year old on his first Princess contract.

We needn’t have worried.

When he arrived we started swinging for the first time.

Dave had worked for the British cruise lines, mostly P&O, for twenty-odd years before he got around to us.

He had a taste of America when he went to Berklee in 1977, then came back to England to steady gigs in the West End (JC Superstar) and touring bands and a steady chat show on the BBC which gave him enough to buy a house in a lower middle class neighborhood which eventually went upscale. That’s where his daughter and grandson now live while he’s out here.
Dave can read fly shit. He swings hard enough to elevate the proceedings. He has a facile wit and a great sense of humor, which are essential when you’re doing this gig. He also is totally obsessive, which I suppose goes hand in glove. He’s the kind of guy who some people do not deal well with, because at a rehearsal he deals with minutia that most people don’t even get. There’s one guy especially who Dave gets to, but Dave has the good sense to point out that this other fellow is insane.

We are lucky to have his experience and is innate musical decision making driving the band.

The Largest Bridge in the World

29 August 2006


Three times every cruise we go under the world’s largest suspension bridge, which is in Denmark of all places. The bridge covers 11 miles. Before that, there are several small causeways spanning a series of islands.
It’s a tight fit, getting our 16 decks under the bridge, Here’s a shot I took of the looming bridge with a schooner, one of the training ships that we see here all the time, making it with plenty to spare.

I was on deck 15, the open deck beneath Skywalkers, where thr improbable DJ “spins your favorite records ‘til the wee hours.” (Yeah, as if all these old folks would be caught dead in a disco. The original and still official name of the place is Skwalkers Night Club.)

It’s a little hard to see from these pictures, but the bottom of the bridge is maybe 50 feet from collision with our communication towers. (The raindrops on the lens don’t do much good for the perspective either.)



The lower level of this bridge, I am told, is a completely enclosed railbed. Yes, there are trains running below the cars which you can’t see. It costs about $35 US to cross the bridge, and some wag in Danish Bridges figured out that the bridge links up the Baltic countries to the extent that travel through to Asia is theoretically possible. It supplements several ferry routes which we see criss-crossing between cities in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Stout vessels, built for the vagaries of uncertain weather. I have no idea what to compare them with in terms of their load factor, but they always seem to still have vehicles and trucks and people on them. The bridge at best seems to have half its potential capacity.

I guess the real point in this is that the comparison of our mass with that of the schooner in the first frame is pretty apt. We are, by comparison, huge, massive. As Dave Cutler told me the other night, we are one of the largest moving objects ever built by men (and Italian men at that, union men). I’d qualify that by adding the modifier “civilian”, although sometimes I wonder if there’s a difference.

We slide under the bridge today around lunchtime. If the weather’s cooperating I’ll try to get some more and maybe even better shots of it.

Getting Ready for Rough Traveling and a Jackpot in Germany

11 August 2006

Well, the British have managed to get the all that unpleasant business in Lebanon off the front pages or, in the case of the cruise ship musician, the crawls of CNN international and BBC World. What they did was round up a bunch of Pakistanis who may or may not have figured out a plot to make bombs out of common household materials that could be smuggled on to planes undetected in common carry-on baggage. As a result of all the hysteria there is no carry-on baggage allowed at Heathrow, All well and good, but if this catches on it’ll make it difficult to fly back to the states with my horns and my Powerbook in tow, to say nothing of my effects, as they call all my stuff I packed for four months in the Baltic.

I don’t anticipate flying through Heathrow. but what scares me is that this might spread to Copenhagen, where I will likely depart Europe in 31 days (this having been written August 11) for JFK or Dallas if I get real lucky.

Good news, though, as we are in Warnemunde for one last time. The last time we were here I thought I’d stumbled upon a store owned by the parent company of Trader Joes. Our Berlin tour guide pointed out a market about a mile from the ship and said that tourists from Sweden came in on ferries to stock up for parties. So I checked it out that night, only to find the store closed. I did manage to look inside the place, though and it had a very TJs feel to it.

Of course I had my doubters.

But when I got there this morning, thee weeks later, I found a place very much like TJ’s. Things for sale were piled up everywhere, the booze boxes had been knifed open on one side, there were plenty of pre-wrapped cheeses and produce, and the usual assortment of sausages (Germany, remember) and frozen stuff and chocolates. I was delighted to find some Arnika gel, which I’d run out of, and which is spelled completely differently in Germany. It’s a great relief to my neck, which gets a workout holding saxophones. Still, I hadn’t found the smoking gun until, turning to the freezer case form the cereal, I found Trader Joes brand prunes! I know that Joe doesn’t make stuff for its competition, so I did my best to ask the check-out gal if the company she worked for had any association with TJs.

So I bought my gel, six bottles of vitamin-enhanced orange and carrot juice, Eurodont mouthwash, a chocolate bar, and those prunes. Just under ten Euros. I was lax in my booze purchasing, but I felt like the Swedish passengers on the ferries deserved no competition from me. Tomorrow we start a two-day in Copenhagen. This almost felt as good as when I found a current New Yorker in Helsinki at the legendary Stockman department store. Even though it was 6.9 Euros I had to have it.
Anyway, this place is Aldi Markt. They have stores all over Germany and a certain division of their company will be opening 700 stores in the states this year. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the stores will be in central Texas.
Peter, wish you were here to help with the translating!

The other thing happening this day was a big sailing festival with Tall Ships everywhere. I took some shots outside the ship when I was walking around.

That’s the bow of the Star on the upper right.

Dull Statistics

Here are the goods on the Star Princess (that's her on the right):

Built in 2001 in Italy

Flag of Convenience: Bermuda

Call Sign: ZCDD6

Official Number 733709

Gross tons 109,000

Net tons 71,763

Overall length 951 feet

Breadth 118 feet

Fuel Capacity 2649 TONS

Fresh Water Capacity 2731 TONS

Normal Passenger Load 2600

Normal Crew Load 1150

Cruising Speed 22.5 Knots

Berlin Crew Tour

Berlin: 189 Kilometers from the Sea

22 July 06

So, there we went.

It cost (well, is it that important what it cost?) $55 (yes, I guess it is). For that we had a long bus ride out and back, a lucid and informative guide whose non-summer job is going to grad school (for an MBA in marketing) in Atlanta. After a turn around the city, pointing out the main sites of interest, of which there are too many to mention, we were dropped at the holocaust memorial and turned loose on the city for 4 hours.



Here is a snap of Daniel doing the Funky Chicken as Nick looks on in horror from the front of the bus and one of the photogs offers him crisps she can’t eat because of food allergy.

Not really. Just a lucky shot.

The three hour bus ride through the former East German countryside was very relaxing. The bus was a Setra with all the European appointments. If ony American busses were this fancy people would get over the stigma associated with riding a bus. Thanks for that, Greyhound.



There was plenty of farmland between the port ad Berlin in all its late summer splendor. The hay was mown, and most of the fields had elevated huts for hunting, an old world tradition for the swells. Daniel said that you have to take psychological tests to get a gun permit here in Germany. (He also said it costs 1500 Euros to take the training necessary to get a driver’s license, which might explain some of the folks we saw whizzing by us on the Autobahn, who looked like they knew what they were doing.)

The bus made a perfunctory photo stop at the remains of the wall as we entered the former East Berlin. I took some pictures of my crew mates taking pictures. The wall is 15 feet tall, covered with its last coat of graffiti from the late eighties, and now encloses beer gardens and a hostel instead of an unhappy populace controlled by a humorless dictatorship.
The changes that have happened since the rest of the wall came down have been astonishing. Urban art is pervasive, which can be a curse and a blessing. The overall vibe in the area near to the wall is really popping. Maybe there should be more walls.



A couple days ago I tripped on an uneven sidewalk in Tallinn and fell flat on my face in front of two horrified natives.I scuffed up two knees and an elbow but by Saturday I was stiff from Thursday’s fall, so I knew I wasn’t up for my usual Bataan Death March through new territory.




I knew what I wanted out of Berlin, and that was broadband and plenty of it. And coffee. That can only mean one thing. Starbucks, of which there are plenty in the former Russian sector. So, after parking the bus, off I tromped to the first one we passed coming in. Tagging along was our new bass player, young Erick from Halifax, Nova Scocia.




The first Starbucks I noticed there were language difficulties. No English among the barristas, Even more serious: no broadband. I downed a cup of Joe, and a strong one at that, we packed up our laptop bags and headed off to the famous Brandenburg Gate. where we heard there was plenty broadband at THAT Starbucks. Well, call me Ishmael, they were right.
Actually the referral came from Daniel. He was born on the eastern side of the wall, but seems to have made the adjustment all right to capitalism. You have to have some commitment to go for a marketing MBA. Utopian notions aren’t enough to get you through that one, especially when you’re in Georgia.

We shot a couple photos at the Brandenburg Gate and noticed crowds starting to gather for the annual Gay/Lesbian parade. The Gate is very beautiful, if a bit smaller than it seemed to me from how it was represented to us in the USA.
Once I was ensconced at a blond wood circular table and I’d gone through the log on procedure, that was IT for me, though.
It does cost a bundle to go online in the Berlin Starbucks, but what the hell. You’re only in Berlin at this very moment, and you’re doing what you like to do, namely sucking up the bandwidth with podcasts, music downloads, Skyping home and my brother Jimmy (who didn’t answer), having a look at 180 emails and checking out the weather, the stuff on Austin’s Craigslist, and a hundred other useless but relatively harmless things.



By the time Erick returned from buying souvenir spoons for his grandmother and a cap for his mother, I could have been anywhere. Erick wanted a piece of the broadband action, so I set him up, because, like most sensible young musicians, he doesn’t have a charge card.

I spent my last hour in Berlin wandering around, looking for a bite to eat. Settled on a brotwurst washed down with a Berlin Pilsner, waiting around for a gays and lesbians file by, but except for a couple recumbent bicyclists there was nothing flamboyant passing by. The only indication that there was something about to go on was the police, the blocked streets, and the bar in a tent in the park playing persistent disco music.

But it was time to load up the bus by then, because there was some question as to how long it might take to return to the ship. Traffic heading the other was was really congested going the other way in the morning and there was road construction, so Daniel decided that we should head out early, around 4:30. I’d like to come back when I’m not so stiff and rushed to spend more time looking the place over.

On the way back, Daniel pointed out the Asti Market, which was about to expand to 700 stores in the USA. He said that they had very cheap booze there, so cheap that people from Sweden take ferries to buy party supplies. This was sounding awfully like Trader Joes, which was going to have 700 outlets in the USA by the end of the year and was owned by a private German company.

So after I at a snack in the staff mess I went off to see if it could be true. Results were inconclusive. The store had closed by the time I got there (9:00) but all the stuff was piled up in TJ’s fashion. I’ll make another trip when we’re back in 2 weeks, if the creek don’t rise.