Saaga

I took this through a window on Deck six of our ship. I couldn’t be bothered editing off my commentary, but after listening to it, I think I have a future in documentary film making.

Having read all of the Hornblower series and a goodly number of the Aubrey Maturin cycle, I expected to be able to weather the disquiet sea with minimal fuss. However, the force 12 wind with 18 foot waves decided otherwise. Luckily the crew gives out Dramamin like candy, which allowed me to function relatively normally when I wasn’t lurching like a drunk through the companionways.

We are heading out of Naples for Genoa after spending the day at Pompei. Had a nice enough time wandering through the ruins of the ancient Roman city, but it would have been better if our tour guide had (a) been alive and (b) been human, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Seeing Pompei after making a brief study of it in high school was weird. I always imagined it to be a villagey small thing, but it was bloody huge.

Yesterday we went to Tunis and took a tour of various Carthaginian sites. It was interesting to see that the harbour created two and a half thousand years ago for the Carthaginian navy is still there. We didn’t se any triremes though.

I am looking forward to being back in Germany. For some reason, every time I hear people speaking Spanish, I have the only barely resistible urge to yell out, “Yo Quiero Taco Bell”

Currently we are in Ismir and are getting ready to leave port. Well I say we, but really I have very little to do with the leaving port effort. I’m sure I could get involved if I really wanted to, but it would probably be in a surplus to requirements kind of way that would land me in the brig. I haven’t seen the brig yet though, that might be fun.

I did however see the medical centre after contracting some kind of stomach infection. I got a needle by the most frightening nurse I have ever seen. I suppose the Doctor chose her to take the focus off his lacklustre performance. I think it must have been a case of someone shouting, “Is there a doctor in the house?” and him putting his hand up, saying, “meh” and shrugging his shoulders.

We had a nice time in Venice, which is where we started the cruise. We had a few days there and got really used to bridge climbing and dead end finding. My friend Martin came down from Bologna to meet us for dinner on our first night in town as well. It’s nice to be in another city and catch up with people you haven’t seen in a while.

Bari was our next port of call.. Bari was a little disappointing. This actually counts as a paragraph

Corfu was next and while it was nothing really amazing, it followed Bari, which made us think wow! We wandered around the bustling stinky (garbage strike) streets, while unbeknownst to me, aliens were busy kidnapping my wife and replacing her with an exact duplicate. Well almost exact; it let me buy a football jersey.

Athens cam next but I have no idea what it was like because I was busy for the whole day in the bathroom of our cabin. It’s funny how boring a small metal box can become after 36 hours; even when most of your concentration is on your stomach.

Ismir was our stop today and even though we were only there for a few hours, it was nice. I ate a kebab, which means soon I find out if I am genuinely better, or only feeling better. We walked through the crowded shopping district of the old town that in places reminded me of a smaller version of the Souks in Marrakech. My reaction, according to Alex was the same as well, which was to freak out every time a shopkeeper grabbed me. I acclimatised quickly though and eventually we were going into shops willy nilly.

The highlight of Ismir was the fact that there was to be a demonstration by the Kurdish population. There were more police than I have ever seen in one place, which made me feel nervous rather that safe. Speaking to a few locals we discovered that they were ‘protecting’ Turkey. Apparently the protests were all over the country today and they were bigger in the East where there are more Kurds. It looked big and important to us though as dozens of riot suited police ran past us to join up with at least another 100 police on the other side of the road.

I took some photos and really wanted to get closer to the action, but M in the back pack on my back changed my mind. It was exciting and frightening at the same time. Especially when the next group of 50 or 60 police ran pat with tear gas launchers as well as machine guns.

We saw the leading edge of the protesters (which may have been the whole lot), which to me looked like only a few thousand. Either the police were overreacting or Turkey feels really threatened by its Kurds.

What a long post. I am putting some pics up on flickr as well. If the internet onboard is working.

As Irena just announced in the comments of the previous
post rant, its my birthday. So apart from having the day off, (actually our Easter break started today) I got bacon and eggs for breakfast and am shortly off to by miniatures from the local geek store. The perfect day. If only Gary was still with us.

*Remember to win them with your song

I remember mentioning that a police state was on the horizon once before. I might change my name to Nostradamus.

What the fuck? How are people not out on the streets protesting this? Oh yeah, right. They would get arrested and bashed by the police.

In related news, it was nice of the NSW police to lend their motto to the transformers movie…

For the last two weeks I have been booking the Media Center (computer lab) a couple of times a week so that my class could go down and practise for World Maths Day, which is an online mathematics competition held in more than 20000 schools worldwide. The kids were excited and had a lot of fun, especially when they played against someone from their own class; it got competitive when they played against someone from one of the other Fourth grade classes.

Wednesday was the day itself (although for us it started on Tuesday at Midday) and so many teachers, including me, booked time in the Media Center. I was lucky enough to get two periods locked in and we were raring to go. So raring in fact, that I dispensed with the normal curriculum for the day, so even when we were in the classroom I would run shifts on our eight computers, while the rest did math stations and played other math games.

Unfortunately I was duped. The WMD servers were jammed full when it started and most of my kids didn’t get any games in on the Tuesday, but I was undeterred, I expected that they would fix their traffic issues and we would be better off the next day. As it happened, they did fix their problems, but a little late for us. This meant that from about 2pm onwards, my class were able to play the game, which was really more frustrating than anything else, because they got a glimpse of how good it could have been, but didn’t get to sink their teeth into it and some of them barely managed to earn their participation certificates.

What did we learn? My class learned that patience often leads to disappointment. I learned not to bother with worldwide online education events, because all they do is waste lessons and provoking whinging in my students.

Here is a glimpse of the new Australian Jersey.

To quote the Green and Gold army:
“These stunning new Nike Jerseys will be worn in all the Socceroos matches for the next two years.”

I mention this mainly because of the use of the word ’stunning’. I looked it up on wiktionary which said,

“Verb
stunning
1. Present participle of to stun.

Adjective
stunning
1. Something that stuns

The stunning jolt from the Tazer gun made the criminal stop fleeing.
2. beautiful, pretty
That woman is stunning!”
Assuming they don’t mean the verb and it is a shirt not a weapon, that leaves beautiful or pretty. I don’t see it.

Firstly it is boring. A solid block of yellow with some green piping. Look out Avenue Montaigne, the designers of our National team jersey are a force to be reckoned with and will have your jobs quicker than you can say Sacre Bleu!

Secondly it is canary yellow. Possibly we were copying Brazil or South Africa when we changed to Green and Gold, but I blame sir Ninian Stephen for making it official in the 80s. Another Governor General to be ashamed of.

I also object to the massive gouge that goes along with it. This is basically a giant Nike ad and they want you to pay $130 for it, which is about $50 more than it is realistically worth. I wonder if anyone explained (to the FFA) how newspapers are so inexpensive despite having a lot of contributors.