Two Layers of Shoppers

Times have changed, said the shop keeper. There are now only 2 layers of travellers.  Those who have so much money that they can come into a store and buy anything they want, and those who buy the usual cheap tourist souvenirs.  The class of people who had two or three hundred dollars to spend is gone.  They were the middle class and they don’t exist in Europe anymore.  Some Canadians, Americans and Brits, but rarely do the European cruisers have that kind of money any more.

Wyona and I always look at bags, scarves and jewellery.  When Margaret’s husband said good-bye to her as she left for this holiday, one of his last words to her was, “I hope you don’t pick up any bad habits while you are gone.”  She hasn’t.  She picked up 2 scarves in Santorini and one on the boat – and that hardly counts as shopping.

“Holy Doodle”, she said when she saw the ring Wyona had purchased but and then offered to let me buy from her. Picking up a piece of jewellery is a significant investment of time; I was glad to be on the receiving end of that deal.   I just say yes. Yesterday at the end of a long day in Santorini, we stopped by some merchants who had 35 % or 50 % off of their rings and necklaces – the end of the season sale. 

Easy to tell it was the end of the season.  Many of the villas and hotels are already closed – really closed.  Plywood is nailed over their windows, no deck chairs are out, and their pools are empty. We didn’t take a ship excursion into town.  Wyona had read that if you go into the village at the other end of Fia, take the cable car to the top of the cliffs and then ride a local bus That way you can go to Oia (EE-yah) for €1.6: 4 euros up in the cable car, 4 down and 1.6 each way into town and out – a grand total of 11.2 euros for the day instead of 89 on a boat excursion.  Another significant saving would have been to walk to the top of the cliffs on the same trail that a donkey ride can also transport you to the top, the donkey ride being 4 euros – the same price as the cable car.

I can’t remember the last bus I rode where the bus fare is taken on the ride – except for those trips I take home from Sicamous and haven’t purchased a pre-paid ticket. Then I am all the way to Golden before I have to pay. Here the local ticket taker walks down the crowded isle, bills stuffed in one hand, a set of tickets he tears off in another and clenched between his hands is a set of 5 metals columns out of which he dispenses the correct change, should people give him bills.  “What do I want 30 centimes back from 3.50” said Wyona, “so I just whispered to him, ‘Keep the change.’  That is how my hand got an extra squeeze and a large smile from him.”

She did the same thing with her money to a clerk in a jewellery store in Athens.  A young 19 year old shopkeeper said to her on the street, “Come in.  I give you no hassle.” 

“No hassle?” she confirmed. 

“None ,” he said and he was true to her word.  He let her look around for more than an hour, just left her alone, though she had gathered information along the way that it was his brother’s shop (aged 32) and his uncle was somehow in the family business. 

When the bill was finally totaled up, for her it was tip time – to the younger shop keeper, even though the older brother and uncle had tried to hover around making the sale.  When he saw the size of the tip he ran to get her another “free” gift.  The tip may have been too much for him to comprehend.

Arta

Istanbul

Istanbul --  “To the city”

“These are historic waters we are sailing through,” said Greg as he gazed from the balcony, onto the Aegean Sea.  He was waiting for Wyona to get her shoes on so that they could go to their dancing lessons – today is the rumba.  Wyona had bubble bathed all morning. “Whenever am I going to have a bubble bath in a balcony suite on a boat, again,” she said to us as Greg and I hurried off to the destination lecture entitled Istanbul, not Constantinople.  I met the lecturer while standing in the specialty omelette line-up for breakfast.  “I enjoyed your lecture two days ago.  My brother-in-law and I were saying how we had wished your lecture had been longer when you talked about Corfu.” 

“It is difficult”, he said, “since I am only allowed 35 minutes of presentation time.  I submitted two lectures and the people on board choose the second one, so I have plenty of material.  But the problem on board is just that there are not enough rooms to run all of the programs people want.” 

The people who gathered around the lecturer post-presentation had questions to ask and answers to share.  Most agreed that the best source of information for a traveller is Rick Steven’s Guide to Istanbul, one man there having read 100 pages of it in another Rick Stevens book.  Greg and he went on to chat about good books to read about the history of the Golden Horn.  The lecture had covered the etymology of the name Istanbul, the best reading on it being that in Turkish it sounds a bit like “to the big city”, which would make sense given the rural roots of the people who  finally ended up living in the city.

That was the historic destination lecture.  Later in the morning and better attended was the shopping lecture, highlighting the way to purchase Turkish leather coats (lightweight for their cold winters of 70 degrees Fahrenheit), rugs, coffee (better at waking people up than Red Bull), apple tea, Turkish delight candy (created for a Sultan with a sweet tooth but no way to eat hard candy) and tourist paraphernalia, all decorated with the sign of the evil eye.  I am going to a market with 4009 shops and 16 entrances and exits, hoping I can buy at least one pashmina, a wool scarf that is so fine it will pass through the circle of a wedding ring.

I took my early morning walk.  The sun rose from behind the distant horizon and lifted its face over the right over the water in the time it took me to only walk one length of the boat. I will be that sun rose in less than to minutes.

We had been promised a stormy sea with high winds today.  I wanted to beat the turbulence and the water on the deck by getting up early.  The wind had already beat me to the deck. I had to lean forward to stand upright.  A few chairs slipped across the deck in front of me.  Some of the backs on the deck chairs banged forward. I casually wondered if I shouldn’t have brought a whistle with me, in case I was blown overboard.  Soon I was thinking of wearing a life jacket in case no one noticed I was gone for a few days. 

Wyona and I came back from the Turkish Grand Market without buying anything ... a sad comment on the shopping energy Wyona and I had. Oh, that is not to say that we didn’t find a beautiful red silk scarf, wider than the usual scarves, but when we went back to get it, we couldn’t find that shop again.  That is what is wrong with shopping in a place where there are 4009 shops.  Not that there are that many kinds of shops – there was leather (coats, purses, shoes), gold, diamonds, silver, ceramics and the usual tourist paraphernalia (the evil eye on key chains, ash trays).

We sat down to eat.  What are the chances that someone you had eaten breakfast with would be at the table with  you – but there they were, Frank and Joan on the side of me, and on the side of Greg, a couple that he calls his chicks.  They were fabulous – older women on their first crew and full of lots of interesting chatter. The dinner companions are always interesting because they have had as many adventures in the market as we have had.

Arta

London – Carmen in Trafalgar Square

“I am so excited, I can hardly stand it,” said the woman who sat next to be on the double deck bus that was bringing Wyona and me back to Trafalgar square this afternoon. “My friend has an extra ticket to Carmen at Covent Garden and those tickets are over £100 each. I was going to watch it free in Trafalgar Square tonight and now I get to go to the real thing."

What!

Just then Wyona whacked me on the shoulder, which means we are headed off of the bus. We crossed the street, I said to her, ``Let`s just see if the Square is set up for an opera tonight.``

I was close to trembling I was so happy when I saw the big screen and people beginning to gather on the benches and steps.

"I am not going to stay. I have too much to do at home,`" said Wyona, packing an umbrella, 2 extra scarves, her black jacket, 2 bottles of water, a zip-lock back full of treacle toffees and 2 bananas into her purple treat bag for me. Then she offered to go home and bring me back a blanket and a stool.

"I am going to be fine," I said.

"If Tonia were here, she would be staying," said Wyona as she left.

Gareth Malone was doing some crowd warm-up. "There are 7,000 people here and we are going to be the nation`s largest instant choir, dong a Summer Big Screen Carmen Sing-Along." he said, doing body warm-ups, vocal warm-ups and teaching the crowd the lyrics and even working on their diction and stage presence. 

Toreador, make ready. Toreador. Toreador.
And think on her, on her, who all can see
On a dark-eyed lady,
And that love waits for thee, Toreador,
Love waits, love waits for thee.

I was laughing so hard, for he had thousands of people whipping imaginary capes over their heads to the first line, and having their hands make the curves that illustrate a beautiful lady with the third line.

The screen was at the base of Nelson`s statue. I looked at the curve of architecture of Canada house, the same curve in the Canadian Pacific Building. I watched the foreign flags floating in the breeze, flags from all of the embassies at the Square: U.S.A., Canada, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, and the Netherlands.

TV cameras were zooming in and out over the square, focusing on the mermaids and dolphins who are usually in the middle of spraying water. Those cameras were not to be outdone by pigeons making equally swooping motions, just clearing the heads of the spectators in front of me as the birds rose from the floor of the square to lift themselves to the top of the National Gallery.

I was in the second row of seats. A group of five in front of me had brought their evening meal and were sharing chicken legs, and mini-jam tarts, as well as shortbread and lemon zingers, passing along napkins and Tupperware containers.

The usual noises were around the square: the clock from St. Martin`s-in-the-Fields ringing on the hour and on the half hour, the sound of the sirens of ambulances and the two-toned daa-hee of police cars, at one point even the sound of a 3 gun salute going off somewhere near the Thames. All of those sounded mixed in with the big sound of the opera being broadcast through the square.

As the night began to fall, the pinks and the reds of the sunset were reflected in the clouds to the south. Soon the pale blues and greys of the sky began to deepen into deep night. As the darkness fell, the street lights from the Strand became brighter, their glow casting a long reflections on the still water of the pools at the bases of the statues in the square. The face of the clock in the tower was bright now, the black Roman numerals marking how the time was passing by. 

At the beginning of the second act, when the scene opens with the smugglers surrounding the ship in the water, I could feel the night moisture of the Thames reaching Trafalgar Square. The wind was blowing my hair and I looked around me at the neck scarves rippling in the breeze. People, who had turned their collars up as protection against the wind, now donned their fedoras or baseball caps to keep the chill of the wind from their necks and heads.

"I am not clapping anymore. The performers can`t hear it," intoned the woman who had brought the big lunch. The rest of the crowd did not hold her opinion. They clapped and cheered as loudly as those who were sitting in the Covent Garden Opera House, a few blocks away, where the curtain went down.

Fourteen squares and piazzas across England, Scotland and Wales had participated in this initiative for free ballet and opera, live from the Royal Opera House to the big screens around the UK.

I had a choice when the party was over – take the bus to New Cavendish or walked back up around Piccadilly Circus, enjoy the laughter of the late night revellers along Regent Street and then slip home. The walk was a good time to think on today’s thrill – my second time hearing Carmen this year.

Love,

Arta