Day 5: Where we're going we won't need Rhodes

Today we had to wake up early once again, but because we docked later and were on no organized tour, we did not have to wake up as early as usual. That was good. We woke up very early for Turkey. Anyway, we got ready and went upstairs to eat breakfast and to wish our little cousin a happy third birthday. We disembarked the boat and had to walk into town a bit before we started Chabba’s walking tour of Rhodes.

We were out in Rhodes around 8/9 ish and there were a lot of shops, but most of them were not open yet. I guess it was too early. There were still enough to cause us to stop a lot during that first portion of the Chabba tour. There was also just a lot of general stress because we are a stressed out family overall.

One of the first things we did on our tour, after seeing a Greek Orthodox church and some random ruins, was look for a bathroom. Fortunately, the bathroom had toilets. I have a strong fear and displeasure of the hole in the ground bathrooms, so this made me very happy. As we were returning to the group, we found an older lady screaming at her neighbors and everyone in the little plaza. I also found my sister filming this and laughing. We’re a nice family. After all of this stuff got finished, we started the actual tour.

First thing that I think Chabba took us to see was the Old Theater. He then took us to see the outside of a Turkish bath and a mosque. Around the Turkish bath/mosque time, we had to split up the group a little because Oppa took Nonny and Nonno to the center of the town. Anyway, we saw the mosque and I guess Chabba had only told Gianni about the big and very nice Muslin library that was nearby, because Gianni then dragged us individually to said library to tell us about it.

We then saw the fort. We climbed up the path towards the fort a little, but to see the top, you had to pay, so we only looked at the outside. There was a decent view of bits of the town from where we were standing, so that was pretty cool. We climbed back down and I found a souvenir store to buy silly postcards of the famed Colossus of Rhodes to send to Chris and Kristina. There was an ongoing debate regarding this particular Ancient Wonder. It was reportedly supposed to be in the front of town, where the ships would travel under its two legs. Oppa said that this was only a myth and that the actual Colossus was situated on top of a hill. I don’t know. I really hope the pictures of the Colossus that everyone in Rhodes believes in are true because it looks like he’s squatting. It’s a very silly-looking sketch of the statue overall. Anyway, Chabba took us to the outside of the castle of Rhodes next, where I wrote my postcards and got them ready to be sent out.

After sitting around the castle for a long time, which, like our “contemplation” moments that we had on the backpacking trip, took a long time, we went back towards the center of the medieval town to finish up the Chabba tour. Once finished, we sat around so Gianni could write the postcards that he didn’t know he was supposed to send out. We saw this little girl playing the accordion for money on the street, which made Umma really sad. Andrew gave her some money and then said that she was very bad.

We unsuccessfully tried to get some money out of the bank, and then started back in the direction of the ship. Of course, this took longer than it should have because we stopped at every other shop along the way. It wasn’t that bad of a thing. On the way back, I found the fake Armani sunglasses that my silly boyfriend has spent the last two years looking for. We found a similar-looking one in Mykonos, but I ended up giving that to James because we decided he looks good in glasses like that. Anyway, I was just happy to finally find them.

We eventually did make our way back to the ship around 12/1 and went up to the Windjammer to eat food because we were clearly starving. The lunch was pretty good. They had this really good tuna pasta out today that I promptly ate too much of. After we ate, I took everyone to the 10th deck to show them the two deer statues that stand where the Colossus arguably once stood. You couldn’t actually see them too well from the ship, but I have epic stalker zoom on my camera, so that helped us a lot. Even then, however, we could only see one of them. There were a lot of boats on the other side of the pier that they were located on, so I think that they were blocking the pillars.

Anyway, I really liked Rhodes. The part of it that we saw was very cute and Medieval-ish. The city was kind of charming and very cute. I also think that it’s crazy that an earthquake hit the town just hours after we left. Talk about timing. I hope that not many people got hurt. I can’t tell though, because we get kind of cut off from the outside world on there cruises.

What else? After I tortured everyone and made them look at the pillars, half of the group went downstairs to go take naps. I went with Gianni and James to the library to grab the daily trivia and sudoku. We also ended up playing a round of Scrabble with Andrew, which lasted until we realized that there were a lot of letter pieces missing from the game. At around four-thirty, I ran downstairs to go change to go to the gym for a little bit, where I ended up jogging a little more than a mile. After the gym, I met Oppa and Chabba upstairs to walk a mile for Vitality points.

I wanted to go to the Where in the World Am I game, but we ended up being 15 minutes late, so we just left to get ready for the show. Because I am weird like that, it took me like five minutes to get ready, so those of us who got ready quickly ended up going back to the library/card room to play Spanish scrabble. It really did not take us too long to get tired of the game, since all of us had very, very limited Spanish knowledge, but we actually lasted longer than we thought we would and came up with some semi-creative words. We stopped the moment the best answers we could come up with were “si” and “el.”

At 7:30, we went downstairs to watch the entertainment of the night. On the daily schedule, it said that the person was an entertainer, which I assumed meant comedian. I dragged my siblings and Andrew along with me for exactly that reason. He turned out to be a pianist, who started with a big Smurf tribute and played a number of other songs. He also cracked a pretty amusing Beethoven joke and played a lot of classical music. I liked him overall though, he was pretty intense.

We left immediately after the show to do the 8:15 pub trivia. It was a lot more crowded than the usual afternoon trivia and there was even a Japan-related question for Andrew to answer. It came down in the end to a tie-breaker between our team and one other team. I got sent out to answer the tie breaker questions. This made me extremely nervous because my general trivia skills are somewhat-lacking. My fears were quickly soothed, however, because both tie breaker questions were about the one topic that I do have an extensive knowledge of: celebrity gossip. The first one was a gimme: J-Lo’s husband. The second was a little more difficult: the name of Madonna’s second child. However, my countless hours spent on ONTD made this one a gimme for me as well, and we ended up beating the other team. We were 15 minutes late to dinner and got a lot of glares from the team we beat during the course of dinner, but it was well worth it for the highlighter and keychains that we all won.

Dinner was very good. I had these cheese tortellinis that were kind of strong, but very good. We celebrated Nicole’s birthday and all got chocolate cake. They also had dulce de leche cheesecake, which Umma and I could not pass up so we split one. It was kind of amazing. It would have made James Franco proud.

We went up to the Viking Crown lounge at around 10:30 to catch the last half of the Rat Pack Music hour. They weren’t really playing Rat Pack music, and when we went to inquire about why, I don’t think they necessarily understood what we were asking and thought we were complaining about the music. They promptly ensured us that they had to play this sort of music for that hour and that it would all be over soon. At this point we told them that we were there specifically for the Rat Pack music and they sent the DJ down to tell us that we could request music if we wanted. We hung around there for a little while longer and got a couple of drinks. I got this drink called the Pyrat Rum Runner, which was kind of rum-strong, but actually pretty good. The drink I chose for Andrew was very good though. Not that strong.

We went from there to the poolside party and buffet, which was very silly. We were there in time for them to all learn the Cha-Cha slide, which made my sister very upset. Anyway, we ran away downstairs very quickly. We soon went downstairs to get ready for bed and our early morning tour the next day. Because James was feeling sick, Umma had James and I switch beds for the night, so I had to sleep in the room without the window for the night. So sad.