Who needs Italy, when there's the French Riviera?

Well, Villefranche was CONSIDERABLY better! First of all, it’s absolutely gorgeous, with stucco houses and old stone arched roads clustered on a steep hillside overlooking the blue, blue water. Secondly, it was a tender port, and we were late enough that our tender over contained very few passengers.

After docking at Villefranche, we walked up a short hill to the citadel, which has 3 tiny museums and a garden, besides containing the town hall and police station. The garden was covered in climbing roses, which were lovely against the old stone walls. One of the museums was a collection of porcelain medieval figures, including knights fighting and practicing, a medieval wedding, a medieval betrothal, a celebration, and scenes from the life of St. Louis. It was really cool.

At the citadel, we bumped into Peter, Jitka and Simi, and we walked down together, through the tiny but charming pedestrian way, lined with quaint shops (although quite a lot of them were obviously tourist oriented and sold clothes as well). By this time, I was quite thirsty, so we parted ways and made our way back down to the waterfront to find a café. En route we passed by, and then traversed along, the Rua Obscura, a road that is entirely buried under the houses, with arched ceilings. It was apparently a place where people would take shelter from bombs as well. Very interesting.

Most of the cafes along the waterfront sat directly on the road, or along the jetty, where there were no walls to prevent Torsten from falling in, so we decided upon a café at the edge of the pedestrian zone, near a fountain. Torsten had a wonderful time splashing his hands around in the fountain, and was with difficulty brought back to the table – only the lure of ice cream kept him from running back to the fountain. We sat there for quite some time, partially because Torsten could play in the fountain, and partially because they had very slow service.

At around 1, we decided to go back to the ship, since it was to leave at 3. Unfortunately, we got to the tender dock just in time to see all the shore excursion people pour in. To avoid being stampeded, we decided to wait in the terminal until the crush died down – we waited for almost 2 hours! It was insane. At first, the people mobbed the jetty, but luckily, the cruise line had sent people out to pass out drinks and keep some semblance of order, so we didn’t have a reoccurrence of the shuttle bus fiasco. The tenders also came fairly frequently; it was just that there was such a mass of people to move. Luckily, Torsten fell asleep during all of this, so he had the opportunity to have a reasonably long nap – that is, until the incredibly loud people on the tender woke him up with their raucous laughter. Later, they had the nerve to say how cute he was. It was tempting to say, “Your inconsiderateness makes your compliments unwelcome”.

When we got back to the ship, I lay down (still feeling a bit delicate), and Ingo went onto the balcony to take some photos. Then he turned around and said to me, “Someone just threw an orange off the ship.” How random!

Anyway, both Ingo and I agreed that this trip has pushed Italy down considerably on the scale of places to go back and visit. Compared to all the other ports, it just seems less appealing - not only because of the individual places we saw, but because of the atmosphere.

Tomorrow is disembarkation day – we dock at Barcelona at 5:30 am. We’ve chosen the self-disembarkation route, which means we carry off all our luggage ourselves, and aren’t tied down to a specific time (although we have to be off the boat by 9:30 am or so). That also means we should have the chance to have breakfast before leaving. I won’t get the chance to update this blog till Switzerland, and then only if I have Internet access, so stay tuned!