Splendour Day 4: Kusadasi, Turkey

I want to start by saying, that if you are reading this in anticipation of a future cruise with a stop at Kusadasi, and you have not been there before, I highly (very highly) recommend that you spend the day visiting Ephesus.  I think your best bet as far as cost and convenience are concerned is to prebook a private excursion online.  Ship excursions will be costly and crowded and a taxi once in port will also be more costly than something you can arrange ahead of time.  Ephesus is really fascinating.  Much more so than the better known Roman Forum or Pompeii in our opinion, and is really not to be missed if you are on a first visit and can possibly get out to the site.

  That said, we have been out to Ephesus before (we were very lucky to visit with a dear friend whose family is Turkish.  She arranged a wonderful tour for us through her cousin’s tour company) and Dave's back was acting up so too much walking was not a good idea (he has had back issues for most of his adult life--you never know when he might bend wrong and be in pain for several day--in which case it is GOOD for him to walk as much as he can, but he needs to move slowly and rest often in a chair with some support). 

  We’ve also stopped in Kusadasi 5 or 6 times for port days, and are getting a good feel for the town.  We always enjoy it.  The ships dock right in town, a very short and easy walk puts you into the clean and cute little streets filled with stores.  If you are interested in buying knock offs of most any brand of watch, clothing, sunglasses, purses, etc it is all available.  Personally, when I want to shop I like some of the ceramics and glassware.

There are also many pleasant and reasonably priced cafes, nearly all of which offer free wi-fi for customers.  We headed off the ship earlyish with the plan of finding a café, having a coffee and a Coke and checking for an email from the kids, then going back to the ship for 11:00 trivia followed by lunch before walking around town some in the afternoon.

We chose the Café Nav, very near the port (turn left out of the shopping area, go left through the restaurants with fish out front as soon as you pass the taxi pick up, and then when you come out by the fountain of fishermen pulling their catch in, you will find it on the far side of the little walking area.  The coffee was excellent, the Coke ice cold (and served with ice), the wi fi reasonably quick and the bill came to a whopping four Euro, which we were able to pay in Euro and even receive change in Euro. 

Dave drinking his Turkish coffee with the old castle wall in the background.

Back on board, no one else showed up for trivia (no surprise, morning trivia really ought to be scheduled around 9:30, before everyone has left for the day.  There were many scheduling issues on this ship.  We felt the cruise director really fell down on that part of his job).  We had fun anyway.  Oralndo from the cruise staff was always fun to chat with and kindly asked us the questions so that David and I could compete with one another.  I won!  I even got a pretty awesome tote bag for winning:

We had lunch up at the buffet (it was the only option). They had a nice little area with somethign we had never seen before.  There were several more ethnic dishes that were labeled has having been made by local the sous chefs onboard who were from those regions.  There were even little maps posted, and explanations of what the food was, etc. This was in the buffet almost every sea day and we thought it was an EXCELLENT idea, and there was some VERY good food to be had there.

 Lunch was very good, and since the ship was nearly empty quiet and relaxing in there.  We were able to get a table facing right out the window. 

  After lunch, I snapped this photo from the pool deck.  It shows how close to us one of the other four ships in port, The Ruby Princess, was:

And here is another photo we took on the way back to the ship after our morning jaunt, where you can also tell that is is only a narrow strip of dock that separated the two ships:

Heading back out, it was considerably cooler on the pier than it had been that morning.  By the time we got to the customs building, black clouds were swirling in and Dave suggested we go back so as not to get caught in a heavy rain.  Thank goodness he did.  Less than 5 minutes after we reboarded the gangways were closed for safety reasons.  Shortly thereafter, that Princess Ship shown above broke her ropes and drifted out to sea, with a broken gangway hanging off the side.  I do not have any photos, I dind’t have my camera up on deck with me.  It was interesting and dramatic to watch though.  Tugs came out, and it took about 30 minutes before they brought her back in, facing the other way.  I can only imagine what Princess passengers on land thought when they saw their ship leaving the dock!

For the next 90 ,minutes or so, it rained very hard and the entire pier remained closed.  We were some of very few people onboard and enjoyed a nice relaxing time having the solarium (covered pool area) virtually to ourselves. 

(I eventually went down and got the camera.  See how dark it was in there with the storm?)

The little island fortress in the rain

Once the storm passed and the gangways reopened, we still had several hours left of our port day, so we headed out to explore.  We felt badly for the hundreds of passengers, many soaking wet, lined up waiting to go through security and reboard the four waiting ships.  There was such a crowd, that port security actually routed those of us disembarking through the normally closed to pedestrians bus parking area instead of through the shopping mall that you are normally routed through.

We didn’t have anything we wanted to buy, so we just wandered around people watching and soaking in atmosphere for an hour or so. 

Ocean front statue

Some of the many colorful shops in the old town area (note, go left into that area for shopping that has everything and a nice feel, to the right is the "bazaar" which is really a shopping mall type area--same stuff, higher prices and not nearly as pleasant.  All of these photos are taken in the area to the left after you exit the ship and enter the city area)

Then, we returned to Café Nav for soda, wine and some munchies (fries—they were fresh cut and looked so good when others ordered them that we HAD to get some).  Mmmmm.

Back onboard, we playes more trivia, and had another very nice dinner with our tablemates.

There were more silly scheduling issues this night.  A "new" (new to RCI, but we played in on their sister line Celebrity years ago) game show, Dancing With the Stripes, was scheduled right during second seating dinner (Which we had).  This was the case throughout the cruise--game shows scheduled during late dining (never early).  On most ships these are primarily held in the after dinner time slot with dance parties going on during dinners and again later, after the game shows.  

So, we missed the game show.  In the after dinner time slot, there WAS the Love and Marriage Game show.  This is a "Newlywed Game" style show that is held on every cruise (and some version seems to be on every line as well) and is pretty much always fun.  The show started at 10:30.  Starting at the EXACT same time was an Oktborfest, that was marketed towards the large number of German cruisers.  The German cruise compass did not even mention Love and Marriage on the schedule--shuttling everyone to the Oktoberfest, or, as they wrote it "October Fest" (hint one that they had no idea what they were doing).

Since "October Fest" was scheduled to last until midnight, we decided to go to the game show first, and then the party.  Love and Marriage was cute, but not nearly so funny as normal.  There was a very small audience (perhaps because over a quarter of the passengers did not have it on their schedules?) an the cruise director was not very good at drawing out amusing stories from the contestants.  It was fine, but not nearly as funny as the norm.

Then we headed up to the Top Hat Lounge to Oktoberfest.  To jog your memory, here is what it looked like at the real thing in Munich a week prior:

and here is the Splendour of the Seas version:

Um, YES, that is indeed a person sitting in the middle of the dance floor reading aloud!  OooooKay.  Yeah.  NOT Oktoberfest, or even October Fest.  Sorry.  

It was a German waiter, and a little German comedic story involving a room steward inadvertently vacuuming up someone's ashes.  It got some polite laughs, but there were many glance among those left in the room wondering what on earth they thought they were doing with this party.  

After storytime ended, they started passing out karaoke books and said it was time for "German Karaoke"  The books being passed around were for only foreign language songs, and all the German songs were super old fashioned--and nothing we knew at all.  

The poor staff were struggling mightily to keep ANY interest going at all.  They were so totally out of their element, it was sad.  Ur tablemates (the mother and son) were there and he was looking through a book.  He agreed to sing with Dave and I (and we cannot carry a tune in a bucket!) if we could find anything we knew. A couple dressed for the party (we would have been too had we known not to leave our Lederhosen and Dirndl in the car at the port) also agreed to go up as a group, but could not find any songs they knew either. 

The activities director came over and practically egged us to go up and do ANYthing--and I suggested that if we could have the regular book we could sing somethign that might not be German but is often played at German fests, like Sweet Home Alabama.  Michele latched onto that and went literally running and was back with the disc with Sweet Home Alabama within a couple of minutes.  And, so, the five of us made a valiant effort.  Most of the room DID sing along with us--but no one else tried to sing anything afterward.    

All in all, we actually had a fun evening, though it was certainly not the norm.  We made it fun anyway!  The general consensus among the Germans we spoke with the next coupe of days was that it really would have been better not to have an "October Fest" than to fail so badly at trying.  No one was really sure what should ave been done, but it was agreed that at a minimum, snacks, a special on beer, and good, modern dance music should have been involved.  Ah well, the staff tried.  

Based on conversations with cruise staff, it seems they were under the impression that the reason so many Germans were on board was to celebrate Oktoberfest and thus they felt obligated to have a celebration onboard.  This is simply not why everyone was travelling.  If you want to travel to celebrate Oktoberfest, you would travel TO the fest (or one of the many around Germany if not to Munich itself).  Germans were travelling because October 3rd is a national holiday (German Unity Day) and that fell on a Thursday, which meant most people had a three day weekend and only needed to take three vacation days to travel that week.  Oh well, WE got a kick out of their attempts and we had fun rounding up our little Sweet Home Alabama group.

--Hadley