Zut Azores!

 Hey look, I'm alive!

 I'm not sure how to start this one, honestly.  It's been about two weeks since the ship departed, about 18 days since I actually left home.  In that time I've gone from Colorado to Germany via Spain and Amsterdam.  Suffice to say, it's been quite the journey; outside of the cruise, it's been predominantly bouncing from one train to another.  Where I currently am is about a 7 hour time difference from Colorado.  We covered most of that difference across 5 or 6 days at sea, early in the cruise, with the last one being about two days before we docked.

 In short, I'm pretty disoriented in a few ways, and a little worn from all the travel.

Still.  This is what I chose and I wouldn't change it.

Anyway.  Last post was pretty much just "I've made it on the ship" so I have a bit to catch y'all up on.  I participated in a handful of activities during the cruise, including an origami class ('talking' dog and samurai hat - and no, I don't remember how to make them), ice skating, and language classes in Polish, Tagalog, and Portuguese.  I'm a bit of a nerd.

I also took pictures of all the different towel animals that the stateroom attendants made: a dog (whose head fell apart when I tried to move it), a birb, meditation bear, elephant, monkey, carnation(?).  Not pictured: dinosaur, because I guess I didn't get a picture of that one somehow.  The area around the ice rink had joke posters and this one in particular just tickled me.

The first port of call on the trip was Ponta Delgada in the Azores.  It's an island chain a ways off Portugal (about 870 miles, to be specific). I'll be honest, my pictures here are mostly just scattered views and sights, with no real rhyme or reason to them, so I'm going to just link the album.  I've put a few captions on things that feel like they'd benefit from them, but for the most part they're just kinda thrown in there.  Imgur uploads have been an issue in the past few days so there's a lack of ordering AND potentially some duplicates still floating around.  Eventually I'll switch to another hosting service that's easier to work with, but this will do for now.

Second was Cartagena.  I did even less sightseeing for this one, having decided that the most important thing here was getting to a laundromat and cleaning a larger batch of clothes.  The shipboard guest laundry service was...just ludicrous really.  $2 per item just for a clean.  So I didn't use that substantially.  I got perhaps half my dirty clothes done in Cartagena, and forgot to take my customary laundromat picture there (which is a shame, it was kinda cute).  Anyway, here are some assorted pictures from that walk as well as four pictures of the harbor where we docked.  And as always, I'm tall and the world doesn't always make that easy.

Somewhere along the way on this trip, between Azores and Cartagena, I picked up a cold.  This endured through about two days ago, and there's still the occasional bad cough popping up.  As a result, I don't even have a good picture of the harbor for Mallorca, the last stop in the cruise.  I spent pretty much all my time in self-imposed quarantine to try to limit the spread - everyone knows cruise ships are germ incubators, but that doesn't mean I should just go around coughing on everything.

Finally we disembarked in Barcelona.  The train from Barcelona to Paris and Paris to Amsterdam had some neat views shared here with no particular rhyme or reason.  I didn't realize we were this close to the shore at one point, and as always, I'm tall, huh? 

The next post will be about Amsterdam, which should begin a pattern of shorter posts as I start having less going on in each place and fewer things worth taking pictures of.  Something I haven't really expressed is that my general approach is to take mostly pictures of things that interest me in particular, whether I can explain why or not, rather than taking pictures of popular or common sights since you can just look those up or see them in documentaries/travel shows/whatever for any given area.  There will be occasional exceptions - Amsterdam pictures will be a spread of famous/recognizable things and general shots of the area, but...yeah.

Anyway.  That post will come later, possibly not until I've settled in Bulgaria in four more days.  By which time I'll also have a little post about Munich to throw together, and perhaps more about the ongoing travels from there.