THE BEAUTIFUL PORTOFINO

WEATHER:  Tops 18C – Lows 11C – rainy!!!!

HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Making the Portofino excursion after last night – it was beautiful

BUYS OF THE DAY:  Drinks package – again

WORD OF THE DAY: - always written phonetically – Terima Kasi – thanks in Indonesian

We are alive!!!  Rusty, but alive.  After 4 hours sleep and a quick breakfast, we haven’t pulled up too shady for the optional excursion to Portofino today.  It is an organized chaos – people all pushy and shovy trying to register for their respective tours and get to their allocated groups.  But it gets done and we are on the bus to Santa Margherita, a 45 minute drive from Genoa, to board a boat to take us to the seaside port of Portofino.

Santa Margharita is beautiful, just what you would picture an Italian seaside town to be like.  We got 15 minutes here for a quick look around.  There were some market type stalls, so you could have a quick browse before boarding the boat.  The boat ride to Portofino was only 15 minutes and this town is even prettier than Santa Margerita.  We got free time here for 1.5 hours before heading back again to the mainland and the ship.

We are starting to get the names of all the cute ‘workers’ on the ship and keeping track of all the traditional Italian names that we meet.  So there has been Marcelo (who can forget him), Giuseppe and Stefan from Photograph shop, Petrecia from um not sure what his job is and Raphael from the nightclub is to name a few.  The beauty of the ship workers is it has their name and country they are from.  So I have been trying out my 5 words of Russian that Julia taught me – she would be so proud – on the Ukrainian staff, my 6 words I can remember from my Indonesian classes at high school – Pak Kelly would be so proud – and the 3 Italian words I have learnt in the last 3 days!  I am multi-national, and with ChelC getting to practice her Spanish on Melvin and the ship board announcements, we are just missing French and German from our list!!!!

Lunch was back in the buffet.  We gave it our best shot, but the wine was just not hitting the spot this time, so we got 2 bottles of water instead and back to the cabin to chill out till 5.15 for the emergency exercise drill, when you need to look like a monkey and wear your life vest for 30 minutes.  Oh well another good opportunity for a photo and Stefan also got some of us as well.  Oh he is only human right – and yes I bought the picture that evening!!

The rest of the evening was pretty chillaxing.  After walking through 3 bars and chatting to our new friends, Leo from Indonesia and Sveltana from the Ukraine we popped a bottle of Lambrusco on the chance that that might go down a bit better than the white wine we drank 50 litres of the previous night, but no chance.  We watched the show in the beautiful theatre “Made in Italy” and as far as cruise shows good it was quite good and then off to dinner.  The rest of the evening was spent chatting to our mates at photography shop and having a look at the shops which we hadn’t even been in to yet!!!

We arrive into Marseille – France tomorrow – and a full day tour to Avignon.  We love cruising!!!