Here I am again!
Door: Linda
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Linda
15 Augustus 2015 | Nederland, Amsterdam
Tuesday August 11th 2015
So, last Saturday we said goodbye to one group and hello to another group again. This time we have a group within a group, which I don’t particularly like to be honest. The groupleader was here with her mom when we had Nancy as cruise director, so she could see what happened when. Now she’s here with her group and another group leader, someone who was on the Creativity with me last year!
The annoying thing of having a group within a group is that they don’t mingle with the rest of the people who are taking this cruise. They need to have their own guide, their own receivers and now the groupleaders have a table in our lobby that they hardly even sit behind! I don’t like it, when you’re on vacation, you would like to meet new people is what I always think!
Anyway, so far so good! We have a gentleman on board who, during a private tour through Zurich, took a wrong step and thought he had broken his foot. When we were in Strasbourg, he wanted to go to the hospital and have an X-ray, to make sure. And yes, it did turn out to be broken! Yesterday we got him a boot in Mannheim to give it some support, because he didn’t want them to put a cast on it. I can totally understand, in this weather you don’t want to have a cast on your foot!
So we managed to leave Basel and sail to Strasbourg. Normally we would be in Speyer on Monday, but the water is too low to dock there, so instead we went to Mannheim. We would go there anyway, to pick up the guests who would go to Heidelberg from Speyer. This way the drive to Heidelberg would take only about 30 minutes, from Speyer it is over an hour.
Our Cruise Director did offer a tour to the Technical Museum in Speyer, the groupleader had mentioned that museum to her guests and some were disappointed that we weren’t there…so she got them a bus to go there and in the end only 3 people went! I don’t even think they were from that group at all!
Other people went to the city of Mannheim. The city centre was a bit of a walk from where we were docked. I went there myself in the afternoon, because I had never been to Mannheim before. To be honest I don’t have to go there again at all!! Man, I hated that city!! It had no character, no atmosphere at all!! Lots of foreigners, meaning Turkish and Moroccan people, the streets were dirty, there was nothing historical of interest and lots of strange bums and pathetic people in wheelchairs going through the trash….It really was unbelievable!! If they ever change the itinerary I sincerely hope they skip this place!!
But this morning we were in Mainz, home of the origins of the printing press! I had just finished a book called “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” (by Alix Christie), the inventor of the printing press. Printing itself had already been invented in China, where they would use wooden letters and so on.
In Europe they would use wooden plates, they would carve mostly pictures in a chunk of hard wood. Which worked, until they made a mistake somewhere in the middle, then they would have to throw away the whole woodpanel and start over.
Gutenberg “invented” the metal letters and a way to keep them such that they wouldn’t break under the pressure of the printing press. He printed 180 copies of the bible, separated in the Old and New testament, which is about 1282 pages total…which is quite an achievement, if you see what they worked with and in what kind of circumstances!!!
Of course there was the type of metal to think of, the paper, the right mixture for the ink, getting the pages to dry….and of course making sure no one knew about it before it was all set and done! Because eventhough it was the bible they printed and the text was all the same, the Church didn’t really like this printing business if it wasn’t used for their own purpose!
In the Gutenberg museum they have a copy of the bible that was done by a monk, a scribe, which took them 3 years to complete! It was beautiful! You could see the lines they made to make sure the lines were all straight, they had lines on both side of the page to keep a margin on the sides. The bible was in Latin, which has pretty long sentences, so to make sure you knew where they new one began, they would make the first letter large and colourful. So the scribe copied the text, but also painted the first letter of each sentence. And you could see that with these long words, it was hard to keep the margins on the right side of the pages.
Then next to this they had a copy of Gutenberg’s bible, both Old and New testament and you could immediately see the difference! The text was nice and straight. They also call it B42 or 42-lines bible, because each section had exactly 42 lines and they were straight as an arrow! Gutenberg only printed the black text, colour ink was just too expensive to make. So when people bought a copy, they would get a painter to make it more their own style. They had 2 versions of a New testament from 2 different families and also here you could see the difference. One was really elaborate and the other colourful, but sober. But both very beautiful!!
Not much is known of Gutenberg’s life really, other then the printing. Not even what he looked like, because the first portrait that was made of hi, was done about 100 years after his death. When printing the bible, he had a partner named Fust, who supplied him the necessary funds to buy paper and ink and so on and Peter Schoeffer was his apprentice. When the bibles were printed, for a reason no one really knows, they ended their partnership and Schoeffer started his own printing business. And they made some beautiful things!!
Now that printing became more known it didn’t mean that more people started reading. At first only the elite, people that could already read and had the money to buy the books, bought them. And like I said before the Church wasn’t happy with it, I’m not sure when exactly, but there was a period that no books were allowed to be sold, unless checked by the Church.
But gradually people got smarter and demanded to know more. Which of course also led to just having about anything printed!!!
I for one am glad that Gutenberg managed to come up with this invention, because I love to read. But seeing the handwritten bible and his bible next to eachother I could see why people would think it was the Devils work at first, the scribe’s bible was really flowing and the printed one had straight lines…It must have been very strange, until people could see the value of it.
I’m glad I got to see it.
Last Monday I was talking to one of our guest about my plan to visit Australia at the end of the season and she said that if I was going to Adelaide and wanted to be shown around by a local….So I said I would love to! So she said she would give me her card…Usually when people say that, the end of the cruise comes around and you haven’t gotten anything yet, but this time the lady went to her room and came straight back with the card!! She works at the Adelaide Zoo and she loves panda’s!
I have given her my card as well, thought it might be a good thing to remind her of who I am!!
Saturday August 15th 2015
Today we said goodbye to the group again and this morning I got a linen bag with a panda on it from the lady who invited me to come to Adelaide!! That was so nice of her, I will definitely bring it when I go there!
This afternoon our Chef Michael got a visitor from Australia here on the ship and he told her about my plan to go there. She gave me her card right then and there!! So I gave her my card as well! Later Michael told me that this was the person to talk to if I wanted to stay in Australia. He said she also got his sister a job in Sydney, so she could make some calls and pull some strings, which is always good to know!! She’s from Brisbane, where I will also go, so I will definitely go and see her there!!
So before the season is over I will have an address for every city I want to go to!
Still debating on how long I will stay there though. I had asked some people yesterday and someone said I would need only 3 weeks from Cairns to Melbourne, but that’s if you’re not staying everywhere more than a day. Plus it’s a prey expensive country. And then someone said I should just go for as long as I think I’ll need to see what I want to see and for as long as I can go there, it’s not like the country is next door and that I will go there again very soon…So just something to think about!
I have a pretty fair idea of what I would like to see and do, where I want to go, so I’ll figure it out!!
I do think I will have to work for Avalon for another season next year though, to get back all the money I will have spent there! haha
Love
Linda
So, last Saturday we said goodbye to one group and hello to another group again. This time we have a group within a group, which I don’t particularly like to be honest. The groupleader was here with her mom when we had Nancy as cruise director, so she could see what happened when. Now she’s here with her group and another group leader, someone who was on the Creativity with me last year!
The annoying thing of having a group within a group is that they don’t mingle with the rest of the people who are taking this cruise. They need to have their own guide, their own receivers and now the groupleaders have a table in our lobby that they hardly even sit behind! I don’t like it, when you’re on vacation, you would like to meet new people is what I always think!
Anyway, so far so good! We have a gentleman on board who, during a private tour through Zurich, took a wrong step and thought he had broken his foot. When we were in Strasbourg, he wanted to go to the hospital and have an X-ray, to make sure. And yes, it did turn out to be broken! Yesterday we got him a boot in Mannheim to give it some support, because he didn’t want them to put a cast on it. I can totally understand, in this weather you don’t want to have a cast on your foot!
So we managed to leave Basel and sail to Strasbourg. Normally we would be in Speyer on Monday, but the water is too low to dock there, so instead we went to Mannheim. We would go there anyway, to pick up the guests who would go to Heidelberg from Speyer. This way the drive to Heidelberg would take only about 30 minutes, from Speyer it is over an hour.
Our Cruise Director did offer a tour to the Technical Museum in Speyer, the groupleader had mentioned that museum to her guests and some were disappointed that we weren’t there…so she got them a bus to go there and in the end only 3 people went! I don’t even think they were from that group at all!
Other people went to the city of Mannheim. The city centre was a bit of a walk from where we were docked. I went there myself in the afternoon, because I had never been to Mannheim before. To be honest I don’t have to go there again at all!! Man, I hated that city!! It had no character, no atmosphere at all!! Lots of foreigners, meaning Turkish and Moroccan people, the streets were dirty, there was nothing historical of interest and lots of strange bums and pathetic people in wheelchairs going through the trash….It really was unbelievable!! If they ever change the itinerary I sincerely hope they skip this place!!
But this morning we were in Mainz, home of the origins of the printing press! I had just finished a book called “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” (by Alix Christie), the inventor of the printing press. Printing itself had already been invented in China, where they would use wooden letters and so on.
In Europe they would use wooden plates, they would carve mostly pictures in a chunk of hard wood. Which worked, until they made a mistake somewhere in the middle, then they would have to throw away the whole woodpanel and start over.
Gutenberg “invented” the metal letters and a way to keep them such that they wouldn’t break under the pressure of the printing press. He printed 180 copies of the bible, separated in the Old and New testament, which is about 1282 pages total…which is quite an achievement, if you see what they worked with and in what kind of circumstances!!!
Of course there was the type of metal to think of, the paper, the right mixture for the ink, getting the pages to dry….and of course making sure no one knew about it before it was all set and done! Because eventhough it was the bible they printed and the text was all the same, the Church didn’t really like this printing business if it wasn’t used for their own purpose!
In the Gutenberg museum they have a copy of the bible that was done by a monk, a scribe, which took them 3 years to complete! It was beautiful! You could see the lines they made to make sure the lines were all straight, they had lines on both side of the page to keep a margin on the sides. The bible was in Latin, which has pretty long sentences, so to make sure you knew where they new one began, they would make the first letter large and colourful. So the scribe copied the text, but also painted the first letter of each sentence. And you could see that with these long words, it was hard to keep the margins on the right side of the pages.
Then next to this they had a copy of Gutenberg’s bible, both Old and New testament and you could immediately see the difference! The text was nice and straight. They also call it B42 or 42-lines bible, because each section had exactly 42 lines and they were straight as an arrow! Gutenberg only printed the black text, colour ink was just too expensive to make. So when people bought a copy, they would get a painter to make it more their own style. They had 2 versions of a New testament from 2 different families and also here you could see the difference. One was really elaborate and the other colourful, but sober. But both very beautiful!!
Not much is known of Gutenberg’s life really, other then the printing. Not even what he looked like, because the first portrait that was made of hi, was done about 100 years after his death. When printing the bible, he had a partner named Fust, who supplied him the necessary funds to buy paper and ink and so on and Peter Schoeffer was his apprentice. When the bibles were printed, for a reason no one really knows, they ended their partnership and Schoeffer started his own printing business. And they made some beautiful things!!
Now that printing became more known it didn’t mean that more people started reading. At first only the elite, people that could already read and had the money to buy the books, bought them. And like I said before the Church wasn’t happy with it, I’m not sure when exactly, but there was a period that no books were allowed to be sold, unless checked by the Church.
But gradually people got smarter and demanded to know more. Which of course also led to just having about anything printed!!!
I for one am glad that Gutenberg managed to come up with this invention, because I love to read. But seeing the handwritten bible and his bible next to eachother I could see why people would think it was the Devils work at first, the scribe’s bible was really flowing and the printed one had straight lines…It must have been very strange, until people could see the value of it.
I’m glad I got to see it.
Last Monday I was talking to one of our guest about my plan to visit Australia at the end of the season and she said that if I was going to Adelaide and wanted to be shown around by a local….So I said I would love to! So she said she would give me her card…Usually when people say that, the end of the cruise comes around and you haven’t gotten anything yet, but this time the lady went to her room and came straight back with the card!! She works at the Adelaide Zoo and she loves panda’s!
I have given her my card as well, thought it might be a good thing to remind her of who I am!!
Saturday August 15th 2015
Today we said goodbye to the group again and this morning I got a linen bag with a panda on it from the lady who invited me to come to Adelaide!! That was so nice of her, I will definitely bring it when I go there!
This afternoon our Chef Michael got a visitor from Australia here on the ship and he told her about my plan to go there. She gave me her card right then and there!! So I gave her my card as well! Later Michael told me that this was the person to talk to if I wanted to stay in Australia. He said she also got his sister a job in Sydney, so she could make some calls and pull some strings, which is always good to know!! She’s from Brisbane, where I will also go, so I will definitely go and see her there!!
So before the season is over I will have an address for every city I want to go to!
Still debating on how long I will stay there though. I had asked some people yesterday and someone said I would need only 3 weeks from Cairns to Melbourne, but that’s if you’re not staying everywhere more than a day. Plus it’s a prey expensive country. And then someone said I should just go for as long as I think I’ll need to see what I want to see and for as long as I can go there, it’s not like the country is next door and that I will go there again very soon…So just something to think about!
I have a pretty fair idea of what I would like to see and do, where I want to go, so I’ll figure it out!!
I do think I will have to work for Avalon for another season next year though, to get back all the money I will have spent there! haha
Love
Linda
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Je kunt nu ook Smileys gebruiken. Via de toolbar, toetsenbord of door eerst : te typen en dan een woord bijvoorbeeld :smiley
