We have been cured of any further desire to cruise.  Our 12-day Black Sea cruise on the Celebrity Constellation was a mixed bag.  We were really interested in the Black Sea, loved Istanbul and Ephesus (Kusadasi) in Turkey, Sevastipol, Yalta, and Odessa in Ukraine and Burgas in Bulgaria, found the two sites in Greece (Athens and Mykonos) a little daunting with a number of angry people and really disliked most of the time on the ship.

On the plus side, all of the locations in Ukraine and Burgas were so, so interesting and places that are pretty much unspoiled by tourism.  They were also places that we would have been unlikely to have seen otherwise.

I particularly loved Sevastipol, a place where most of the people we encountered were surprised to see anyone that alighted from a ship!  Except for a trip long ago to the island of Lanai in Hawaii when there were just 11 hotel rooms on an island otherwise filled with pineapple fields, I've never experienced a place so untouched by western ideas of tourism.  I think a lot of Russians may go there to vacation but their expectations must be quite different from ours because there were no hawkers of touristy stuff, no traveler specials, nothing suggesting that tourism is an economic driver.  It was really nice.  All we did was walk around the city, visit a park commemorating the Seige of Sevastipol during the Crimean War and had a very nice lunch, but it was just enchanting.  Too bad we had to get back on the ship! The second stop in Ukraine was Yalta.  A city just chock a block full of interesting history, including the meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin during which they made the decisions about carving up the spoils of WWII.  The third, and final, stop there was Odessa; a much bigger city and very used to tourists from the countries in the former Soviet Union, but still exotic and interesting.

We had one stop in Bulgaria, Burgas, a seaside city similar to what Mykonos may have been like before every cruise ship in the Mediterranian stopped there and attracted hawkers and overpriced, mostly useless tchotchkes frequently made in China or India instead of the country visited.

In general, the Ukranian and Bulgarian people we encountered were generally curious and interested in us. Although few spoke English, there was a nice spirit of trying to get along.

Greece was a little less nice.  In Athens we encountered a number of angry people, likely owing to their dashed hoped about what affiliating with the European Union was going to mean for them.  We kinda expected it because there has been a lot in the Irish press about the difficulties they have encountered, what with the Euro Zone expecting them to pay taxes and all.  That has to be annoying.  But seriously, their economy is in very bad shape and that seems to have affected how they feel about tourists, particularly from Europe or America.  Mykonos was just a huge tourist trap, although I did visit the island of Delos, just off Mykonos, the birthplace of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis, which was very interesting.

Turkey was great, we started and ended in Istanbul, a city to which Alan and I agreed to return.  On the first day there we toured the Topkapi Palace and bought a rug (which I hope we don't regret) and on the second, just before boarding the ship, we visited the Grand Bazaar.  On our return we had another day there and did the hop-on/hop-off bus to get a sense of the city in advance of a trip we are hoping to take back to Turkey before we return to America. Ephesus, the place where "mother Mary" spent her last days, was very interesting, very much outside the large port city of Kusadasi where the boat docked.  So much antiquity all around, it was just amazing, particularly in light of our earlier trip to Connemara in Ireland where we spend so much time looking at Bronze Age stones in remote fields.  These were whole, amazing cities, so well preserved.  I would definitely recommend a trip to Ephesus to anyone interested in early civilization.

By far, the worst was the time we spent on the ship.  We expected an all-inclusive, fun filled adventure, with lots of people who were open to meeting new people and having new experiences.  What we got was constant up-selling of "extras"  (who knew water was in extra), constant sanitizing of all surfaces "for your safety", amid hundreds of already formed cliques all operating in their own little sphere jockying for any desirable space in common areas and "saving" huge swaths of it for the exclusive use of their posse, whether the others were there or not.  The prices were staggering, $80 for a bottle of gin (and you can't bring it back with you from the shore, they check); $30 for a bottle of the cheapest wine or a corkage fee of $25; $200 for a massage; $3 for a half litre of water that goes for 50 cents a litre when you disembark; $3 for a coke and close to $100 per person for a shore excursion that you can arrange for half that privately once on shore.  We were so disappointed.  The only good thing was that our table at dinner was great.  Our group consisted of a nice couple from New Jersey and a single woman from Sydney, Australia.  We all agreed to keep in touch and I hope that we do.  If it were for them, we would have had nothing good to say about our time on the Celebrity Constellation.

All in all a lesson that we are not cruise people.  I wouldn't do it again if it were free. That said, the experiences we had on shore in Turkey, Ukraine and Romania were just great and we are grateful to have had to chance to see them at this stage of development.  We are happy to be back to normal.