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First stop on the actual cruise, Santa Margarita, a smallish town in northern Italy. It had turned out to be a very nice day and so after breakfast and some deliberation, we decided to go to the beach. The water was freezing. Considering it was only May, this was rather understandable, and I can now say I have swum in the Mediterranean Sea :D Well sort of, anyway XD I didn't put my head under because that evening was the first formal night and curls + blowdryer = not so good. But I still say it counts.
Dinner was absolutely epic, of course. It was also my mom and dad's 25th wedding anniversary, so the waiters came out with a cake and sang, which was really sweet. I also have pictures of the food, but I don't know that anyone would be interested except perhaps
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I did my usual thing of heading up to walk around on deck after dinner, and unfortunately the top deck had windblocks, so it wasn't anywhere near as fun as usual. But on the side away from land, the sea and night just kind of blended together into this never ending black which was both kind of cool and kind of creepy.
The next stop was Marseilles, but we actually didn't stay there. It's a more industrial port city, and not very pretty, so we hopped a bus out to Aux en Provance (I don't think I have the correct spelling for that, but I don't know where to find it) for lunch. We hiked up to a small plaza to eat, and on the way back to the bus stop, my brother wanted to find a bookstore (he'd been reading the HP books in french, to practice, and he wanted to get the next one while it was still available). On the way, I saw this:

I couldn't resist. And yes, it is real, and yes, I would have dearly loved to eat there, but unfortunately we had to get back to the ship.
We did find a bookshop and while my brother was buying his book, I made a beeline for the manga section, where I found this:

I was going to grab some pictures of the pages, but we had to leave.

Next was Barcelona. We got an early start, taking a taxi up to the Cathedral that has been under construction for the last 100 years or something equally ridiculous, and was originally designed by Gaudi.

It shows. I think those are grapes, bananas and...apples on top of the points there. Pardon the construction scaffolding, there wasn't really any way to avoid it.
From there, we swung through a plaza (Pigeons. Everywhere. We saw so many pigeons on this trip and they were all trying to mate and none succeeded) to get to Las Ramblas, sort of the main drag of Barcelona, which was packed with people, shops, and street performers.



Pardon the people walking through the shot.

I have no idea how he's doing that.
Las Ramblas was also home to several petshop-y stalls, and as I was still in my semester-at-college-denied-small-fluffy-animals state, I spent a good amount of time squeeing at the bunnies and hamsters and chinchillas they were offering. But moving on.
We veered off to visit a market (so. much. chocolate *o* and a ton of seafood) and then to the old city, which was host to a lot of medieval era architecture that my mom wanted to see. After that, we dropped by a tapas bar, and then a sandwich place for lunch. We made a brief stop at the beach, but there wasn't a lot of time so I just waded as opposed to putting on my suit and swimming. En route to the beach, however, we kept seeing these groups of random drum bands in different uniforms partying in the street, making a lot of noise and we still have no idea why. I'd have thought it was some kind of festival, but we hadn't heard about it at all. It was very confusing...and mildly entertaining.
After the beach was a quick taxi back to the ship, and an excellent dinner as usual.