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Corfu
Friday, July 10 2026
location: room 115, M.S. Monet in Corfu, Greece
This morning we were docked in Corfu, the most northwestern island of Greece. I'd never been to Greece (or Albania, or Montenegro), though Gretchen memorably visited Athens as a teenager and kept witnessing men vigorously masturbating behind columns or other objects that provided them some (but not much) privacy. Unlike anything in Albania, Corfu is a major tourist destination, and we were docked beside an another enormous cruise ship that towered over our plucky little vessel. Just getting out of the port was a bit of a slog, and from there we gradually made our way through the less touristy parts of Corfu to its old medieval city. We arrived there well before the crowds and it was great to see how it was before being mobbed, as shop keepers brought out display racks into the narrow stone-paved streets. A motif I kept seeing on refrigerator magnets was a cat on a low-relief chair, although occasionally a designer played around with it and substituted in a sea turtle in place of the cat.
More than anything else, Gretchen wanted to go swimming in the sea, so after making it across the old city, we found our way down to some beachside restaurants near Faliraki Square. After a little wading, I found a place on the rocks above the water that was shady enough for me to sit in while Gretchen went for a swim. She went pretty far out into the water, but not swimming into the lane of boat traffic. Meanwhile I had nothing much to do except tidy up around me. I used a stick to fling cigarette butts and a mostly-smoked cigar into the surf, and they bobbed nearby for the rest of my time there. When Gretchen eventually returned, we briefly considered ascending the seawall on an iron spiral staircase, but its central pole was rotted all the way through at the bottom and it didn't look safe. As for the seawall itself, I'd initially thought it was a natural cliff, but it was actually a highly-weathered wall made of stacked stones, including a few arches.
So we left the beach the way we'd come and then went back through the old city via a different route, marveling at the flowers and many little gardens that had been attached to walls.
Our next destination was the New Venetian Fortress of Corfu, which had looked, from the boat, like the lair of a villain in a James Bond film. On the way up, Kelly and Brian randomly appeared, having just walked over from our ship. So the four of us went together into the fort. It was a sprawling stone structure up on the hill and not even all that old (at least by the standards of what we'd been seeing), dating to the early 19th Century. It was a largely functional structure with only a few decorative accents, but it was full of seemingly medieval features such as murderous gate houses and arrowslits that evidently still had a role to play in 19th Century fortress defense. Being high on a hill, there were some good views from up there.
The only problem with walking around with Kelly and Brian is that they tend to be slow and sometimes full of annoying little complaints, and Gretchen and I are generally more fit and capable, so they wind up being a handicap. By the end of our time at the fort, I was ready to head off without them, but they continued tagging along for awhile, included a search for synagogue that we never actually managed to find. Eventually, though, they went their way and we headed back to the boat. It was a long walk, and there were stretches of limited shade, and there were no shortcuts around all the security at the harbor, which forced us through a building where we were scanned with metal detectors. Things had been a lot more chill in the Caribbean.
Back on the boat, Gretchen and I had lunch by ourselves. Today's pizza had been made with a white sauce and included a thin layer of mashed potatoes, and it was much better than I expected. The only complaint from lunch was that one of the passengers at a neighboring table was talking loudly in a way that carried much further than anyone else's voice. It might've been the frequency but it could've just been the volume. She spoke with a gentile southern American accent.
After another jet-lag-related nap, Gretchen and I joined Kelly and Brian in the lounge and they filled us in on some of the quirky fellow travelers on our boat. One concerned a woman who had seemed mute earlier in the cruise. She'd attempted to communicate in this state with Brian and it hadn't gone so well, though she'd never moved her lips or resorted to writing things down, which had Brian wondering if the problem was actually cognitive. But now, suddenly, that mute woman, whose name turned out to be Coron, was talking just fine. Not only that, but she had a cadence to her voice that overwhelmed all other voices. It occurred to me that this must've been that woman we'd been hearing at lunch. We would later learn that Coron had been experiencing laryngitis earlier in the cruise, and that accounted for her muteness, though it didn't account for complete inability to communicate.
Another story Kelly had was about a gentleman we'd seen on the boat who had been walking about with the assistance of a cane. Somehow Kelly got to talking with him and made the mistake of asking him what was wrong with his leg. As she characterized it to us, it was like dropping a coin into a machine and having no idea what it would spit out. What he told her was along gory tale of a cancer that had appeared in the cartilage of his leg and how it was removed by doctors. He even had photos on his phone to show her, photos Kelly very much wished she hadn't seen.
At dinner tonight, the four of us (Kelly, Brian, Gretchen, and me) were forced to sit at an eight-top. Just as we were taking our seats, a terrible thing happened: that formerly-mute woman Coron came over and said she hadn't chatted with us yet and said she wanted to sit with us. We were at an eight-top and couldn't really tell her anything but "sure." Kelly had had enough of Coron at that point, so Gretchen decided to "take the bullet," switching with Kelly to sit next to Coron. She also said yes to a glass of wine when the wine guy came around, something she wouldn't normally do. But then Eric and Gila, that self-centered "health vegan" couple from Albany, the ones who'd been banging on our wall that first night on the boat, sat down at the two end seats of our table, and Gretchen didn't really want to talk to them either. Fortunately, Coron was delighted to talk to them, so everything pretty much canceled out. Rounding out our table, Mary, the tall female half of the veterinarian couple from Brighton, took the one last seat at our table, as there hadn't been room to sit with her significant other Dave at another table. Unlike Gretchen, Mary seemed to like Eric and Gila, so all four of those people managed to carry on as if at a completely separate table.
It turned out that the Eric at our table, who happens to be an anesthesiologist, was having a birthday today. So at some point there was the singing of that song and the delivery of a cake.
Soon after dinner, the cruise had its big trivia night, and we all went up to the back outdoor deck and broke up into teams. Our team included Kelly, Brian, Gretchen, and me, as well as the veterinarians from Brighton, Mary and Dave. That was the limit for team size, which thankfully meant that the Coron and the health vegans had to be on other teams. As always, the questions were often absurd and required impossibly-specific answers. For this particular cruise, many of the questions required detailed knowledge of Croatia, which Dave seemed to have the most of on our team. There also seemed to be some falsehoods baked into the premise of some questions, particularly the two that seemed to imply that the avocado is a native Mediterranean fruit. The two questions whose answers I definitely knew that nobody else on our team was sure about were:
What is the color of the hot wire when doing wiring in America?
Answer: black
What material was the first prototype computer mouse made from?
Answer: wood
As we played, it seemed Dave on our team and Eric (the wall-pounding anesthesiologist health-vegan at a table on the other side) were both intoxicated, and they kept hooting and hollering at each other and making a rukus. It was enough to cause Kelly and Brian to whisper words to the effect that these gentlemen were engaged in an embarrassing testosterone-fueled pissing contest. Between that and the stupidity of the question, my reply to her was "This is miserable." But once the teams results were graded, it turned out that our team had won by a single point. Our prize was supposedly a bottle of wine [which none of us ever got] and teeshirts for the victors (something I made sure to help myself to from the rarely-staffed cruise director desk).
Gretchen, Kelly, Brian and me all went up to Kelly and Brian's cabin, 206, to debrief. As we were about to go into the room, Coron the loud-mouthed formerly mute woman came past and almost seemed like she wanted to join our little impromptu party. After that bullet was dodged, I remarked, "She probably thought we were all going to have a menage-a-whatever-five-is." Most of our conversation ended up being about what a primitive primate Dave had been during tonight's trivia, though we also touched on Coron and how best to avoid her. I should mention Kelly and Brian's cabin, which was unusual in that it had originally been the ship's gym. But evidently nobody wanted to use a gym on such a small cruise ship, so it had been repurposed into a room, one somewhat larger than the others on the second floor. But had a weird shape due to a bathroom having been added to its center. This necked the room down between two separate areas, one being a kind of living room and the other being pretty much nothing but bed. Kelly was often mentioning things about it that bothered her, such as the large rubbish can it came equipped with, the difficulty of getting into and out of bed without hitting ones head, and the fact that the PA system didn't seem to work. Another oddity was that there is no cubby to house its keys or its residents' ID cards at the front desk, so whoever worked there had to be put them a special place, one that proved hard for the staffer to remember. Kelly and Brian had selected the room on a tip from Dirk, the guy who owns the vegan cruising company, but, like every brilliant idea Dirk comes up with, the devil had been in the details.
It turned out that I'd accidentally left my Bear Cantina hot sauce at the dinner table, and Mary was now holding it hostage. When I went back to the table to retrieve it, I found a note instead saying "Your Hot Sauce is on holiday — To find your fiery friend — head to the place that is almost as hot as your hot —>" I tried going up to the jacuzi (which is actually cold on this cruise), but I didn't bring my phone and it was too dark to see anything. Also, there seemed to be a couple canoodling in the darkness on a nearby chaise longue. So I went to bed.
A statue to a young man who self-immolated in support of Greek democracy back in 1970. Click to enlarge.
A street in the old city. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen wades into the surf before swimming. Click to enlarge.
Others in the surf. Click to enlarge.
A crab came scuttling towards me as I sat in the shade waiting for Gretchen to get her swimming in. Click to enlarge.
A dayflower in the old city of Corfu. Click to enlarge.
A four o'clock flower in the old city of Corfu. Click to enlarge.
A garden on a wall in the old city of Corfu. Click to enlarge.
A church and one of those huge Balkan swifts (the Alpine swift) caught mid-air in the old city. Click to enlarge.
A view from the new fort. Click to enlarge.
Kelly and Gretchen beneath an inner wall in the new fort. Click to enlarge.
A view from a window in the new fort. Click to enlarge.
A view of an ugly newer harbor from the new fort. Click to enlarge.
An upstairs room in the new fort. Click to enlarge.
A settling crack in the new fort. Click to enlarge.
Walking behind Gretchen, Kelly, and Brian along one of the steep sloping outer walls of the new fort. Click to enlarge.
An arrowslit in the new fort. Click to enlarge.
Bright sunlight coming through upstairs windows in the new fort. Click to enlarge.
A lion-adorned entrance to the bottom of the new fort down near sea level. Click to enlarge.
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