Goofus Visits the Vatican

Last week Beth and I went into Rome armed with the intention of going to the Vatican museum. Brian had advised us to wait until noon to get in line because that would minimize our wait time. But when we walked into St. Peter's Square at 11:15 we figured we would get a head start on our day and fell into the line that was in front of us. I'm not ready to say that the following is a trait of Europeans and not just a general rudeness that descends on tourists in generals, but the lines to all of these religious sites and museums are teeming with the pushiest people I have ever been around. It is pretty common to spend the ten minutes before you see a Renaissance art masterpiece with the hands of an elderly woman pressed into the small of your back. Beth and I have been pretty gracious the first six weeks of our time over here, but we are slowly losing our patience. I now walk extra slowly the moment I feel hands on my person, and she has used her defensive blocking skills from her JV basketball glory days (Here we go, Lady Popes!).

We made it through the line in record time and were pretty pleased with ourselves. Our elation was short-lived, however, when we realized that we had been in the line for St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museum was a mile away. But my motto has always been, when life gives you Basilicas, make Basilica-ade. We spent a half hour walking around and got to see Michelangelo's Pieta up close, as well as Bernini's statue of Pope Alexander. Fun fact: one of the women in the frieze in front of the Pope - I think she is supposed to represent Faith - has her foot on a globe and a look of mild annoyance on her face. If you look closely, there is a small nail extending from the globe that is digging into her foot. The nail is sticking out of England, and the lady's facial expression is supposed to represent Pope Alexander's frustration at not being able to unify the Anglican and Catholic churches.*

After we got out of the Basilica we walked over to the Vatican Museum. Again, luck was on our side and we only had to wait twenty minutes before we were inside. The museum is another prizefight experience where you keep getting socked by masterpiece after masterpiece. Mummies! Ancient Greek busts! Whole apartments painted by Raphael! I had only realized the night before that going to the Vatican Museum meant seeing the Sistine Chapel (see the title of this entry), so I was especially excited. Brian had told us that you see signs pointing you to the Chapel the moment you walk in, and likened it to the signs for Ruby Falls (or, for my sister, South of the Border). Our guidebook said that even if you walked past all the other works of art and went straight to the Chapel (undoubtedly breaking the hearts of art historians everywhere), it would take a half hour. So by the time we even walked through its doors, our heads were a little woozy from seeing things we had previously only seen in books up close. But we rallied and spent about forty minutes there, going back and looking at favorite panels and consulting our guidebook for more information (two more fun facts about “The Last Judgment”: the flayed skin that St. Bartholomew is holding is Michelangelo’s self-portrait, and the donkey-eared imp helping load the poor souls onto Charon’s skiff is modeled on a contemporary of Michelangelo’s who criticized Michelangelo using nude models.)

And finally, another reason for the title of this entry and another reason why I shouldn’t be so smug about Dan Brown: I didn’t realize until I read “Angels and Demons” that the Sistine Chapel was where the cardinals met to elect a new pope. I think everyone got a big kick out of me hanging up my campaign posters under some of the less significant frescoes.

*Please take any art/history/art history information I dispense with a huge grain of salt. I got the above info by eavesdropping on the free Basilica tour given by an enthusiastic American college student.

Montserrat

On Sunday, Cody, Beth, Brian and I took the train out of Barcelona to Montserrat. Montserrat refers to a mountain range that has jagged (or serrated, see "seurat") peaks. A monastery is nestled in there as well. Its name might be Montserrat as well. I am not sure, as I remained willfully ignorant about both the mountains and the monks.* It took about an hour and a half but once we were there, I felt like the long travel time was totally worth it. The view was beautiful, and after a week of visiting congested tourist spots, it felt great to be in a tourist spot where the tourists were more widely dispersed.

When we got there, the other three were starving so we stopped at the Montserrat cafeteria. I didn't feel particularly hungry, but that didn't stop me from getting a plate of grilled vegetables, croquettes (Spanish for deep fried cheese balls), and a large serving of a flan-like pudding. We took a funicular up to a trail (the St. Joan's funicular for those of you who might visit Montserrat), and hiked on its trails for about an hour and a half.





We arrived back in Barcelona with plenty of time to make our all aboard time. Unfortunately, the port bus that takes us back to the ship had slowed down its service, so we had to take a cab. When I've taken a cab back to the ship in Italy, I've felt like I was in a Loony Tunes episode, since the taxi is often on its side wheels for most of the ride, all in an effort to get you back to the ship on time. This driver took a more leisurely approach, and stretched a seven-minute drive to twelve, so we had to book it up the gangway. I was the last crew member checked in for the day, and still had forty-seven seconds to spare, so I felt pretty good about myself.

When we got back to the ship I saw Al, a guitarist who had encouraged us to visit Montserrat. I told him we had been there and had had a great time.

"Did you hear the boys choir?" he asked. "They sing at one on Sundays."

I told him we hadn't, and admitted that we hadn't even visited the monastery. Al took a deep breath, as if he had just been told that a loved one had died or that his son hated flamenco music.

"What, may I ask, did you do up there?" His face was getting a little red. I sometimes have a hard time taking Al seriously, because I think he looks a little like Eugene Levy doing a character. His Levy-similarities increase the more upset he gets. "That's like going to the Miss Universe Pageant and not looking at the girls! I mean, you seem like a nice kid, but come on!"

I told Al that I had liked Montserrat so much that I wanted to go back and assured him that I would visit the monastery when I did. That seemed to placate him a little, but he has eyed me suspiciously every time he has seen me since.

*After checking Wikipedia, I learned that Montserrat is host to the Benedictine Abbey, Santa Maria de Montserrat. I also learned that Montserrat is featured in the “Lionheart” video game.

When Bad Things Happen To Good People

Sometimes terrible events happen in one's life and your first reaction is to pretend that they did not happen and blithely go about your business. But that would be unfair to you, my blog readers, who have an expectation of learning about all the aspects of my experience on this ship, warts and all. So it is with that in mind that I tell you a week ago last Friday, I lost my camera. We had rented a car in Livorno and driven to Siena, about an hour and a half away. It was a bit of a bozo explosion because Siena had had their big horse race, the Palio, the night before, and things were still in full swing. The Palio consists of a horse from each of the city's seventeen (I think) neighborhoods running a race around a track in the city's center. The races last approximately ninety seconds. Each neighborhood is represented by a brightly colored flag, usually with some kind of barnyard animal upon it. If you are one of my eight-month old nephews and do not want to know what you are receiving for Christmas/your first birthday, you might not want to read the next sentence. They had a lot of these flags for sale and I bought several.

Our time there was a bit rushed, just because it took us such a long time to find a parking space. But we were able to walk through the town's cathedral, which had a statue by Michelangelo inside, and then eat a fantastic meal. We also ran into a parade by the winning neighborhood. The parade consisted of a bunch of junior high age boys in yellow and white tights and plumed hats drumming and waving their neighborhood's flags. Some of them had pacifiers in their mouths, the significance of which we were never able to figure out. All of them looked mildly hungover. I got a ton of great pictures of them, some of which Cody complimented (which is high praise indeed because he is a gifted photographer), but they were all for naught since I lost my camera. But imagine, if you can, a bleary eyed thirteen year old half-heartedly waving a gigantic flag with a certain je ne sais quoi that somehow captures the entire human condition. Then you will kind of have an idea of the kind of pictures I took.

I'm not sure where I lost my camera. It was definitely in the car on the drive home, so it either fell out at the gas station where we unsuccessfully tried to fill up the tank, or the next people who rented the car stole off with it, or it was snatched up by some ferret-eyed passenger who noticed that I failed to pick it up when I put it through the ship's x-ray machine. Whoever has it now, I hope they appreciate pictures of teenage parade revelers and elderly Sicilian women.

Angels and Demons

I apologize for the lack of updates. I was struck down by a cold that slithered through the cast two weeks ago and so the blog took a hit as well. I will try to recount the different fun things we did the past two weeks, in no particular order.

My friend Christine's father recommended that I read Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons" in order to get a fast and easily digestible overview of Rome. I'm glad I did, because it gave us some fun places to go to that I otherwise wouldn't have known about. A few Romes ago, we visited the Chigi chapel in the Santa Maria del Popolo Church. According to Dan Brown, Rafael designed the chapel and then Michelangelo decorated it (also according to Dan Brown, it is teeming with Illuminatus symbols, but I'm not sure if that's intentional or not). But the chapel itself is beautiful and, according to our guide book (although Dan Brown would undoubtedly agree) one of the more secular chapels in Rome. The four seasons are portrayed on the ceiling, as well as the astrological forecast for one of the men buried there.

The Popolo plaza is incredibly beautiful too, and we got to wander around that for a while. Dan Brown chose not to have any elderly cardinals murdered here, so I don't have any historical information on it, but we were all taken with the fountains.

Teatro Sannazaro

Two weeks ago in Naples, Brian, Beth and I stopped at a café to get a cappuccino. We were on the Via Chiaia, and it was great to sit outside because the street slopes downwards so you sit at an angle, like you're gently rocking back in your chair. At one point a smiling woman came towards me making eye contact, and I was nervous that there was some Italian custom I didn't know about concerning sitting with strangers at outdoor cafes. She was pleasantly plump and well-dressed, but I think she might have been homeless because when the owner of the café saw her he came out and shouted at her, shooing her away. This was all done in Italian, so I'm not sure that she was definitely homeless, she could have been an ex-girlfriend of the ex-owner's for all I know. She good-naturedly shouted back at him and moved away from our table, but lingered after he went inside and approached another table and beseeched them with questions. Again this was all in Italian, so she could have been asking for money or to go out on a date in order to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. We will never know. When the owner saw her talking to a new table, he came out again, this time brandishing a small kitchen knife. He shouted some more, she shouted back, but in the end she walked away.

We paid our bill and crossed the street to look at some shoes for Brian. When we came out of the shoe store the café owner was standing outside, waving us over. We thought we must have messed up with the bill, and not wanting to get stabbed, we crossed back. He had a big smile on his face and asked us a lot of questions in Italian, which even Brian couldn't make out. But then another guy who worked in the café came up and said, "He wants to know if you would like to see the theater in back."

Up until this point I had been under the impression that this had just been a simple café. But when we followed the owner and the new guy, whose name turned out to be Carmini, to the back and through a marble hallway, we discovered that the café was merely the front of a beautiful theater, the Teatro Sannazaro. Carmini told us that the theater was modeled after Teatro San Carlo, which is Napoli's opera house. I can't remember how old the theater was, but it was used as a brothel after World War II and then renovated and turned back into a theater in the fifties.

Carmini was a great host, answering all of our questions and continuously apologizing for his English, which was flawless. He told us that he had worked for the theater for ten years, and they mainly do comedies, as "comedy is in the blood of the people of Napoli." Beth and Brian took a ton of pictures (don't worry, I left my camera on the ship that day), we talked some more with Carmini, and then left, content with our unexpected adventure in Napoli.

Princess Grace and Me

I escorted my first tour on Saturday. Since we work on the ship, we are eligible to sign up to go on tours for free, we just need to keep track of the passengers and fill out a brief sheet at the tour's end. I had signed up to do this a couple of times before but had been unsuccessful. But Saturday my fortune changed, and I found myself assigned to accompany the tour going to Monaco, Monte Carlo, and the view from Eze.

I should start out by saying that I have been fighting a cold for the past week and Saturday it had reached it's apex. But I wasn't going to let my stuffy nose and mild cough disrupt my enjoyment of the day. I woke up at 6:15 am and got ready. I was anxious to make a good impression to the Shore Excursion people so they would know I took my job as escort seriously, so I wore a blue polo shirt and khaki pants. Even though the day was a little warm for pants, I thought my mild discomfort was a small price to pay for a job well done.

We got to the bus and I introduced myself to the tour guide, a poised Italian woman named Franca. She could have been 41 or 78- I have no idea. She had a sophisticated demeanor that not even her regulation-issued white polo shirt could hide, and I imagine she was mildly annoyed at having to lead a tour since it disrupted her morning routine of sipping bellinis and seducing the local tennis pro. As part of your tour escort duties you are supposed to get on the bus microphone and introduce yourself to the group and explain that you're there to make sure everyone gets back on the bus on time. However, due to a mixture of my general malaise and an onset of shyness, I decided that an introduction wouldn't be really necessary. Franca seemed to have everything under control, I reasoned, plus other former escorts had told me that they didn't always introduce themselves. This lapse in escort duties proved disastrous later on in the day.

Our first stop was at Eze, a medieval village that is now primarily used as a high end shopping spot. Franca explained that we would depart the bus, use the bathrooms in the parking lot, walk up the paved hill to Eze for shopping, and then meet back at the bus in one hour at 9:45. As I followed everyone to the bathrooms, I noticed a group of women break apart from the group and go back to the bus. Was I supposed to follow them, I asked myself? Would that be an invasion of their privacy? How big can this Eze place be, anyway? Assuring myself that my duty was to the group and not a rogue band of tour rebels, I followed everyone else up to the bathroom.

Franca led everyone up the driveway to the entrance of Eze. Eze itself has maintained all of its old world charm for the past several hundred years, and is a series of cobblestoned streets that gently roll upward to a beautiful view of the French Riviera before looping back to its gated entryway As I watched the group head inside for picture-taking and perfume-buying, I noticed the rogue three women were not among the numbers. Not wanting to be any more remiss in my escort duties than I already had been, I walked back down the hill to see if I could find where they had ended up.

They were at the bottom of the hill. And they were pissed off they had been left behind. And they were from New Jersey. It was three generations of confusion: the pear shaped grandmother, the bleach blond mother, and the winsome innocent daughter (therapists who deal with alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional families would describe her personality as "the peacemaker"). I was greeted by a symphony of bleatings. "Wheah did she go?" "She said she would waaaaait for everyone!" "I don't appreciate being left behind in a foreign country." I quickly shepherded them up the hill, which looked like the slope of K2 now that I was accompanied by a sixty-four year old with an apparent cardiac condition. She took frequent stops, clutching her chest a la Redd Foxx, and would say things like, "I don't think I can make it. My heart is racing! This isn't good for me."

Thanks to the Herculean efforts of the granddaughter, who offered cold water and would hop up the hill to demonstrate the ease of its ascent, we were finally able to reach the entrance of Eze. But the charming village had now transformed into a deserted ghost town, its rambling streets a confusing labyrinth. The tour group was nowhere in sight, which was met by further honkings from the goose brigade. Leaving the grandmother gasping at a scenic overlook, I offered to run up one of the streets to see if I could find the rest of the people. This trip proved fruitless, as did the next one, but on my third try I ran into a Spanish ten year old who was hopping down the steps who pointed me in the right direction. Now sweating lightly myself, I brought the three women back into the fold, blithely lying every time the grandmother asked if there were a lot more steps.

When the grandmother laid eyes on Franca, she pointed a trembling finger at her and, in a tone usually reserved for witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials, shouted, "You! You said theah would be time for us to go the bathroom!" Franca, ever poised and a little confused as to what this newfound member was talking about, smiled and replied that yes, there were bathrooms right around the corner. Two minutes of heated accusations followed, where they never mentioned the fact that they had returned to the bus, but they were finally won over by Franca's charm (and perhaps my mantra-like ramblings of "I'm sorry, it was my fault") and went off shopping. I went up to Franca, expecting her to be angry at me, but instead she rolled her eyes and hissed, "You come on this tour to see Eze! Not to use the bathroom!"



Eze itself was nice. I walked around and took a couple of pictures. A couple from Florida asked me to take their picture by the sign of Eze's luxury hotel. They had been sitting in the front seat of the tour bus and, when I had walked on, had read my nametag and barked, "Brendan! Where in the United States you from?" When I said Massachusetts, the guy said, "Yikes! I'm sorry!" He probably would have clapped me on the shoulder and offered to buy me a rum runner if I had still been within arm reach by that point. But now I was struggling to use their digital camera, which I could not for the life of me figure out, and they were having a further laugh at my expense.

"So, Massachusetts, huh?" the guy asked. "What's Billy Buckner up to these days?" I should point out this is probably where I probably hit rock bottom that day: unable to operate a standard digital camera and forced to talk about sports. Somehow, I was able to remember who Bill Buckner was (I should mention here that I have not lived in Massachusetts since 1998 and if you held a gun to my head and told me to name three members of the Red Sox starting lineup, my brains would be splattered on the back wall), and I mumbled something about "probably still letting balls go between his legs." The camera miraculously worked at this point and I took their picture. The woman threw a satisfied look at her image on the camera and said, "I just saw this place on 'Lifestyles on the Rich and Famous.'" At this point I realized both of these people were stuck in 1986 and left before they tried to sign me up for Hands Across America or engage me in a debate on the merits of New Coke.

At 9:42 I walked back down the hill with Franca. She got on the bus, and after a quick head count of passengers, realized there were three people missing. I got off the bus and started to run up the hill to retrieve the lost sheep, and quickly ran into the three New Jersians, sauntering down at a pace best described as leisurely. They seemed surprised that I had been looking for them and in no hurry to pick up the pace when I told them that everyone else was on the bus and waiting for them. The grandmother responded to this information by pulling a bedazzled red tank top out of a paper bag and telling me she just had to buy it because "you can't get stuff like this in the States."

They asked me what I did on the ship, and were totally surprised that I had been in the show they had seen on Wednesday. "Oh, yeah!" the mother exclaimed, "You were up there with the blond haired girl and the girl who looks like that lady from 'Cheers!'"

I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Beth has blond hair, so I knew she was safe from the "Cheers" comment, but I was worried that this woman was crazy enough to think that Jenny looked like Rhea Perlman. "Shelley Long?" I asked.

"No," the woman answered, her eyebrows clenched together as if she was trying to remember a complicated scientific equation.

"Um, Kirstie Alley?"

"Yeah! That's it! Kirstie Alley!" The woman pointed her finger at me excitedly. I didn't have the heart to tell her that Kirstie Alley was now best known for her alarming weight gain and not her "Back to School" days of foxiness. Even though I'm pretty sure the woman hasn't watched television in the past fifteen years, I did not relay this comparison to Jenny.

When we got back to the bus a lot of the passengers had plead mercy to the mounting heat and decided to wait outside. A hatchet-faced woman in a white tank top was smoking a cigarette by the bus' entrance. When she saw the missing passengers, she threw down her cigarette, squashed it with her foot, and shouted at them, "C'mon, let's go!" The New Jersians did not take kindly to this, and the grandmother asked who she thought she was telling them to hurry up? The woman said they were fifteen minutes late (it was ten o'clock by this point). The New Jersians were unphased, and the mother squawked, "We were told ten o'clock!" I had to admire her quick thinking and utter disregard for the truth. It temporarily shut up the smoker, who muttered, "Well, how come all of us got here at 9:45?" But the New Jersians ignored her, and clutching their postcards and red tank tops, strutted onto the bus.

Our next stop was Monaco. I think we got there riding the same road that Princess Grace was driving on when she died. I'm not sure, because I was trying to dry the profuse amount of back sweat that had accumulated on my shirt from sprinting up a cobblestoned French street in ninety degree heat. Plus, I was having trouble understanding Franca when she was talking. Her voice took on a hushed and reverential tone when she told the story of Princess Grace's death: how Princess Stephanie couldn't legally drive outside of Monaco and so the two switched places outside the principality's limits, and then the road's sharp curves proved too much for her. All the passengers seemed caught up in her story, even the woman who seemed to think Grace Kelley was most popular for her films where she danced alongside Fred Astaire.

When we got off the bus, I decided I wasn't going to let history repeat itself and always remained an arm's length away from the New Jersians. This caused me to basically repeat everything that Franca told the tour group, as the older generations of the group were engaged in actively not listening to anything going around them. I think by the end they must have thought I was some Prince Rainier superfan, as I seemed to have an endless supply of knowledge about his family, including but not limited to which mansion was Stephanie's and which was Caroline's, how to tell if Albert was in the palace at any given time, which grave was Prince Rainier's and which was Princess Grace's, and the significance of Princess Grace's epitaph: "Gratia Patricia."



Later when I was looking through some old postcards the grandmother came up to me. Since it's the 25th anniversary of Princess Grace's death (another fact the family was impressed that I knew), her family has released a series of postcards of old publicity shots from her movies.

"Have you found any with William Holden?" she asked me.

I told her I hadn't and she sighed.

"He was my favorite," she said. "He still is. I watch all his movies and it's like he's still here."

She smiled sadly and went back to rifling through postcards of famous movie stars, now long gone. She ended up with one of Grace Kelley and Dizzie Gillespie and I picked one of the royal family in 1981. I got the New Jersians safely back to the bus on time, but a middle-aged couple decided to be ten minutes late so no one really noticed.



We then drove to Monte Carlo and spent about a half hour there. Monte Carlo was kind of lost on me, because to truly appreciate it you have to have one of the following: an insane amount of money, a mild gambling addiction, and an appreciation of foreign sports cars. Parents would have their kids line up next to the Porsches and Ferraris parked outside of the casino and discreetly take their picture. I walked around aimlessly and took pictures of the fountains, but after that I didn't really know what to do. I ended up taking a picture of an expensive necklace in the Bulgari window, but felt foolish when people from the tour walked by and shouted, "Get it!" I wish I had had the wherewithal to tell them I was scoping the store out for my jewelry heist.



The drive back was done in quiet, except for the family from New Hampshire sitting next to me who documented each car dealership we drove by (for the record, their oldest daughter is mad at Saab right now for the poor repair job they have done on her car). We arrived back in port, I said goodbye to my new best friend Franca, waved goodbye to the New Jersians, and returned to the ship to wash off the layer of salt from my body.

My name is Lucca

Barcelona!

San Gimignano

Pisa!

Our visit to Florence where we saw David!

Perseus holding Medusa's head

The Rape of the Sabine Women

The Cathedral



Two Fridays ago we went to Florence in order to see David. Brian had bought us tickets online, which enabled us to bypass the line that stretches down the block. The Friday travel days are a little tricky, as they require us to take a shuttle from the ship to downtown Livorno (free), then a bus to the Livorno train station (one euro), and then a train to our final destination (12.60 euros this past Friday). Also, none of these steps are exactly intuitive for the first-time traveler, as you have to buy your bus tickets at the unmarked newsstand across the street from the bust depot. We (and by we, I mean Cody and Brian, who I always refer these people to) end up serving as Unofficial Livorno Guides to the passengers, sweaty and confused and with a slightly dawning sense that they were duped by whoever told them that getting to Florence would be "easy," who are dropped off on the square with us.

Since we weren't scheduled to see David until 1:30, we wandered around Florence a little bit when we got off the train. We passed through the square and spent a long time looking at the statues and the duomo, acting out our favorite scenes from "A Room With A View."* After much picture taking and Helena Bonham Carter-impersonating**, we wandered through the side streets and somehow ended up at the Borsolino shop. I say "somehow" but inevitably with Brian we end up at some high end store where all of the sudden you find yourself thinking that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if you dropped 900 Euro on a handmade suit. I don't mean this last statement to come across like I'm complaining, it's just that I'm highly susceptible to parting with my money, especially when the beseecher is an elderly Italian tailor waving a cigarette and measuring tape. But this place was great! Borsolino, for you philistines who don't know, is the company that makes high-end fedoras worn by the likes of Al Capone. They also sell shirts, which were on sale before the fall line comes in. Each of the guys bought a shirt that makes the wearer look like a million bucks.

Then we went and grabbed a slice of pizza at one of the pizza joints dotting the Floretine square. It wasn't great, but it was cheap, which was what we were after.

Then we got to see David, which was tremendous. I had looked up a few facts about the statue on the internet the night before, so I felt equipped to give a tour. I talked about how the statue was carved from a flawed piece of marble, was started by somebody else forty years before Michelangelo got the commission to do it, the pseudoscience of art restoration, the crazy guy that attacked the statue with a hammer in 1991, and how Michelangelo chose to depict David not in the typical pose of action, but rather in the moment before or after he killed Goliath (the director of the Accademia and I both think it's the moment before, but feel free to have your own opinion). Swept up in Michelangelo-fever, I purchased a copy of "The Agony and The Ecstasy" for 11 euro. I am thirty pages in, and already my understanding of the great master has deepened.

The ride back was uneventful, except we shared the crowded bus ride home with a hateful family from Pennsylvania. The college-age daughter had studied abroad in Florence before and was acting as tour guide for the rest of her gene pool. She was annoyed at everything: her mother's inability to move down the aisle, her younger sister's refusal to sit on the small ledge of the seat taken up by the younger sister's boyfriend, the elderly Italian women who continued to push their way onto the bus at each stop, the low rush numbers for Kappa at Lehigh, and how "the jackass" sitting in an aisle seat was oblivious to her urgent need for him to move into the empty window seat to his left, even though she never made any attempt to communicate with him. We escaped at the Livorno square and parted ways- we to our ship, they to their unhappiness.

*We didn't really do this, but I wish we had
** We didn't really do this, either