Now after a week in the Mediterranean, my sinuses have become slightly chapped in the dry air. From walking miles each day sightseeing, my feet burn with raw skin, and the muscles on the front of my lower leg and on my calves throb with soreness.

Despite such minor discomforts, I feel very alive. I have seen some amazing sights in only my first two weeks aboard. I have played shows every day and learned several new musical skills. I have come to understand that the world is simultaneously far vaster and far more amenable than I would have ever imagined from spending a lifetime in Santa Cruz, CA.

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After a day of port duty in Livorno (the gateway to Tuscany, as well as a stepping-off point for tours to Pisa and Florence), I woke early the following morning ready to head out to Rome. I had breakfast as the sun rose and managed to get off the ship with one of the first groups of crew to leave. I followed a group of dancers who seemed to know the way to the train station. However, as I was buying my ticket, the train to Rome came and left, leaving me with no further guides.

That wasn't such a big deal. My only agenda for Rome was to get into the city and wander. Get lost and see what I ran into. Well, my plan worked out perfectly.

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There's definitely a reason the French Riveria is so posh. Put aside all the fancy hotels and the fantastically priced boutiques, and you still have miles of world-class beachfront. That's the first impression I have as the Grand Princess easily glides to anchor half a mile offshore of the marina at Cannes. Some time later, after several groups of passengers who had signed up for tours left the boat, I boarded a tender (one of the ship's lifeboats) and landed at a carpeted, tent-shaded quay in Cannes.

Immediately apparent was that the city of Cannes was preparing for the city's famed film festival in a big way. All along the main waterfront drag, crews were building tent structures for vendors. Banners for film production companies flew from hotel balconies, and almost every building bloomed with posters for films.

I had only one item on my sightseeing agenda for Cannes: to walk the sands of a beach and wade in the Mediterranean for the first time. So I walked and walked and walked past the luxury hotels, past the strangely named Theatre Claude Debussy. (Strange not that it's named after Debussy but that it appeared to be a movie theater—not a concert hall—named after a French impressionist composer.) I walked past all the beachfront restuarants. Each had a patio of umbrella-shaded tables upon a wooden deck above the sand, with chaise lounges stretching out to a section of water, which was cordoned off with buoys to protect each eating establishment's waterfront. Finally I found a municipal beach populated by a family crowd: parents and children murmuring in French, young sunbathers oiling up for the day. I peeled off my shoes and socks, walked to the water's edge and trudged up and down along the beach a couple of times. Mission accomplished.

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Oh, Barcelona, I have fallen in love with you, and I hardly know you. At first blush, you seemed like an unremarkable Mediterranean port town. A noble place, for sure, with grand architecture and a wizened presence suitable to an Old World city. Your graces, however, are revealed not in a flash, but in a seduction. Your streets vibrate with life. Your monuments pay tribute to a legacy of kings. Your buildings hold the boulevards with quiet elegance.

And your people. Dark and lovely, they move easily down La Rambla on a promising Friday afternoon. They stride downhill toward the marina or hurriedly motor on a scooter through the alleyways of the Gothic District, where the narrow faces of these beautiful people mirror the graceful lines of a cathedral that reaches to heaven in a cascade of pointed arches.

Yes, I fell in love with this city. After a mere 20 minutes of walking the streets to find a post office, I knew that a single day would not be enough to experience Barcelona's delights. I walked La Rambla, the main avenue downtown, with a crush of people promenading along a broad paseo in the median. Mimes lined the street striking poses as statues—a Roman senator, a devil, a military captain, a woman growing out of a patch of flowers in violent bloom—as well as painters turning out portraits of passersby in 20 minutes, newsstands bulging with souvenirs and sidewalk cafes serving eclectic fare at extravagant prices.

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After my morning workout and a two-hour practice session, I wandered out on the Promenade Deck to see the rock of Gibralter slowly moving aft along the port side of the ship. We were directly in the middle of the Strait of Gibralter on a glorious morning—cool and a bit breezy, but flat on the surface of the sea. I gawked for a few minutes and then went back to my cabin to fetch my camera. A few photos later, I walked through the ship to the starboard side and saw the hills of Marrakesh and the tip of Africa.

To my eyes, the Strait of Gibralter is hardly more than two miles from the tip of Europe to the tip of Africa. Now that I have seen it firsthand, I can understand in a new way how control of Gibralter has long been the key for any civilization seeking dominance in the Mediterranean.

The weather today is quite remarkable. During our Atlantic crossing, I heard several stories about rough weather or tough currents. We've had neither.

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After five days at sea, the Grand Princess finally made landfall at Punta Delgada, Azores Islands, a province of Portugal, and I was certainly ready to get off the ship for the first time. Since I joined at Galveston, TX, I have spent a full eight days on board—rather a long stretch, by most accounts. Most of the veteran crew started to get antsy toward the end of the five-day-long Atlantic crossing.

I could hardly stifle a giggle upon walking down the gangway and boarding a shuttle that would take me the short distance along the quay and into town. Having rarely left California, here I stood at the edge of the Old World thousands of miles away from my Santa Cruz, CA home.

Punta Delgada is definitely Old World. The shuttle stopped along the wall of a centuries-old fort. The streets are cobblestoned all around the town center, and the narrow sidewalks are inlaid with white tiles in simple scrollwork patterns. Just off of the central plaza downtown is a small church that, from the looks of it, dates earlier than the 16th century.

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I can hardly keep myself awake at the moment. Right now it's 1:30pm, and the ship's somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about two and a half days out of Miami. Here we're in open space, responsible to no nation or government. Perhaps my biological clock is likewise unregulated and my sleepiness a result. At any rate, when I took out my laptop to write, I sat up on my bunk and quickly nodded off for about 30 minutes.

My bunk is quite cozy. I have the lower of two stacked berths, with my cabinmate Anatolie on the top bunk. There's a small shelf at the head of the bed where I leave my current book and a small digital alarm clock. There's a reading light, too, and a set of curtains around the exposed side of the bunk, so when I go to bed at night, I turn on the light, draw the curtains and luxuriate in the 25 square feet of space on this ship that is mine all mine.

Such small personal space may seem like a privation. I remember going fairly insane in a shared dorm room when I first went away to college. This time around, perhaps with the benefit of another almost 20 years of life experience, it's no problem whatsoever. In fact, I rather enjoy my cabinmate. Anatolie's one of the ship's two solo pianists. He sounds great on the piano in atrium amidships—his primary venue.

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I've already lost track of the days. I could swear that yesterday my cabinmate, Anatolei, who's one of the ship's two solo pianists, said he had to play for a church service. Yet today, when I hunted down my first copy of the ship's daily newsletter, the Princess Patter, the front-page flag read, “Sunday, April 30, 2007.” I think that I merely discovered a typo in the Patter, but I was quite taken aback when I had to think long and hard about the day of the week and the date.

Still, though I have lost track of the days, I have gained a better understanding of the layout of the ship. A couple of the orchestra musicians led me aft to the main passenger buffet for a dinner between shows last night, and this morning I managed to find my way back there for breakfast. Since passengers have first priority, musicians must wait until after 10:30am for breakfast. (If we want to eat at the passenger buffet, that is. The staff mess is open 6am to 9am, but the food's not nearly as good or varied.) I'm accustomed to eating around 9am, so I'll have to adjust my schedule.)

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Though I love the Promenade Deck, I have found another spot for journaling, a spot less suffused with laptop-damaging sea spray: the Skywalker Lounge. It's the highest spot on the ship except, perhaps, the bridge. Towering above the stern on Deck 17, the Skywalker Lounge is accessed by way of a Space Mountain-like glass-enclosed tunnel, and it's the ship's main disco. The place is outfitted with solar system-themed carpeting, loads of metallic surfaces, large twinkle-star lighting fixtures that change color every few minutes, wraparound sofas upholstered in five-point stars of muted color and brown leather-trimmed arm chairs.

It's actually an excellent bar. Of course, I'm not a drinker, and I'm a poor judge of bars. But for my journalistic purposes, this one is perfect. The music is excellent—a mix of R&B hits from the past half-century tossed like raisins in a green salad amid contemporary nonelectronic dance hits. No doubt on GLBT cruises this place is elbow-to-elbow and more humid than the Promenade Deck. But at the moment, there're about five people in the entire place (and it's a decent-sized place, roughly equivalent to two of Santa Cruz's Dakota Club). That count includes me and the DJ.

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I feel more clear-headed today, but not entirely at my best. I managed to wake fairly early at 8:15am (considering that I went to sleep after midnight on a day of crazy activity, massive culture shock and very little sleep or rest). I ate breakfast with the showband's trombone player, who knows my hometown of Santa Cruz, CA and who once spent a weekend jamming with a local band. Afterward, I attended two “inductions,” which are ship-orientation meetings or events. Today's inductions included a check of my laptop power supply and my cellphone charger. Because fire is such a hazard on a ship, every appliance that's plugged into the ship's electrical system must be tested and stickered as safe before use.

Since yesterday involved a profound sense of culture shock, I wanted to document some of the shipboard conventions that provoked it. As I write, I have a magnificent feeling of—not comfort nor contentedness, but something of peace, of acceptance and approval of my surroundings. I'm almost entirely alone on the port side of the Promenade Deck, just aft of amidships, looking out over an ocean  radiating royal blue. I can smell the light pong of the salt air as well as a rich smell of the wooden deck surface beneath me, a smell like the heat-dried wood of a sauna. A Polish piano/accordion player, who joined the vessel yesterday when I did, passes every few minutes or so. He's obviously getting some exercise walking circuits on the Promenade Deck, which measures one-third of a mile for a complete circumnavigation of the vessel—or so reports a sign I found near the stern reading, “Three times around the Promenade Deck equals one mile.”

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