Land!

Annual ramblings below: see last entry for November

We did the usual bunch of quizzes on Wednesday, and won one of them.  After lunch went to Matthew McCombie’s piano recital.  Nice bag of lollipops from Chopin, Mozart, Grieg, and Scott Joplin.  The Grieg selection ended with the fiendishly difficult Wedding Day at  Troldhaugen, which Matthew executed brilliantly.  

When we went up for breakfast on Thursday, we were steaming past Porto Santo, which I hadn’t seen before: on previous cruises we’ve arrived around daybreak, and sailed off later in the other direction.  Some beautiful lighting effects from the early morning sunlight through breaks in the cloud.  By that point the sea was pretty calm, with only a few white caps on the surface.

The approach to Funchal was impressive: the last couple of times we arrived by sea it was in darkness, so the approach on a warm, sunny day was a treat.  After lunch we took a ride into town for some shopping, a stroll and some people watching.  The place is pretty well dolled up for Christmas with the usual fine displays of poinsettias, but it’s after dark that it comes into its own: we took another shuttle bus after supper.  The old joints are protesting a bit at all the walking, but it has been worth it.

The street lights on the hillsides are already beautiful enough, but the coloured lights in the streets and along the front are spectacular.  The two roads either side of the valleys that converge on the harbour are festooned with suspended lights, one red and one blue, and the side streets seem to compete with each other with their illuminations.  We found ourselves speculating as to the city’s sources of electric power.