#738 Solving a Canary Islands Mystery

Why did we spend part of one day on our Fall 2018 voyage of Semester at Sea aboard the MV World Odyssey anchored off the Canary Islands' coast? 

Was it to enjoy the vibrant blue Atlantic Ocean and distant mountains backing the port city of Las Palmas deemed by one study as having "the best climate in the world"? 

Was it to view the large collection of drilling ships anchored nearby? 

It was none of these.  Instead we were there to meet a tanker ship for refueling.

But why take on fuel in this relatively remote place? Aren't 'island things' always more expensive?

I found one answer in the reference section of the MV World Odyssey library where the very last print edition (2010) of the Encyclopedia Britannica resides. In Volume 2 the entry for the Canary Islands ends with this paragraph:

"The Canary Islands manufacturing industries are small scale outside Santa Cruz de Tenerife whose petroleum refinery processes large quantities of crude oil."  

Yours in mystery solving in the library,
Kelly   

#737 Spanish Architectural Extremes

Everywhere we go we find architecture. In Spain, we find architectural extremes.

Antoni Gaudi designed a rural hillside to be an exclusive neighborhood for Barcelona's elite. But when circumstances doomed those plans, the real estate failure launched one of Barcelona's major attractions, Park Guell.  Ornate and wildly ornamented, it opened to the public in 1926.

Across town, sleek, clean, and free of ornamentation, Barcelona Pavilion, the reconstructed modernist masterpiece designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1928 stands in start contrast to Gaudi's naturalistic mosaics.

Steel, glass, straight lines, and horizontal floating planes exemplify Mies' architectural theme "less is more".

These two Spanish constructions are close in age only. In Barcelona, we find architectural extremes.

Yours in Spain,
Kelly 

#736 The Dream Ship In Transition

For Semester at Sea, the start of the fall semester involves more than enrolling students, hiring faculty, and choosing an itinerary. It also involves blue paint.

Lots of blue paint.

Semester at Sea uses the same ship for the fall and spring semesters. But each summer, the ship sails with German cruise passengers under the name MV Deutschland. We've blogged about the Deutschland, well-known for its recurring role in a popular television series, Das Traumship, ("The Dream Ship") where she carries a green and white color scheme.

So to make the transition every fall Semester at Sea calls in a specialized painting crew with cranes, lifts, and long-handled paint brushes who set about converting the green and white MV Deutschland to the blue and white MV World Odyssey.

In Hamburg, our embarkation port for Fall 2018, we witnessed the transformation to quickly cover the summer's Deutschland green with SAS blue, stencil on the Semester at Sea logo, and re-brand the MV World Odyssey.

Yours in transition,
Kelly