August 23, 2026

Greetings!

I am writing this to you a few days before you will receive it, as Sunday is going to be a very busy day. We are just making preparations to leave Lefkáda, Greece, which is very green and lush, and as we sail out, we will pass Skorpios, Aristotle Onassis’s private island.

We spent much of the morning working, then popped onto shore for a quick but very refreshing dip in the ocean, then back on board to finish up the day’s work.

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It’s been another busy week here on Quest. The highlight for me was our stop in Monemvasia. I set work aside for the kind of day I relish: equal parts cultural exploration, culinary indulgence, and a great swim. I wrote about the first two in my Monday Substack post: Monemvasia: The Stony Boat and Europe’s Most Coveted Wine.

The swim was also marvelous, thanks to these wonderful kids, who had spent their day fishing 88 jelly fish from the swimming spot we had eyed during our trek across the causeway. Dima risked it, but, having encountered a jellyfish in my childhood, I stayed on shore and chatted with the kids, who were charming and spoke fantastic English. We found another beach for me to dip into.

Monemvasia has a lot of restaurants, but Mantoula is a favorite, not only for its remarkable cuisine, but also for its breezy terrace with an incomparable view. I fell right into my plate of dolmades with egg and lemon sauce, which reminded me of my very first plate of them, in an officers’ mess onboard the Illyria a million years ago. I recreated the sauce for one of my columns in The Moscow Times, which you can visit here: North Meets South in Mini Golubtsy .

I’ve been doing a little advance planning for my next few cruises including packing lists and capsule wardrobes.

Eleven days in the Mediterranean and Adriatic is not so much a clothing problem as it is a shoe problem.

The Stradun is limestone that four centuries of foot traffic have polished to something very close to glass. Korčula is worse, because Korčula is also steep. Hvar contributes marble steps and a great many of them. I have watched women far more elegant than I am go down hard on those stones in beautiful, sensible-looking sandals, and I have come close enough myself to have opinions.

Nothing in my luggage works harder than my shoes. They have to look polished at dinner — on a ship where the dress code still means something — and then carry me across four miles of Dalmatian limestone the next morning without a word of complaint. It's a hard brief, and most shoes fail it.

One rule, learned the hard way: leave the kitten heels and stilettos at home. Ships have teak decks, teak decks have gaps, and a narrow heel finds every single one. Add the motion of the ocean and a bit of swell, and a slender heel stops being elegant and starts being a hazard. On board I rely on chunky heels and wedges — all of the height and the polish, none of the peril.

These are the brands that keep me going, voyage after voyage. Each pair here has earned its place in my suitcase. A longer list of my recommendations can be found here: The Invaluable Cruise Shoe Collection.

So this week's list is short, unglamorous and mostly about traction that has now survived five Adriatic summers and still looks like something you would wear to dinner.

01. BARCELONA: Lands' End Sneaker Water Shoes For beach days, river tenders, and anywhere the phrase "wet landing" appears. They drain, they dry, and they don't look like scuba gear.

02. MARSEILLE: Stuart Weitzman Leather Loafers The answer to a cool evening and a long corridor. Flat, quiet, and completely at ease on a deck that is moving underneath you.

03. ROME: Stuart Weitzman Island Espadrille Wedge Sandal Substantial enough that I'm not negotiating with a narrow heel on a wet ramp, and ornamented enough to feel like evening wear.

04. VALLETTA: Birkenstock Boston Suede Leather Clogs The clog I live in between the cabin and the deck. Closed toe for a cool evening, and suede that reads as considered rather than merely practical.

05. VENICE: Stuart Weitzman Dayna Platform Sandal A block heel this substantial is the whole argument of this collection: a proper evening shoe that holds fast on a teak deck.

06. DUBROVNIK: KEEN Bali Strap Sandal Adjustable, washable, and secure on a wet tender platform. Not a beautiful shoe. An extremely useful one.

07. CORFU: KEEN Kona Sandal A thong sandal with a real KEEN footbed underneath, which sounds like a contradiction and is not. Light for the pool deck, supportive for the walk back.

08. ATHENS: Tory Burch Minnie Travel Leather Ballet Flats They fold flat, they weigh nothing, and they look far better than a shoe that folds flat has any right to.

09. SANTORINI: Birkenstock Gizeh My cabin-to-anywhere sandal. Slips on in the dark, grips a damp deck, and looks intentional with a linen dress.

10. RHODES: Adidas Gamecourt 2.0 Tennis Shoes White sneakers that read as crisp rather than sporty — the difference between wearing them to breakfast and leaving them in the cabin.

​Shop the whole collection →​

Shop the whole collection: The Invaluable Cruise Shoe Collection.

Three second reads this week, all of them pulled down for work, and each of them better than I remembered.

I just finished a brand new talk on La Goulette, the Tunisian port that will set us down a short taxi ride from Carthage when Explora I sails from Barcelona to Rome at the end of September . Though La Goulette is the gateway for three absolutely stunning sites: the remains of Ancient Carthage, the picturesque blue and white village of Sidi Bou Said, and the marvelous Bardo Museum with its superb collection of Roman mosaics, Tunisia can be a bit intimidating for guests. I was anxious to make this talk at once reassuring, but also encouraging. That meant a happy few weeks with Eve MacDonald's Carthage: A New History.

Much of what we think we know about Carthage comes from the people who erased it: Polybius, Livy, Appian, and a two-word slander. MacDonald sets those sources aside and rebuilds the city out of the archaeology, and what emerges is not an empire at all but a commercial civilization organized as a network — traders, shrines, and harbors strung from Ibiza through Sardinia and Sicily to the Tunisian shore. MacDonald treats the intriguing tophet and the vexed question of child sacrifice with scholarly honesty rather than advocacy, and she resets Hannibal inside Hellenistic political logic instead of Roman categories. Not unsurprisingly, the three Punic Wars loom larger than the social history, because that is where the sources survive. This is popular history done properly — readable, well-paced, built on current scholarship, and substantial enough to reward your attention on the flight over.

I listened to the audio version, narrated by MacDonald herself. Because I do a lot of work where my hands are busy but my mind has space to process audio entertainment, I listen to audiobooks from audible.com almost constantly. For me, it’s a great way to experience a book. I bought the Kindle version for my research, and am glad to have it marked up for quick future reference.

Updating my Ottoman Empire talk for the the present sailing sent me back to Jason Goodwin's Lords of the Horizons. This was a treat, and I was delighted to find the book as engaging as it was five years ago when I first read it.

Goodwin covers six hundred years of Ottoman history deftly: a sweeping, story-driven narrative that makes a complex story legible. The Bosporus stops being a pretty view and becomes the crucial chokepoint that shaped military action for centuries. The fortress you photographed from the rail turns out to stand exactly where it stands for a reason. Goodwin favors the political and the military over the social, and anyone hunting for historiographical debate or sustained engagement with primary sources will need to look elsewhere. For me, this was a book that helped me better understand the flow of this complicated historical period. So, if you want one authoritative, readable overview of the Ottoman world — enough context to change how you see a city or a coastline, without demanding that you become a career Ottomanist — Lords of the Horizon is close to ideal: wide-angle, vivid, and considerably more page-turning than any history covering this much ground has a right to be.

I am an unabashed devotee of the Empire podcast, so I came to William Dalrymple's The Golden Road already predisposed to adore it. I then made the excellent decision to listen to the audio edition, which Dalrymple narrates himself. It is a marvelous performance, and it turns a substantial book into extremely good company on a long flight.

Dalrymple's argument in The Golden Road is that ancient India was the engine that radiated mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion across Asia — and that the traffic moved not overland along the Silk Road but by sea, on the monsoon winds. I found it incredibly compelling. What I value most is Dalrymple’s insistence on cultural translationrather than conquest: when Indian ideas reached Southeast Asia they did not displace what they found, they blended with it and became something new. It should come as no surprise that Dalrymple is a gifted storyteller, weaving meticulous research into prose with aplomb. The Golden Road is absorbing, surprising, and utterly revelatory. If you have ever stood in front of a temple in Java or Cambodia and felt a flicker of recognition you could not quite place, this is the book that explains it — and turns sightseeing into actual seeing.

Emily Nussbaum went on the New Yorker's Critics at Large to nominate her all-time favorite television series, and she chose Slings & Arrows: the early-2000s Canadian comedy-drama about a shambolic Shakespearean theater festival haunted — literally — by its late artistic director. I agree with her without reservation: Slings and Arrows is the best television I have ever seen. It is funny, heartbreaking, and then there is all the truly amazing Shakespeare. I’ve seen it perhaps five or six times all the way through and this podcast sent me back to the YouTube collection to enjoy it all over again…bliss. Over three seasons, the gang at the fictional New Burbage Shakespeare Festival mount ambitious productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, allowing the show to explore the human condition in youth, middle age, and old age. Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz draw Nussbaum out on why so few people watched it, and Nussbaum lands on the line I have been turning over ever since: "The history of TV is the confusion between whether something is good and whether it's popular." She also delivered the best news of the week: there is a prequel! This podcast episode is a great introduction to the series if you are coming in fresh, but I guarantee you will want all eighteen episodes immediately. You can find them here. You’re welcome!

I came late to the Indian Uprising of 1857, and this Empire miniseries did more to correct that than anything else I have read or heard. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand open with secret messages passed from city to city inside chapattis, then turn to the cartridges greased with animal fat that Hindu and Muslim sepoys were ordered to bite — an insult to both faiths and the spark that turned a garrison mutiny into something far larger. What the series does so well is explain what had poisoned relations between British officers and Indian soldiers over the preceding decade, and why 1857 still sits at the center of how India and Britain understand one another. Begin with Part One and keep going.

Be sure to check in with the Destination Resources Reading Lists, which I update regularly with new books, podcasts, TV and film, and other resources designed to make your travel meaningful. I did a big update recently, changing the format to make it easier to navigate. Visit via this link!

The natural companion to Eve MacDonald's Carthage: A New History is her hour with Tristan Hughes on The Ancients, which sets down in Carthage in 210 BCE and asks the question that matters most to a traveler: what was it like to live there? This is the question I sought to answer in my new talk on La Goulette. Towering tenements and Punic porridge, the markets, the gods, and the ordinary business of getting through a day in what MacDonald makes a persuasive case was the capital of the ancient Mediterranean. Hughes has a gift for asking exactly the question you would ask yourself, and MacDonald is generous with the archaeology. I listened to this episode for the first time before my first visit to La Goulette and it helped me to plan the hours strategically.

The Cultural Companion to Cruise Regions A reminder that you can download my free Cultural Companion to Cruise Regions detailing the history, culture, and cuisine of all fourteen major cruise regions, from the Adriatic to Antarctic! Access the free guide via this link. If you now someone who is cruise curious, or indeed cruise cautious, share the guide with them via this link: https://jennifer-eremeeva.kit.com/cultural-companion-k.

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I took a break from non fiction this week to enjoy a marvelous read/listen. John Lanchester's newest book, Look What You Made Me Do is a dark, intergenerational comedy, set in London. Brilliantly narrated, very taut, and hugely enjoyable.

​Iberian Reading List: 21 Books to Read in Spain and Portugal​

​Adriatic Wines, Explained: The Indigenous Grapes to Enjoy on Shore​

​Monemvasia: The Stony Boat and Europe’s Most Coveted Wine​

​The Square Where Perhaps Medicine Was Born​

​The Town Built Like a Fish​

Be sure to check in with the Destination Resources Reading Lists, which I update regularly with new books, podcasts, TV and film, and other resources designed to make your travel meaningful. I did a big update recently, changing the format to make it easier to navigate. Visit via this link!

We sail onward! We will finish the summer with calls into beautiful Korcula (read my Substack article about the town’s fascinating history), Brindisi, Sarande, beautiful Nafplio, and onto Athens. I’m back on the Malta beat as I finalize my new talks for my cruise on Explora.

I love hearing from you — let me know how I can help make your travel meaningful. I am rolling out new 8-Hour Guides to popular cruise destinations and always welcome suggestions for new ones from this remarkable community of readers.

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I love hearing from you -- let me know how I can help make your travel meaningful. I am rolling out new 8-Hour Guides to popular cruise destinations and love getting suggestions for new ones from this amazing community of readers.

Safe onward travels!

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