Friday, July 6, 2018

On the Royal Crown

I was so tired last night I couldn’t do an entry in my travel blog.  We spent the day touring Budapest, visiting Castle Hill on the Buda side of Budapest, and then returning to Pest to have lunch in a big old brewery restaurant, then a long visit to the Synagogue.  Then we finally boarded the Royal Crown.  The boat is quite beautiful, our room is small but full of nooks and crannies where our stuff can be stashed.  We had negronis at the bar (but alas, the bar is not open).  One must pay for alcohol consumed at other than meal times.  Oh I forgot, we started the day with a history lecture from Scott Pearson, the Stanford historian about the Travails of the Hungarians, from the early centuries to 1918.  And yes, travails they were, battles lost (mostly) sometimes won, invasions to spare, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, Nazis, Communists...Scott promised to send us all a detailed document of all the dates and information, so we wouldn’t have to try too hard to remember it all.  It’s funny, all the Hungarian tour guides seem to have studied out of the same book, they all make a big point of telling us that the Rubik cube was invented by a Hungarian, and that Harry Houdini was Hungarian.  The guide on the tour today said that Orban the recently reelected prime minister (who has a bad reputation in my book) was at least somewhat better than all the other candidates, and was reelected on the promise of saving the Hungarians from the immigrants, apparently that did the trick.  Hungary has very low salaries in comparison to other European countries, but a cost of living that is high, so the country is losing people who leave for a better standard of living in Austria, Germany or the UK.

The boat pushed away from the Budapest dock after dinner, and we went up on the panorama deck to watch the illuminated city as we floated past.  That was really spectacular.  All of those immense fairy tale buildings on both sides of the Danube.  The parliament building, the Mathias church, the Royal palace, the hotels (including our spectacular Gresham Palace hotel), also the bridges.  What a gorgeous view we had from the water, everything was golden including flocks of birds in the night sky above the palaces.

This morning the boat docked upstream on the Danube near the Hungarian town of Kalocsa, paprika capital of the world.  We had an interesting smorgasbord of a morning, visiting a Paprika Museum, watching folk dancing and embroidery at a folk arts center, and culminating in an amazing display of Hungarian horsemanship.  We have come back to the ship, and are now resting in our little rooms.  There will be lectures at 4 on music from the music professor and at 5:30 from the history professor.  We are now cruising on the Danube, heading towards Bratislava, capital of Slovakia.

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