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the problem with communist modernism
Wednesday, March 28 2018
location: room 311, MS Joy, Docked on the Danube River in Mohács, Hungary
This morning when I pulled back the blinds on our palatial riverboat room, I saw that we were in a place called Mohács. The buildings were severe and elegant, in that way buildings can be in Europe when they aren't stately and old. We had our first breakfast of the cruise down in the dining room. It being a buffet, there was less of that lingery, relentless quality that I dislike. Still, even in its vegan form, breakfast is not my favorite meal of the day, and there were no breakfast mushrooms on the MS Joy. There were sausages, baked beans, slices of faux cheese, and even croissants, so that was mostly what I had.
Back in the room, I was trying to get a fix on exactly where we were in the world using my phone's GPS. But it kept indicating that we were somewhere just downstream of Vienna, Austria. Wait, had we sailed up to Austria to begin this cruise? I hadn't paid close attention to the itinerary, and GPS is never wrong. In this case, though, it was. Evidently it was getting its fix on where we were using location info provided by the internet connection, which was traveling indirectly either via satellite or the cellphone network to some internet provider far away. Mohács is in southern Hungary near where the Danube leaves Hungary and becomes the border between Croatia and Serbia. It's also where the staff of the MS Joy did most of its initial paperwork with the hundreds of passports it had taken from us.
I like doing remote workplace work on a river boat. I like to sit near the front of the boat in the lounge and work, glancing up now and then to watch the world coming at me along the riverbanks. It's good with a cup containing three shots of espresso, though on this boat the coffee machine is a long way away, and I tend to get left with a tablespoon or so of cold espresso that goes undrunk for awhile before I make the journey for a refill.
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Our boat took a detour west from the Danube up the Drava and docked at the city of Osijek, Croatia, which had been on the frontline during the battle for Croatian independence (from Yugoslavia) in the 1990s. Gretchen and I borrowed bicycles from the MS Joy, which, sadly, didn't turn out to have electric motors. It was perhaps better this way; Osijek is extremely flat, and the narrow roadways and sidewalks are not good places for rapid motor-powered cycling. Our first stop was at a large square near the boat dominated by the tall brick Church Of Saint Peter And Saint Paul. Gretchen wanted to go inside, so (lacking anything else to do), I joined her. In the gloomly light were several long queues of people paitiently waiting for confession; surprisingly, many of them looked to be in their 30s if not 20s. Overhead were a great many frescoes that looked a little modern for a church of such seeming age. But it turned out that the church was built in the 19th Century and the frescoes were completed during World War II.
We biked around the neighborhood, eventually finding ourselves back at the church. Nearby we found some amusing graffiti depicting a woman squatting to piss while a man stood by watching for onlookers.
Gretchen obtained a map from an MS Joy tour group (one we weren't part of) and suggested we bike to the east along the Drava. The buildings were prettier over there, and we found a place that was either a church or a monastery tucked away on cobblestone streets that jarred our bones to bike across. After befriending a gorgeous (and friendly) tabby cat, we entered the remains of a fort (complete with moat) along the Drava. It wasn't even all that old, dating to war with the Ottomans in the 1700s.
We biked back west and then across a spindly pedestrian-only suspension bridge across the Drava to its mostly-unpopulated north bank, where we rode on a path that had been surfaced with astroturf. There were fresh green leaves from some early-spring plant that (from the distance) resembled skunk cabbage. But it was something else.
As I looked back across the Drava at the town of Osijek, with its occasional drab concrete buildings built during the communist Yugoslavia years, I realized what was so unsettling about modernism in a non-capitalist context: the lack of advertising. Ugly as brutalism and other 50s architecture tend to be, the occasional billboard with its splash of color (admittedly ugly and garish on its own) helps enliven the scene and dissipate the gloom. Without it, the modernism is shown for all the depressing austerity that it fundamentally is.
Back on the boat, we were greeted with non-alcoholic beverages at the entranceway, and back in my room, I immediately added booze to mine. Meanwhile, Gretchen headed up to the roof of the boat, where (unlike our boat on the Rhone) there was supposedly a hot tub.
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Eventually I joined Gretchen in the hot tub, where I found her with a German couple, a guy from Northern Ireland, and perhaps that older Dutch couple, one of only four other people who had been on our Rhone cruise. The hot tub was small, but it could accommodate at least eight people.
At dinner, we sat again with Carrie and Boris (the latter of whom Gretchen was beginning to detest). Also at our table was a young English couple, the woman of whom ran a chicken rescue. She talked endlessly of the problems of rescued laying hens, and the problems that come as they age. Since their egg-laying apparatus gets worn out, they often have medical complications from it. She said that sometimes it's helpful to spay them or give them hormone therapies to prevent laying. But the former is expensive and dangerous and the latter is expensive and temporary, so it's a hard thing to justify with a limited budget. I was gratified to learn later that I wasn't the only person who found all this discussion of chickens tiresome; Gretchen referred to the woman later as "too chickeny."
The Church Of Saint Peter And Saint Paul with the public urination graffiti.
A detail of that graffiti. Click to enlarge.
A somewhat absurdist statue of someone named Krleža.
A friendly tabby cat in eastern Osijek. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen (on a bike) with the fort along the Drava. Click to enlarge.
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