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Mohács blend
Friday, April 6 2018
location: room 311, MS Joy, Docked on the Danube River in Mohács, Hungary
Today was the last full day on the MS Joy, and we were back in Hungary, docked at Mohács. Gretchen was still pretty sick, though she managed to make it to breakfast on her own. At lunch time, I went to Arthur's (the little restaurant in the back of the boat) to try something off their lunch menu. I'd already gotten everything I could want out of the very limited (and unchanging) dinner menu, but I wanted to try their burger (which was only available for lunch). It came with avocado and fake bacon and most definitely two buns, so it could be grabbed by human hands and eaten without the aid of utensils. It was exactly what I wanted, and it was sad once it was gone. Even sadder were the fries, which had been made from sweet potatoes. They didn't have that surface crispness a good fry has, and (perhaps this is a problem with sweet potatoes) the inside was rubbery where one would rather have creamy. Worst of all, though, was the cloying vegetal sweetness. I'd approached them with an open mind, but they were inedible. If I ever hear someone gushing about sweet potato fries ever again I will throttle that person. Happily, though, I'd also ordered the white bean soup, and it was great. I am a sucker for bean soups, and (though it's foolish to trust a non-Italian European with a bean), the cook had somehow not ruined it.
By then, Gretchen was up and about and eager to go to lunch in the big dining room at the front of the boat. I saw this as an opportunity to get another bowl of soup (the soup varies by meal but is always the same in the two restaurants). So I ended up having a second, lighter lunch. The addition to the soup, the highlight of that second lunch (eaten with the Scots) was some tortellini in red sauce that tasted like Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, and I mean that in a good way.
This afternoon, Gretchen and I left the boat and went for a walk around Mohács, Hungary. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I'd brought my phone preloaded with offline dictionaries for all the languages we'd been encountering. There were some posters on a lamp post featuring stylized dogs wearing neckties. The translation from the Magyar suggested that they had "two tails," whatever that means.
Walking west down Szabadság utca (Liberty Street), we saw the most absurd-looking pit bull being walked towards us. The dog was a metallic grey with a head like that of a hippopotamus and as big as a snapping turtle. Gretchen had to stop the dog and make a fuss over him, which he accepted like a gracious celebrity. His human (a muscular guy in a muscle shirt) gave his dogs a few happy slaps and kept going. As always in Hungary, the dog was completely intact. At least he hadn't been forced to wear a muzzle; the few other pit-like dogs we'd seen (particularly in Bucharest) had all been wearing medieval-style mouth cages, usually incorporating steel mesh in their designs.
A school, a government building, and a church all shared a large parking lot in the middle of town. This seemed like a clever idea, since they all have different hours of operation. I heard a bird singing in a tree, and when I finally caught sight of the feathery creature, I saw he was an all-black thrush, otherwise similar in appearance to an American robin. This must've been a European blackbird, which I only knew about from books.
On the walk back to the boat, a woman was walking her dog behind us (offleash, as is common in Eastern Europe), and the dog kept barking and acting aggressively at us. But when we'd stop and turn around and coo and him, he'd get shy and bashful and hold back. His human companion seemed simultaneously proud and embarrassed by his behavior, gently chiding him and smiling at us.
Late this afternoon I took a recreational 50 milligram dose of tramadol and went off to the front of the boat in the lounge to work.
[REDACTED]
While working, I somehow managed to spill my cup containing most of three shots of espresso all over the table and onto the chair and carpet below. Sara (the yoga teacher) came over to help me clean it up, followed soon by the staffer with the sing song voice and bad skin (most of the staff on this boat were from Serbia, Romania, and the Philippines; she was one of the Europeans). I said, "surely this material must be easy to clean." She wasn't so sure. Oh well, it would be someone else's boat at this time tomorrow.
By today, it was clear that the staff was winding down their interest in our group. One could tell especially in Arthur's, where tea became harder and harder to come by at the hot drink machine. At some point today, parts of that machine had been detached, revealing its technical innards. And then I began seeing refuse (including abandoned orange peels) accumulating on the Arthur's bar.
Late in the afternoon Gretchen, who was feeling too ill to go, sent me to the lounge so one of us would be present for the final briefing. There I learned about the settling of accounts and how and when we'd depart the boat tomorrow. For this, I sat with the Aussies, who were drinking beer that another guest needed to get rid of. There was no more of that beer, so I ordered another four euro draft. This was the part of the cruise where all the staffers paraded through so we'd have a fresh memory of their tireless service and could tip them appropriately. Gretchen and I still had plenty of money in Hungarian forints, so that would be the form our tip would take. To get us in the mood, champagne was handed out. It was the first free booze of the cruise.
Gretchen and I ate dinner tonight at a small table just with the Aussies. It being the final dinner of the cruise, it was in a different format than all the previous dinners. Tonight there was no choice about what to order; there were many courses, and it all came out in waves. We were also equipped with additional flatware without any sense of what it all was for. One utensil resembled a thick spatula and might've been for the sweet and sour "duck" (clearly made from seitan). I hadn't expected the "duck" to be that great, but it was excellent, and Gretchen gave all of hers to me as well.
The final dinner wound down with some sort of baked icecream cake and then little snifters of cognac.
After dinner, Gretchen and I spent a fair amount of time just waiting in line out in the boat's central foyer so we could settle up our accounts (to pay for our tour bus rides and drinks). I don't know why it took so long, and who was farting silent-but-deadly bursts of intestinal gas nearby, but I'd had about enough for the evening. So at the earliest possible opportunity, I went back to the room and fell asleep.
Later Gretchen got into bed, and I could hear her muttering something to herself. What was going on? I asked, and she responded, through a mental fog, that she'd taken ambien. Normally she only takes 5mg of ambien at a time, but this time she'd been unable to cut the pill in half and so had taken the whole 10mg pill. This accounted for her weird lucid-dreaming fugue state.
A statue at the corner of Liberty Street and Trinity Street (Szentháromság utca) in Mohács, Hungary.
Flowers in the grass near where our boat was docked at Mohács.
Sunset over the Danube as we navigated northward towards Budapest.
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