Moving right along...to our next cruise!: Budapest may be our new fave city, but Bratislava is right up there!...

I think we are entering the part of the world that everybody has been raving to us about and so far the weather is cooperating so the cities are even more beautiful than friends have told us. And we are loving eating “on the economy” as they used to say in the military. We have been inhaling goulash!

Our favorite part of the Budapest visit was the trip to the Bodor Major Horse Farm (http://bodormajor.hu/eng/about_us.php) on Szentendre Island. This was a majorly cool adventure. Although we didn’t ride the horses we did get a wagon ride back to our ship after being plied with foods of all kinds (pizza, fresh bread, goulash and other things I can’t remember) drink (firewater and wine), plus being offered entertainment and craft and cooking (wood carving and goulash and bread making) demonstrations. The entertainment was a lot of Hungarian horsemen displaying their prowess at managing from one to five horses at a time. A chariot rider and four horses, lots of whip-cracking and spear throwing from horseback, and a guy standing on the backs of two horses while galloping around the arena guiding three more horses. Not to mention the guy riding a burro! Definitely a great show!

This guy led our bus to the Farm


Our introduction to the Farm

This would keep you really, really warm in winter!

They teach their horses to completely trust them

He is cracking a whip right around the horse's head and body and the horse doesn't even flinch.

One of our boat people got a ride

Now THAT'S control!

This is the only horse with this kind of bit, he was one of the five being driven by a guy standing on the backs of two of them.

Our ride back to the ship.

Our driver.

We were the only wagon without a cover.

And of course we got to watch another river cruising ship, the Swiss Diamond, wrap itself around a bridge support. The ship sustained fairly major damage and who knows how the bridge support fared (the bridge is in the process of being demolished and rebuilt so that wasn’t much of a problem except for the accountants for whatever company owns the Swiss Diamond) and there were a few injuries but nothing serious that we’ve heard about.

Garden gnomes who belch incense smoke

The Budapest market

More paprika than I knew existed

The Swiss Diamond rafted next to us later had an accident, hitting a bridge support.

One of our brought-on-board entertainers.

Goose Bumps is goose liver, we have no idea why the interesting translation.

A restaurant build on top of an old underground station in Budapest

On to Bratislava on the 22^nd of May, Thursday. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! We had a walking tour of the downtown and stayed there to just wander and have coffee and eventually eat lunch. As with most cities we’ve visited, there are tons of churches, lots of cute alleyways, more souvenirs than anybody should want, and now that we’re in the vicinity of Austria, lots of crystal. Really, really beautiful crystal. Really, really expensive crystal. Biggest problem was that many of the streets are pedestrian streets—until somebody needs to drive on them. The ambassadors may drive on them, rich people, the suppliers for the shops, anybody with an appointment, and pretty much anybody with a good excuse may drive their car on a pedestrian street.

Thank goodness we are now in the Euro-zone for good. It was getting quite difficult to keep track of the various currencies: English pound (.59/$), Hungarian forint (222/$), Croatian kuna (5.5/$), Turkish lira (2/$), Serbian dinar (85/$), Romanian leu (3.2/$), Slovak koruna (22/$), we were going nuts trying to figure what stuff cost in dollars. Not to mention that pretty much every currency is hitting its high against the dollar. Now we just have euros (.75/$) until we leave Amsterdam.

After a nice day in Bratislava we came back to the ship for a concert by the conductor and the first violinist of the local symphony. They were just fabulous! We’ve been having these entertainment moments (well, they’re more like entertainment 45 minutes) every few days. Unfortunately, they will cease after Vienna. At least the on-board entertainment will cease, we’ll probably have some tours to music venues. While in Vienna, we get to go to an Imperial Concert in the Schonburg Palace that is just for about 60 of us from Uniworld. This is not the Schonbrunn Palace, we will tour that another day, hopefully with Greg, Yolanda, Kathy, and Greg (our children and their spouses, for those of you who don’t know us well).