Another poor night’s sleep, the boat was on the move upriver all night and the engine was quite noisy. (My life is so hard!)
We had lectures from 8 till 12, not quite as interesting as the other day as it was given by a dietitian so it wasn’t quite so medically oriented. I hadn’t considered before how hard it is to keep your nutritional intake adequate when you’re losing weight, either from surgery, dieting or drugs. Apparently 6% of adults in the US are on Ozempic or knock off versions of it now, many are not being nutritionally looked after so expect problems in the future. Have you heard of “O face”? It’s all over TikTok it seems, and describes people who are on Ozempic and whose faces now look haggard and drawn.
Half way through the morning we were called out to the deck to see us passing through the first and biggest of the locks we’re going to pass through. I wasn’t too excited but it broke up the morning nicely. Most dramatic was the view from our room. It was quite a snug fit.
We had lunch on board and then once the boat arrived in Bratislava, we joined our tour. Simon’s choice was the craft beer tour. It included a brief walk around the very compact old centre of town, and then we stopped at an old tavern to sample some beers and try some local snacks. Our guide confessed that they make better beer in the Czech Republic but these were OK. I know very little about beer, mostly I just sipped mine and passed them on to Simon.
Our tour guide was very entertaining, we had 23 people on our tour but I enjoyed it much more than I expected. Maybe we were too quick to write the walking tours off?
Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia, it used to be Czechoslovakia but they had an amicable split around 30 years ago. It was behind the Iron Curtain here as well and the old town centre seems very well preserved. Hopefully a nice mix of not too much war damage and not enough money last century to squash everything, rip out the public transport and build roads. I could put photos in but it’s just the usual beautiful old buildings, churches, castles, town halls etc. They do have quite a bit of modern art around, statues put up in the 90s which give it a more lively feel than Budapest.
After the tour we wondered along the river to the big new shopping centre. This is enormous and air conditioned, very sensible in a country with Continental weather i.e. too hot in summer and too cold in winter. Once again we were looking for a computer for Simon and once again we were unsuccessful. It was fun watching the locals though.
As we walked back to our boat we could see the debris from the floods here a few weeks ago. Remember way back when we were in Italy, we had some rain? At the same time, Central Europe was having terrible flooding. We could see debris right up on the top of the river banks.
I hadn’t thought before about the effect on the cruise ships but in fact it caused quite a bit of mayhem. This is the reason why we are on a different ship to the one we were supposed to be on, and company management have decided that tomorrow we have to be moved onto our original ship. This means taking a bus out of Vienna early in the evening, which is very annoying for all those people who had booked into the optional excursion of a classical music concert in Vienna tomorrow night. I would have been interested but Simon vetoed it so we aren’t too inconvenienced by the chang. I am worried about losing precious pre dinner nap time, though.