Day 4 Jul 5th (Bratislava) in Honeymoon

It was a (relatively) easy day, since Bratislava isn't that big and have that much to see.

We woke up at 9, and had a leisurely breakfast, and hung out to wait till the boat gets into Slovakia. We went through a lock, which was a sight. Thought I'm sure after a while it will get boring. I think the cruise line thought of everything when they squeezed in the safety drill during this time too.

We spent a lot of time now hanging out with the couple from Tennessee; I think they are like our default dining buddies now. They are very nice people and fun to be around with. I gather that there is an explosion in the amount of people who come to river cruising because of all the ads that Viking Cruise line takes out on PBS (so attracts a lot of Downton Abbey viewers) and so the clientelle tends to be PBS viewers - I am surprised how many of them were educators. I said were because almost everyone on the ship are retired.

So we got to Bratislava and took a tour of the city, and saw the diplomat's hill, castle, and old town. We wondered around in the old town for a while to take pictures. It is a quaint little place with lots of small side streets that you'd associate with small European towns. The architeture for churches, opera house and theatre was very beautiful and we took many pictures.

This night after we came back to the boat and had dinner, and watched a troupe perform at our ship. Now, our ship has a nominal 'dance floor' - a circle patch with a diameter of 11 feet. So the troupe didn't have much space to dance around. There was a hammer dulcimer, a bass, a viola, a violin, a singer, and a pair of dancers. But I was impressed by how much use they have of the space. The performance was pretty good; entertaining, even though I could hear some 'uncleaniness' in the music part (some wrong notes and such). But who cares. The Slovak traditional music sounds like a mix of blue grass fiddle music or Jewish folk dance music, but played with a hammer dulcimer.

I was up at the lounge writing this while the on board pianist was finishing up his shift, and, seeing that I am the last person in the lounge, he chatted with me. First about his son who is 15 and is in a computer science school, and then about the Yamaha Clavinova on the ship once he found out I play the piano too, and then about jazz piano idiom once he found out I am classically trained but would like to play jazz. He is a very chatting fellow.

As a result, I can't get into too much detail about today here, since I now only have 7 hours to sleep before I have to wake up tomorrow for Vienna.