Arrival - and Old Home Week!

 We will be spending the two weeks of the cruise on the MS Esprit, one of the smaller Tauck river ships. She only carries a maximum of 96 passengers, half the guest count of the (ludicrously numerous) Viking river ships, so we were expecting a comfortably sized group on this trip. As it turns out, there are only 64 of us, so it will be even easier to make the acquaintance of our fellow travelers.

 And on top of that, we're the only non-Americans on the whole trip! Well, not really. We met a couple from Florida who were actually both from Ontario, but had moved to the States for work reasons years ago.

 We happened to meet the Cruise Director in the Lobby - and it turns out that we have the same CD, Maggie, that we had on our previous Tauck river cruise in 2018, when we did the Cruise Tour from Krakow, Poland to Berlin with the cruise in the middle.

 And then we were talking to the Bar Manager, as we invariably do, and found out that Pieter had worked for Crystal for 25 years, dating back to Crystal Harmony, and more recently was in charge of training Barkeeps for the Crystal river ships and working on the Crystal Mozart himself. So we knew a lot of the same people.

Our first dinner on board was excellent and bodes well for the rest of the trip. Monica opted for the local specialties, a fish soup called Halászlé and what was described almost as a vegetable-filled bread, but was really a puffy, and delicious, square of bread with Lecsớ, a yellow pepper, tomato, paprika and onion 'paprikash' with sour cream and roasted garlic on the side. Larry went for the jambalaya, which looked great but was a huge portion that even he couldn't finish.

The Lecsớ is hiding on the right hand side of the plate

The Jambalaya looked delicious but it
was enough for 2!

At 9 p.m. we set sail to reposition the ship and do an evening sail through the iconic (especially if you watch those Viking River Cruise ads on TV) centre of Budapest, with all of the buildings so beautifully lit up.

 

The former Buda Castle of the Hofburgs. Now it houses
a Museum of Hungarian Art, a Public Library,
and the office of the President

On the hill, St. Matthias Cathedral and
the Fisherman's Bastion, so named because
the fishermens' guild was responsible
for its maintenance

The Parliament Building and the almost full moon
overhead

 

We hadn't even docked in our new position before we went to bed. Many of the other guests had arrived a day or two early and were already time-adjusted, but we were running on fumes by this point. We needed to be ready for Monday's 8:30 a.m. tour departure, so it was off to get some shut-eye.