So we unpack in the hotel and go out on the town. We didn’t make it very far when we ran into a hotel that had a casino. I am not much of a gambler but Allen liked to take a shot at it. So we paid our 10 dollars entrance and go on in. It seems to me that Allen is actually doing pretty well so I get 10 more dollars in chips and sit down at his two dollar blackjack table. Allen is behind me giving me advice when to stay and when to hit. I am not doing that fabulous but after awhile I am actually about 30 dollars ahead and as I am now on a cold streak and consistently losing I decide to stop.
Allen continues but lady luck has fled the scene and he loses his stake. At this point, we are wandering around and he is explaining about the different games of chance. I cash in my chips but Allen wants to take another shot at fame and gets 15 dollars in chips. Well, he puts it all down and after two hands it is all gone. Fun eh?
Well, it honestly has been a fairly big day and longish evening so we decide to go back to our “floatell” and when we got there we decided to get a beer. I have visited a few questionable bars in my life and this was a sleazy looking bar. I tell Allen that I think one of the girls in the corner is a working girl, but hey I guess that is just a bit of the entrepreneurial spirit.
There were a few tables of people sitting around but we just marched over to the bar to try and order a beer. Later we find out that our bartender is from Russian and cannot speak English or German. She does, however, get a girl who is dressed more like a hostess to try and help out. Our hostess speaks German and only a few words of English, so she does help us to communicate with the bartender.
Allen and I don’t see much of our hostess after that and just hang around to have a few beers. When we arrived our eyes didn’t adjust too well (yeah, right) and so we didn’t really notice that the dance floor looked a bit strange, had a few lights around the edges. I guess somehow we also overlooked that the dance floor was sort of heart shaped and had a pole in the middle of it. Allen proposes that perhaps the bar does a conversion part way through the evening to “dancing”. I tell him that he is full of it – but I am required to eat my words a bit later when he tells me to turn around and see for myself.
It turns out that our hostess is actually a dancer – time passes and we are drinking our beer wondering a bit about the floatell we are staying in. The hostess comes over and is really friendly and places her hand on my leg. It was only later that I found out she was a bit more forward with Allen.
It is about this time that we have a bit of a communication problem. The hostess apparently wishes to be friends with Allen but she cannot talk to him. I don’t want to be her friend and I think that the whole thing is too funny, so I am translating for her. The real funny thing is that my German skills are actually very weak as I didn’t think I would need a foreign language when studying, so my skills are based on a few classes as well as watching television.
The hostess believed that time was on her side so she spends time with some of the other customers. A bit later, when Allen starts to get drunk he asks me to do some translating. He has a question about some of the alcohol that the bar has. I thought that my German skills were up to the task of trying to get a comparison of these two types of schnapps on the shelf but I guess not. Quick as a cricket Allen now has two shots in front of him. He only wanted to know if Jagermeister was similar to olucum. Allen takes a sip but the hostess and the bartender tease him. I translate that this is not a sipping alcohol and he gets the idea.
Very very shortly after all this the bartender and one other employee starts singing Russian songs. I am thinking that all is well again, but after the bartender cannot sing any longer so the other man plays some dancing music. Both Allen and I are drafted to do Russian dancing with the bartender and the hostess. It is about this time that I am really quite happy that I am not Allen. We dance for about 10 minutes and sit for 10 minutes.
Now the hostess comes over and announces that she is quite thirsty and would like a drink. I am sorry but I have not had nowhere near drunk enough to start buying 25 dollar drinks. The girl is bothering me until explain to her, in German, that I cannot afford to buy you a drink. Even though Allen has had a few shots and a fair few beers he comes up with a very interesting line. The reason that we couldn’t buy her a drink was because we were selling ‘shower curtain rings’. I couldn’t quite translate this so I tell her we sell shower curtains.
Quitting is not in her style so she starts to list off drinks that we might wish to purchase for her. Of course she starts with the most expensive drink …. we continue this game for about one more beer. She isn’t happy with us offering to buy her a beer so she leaves us. We then pay up and leave. The bar tab was about 40 dollars even though we didn’t have that much to drink.
When we get to our room Allen thinks that the whole day has been so funny that he will call his girlfriend and tell her about it. He was drunk but he had a good time explaining it.
The next day we did sight seeing all day, and although interesting we did unfortunately build up a huge thirst. We took a nap and headed back into town, destination ye olde Irish pub. This pub may not have actually qualified as an Irish pub anywhere else in the world but it did here. It was here that we found out that the beer cost about half as much as the previous evening so we took advantage of the savings by drinking twice as much. But the music was really quite loud and besides it was about to close anyway as it was about midnight.
So Allen orders one more beer and starts to chat up the waitress. To my dismay he is actually breaking new ground on communication for this trip and finds out that there is a disco called “Music” around the corner that is open until 5:00. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time so off we go.
We get there to discover a real Hungarian techno disco. It was cool in a loud sort of way. The dance floor had a strobe that flashed to the music and periodically stage smoke came out from somewhere. It was a blast and I guess up to this point was a learning curve as it turns out that the disco had beers that cost between 70 cents and a dollar, considerably less than the four to five dollar beers we had been slurping the night before. This could be seen as an advantage or it could be seen as trouble in the making. So we partied there until 3:30, and the main reason we stopped is because we ran out of money. To be honest we were lucky that the cab driver would take US dollars as that is all we had left, and we made it back to the boat by 4:00 but not before setting our alarm for 7:15. No, it didn’t wake up anybody.
The manager phoned to inform us that the shuttle was here to pick us up, as it was 7:40 we hastily threw everything into our bags and left. Allen’s job was to pay our bill and I was to hold the shuttle. Perhaps the only reason I could hold the shuttle was because nobody understood me, but by that time Allen had arrived and off we went. But he looked really upset, and I soon found out the reason why. The telephone call to his girlfriend was only 27 minutes long but cost one hundred and sixteen dollars.
Lessons learned: Don’t drunk call your girlfriend from a floating brothel.