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my stomach and this food
Monday, October 24 2016
Off the east bank of the Rhone, Avignon, France
This morning Gretchen and I had breakfast at a table with a young German couple, mostly because we'd decided the male half of that couple looked like a younger [REDACTED] Nathan VanHooser (my friend from childhood). But they mostly spoke German and weren't very talkative.
By this point our boat had shoved off the dock at Avignon and was passing the famed partial bridge (which we'd also seen the day before yesterday) to gradually begin the voyage up the river. Some of the bridges we would be passing under were so low that all the sunshades, railings, and furniture on the uppermost deck had to be collapsed. On the bow end of the boat, the radio/radar mast had to be folded down and even the boat's bridge (that is, the command & control center) had to be evacuated and telescoped into itself using a fancy system of hydraulics. The vessel had evidently been designed for the geometric constraints of this very river.
After yesterday's unpleasant experience in (and returning from) Aix, I was burned-out on the idea of leaving the luxurious (and comfortable) Scenic Sapphire. So, while Gretchen was out touring wine country with the nice gay couple from Frankfurt, I was back in the room noodling away on my laptop, doing some combination of work for The Organization and obsessing over the ongoing Trump-Clinton presidential showdown.
Unlike previous days, which had been some combination of cold and rainy, today was beautiful, so after lunch I did finally leave the interior of the ship and spent some of it up on the roof deck on the stern-end of the boat (in front of the bridge). To give you an idea of how luxurious the boat was, I was up there with just Gretchen, sipping on a glass of white wine leftover from lunch, and one of the staff came up and asked if he could get me anything. I ordered another glass of white wine, and up it came. Now that's vegan luxury.
That said, the cuisine and feeding regime hasn't been agreeing particularly well with my system. The food has been somewhat different from what I normally eat (for example, there haven't really been much in the way of beans outside of tofu and the occasional chick pea). Added to that has been the fact that there really is no food available except during the meals (though there is a dessert-y afternoon tea and a savory "midnight snack"). This tends to make me eat more during meal time than I otherwise would. Worst of all is dinner time, when we're given very little choice about what is placed in front of us, so there's a tendency (for me at least) to eat it no matter what or how much it is. The end result of all of this has been a flare up in my acid reflux problem. It's not that I don't occasionally get acid reflux in my normal life; I probably suffer from it more than most people do. But on this boat it has been a near-continuous issue. I've been forced to eat several antacids each day (and it's lucky I happened to have some in my computer bag).
There's also been the problem with the oppressive blandness of European food, though I've found a solution for that. As part of the effort to make the buffet look festive and bountiful, one of the staff is tasked with placing decorative arrangements of colorful whole vegetables at either end of the buffet island. Among these vegetables are long red peppers. Every lunch, I've been grabbing one, cutting it into pieces, and using it to spice up my food. The peppers are a little hotter than jalapeños and are fairly easy to work with. (Amusingly, Gretchen noticed that after I started stealing these peppers, she saw someone else doing it too.)
This evening, Gretchen and I sat at a table with Andrew the Google engineer and his wife Michelle and an American couple now living in The Hague, The Netherlands. The male half of that couple said so little that I didn't know for awhile whether he was Dutch or American. The woman, on the other hand, talked almost constantly. Unusually for a person of her gender, she was an obnoxious know-it-all type. For example, after I told the harrowing story of what it was like to be an eight-year-old atheist transferred to a public school in the Bible Belt, the annoying woman from The Hague tried to correct me on the specifics of how that experience had been. I could tell Gretchen wasn't having it, and at some point Gretchen even kicked me under the table to express her irritation. Later, when someone asked the annoying woman's husband what he does, he said mysteriously that he wasn't allowed to say. "Oh fun!" I exclaimed, though I wasn't really interested.
Back in our cabin, Gretchen brought up Creed on our video system. It's that recent revival of the Rocky movie franchise. I worked on my computer, sipped a not-terrible German pilsener (Karlsberg I think), and occasionally looked up to watch the movie. But I wasn't much more interested in that than I had been in the career of that quiet gentleman married to that fat annoying woman (who wasn't even vegan, it turned out) from The Hague.
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