Budapest

Brian picked me up at the airport, a begrudging courtesy he extended to me since I had picked him up at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul a few months back, and had organized a car for him to ease the transportation nightmare that is Kiev.

I landed at 23:00, but didn't make it out of the secure area for a while. Partially because only two passport checkers were working but mostly because I was questioned about my bags and made to X-ray them again. As such, I was the last person on my plane to get out of the airport.

We took a cab back to his apartment, a lovely first-floor converted doctors office on Veres Pálné utca and Szerb utca. I took a folded-out couch, without sheets (by choice, it was hot as hell in there), and we both crashed. Brian, after all, had work the next day.

The best thing about the ground floor, without question, was the ease with which we could get my massive extra bag into the apartment. And, since my parents will be stopping in Budapest as their last stop before going home when they visit Europe in two weeks or so, they'll be bringing it home. Which means, as of when I arrived at Brian's apartment, I am officially a backpacker again!


***


The routine in this city is such. Brian has work that requires him to leave the apartment around 8am and get back about 12 hours later. We have one set of keys. So this means I get up in the morning to lock him out of the apartment, then get 12 hours to do whatever I damn well please until Brian comes back and we go drinking or eating or something.

For this first day, though, whatever I damn well please consisted of catching up on this damned blog (needed to write all of Odessa and Kiev, pretty much) and doing nothing in the apartment. I didn't leave until 6pm, when I went to grab breakfast at a nearby square just down Szerb utca in the opposite direction from the Danube.

For the first time in 6 months, I felt like I was in Europe. I know that with the exceptions of Georgia, Israel, and Anatolia, I have spent the vast majority of my time in Europe. But Budapest is the first step towards a gradual re-acclimation to Western society. The delicious pasta carbonara didn't hurt either.

Brian met up with me around 8, and we headed straight to dinner. We went to Raday utca, which is lined with restaurants. Specifically, we sought out a place that makes chicken wings that Brian likes a lot, but we couldn't find it, so we settled on the first place with a misting fan.

Brian had a steak, I had duck. They were both delicious. After dinner we walked to Kálvin Tér, a busy square, to meet Mark, one of Brian's co-workers. I stopped off briefly at the Mercure Hotel to grab a map of the city so I could actually do some sightseeing at some point.

When we met up with Mark, we went first to a place called Janis' Pub. It looked decent enough, and is right around the corner from Brian's apartment. But the proximity was overshadowed by Mark's want to go to a different place and an overly talkative American who worked at the pub and didn't seem to want to leave us alone any time soon. Interesting side note, though. The ever-more-famous band Finnegan's Wake was formed and met at Janis' Pub, and play there every month.

Instead of that bar we went to Köny Vtár, on Kiskörút. There we met up with Victor and Gerge, two other people at the office Brian works in. General shenanigans commenced (I.e. conversations and beers), and the night ended relatively early, around 1.


***


The next morning I got out a bit earlier. Locked Brian out at 8 and left by about noon to go to California Coffee Company, on Múzeum utca just on the other side of Kálvin Tér, for wifi. See, Brian's apartment's wifi is dead, and his landlord is in Romania so can't fix it while I'm here.

I spent a while there, then went to the museum next door.

The museum was whelming, neither over nor under. There was a section on Hungarian Olympians, some beautiful paintings (though most of the men in the paintings looked like stereotypes of conquistadors), and an interesting exhibit on the Gömböc, which is a mathematical stem cell of sorts. It's a three dimensional shape from which you can create any standard geometrical shape, or something like that. The descriptions they gave are as follows:

"The Gömböc is the first known convex, homogeneous object to have just one stable (S) and one unstable (I) equilibrium points. The Gömböc always self-rights to its single stable position, like a weeble - without added weight. The existence of the Gömböc was conjectured in 1995 by one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Vladimir Igorevich Arnold."

And

"All equilibrium classes of objects can be constructed by using the Gömböc as a starting point, but not the other way around: the existence of the Gömböc cannot be deduced from the existence of other shapes."

Other exhibits included stuff on WWI and WWII, as well as the 12 day Hungarian revolution and their life as a satellite communist state.

I next stopped by at a synagogue. This one pissed me off quite a bit. I would type again what I think but since I already wrote it in an angry email I'll reproduce below:



"I'm so damn sick of being a walking museum. Why does everyone else get to live now and Jews have to be relegated to the past? Just came from Budapest synagogue. "hungary was home to 750,000 Jews." "Jews would worship here."

"But Jews still live in Hungary, in Budapest, and still worship at that shul! I almost expected them to tell me "step right up, you can meet a real, live Jew! He'll even say something in Jewish!"

"People are surprised to find out I'm Jewish. Many are genuinely sensitive to it and just accept it as fact. Others, when I get to know them enough, make jokes on occasion, which I'm happy to play along with. But too many find sick novelty in it. They make insensitive remarks or tiptoe around the subject. They tell me things like "Cool! I've never met a Jew before!" and "You don't look Jewish." and "I wouldn't have guessed." or, perhaps worse, "I might have guessed."

"I'm not a museum. I'm not a victim. I don't like the attention and I don't want to walk into a living, breathing house of worship and be told what the mysterious Jews once did there, way back when. We're still here, and I'm sick of modern world citizens apologizing for their grandparents' sins with extra attention towards the freaks in the funny hats.

"I'm all about history. I don't love but I understand the usefulness of museums. I get the whole "never forget" mentality of the Holocaust, and I couldn't agree more with it.

"But don't freeze me in time.

"I visit churches and mosques all the time while traveling. I don't walk in with the mentality that I'm in a relic. Whether or not you're religious, you should be aware that most places of worship you'll ever see are still in use. I don't go to a church and marvel at a medieval bureaucracy that let people pay down their sins for entry into heaven. I see a series of artistic works and architecture that has helped shape a modern group of individuals (And that medieval period? Totally separate from today) Churches, and christianity, continues to evolve (in 1996 or 1997 Pope John Paul II announced that the Sun was indeed the center of the Solar System, reversing several hundred years of Church doctrine).

"So why are Jews different? Is it because among minorities we (Hasids and orthodox Jews excluded), unlike blacks or Asians, can 'hide' the Jew-ness? We have a J bomb we don't have to drop unless we want to? At least a black man experiences (or hopefully doesn't experience) racism from the start, because it's quite obvious he's black. But the attitudes that people have towards me can change in a heartbeat. It's like in the Gentleman's Agreement, when Mr. Green tells everyone it's actually Mr. Greenberg.

"I got pretty upset at the Dohány Utcai Zsinagóga. The building is magnificent. I would have been lucky to have been Bar Mitzvah'd there. It actually reminds me more of a Greek Orthodox church than any synagogue I've seen (and that's fine. The architect clearly had some Greek influence); the interior is breathtaking. But to walk outside from there and hear an English man say to his 12 year old son, "hey, look, they sell those little things Jews put on their doorways" is insufferable. The little sign next to it that announces "-20% for blessings" is almost as bad.

"I don't know if the answer is education. I don't think the solution can be taught in schools. In fact, that seems like part of the problem. Putting Jews, me, in a textbook. That's a way to ensure our placement into the annals of history, not a way to move on and be world citizens who are Jewish, not Jewish world citizens.

"I'm not a God-damned museum."



I would add that it's not just Jews who have this problem. American Indians do too, as do some Mongolians. But the point stays the same. This place, a beautiful place that I would have been lucky to be Bar Mitzvah'd in, had a sign in the front with the label "Jewinform" in a Hebraic typeface. A tshirt was being sold at the entrance to the sanctuary itself with the silhouette of a Hasidic Jew dancing and the label "חיPod". Upstairs in one of the buildings was a Jewish museum, where the items used in every Jewish holiday were in holiday-themed displays. All that was missing was the wax figurines showing eager tourists what Jews used to look like. Anyway, if I keep writing about this section of my day I'll get upset and stop, so I'll move on.

I went to a Kebab place next, one that Brian had shown me the night before. That's where I wrote the rant I quoted above.

Then to a coffee house down the street. I sat at Costa Coffee for hours. I had planned to see the opera house and then go to the Museum of Terror, but I was a little too upset. Instead I sat at the coffee shop, and eventually walked past both of the above things before heading back by metro and never going inside either.

Brian and I went out to dinner this night too, but not before stopped at Brian's favorite hot chocolate place, which not only serves perfect European-style hot chocolate, but mixes bits of fruit inside as well. It was delectable.

Dinner was at the Manga Cowboy, the wing place Brian and I had failed to find on the previous attempt. The wings were delicious, and on the spicy side. Hungarians seem to actually know what spice is, unlike Ukrainians.


***


On July 11 I wandered to Buda. See, Budapest is actually two cities. Buda and Pest combined to form Budapest. Brian lives in Pest, the castles are in Buda. So across the bridge I went, across Szabadság Híd, to see them.

It was hot, brutally so. As soon as I crossed the Danube into Buda, I started uphill. First, I stumbled into some sort of Cave Church. I thought it might be the entrance to the citadel, but didn't know my mistake till I had paid the 400HUF (they use the Forint, exchange rate about 231HUF-$1, but the currency itself is pretty much a medieval fantasy currency) entrance fee. The church was cool, but not 400 Forints cool.

I continued uphill for a long time longer. It was tiring work. So tiring that when I emerged at the top by the citadel, I downed 1.5 liters of cold water immediately.

The views were amazing, but the nature hike was more impressive, and the citadel itself was simplistic and not much to look at. I don't know about the inside, though, didn't want to spend 2,000 forints to see inside.

I walked down the hill towards the other castle, the Buda Castle. Through a few parks and along the Danube brought me to a funicular that would take me up for 900 forints. Not knowing the way up without the funicular, I took it.

Again, I couldn't bring myself to pay to get into the castle/palace itself, and I didn't want to see the museums inside, so I ogled the views of the outside of the building and the city, and walked back down the hill.

I walked across the Chain Bridge (making it my second crossing of the Danube in a day. It took weeks for Alexander the Great to do the same) back to Pest, and took the tram back to the apartment.

My night consisted of watching Anchorman. I could have gone out, but I am really enjoying my sober days here. Brian went on some sort of outing or date or something, coming back around 1. I just hung out, called home, and got stuck in the torrential downpour that arrived from about 10-12 that night.


***


I let Brian out at 8 this morning of the 12th, and sat in the square nearby for a while, eating breakfast at the Hummus Bar, a delicious shop run by some old Jews which offers the cheapest and best hummus and falafel in town, while I waited for my laundry at the apartment to finish washing.

Laundry was a bit more of an ordeal than I expected, but only because I was really lazy, put it through two extra spin cycles and had to organize all of Brian's drying laundry from a heap of cotton to a well laid-out set of clothes on a drying rack to fit my stuff in as well.

I lazed pretty much all day. I tried to get to the Museum of Terror just before 6, arriving by metro and getting to the door at 5:59, thinking I'd have 1:01 before it closed, but it closed a minute later. The guard at the door was very helpful and friendly, though.

This meant the whole day was a bust. I spent the whole time in cafes and I couldn't have been happier about it. It gave me time to think. Things like:

Escalators, water bottles and useless jobs.

Jerry Seinfeld once said, to paraphrase poorly, "ever notice that when you're on an escalator, the thing you're holding moves a little bit faster than the thing you're standing on?" I always notice this. It's especially pronounced in a place like Arsenal'na, when two 2.5 minute escalators take you to the deepest metro in the world. But this is a serious issue. And some Finnish guys I met on my Chernobyl trip gave me the answer. Apparently, they do that so you feel like you're not falling backwards. I tried it. I stood without the handrail. It felt dizzying and confusing; I did feel like I was falling once or twice. Then I get to Budapest, and I found escalators whose stairs moved faster. I've never been more scared on stairs. I feel like I'm Uzbek shopper on these things (See YouTube).

Is it really so hard to figure out the difference between water bottles with gas and those without? I'm horribly allergic to pistachios, so I usually just avoid food packaging that's green. It's a dead giveaway, and it works most of the time. It also means I don't eat a lot of mint treats, but hey, sometimes it's a worthy tradeoff. But in some countries (whose languages I don't speak) I have to guess based on the labels written in what might as well be Aramaic mixed with Sanskrit. Usually I figure the choices are "gas" and "no gas." that's how it is in most places, so I usually pick the longer disclaimer on the bottom of the packaging. It's also usually blue, the label at least, when it's gas-less. These two rules have served me well, until Ukraine, when a third choice was introduced. "A little gas" made its way into the water label industry, and I became that much mor confused. Now, I'm looking at blue tops with gas and pink tops without? Make up your mind, world conspirators of water bottle manufacturers!

Every country has a job that is outdated and useless, yet people are still hired for them. The US still thinks its alright to have politicians, for example. But Ukraine and Hungary had some interesting choices for useless employees. Ukraine, for Euro, wouldn't allow anyone into the stadium with liquids. I assume this was partly for security and partly because of basic economics (though they only sold non-alcoholic beer inside the stadium itself, a completely misguided move, in my opinion). But is a wall of 50+ policemen on each street leading up to the stadium necessary for this purpose? can't you put up a fence and have 5 people manning them? Or, better yet, Have people throw liquids out when you check tickets, at those gates? They're already manned, and gated! Likewise, Budapest doesn't even seem to have gates when it comes to checking tickets. They have four people in uniform outside the escalator to every metro, checking tickets. Put in some turnstiles!

These are the things I think about when I'm relaxing in a wondrous city. That, and I marvel at how everyone here, for the first time since I was in Israel, speaks English, and damn well.

Brian came back around 7:45 and we hung out in the apartment for a while before going off to Pampas restaurant for some exquisite steak and South African wine, just down the street.


***


Brian and I both left the apartment at 9, and got breakfast nearby at the Central Cafe, a world-renowned patisserie founded in 1887. Our respective breakfast dishes were good, but the pastries afterwards were breathtaking. I had a mint-lemon item that was beyond words to describe (and I ate it so quickly I forget what it was called). Brian had a raspberry mousse and jelly combination.

At 10 we had departed. Brian left for work, and I headed to Heroes Square.

Heroes Square was, well, boring. It had a large monument in the center and a semi-circular monument on the end. There are a couple of museums lining the outside of the square, but it really is just a big communist square, the likes of which I've seen many times before, from Moscow to Warsaw, from Kharkiv to Minsk. But it is one of the main attractions that Budapest has to offer, and since I don't remember much from my visit to Budapest with the family in 2003, I felt I should go, and I'm glad I did.

Having failed twice thus far to get inside the Museum of Terror (AKA House of Terror), and since it is on the way from Heroes Square back to the center of town, I stopped by this time, with plenty of time before closing. The museum is a haunting place, a building that was once headquarters to the secret police force of every oppressive government (i.e. every government) that controlled Hungary from the 1940s (or so), until the fall of Soviet-style Communism in the 1990s. Many hundreds of political prisoners were tortured and killed there, and many more of what I consider 'paper murders', unjust killings authorized by a signature in an office, occurred on the premises.

I was not allowed to take photos inside the museum, but that didn't really stop me. I managed to get a good 20 or so. The structure of the rooms themselves -- walls, doorways, walkways, etc. -- seemed to be relatively untouched. A few of the rooms looked to be refurbished, not fabricated, and a few more were completely redone to make a statement, share something gruesome, or otherwise inform. The experience itself was haunting. Inside 60 Andrássy út, what looks to have been built as an apartment building gives one a feeling of desperation. On the wall of the middle courtyard is depicted hundreds upon hundreds of photos of victims who were killed on the premises who were, in all likelihood, tortured. A gigantic tank is stationed at the base of the courtyard, over a small reflecting pool that spills into a basin somewhere on the basement level.

I walked up to the second floor to start my tour, and found myself walking through a variety of rooms. One, for example, was a meeting hall from which the outcomes of show trials were decided, and other policy decisions were made. Another was the office of the top officers at the time in charge of the SS/KGB/Secret Police. Yet another was plastered wall-to-wall with pictures of fascist and communist propaganda, which led into a room of countless documents, probably detailing many of the horrors that occurred there.

The scariest part of the whole thing, though, was the basement. That's where the cells were. Though they were probably at best refurbished, but more likely fabricated from old pictures and records, the spot was pretty haunting. Tiny cells that once housed prisoners, a tiny office that some officer would sit in when he wasn't making his rounds or beating and torturing his prisoners. I walked into the padded cell and actually closed the door. A tiny shaft of light came in from somewhere I could not find. It was dark, lonely, and immediately unbelievably alienating. My mind jumped right to the horror that would be the door locking itself, with me inside. And while I do believe in those moments of self-actualization when you experience, if only for a brief moment, the absolute best and worst moments of life (we learn much about ourselves from how we cope with the bad, especially. I always think back to the absolute horror that was the few seconds I thought my legs were paralyzed after my skiing accident), I sincerely hope that brief brush with imprisonment, though superficial, momentary, self-imposed, and without danger, is the closest I ever come to actual incarceration.

With a relatively limited number of hours before leaving Budapest (more on that below), I made my way next towards my last touristy item in the city, Memento Park. To get there, I made my way back to Brian's neighborhood, then crossed the bridge via tram to the Gellért Hotel, where I would later spend several hours. From there, I requested a taxi from one of the doormen, as public transport was sparse, confusing, and time-consuming for this out-of-the-way gem. But the taxi ride was only 15 minutes or so, bringing me to a spot right on the outskirts of Budapest (I actually left the city for a stretch of maybe half a kilometer right towards the end, before reentering and arriving at the park).

Memento Park is, to me at least, unique among parks I've visited. When the Hungarians overthrew their Communist rulers, they distinguished themselves from their fellow satellite states in how they dealt with the signs of Communism - namely, statues. Prague, for example, was once home to the world's largest Stalin statue, which was dynamited. In its place (see a later post on Prague) was erected a large metronome, symbolizing the time lost to communism. Most other modern nations that arose after the Iron Curtain fell also destroyed their statues that symbolized communism. Not Budapest.

Budapest kept their statues - or at least 41 of them. They removed them from their prominent positions in town and, eventually, erected them on the outskirts of town in a place called Memento Park. So today, with a little commuting and a lot of time, you can run out to see the statues that once dominated public life in Budapest.

It's really fascinating. The statues range from 1949-1989. Statues of Lenin, Marx, and Engels line the parks outskirts. Other Hungarian Communist leaders are there, too, like Béla Kun, Endre Ságvári, and Árpád Szakasits. It gives you a small taste of the completely pervasive propaganda people were surrounded by every day during Hungarian's Communist regime(s).

My taxi waited for me at the park, and drove me back when I was finished with Memento Park. I was brought back to the Gellért Hotel, where I was going to spend the next several hours.

My dad insisted that I spend a little time in a Hungarian spa. So I went to the most famous one I could find, at his suggestion (and on his dime).

Walking into the Gellért was an immediate leap upward in terms of the pure luxury I was experiencing just by being inside. It was just across the Danube in Buda, and I never got a Turkish bath in Turkey (sacrilegious, I know), so why not now?

Buying my ticket was pretty easy, and it cost a lot less than I expected. Entry to the baths was not terrible, and for the same amount again I could get a 40-minute massage. All-in-all, I probably spent about $50 for the whole thing, which was good because I spend 4 hours in the baths.

The baths. They were numerous (I counted 6 communal pools, 4 private pools for men), ranged in temperature from 18-38°C, with a 40-50° steam room, and two saunas. The outdoor pool had a wave machine that went off every hour for 15 minutes. I just jumped back and forth between pools, getting my fingers all pruned up and relaxing away all my troubles.

Like I said, I was there for 4 hours. It's not easy to entertain yourself for 4 hours by yourself in a series of pools, but I was so relaxed in the incredibly ornate and luxurious surroundings I had found myself in that I didn't really notice the time. Though I had to pay a little attention, because I had booked my 40-minute massage for the earliest possible time slot (which is how I ended up with a 4 hour waiting period of hot tubbing).

My masseuse was very strong, and knew what he was doing. I asked for him to work on my neck and back, and to hold nothing back. He tried as hard as he could to destroy my muscles with his hands. In the end, he was grunting more than I from the pain I caused his hands, and when he finished, his voice was one of pure relief for being able to rest up. But I got my money's worth, and that's all that matters.

I went the wrong way getting back. I decided to save time by hopping a tram instead of walking over the bridge. But instead I managed to get on the tram that went along the Danube on the Buda side, dropping me off over by the other bridge, the chain bridge, which I walked over, and then had to tram all the way back to Brian's place. But it was fine, because I still had plenty of time to pack up before leaving Budapest.

I grabbed some food at the Hummus Bar, a kebab hummus plate, and packed up everything I own into my backpack.

Brian, for the last few months, while living in Budapest, has spent many a weekend taking trips to places around the city. So he suggested we go on a weekend trip. This would cut severely into my plan of spending a few days in Bratislava, Vienna, and Prague (as had spending a week in Budapest instead of the original 3 days I had planned for), but the opportunity was there, and I planned to take it. So I just told Brian I'd go where he wanted and he told me to meet him at 8:30 at his apartment to go.

When we met up, I learned officially that Brian had landed on a train to Belgrade, followed by a day in Zagreb, and then a train back to Budapest, where I would spend about 4 hours before heading off to Bratislava. This meant I didn't need to take all of my crap, just a small backpack, for 2 days of travel. So much easier!

At 9:30 we got a bus from Ferenciak Tér to the train station.

At the train station itself we had to wait in line for tickets, which we paid for in cash and had handwritten for us (because why would you have a machine print tickets for pennies each when you could pay someone to handwrite it?) 15 minutes before departure.

Departed 10:20pm. There were no more sleepers available, so we were stuck in seats. Which was fine by us. We played some cards, some monopoly on my iPad and chatted and slept. Oh, and we read up on Serbia, which quickly turned us against the country. Serbia has a nasty history of subjugating everyone around them. Yugoslavia was pretty much Serbia running the country and oppressing the others. They killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and started World War I. They do not have a good track record. But this was exploration time, and Exploration 101 dictates that one does not judge a country by its US State Department history writeup.

At 1am we arrived at the Hungarian border. We got through at 1:25.

At 1:41 we arrived at the Serbian border. A mildly insane guy in our car (whom we had, before departure, mistaken for a train employee, as he was wearing a reflective vest) tried to get off train. "Is this the border, sir?" he asked me. I said yes, and he got off the train anyway. Moments later I hear, "Policia!" It's been a few days since this happened, and as I write I forget whether he got back on after that. I want to say he didn't, but he probably did.

We crossed the Serbian border shortly after that. But this post ends here, as at this point in my travels I am no longer in Hungary. On to Serbia!